On this episode of The Unregulated Podcast Tom Pyle and Mike McKenna discuss the debt ceiling battle, recent staff changes, and a busy week of events in Washington.
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Biden’s Bird Blenders Actually Increase Local Temperatures
May 18, 2023 by Leave a Comment
Studies have found that wind turbines impact local meteorological conditions by raising temperatures at the surface level while the wind turbines are in operation. Due to lucrative federal subsidies, wind farms are being built at a rapid pace contributing to a growing concern of the cumulative impacts these wind projects will produce. Advocates of wind argue that the surface temperature impact of turbines is local and not global, as are emissions of greenhouse gases, and that wind turbines are only redistributing heat rather than trapping it in the atmosphere. Those same advocates, however, ignore the rising energy costs and poor reliability of wind turbines on the electric grid and the fact that after decades of subsidies, wind energy accounted for a mere 4 percent of the total U.S. primary energy consumption in 2022, while coal, oil and natural gas provided nearly 80 percent. They also ignore the number and types of birds that are killed from wind turbines, which is significant, and the impact of wind turbines on farming.
The Studies
A 2004 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that “large-scale use of wind power can alter local and global climate by extracting kinetic energy and altering turbulent transport in the atmospheric boundary layer.” The study states that large amounts of wind across the continent will produce a pronounced impact on the climate. A 2010 study found that wind farms affect temperatures and humidity near the surface and that the “explosive growth” of future wind farms could impact agriculture. A 2013 study found the same impacts. A 2015 study found that wind farms raise nighttime temperatures. A 2011 Purdue study found increased temperatures at the surface were a result of wind farms, as did a 2016 study in Scotland. A 2018 study estimated that generating electricity demand with wind power in the United States would warm surface temperatures by 0.24 degrees Celsius, which is nearly one-fourth of the amount of warming the globe has seen since 1800.
Wind turbines complicate farming as straight rows in a field and efficient aerial applications are no longer viable, decreasing farm efficiency. Many agriculture pilots refuse to fly their aircraft within a half-mile of the turbines. Ground rig sprayers also do not work well in turbine fields if the ground is soggy or the crops are leaning. And, the equipment used to build wind turbines can damage drainage lines in a field and often the damage is not fixed in a timely manner or at all if the wind company disagrees that the damage is their fault. Also, higher temperatures occurring at night in areas with wind farms results in plants releasing more carbon dioxide than they would otherwise. That carbon dioxide is needed to make plant material and grow crops, but has also been the target of all of President Biden’s actions on climate. Nighttime temperatures have been increasing during the past 40 years and were made worse by wind turbines after they started multiplying, incentivized by federal tax credits beginning in 1992. Those increased nighttime temperature increases are limiting crop yields.
Wildlife Impacts
The studies on the surface temperature did not look at impacts upon wildlife, considering impacts to agriculture instead. In Wyoming, however, wind projects are being built within a major corridor for golden eagles. Mike Lockhart, a wildlife biologist specializing in eagles who worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) for more than 30 years said that the number of eagles killed by wind turbines in a major corridor is significant and likely underestimated. The golden eagle is protected under the Eagle Act. Wind facilities are required to obtain so-called “incidental take permits” for killing golden eagles that are issued by the Fish and Wildlife Service. The wind industry, however, is ignoring the Eagle Law and not getting the required permits, as FWS indicates:
“For golden eagles, a goal of the 2016 Eagle Rule was to increase compliance and improve consistency and efficiency relating to permitting golden eagle take at wind-energy projects. However, those goals have not been realized. While participation in the permit program by wind energy projects has increased since 2016, it still remains well below our expectations. Low application rates and permit-processing requirements that some have perceived as burdensome have resulted in few permits being issued for wind projects as compared to the number of operational wind projects in areas where golden eagles occur. As a result, golden eagles continue to be taken without implementation of conservation actions to offset that take.”
The Biden FWS is not cracking down on wind turbine bird kills. Instead, it proposes to make permitting easier by making it less effective. Because wind project developers think eagle kill permitting is too “burdensome,” the Biden FWS proposes to ease up on the requirement. The FWS proposal is to do away with site specific permits and instead create a “general permit” that covers all normal wind projects and their bird deaths. A project signs up and pays a small fee, which supposedly mitigates future eagle deaths. As part of the general permit, the entire project is exempt from NEPA as long as eagle killing is all they are doing. Having no requirement for an Environmental Impact Statement as other projects must submit to speeds the process up. Also the requirement that an independent observer count the dead eagles is not part of the general permit. Instead, the government will depend on the wind facility operators (who have not been getting permits) to tell when too many birds have been killed by the turbines. Clearly, this favors wind development at the expense of the eagles. President Biden said that every federal agency should do whatever it can to promote renewables and this FWS proposal apparently meets his test.
