Guest post by Alec Rawls
The upcoming rule:
… will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits 800 to 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt, meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt.
Can this stand, after Obama’s big energy-policy tour last week included not a single mention CO2, greenhouse gases, climate or global warming?
EPA’s endangerment ruling on CO2 is being challenged in the courts right now. In particular, the world’s largest coal company, Peabody Energy Company, is challenging the ruling specifically on the grounds that EPA improperly relied on the IPCC’s bogus claims that CO2 is causing dangerous global warming. Obama’s retreat from any mention of CO2 or climate, never mind global warming, would seem to be an official admission that Peabody is right and the IPCC is wrong. How can global warming be important enough to warrant shutting down coal, by far the largest source of electricity in the country, if it is not important enough for the president to even mention during his big energy-policy extravaganza?
Obama did mention “clean energy” several times in his Nevada speech, but there is nothing unclean about CO2, certainly not that can hold up in court. CO2 is the beginning of the food chain, the essential nutrient from which all life on earth is constructed. Animals get their carbon building blocks from plants which get it from atmospheric or oceanic CO2 through photosynthesis, and current levels of CO2—about 0.039 percent of the atmosphere—are alarmingly close to the minimum required to sustain life.
From Lawrence Livermore Labs CO2 “fact sheet“:
Carbon dioxide is necessary to sustain life in concentrations of about 0.04 percent of the earth’s atmosphere …
The biosphere craves more of this healthful gas, not less.
The ONLY concern about CO2 is the idea that its greenhouse warming effect might be dangerous, and no such concern is being voiced by Obama. Apparently it is off the table, which ought to clear off all of his green energy plans as well, because their expressed rationale was the greenhouse threat from CO2. That is especially true with the EPA’s endangerment finding for CO2, which explicitly relies on the IPCC reports.
Oral arguments in the consolidated Peabody case took place at the end of February, but if the entire basis for the endangerment finding is no longer operative, the court ought to admit a motion to include that information. It will be a travesty if Obama is allowed to unplug ultimately half the grid on a rationale that he himself now considers too toxic to mention.
To John@EF, who said:
“First, there are no new coal plants on the horizon for free-market business reasons”
That is absolutely wrong. From the original article referenced above, from the Washington Post: “There are about 20 coal plants now pursuing permits”
Additionally, the new EPA rules do not apply only to newly constructed power plants. The wording of the tailoring rules makes the standard apply to any “new source”, which includes any replacement or upgrade of existing sources. You’re basically telling investors that if you invest in a coal power plant, you won’t get any ROI because the plant will be obsoleted prematurely. I would strongly advise against investing in any energy company before closely examining their portforlio. I would also advise dumping any CSX railroad stocks you might currently have.
I think anyone who is pushing this thing should put their money where their agenda is, and buy some con-ed stocks to help them pay for upgrades. They really don’t have much of a choice in many cases. For some plants it will come down to a decision between two evils. In the worst case, the plants could be closed and take big losses for the stock holders, or alternatively, you keep the plants open and install costly upgrades, which still results in a loss, but not as big.
The end result will be higher costs for energy, which will hit food producers really hard and damage US food exports due to uncompetitive prices, as well as higher prices for literally everything we buy.
Don’t believe me? Skip the media hype and check out the EPA rules and tailoring adendums themselves. The effects won’t be immediate, but they will be a lot bigger than the EPA is claiming. The only thing that makes this even close to feasible is the recent boon in natural gas.
One more thing to add to an already long post. Expect organizations like Greenpeace to push lawsuits with the aim of asking for broad interpretation of the EPA’s wording, which has been left intentionally vague. There will be attempts to expand the compliance mandates through liberal court justices, who are willing to do just about anything for the special interest groups.
Link to the rules: http://epa.gov/carbonpollutionstandard/pdfs/20120327proposal.pdf
Oh, and btw, the EPA doesn’t have the budget or manpower currently to enforce this, and the current plan pushes the bulk of the costs down to the State level. Good luck getting a permit when they are backed up by months, or even years.
John@EF says:
March 28, 2012 at 8:43 am
Great. Retire them and replace with cheaper, cleaner natural gas.
