The Emerging U.S. Energy Powerhouse
By Steve Goreham Republished with permission of The Washington Times. The United States is emerging as the world’s energy powerhouse. Two months ago, the US became the largest producer of crude oil. Exports of crude oil, oil products, and natural gas are rising rapidly. The “keep it in the ground” movement is losing ground. US crude oil production in August reached 10.8 million barrels per day, more than double the 5 million barrels per day produced in 2008. Last February, US output surpassed that of Saudi Arabia. In August, US production exceeded that of Russia, making the US the world’s largest producer of petroleum. US natural gas production is up 40 percent from 2007 to 2017. The US surpassed Russia as the world’s leading producer of natural gas in 2011. Driving American energy dominance is the hydrofracturing revolution. Over the last two decades, US geologists and petroleum engineers perfected the techniques of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, permitting cost-effective extraction of oil and gas from low-permeability shale rock formations. US companies hold about a 10-year experience lead in shale extraction techniques over international competitors. In 2000, only about 7 percent of US natural gas came from hydraulically fractured wells. Today about 70 percent of US gas production and over 50 percent of crude oil production comes from fractured wells. Fracking operations are active in more than 20 states. US oil and gas production surged despite strong opposition from environmental groups. For more than a decade, green advocates have opposed drilling, fracking, pipeline transport, export terminals, and even investments in oil and gas. But the “keep it in the ground” movement is being trampled by the US energy juggernaut. Along with the rapid rise in production, US oil and gas exports are exploding. US exports of refined petroleum products increased by a factor of five from 2004 to 2017. Our nation became a net exporter of refined petroleum products in 2011. In 2015, the Obama administration lifted a 40-year ban on US crude oil exports. Crude exports rose by 400 percent since 2014. The US still remains a net importer of crude oil, but oil imports have dropped to the lowest level since 2000. In 2017, the US became a net exporter of natural gas, with Mexico the largest customer. Prior to 2010, terminals were under construction to import liquefied natural gas. But the fracking revolution produced a huge volume of gas at one-half of the price of gas in Europe and one-third of the price in Japan. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals started operation in 2016 at Sabine Pass in Louisiana and in 2018 at Cove Point in Maryland. Four other new LNG export terminals are scheduled to come on line by 2020. Propane, a hydrocarbon fuel used for heating and cooking, is a notable example of success. Prior to 2010, the US was a net importer of propane. But US propane field production doubled since 2010 and exports now approach one million barrels per day. About three billion people around the world do not have modern fuels for heating and cooking. India has a program to get liquid propane gas to 80 percent of households by March, 2019. Exports of US propane are meeting this need in India, along with needs in China and other nations. The Panama Canal expansion completed in 2016 allows supertankers to deliver US propane and natural gas to Asia. A major benefit of US energy resurgence is an improved balance of trade in energy. In 2011, US energy imports exceeded exports by $325 billion. With growing production of oil and gas and rising exports, the US trade imbalance in energy fell to $57 billion in 2017. Energy plays a major role in the strength of today’s US economy. The US plastics industry now enjoys a large cost advantage in global markets. US oil and gas refineries produce the lowest-cost ethylene and propylene in the world, the basic materials for plastics. US natural gas also provides a cost advantage for chemical and steel firms. Gas fuels generation of cheap electricity for aluminum, cement, paper, and other industries. Despite environmental opposition, the United States is emerging as the world’s energy powerhouse. US energy production is not only good for US industry and the US economy, but exports increasingly provide low-cost energy for Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world. Steve Goreham is a speaker on the environment, business, and public policy and author of the book Outside the Green Box: Rethinking Sustainable Development. __________________________ 
‘Electrification’: The Road to Higher Energy Prices
By Steve Goreham -- January 3, 2018 “Electrification calls for a massive societal transformation from gasoline to electric vehicles, from traditional power plants to wind and solar generators, and from gas heating to electric and heat pump systems. There is no evidence that this transition will have any measurable effect on global temperatures. But electrification will produce substantially higher energy prices.” “Electrification” is the new buzz word touted by climate fighters and environmental groups. Where electrification once meant providing electricity to people, today it often means elimination of traditional fuels. But the only tangible result of green electrification policies will be higher energy prices. Proponents of electrification intend to force transportation and heating and cooling systems to run on electricity, and eliminate the use of hydrocarbon fuels. Electric cars, electric furnaces and water heaters, and heat pumps must replace gasoline-powered vehicles and gas-fueled appliances. In addition, wind or solar systems must supply the electricity, not power plants using coal or natural gas, in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. California’s 2017 Climate Change Scoping Plan calls for a 40-percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and an 80-percent reduction by 2050. Goals call for 4.2 million plug-in electric and plug-in hybrid cars on California roads by 2030, up from about 300,000 today. The plan also calls for electrification of space and water heating. Utility Southern California Edison (SCE) recommends an even more aggressive plan. The SCE “Clean Power and Electrification Pathway” plan calls for 7 million electric cars on California roads by 2030 and for one-third of state residents to replace their gas-fired furnaces and appliances by 2030. Nine other states promote adoption of electric cars as part of a broad electrification program. New England states are exploring “strategic electrification” in order to meet tough emissions reduction goals. In most of these efforts, cost to consumers is rarely discussed. Electrification has become a global quest. Germany, Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom propose to ban sales of internal combustion engine cars by 2040. The Dutch government proposes to eliminate gas as a source of heating and cooking from all homes by 2050. