Comments On The Insanity Of EPA's New Power Plant Rule

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  • On May 23, EPA put out its long-expected proposed Rule designed to eliminate, or nearly so, all so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions from the electricity-generation sector of the economy.  The proposal came with the very long title: “New Source Performance Standards for GHG Emissions from New and Reconstructed EGUs; Emission Guidelines for GHG Emissions from Existing EGUs; and Repeal of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule.”  The full document is 672 pages long.   

  • Various not-very-far-off deadlines are set, ranging from as early as 2030 for some changes to coal plants, to at the latest 2038 for the last changes to natural gas plants. 

  • But how exactly is this emissions elimination thing to be accomplished?  Today a substantial majority of U.S. electricity (about 60%) comes from one or the other of those fuels; and it is inherent in the burning of hydrocarbons that you get CO2 as a product.  In all those 672 pages, EPA has only two ideas for how to eliminate the carbon emissions from combustion power plants: carbon capture and storage (CCS), and “green” hydrogen.  Either you must implement one of those two ideas to meet EPA’s standards by the deadline, or you must close your power plant. 

  • But here’s the problem: both of those ideas are, frankly, absurd. 

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The Real World Costs Of Backing Up Weather-Dependent Electricity Generation With Battery Storage

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The Real World Costs Of Backing Up Weather-Dependent Electricity Generation With Battery Storage

  • A recurring question at this blog has been, how do the world’s politicians plan to provide reliable electricity without fossil fuels? Country after country, and state after state, have announced grand plans for what they call “Net Zero” electricity generation, universally accompanied by schemes for massive build-outs of wind and solar generation facilities. But what is the strategy for the calm nights, or for the sometimes long periods at the coldest times of the winter when both wind and sun produce near zero electricity for days or even weeks on end?

  • When pressed, the answer given is generally “batteries” or “storage.” That answer might appear plausible before you start to think about it quantitatively. To introduce some quantitative thinking into the situation, last December I had a Report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation titled “The Energy Storage Conundrum.”

  • That Report discussed several calculations of how much energy storage would be required to get various jurisdictions through a year with only wind and/or solar generation and only batteries for back-up, with fossil fuels excluded from the mix. The number are truly breathtaking: for California and Germany, approximately 25,000 GWh of storage to make it through a year; for the continental U.S., approximately 233,000 GWh of storage to make it through a year. At a wildly optimistic assumption of $100/kWh for storage, this would price out at $2.5 trillion for California or Germany, $23.3 trillion for the U.S. — equal or greater than the entire GDP of the jurisdiction. At more realistic assumptions of $300 - 500/kWh for battery storage, you would be looking at 3 to 5 times GDP for one round of batteries, which would then need replacement every few years.

  • But even these numbers wildly understate the real world costs of storage that would be needed. Here’s why.

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Costs Beginning To Change The Net Zero Debate In The UK

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  • I have long said that when the costs of fossil fuel suppression policies start to hit home to average consumers, the whole climate alarm movement will become politically toxic, and will fade away.

  • So far in the U.S. we haven’t seen much movement in this direction.

  • The red states are mostly alert to the issue of the costs of Net Zero, and want no part of fossil fuel suppression. The blue states have inflicted some substantial early costs on themselves (up to about doubling the cost of electricity in the case of California) without the voters having yet gotten too upset. At the federal level, the misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” passes out hundreds of billions of dollars worth of handouts and subsidies to hide the cost of fossil fuel suppression from the public. It could be several more years before blue state voters figure out how they are getting fleeced.

  • But in Europe, and particularly in the UK, there are serious signs of shifting political winds.

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The Bidens: "Stone Cold Crooked" (7) -- How Is It Even Possible To Keep Spinning This?

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The Bidens: "Stone Cold Crooked" (7) -- How Is It Even Possible To Keep Spinning This?

  • I want you to imagine that you have recently taken a job as a senior editor at the New York Times. Your mission, well understood by you, is to co-ordinate the coverage to spin the news of the day in a way to present Democrats in as favorable as possible a light, and Republicans as unfavorably as possible. In particular, you understand that Donald Trump must be shown as the devil incarnate, while Joe Biden is a kindly fellow who just loves his family. No problem.

  • But now you are suddenly presented with the news of the past few days. The “Justice” Department, under the control of Biden henchman Merrick Garland, has just taken the unprecedented step of indicting Trump, who currently holds a commanding lead in the polls to be the Republican candidate in the next presidential election, for the supposed “crime” of repeatedly asserting that the last election was stolen — an assertion that has been a perennial in presidential politics for decades without anybody ever being indicted for it. Meanwhile, a transcript of a witness’s testimony before a House committee earlier this week has just been released, with the witness having offered testimony to close the loop with the last piece of a clear quid pro quo bribery scheme involving millions going not just to Hunter Biden, but also Joe, with U.S. taxpayer funds used to the benefit of corrupt Russia-allied Ukrainians.

  • OK, this is a tough one. How are you possibly going to spin your way out of it?

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The Bidens: "Stone Cold Crooked" (6) -- What Did China Get For Its Money?

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  • On July 27 (last Thursday), Representative James Comer of Kentucky appeared on Senator Ted Cruz’s podcast. Comer is the Chair of the House Oversight Committee, and the guy who has subpoenaed, and little-by-little is getting, the bank records of transfers from foreign governments to Biden family companies. Late that evening, Twitchy posted about an 8 minute clip from the podcast of Comer discussing some of the things his subpoenas had uncovered. Comer particulrly discusses one large payment from a Chinese government-connected entity, much of which went to various Bidens.

  • Separately on the same day, July 27, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio released on Twitter (or is it now “X”?) a thread that he called “The Facebook Files, Part I.” Jordan, in addition to being the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, also serves as Chair of is Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Government. In that capacity, Jordan had received a trove of internal Facebook communications documenting pressure from the White House to suppress various true information, notably information relating to the origin of the Covid virus in the Chinese Wuhan laboratory. The Wall Street Journal on July 28 had further reporting on the Facebook emails newly released by Jordan’s Subcommittee.

  • In other words, we’re starting to learn what China got in return for its investment in the Bidens.

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The Bidens: "Stone Cold Crooked" (5)

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  • With every passing day it becomes more and more clear that we have a President who has been for years, and may still be, in simplest terms, on the take.

  • Using family members as fronts, and the prerogatives of elected office as bait, he has presided over a bribe-collection business that has leveraged U.S. foreign policy and foreign aid to rake in millions for the clan, mostly or entirely from business interests aligned with the worst of our adversaries on the foreign stage.

  • In your wildest dreams, could you ever have imagined that the U.S. presidency could sink so low?

  • And yet, even as the known facts become more and more definitive, and the remaining potential defenses more and more implausible, there continues to be complete unanimity among senior Democratic Party officeholders and their press supporters in the ongoing defense of the President.

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