It could have been worse had Pruitt not halted the CPP
By Larry Bell ~
As reported in the Houston Chronicle (chron.com), “Texas’ electricity grid operator expects the state’s power demand to hit an all-time high this summer, possibly requiring customers to reduce power consumption and triggering emergency measures to keep electricity flowing through the grid.”

ERCOT Region Map
Titled “A Summer Bummer Looms,” the article goes on to say that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) estimates that it will have just enough power to meet demand forecasts provided that temperatures don’t get excessively hot or the wind doesn’t blow strong enough to breeze by the deficit.
But wait just a minute. Is this really the same Texas I live in that they are referring to? Isn’t Texas the country’s petroleum and gas energy capital? And hasn’t the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) bragged that Texas leads the nation in that wind power production which is making evil petroleum obsolete and unnecessary anyway?
Reading more deeply into the article, they give the reason after all: ” . . . following the shutdown of three of the state’s largest coal-fired plants, planned outages, and project delays, the state’s summer power reserves are at their lowest in more than a decade.”
Who could possibly have imagined that shutting down a few coal plants would make any real difference, leading to what they project as an expected “spike in wholesale electricity prices.” Not to worry, however, if demands exceed supply, ERCOT may ask customers to “raise their thermostats to cut power consumption,” or failing that, they may “cut off power to large customers — such as industrial plants,” or will “trigger rolling outages.”
Even more remarkable, this is all reported in a newspaper that makes The New York Times and The Washington Post look like shills for climate-cooking SUV salesmen. Where is that electricity going to come from to recharge all the plug-in Obamacars, including nifty Teslas that mostly only Texas oil barons can afford?
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that coal’s share of the market fell from 50% in 2008, to around 31% in 2017. True, abundant and relatively less expensive natural gas resulting from a fracking revolution hastened coal’s competitive decline in the U.S. energy market.
Nevertheless, the 8-year tenure of the previous White House administration may well have dealt a final death blow to the industry, fulfilling a 2008 campaign promise.
Candidate Obama pledged, “So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted . . . That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel and other alternative energy approaches.”
The Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wasted no time crafting a signature Clean Power Plan (CPP), a suite of regulations intended to dramatically reduce CO2 emissions from the existing electricity generation fleet by 2030. This unprecedented interpretation of the agency’s regulatory powers forced states to build new generating facilities, rather than allowing upgrades at individual plants to achieve reductions in the most feasible and cost-effective ways.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the CPP even before it was enacted, great industry damage had already been accomplished as many states scrambled to comply.
Texas may be The Lone Star State, but it doesn’t stand alone in this “free renewable energy” nonsense that provides costly, unreliably intermittent, anemic power.
According to the Center on Global Energy Policy, more than 250 coal-fired plants have been retired since 2010, taking more than 34,000 megawatts of power generation capacity off line. Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that 33 coal plants were shuttered during President Obama’s second term. A dozen are slated for closure in 2018, rivaling a record high of 15 which were shut down in 2015.
Last year, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced plans to rescind the CPP, which various analyses estimate would otherwise have cost customers about $39 billion annually through 11% to 14% electricity bills increases. EIA data have indicated that the CPP would also have reduced manufacturing production by $45.billion annually — costing 68,000 jobs in the process.
The benefit of all of this would be to avert only 0 .019º C of future warming over nearly a century, a highly speculative amount far too low to be accurately measured with even the most sophisticated scientific equipment.
Thanks in large part to coal power generation, the U.S. has had the most reliable and affordable supply of electricity in the world. Gratefully, the Trump Administration is committed to policies and actions that will perpetuate and expand this global advantage.
Any notions that generously subsidized solar and wind will significantly compensate capacity losses from shuttered coal plants and over-regulated oil and natural gas suppliers are scientifically and economically delusional assaults which will leave America’s families and industries powerlessly impoverished.
We have witnessed a canary in the coal mine — and it is dying.
[This article originally appeared at www.Newsmax.com]
Larry Bell contributes posts at the CFACT site. He heads the graduate program in space architecture at the University of Houston. He founded and directs the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture. He is also the author of “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax.”
Read more excellent articles at CFACT http://www.cfact.org/
kamas716
Tue 03/20/2018
Shades of Australia
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nickreality65
Tue 03/20/2018
The CPP was 20 years of talking before anything of substance happened. ERCOT lost coal plants ’cause their time had come.
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TonyfromOz
Tue 03/20/2018
Nick,
thanks for leaving this comment. Having been doing this for ten years now, I’ve been watching this quite closely.