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht announced intentions to become “gas-less neighborhoods.” Electrification will be expensive. Most Americans don’t want electric cars. Large subsidies from taxpayers and mandates on auto companies and consumers will be required to force adoption. Furnaces and appliances powered by heat pumps, solar, and electricity are almost always more expensive than using natural gas or propane models. A 2017 study by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority found that only four percent of the state’s heating, ventilation, and air conditioning load could cost-effectively switch to heat pumps. The study recommended mandates to place an obligation on businesses and consumers to “source a certain portion of their heating and cooling load from renewable sources.” According to proponents of electrification, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions the sourced electricity must come from renewables. Therefore, all electrification programs promote wind and solar generation systems, backed up by battery storage. Today, the US is blessed with very low electricity costs. In 2016, the average wholesale electrical price, which is the price paid to generating facilities, ranged from only 2.3 cents per kilowatt-hour in the Pacific Northwest to 3.6 cents per kW-hr in New England. Coal, natural gas, nuclear, and hydroelectric, our traditional sources of power,deliveredmore than 90 percent of this low-cost electricity. Only 6.4 percent of our 2016 electricity came from wind and solar. Actual costs of wind and solar systems tend to be hidden from the public, but when disclosed, can be hideously expensive. The California Solar Ranch, which began operation in the Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles in 2014, delivers electricity at over 15─18 cents per kW-hr, more than four times the market price. The 2013 Massachusetts solar build-out was the result of a 25 cents per kW-hr subsidy paid to commercial solar generators, boosting the total solar price to almost 30 cents per kW-hr. But the Deepwater Wind Block Island project of Rhode Island takes first prize for outrageous renewable electricity cost. The five-turbine offshore system went into operation in 2016 at a contracted price of 23.6 cents per kW-hr, with an annual increase of 3.5 cents, placing the future price at over 40 cents per kW-hr. Who wants to pay ten times the market price for any product? According to the Energy Information Administration, on average US electricity prices increased less than five percent during the eight years from 2008 to 2016. But over the same period, prices in nine of the twelve top wind states climbed between 13 and 37 percent, significantly higher than the national average increase. Commercial wind and solar systems are typically built far from cities, requiring new transmission lines, with costs passed on to electric rate payers. If electrification is adopted across our nation, look for escalating electricity prices. Electrification calls for a massive societal transformation from gasoline to electric vehicles, from traditional power plants to wind and solar generators, and from gas heating to electric and heat pump systems. There is no evidence that this transition will have any measurable effect on global temperatures. But electrification will produce substantially higher energy prices.————-- Steve Goreham is an active speaker and writer on environment, business, and public policy. He is author, most recently, of the critically acclaimed primer, Outside the Green Box: Rethinking Sustainable Development. ___________________________ 
MIT Admits: Electric Cars Are NOT Green, Pollute MORE Than Petrol Cars
By Amando Flavio November 23, 2017 Electric cars are considered pollution-free as they can help keep our cities and our planet clean. However, a recent study published by the Trancik Lab of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has revealed that electric cars are NOT as green as you think and are worse polluters than petrol and diesel cars. The study claims that an electric Tesla Model S P100D saloon produces more carbon dioxide (at 226g per kilometer) than a petrol-driven Mitsubishi Mirage (at 192g per kilometer). Though the MIT study has shocked green energy advocates, it is not the first time a study is raising concerns about pollution caused by electric cars. In 2016, a groundbreaking study conducted by Norway’s University of Science and Technology concluded that ‘larger electric vehicles can have higher life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions than smaller conventional vehicles.’ Independent energy experts have also debunked the ‘electric cars are green’ myth saying majority of the energy that charges the batteries of electric cars comes from the national grid. In the U.K for example, latest figures by the Digest of UK Energy Statistics show that 51% of energy used to charge electric cars comes from power stations that burn fossil fuels such as gas and coal. Nuclear power is responsible for 21% while just under a quarter of the power comes from renewable sources. Also, experts say mining the huge amounts of nickel, cobalt and lithium used in the manufacturing of batteries comes at an environmental cost. According to a 2009 study, nickel was the eighth worst metal to mine and process in terms of global warming and pollution. Villagers who live next to the Cerro Matoso nickel mine in Colombia have reported higher rates of respiratory diseases and birth defects, the study found. Also, lithium extracted from South American deserts results in one ton of carbon dioxide for every ton of lithium carbonate produced, it added. Nico Meilhan, a car analyst and energy expert, told the Financial Times: “If we really cared about CO2, we’d reduce car size and weight. If you switch from oil to cobalt and lithium, you have not addressed any problem. You have just switched your problem.” __________________________ |
What are the major sources and users of energy in the United States?
Information on this page was collected from the source acknowledged below:Energy Information Administration's "Energy Explained" series: Energy in the United States and How the United States Uses Energy Energy Sources in the United States"The three major fossil fuels—petroleum, natural gas, and coal—combined accounted for about 77.6% of the U.S. primary energy production in 2017:
___________________________ Environmentalist explains why renewable energy can't save the planet
Solar and wind farms require large amounts of land and come at a high economic cost, says Michael Shellenberger, Environmental Progress president. 
