ObamaVolts Unsustainable

Energy security must include reliable power, Posted on May 4, 2015 Written by cfact.org, The Obama — EPA  plan ensures that black­outs will be in our future.

Unlike pop­u­la­tions in most other parts of the world, we Amer­i­cans take vital ben­e­fits of depend­able elec­tric­ity for granted. We sim­ply plug into an out­let or flip on a switch and fully expect that our lights will go on, our com­put­ers will charge, our cof­fee will heat up, our air con­di­tion­ers will func­tion, and yes, our gen­er­ous tax­payer sub­si­dized plug-in vehi­cles will run again until tomorrow.

This won­der­ful, finely bal­anced round-the-clock empow­er­ment required plan­ning and devel­op­ment which didn’t occur overnight. The same will be true of future efforts to restore ade­quate capa­bil­i­ties after the Obama EPA’s Clean Power Plan takes an esti­mated one-third of all U.S. coal-fired plants off the grid over the next 5 years. This amounts to a loss of gen­er­at­ing capac­ity suf­fi­cient to sup­ply res­i­den­tial elec­tric­ity for about 57 mil­lion people.

The North Amer­i­can Elec­tric Reli­a­bil­ity Corp, a non­profit over­sight group, empha­sizes that the plan con­sti­tutes “a sig­nif­i­cant reli­a­bil­ity chal­lenge, given the time required for imple­men­ta­tion.” The time­line to con­vert or replace a coal-fired power plant with nat­ural gas requires years, whereby sit­ing, per­mit­ting and devel­op­ment to meet EPA’s interim tar­get would need to be com­pleted by 2017.

Even if a state were able to sub­mit a com­pli­ance plan by 2017 or 2018, the EPA has admit­ted that it may take up to another year to approve it. New and upgraded nat­ural gas plants will require addi­tional pipeline infra­struc­ture which may take five years or longer. More expan­sive trans­mis­sion lines will also be required to con­nect that capac­ity to the grid, with full imple­men­ta­tion poten­tially tak­ing up to 15 years.

EPA’s lat­est cli­mate alarm-premised war on coal assault calls for states to cut CO2 emis­sions by 30% from 2005 lev­els by 2030 despite satellite-recorded flat mean global tem­per­a­tures over the past 18 years and count­ing. This fed­eral usurpa­tion of state respon­si­bil­ity dat­ing back to the inven­tion of the mod­ern steam engine in the 1880s is unprecedented.

A “fin­ish­ing rule” expected to be issued in June or July will require states to meet agency carbon-reduction tar­gets by reor­ga­niz­ing their “pro­duc­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion, and use of elec­tric­ity.” In com­ply­ing, 39 states must achieve more than 50% of the EPA’s reduc­tion tar­gets by 2020.

Not only are the EPA’s man­dates infea­si­ble, they also demand that states oper­ate “out­side the fence line” to force shut­downs of coal (and even­tu­ally nat­ural gas), estab­lish min­i­mum quo­tas for renew­ables (wind and solar), and impose energy con­ser­va­tion man­dates. Never mind here that last year the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled against the Fed­eral Energy Reg­u­la­tory Commission’s claim of author­ity over “demand response” of the national energy grid.

Even lib­eral Har­vard con­sti­tu­tional author­ity Larry Tribe has observed being stunned at this effort to nation­al­ize U.S. elec­tric­ity gen­er­a­tion by coerc­ing states to pass new laws or rush through new com­pli­ance rules that exceed the EPA’s legal juris­dic­tion. Pres­i­dent Obama is clearly eager for such pol­icy changes to be quickly put into effect which a future Repub­li­can pres­i­dent can’t reverse. This will also pro­vide brag­ging rights for a cli­mate ini­tia­tive he can announce at the Paris cli­mate con­fer­ence later this year.
For­tu­nately, while states are invited to draw up imple­men­ta­tion plans for EPA approval, they really have no legal oblig­a­tion to do so. And while the EPA can attempt to com­man­deer a fed­eral plan if states resist, there are good incen­tives for them to band together in call­ing the EPA’s bluff — rea­sons which can oth­er­wise bear dan­ger­ous and costly consequences.

An April 7 Wash­ing­ton, DC, power out­age caused by a mechan­i­cal fail­ure and fire at a trans­fer sta­tion tem­porar­ily dis­rupted elec­tric­ity to the White House, the Capi­tol, gov­ern­ment agen­cies (yes, includ­ing the Energy Depart­ment), businesses/residents, and street lights. While rel­a­tively minor, it most likely could have been avoided if a 60-year-old coal-fired plant called the Potomac River Gen­er­at­ing Sta­tion in Alexan­dria, Va., which pro­vided backup capac­ity to bal­ance the grid, had not been shuttered.

It was one of 188 plant clo­sures cred­ited to for­mer New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s activist “Beyond Coal” cam­paign which he has sup­ported with a $80 mil­lion in dona­tions to the anti-fossil Sierra Club.

A far more dam­ag­ing 2003 North­east black­out resulted in costs of about $13 bil­lion. Refer­ring to the Clean Power Plan, the New York Inde­pen­dent Sys­tems Oper­a­tor (NYISO) now reports that the EPA’s “inher­ently unrea­son­able” reduc­tions “can­not be sus­tained while main­tain­ing reli­able elec­tric ser­vice to New York City.” The NYISO fur­ther projects unac­cept­able plan con­se­quences which “no amount of flex­i­bil­ity can fix.”

States should col­lec­tively heed this real­ity. Rather than accept the EPA’s dirty work, it’s imper­a­tive that fed­eral hijack­ing of state sov­er­eignty be resound­ingly rejected.

Related Posts

• EIA: 13 Gigawatts of Coal Capac­ity to Retire in 2015 Due to EPA Regulation
• Lib­eral Obama Law Pro­fes­sor: Obama’s EPA is Burn­ing the Constitution
• Using the Global Warm­ing Hoax to Destroy America
  Filed Under: Climate Change, Natural Resources, Renewable Energy
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