A 2013 paper titled “Estimates of bird collision mortality at wind facilities in the contiguous United States” estimated that about 250,000 birds die a year from bird deaths. With around 50,000 megawatts of installed capacity, that is roughly 5 deaths per megawatt per year. For the Biden Administration’s goal of “net zero” emissions, Tesla calculates that the United States will need 2 million megawatts of wind capacity. At five bird deaths per megawatt that results in 10 million deaths a year or 300 million dead birds over the 30 year lives of the FWS proposed general permits. The vast majority of the dead birds are expected to be songbirds, but migratory bird deaths as well as birds of prey have been common.
In Wyoming, the noise and industrialization from wind projects are also expected to spread across migration corridors used by pronghorn antelope, which will not only harm wildlife but could impact tourism in some areas. BluEarth Renewables, which is building the 60-turbine Two Rivers Wind Energy Project near Medicine Bow, and Connect Gen, which is building the Roundhouse Wind Projects, together will have 106 turbines.
Conclusion
The studies showing the impacts of wind turbines on surface temperatures raise questions about the value of wind energy in the United States as the higher nighttime temperatures affect crop yields and contribute to warming, which climate alarmists including President Biden call “an existential threat.”
Also, wind energy is weather driven and as such does not generate power 24/7 as required by consumers of electricity. As such, it requires back-up power from coal or natural gas generators that stand-by at higher operating cost than if they were run 24/7, or expensive batteries if there is enough excess wind power to store electricity for release when the wind is not blowing. In essence, it requires the building of multiple systems instead of simply one that can run all the time.
Further, wind power is supported by lucrative federal subsidies paid by taxpayers and state mandates. And, Biden’s Fish and Wildlife Service is allowing wind turbines to kill birds by its revised permitting requirements and its lax environmental control. The government is definitely bending all the rules and slathering on huge incentives to build wind turbines. Americans will have to decide whether they support this preferred energy source or not as the costs mount.
*This article was adapted from content originally published by the Institute for Energy Research.
Biden, Bypassing Congress, Attempts To Close Natural Gas Power Plants
May 17, 2023 by Leave a Comment
EPA’s proposed power plant rule hits coal plants particularly hard since they would need an extremely expensive technology that is not yet commercial to allow coal plants to generate electricity in the United States. But, the new proposed rule would also wreak havoc on natural gas plants. Biden’s 681-page Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed rule would require natural gas plants to blend hydrogen into fuel to survive. Natural gas plants would have to co-fire with 30 percent hydrogen by 2032 and 96 percent hydrogen by 2038. But to be politically acceptable, that hydrogen would have to be produced from renewable electricity (green hydrogen), which is three to four times more expensive. If hydrogen produced from natural gas were allowed, which is generally the way hydrogen is produced today, it would defeat the purpose of forcing hydrogen in natural gas plants. With this rule, politicians are escaping the wrath of citizens for skyrocketing electricity prices by blaming it on electric utilities.
Blending more hydrogen into gas also increases NOx emissions and puts plants out of compliance with other EPA regulations. To reduce NOx, power plants would have to install new turbines and other costly equipment, some of which is only now being developed. Natural gas plants’ other alternative is to add expensive carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) equipment, similar to coal plants, which will also add to consumers’ bills. EPA’s new power plant rule makes coal and natural gas plants so expensive that utilities will be forced to build politically correct wind and solar plants, and raise rates to pay for the new generating technologies.
Existing natural gas plants get more leeway than coal plants in the proposed rule — only the largest natural gas plants, those over 300 megawatts that run over 50 percent of the time, will have to cut their emissions by 90 percent by 2035. Coal plants would have to do so by the end of the decade, unless the plant retires before the end of 2040. The proposed rule puts about 23 percent of existing gas plants in jeopardy. However, that percent could become much larger as EPA is considering lowering the threshold to 150 megawatts. New gas-fired “peaker plants,” used as backup generation to politically correct intermittent wind and solar plants, would face less stringent standards.
Coal plants that run past 2040, would be required to install CCS technology starting in 2030, while those shutting down between 2035 and 2040 would be required to co-fire with 40 percent gas by 2030, putting a “bounty” on closing coal plants. Only one commercial power plant in North America is currently operating with carbon capture– the Boundary Dam Power Station Unit 3 in Canada’s Saskatchewan province. The unit is outfitted with a $1.1 billion carbon-capture system, which is now collecting around 80 percent of the unit’s carbon-dioxide emissions. Removal of fly ash that fouled the capture system for several years after it began running in 2014 required modifications and additions of new equipment.
The EPA is using the Clean Air Act as a means to set the regulation. The proposal, taking more than 18 months to develop, reflects constraints imposed on the EPA by the Supreme Court, which ruled last year that the agency cannot impose a system-wide shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, saying instead the agency could only mandate emissions cuts based on technology that could be deployed “within the fence line” of power facilities themselves. The EPA anticipates the new proposal will cost the power industry over $10 billion, although others expect it to result in costs multiple times higher for replacement power for the plants that will be closed.