JUDGE CITES 'CLIMATE CHANGE' IN BLOCK OF DRILLING
Rebukes Trump administration's energy agenda Published: 8 hours ago 3/21/19 Ruling that the Trump administration failed to take “climate change” into account, a federal judge temporarily halted hundreds of oil-drilling projects on more than 300,000 acres of public land in Wyoming. Rudolph Contreras, a U.S. district judge in Washington D.C., determined the administration violated environmental laws by failing to consider greenhouse gas emissions, ordering the Bureau of Land Management to redo its analysis, the Washington Post reported. If upheld, the ruling jeopardizes Trump’s energy agenda, which relies on fossil-fuel production to bolster independence on foreign energy. WildEarth Guardians climate program director Jeremy Nichols called the ruling Tuesday “the Holy Grail ruling we’ve been after, especially with oil and gas.” “”It calls into question the legality of oil and gas leasing that’s happening everywhere,” he said. President Obama appointed Contreras to the bench in 2012. One News Now observed the order by Contreras appeared to go a step further than others. While previous rulings focused on individual lease sales or permits, Contreras said that when Bureau of Land Management officials auction land, they must consider the impact on emissions from past, present and foreseeable future oil and gas leases nationwide. “Given the national, cumulative nature of climate change, considering each individual drilling project in a vacuum deprives the agency and the public of the context necessary to evaluate oil and gas drilling on federal land,” Contreras wrote. The decision came in a lawsuit against the BLM by WildEarth Guardians, Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Western Environmental Law Center. The complaint charged the administration failed to calculate and limit the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from future oil and gas projects. A recent study, the Guardian of London reported, found the administration has made more than 13 million onshore acres available for leasing, far more than any similar period under Obama. Most of the land is in the western states of Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. Bureau of Land Management spokeswoman Kristen Lenhardt said the agency was still reviewing the ruling and “determining a path forward regarding the implications.” Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, a defendant in the case, told the Washington Post the BLM already does the correct analysis of greenhouse gas effects at the leasing stage. That assessment changes once it knows how many oil and gas wells might be drilled on leased land. “This judge has ignored decades of legal precedent in this ruling. The judge is basically asking BLM to take a wild guess on how many wells will be developed on leases, prematurely.” Kyle Tisdel, attorney and energy and communities program director for the Western Environmental Law Center said that with “the science mounting that we need to aggressively rein in greenhouse gases, this ruling is monumental.” “Every acre of our public land sold to the oil and gas industry is another blow to the climate, making this ruling a powerful reality check on the Trump administration and a potent tool for reining in climate pollution.” Same old same old Noted climate-change skeptic Marc Morano testified to Congress last month that after nearly two decades of global cooling, “global warming” activism has been shown to be merely the latest environmental scare with the same big-government solutions of wealth redistribution and central planning. He said the focus on the Green New Deal proposed by freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has moved the Democratic Party “into serious, unscientific, nutty territory.” Ocasio-Cortez recently claimed that unless global warming is addressed, the world has only 12 years left. Morano pointed to similar warnings dating back 150 years. He quotes an MIT professor who said: “As early as 1864 George Perkins Marsh, sometimes said to be the father of American ecology, warned that the earth was ‘fast becoming an unfit home for its ‘noblest inhabitant,” and that unless men changed their ways it would be reduced ‘to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.'” Morano cited British scientist Philip Stott saying the earth “has been given a 10-year survival warning regularly for the last 50 or so years. We have been serially doomed.” Read more at ________________________ 
Power Lines Are Burning the West
Human technology is responsible for more loss from fire than any other cause. But reducing fire’s impact will require changes to how people live, not just to the infrastructure that lets them do so. KENDRA ATLEEWORK MAY 25, 2018 The Cocos Fire burns in San Marcos, California, in 2014. MIKE BLAKE / REUTERSIn October 2017, 250 square miles burned in Northern California, destroying6,000 homes and businesses and killing 44 people. For now, the cause of these fires has not been determined. The private utility company Pacific Gas and Electric, known to Californians as PG&E, is under investigation. Total damagefor the Northern California wildfires comes to $9 billion. PG&E has started stockpiling cash. In California, this is a familiar story. Three years ago, in February of 2015, one-third of the houses in my remote neighborhood in Eastern California burned down. Here, before the fire, 100 houses lay scattered across the leeward flank of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The people who live here spend their time walking steep roads, listening to crickets, chasing mule deer out of the garden, and looking over a desert valley below. Days after the fire, my neighbor, Cassie, wasn’t doing any of these things. Instead, she stood inside her smoking foundation. Tall and easygoing with freckles on her nose, Cassie had come home from college that winter to sift rubble with her mom and dad. Under different circumstances, we might have hiked together or skated frozen ponds. I used to carpool with her family to school, and I remember her house, wooden and gorgeous and overlooking a ravine from which flames later rose. We wore rubber gloves to sort the rubble, but there was not much rubble to sort. The air smelled of sulfur, and mostly only dust lingered, as if a great storm had picked up the walls and roof and furniture and lifted everything away. Like the 2017 fires in Northern California, the cause of the fire that burned our neighborhood, according to the government database, is still under investigation. One source is more likely than others: On that day, strong winds whipped power lines that hung over dry brush. A power line can start a fire if it breaks in the wind. It can start a fire when a tree or a branch falls across it, or when lines slap together, or when equipment gets old and fails without anyone noticing. In 2015, fires started by electrical lines and equipment burned more acres in California than any other cause. Power lines sparked fires that set records in New Mexico and fed a blaze in Great Smoky Mountains National Park that entered the city of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and killed 14 people in 2016. In recent years, they have consistently been among the three major causes of California wildfires. Hurricane-force winds periodically shriek off the Pacific and rattle California. Wind strong enough to break a power line spreads fire fast. This past October, when I sniffed the air and found that California was once again burning, I looked around and saw many wires thatching an orange sky. I was visiting my aunt in Northern California, 50 miles from the fires. We sat inside and