EV's, Reliable Power, et al

Herman · December 24, 2022, 12:41:25 AM

Today's grids are being ruined by systemic preferences for unreliable electricity.

1) no price penalty for being unreliable

2) huge subsidies for unreliables

3) mandates for unreliables

By Alex Epstein

The Opportunity

America, given its combination of abundant domestic energy resources, technological ingenuity, and free-market competition, has the potential to have the best grid in the world—providing electricity that is low-cost, ultra-reliable, and increasingly clean.

The Problem

Although America could have world-leading electricity, the American grid is instead becoming a national embarrassment—with rising costs and mounting reliability problems, most problematically in California and Texas but now spreading around the country.¹

The cause

A root cause of America's cost and reliability problems is extreme preferences for unreliable solar and wind electricity:

1) no price penalty for being unreliable

2) huge subsidies for unreliables

3) mandates for unreliables

Here's how they work and how to fix them.

Unreliability preference 1: no price penalty for being unreliable

In almost every area of life we pay far more for a reliable service than for an unreliable one. But in electricity, unfair rules make utilities pay the same for unreliable solar and wind as they do for reliables.

Policy solution: Electricity markets should require all generators to meet technology-neutral reliability standards.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and ERCOT (the Texas regulator) should set reliability standards that all competitors must meet—not allow some to sell unreliable electricity, as they do now.

Technology-neutral reliability standards do not prevent solar and wind from being used.

They simply require that generators who want to use solar and wind take responsibility for combining it with reliables and/or storage to guarantee reliability. Instead of foisting responsibility on others.

Technology-neutral reliability standards may well lead to innovative, truly cost-effective uses of solar and wind—e.g., solar/gas/battery hybrid generators in sunny parts of the country that can provide reliable electricity at lower costs.

Any company or academic who believes that solar and wind can be cost-effective generation sources on a large scale should welcome technology-neutral reliability standards.

They can try to prove their ideas on the market—not force us to use unreliables and then trust that it'll work out.

With tech-neutral reliability standards, electricity "markets" can function as competitive markets—lowering costs and raising reliability—since all competitors will have to offer the same level of value.

Subsidies for unreliable electricity, above all the Investment Tax Credit and the Production Tax Credit, force taxpayers to pay huge amounts of extra money to unreliable solar and wind generators.

The "Investment Tax Credit" and "Production Tax Credit" solar and wind subsidies pay utilities to shut down or slow down reliable gas and coal plants whenever the sun shines or the wind blows. This defunds reliable plants, causing many to be shut down.²

Solar and wind subsidies are driving reliable power plants out of business, leading to higher costs and lower reliability.

Ominously, the "Inflation Reduction Act" recently extended them indefinitely.

A future Congress should end solar and wind subsidies, driving lower prices and higher reliability.³

The "Inflation Reduction Act" pretended to be pro-nuclear by including nuclear under "clean energy" subsidies. But since nuclear overregulation makes new plants cost-prohibitive, the IRA's endless "clean energy" subsidies created an endless trough for solar and wind.

Another solar and wind subsidy of the IRA is "green hydrogen." The IRA forces us to give those who make hydrogen using solar and wind an extra $3/kg. That's twice the normal market price! This is like forcing taxpayers to pay gas stations an extra $8/gallon!⁴

Another form of subsidy to eliminate: government subsidizing unreliable solar and wind by socializing their costs, such as additional transmission lines or redundant backup capacity. This subsidy further rewards unreliable electricity at the expense of reliables and of customers.

Solar and wind subsidies not only drive the shutdown of reliable power plants and loot taxpayers, they also inflate electricity prices. Because solar and wind can go near-zero at any given time, they don't replace most of the costs of reliable power plants—they add to them.

The combination of no price penalty for unreliability and special subsidies for unreliables means that instead of unreliables receiving far less dollars than reliables, they get a huge premium. And more and more reliable power plants go out of business.⁵

Policy solution: End all subsidies for unreliables.

Abolish the Investment Tax Credit and Production Tax Credit. Stop "green hydrogen" subsidies. Require generators using solar and wind to pay for the extra infrastructure they need instead of forcing others to foot the bill.

Even beyond paying a premium for unreliable electricity, many states mandate a certain percentage of unreliable solar and wind—and states are becoming more and more aggressive with those mandates. Another dire threat to our grid.⁶

Policy solution: End all mandates for unreliable solar and wind

These mandates, which require areas to use solar or wind and shut down reliable fossil fuels and nuclear, regardless of the impact on cost and reliability, should be ended at every level: national, state, and local.

Summary: America can stop the decline of our grid and move toward low-cost, reliable, and cleaner electricity by ending all preferences for unreliable electricity:

1. Require tech-neutral reliability standards

2. End all solar and wind subsidies

3. End all solar and wind mandates

Herman · December 24, 2022, 12:46:13 AM

The "green energy" movement is celebrating a technical breakthrough in nuclear fusion, in order to distract from the catastrophic consequences of its anti-fission, anti-fossil-fuel policies.

The green energy movement, including the Biden Administration, is celebrating a technical breakthrough in nuclear fusion, in order to distract from the catastrophic consequences of its anti-fission, anti-fossil-fuel policies.

