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New EPA Regulations
Likely To Make Power Grid Less Stable While Making Electricity More
Expensive
By Kevin Killough, State Energy Reporter
March 02,
2023
The coal industry is preparing for an onslaught
of new EPA regulations over the next several months likely to speed
up retirement of coal-fired generation plants.
The rules include what’s called the “Good Neighbor” provision, which
would require upwind states to ensure that their air pollution
doesn’t impact downwind states’ ability to meet air quality
standards.
Researchers say that coming into compliance with the regulations
would likely be uneconomical for many coal power plants.
Travis Deti, executive director of the Wyoming Mining Association,
told Cowboy State Daily that President Joe Biden has been explicit
in his intent to eliminate all or most of the U.S. coal-fired
generation. The industry, Deti said, has been anticipating a hostile
regulatory environment.
“This is just using the regulatory apparatus to keep coal in the
ground, and it will make our grid less reliable. It’s a political
move and not unexpected,” Deti said.
Destabilizing Grids
According to economic estimates by Rhodium Group, an independent
research provider, 30 gigawatts to 60 gigawatts of coal-fired
electrical generation will be taken offline by 2030, and that’s in
addition to 60 gigawatts of retirements already in the works. There
is currently about 220 gigawatts of capacity operating today,
supplying 20% of the nation’s electricity.
Much of the lost coal-fired electricity generation will be made up
for with new wind and solar farms, and the so-called Inflation
Reduction Act provides billions in funding for renewable energy
projects. As more intermittent, unreliable generation resources are
added to the grid, utilities are facing greater struggles to keep
electricity flowing to homes and businesses.
The problem could become even worse as more people switch to
electric cars and natural gas is replaced with heating and cooking
sources powered with electricity.
In its 2022 Long-Term Reliability Assessment, the North American
Electric Reliability Corporation rated most of the West and Midwest
at elevated or high risk for resource inadequacy during high demand,
meaning that during times of high or low temperatures, large
sections of the grid could experience rolling blackouts.
According to a study released last week by the PMJ Interconnection,
which is a very large grid serving about 65 million people in the
East, the measure of spare power supplies versus peak demand on that
grid is expected to fall from 26% this year to 15% by 2030.
Storage Problems
Paul Bonifas, an energy consultant who has worked in partnerships
with the University of Wyoming, told Cowboy State Daily that when
wind and solar are producing electricity, they’re cheap and
affordable, and, while there are carbon dioxide emissions in the
manufacturing of the components, shipping and construction of wind
and solar farms, they don’t produce carbon dioxide emissions while
they’re producing electricity.
“The issue with renewables isn’t that the technology doesn’t work,
the technology works fine, it works great,” Bonifas said.
The problem is that there’s no cost-effective reliable way to store
energy. A very large battery facility could store enough power for
up to 12 hours, but periods in which there’s no wind or sun can be
longer than that.
Energy expert Alex Epstein calculated how much it would take to
store up enough energy in batteries to power the globe for three
days. Based on the price of Tesla Megapacks, it would cost $590
trillion, which is six times the global GDP. And the batteries have
to be replaced about every 10 to 20 years.
Bonifas said that you really need to look at global figures, because
to make all this work would require wind and solar farms producing
energy across the globe.
“The idea is the sun’s always shining somewhere. So if you can coat
the entire planet with solar panels, and run transmission lines
through the oceans, then you always have power. Okay, but let’s talk
about something realistic,” Bonifas said.
The Kool-Aid
Dan Kish, senior fellow with the Institute of Energy Research, a
nonprofit doing research on government regulation and global energy
markets, told Cowboy State Daily that the federal agencies that
should be alarmed at the studies showing increasing grid instability
are just ignoring the danger.
“They’ve all drunk the Kool Aid, and they just keep taking us down
this road,” Kish said.
Kish said these newest regulations are part of a strategy that seeks
to place expensive rules over every aspect of a coal-fired power
plant’s operations.
“It’s death by a thousand cuts. And meanwhile, China is building two
plants every week, which is going to bury any kind of emissions
reductions we have here in the United States,” Kish said.
Dispatchable Power
A January study by Energy Innovation, a renewable advocacy and
climate policy think tank, found that the only coal-fired power
plant in the United States that’s cheaper to operate than to replace
with wind and solar farms is the Dry Fork Station about 10 miles
north of Gillette.
Like many studies concluding that wind and solar are cheaper, the
Energy Innovation study uses levelized cost of energy(LCOE) in its
calculations, which the U.S. Energy Information Administration has
said is “misleading” when comparing costs across technologies,
because it doesn’t factor in the cost of dealing with intermittency
of wind and solar.
Bonifas said that when you remove 120 gigawatts of coal-fired
generation, you can’t just replace it with 120 gigawatts of wind and
solar. You have to have a dispatchable source of energy – energy
sources from natural gas and nuclear that are ready to go whenever
they’re needed – that supplies the 120 gigawatts lost capacity from
coal whenever the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
“Since you don’t control when renewables ramp down, you just have to
have the exact same capacity of dispatchable energy as you would
have if you had no renewables,” Bonifas said.
That means basically you’re paying for the dispatchable power and a
lot of supplementary wind and solar. The costs to the consumer will
then increase the more a grid adds wind and solar.
Subsidies And Favors
Deti said that wind and solar wouldn’t make any economic sense
without the federal subsidies the industries are receiving and the
favorable regulatory environment they have. The Bureau of Land
Management is laying out policies to make it easier for wind and
solar projects to be built on federal land, while making it harder
for oil, gas, and coal operators to produce on those public lands.
“The only reason we are where we are with wind and solar right now
is because of massive federal subsidies, massive tax benefits, tax
breaks, and regulatory favor,” Deti said.
Meanwhile, China and India are building more coal-generation
capacity than the U.S. is shutting down, which Deti said is
frustrating for American coal companies.
“They’re gonna continue to burn coal, because they realize that coal
is abundant, reliable and affordable for their populations. It’s a
way to bring their people out of poverty and to provide reliable
electricity. In the United States, we seem to have forgotten that
lesson,” Deti said.
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