watched the noon sun dim. My childhood home didn’t burn the year Cassie’s did. But it should have. Dry leaves lay in piles beside the wooden walls. The volunteer fire captain’s house across the street burned, although he maintained plenty of defensible space. And so I wait, even now, for the next windstorm. In the months after my neighborhood burned, I waited fearfully, which means I waited angrily. In particular, I hoped power companies would put their lines underground. In 1995, fire-related costs ate up 16 percent of the U.S. Forest Service budget. By 2015, half of the budget was devoted to fire. Some of us wondered how safe our power can be when utility-company profits drive power operations. PG&E has been found guilty of negligence before in wildfires, and some of us point at negligence and greed again this time. There’s a precedent for fire occurring alongside an infrastructure that drives economic growth. From 1870 until the 1920s, most major fires in America were caused by locomotives. We fixed that problem, says Stephen Pyne, a firefighter-turned-historian. “New laws were enforced, fines and lawsuits applied economic pressure, engines were compelled to replace coal with oil as fuel, suitable spark arrestors were invented, rights-of-way were cleaned of debris, lines were patrolled.” And so locomotives started wildfires for decades, but not forever. Like railroads, power lines deliver a seemingly limitless supply of a product wherever people want it. On a good day, the grid makes life easy. Far from urban centers, in my house up the side of a mountain, in an ocean of dry brush, the lights still flick on. In general, power lines only cause fire when things go wrong above ground. Even utility companies agree, after a 2012 study by the Edison Electric Institute revealed that underground lines had fewer problems during storms and were better for public safety all around. But California has 210,000 miles of electrical lines. The cost to put lines underground is about $1 million per mile to start, and much more in mountainous areas. That’s five to 10 times what it costs to hang a line overhead, which usually makes underground lines logistically or economically impractical. In North Carolina, for example, a plan to put power lines underground was dropped because utility rates in the impacted area would have risen by 125 percent. And despite the impulse to blame industry, the power companies aren’t entirely in control of the solution. California utility companies don’t get to decide how much line they install underground; that matter is regulated by the Public Utilities Commission, in order to “protect consumers,” “safeguard the environment,” and “assure Californians’ access to safe and reliable utility infrastructure,” according to the organization’s stated mission. The commission balances risk with cost and limits how much utility companies can spend by putting wires underground. Other improvements to the grid are being investigated, including better line insulation and technology that could anticipate line failure and shut off power in advance. But all of these solutions will be slow and costly to implement. I might get angry with utility companies, but I like to turn lights on in the dark. In the United States, fossil fuels burned to make electricity and heat put more greenhouse-gas emissions into the atmosphere than any industry. My neighbors’ houses burned amid the worst drought California had seen in a millennium. In recent decades, wildfires in the American West have begun to range farther and burn longer. Scientists from eight universities got together in 2016 and looked at tendencies in wildfire and the ways we manage wildfire. They concluded that “wildfires across western North America have increased in number and size over the past three decades, and this trend will continue in response to further warming.” They called this a “new era.” Fires burn bigger areas and destroy three times as many houses as they used to. What was once a problem in June, July, and August now extends through November and beyond. I evacuated for avalanche warnings in the winters of my childhood. In February 2015, I wandered my neighborhood and gaped at new patches of sky, as smoke seeped out of the ground. When a fire comes up the side of the mountain and destroys our homes, we say: natural disaster. When lightning starts that fire, we say: natural disaster. When power lines start that fire, we still say: natural disaster. Deliberate debris burning, fireworks, and rogue campfires are among the most common causes of so-called wildfire in some parts of California. Still, when people consider wildfire—even wildfire caused by human tools—it seems to us as inescapable as lightning. Three years after her house burned down, I asked my childhood neighbor Cassie whether she felt the fire that destroyed her house was inevitable. She lives in San Francisco now, where she prepares environmental impact reports for federal and state agencies. Her parents live in a house rebuilt atop the ashes of the old. “The smell of smoke made me nauseous,” Cassie told me, while Napa and Sonoma burned last fall. “I woke up in the middle of the night because I could smell it. It felt so close.” Cassie did not consider the loss of her home unavoidable. When people treat fire as an inevitability, she said, its consequences become divorced from human behavior. What she saw on the local news after the Northern California fires were the stories of “people and families and homes,” over and over. It makes sense, because people’s lives are changed, she said. “But that’s always the focus, instead of the bigger issue ... instead of, this could have been prevented, and there’s a reason that it happened, and it’s connected to our infrastructure. But I just don’t think it’s something people want to talk about.” It sickened her, to feel fire’s heat, to smell its smoke, without facing its implications. And those implications are complicated. “Many of the problems of fire management do not have technical fixes,” Pyne, the fire historian, wrote during the Northern California fires. “They depend on social choices hammered out in politics—appropriate land use, the purpose of public lands, competing economic interests, cultural values, and philosophies.” It’s possible to update technology to dodge disaster, to a point. We can make advance warning systems for earthquakes, cloak first responders in nasa-developed fire suits, and mitigate rising sea levels with permeable pavement and rain gardens. We can also update technology to avoid having to change the assumptions that cause some of the problems in the first place. When locomotives burned forests, people changed the mechanics of trains—they didn’t reevaluate the long-term viability of rail. The need to move thousands of tons of lumber and coal and food and passengers at high speeds through forest and prairie and desert did not come into question. It’s easier to find a quick fix than it is to change culture. Some biologists contend that our brains did not evolve to conceive of the long-term consequences of our choices; that we are not primed to master deep time but to put out small fires, if you will. Yet it appears we have also evolved to comprehend the far future, if only in flashes. We operate, Pyne writes, “not according to strict evolutionary selection but in the realm of culture, which is to say, of choice and confusion.” The night our neighborhood went up in smoke, I was 2,000 miles away. I sat on the floor and held a phone to my ear while my father described our mountain, burning. I gathered the things I had taken from my childhood bedroom around me like talismans and I imagined the world in flames. My