In its first 2 years the Biden administration, through its anti-fossil fuel policies, has helped cause the worst energy crisis since the 1970s.

Instead of reversing course it's using a technical breakthrough in fusion to pretend everything is going great.¹

But a research breakthrough that, optimistically, will be useful in several decades, doesn't change the fact of today's ruinous energy policies.

Real energy leadership by the US would mean passing policies that make possible energy abundance today using fossil fuels and nuclear fission and enabling technologies such as nuclear fusion in the future. Instead this Administration has opposed fossil fuels and done nothing to decriminalize fission.²

Nuclear fission—generating energy by splitting (fissioning) the nuclei of atoms—has been an epic and preventable tragedy for the past 50+ years thanks to the Green movement, which has demonized it as dangerous and regulated it to the point of effective criminalization.³

In the 1970s, we had fission that was cost-effective—producing low-cost, reliable electricity in the cleanest and safest way ever achieved. And yet the Green movement's false portrayal of fission as dangerous has made it so regulated that fission costs many times what it used to!

Real nuclear leadership means radical reform to "decriminalize" fission, such as: banish the pseudoscientific "linear no-threshold model" from public agencies and eliminate the ability of anti-development activists to be involved in the nuclear permitting process.⁴

Instead of acting to decriminalize fission, this administration has at best called for new subsidies. But these won't unleash fission's potential. Consider: Since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established in 1974, no nuclear plant has gone through the full process of conception to completion.

While doing nothing meaningful to unleash fission's potential, the Biden Administration has engaged in meaningful destruction of the fossil fuel industry—the only industry that, for the foreseeable future, can provide cost-effective energy to billions in a world that needs more energy.⁵

The reason the green energy movement is hostile not just toward fossil fuels but also nuclear fission and also hydro is that "green"—"minimal human impact"—is an anti-energy idea. If you don't want us to impact Earth you ultimately must oppose every form of energy.

Observe that "green" activists are now successfully opposing the massive mining, transmission-line-building, and development involved in solar and wind—because of the large impact these have on nature.⁶

The core reason that the "green" movement opposes energy is that using energy by its nature impacts Earth. Energy is "the capacity to do work," which means transforming our environment. The more energy we use, the more we transform Earth, the more impact we have.

The fundamental hostility of the "green" movement to energy explains why throughout its history it has never supported current, cost-effective source of energy and only "supported" imaginary sources of energy that might exist in the future.

"Green" leaders supported nuclear—until it became cost-effective, at which point they demonized and criminalized it. "Green" leaders supported natural gas—until it became cost-effective on a global scale thanks to shale energy tech, at which point they demonized it as "fracking."⁷

Because the "green" movement is anti-energy, any enthusiasm its leaders express for fusion is phony; while they may claim to want clean, cheap, abundant energy before it exists, they will not like the impact it has once it exists. And in the past, green leaders admitted this.

Amory Lovins, the leader of the modern "green energy" movement, said in the 1970s: "It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we would do with it."⁸

When asked in 1989 about the prospect of fusion by the LA Times, Jeremy Rifkin said: "'It's the worst thing that could happen to our planet.' Inexhaustible power, he argues, only gives man an infinite ability to exhaust the planet's resources, to destroy its fragile balance..."⁹

When asked in 1989 about the prospect of fusion by the LA Times, leading "green" thinker Paul Ehrlich said that given society's dismal record in managing technology, the prospect of cheap, inexhaustible power from fusion is "like giving a machine gun to an idiot child."¹⁰

The world needs to reject the "green" movement and instead embrace a "human flourishing" movement that embraces intelligent human impact on Earth as a good thing, and embraces both today's most cost-effective energy sources—above all, fossil fuels—and is eager to improve on them.

To understand why fossil fuels are so valuable for the foreseeable future, and why their benefits far outweigh their negative side-effects including climate-side-effects, read this summary of my new book Fossil Future.¹¹

Given that fusion is our sun's energy source, the prospect of harnessing it for human purposes is thrilling. But we must recognize that the recent development is a research breakthrough—and that there's a huge gap between a research breakthrough and an economic breakthrough.

Research breakthroughs make possible technical breakthroughs, which make possible economic breakthroughs.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that fission has challenges that can be demonized (radioactivity, waste) but fusion doesn't. Consider temperature: the fusion breakthrough involved temps of 100M °C—100,000X hotter than nuclear fission, and 7X hotter than the center of the sun!¹⁴

Whatever the technology—fossil fuels, fission, fusion—we need leaders who embrace human flourishing, who reject "green" hostility toward human impact, and who support pro-human, truly scientific safety laws that don't hold back innovation.

Berry Sweet · December 24, 2022, 12:48:16 AM

Umm....wot?

Herman · December 24, 2022, 01:03:51 AM

~~Quote from: "Berry Sweet" post_id=488852 time=1671860896 user_id=164~~
Umm....wot?

That is what I say kid, wot?

Zetsu · December 31, 2022, 03:48:30 PM

Tesla Model Y's circuit board must have gotten fried and ended up killing 2 ppl ac_umm

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