If natural gas plants, are in fact cheaper, over all, then the power companies don’t need federal diktats, to order them to do what is already in their best interests.
Thanks to a combination of factors, including (1) new EPA regulations and (2) the ‘de-regulated’ Texas electricity market, Texas faces potential electricity shortages this year … ERCOT has already run PSA (Public Service Announcement) radio messages regarding conservation. I have never seen conservation messages run before in Texas while not actually being ‘in situ’ during a crises.
Here is ERCOT’s press release dated March 1st 2012:
News media account, WFAA.com:
Remember that ‘Smart Meter” rollout? Yup, that is going to play a part in “demand reduction” too.
– – – – – – – – –
Now, explaining how the de-regulated electricity market enters into ‘effecting a shortage’ of electricity supply gets a little complex. Producers of electricity, the ‘generators’ of electricity must somehow be induced to invest (read that as “spend”) millions in plants and equipment which can be expected to operate only a portion of the year, during peak demand periods, usually during our summer months … given the economics of the situation, this can result in the cost in those ‘peaks’ of electric supply to range upwards of US $3,000 a MW-Hour, whereas baseload plants can produce at about US $40 a MWHour.
So, to encourage additional expenditures on those used-just-few-months-of-the-year ‘peak’ generation facilities, the top ‘cap’ paid for bulk electricity production is probably going to be raised:
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Gail Combs,
So as the USA continues to close down and not replace older coal powered plants China is opening another coal-fired power plant every week to 10 days.
http://www.chinamining.org/News/2012-03-14/1331688172d55207.html
China is expected to consume 270 million mt/year less standard coalequivalent for electricity generation by 2015, compared with 2011 levels, China Electricity Council said in a report Monday….China’s coal-fired power sector consumed a total of 1.262 billion mt of standard coal equivalent in 2011, according to Platts calculations.
In the US we use natural gas fired plants as peakers. China doesn’t have much natural gas so they use coal fired plants as peakers. In the US we have roughly 300 GW of coal fired plant that consumed until recently about 900 Million metric tonnes of coal/year. In China they have 800 GW consuming 1200 Million metric tonnes of coal.
The bulk of Chinese coal consumption is for things like cement and steel. They built enough new ‘urban housing’ in the last 10 years to house 200 million people.(about 60 million was for population growth and 140 million for rural to urban migration..urban living is less energy intensive then rural living).
They are also putting up a lot of windmills and hydro-dams which have to be backed up with something(coal as they don’t have much natural gas).
We are on the cusp of a sharp inflection (downward) in population, in the midst of a global economic crisis, still in a relative low concentration band of CO2 (vs the standards of all Geological Time), in a world bristling with WMD, dangerously close to the end of the interglacial. Yet, the utopian would be intellectuals clamor for a self imposed reduction in activity and increased costs for all. This is very ugly.
My understanding has been that traditional grid structure is to use coal and nuclear plants to create a baseload structure and then deploy natural gas turbine plants in the urban areas to provide supplemental load at peak times. This has worked extremely well for a long time. The EPA regulations have actually hampered the improvement of coal plants because they added a long list of very costly pollution upgrades of only marginal effectiveness that are required for any upgrade application. So not only are our coal fired plants getting old, they are less efficient than they should be. Why would someone even try to bring a new plant on line when they can get just a few more years out of the current set of boilers that are already 20 years past their expected design life. The problem is this is a train wreck waiting to happen. These plants or going to reach end of life failure at some point and they are all old enough that we could lose 20% of the baseload to plant failures in a very short order – this would probably blackout large portions of the grid. I just hope the site technicians shut things down before they get to catastrophic failure levels. People die when compressed steam plants give way.
The left’s agenda is exposed: D.C. insider blows whistle on ‘global warming’
polistra says:
March 28, 2012 at 6:31 am
Well, whatcha gonna do about it? Elect Romney, who is just as Green as Obama?
Until this country develops a SECOND political party, our only hope is total bankruptcy.
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That is why I am an independent and not a Demi-RAT or Re-BOOB-lican.
What can we do??
Keep a close eye on the federal register and scream bloody murder every time one of these non-elected government groups proposes another unconstitutional “Regulation” that will harm the country.