The proposed EPA rule is being called a “job killer” and it would increase electricity prices for American consumers, as many of the plants could become stranded assets, if not choosing to add costly equipment, whose costs would be passed onto consumers. Retrofitting an existing commercial-scale 300-megawatt natural-gas plant with carbon capture would cost $372 million, while retrofitting a similar-size coal plant would cost $600 million, based on recent estimates from the Energy Department. For new plants the cost would be about 10 percent less. According to some U.S. power industry experts, carbon capture needs a longer test drive to determine operational challenges, maintenance issues, data and optimization of the system before building whole fleets of CCS technologies.
Senators Joe Manchin and Shelly Moore Capito of West Virginia highly criticized the proposal because their state’s economy is reliant on the fossil fuel industry and this new plan would essentially kill it. As of 2021, mining and coal-fired power generation had a $14 billion impact on West Virginia’s economy with the state’s mining industry spending over $2.1 billion on wages. WV coal operators generated roughly $9.1 billion in economic activity in 2019. Capito vowed to formally challenge the EPA’s new rule, using the Congressional Review Act – labeling it as an “illegal overreach.”
Conclusion
According to EPA, 120 natural-gas plants and 200 coal-fired plants would be affected by its proposed rules. It also said that there were plans already for 60 percent of coal generating units to go out of service by 2040 faced with six onerous rules from the EPA. The agency is expected to see lawsuits against the rule questioning whether EPA has the authority to force the use of technologies that are not economically or technically feasible for widespread use. The lawsuits will argue that the proposed rule represents government overreach and threatens to destabilize the electric grid, as intermittent solar and wind units would require very expensive battery back-up to release previously stored power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Regardless which alternatives are chosen, if this new rule goes into effect, Americans’ electricity prices will increase greatly, and American businesses will have a harder time competing against manufacturing in China, India and other parts of the world building coal plants at a breakneck pace.
*This article was adapted from content originally published by the Institute for Energy Research.
EV Batteries An Environmental Time Bomb
May 16, 2023 by Leave a Comment
The green transition is pushing electric vehicles upon the American public as it is believed that they are less greenhouse gas intensive than gasoline vehicles. Electric vehicles, however, require lithium-ion batteries that have issues regarding greenhouse gas emissions during the mining and processing of the raw materials needed and the disposal of the batteries at the end of their life cycle. As more and more electric vehicles are sold, the problems inherent to mining and disposal increase. The graph below shows the huge increase expected in global EV battery demand. In the United States, electric vehicles are being forced on the public through proposed vehicle standards and purchase incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, also known as the climate bill.
The production of lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles results in more carbon dioxide emissions than the production of gasoline-powered cars and their disposal at the end of their life cycle is a growing environmental concern as more and more electric vehicles populate the world’s roads. About 40 percent of the climate impact from the production of lithium-ion batteries comes from the mining and processing of the minerals needed. Mining and refining of battery materials, and manufacturing of the cells, modules and battery packs requires significant amounts of energy which generate greenhouse gases emissions. China, which dominates the world’s EV battery supply chain, gets almost 60 percent of its electricity from coal—a greenhouse gas-intensive fuel. According to the Wall Street Journal, lithium-ion battery mining and production are worse for the climate than the production of fossil fuel vehicle batteries. Production of the average lithium-ion battery uses three times more cumulative energy demand (CED) compared to a generic battery.
The disposal of the batteries is also a climate threat. If the battery ends up in a landfill, its cells can release toxins, including heavy metals that can leak into the soil and groundwater. A study from Australia found that 98.3 percent of lithium-ion batteries end up in landfills, which increases the likelihood of landfill fires that can burn for years. One landfill in the Pacific Northwest was reported to have had 124 fires between June 2017 and December 2020 due to lithium-ion batteries. Fires are becoming increasingly more common, with 21 fires reported on the site in 2018, increasing to 47 by 2020.
Recycling of lithium-ion batteries is being pushed by governments due to the environmental waste issues associated with them and the growing demand for batteries as more and more electric vehicles are sold. Only about 5 percent of the world’s lithium batteries are recycled compared to 99 percent of lead car batteries recycled in the United States. Recycling lithium batteries, however, can be hazardous. Cutting too deep into a cell or in the wrong place can result in it short-circuiting, combusting, and releasing toxic fumes. Because batteries differ widely in chemistry and construction, it is difficult to create efficient recycling systems. And because the cells are often held together with tough glues that make them difficult to take apart, it is often cheaper for battery makers to buy newly mined metals than to use recycled materials, even with rapidly increasing prices.
Governments are beginning to require some level of recycling, however. In 2018, China, which has the largest EV market and lithium-ion battery production, imposed rules aimed at promoting the reuse of EV battery components. Last year, the European Union passed rules for battery recycling that requires a certain percentage of recycled materials to be used in the manufacturing of new batteries.
