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Wind Subsides Cost Taxpayers Big

Appears on Newsmax:

A draft package released by the Senate Finance Committee proposes to revive a 2.3 cent per kilowatt-hour production tax credit (PTC) incentive for wind energy, which lapsed last December. Congress had voted to terminate the PTC along with other tax breaks for wind projects at the end of 2013, only to have it retroactively extended through 2014 by the Obama cromnibus budget.

Previous “temporary helping hand” extensions have been granted seven times since PTC was first stablished in 1992 to “help the industry compete in the marketplace.” It was preceded by two other “temporary” federal subsidies dating back to 1978, which were advertised to accomplish the same elusive purpose.

Alas, despite lots of windy marketing claims there simply aren’t any free “renewable energy” lunches. According to the Energy Information Administration, 2013 PTC wind benefits alone topped $5.9 billion, while solar received $5.3 billion. The Senate Finance Committee now projects that a two-year PTC extension will heap on another $10.5 billion in lost federal tax revenues over the next 10 years.

Wind and solar combined provided less than 5 percent of total U.S. electricity in 2013. Yet according to the nonprofit Institute for Energy Research, federal subsidies and support on the basis of that per-unit electricity production, each of them received more than 50 times more subsidy support than coal and natural gas combined.

Added to this taxpayer pain are cost penalties borne by electricity consumers thanks to renewable energy mandates provided in 29 states and the District of Columbia that guarantee designated market shares regardless of extra production charges for wind and solar power. Escalating costs have prompted Ohio to freeze its mandates, and West Virginia to cancel them altogether.

Consider New York state, for example, which has been blowing billions of taxpayer green on wind, yet has some of the highest U.S. electricity rates. Despite this charity, a household there using 6,500 kwh of electricity annually will pay about $400 more than the national average. Statewide, this 53 percent extra cost over the national average amounts to approximately $3.2 billion each year. And after all, wasn’t the main idea to replace fossil-fueled plants with assuredly “cost-effective” renewables? A 2013 report by the New York Independent Systems Operator (NYISO) estimates that New York’s first 15 wind farms operating in 2010 produced about a 2.4 million megawatt-hour output.

That’s equivalent to a single 450 mwh gas-fired combined cycle generating unit operating only at 60 percent capacity which can be built at about one-fourth of the capital cost. Even worse, those wind turbines have a very short operating life, requiring a total infrastructure reinvestment about every 10-13 years, easily a $2 billion replacement for New York.

Add to this substantial infrastructure and transmission costs to deliver electricity from remote wind sites to the New York City area where greatest power demand exists. Such dislocations between locations of supply and high demand are typical throughout all regions of America, both for industrial scale wind and solar. The quality of that power isn’t any bargain either.

Unlike coal- and natural-gas-fired plants that provide reliable power when needed — including peak demand times — wind turbines only produce electricity intermittently as variable daily and seasonal weather conditions permit regardless of demand. That fickle output trend favors colder night-time periods rather than hot summer late afternoons when needed most.

The real kicker here is that wind has no real capacity value. Intermittent outputs require access to a “shadow capacity,” which enables utilities to balance power grids when wind conditions aren’t optimum . . . which is most of the time. What we don’t tend hear about is that those “spinning reserves” which equal total wind capacity are likely fueled by coal or natural gas which anti-fossil activists love to hate and wind was touted to replace. But then again, self-proclaimed environmentalists aren’t all keen on wind turbines either.

A Sierra Club official described them as giant “Cuisinarts in the sky” for bird and bat slaughters. In some cases “not in my backyard” resistance arises from an aesthetic perspective as evidenced, for example, by strong public opposition to the proposed 130-turbine offshore Cape Wind development stretching across 24 square miles of Nantucket Sound’s pristine Horseshoe Shoal. Other wind critics also have legitimate health concerns about land-based installations. Common symptoms include headaches, nausea, sleeplessness, and ringing in ears resulting from prolonged exposure to inaudibly low “infrasound” frequencies that penetrate walls.

So long as this industry’s survival depends upon preferential government handouts and regulatory mandates, two things are clear. Wind is not a free, or a competitive free market source of energy. It is also not a charity we can continue to afford blow money into. It’s time to finally pull the plug and permanently cut off the taxpayer and rate-payer juice.

Aug 03, 2015 | 4 comments | by

Anti-fossil Energy Groups Lobby Students

Universities and other public institutions throughout America are being targeted in an aggressive climate crisis-premised campaign demanding that they divest themselves of all fossil energy investments and influences. In the process, legitimate funding sources are being sacrificed, objective education and science programs are being compromised, and careers of non-conforming researchers are under assault.

