The Problem With the Power Plant Rule

Earlier this year, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) issued a proposed rulemaking on New Source Performance Standards for greenhouse gas (GHG) Emissions from New and Reconstructed Electric Utility Generating Units (EGUs). It is colloquially known as the “Power Plant Rule.”

This rulemaking suffers from a host of flaws, but one issue—which I focused on in the Institute for Energy Research public comment on the rulemaking—is the issue of grid reliability and the failure to account for a concurrent rulemaking that will have a significant impact on the purview of this rule.

The other proposed rule in question is the Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light-Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles Rule, colloquially known as the “Tailpipe Rule.” This rule would require a very low fleetwide average for vehicle emissions for model years 2027 and later. In practice this would make the manufacture and sale of ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles difficult, if not impossible. The Biden administration has made clear that the intention of the rule is to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles.

A rule that would cause a significant portion of the car fleet to transition from gasoline to reliance on the electricity grid would definitionally have an impact on grid requirements and by extension, on both the volume and variety of generation that the grid requires. Grid reliablity might sound like a nebulous and distant concept that will be dealt with far from home, but the impacts of even short blackouts can be both deadly and inconvenient. Power grids mostly fail when it’s very hot or very cold, when people are least equipped to cope without electricity’s ability to insulate them from the weather.

Grid reliability issues are also incredibly costly, and the costs of their disruption are not born only at the utility level. They cause food in people’s refrigerators and freezers to spoil and need to be replaced. Think about how much it would cost you to replace everything in your refrigerator and freezer right now. What if that were happening several times a year? What about a few times a month? These costs would add up quickly, and would be most difficult to bear for those who are already struggling to pay for everyday necessities.

Now consider that many employers would be forced to close without electricity. Some people are salaried and might get a free day off of work, but what about unsalaried hourly workers? For many people, this would mean periodic unexpected days without work (and without pay). The economy wide impacts of this are massive, and the personal impacts are daunting. Grid reliability is essential to the functioning of our economy and everyday lives.

All electricity sources aren’t equally reliable. In order to adequately meet peak demand, baseload sources like natural gas, coal, and nuclear are needed. The Power Plant Rule would have a serious impact on natural gas generation in addition to phasing out coal generation. The EPA study accompanying the Power Plant Rule didn’t take into account the increased volume of electric vehicles on the grid that the Tailpipe Rule would create. This concurrent rulemaking would clearly have an impact on the ability of the grid to meet demand. One rule will raise the demand for electricity, while the other will decrease supply, but we’re to believe that these rulemakings are not substantively related to one another enough to necessitate an analysis from EPA on their compounded impacts.

On the issue of reliability more broadly, a number of analyses have been performed that demonstrate the flaws in the proposed rulemaking.

The Center of the American Experiment has an excellent analysis on what the rule would do, particularly to the portion of the grid operated by MISO (Midcontinent Independent System Operator). In their analysis, Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling found that the rule would impose blackouts in MISO, as well as costing $246 billion through 2055 when the economic costs of blackouts and other impacts were taken into account. Their analysis accounted only for the impacts on the portion of the Grid operated by MISO which covers 15 states and the Canadian province of Manitoba.

From this, it’s reasonable to conclude that grid impacts would be far outside of the scope of the supposed benefits of the rulemaking, given that the EPA’s estimated annual net benefit of the rule is $5.9 billion and $246 billion over the period from now to 2055 is $7.7 billion, again in the MISO jurisdiction alone.

The costs of this rule to grid reliability would outweigh the benefits of the rule, and studying the extent of those costs is made more difficult by the lack of public availability of the model and data used by EPA.

A rulemaking with impacts this broad should have taken grid reliability concerns more seriously and acknowledged the impacts of the concurrent Tailpipe Rule. Could it be that the Biden administration’s abstract commitment to the vision of an all-electric future is preventing a candid assessment of the cost, in dollars and dysfunction, of getting there?

https://blog.independent.org/2024/01/02/power-plant-rule-problem/?omhide=true

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The Endangered Species Act has done little for endangered species

WHEN THE Endangered Species Act was signed into law 50 years ago, nothing about it was controversial. The legislation had passed unopposed in the Senate and by a near-unanimous majority (355-4) in the House. No one in Congress, the news media, or the scientific community seems to have had any qualms about enacting what is now one of the most potent and rigorous environmental laws on the federal books.

"Essentially no skepticism was expressed about either the law's conservation goals or its regulatory strategies," University of California, Berkeley professor Holly Doremus, a leading environmental law scholar, wrote in the Journal of Law & Policy. "Legislators appear to have regarded it as an opportunity to deliver ringing rhetoric that would please the environmental movement without facing any immediate political costs."

Accepted at face value was the assurance that with the new statute in place, endangered plant and animal species would be protected and their populations restored to healthy levels. That was the reason for the Endangered Species Act, explicitly spelled out in the text. Section 2(b) says the law's purpose was "to provide a program for the conservation of such endangered species and threatened species." The law also defined those key words, "conserve" and "conservation." They mean "to bring any endangered or threatened species to the point at which the measures provided pursuant to this chapter are no longer necessary."

Measured against that yardstick, the Endangered Species Act has been a failure.

To begin with, there are more endangered and threatened species than ever before. When the law went into effect in 1973, fewer than 130 species were on the government's list of domestic plants and animals at risk of going extinct. Today, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, there are well over 1,600. And just as the ESA has not prevented the endangerment of many additional species, it has not achieved its mission of bringing endangered flora and fauna populations back to health. All told, only 57 domestic species (3 percent of those listed) have recovered, while 11 (1 percent) have gone extinct. After a half-century under the stringent safeguards established by the law, 96 percent of the endangered-species list is still, by the federal government's reckoning, endangered.