Composition of Lithium Ion Batteries
A lithium-ion battery is composed of cells, which contain the active materials, a battery management system, and a pack, which is the structure in which the cells are mounted. Aluminum is important for the pack component because of its light weight but it is a very energy-intensive material, representing 17 percent of the battery’s carbon footprint. About 40 percent of the carbon footprint of the battery comes from the mining, conversion and refining step of the active materials of the cells where nickel, manganese, cobalt and lithium are processed into cathode powder. Actual cell production is the second most energy-demanding activity and represents 20 percent of the carbon footprint due to the energy used during the manufacturing process.
Issues with Mining of Battery Raw Materials
Two types of mining commonly required to extract minerals for batteries are open-pit mining and brine extraction. One of the major ways to extract lithium called brine extraction uses a large amount of water that is pumped into salt flats, bringing saltwater containing minerals to the surface. Once the water evaporates, lithium is filtered out of the mixture. But, the water-intensive process has the potential to contaminate the water supply. More than half the earth’s lithium supply is located in an area called the Lithium Triangle, spanning the Andean Mountain sections of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile. The area is one of the driest places on the globe, and lithium mining consumes as much as 65 percent of the region’s water. Any expansion of demand will place more pressure on water issues.
Also needed for electric vehicles is cobalt, the majority of which is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The mining of cobalt produces hazardous byproducts that can toxify the environment. Cobalt mine sites often contain sulfur, which generate sulfuric acid when exposed to air and water that infiltrates rivers, streams and aquatic life. Child labor is also being used in the Congo to mine cobalt, and about 80 percent of the industrial cobalt mines in the DRC are owned or financed by Chinese companies.
Conclusion
Electric vehicle batteries require mining natural resources, processing them, and manufacturing the materials into batteries, which is energy intensive—3 times more energy intensive than the batteries in internal combustion vehicles. Further, when a battery is at the end of its life cycle, it is usually disposed of as e-waste in landfills that can result in hazardous compounds leaching into the soil and can cause large fires, which are extremely difficult to control due to the large amount of combustible waste that they are mixed with. Recycling the batteries is being pursued by governments, but it is expensive as there is no standardization in battery design and they are difficult to dismantle. Like many things related to the government-imposed green transition, it appears that much of the foresight that typically accompanies market-driven revolutions is actually hindsight, with consumers left to bear the brunt of unwise decisions and edicts.
*This article was adapted from content originally published by the Institute for Energy Research.
The Unregulated Podcast #131: 10 or 10 Million
May 12, 2023 by Leave a Comment
On this episode of The Unregulated Podcast Tom Pyle and Mike McKenna discuss the debt ceiling battle, new carbon tax proposals, and the continued deterioration of America’s electric grid and political fabric.
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Biden Lies And The American Dream Dies
May 4, 2023 by Leave a Comment
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new emissions standards for vehicles require manufacturers to increase overall fuel efficiency by over 25 percent by 2026, effectively mandating that electric vehicles make up two-thirds of new car sales. In order for customers to buy electric vehicles, manufacturers will have to make them less expensive than internal combustion vehicles, which will likely mean raising the price of internal combustion (ICE) vehicles until they are more costly than electric vehicles. Today, the average electric vehicle costs around $65,000, while the average ICE vehicle costs around $48,000.
Electric vehicle prices are likely to also increase because increasing their demand will increase the demand for the materials to manufacture batteries, which are the largest cost component of an electric vehicle. Prices for rare earths, for example, have increased between 60 percent and 400 percent since 2020. Prices for lithium, the basic ingredient in most EV batteries, have increased by over 300 percent since 2020, having come down dramatically from their high last year. Moreover, the Biden administration continues to prevent the development of new mineral mines in the United States to supply those materials by revoking leases, delaying permits and labeling plants as endangered. This leaves China with a stranglehold on these metals, particularly their processing and on the supply chain for EV batteries, of which the U.S. Secretary of the Interior admits she is unaware despite her U.S. Geologic Survey tracking that data. China can process these minerals cheaply because of their lax environmental rules and their massive amounts of low-cost coal-fired generating plants.
Further, there is the increased electricity demand needed to charge these electric vehicles with more charging stations added to homes, apartment buildings, and on highways as more electric vehicles are purchased and operated. For electric vehicles to reduce emissions, the United States would need huge increases in wind and solar energy development. Yet, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that, by 2050, renewable energy will provide 63 percent of U.S. electricity generation, with wind and solar providing the largest amount of that renewable share. Natural gas and coal are still expected to provide a 27 percent share in 2050. Consequently, while the EPA may limit tailpipe emissions, it will transfer many of those emissions to power plants.