house survived the fire because the volunteer fire captain, who drove up his street in a fire truck and saw his own house burning, had the presence of mind to keep moving, to keep working to save what remained. He or another volunteer doused the flames that devoured a pile of railroad ties in our yard, flames that could have laddered up our brush hill and laced fingers through the railings of the porch. Eventually, the scientists say, wildfires in the western United States might dwindle. This could happen when precipitation withers to the point that vegetation doesn’t come back. The fires will end when there is nothing more to burn. Cassie and I would like to choose a world in which there is a lot left to lose—we would prefer to protect our mountain homes, not to mention our larger communities and the global climate, and direct our lives in ways that will save what we love. Others would, too. Last October somebody put up signs in Sonoma that said, “The Love in the Air Is Thicker Than the Smoke.” For those of us living in the path of wildfire, we have come to understand that we must live with it, that no quick solution awaits us, that changing the ways we think and being open to new ways of living might protect our communities. Pyne writes that fire as we know it is “largely the outcome of what this creature has done, and not done.” Humans have changed fire, and fire will change us, one way or another. We can try to choose the way. Maybe this means smarter technology, already in the works. Maybe it means making new relationships with fire, making fire a tool, listening to the people who understand fire when it’s time to rebuild and then rebuilding in different ways, or even in different places. The scientists say we can choose to accept wildfire as “as an inevitable catalyst of change,” and we can adapt. Here, in a nation that currently suppresses 95 percent of all wildfires, at great cost and with questionable efficacy, it might be best to focus more on guiding the way fire burns. Communities can put more resources into controlled burns—more than 99 percent of which stay within selected boundaries—and teach the public about their benefit. Local governments can help educate and support landowners in fuel removal and property protection. And both residents and developers can think carefully before they build farther into wilderness, which is, after all, fire’s country. And yet it’s hard to work to change more than the technology—to change ourselves in order to accommodate and support these adaptations. It’s easy instead to slip back into life as we know it, to forget what a new era may ask of us, even when the stakes are very high. “Despite the fact that I feel very passionately about a lot of these issues, and they impact me personally, I don’t think about it day to day,” Cassie said. “At all. Ever.” And neither do I. This is life, the slow build of the wind on the Pacific, the heave of power over our heads. ____________________________ 
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Thank You Kent Lamberson
Only a Bird's-Eye View Can Show Scale of Wind Power's Dirty Secret
By Jared Harris Published February 14, 2020 at 2:14pm Wind power has a reputation for being a clean energy source that can function with a strong and consistent breeze, but one visit to a Wyoming landfill may startle some die-hard advocates of the technology. The environmentally unfriendly side of wind turbines can be seen at the Casper Regional Landfill, with only a bird’s-eye view showing the full scale of the technology’s impact. According to Wyoming News Now, the landfill reached deals with three wind farms in September 2019 to begin accepting their old equipment. “Ninety percent of the turbines are completely reclaimed, recycled and reused, but there is 10 percent that is fiberglass, so those are coming to us from three different farms in the state,” Casper’s Solid Waste Division manager, Cynthia Langston, told Wyoming News Now. The 10 percent that can’t be recycled has to be disposed of by some other method. The blades are first cut into sections before being loaded onto transportation and hauled to the Casper landfill. Because these fiberglass blades are too strong to be crushed, the giant pieces of trashhave to be buried intact. The scale of it all is so large that it can be seen in photos taken by mapping satellites. Viewing the landfill on Google Maps reveals rows and rows of the fiberglass blades, only partially covered with dirt: Viewing the landfill on Google Maps reveals rows and rows of the fiberglass blades, only partially covered with dirt. (Google Maps / screen shot) Because of the blades’ resilience to the elements, the discarded turbine pieces will not decompose anytime in the near future. “The wind turbine blade will be there, ultimately, forever,” Veolia Environnement SA’s chief operating officer, Bob Cappadona, told Bloomberg, which noted that his company “is searching for better ways to deal with the massive waste.” “Most landfills are considered a dry tomb,” Cappadona added. “The last thing we want to do is create even more environmental challenges.” Wind energy does have its problems, but there is no denying that the technology is innovative and generally low-waste. A turbine’s blades are turned by wind, a free and renewable resource, as a mechanism converts the rotation into clean electricity for homes, schools and hospitals. The Department of Energy celebrates wind power, particularly the fact that “turbines don’t produce atmospheric emissions that cause acid rain, smog, or greenhouse gases.” While the turbines themselves don’t produce much in the way of pollution, the fiberglass waste remains an ugly problem for wind power’s image. Advertisement - story continues below Wind turbines don’t work in all parts of the United States, but their ability to produce cheap, renewable and domestic power is not something that can be overlooked. __________________________ 
ENERGYCOMMENTARY
A New Dark Age: California’s Blackouts Are Self-Inflicted Jarrett Stepman / @JarrettStepman / October 13, 2019 The sun sets over the Marin Headlands and Golden Gate Bridge in this view from Hiller Drive in Oakland, California, Oct. 9, 2019. This area was the scene of the 1991 Oakland Hills fire. (Photo: Jane Tyska/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News/Getty Images)COMMENTARY BY Jarrett Stepman@JarrettStepman Jarrett Stepman is a contributor to The Daily Signal and co-host of The Right Side of Historypodcast. Send an email to Jarrett. He is also the author of the soon-to-be released book, "The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past." California, the richest state in the nation—and one that’s often portrayed as the progressive harbinger of the future for the rest of the country—has been hit with its latest Third World-style disaster. On top of high poverty rates, skyrocketing homelessness, rising crime, and the return of medieval-sounding diseases, the state—specifically, the San Francisco Bay Area—has been hit with a mass blackout. About 1 million people in one of the most densely populated parts of the country have had their power shut off by the utility company, Pacific Gas and Electric. The local utility, PG&E, initiated the blackout in an effort to limit the potential for mass wildfires, which ravaged the state in 2018 and bankrupted the company. Exposed power lines and infrastructure make the likelihood of sparking fires much greater in places where there is ample dry fuel (more on that later). Still, the fires are back this year. The demand for socialism is on the rise from young Americans today. But is socialism even morally sound? Find out more now >> The blackout, which