Attempting to put lipstick on a pig, defenders of the status quo cheer the fact that 99 percent of listed species haven't gone extinct. But as Jonathan Adler of the Center for Environmental Law at Case Western Reserve University observes, that is like celebrating because 99 percent of patients admitted to the emergency room years ago are still on life support. The whole point of treatment is for patients to get well, not to linger in ill health.

Similarly, the whole point of the Endangered Species Act was to conserve at-risk plants and animals, not just to list them. What went wrong?

The essence of the problem lies in how the law treats property owners. The ESA makes it illegal to harm an endangered species, including by destroying or changing the habitat where that species lives. Since two-thirds of species on the endangered list are found on private property, owners can face crippling restrictions on the use of their own land. Rather than encourage property owners to protect the habitat on which such species rely — for example, by reimbursing them for the profit they stand to lose if a planned development is halted or a stand of timber goes unharvested — the law threatens them with painful losses if they don't. Often their response has been to preempt that threat by eliminating the evidence before the government learns about it.

"When it comes to private land, ESA encourages not preservation of endangered species, but their quick shooting," science writer Ronald Bailey wrote in 2003. "If an endangered species is found on a farmer's property, she has every incentive to, as they say, 'shoot, shovel, and shut up.'"

Sam Hamilton, a career Fish and Wildlife Service official who became the agency's director under President Barack Obama, grasped the issue. "The incentives are wrong here," he once said. "If I have a rare metal on my property, its value goes up. But if a rare bird occupies the land, its value disappears. We've got to turn it around to make the landowner want to have the bird on his property."

Sadly, Hamilton died just months after being named to head the Fish and Wildlife Service and was never able to effect that turnaround. As the Endangered Species Act embarks on its second half-century, it is clearer than ever that the law needs an overhaul. Will it take another 50 years to make that happen?

https://jeffjacoby.com/27428/the-endangered-species-act-has-done-little-for

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A 1.3 GW offshore wind project has been cancelled by its developers, dealing a blow to Biden's wind energy targets

BP and Equinor have canceled plans for a 1.3 GW offshore wind energy facility off of Long Island's southern coast, the companies jointly announced Wednesday.

Empire Wind II is the second stage of an offshore wind project in New York state waters with 2.1 GW in proposed capacity, enough to provide electricity for 700,000 homes.

The project was the subject of substantial backlash from community groups in Long Beach, NY (where a transmission cable was planned to be placed); Governor Kathy Hochul vetoed a bill to expedite its construction in October, a premonition of the project's ultimate fate.

The first stage, Empire I (800 GW capacity), received regulatory approval from the New York State Public Service Commission in December, and is expected to come online in 2027. But BP and Equinor's 50-50 joint venture in New York appears to be drastically limiting its scope, at least for the time being.

Macroeconomic conditions continue to hamper offshore wind development in the United States, with Empire Wind II's cancellation following similar news of scrapped or downsized projects in New Jersey and Massachusetts in 2023.

"The decision recognizes commercial conditions driven by inflation, interest rates and supply chain disruptions," Equinor said in a press release Wednesday.

"Commercial viability is fundamental for ambitious projects of this size and scale. The Empire Wind II decision provides the opportunity to reset and develop a stronger and more robust project going forward," Molly Morris, president of Equinor Renewables Americas, said Wednesday.

BP and Equinor each expressed their desire to participate in a new round of offshore wind auctioning started by the New York state government in November, as the state aims to install 9 GW of offshore wind capacity by 2035. So as BP and Equinor walk away from Empire Wind II, it may represent more of a delay than a death knell for renewable energy targets in New York.

While New York state may eventually reach its wind energy targets from new projects, albeit later than originally expected, Empire Wind II's cancellation may serve more consequential to the Biden Administration's green energy ambitions—Biden aims to install 30 GW in new offshore wind capacity by 2030.

With the US presidential election ten months away—and former president Donald Trump vocally opposing offshore wind energy on the campaign trail—the Biden Administration may have a limited window of opportunity to secure new offshore wind projects before the regulatory environment changes drastically in 2025.

Empire Wind II had received approval from the US Department of Interior in November; neither the Department of Interior nor the Department of Energy has yet released a public statement on the matter.

https://www.ibtimes.com/bp-equinor-scrap-plans-empire-wind-ii-project-new-york-3721545

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Should We Be Concerned Over Climate Change?

The climate is changing, but is the change cause for concern?

“There are natural climate cycles, which are normal,” research scientist Roy Spencer says, adding that “If you move beyond the temperature to things like storminess, you know, hurricane activity, there have been no demonstrable, long-term changes in anything other than a modest, relatively benign increase in temperature.”

When it comes to climate change, Spencer, a meteorologist and research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, says he’s “been hearing the rhetoric and the fearmongering since the 1970s.”

Asked if he personally worries about climate change, Spencer says: “No, if I was seriously worried about it, you know, I’d be worried for my children’s future and my grandchildren’s future. And I’m not.”

“I’m more worried about what our government is doing on a number of fronts, including regulatory mandates, which is going to make life much more expensive for them and therefore reduce their standard of living,” adds Spencer, who has researched climate change for 40 years.

The “natural fluctuations in weather are normal,” argues Spencer, currently a visiting fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)

Spencer joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” for the final episode of a three-part series on climate change. In it, he explains what we know and don’t know about the root causes of climate change and the appropriate response to a changing climate. Spencer also provides insight into how the climate may change in coming years

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/05/should-concerned-over-climate-change/

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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