Electricity costs will also increase, negating the anticipated savings from “refueling” those electric vehicles. The federal government provides lucrative subsidies for wind and solar energy development and it has done so for 45 years at taxpayers’ expense. Many states have also implemented green energy mandates as developers of wind and solar power could not, and still cannot, compete on price alone, despite proponents’ claims. Wind and solar power are weather-driven and their inherently intermittent nature requires backup power from natural gas or coal generating units or from very expensive batteries—costs that are not imbedded in the calculations used in competing wind and solar power against traditional technologies.
In Europe, huge subsidies were used to increase wind and solar generation which resulted in large increases in electricity costs. Germany, for example, has the highest household electricity rates in Europe—around 3 times as high as those in the United States, and the continent is experiencing deindustrialization become industries cannot afford the cost of energy. A wind- and solar-based electric grid, without natural gas or coal generation, will require huge amounts of battery storage, which is simply an enormous added expense to accommodate their intermittent energy production. And, with the increasing electricity demand comes increasing electricity prices as new wind and solar plants replace existing coal and gas plants whose capital costs are mostly or entirely paid off.
EV Efficiency and Range Falls Short of EPA Ratings
Car and Driver magazine’s testing director Dave VanderWerp compared the EPA’s fuel economy and range estimates to the results of his own real-world highway tests. He found that electric vehicles underperform in efficiency and range relative to the EPA figures by a much greater margin than gasoline vehicles. On Car and Driver‘s 75-mph highway test, gas vehicles averaged 4 percent better than their stickers indicated while the average range for an electric vehicle was 12.5 percent worse than the window sticker numbers. According to VanderWerp, while EPA tests separate city and highway range figures, only a combined number for electric vehicles is presented to consumers. The combined rating is weighted 55 percent in favor of the city figure, where electric vehicles typically perform better, which inflates the EV estimates.
The way the tests are conducted also skews the reported range figure. Unlike Car and Driver‘s real-world test, which is carried out at a constant 75 miles per hour, the EPA’s cycle is variable, with the speed increasing and decreasing over the course of the test. The variability of speed in testing is detrimental to the results for gas vehicles, which tend to be most efficient at a steady rpm. However, for electric vehicles, the ability to regenerate energy under braking leads to higher range results, which are then shifted even higher by the slight bias towards city driving in the combined rating. It is almost as though the EPA has rigged the tests to achieve the numbers it wants to achieve. Consumers, however, live in the real world and would get different results, as Car and Driver did.
Because of the way EPA conducts its testing, range figures are not comparable across different vehicles. The EPA’s highway cycle is conducted at significantly lower speeds than Car and Driver‘s 75-mph test, with the initial EPA results then multiplied by a reduction factor to simulate the effect of higher speeds. Automakers can choose between running a two-cycle test—where the data is multiplied by a standard 0.7 adjustment factor—or carrying out a five-cycle test in an attempt to earn a smaller reduction factor, making the label figure higher. To be upfront about the data, EPA should publish both city and highway range figures—as they do with fuel-economy estimates for gasoline vehicles. Putting their thumbs on the scales as they have been doing misleads the public and reduces trust in the EPA and the electric vehicles the Biden administration is pushing.
Conclusion
The EPA is forcing Americans to buy electric vehicles in the future by its regulations, whether Americans want those vehicles or not. Besides taking options away from Americans to choose what is best for them, EPA’s decisions also have security issues and cost issues associated with them. Electric vehicles currently cost more than gasoline vehicles, but the cost of both are likely to increase as automakers price vehicles so that they can meet EPA standards by selling the required number of electric vehicles. This means fewer Americans will be able to afford personal transportation and the freedoms that come with that tradition. Further, because China dominates the processing of metals needed for car manufacture and the supply chain for EV batteries, it makes the United States dependent on China—an autocratic country—far more (actually, 4 times more) than the United States was ever dependent on the Middle East for oil. That dependency is unnecessary since the United States has the mineral resources, but the Biden administration will not let those resources be mined.
Further, the EPA is skewing the data on EV efficiency and range, making them look more advantageous than they are, by the way it is performing its tests and how it is combining data for city vs. highway driving. Clearly, that points to a need for revised testing and labeling standards for electric vehicles, but that may not be in the Biden administration’s best interests, given its climate agenda which adheres to the belief that electrification of everything is fundamental. Car companies that exaggerate their mileage performance for gasoline vehicles face steep fines. Those fines should be extended to electric vehicles if the manufacturer exaggerates their range and efficiency data. And if the EPA is deliberately misleading in its tests to achieve a political rather than an objective number, perhaps they should share in the fines through a reduction in its budget.
*This article was adapted from content originally published by the Institute for Energy Research.
Team Biden Rolls Out Deranged Plan To “Electrify” America’s Armed Forces
May 3, 2023 by Leave a Comment
Secretary of Energy Granholm believes the U.S. military can rely on electricity to fuel its tanks and other military fighting equipment in about a decade. And, of course, that electricity must be supplied by politically correct resources—wind and solar power—that are weather-dependent. Granholm testified before the Senate in support of a plan to fully establish an all-electric vehicle fleet in the U.S. military by the 2030s. Granholm, a former Michigan Democratic governor, believes that reducing reliance on the “volatility of globally-traded fossil fuels” is key. She claimed an EV military fleet would feel fewer effects from the economic repercussions of events like the Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, she ignores the facts that a fully-electric military would be “expensive,” costing billions or more, and would be inherently “unreliable.” Reliability of equipment is a cornerstone of military readiness.