As reported by Kimberley Strassel in The Wall Street Journal, one such sponsoring organization, “UnKochMyCampus,” provides a “campus organization guide” on how to “expose and undermine” any college that works against “progressive values.”

Spearheaded by Greenpeace, Forecast the Facts, and the American Federation of Teachers, its website directs students to a list of universities which have received money from Koch foundations. It also offers step-by-step instructions on how “trusted allies and informants” (including other liberal students, faculty and alumni) can be recruited to demand Freedom of Information legislation record disclosures from offending programs and professors.

The Federation of Teachers and National Education Association even sponsored a day-long March conference devoted to training students on “necessary skill to investigate and expose” any Koch influence. Funding influences of left wing contributors, however, are quite a different matter.

It seems quite okay that billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer and his wife pledged $40 million to create the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy at Stanford. Steyer, a prominent climate alarmist, anti-Keystone Pipeline lobbyist and carbon tax proponent, also spent $74 million supporting 2014 congressional candidates who would advance his uber-liberal agendas.

A recent National Association of Scholars report titled “Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism” discusses how universities continue to be co-opted as bastions of progressive ideology. Excerpted by Rachelle Peterson and Peter Wood of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the movement can be heavily credited to the former senator, now the secretary of state, John Kerry and his wife Teresa Heinz following her previous husband’s fatal 1991 helicopter crash.

Upon meeting at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro U.N. Earth Climate Summit the two recognized colleges and universities as important seedbeds for a new “sustainable development” initiative. This mantra was hatched by the U.N. under its Agenda 21 doctrine and became smuggled into unwitting American townships and counties through its International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI).

In 1992 Kerry and later-to-become wife Heinz launched the nonprofit “Second Nature” with the mission to “create a sustainable society by transforming higher education.” The organization began soliciting professors including ecologists, scientists, philosophers, and poets who were willing to introduce sustainability content into their courses along with encouraging the creation of new centers of sustainability study.

Second Nature’s primary and most successful targets proved to be college presidents who possess an unparalleled ability to shepherd the movement to adulthood along with financial flexibility to experiment with new technologies and programs. A group of 12 institutional heads initially came onboard, including Arizona State University President Michael Crow, and University of Florida President Bernard Machen.

The group pledged to “recognize the scientific consensus that global warming is real and is largely caused by humans” and to set an example by going “carbon-neutral.” Among other things, they also committed to engage in shareholder activism to pressure the corporations in which the college owned stock to move towards climate neutrality. As of last January, 685 colleges and universities have signed on.

Joined by mega-funded green groups, friendly media and government politicos the movement continues to gain fast-paced momentum. A recent Greenpeace-sponsored New York Times attack on Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics accused him of personally failing to disclose research funding, even though those monies were properly processed through official institutional agreements.

Two days after the Times article appeared, ranking Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., sent letters to university employers of seven researchers identified as climate crisis skeptics. All were asked to provide details about their outside funding sources.

In addition, Senators Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.; Ed Markey, D-Mass.; and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., attempted to intimidate climate apostates by sending 107 letters to think tanks, trade associations and companies demanding that they provide the same information.

By extension, this presumably suggests that no scientist who ever accepts research funding from any special interest-linked sponsors should be trusted. Let’s remember, however, that government politicians and bureaucrats wishing to expand authority and budgets are as self-interested as anyone, and that nearly all university-based climate research depends upon federal grants they provide.

Those research conclusions, in turn, influence billions of dollars in regulatory and consumer energy costs. There’s little wonder then about the need for alarmist witch-hunting activists following 18 years and counting of flat global temperatures despite rising atmospheric CO2 levels. When the climate scare goes away, so does that power and money.

Another version of this post appeared in Newsmax.

 

May 11, 2015 | 2 comments | by

Energy Security Must Include Reliable Power

A similar version of this blog post appeared in Newsmax:

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 five 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, 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 percent 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 percent of EPA’s reduction targets by 2020.

Not only are EPA’s mandates unfeasible, they also demand that states operate “outside the fence line” to force shut-downs 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 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 EPA can attempt to commandeer a federal plan if states resist, there are good incentives for them to band together in calling EPA’s bluff — reasons which can otherwise bear dangerous and costly consequences.

An April 7 Washington, D.C., power outage caused by a mechanical failure and fire at a transfer station temporarily disrupted electricity to the White house, 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, hadn’t 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 $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 EPA’s “inherently unreasonable” reductions “cannot be sustained while maintaining reliable electric service to New York City.” NYISO further projects unacceptable plan consequences which “no amount of flexibility can fix.”

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

Apr 29, 2015 | 2 comments | by