It’s amazing how the green left have latched onto the fact that coal fired plants in the U.S. have closed down, and they have this mistaken belief that is due to the growing number of wind plants, and in fact it has nothing to do with that at all.
When I started, back in 2008, coal fired power supplied just on half of the U.S. total power generation. However, the most important part of that was that those coal fired plants were all quite old. Now, while a coal fired plant has an average life span of around 50 years, back in 2008, the average age of the whole U.S. coal fired fleet, (and that’s every coal fired plant in the U.S.) was just on 49 years. Now, a lot of those plants were constructed back in the 50s, when the technology for coal fired power was only just beginning.Because of that, those plants were quite ancient, and I have seen some as old as 80 years old even back in 2008. Because that technology was old, those plants were all of them quite small, well, tiny by comparison, when a typical large scale coal fired plant can have four Units of around 650MW to 750MW for a total Nameplate of around 2700MW+. They ranged in size from 5MW to around 100MW for the bigger Units, but the average of them all was only around 10MW to 15MW. There were many hundreds of these smaller tiny plants dotted all across the U.S. as every city had a small plant or two of them, all of them ancient. Now, as they got older, and newer and larger plants were constructed (n the 70s and 80s) those smaller plants went back to act as rolling reserve, and only used for Peak Power periods or when power consumption was high.
What started to happen around ten years back is that those tiny plants started to close, and in quite large numbers. They were not being replaced by renewables (and ten years back, that mainly meant wind power) but they were being replaced by new technology Natural Gas (NG) Fired plants, and not small ones of the same size as those old coal fired plants, but by large Nameplate plants, both CCGT and OCGT natural gas fired plants. Now, in the U.S. this was made so much easier by the now available Natural Gas in huge supply, thanks to Hydraulic Fracturing, and now the U.S. is the largest NG producer on Earth. Hence there were an increasing number of these plants being constructed, with natural gas being so cheap, and all of these plants are the latest technology, so will have many years of use in them before they also begin to age.
So, those ancient and tiny coal fired Units only used on a sporadic basis were now shut down, More often than not, those new NG plants were constructed at the same site, a lot cheaper at a ‘brown field’ site than at a green field site. Because of that the total amount of power generated from NG sources has all but completely replaced the power generated from those ancient coal burners, and that is borne out by the data available at the EIA site, one I have been using since I started ten years back now.
Perhaps you might like to read one of my Posts at our site on matters closely related to this, and that Post is at the following link.
The Benefits That Coal Fired Power Gave Us
This Posts explains the exponential growth of coal fired power from the end of the Second World War, and how it was that of itself that gave us the benefits we now take for granted.
So yes, coal fired plants have closed, because their time has come, but again, as is nearly always the case, there is a reason for that, and it’s the entirely opposite reason from that being ‘pushed’ by the renewables supporters.
Again, thanks for the comment here.
Tony.
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nickreality65
Wed 03/21/2018
Retired from 35 years in power generation. Have an entire ppt on CPP. Interested? I’m on LinkedIn.
Now for something completely different.
K-T and assorted clone diagrams of atmospheric power flux balances include a GHG energy loop of about 330 W/m^2 which violates three basic laws of thermodynamics: 1) energy out of thin air, 2) energy moving from cold to hot without added work, and 3) 100% efficiency, zero loss, perpetual looping.
One frequent defense of this critique is that USCRN and SURFRAD data actually measure and thereby prove the existence of this radiative energy. Although in many instances the net 333 W/m^ of upwelling LWIR exceeds by over twice the downwelling solar radiation, a rather obvious violation of conservation of energy.
And just why is that?
Per Apogee SI-100 series radiometer Owner’s Manual page 15. “Although the ε of a fully closed plant canopy can be 0.98-0.99, the lower ε of soils and other surfaces can result in substantial errors if ε effects are not accounted for.”
Emissivity, ε, is the ratio of the actual radiation from a surface and the maximum S-B BB radiation. An example from the K-T diagram: 63 W/m^2 / 396 W/m^2 = 0.16 = ε. In fact, 63 W/m^2 & 289 K & 0.16 together work just fine in the GB version of the S-B equation. The 330 W/m^2 GHG loop vanishes back into the mathematical thin air from whence it came.
“Their staff is too long. They are digging in the wrong place.”
“There is no spoon.”
And
Up/down/”back” GHG radiation of RGHE theory simply:
Does
Not
Exist.
Which also explains why the scientific justification of RGHE is so contentious.
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mobiuswolf
Tue 03/20/2018
Reblogged this on The zombie apocalypse survival homestead and commented:
OOPS! m
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Brittius
Tue 03/20/2018
Reblogged this on Brittius.
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