Just imagine a son or daughter in an EV military tank operated by enormous and heavy batteries that go dead in the middle of battle with no ability to be recharged quickly or at all, because the opposing side is advancing with modern weapons fueled by petroleum as that country is using the world’s resources to their most suited uses. Can you envision Americans building charging stations behind enemy lines to make these EV tanks usable? As this example shows, the Biden administration all in one basket (electrification) mentality should make Americans cringe at the sheer absurdity of it. As the Biden administration does all it can to eliminate American energy independence under the guise of “clean” renewable energy, it is creating a national security risk. Further, the Biden administration’s green energy goals rely in many ways upon Communist China—a potential enemy—as that country dominates the battery supply chain and the supply chains of most critical minerals that renewable energy and electric vehicles need. The “volatility of globally-traded minerals” that are dominated by Chinese investments and processing apparently has not occurred to Secretary Granholm.
Army Unveils Its Electrification Plan
In the actual report from the Army, however, there is a distinction between electrifying non-tactical vs. tactical vehicles. Tactical vehicles are basically any vehicle that is used in combat, combat support, training, or related operations. Non-tactical vehicles are usually found on military bases and are used for transportation to military appointments, group activities, etc.
The U.S. Army plan to establish an electric vehicle fleet, outlined in a document titled “Climate Strategy,” calls for the service to cut its emissions by 50 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels and reach net-zero emissions by 2050. It separates tactical vehicles from non-tactical vehicles. The strategy is to establish an “all-electric light-duty non-tactical vehicle fleet by 2027” and an “all-electric non-tactical vehicle fleet by 2035.” For tactical vehicles, the plan calls for “field purpose-built hybrid-drive tactical vehicles by 2035 and fully electric tactical vehicles by 2050.” Pretty amazing when none exist today, and when the supply chains for all the minerals necessary are dominated by China.
The Army strategy states, “There are 950 renewable energy projects supplying 480 megawatts of power to the Army … scoped and planned through 2024. The Army will continue these and other efforts under the Army Installation Energy and Water Strategic Plan to maximize resilience, efficiency and affordability on every installation.” The goals are “100 percent carbon-pollution-free electricity for Army installations’ needs by 2030” and the installation of a “microgrid on every installation by 2035.”
Despite having later dates for tactical versus non-tactical vehicles, the plan is still expensive and ludicrous. The critical minerals needed to manufacture batteries are located in countries like China and the mineral processing is dominated by China. Batteries and battery components are generally not manufactured in the United States, which creates national security problems. And while the United States has critical mineral resources, the Biden administration is revoking leases, delaying permits and listing plants as endangered to stall critical mineral mining projects in the United States that are increasingly under legal challenge from environmentalists and others.
Environmental Justice is the Buzzword
What Granholm was preaching to the Senate is Biden’s environmental justice plan. A few weeks ago, President Biden signed an Executive Order, “Revitalizing Our Nation’s Commitment to Environmental Justice for All,” that requires all military branches to incorporate environmental justice into their missions. Environmental justice requires federal agencies, including the military, to be up to the required standards of Biden’s climate agenda, as the administration scores their rate of performance. The Executive Order reads in part, “For far too long, communities across our country have faced persistent environmental injustice through toxic pollution, underinvestment in infrastructure and critical services, and other disproportionate environmental harms often due to a legacy of racial discrimination including redlining. These communities with environmental justice concerns face even greater burdens due to climate change.” Biden aims to rectify all of this carnage by spending well over a trillion dollars through various bills including the Infrastructure and “Inflation Reduction Act.”
Unfortunately, the United States is deliberately undermining our economy and our military over climate change while our enemies are building their offensive and defensive weapons quicker, stronger, and in some instances even better. The fact that ‘our leaders’ want to change how we develop, manufacture, produce and distribute our military capabilities –in the name of ‘the climate,’ is terrifying for it will cause Washington’s politicians to further their activist agendas while putting our national security at risk. Huge amounts of money are being distributed to “green groups” to promote these policies while also (unspokenly) building political cadres of people dependent upon federal tax money. President Biden and Secretary Granholm are saying that this will help make America energy independent. But, the United States is already energy independent with its coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear and renewable resources. Nonetheless, the Biden administration is doing all it can to restrict American manufacturing and our energy-producing capabilities to push its climate agenda.
