Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would roll back the Biden administration’s greenhouse gas emissions standards on power plants. [emphasis, links added]
That’s great news for consumers, who will suffer from widespread blackouts and billions of dollars in costs if the rules are not repealed.
The Biden administration’s rules, finalized in May 2024, would subject millions of people to rolling blackouts by effectively forcing reliable coal plants to retire and erecting impediments to building the new natural gas plants needed to replace them reliably.
Under Biden’s rules, coal and new natural gas plants would be forced to spend billions of dollars installing unproven carbon capture and sequestration technology to capture 90% of their emissions or shut down by 2039.
Almost all coal plant owners would rather close up shop than undertake such high compliance costs. As a result, the rules would make America’s electric grid dangerously dependent upon unreliable wind, solar, and battery storage technologies.
There couldn’t be a worse time to retire reliable power plants.
The North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) warned in 2024 that one regional grid is at risk of blackouts in “normal peak demand” conditions in 2025 and beyond, and more could expect them in the near future.
NERC correctly identifies that “resource additions are not keeping up with generator retirements and demand growth.”
The unreasonably short compliance deadline and broad scope of Biden’s rules prompted four of the largest grid operators in the United States, serving 30 states and 155 million people, to warn the EPA of the dire effects on grid reliability.
The grid is clearly in trouble when the people who run it are saying that “hope is not an acceptable strategy.”
The nation’s grid operators have good reason to worry. Our organization modeled the cost and reliability impacts of Biden’s regulations in the Southwest Power Pool, the grid operator spanning 13 states from North Dakota to New Mexico, on behalf of the North Dakota Transmission Authority, and concluded the rules would cost ratepayers billions and lead to enormous blackouts.
Using EPA’s forecast of what power plants would serve the SPP grid under the regulations, we determined building enough wind, solar, and battery storage to replace the retiring coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants on the system would cost families and businesses in the region an additional $65.6 billion over the costs of operating the current grid.
For context, the Biden EPA thought the entire U.S.’s compliance costs would only cost $19 billion through 2047.
Not only would the rules cost a fortune, but they would also lead to devastating blackouts.
Modeling the Biden EPA’s grid portfolio assumptions with historical generation, our model predicts 13 separate blackout events in 12 days of February 2040 if hourly demand and wind and solar generation were the same as in 2021.
One blackout would last 41 straight hours. Shortfalls would total 1,365 hours, or 15% of all the hours of the year, most in the evening and in the winter. The EPA did not perform any hourly reliability modeling.
Bad energy policies impose real costs in lives and suffering: February 2021 brought Winter Storm Uri, which killed 246 people in Texas.
Lengthy blackouts across SPP would have affected about 5.2 million people — in a part of the U.S. that experiences harsher winters in Texas.
Under President Donald Trump, the EPA is wisely poised to reprioritize grid reliability while continuing to protect the environment.
Read rest at Washington Examiner
This will help the red states that aren’t forced into shutting down their operational coal and natural gas plants but nothing will change in the blue states. California, NY, MA, and here in Colorado are still pursuing a Net Zero plan which will destroy our grids as the last coal plants are shut down while putting up more solar and wind. Since the grids are mostly interconnected when there are blackouts occurring due to lack of base power there will be strains on the grids of the nearby red states.
Just start cutting off all Power to the UN Building make them use Candles
The US was arguably only one Democrat administration away from catastrophic grid failures due to the wind drought trap that is sent by running down coal capacity to the point where there is not enough baseload viable get through windless nights when wind and solar make no contribution regardless of the installed capacity. The trap is sprung during wind droughts at night.
Read all about it!
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/escaping-the-wind-drought-trap