Biden’s Attack On Electricity Will Ruin America’s Power Grid, Hike Prices

…With climate change, we are told, living conditions will deteriorate, and only by decarbonizing the economy can we avoid those losses.

It may take several more generations to convince people one way or the other, but in the meantime, there is a quick way to discredit the claim, and that is for the government to implement a policy that is so costly and catastrophic in the near term that people generally start wondering whether climate policies might not be considerably more dangerous than climate change. [emphasis, links added]

Such is the thin silver lining on President Biden’s latest round of climate policies, by far the most ambitious yet.

In April, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed two rules that, if implemented simultaneously, would wreck America’s electricity grid.

The first was vehicle emissions standards that would require two-thirds of all vehicles made in America to be fully electric by 2032. That’s barely eight years from now.

The second would require the large natural gas and coal plants upon which the nation’s electricity depends for “baseload” power to adopt carbon-capture-and-storage technology (CSS) (in which carbon dioxide is removed from the power-plant exhaust by a chemical process, then transported by pipeline to be injected deep underground) or switch to “green” hydrogen (i.e., hydrogen produced by renewable sources) by 2038 at the latest.

Both rules rest on thin legal ice.

For the vehicles rule, the EPA defines each “class” of vehicle as including fully electric cars of the same size as the relevant combustion-engine vehicle; then it sets the emission standard so low that no combustion-powered car can possibly meet it.

As a result, there is no way for carmakers to comply with the “fleet average” standards by improving emissions in their existing vehicles, as the Clean Air Act contemplates.

Rather, carmakers will have to switch to producing fully electric vehicles (EVs), regardless of whether the charging infrastructure is in place and the grid can handle the ballooning demand.

The Supreme Court insisted last year in West Virginia v. EPA that the Clean Air Act does not give the EPA power to require utilities to switch to different kinds of power plants; the same principle should apply to the engines in our automobiles.

The power plant rule is on even thinner ice. The EPA claims that the efficacies of carbon capture and green hydrogen are “adequately demonstrated,” as the Clean Air Act requires.

But in fact, neither technology has demonstrated its viability at the scale and for the purpose that the EPA proposes.

All of the EPA’s cited examples are of much smaller carbon-capture-and-storage operations; and in no example has CCS reached the 90 percent carbon-emissions reduction that the EPA proposes to require.

The proposal is full of accounting tricks, such as subtracting the amount of federal renewable subsidies from its compliance-cost estimates, as if costs disappear when you push them onto taxpayers.

Each rule would be ruinous on its own. But an EV mandate that suddenly increases grid-capacity requirements, on top of a power-plant rule that suddenly diminished grid capacity, would be a societal disaster.

Ultimately, it couldn’t work, and in any case, the next Republican administration would certainly rescind the rules.

But if President Biden wins reelection and proceeds with the simultaneous implementation of both rules, it will have a catastrophic effect on America’s electricity grid, ushering in an era of painful scarcity, renewed inflation, and job losses for America’s families and industries.

With the new federal subsidies, the Edison Electric Institute had previously estimated that there would be 26 million EVs by 2030. That would require an extra 100 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity or about 2.5 percent of what the U.S. grid produces now.

The EPA estimates that under its vehicle rule, 67 percent of all vehicles produced in the U.S. will be EVs by 2032. Sometime later that decade, two-thirds of the perhaps 400 million vehicles on American roads would be EVs.

That would require on the order of 1,000 TWh more electricity, an increase of 25 percent of what the U.S. grid currently produces, which in turn would require a doubling or tripling of installed capacity since the rated output of renewable plants is much lower than their nameplate capacity.

The basic problem here, as with other aggressive climate policies, is that if you throttle fossil energy before renewable substitutes are available at a similar price, all you’ve done is constrict the supply of things that people can’t do without.

If the production or sales of EVs fall short of EPA projections, the result will be far fewer new cars available, leading to a massive increase in the demand for, and the cost of used gasoline-powered cars.

If the number of charging stations, transmission lines, or power plants fails to keep pace with demand for electrical capacity, the result will be “scarcity pricing” for electricity, meaning a small reduction in supply sends prices soaring.

The benefits would be meager indeed. Extracting critical minerals from the 100,000 pounds of ore that need to be mined to build a single EV battery is an energy-intensive process.

Combining that use of fuel with the energy required to charge a battery throughout its lifecycle means that the upstream carbon emissions of EV batteries are far from zero.

They are likely at least half the carbon emissions of regular vehicles and could prove to be higher than that, depending on how the grid manages the chaotic transition to renewables that Biden has in store.

The ultimate purpose of the new EPA rules is to force a countrywide shift to renewable energy. Standing in the way of that goal are at least two virtually insurmountable obstacles.

The first is a suffocating amount of red tape. Most studies estimate that the U.S. needs to deploy about 500 gigawatts of solar power by 2035 to achieve Biden’s clean-electricity goals.

That’s on the order of 1,000 utility-scale solar plants, which would cover an area the size of New Jersey.

Most of the bigger projects would have to be built on Bureau of Land Management land in the Western states, where the sun shines all day and all year.

Each of those would need its own permit in time to build and go operational before 2035. So in order to reach Biden’s clean-electricity goals, the BLM would have to issue hundreds of solar permits in the next seven or eight years, to leave enough time for construction.

But the permit-review process consumes so much in agency resources that the BLM can issue at most two or three solar-project permits each year, and that’s operating at full tilt. The permitting bottleneck alone makes Biden’s green dream a sheer fantasy.

The second obstacle is that, even if you could get all the permits you needed, there is a physical limit to how much solar and wind you can put on the grid and still keep it stable.

Solar and wind are intermittent sources, with output that is highly variable throughout the day, whereas demand follows a much more stable “duck-shaped” curve, with demand highest in the morning and early evening.

So when solar power or wind power unexpectedly drops off, you need to be able to dial up what we call a “dispatchable” source. And right now that means coal, natural gas, or nuclear.

Read the full post at NRO