Conclusion
Secretary of Energy Granholm believes that our military can electrify its operations—at least its non-tactical fleet by 2030. The Army recently released a report on its electrification plans that includes both non-tactical and tactical vehicles with specific dates to be accomplished. This ridiculousness is going on in the U.S. military while other countries are developing their weapons with fuels that make sense in a combat situation where charging stations are not at a tank’s beck and call. The whole situation is in the name of environmental justice—a term that is bandied about that may fool politicians into doing the Biden administration’s bidding—and supposedly in making the United States energy independent. However, according to data from the Energy Information Administration, the United States is already energy independent. The Army’s plan, however, will do the opposite by making the United States dependent on China for batteries and critical minerals and greatly risking our national security. Instead of fostering energy security, these programs and their enormous costs actually reduce our energy, economic and national security.
*This article was adapted from content originally published by the Institute for Energy Research.
American Energy Alliance to Senator Manchin: You’re Not Helping
May 2, 2023 by Leave a Comment
WASHINGTON DC (05/02/2023) – Today, Sen. Joe Manchin (D. W.Va.), once again, introduced legislation that will do little to actually solve our nation’s permitting issues, and, in many cases, it might actually make them worse. The measure seemingly seeks to reform the federal permitting process, but mainly is a vehicle to congressionally authorize the West Virginia Senator’s pet project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline.
AEA President Thomas Pyle issued the following statement:
The American economy needs meaningful permitting reform. This legislation from Senator Manchin is certainly not that. The measure is insufficient at achieving actual permitting reform and contains provisions that do the bidding of environmental groups who seek to expand the powers of the federal government to override states and localities with respect to transmission projects.
The time limits and page counts in Manchin’s bill are meaningless unless the underlying issues with NEPA are addressed (which this legislation does not do). Setting time limits without meaningful reform of NEPA could perversely increase problems because anything that is left out of an environmental review to meet the deadline could then become grounds for NEPA litigation. The long timelines for NEPA reviews are a symptom of the dysfunction, not the cause. Any permitting reform legislation must clarify the scope of NEPA and the role of courts in those reviews.
The Mountain Valley part of the legislation sets a terrible precedent. If it requires an act of Congress to approve individual pipelines, we will never get any more pipelines built.
Giving FERC greater power to override state objections to transmission lines is a bad policy. When it comes to electricity transmission, states that get forced into participating in these projects end up having to bear the costs in rate charges. Thus, FERC can effectively force unwilling states into participating in whatever electricity projects the FERC chooses to approve. There was a state AG letter opposing this last year that explained it like this:
“The Act contains three interrelated provisions that, particularly when taken together, eviscerate states’ ability to chart their own land-use and energy policies. First, it would authorize private companies to use eminent domain against state land. Second, it would authorize FERC to command utilities to construct entirely new transmission facilities whenever and wherever FERC deems necessary. And third, it would authorize companies to spread the costs of constructing new transmission facilities onto residents of other states, requiring citizens of one state to subsidize the agenda of politicians and bureaucrats in other states. These provisions eviscerate state sovereign authority, commandeer companies to carry out the will of a three-vote majority of FERC Commissioners, undermine the power of each citizen’s vote to decide policies at the state level, and inevitably force the citizens of our states to subsidize the costs of expensive and unreliable energy policy preferences of California and New York.”
The parts of the Manchin legislation that are incremental improvements in permitting are not enough to justify passage. Congress is famous for passing inadequate legislation and then is content to move on without addressing meaningful and necessary changes to federal programs. This measure is a trojan horse for Senator Manchin’s pet project, the Mountain Valley pipeline.”
Additional Resources:
The Plugged In Podcast #95: Kenny Stein on H.R. 1
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The Unregulated Podcast #130: Mine, Baby, Mine!
April 28, 2023 by Leave a Comment
On this episode of The Unregulated Podcast Tom Pyle and Mike McKenna discuss the debt ceiling battle, mineral dependency, EV mandates and more. This week they are joined by former professional hockey player and current Representative Pete Stauber (R-MN) to talk about the importance of domestic mineral production and a new paper from the Institute for Energy Research.
Links:
EPA Regulatory Delays Exacerbate Biden’s War On Affordable Energy
April 28, 2023 by Leave a Comment
President Biden’s new rules for power plants that will be released soon would benefit carbon capture and sequestration technology by enabling coal and natural gas plants to meet the new proposed standards developed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). However, the EPA is lagging far behind on permits allowing for the construction of the new technology. The new regulation is one of a series of regulations toward implementing Biden’s goal of cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030. The new rules on existing and new coal and natural gas plants are set to be imposed as dozens of carbon capture and sequestration projects await approval by the EPA, stalling construction and stifling investment. The backlog has delayed projects and frustrated states and industry officials seeking to build the new systems, and calls into question whether the Administration actually wants to deploy the technology.