has hit cities throughout Northern California, is causing chaos: businesses have to shut down, people can’t go to work, and in some blacked-out areas, curfews have been put in place to prevent crime. It’s a mess. Much of the blame for the blackout has been hurled at the utility, with some even turning to vandalizing PG&E offices and shooting at its trucks. Though it’s easy to criticize PG&E, which hardly looks good in this whole mess, there is a lot of blame to go around—and no, it doesn’t have anything to do with “climate change.” Poor land management has been a major contributing factor to the uptick in massive wildfires in the West and around the country. California is particularly susceptible. Fires need heat, and they need fuel. At certain times of the year in California, the state is hot as dry winds blow in from Nevada, a combustible environment for fire. That’s hardly a new situation in the Golden State. Unfortunately, there’s now far more fuel in our forests that has built up over decades because of a change in forest management strategy. Former California Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, who now lives in Texas, has done a great job of highlighting this issue and explaining how the blackout crisis was largely caused by politicians. Renewable energy has been prioritized over reliable infrastructure, DeVorerecently wrote in The Federalist, while there has been an uptick of vulnerable power lines to connect distant wind farms to urban centers. PG&E shifted its priority to the overpriced renewables at the behest of politicians, The Wall Street Journal explained in an article aptly titled “California’s Dark Ages.” For years, the utility skimped on safety upgrades and repairs while pumping billions into green energy and electric-car subsidies to please its overlords in Sacramento. Credit Suisse has estimated that long-term contracts with developers of renewables cost the utility $2.2 billion annually more than current market power rates. Now, in large parts of California, if you want to keep the lights on during the blackouts, you better have a flashlight or a gas lamp. Twenty-first century green dreams have led to 19th-century realities. The Dark Ages indeed. Worse than the misguided green energy push and poor infrastructure, of course, has been the shifting forest management strategy—mostly the result of misguided environmentalist ideology—that turned large swaths of the state into a tinderbox. “With a decline in the harvest came a decline in the allied efforts to clear brush, build and maintain access roads and firebreaks,” DeVore wrote in The Federalist. “This led inexorably to a decades’ long build-up in the fuel load. Federal funds set aside for increasingly unpopular forest-management efforts were instead shifted to fire-suppression expenses.” One failure led to another as poor forest management has necessitated vastly increased budgets for putting out the fires, which will undoubtedly continue to be a threat. Further, DeVore noted, these fires pose more danger to people than ever before as middle-class Californians flee the state’s expensive urban areas to the more affordable, but also more at-risk parts of the state. So, the current blackouts are ultimately the result of short-term reality and long-term dysfunctional governance. California is a wealthy state with vast natural advantages and near-limitless potential for growth. It’s why so many Americans have moved there over the past century. Despite those attributes, California’s future success looks, well, a whole lot darker due to political dysfunction and the inability to address the growing problems facing the state. Let us all hope that America’s future is a lot brighter than California’s. A Note for our Readers:With the demand for socialism at an all-time high among our young people—our future leaders and decisionmakers—the experts at Heritage stopped and asked a question that not many have asked: Is socialism really morally sound? The researchers at The Heritage Foundation have put together a guide to help you and our fellow Americans better understand the 9 Ways That Socialism Will Morally Bankrupt America. They're making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today! ___________________________ 
100 Percent Renewable Cities – Is Your Mayor Smarter Than a 5th Grader?
Power lines (Xiangli Li / Shutterstock) By Steve Goreham Published February 19, 2019 at 10:38pm Modified February 25, 2019 at 7:00pm Mayors in more than 100 U.S. cities have announced plans to transition their electrical power systems to 100 percent renewable by 2050. They propose replacement of traditional coal, natural gas, and nuclear-generating stations with wind, solar and wood-fired stations. But none of these mayors have a plausible idea of how to meet their commitment. In December, Cincinnati became the 100th U.S. city to commit to 100 percent electricity from renewable sources, with a target to achieve this goal by 2035. Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley said, “It has become clear that cities will lead the global effort to fight climate change, and Cincinnati is on the front lines.” Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson also pledged to reach 100 percent renewable electricity by 2050 as part of the city’s 2018 Climate Action Plan. But these announcements appear to be a folk tale worthy of the Brothers Grimm. In 2018, renewables provided less than 3 percent of Ohio’s electricity, which came 47 percent from coal, 35 percent from natural gas and 15 percent from nuclear generators. Mayors Cranley and Jackson appear to have failed to consider the cost or scale of their energy change commitments. As part of the effort, the Ohio Power Siting Board recommended the approval of the Icebreaker Wind Facility last July. The Icebreaker project would initially construct six 3.5-megawatt wind turbines in Lake Erie, ten miles off the coast of Cleveland, at an estimated cost of $126 million. The project would annually produce only about 75 gigawatt-hours of electricity, but plans call for an expansion to over 1,000 offshore wind towers. Renewable energy is fashionable, but also expensive. The Icebreaker wind turbines cost $21 million each, or about six times the U.S. market price for wind turbines, which is about $1 million per megawatt. The cost of expansion to 1,000 turbines would approach $20 billion. These renewable system costs will be in addition to existing power generation plants, 90 percent of which must be maintained to provide security of electricity supply when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. In 2017, Ohio residents consumed 119,000 gigawatt-hours of electrical power. If completed, the 1,000 wind turbines of the expanded $20 billion Icebreaker project would deliver about 12,000 gigawatt-hours, or only about 10 percent of Ohio’s electricity need. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter pledged their cities to 100 percent renewables by 2030. Major wind system build-outs during the last five years boosted Minnesota to the 8th-leading wind energy state in the United States. Renewables now provide about 27 percent of the state’s electricity. But Minnesota residents are paying for it. Over the last nine years, Minnesota power prices increased 34 percent, compared to the US average price rise of 7 percent. In Wisconsin, Madison Mayor Paul Soglin announced last July the city’s commitment to 100 percent renewable electricity by 2050. But Wisconsin is not exactly the sun belt. Traditional generating stations provide 92 percent of the state’s electrical power and Wisconsin is a poor location for both wind and solar. Not to be deterred, the City of Madison announced in 2017, a contract for five “utility-scale” solar arrays that would deliver 20 megawatt-hours of electricity per year. But Wisconsin consumes 65,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity each year. More than three million such “utility-scale” solar projects would be needed to supply just one percent of Wisconsin’s electricity. City officials in Atlanta pledged to reach 100 percent renewables by 2035, but have been honest about the fact that they don’t know how to do it. Only about 6 percent of Atlanta’s electricity comes from renewable sources, about the same amount as the state of Georgia. So, Atlanta proposes purchasing large amounts of renewable energy credits from wind and solar generators in other states, so that they can claim their green energy status. Energy does not have color. No one can tell whether the electricity from their wall outlet is green or provided by a coal-fired plant. Purchasing renewable credits from other locations is the sleight-of-hand method that allows city mayors to claim 100 percent renewable status. Maybe these mayors have learned a way to spin climate change straw into gold. Cincinnati, Cleveland, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Atlanta and several other cities will receive $2.5 million grants from the Bloomberg Philanthropies group of billionaire Michael Bloomberg for their efforts to “fight climate change.” Unfortunately, these grants will only be a drop in the bucket compared to the billions in additional electricity costs that citizens will pay for renewable electricity programs. California is the center of the 100-percent-renewables fable. More than 30 California cities have committed to 100 percent renewable electricity, including San Diego, San Francisco and San Jose, as well as the state of California itself. The state is doing a great job of boosting electricity prices. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, California 2017 residential electricity prices were 18.2 cents per kilowatt-hour, about 50 percent higher than any other state in the West. Look for California rates to double in the next two decades, driven by efforts to achieve high penetration of renewables. So is your mayor smarter than a fifth grader? When it comes to energy policy, maybe not. Steve Goreham is a speaker on the environment, business and public policy. He’s also the author of the book, “Outside the Green Box: Rethinking Sustainable Development.” The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. CORRECTION, Feb. 25, 2019: We have made two corrections to this Op-Ed at the request of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, which contacted the writer directly about them. First, we have corrected “As part of the effort, the Ohio Power Siting Board approved the Icebreaker Wind Facility last July” to “As part of the effort, the Ohio Power Siting Board recommended the approval of the Icebreaker Wind Facility last July.” Second, in the same paragraph, we corrected “six 3.5-gigawatt wind turbines” to “six 3.5-megawatt wind turbines.” Though The Western Journal did not originate these errors, we did publish them, and are therefore responsible for them. We apologize for any confusion the misinformation may have caused. We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards. __________________________ 
‘Sustainable’ Fuels Unlikely to Replace Hydrocarbons for Air Travel
By Steve Goreham -- January 2, 2019 “Hydrocarbon fuels will remain essential for modern air travel. So-called sustainable aviation fuels are expensive, produced in negligible volumes, and provide CO2 savings only on paper. As such, they fail the real sustainability test of affordability, plenty, and reliability.” Air travel is a miracle of our modern society. In 1620, the pilgrims took 65 days to cross the Atlantic Ocean by sailing ship and two passengers died during that hazardous journey. Today, a single jumbo jet safely transports more than 300 passengers from London to New York in under eight hours. Millions flew to see loved ones this last Christmas. But jet planes burn hydrocarbon fuel, an energy source under attack. Each day, more than 100,000 commercial flights carry more than 11 million passengers a combined total of 14 billion passenger miles worldwide. More than 99 percent of these flights are powered by aviation fuel from petroleum. Commercial air travel poses a problem for climate change fighters. There is no viable low-carbon substitute for most of today’s air travel. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) of the United Nations warns that the aviation industry exhausts two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Aircraft CO2 emissions are projected to quadruple by 2050 from 2010 levels. Government officials have long been concerned about greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes. Germany, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, levied eco-taxes on air travel and other nations have threatened to do so. Lord Turner, past chairman of the UK Parliament committee on climate change stated, “In absolute terms, we may have to look at restricting the number of flights people take.” Because of the growing threat of climate change-driven taxes, the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the trade association of the world’s airlines, adopted voluntary goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These goals are to 1) improve fuel efficiency, 2) to cap emissions through “carbon neutral growth,” and 3) to cut carbon dioxide emissions in half by 2050. Commercial airlines have a long history of improving fuel efficiency, an excellent goal, which reduces the cost of operations. But goals to reduce CO2 emissions are impractical. Airlines are counting on what they call Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) to provide most of the CO2 emission reductions. While traditional aircraft fuels are refined from petroleum, sustainable alternative fuels are produced from vegetable oils or biomass, such as soybeans, sugar cane, or algae. SAF is designed to be a “drop-in” fuel, able to be blended up to 50 percent with traditional jet fuel and used in all existing aircraft and airport infrastructure. The Finnish company Neste is a leading producer of SAF, beginning production in 2011. Neste produces its fuel from recycled cooking oil. But recycled cooking oil is expensive to gather. As a result, Neste fuel is three or four times the price of traditional aviation fuel, reducing airline demand. Neste is lobbying for “regulatory incentives” to force the use of SAF. If sustainable aviation fuels are adopted, the scale of the capacity required would be huge. According to the ICAO, replacement of traditional aviation fuel from hydrocarbons with SAF would require170 new large bio refineries to be built every year from 2020 to 2050 at a cost of up to $60 billion per year. Today, far less than one percent of global aviation fuel is a sustainable version. But it’s not clear that “sustainable” aviation fuels will significantly reduce CO2 emissions. When traditional aviation fuel combusts, about three tons of carbon dioxide are created from each ton of fuel. When SAF is burned, about three tons of CO2 is also exhausted for each ton of fuel. So how can it be that the use of sustainable fuels reduces emissions? Sustainable advocates promise carbon savings by assuming that combustion of biomass is carbon neutral. Their logic says that plants grow and absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, which is then released when SAF or other fuels are burned. But since plants grow and absorb CO2 on land not used for biofuels, converting land to biofuels double counts the absorption