U.S. Energy Industry Warns Biden EPA’s Proposed Carbon Emissions Rules are ‘Unworkable’
LESLIE EASTMAN
AUG 12, 2023 2:00 PM
A few months ago, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced economy-crushing, liberty-limiting, rules that would theoretically eliminate carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s electricity sector by 2040.
U.S. power plant owners warned these plans are unworkable, relying too heavily on costly technologies that are not yet proven at scale.
Top utility trade group the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for revisions of the proposed power plant standards, which hinge on the widespread commercial availability of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and low-emissions green hydrogen, adding the agency’s vision was “not legally or technically sound.””Electric companies are not confident that the new technologies EPA has designated to serve as the basis for proposed standards for new and existing fossil-based generation will satisfy performance and cost requirements on the timelines that EPA projects,” EEI said in a public comment released on Tuesday on the agency’s deadline for feedback.Resistance from the EEI and other energy-related groups poses a potentially big challenge to the administration’s climate agenda.
EEI isn’t the only group that has crunched the numbers during the comments phase of the rule-making process. The Center of the American Experiment was hired by the State of North Dakota to model the EPA proposal to determine whether it could supply reliable electricity to the 15 states on the MISO (Midcontinent Independent System Operator) grid.
Our team found that the grid implied by the EPA rule, heavily dependent on sporadic wind and solar power, would result in devastating blackouts. They further calculated that if the grid were to be made mostly (but not entirely) immune to blackouts, while still complying with the EPA rule, another $246 billion would have to be spent within the MISO system alone. That public comment is embedded below.EPA’s power plant regulations will devastate ordinary people–those who rely on electricity and want affordable transportation–while enriching a handful of well-connected industries that have curried the favor of the current administration.
In their quest for green energy glory, the eco-activists at the EPA have forgotten about math and science.
A solar farm can generate 200 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy all the way up to more than 100 million kWh in a single year.
In the U.S., there are geothermal power plants in seven states, which produced in 2022 about 17 billion kilowatthours (kWh) (or 17,002,000 megawatthours). This was equal to about 0.4% of total U.S. utility-scale electricity generation.
Let’s compare these numbers to less favored and privileged energy sources.
Coal is a remarkably dense energy source: A single metric ton of coal can produce up to 1,927 kilowatt-hours of electricity. In the United States, 52% of the electricity comes from coal generation. A typical coal fired power plantcan produce 109 kWh/year (1,000,000,000 kWhr/year) of power, the plant burns 14,000 tons of coal every day.
Nuclear energy takes production up a notch, so the units are in megawatts (1 million watts). As an example of potential capacity, one example reactor operates at 582 MW capacity for 24 hours, and generate 13,968 megawatthours (MWh) during this time. IDuring the year, it would create 5,098,320 MWh.
The Center of the American Experiment has modeled the projections based on the EPA’s rules and the realities of actual energy creation.
To conduct our reliability analysis, American Experiment compared EPA’s modeled power plant capacity portfolio (from the figure above) to historical hourly electricity demand in MISO and hourly wind and solar capacity factors in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 to see if EPA’s modeled grid could meet electricity demand for every hour of every day. Our analysis determined that EPA’s modeled MISO grid would not be able to keep the lights on, resulting in blackouts, some of them massive.For example, one blackout would occur in January of 2040 and result in 26,000 megawatts (MW) of capacity shortfalls, shown in red in the graph below. This accounts for 19.5 percent of electricity demand at the time of the blackout, which means one in every five homes in the region would experience a rolling power outage.
For context, a 26,000 MW blackout would essentially shut off power to the entire states of Minnesota and Wisconsin at the same time.
EPA’s modeled MISO grid produces massive blackouts because the agency is relying on unreliable wind and solar generators to meet peak electricity demand. The agency also overestimates the reliability of wind and solar, and as a result, there is not enough reliable power plant capacity on the grid to keep the lights on.
We are still recovering from the damage done by “expert bureaucrats” during covid. If the EPA’s energy rules are allowed to go forward, the impact could be even worse for our county.
And, I mention this fact one more time: Carbon dioxide is a life-essential gas.