In order to store captured emissions underground at scale, companies need to sequester the carbon at so-called carbon capture injection wells, or Class VI injection wells. The EPA has been slow-rolling the approval of these wells. In an effort to circumvent the slow approval, states have sought to secure their own permitting authority, known as “primacy,” to expedite the process. Yet here, too, applications have not been approved at the EPA’s offices. There are currently more than 70 outstanding Class VI permit applications across eight states. According to an EPA report, a massive scale-up of carbon capture technology at U.S. power plants could become a $600 billion industry by 2050, but permits are needed to do so.
So far, North Dakota and Wyoming are the only states that have been granted primacy, and both approvals came under the Trump administration. North Dakota has attracted key projects and investments, including $250 million for the largest carbon capture project in the world, expected to operational by early 2024. Arizona, Louisiana, Texas, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania have applications pending, while many more states have expressed interest.
The new rules that EPA is about to impose on natural gas and coal plants are meant to eliminate them entirely—fossil-fuel driven technologies that generated 60 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2022. The cost and difficulty of implementing carbon capture technology will make renewables like wind and solar a more attractive energy source for power plants, resulting in utilities building them instead. However, wind and solar will make the grid unreliable and electricity more expensive. Wind and solar are weather-dependent, generating electricity only when the wind blows and the sun shines and requiring very expensive battery back-up when they do not produce electricity.
Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act provides taxpayer funding to encourage carbon capture, utilization, and storage projects. The law expanded the availability of tax credits for carbon capture and storage and increased the credit amounts. The tax credits are now worth up to $85 for every ton of carbon dioxide captured, up from a maximum of $50 previously. The president’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, now a year old, also provided money to the EPA to help administer the permitting process.
Background on Carbon Capture and Sequestration Technology
Electric utilities have in the past found it difficult to capture large amounts of the carbon dioxide from coal- and gas-fired power plants, particularly since the technology is expensive and requires large amounts of electricity to operate. In the 2010s, several early projects partly funded by the federal government were abandoned because of the high costs. Only one coal plant in the United States ended up using carbon capture on a large scale: The $1 billion Petra Nova facility in Texas, completed in 2017. It sold the captured carbon dioxide to oil drillers who injected it into oil fields to extract more oil. That facility shut down in 2020, but its owners plan to restart it this year.
Canada’s Saskatchewan’s state-owned electricity provider has a $1.3 billion, 110 megawatt coal plant with carbon capture technology. The Boundary Dam power plant traps 90 percent of the plant’s carbon dioxide, pumping it underground and then selling it to the Cenovus oil company for use in priming nearby oil fields or burying it in geological formations.
The higher tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, however, have increased interest in the technology. The owners of at least six coal plants and 14 large gas plants are conducting detailed engineering studies to gauge the economic feasibility of carbon capture and storage. Calpine Corporation, one of the country’s largest generators of electricity from natural gas, is exploring plans to install the technology at four large gas plants in Texas and California. Since the federal tax credit will not be enough to cover the cost of capturing carbon from the gas plants, the company is exploring other potential sources of financing.
A recent study by Rhodium Group, an energy research firm, estimated that only about 20 gigawatts of coal and natural gas plants would likely install carbon capture by 2035 — a small fraction of the almost 700 gigawatts of coal and gas that exist today, mainly because of cheaper alternatives from wind and solar projects. Those intermittent renewables, however, require expensive batteries as backup, which are heavily subsidized in the Inflation Reduction Act, along with wind and solar plants. Consumers and taxpayers are struggling to pay for the costs associated with reducing carbon dioxide emissions, which are escalating with exotic new methods of generation prescribed by government policies.
Despite that forecast, carbon capture might be a more attractive option in parts of the country where it is difficult to build new wind and solar power because of a lack of wind or solar resources, insufficient power lines or community opposition. Options for backing up renewable energy, such as advanced batteries, might not pan out. And some states like Wyoming have expressed interest in encouraging their utilities to use carbon capture technology in order to maintain a market for fossil fuels. It also might prove easier to modify existing natural gas plants so that they can run entirely on hydrogen fuel from renewables.
If this EPA rule is implemented and can withstand legal challenges, carbon capture technology is more likely to be used at industrial facilities, such as at hydrogen or ethanol plants, where it is often technically easier to capture carbon dioxide and there are fewer alternatives for cutting emissions.
Conclusion
Despite the rampant growth expected for wind and solar facilities, the electric grids of the future will need electricity sources that can run on demand at all hours to complement their intermittency. Carbon capture technology could allow coal and natural gas-fired plants to provide that service if EPA is successful in implementing its proposed regulation on power plants. But, while the EPA is proposing CCS technology, the agency is delaying the approval of permits that would allow the necessary R&D to move the technology forward. This is not unlike the administration’s opposition to critical metal mining projects in the United States at the same time it pushes policies designed to rely much more on minerals necessary for green energy initiatives. It seems that the Biden administration does not want Americans to have a reliable energy grid and is doing all it can to make electricity more expensive for Americans as electricity rates have already risen with solar and wind’s forced entry into the market.
*This article was adapted from content originally published by the Institute for Energy
