Short-Sighted, Dangerous, Hard to Reverse, Calamitous
Steve Dittmer | AFF Sentinel
Colorado Springs, CO
Originally sent to subscribers 04/15/24
Many folks have caught on to the Green New Deal as a concept way before its time, if not just an impractical fantasy the government is trying to conjure up, whose time should never come. But a recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal vividly pointed out that regardless of the shortsightedness of phasing out fossil fuels for all the hundreds of products and fuels they supply for modern standards of living, there is another colossal problem the greenies have not grasped.
Our electric grid is overtaxed in some regions already. But the new demands of AI data centers, added to the (maybe) demands from EVs and federally subsidized manufacturing plants like chip factories would put exponential requirements on the grid we can’t even come close to supplying now or in the near future. Big data centers need 100 times the power as the average industrial plant, and need it steadily around the clock. Windmills and solar panels cannot supply round-the-clock power and batteries are still expensive and short of capacity. Already, new data centers are waiting two to six years for power to be connected, (“The Coming Electricity Crisis,” 03/29/24).
Building the new transmission lines the renewables need to connect to the grid are ten to 12 year projects. Yet with all the projected major increases in electric power required, fossil fuel power plant and nuclear plants are being shut down. Federal energy officials explained that the country is “subtracting” fossil fuel resources faster than they can be replaced. PJM Interconnection, which supplies power to 13 Midwestern and Northeastern states, said about 30 percent of the region’s generating capacity is at risk of retiring by 2030.
While some plants are nearing the end of their scheduled life, a torrent of new regulations from EPA is a bigger problem, requiring plants to install new technology that hasn’t even been proven and costs too much. The bottom line from a PJM report translates as, “No one has figured out how to replace all the capacity that is shutting down.”
Sounds to us like a typical do-gooder Green project, with a big splash, long on political ideology, no practical solution and not enough money to accomplish without gargantuan injections of taxpayer money.
Recent winters and summers, when only the beginning of this “transition” has begun to appear, demonstrated during winter cold snaps and summer heat waves that wind and solar need fossil fuel backup systems when it’s dark or still. The Journal story points out that’s a big problem.
“Baseload plants can’t turn a profit operating only when needed to back up renewables, so they are closing.”
Upgrading the grid would require millions of new heavier transformers for homes and charging stations; heavier poles and lines for higher power needs; giant utility transformers for power stations with a multi-year wait even now and lots more power generation in a country retiring coal and gas power plants by the handful. One estimate for the cost of these upgrades by 2035 is a cool $1 trillion, paid by utility companies, taxpayers and electricity customers.
The very real power calamity we’re heading for in the next half dozen years or so is many times more potentially calamitous than the far distant theoretical “manmade” climate warming the left is so worried about. Retiring all these power generation plants would seem to be more suicidal for the economy and the standard of living than the public yet realizes.
Nobody yet we’ve heard from has figured out how to re-charge EVs when people get home who live in apartments or townhouses with no garage access. This from a government who wants us to give up the concept of single-family homes and all move into multi-family buildings.
In fact, the Biden administration has plans in a second term to begin taking over zoning at the federal level, superseding local control with federal rules and regulation.
Speaking of ill-conceived and short-sighted government schemes, the SEC has gotten so many comments and objections to its program to force all public companies to gather and calculate all the GHG emissions occurring from their operations that it has “paused” the program. It had already removed the Stage 3 requirements that would have required cattlemen to ascertain and report all their emissions to any public company they dealt with. But Stage 1 and Stage 2 implementation has been paused because no one has really figured out how to gather and calculate all the data the government hasn’t really discovered it has imagined can be gathered.
California’s $20/hr. mandate for fast food franchises has kicked in and some employees were shocked to find the doors locked when they went to work. Stores have cut back on the number of employees, cut hours for some and closed some stores completely. Cutting volume and opportunity for fast food restaurants in the country’s biggest market is problematic for the beef industry and pressured consumers. Demand for ground beef has pushed 90 percent lean beef to levels well over $300, reflecting the need filled by chains and independents selling beef burgers nationwide.
We know California is a “forward looking” testing lab for harebrained schemes with no underpinning economic reality. We hope this one stays and dies in that lab before it infects all the rest of the country.
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