“As a result of the assumed EPA retirements with no resource additions, the SPP network was so severely stressed by large reactive deficiencies that the software used in the analysis was unable to produce meaningful results, which is generally indicative of voltage collapse and blackout conditions.”
– Southwest Power Pool, “Reliability Impact Assessment of the EPA’s Proposed Clean Power Plan,” October 8, 2014.
The states and their multistate organizations are weighting in against the Obama administration’s proposed new regulations aimed at reducing emissions from existing electric powerplants 30 percent from their 2005 levels by 2030. They are doing the math, and both cost and reliability are computing negatively.
Last week, MasterResource highlighted pushback from the Virginia State Corporation Commission, which stated: “As currently drafted, the carbon emission rates that EPA proposes for Virginia are arbitrary, capricious, and unlawful.…
Open international borders create mutually beneficial trading relationships that promote peace and prosperity. Tariffs, quotas, and other forms of protectionism and nationalism create conflict and lower living standards for all.
In our imperfect world of state-owned energy companies, some being U.S. foes, the imperative is policy reform toward private property rights, market exchange, and the rule of law. This is the real sustainability issue, not the exaggerated issue of anthropogenic climate change from carbon-based energy usage.
Private ownership of the subsoil, and privately owned energy infrastructure otherwise, would create wealth compared to the current system of political elitism. Private, dispersed wealth, such as initially assigning mineral rights to surface owners, such as proposed by Guillermo Yeatts, whose views are summarized in my post, “‘Theft of the Subsoil’: Guillermo Yeatts on Latin/South America mineral-rights reform,” would increase personal power and civil society, while reducing state power.…
“As currently drafted, the carbon emission rates that EPA proposes for Virginia are arbitrary, capricious, and unlawful.”
“Virginia’s compliance with the Proposed Regulation, as currently drafted, will be expensive and will be paid for by Virginia residents and businesses. Contrary to the claim that ‘rates will go up, but bills will go down’, experience and costs in Virginia make it extremely unlikely that either electric rates or bills in Virginia will go down as a result of the Proposed Regulation.”
“Additional near-term generator retirements caused by the Proposed Regulation will compound existing, unresolved reliability concerns in the Commonwealth.”
– Staff of the Virginia State Corporation Commission, Comments to U.S. EPA, October 14, 2014.
The anti-intellectual, postmodernist arguments for free-lunch/lunch-you-are-paid-to-eat CO2-emission reductions regulation, or in the U.S. EPA’s words, “‘rates will go up, but bills will go down,” sooner or later must hit the shoals of reality.…