This page is especially important:
Regulations Open for Comment ~ http://www.regulations.gov/
Hot Off the Presses at the Federal Register: http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/news.html
From WIKI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Register
All IPCC predictions of warming are illegitimate because they are based on models using the non-existent carbon dioxide greenhouse effect. I say this because Ferenc Miskolczi’s work on the absorption of infrared radiation by the atmosphere proves it. Using NOAA database of weather balloon observations that goes back to 1948 he demonstrated that the transparency of the atmosphere in the infrared where carbon dioxide absorbs has been constant for the last 61 years (E&E 21(4):243-262, 2011). At the same time the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide increased by 21.6 percent. This means that the addition of all this carbon dioxide to air had no effect whatsoever on the absorption of IR by the atmosphere. And no absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed. This is an empirical observation, not based on any theory, and it overrules any theoretical calculations that do not agree with it. Specifically, it overrules and invalidates all climate models that depend upon the greenhouse effect to predict warming, which means all IPCC climate models. Carbon dioxide does not do any warming even if you double it, hence the sensitivity of temperature to doubling of CO2 is exactly zero. His peer reviewed paper has been available in the scientific literature for more than a year now but no peer reviewed articles opposing it have appeared in this time. One has to assume that this is not for lack of trying. Hence, it is time to retract the fairy tales about warming, stop subsidies to boondoggles for “clean” energy, and reverse all emission control laws.
Let’s review the facts from a reputable source.
This is from the NEI website (NEI, the Nuclear Energy Institute is the policy organization of the nuclear energy and technologies industry and participates in both the national and global policy-making process) where we find:
The data? This page New Nuclear Plant Status leads to a downloadable .xls spreadsheet …
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Anthony, in light of this thread perhaps a quick thread about the Federal Register might be appropriate. People from other countries might want to chip in with info on any similar process in their countries. Heck I do not even know if states have anything similar. I only know about the Federal Register thanks to a farming group.
After all we can not complain about our government and the laws and regulations if we do not vote and we do not tell the idiot bureaucrats where to stick some of their crazier ideas.
@ur momisugly Russ R. says:
March 28, 2012 at 5:56 am
“The regulation is on NEW power plants, not existing ones, so it will not lead to anything being “unplugged”. Existing coal plants will keep on operating.”
Russ, you need to do more research on this. There are already 19GW of planned plant shutdowns going into effect in 2015. The reserve generation capacity in PJM area is going down significantly. Bottomline is that most existing coal plants will keep on operating – till 2015. However, there are already 2 plants shutting down in 2012 solely due to EPA mischief.
Couldn’t a smart company get around this by building three natural gas plants for every one coal fired plant and stating it is part of the same complex? The three gas plants produce 2400 lb of CO2 for three megawatts and the coal plant produces 1600 lb of CO2 for 1 megawatt leading to an 4000 lbs of C02 emitted for four megawatts produced.
Hugh Pepper says:
March 28, 2012 at 6:45 am
….the IPCC is not some fly-by-night group. Its reports are the summaries of thousands of peer reviewed studies from all over the world, signed off by every major Academy of Science in the world and finally the participating governments. Their findings are universally accepted, except a by a few, who, for their own mysterious reasons, refuse to be persuaded….
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Hey Hugh, I have this really great bridge I want to sell, It is to be auctioned this week with a starting bid of just $100 Trillion. I am sure YOU are one of the ones who will want to bid on this great bridge…
For others take a look at the actual “the thousands of peer reviewed studies from all over the world” that is in the IPCC: Climate Bible Gets 21 ‘F’s on Report Card
or the book: http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/my-book/
Can we have coal burning plants and ban Coke and Pepsi instead?
I bet people would be healthier.
“Gail Combs says:
March 28, 2012 at 10:01 am
polistra says:
March 28, 2012 at 6:31 am
Well, whatcha gonna do about it? Elect Romney, who is just as Green as Obama?
Until this country develops a SECOND political party, our only hope is total bankruptcy.
_________________________________
That is why I am an independent and not a Demi-RAT or Re-BOOB-lican. ”
This will ultimately be self correcting as it will destroy our economy and people will start freezing in the dark, starting with California. However, there could be much pain before it corrects. A second political party, now there’s a great idea. It will assure the re-election of the leftists by splitting the vote of those who do any thinking.