of CO2 from the atmosphere. SAF emissions savings are only a paperwork mirage. Hypocrisy in Flight Sustainable advocates want “sustainability” for you and me, but not for themselves. Tens of thousands of attendees to the recent climate conference in Katowice, Poland arrived on commercial and private planes from all over the world. Most of these attendees fly to climate conferences every year to collectively warn about CO2 emissions. At Katowice, former actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who flew to the conference, stated that he wished he could “be a terminator in real life, and be able to travel back in time and to stop all fossil fuels when they were discovered.” In the past, Schwarzenegger owned as many as four Hummers at one time. As governor of California, he flew on a private jet for three hours each day from the capitol in Sacramento to his home in southern California. Hydrocarbon fuels will remain essential for modern air travel. So-called sustainable aviation fuels are expensive, produced in negligible volumes, and provide CO2 savings only on paper. As such, they fail the real sustainability test of affordability, plenty, and reliability. Despite powerful concerns about the need to fight climate change, it is unlikely that renewable fuels will ever be a major source of aviation fuel. What is politically correct is far too economically incorrect. ———————————-- Steve Goreham is a speaker on the environment, business, and public policy and author of, most recently, Outside the Green Box: Rethinking Sustainable Development. ___________________________ 
100 Percent Renewables—Poor Policy for Ratepayers
By Steve Goreham -- October 29, 2018 “Cities and states pursuing 100 percent renewable electricity lay the foundation for a future painful lesson. Households and businesses will experience the shock of rapidly rising electricity prices as more renewables are added to the system.” Two states and more than 80 cities and counties have now announced a goal of receiving 100 percent of their electricity from renewable sources. Wind, solar, and biofuels are proposed to replace electricity from coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants. But evidence is mounting that 100 percent renewables is poor policy for US households and businesses. More than 80 cities announced commitments to get 100 percent of their energy from renewable sources. Minneapolis committed to attaining 100 percent renewable electricity by 2030, Salt Lake City by 2032, and St. Louis by 2035. Nine counties and two states, California and Hawaii, have also made 100 percent renewable pledges. Some cites already claim to get all power from renewables, generally by using a little electricity “sleight of hand.” Rock Port, Missouri claims to be the first US community powered by wind because it has a local wind farm. But when the wind doesn’t blow, Rock Port gets power from other generators in Missouri, a state that gets 77 percent of its electricity from coal and 97 percent from non-renewables in total. On September 10, Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 100, committing California to 100 percent renewable electricity by 2045. Brown stated, It’s not going to be easy. It will not be immediate. But it must be done…California is committed to doing whatever is necessary to meet the existential threat of climate change. But cities and states pursuing 100 percent renewable electricity lay the foundation for a future painful lesson. Households and businesses will experience the shock of rapidly rising electricity prices as more renewables are added to the system. Intermittency Problem Wind and solar cannot replace output from traditional coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants, despite claims to the contrary. Wind and solar are intermittent generators. Wind output varies dramatically from high output to zero, depending upon weather conditions. Solar output is available for only about six hours each day when the sun is overhead and disappears completely on cloudy days or after a snowfall. Hydropower is a renewable source that can replace traditional power plants, but even this source is insufficient in years of drought or low snow runoff. Experience shows that utilities can only count on about 10 percent of the nameplate capacity of a wind or solar facility as an addition to power system capacity. For example, on December 7, 2011, the day of peak winter electricity demand in the United Kingdom, the output of more than 3,000 wind turbines in the UK was less than five percent of rated output. The UK House of Lords recognized the problem a decade ago, stating “The intermittent nature of wind turbines…means they can replace only a little of the capacity of fossil fuel and nuclear power plants if security of supply is to be maintained.” To achieve “deep decarbonization,” states will need to keep 90 percent of traditional power plants and add increasing amounts of wind and solar to existing systems. Total system capacity must first double and then triple as 100 percent renewable output is approached. A 2016 study by Brick and Thernstrom projected that California’s system capacity would need to increase from 53.6 gigawatts to 90.5 gigawatts at 50 percent renewables and to 123.6 gigawatts at 80 percent renewable output. Rising system capacity means enormous electricity cost. In 2017, California received 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, excluding power from large hydroelectric plants. California 2017 residential electricity rates were 18.24 cents per kilowatt-hour, 50 percent higher than any other US western state. From 2008 to 2017, California power rates rose 25 percent compared to the US national average increase of about 7 percent. But the worst is yet to come. As California adds renewable capacity to approach 100 percent renewables, generated cost of electricity will likely triple. International examples show soaring electricity prices from renewables penetration. High levels of wind and solar in Germany and Denmark produced household electricity prices four times US rates. Renewable programs pushed power prices in five Australian provincial capital cities up 60 to 160 percent over the last decade. Wind, solar, and biofuel penetration in Ontario, Canada drove electricity prices up more than 80 percent from 2004 to 2016. Renewable output in these locations remains far below 100 percent. Batteries … No Panacea Green energy advocates recognize renewable intermittency and hope that advances in battery technology will save the day. Large-scale commercial batteries, they claim, will be able to store power during high levels of renewable output and then deliver power to the grid when wind and solar output is low. But batteries are not the answer because of the large seasonal variation in renewable output. For example, wind and solar output in California in December and January is less than half of the output in summer months. Commercial large-scale batteries available today are rated to deliver stored electricity for only two hours or ten hours duration. No batteries exist that can store energy in the summer and then deliver it during the winter when renewable output is very low. Conclusion Superstition is powerful. There is no evidence that 100 percent renewable efforts, all combined, will have a measurable effect on global temperatures. Instead, cities and states that pursue 100 percent renewable policies will learn the hard lesson of skyrocketing electricity prices. ———– Steve Goreham is a popular speaker on the environment, business, and public policy and author of the Outside the Green Box: Rethinking Sustainable Development. __________________________ |
