Essay by Eric Worrall
Does anyone even pretend anymore that Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act” has anything to do with inflation?
Big new incentives for clean energy aren’t enough – the Inflation Reduction Act was just the first step, now the hard work begins
Published: August 19, 2022 5.31pm AEST
Daniel Cohan
Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Rice UniversityThe new Inflation Reduction Act is stuffed with subsidies for everything from electric vehicles to heat pumps, and incentives for just about every form of clean energy. But pouring money into technology is just one step toward solving the climate change problem.
Wind and solar farms won’t be built without enough power lines to connect their electricity to customers. Captured carbon and clean hydrogen won’t get far without pipelines. Too few contractors are trained to install heat pumps. And EV buyers will think twice if there aren’t enough charging stations.
In my new book about climate solutions, I discuss these and other obstacles standing in the way of a clean energy transition. Surmounting them is the next step as the country figures out how to turn the goals of the most ambitious climate legislation Congress has ever passed into reality.
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For infrastructure, tax credits for electric cars will do little good without enough publicly available chargers. The U.S. has around 145,000 gas stations, but only about 6,500 fast-charging stations that can power up a battery quickly for a driver on the go.
Over 1,300 gigawatts of wind, solar and battery projects – several times the existing capacity – are already waiting to be built, but they’ve been delayed for years by a lack of grid connections and backlogged approval processes by regional grid operators.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed by Congress last year provides some funding for chargers, power lines and pipelines, but nowhere near enough. For example, it sets aside only a few billion dollars for high-voltage power lines, a tiny share of the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to chart a path toward net-zero emissions. Its $7.5 billion for chargers is just a third of what electric car advocates project will be needed.
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/big-new-incentives-for-clean-energy-arent-enough-the-inflation-reduction-act-was-just-the-first-step-now-the-hard-work-begins-188693
$21 billion for electric chargers (3 x $7.5 billion) + whatever the maintenance costs, hundreds of billions of dollars for high voltage power lines and other ancillaries in addition to the $433 billion Biden has already allocated in his “inflation reduction act”.
I doubt a mere trillion dollars would be the final green demand for money. These costs will be passed on to consumers, either via taxes or direct charges.
I want to know what the results of the goals will be. That is where the rubber hits the road. There is only one climate goal and that is reducing the global average surface temperature anomaly. Everything else is fluff and armwaving.
So how much will this legislation reduce it? No one seems to predict or care. Except Bjorn Lomborg.
https://youtu.be/vgC0AvmTATE
It’s even worse than that – they have never even bothered to consider if “lowering the GAST anomaly” would be “good” or “bad.” (Hint: They called every previous warm climate period a “Climate Optimum” for a reason!)
“But pouring money into technology is just one step toward solving the climate change problem.” — Daniel Cohan, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Rice University
Dear Prof. Cohan,
What “climate change problem” is there to be solved?
Are you talking about the last 250 years—where Earth’s climate has changed almost insignificantly compared to the last 200 million years—or the last 8 years where Earth’s global temperature has not risen at all despite mankind continuing emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere?
And what is the ideal climate, defined for all people in the world, that someone has determined should exist so that everyone can then spend untold $trillions so that it will never change in the future?
“If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.” — Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Finally, a personal observation: whatever Rice is paying you as an Associate Professor is way too much, IMHO.
The thing about blackmailers is that they never stop – they always come back for more.
My prediction is that much of the green infrastructure part of the bill will fail long before most of the money is spent productively. Materials, logistics, lack of infrastructure dependencies and regulatory inhibitions will slow all of this down to a crawl as happens with almost all top down ideological government initiatives.
Let’s hope so!
How much does it cost to build a nuclear plant or a coal fired plant or a gas fired plant? I don’t mean the litigation, I am only interested in the fees, the labor, the material and the land.
NetZero is something like trans-woman. Whatever it is, it will not be anything resembling NetZero.