That’s like claiming I would save money by selling my 1999 pickup truck and replacing it with a passenger vehicle. Sure, I would save on fuel but a new car, like a new natural gas plant, costs money. I can’t possibly save enough money on gasoline to economically justify spending $500 a month on a new vehicle payment.
I’ve tried this argument on my wife, and she doesn’t buy it. You don’t need a computer model to figure it out. Anybody who can follow a household budget shouldn’t fall for what your proposing, either.
Now, when that coal plant is at the end of it’s service life and it ready for the scrap heap, that’s a different story.
The actual figure– 1000 pounds– seems carefully calibrated to target coal plants. I’m no legal scholar, but I have to wonder if that’s legal. Is EPA required to have some basis for that level?
Excuse me but just because Obama stops talking about CO2 or harmful climate change during an energy policy tour does not mean he is backing away from it. Just lump it in with the Russian missile talk slip where he intends to not talk about his intentions until after the election. Defuse, deflect, and defend is the name of his game and honest discussion with the American people on what makes sense in policy terms is completely out the window. This is all about special interest management and nothing to do with logic or making sense with taxpayer resources!
EW-3 says: @ur momisugly March 28, 2012 at 6:45 am
…Are they intentionally trying to destroy the country?
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YES
You can not have “Global Governance” aka World Government with a strong patriotic USA so the USA had to be emasculated. Look into the Traitor, Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. White was the chief force behind the post-World War II Bretton Woods arrangements, which created the World Bank and the IMF.
David Rockefeller in his autobiography ‘Memoirs’ admits he is part of a secret cabal working to destroy the United States. this is the direct quote from his book on pg 405:
If this nation’s coal plants are to be gradually phased out, it needs to be done in a carefully planned, organized way and on a schedule that allows the utilities the time (and money) they need to replace them with natural gas and/or nuclear plants. Watching the irresponsible way it is happening now, with the EPA merely regulating them out of existence without any thought to the effects its actions will have outside of environmental protection, could very well leave us sitting in black/brownouts and the consequent effects it has on our lives and the economy. Once coal gets freed up enough in the years ahead, we should start building coal-to-liquids plants to reduce our dependence on imported oil for our transportation needs. We spend something like $350 billion a year on imported oil….that’s over $1 trillion in three years. Having that money stay at home could be a significant boost to the economy, and it would turn the EPA’s irresponsibility into a positive. But I guess expecting government to act in a responsible and thoughtful way is, at times, asking way too much.
More Soylent Green! says:
March 28, 2012 at 9:13 am
I expect hUGH will fashion an iPad from twigs (and power it with faeries).
_Jim says:
March 28, 2012 at 9:18 am
Gail Combs says:
March 28, 2012 at 8:02 am
You got a blog yet?
Somewhere where some of your ‘arguments’ can be de-constructed without soiling Anthony’s place?
On second thought, never mind. I’ll start one …
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Please do Jim you attacks on me here are getting quite old especially when they are NEVER backed up by a smidgen of fact.
At least Hugh tries to back up some of what he says. You just go for the throat with absolutely no reason given.
Can you specifically post or cite the exact language which began all this, language that states that the US is to be emasculated? Or cite that language which states global governance is the desired end goal? (Bear in mind mankind’s history; our trek ‘out of the muck’ that brings us to ‘modern times’ today.)
Nothing tertiary this time, and nothing that requires wide latitude in the ‘reading between the lines’; we need specifics, please.
I tend to think the end of our civilization will ‘end’ along these lines (see link immediately below), with a sort of ‘corruption’ from within (and beginning at the low, not high, levels), with an ever-more dependence of people on government and government services, and that the running-up the flag pole of this ‘whirled government’ is just so much ‘navel gazing’ among a ‘populist’ crowd that, like the CAGWers thinks that they and they alone ‘see’ yet another EOTW event.
The End of Families Means the End of Our Civilization
http://mesopotamiawest.blogspot.com/2012/03/end-of-families-means-end-of-our.html
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Btw, speaking coal and electricity, Jo is calling for the hour of power:
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/03/the-hour-of-power-celebrate-human-achievement-this-saturday/