Tag: Scoping Plan

The Mystery Of The Uncontrolled Hatred Of Fossil Fuels And Those Who Produce Them

What is it about fossil fuels and the people who produce them that brings forth such uncontrolled hatred, anger, and vengefulness in a very large segment of the population?

From The Manhattan Contrarian

Francis Menton

What is it about fossil fuels and the people who produce them that brings forth such uncontrolled hatred, anger, and vengefulness in a very large segment of the population?

I’ve been trying to figure out the answer to that question for many years, but I’m no closer today than when I started. I look at the use of fossil fuels in the world, and somehow I see enormous benefits to mankind — reliable electricity, transportation of people locally and at long distances, and of freight to enable worldwide trade, comfortable heating and cooling of homes, refrigeration to preserve food, computers, and so much more, all at remarkably low cost and remarkably small environmental impact. Most uses of fossil fuels either have no good substitutes (e.g., air travel, ocean shipping, steel-making), or only substitutes that have both higher cost, plus inferior functionality and/or their own environmental problems (e.g., wind, solar, or nuclear for electricity).

With almost no exceptions (e.g., the Unabomber) everybody who has access to fossil fuels or their energy output uses them in large quantities, precisely because they provide great benefits at low cost and low environmental impact, in ways that nothing else can. Even the most virtue signaling of climate fanatics, with almost no exceptions, won’t give up air travel, or buildings made with steel and concrete, or full-time life-saving electricity at the hospital, or plenty of other things that come only from fossil fuels.

The image that I can’t get out of my mind is the spectacle of the witnesses speaking at a public hearing I attended in May 2022 on the subject of the “Scoping Plan” then proposed for New York State to banish fossil fuels from its energy system. (That Scoping Plan has since been adopted, with essentially no significant changes.). As I reported in this post on May 3, 2022, I observed about 60 people testifying at this hearing, of whom only three spoke critically about the idea of banishing fossil fuels — and those three were myself plus two representatives from local utilities (whose criticisms were understandably mild and hedged, to say the least, given the political environment that they face).

At that hearing, a large number of supporters of banning fossil fuels gave impassioned and emotional pleas to speed up the process. What had aroused these strong emotions? The witness whose testimony I remember most vividly was a thirty-ish woman who stated that her young son had severe asthma, which she blamed on the fumes emitted by her gas-powered kitchen stove. Speaking of the health problems of her son, this woman broke down in tears and deep sobs, which definitely seemed genuine, and blamed the son’s problems on the uncaring gas utility. And yet for some reason she continued to use the gas stove. Had it never occurred to her that it was completely within her agency to go out and buy an electric stove? I was hoping to get a chance to ask her that question, but she disappeared before I could track her down.

In the years that I’ve been following this subject, the efforts to impose punishments and revenge on fossil fuel producers in this country have only proliferated and become more impassioned and more intense and more angry. Here are a few markers along the way:

  • In this post on January 24, 2018 I reported on lawsuits that had just been brought by certain cities in California, and by New York City, both against a group of five major oil companies, blaming them for the “nuisance” of CO2 emission, and asking for some large and unspecified amount of damages plus some equally unspecified injunctive relief. I nominated those cases for the prestigious title of “stupidest litigation in the country,” based on the proposition that I couldn’t figure out what they were really trying to accomplish. I asked, if it’s money they want, why don’t they impose a tax on fossil fuel purchases; but then I answered my own question: “Oh, wait a minute, they already have that.  Well, they could double it!” Ultimately, the cases could only be understood as vengeful political acts against irrationally hated adversaries.
  • The New York case from January 2018 ended up getting dismissed in the District Court, and that decision was affirmed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, while the California case that I had discussed continues to this day to kick around the courts after a convoluted procedural history. So would this long stint in purgatory be the death of this type of effort to exact revenge on large oil companies for the sin of producing fossil fuels? The opposite. Such cases have proliferated like mushrooms in the years since. Here is a May 2023 post from a Columbia Law School blog with some extensive history of cases taking the same or very similar form. According to author Korey Silverman-Roati, “In total, at least 25 [similar] cases have been filed in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai’i, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Vermont.”
  • Nearly all of these cases were brought in state rather than federal courts. (The exception was the New York City case — the one that ended up getting dismissed.). The occasion for the May 2023 Columbia blog post was that the Supreme Court had just denied a certiorari petition that had been filed in several of the cases seeking to get them removed into the federal courts. With that Supreme Court action, there are now somewhere around two dozen of these cases moving forward in one state court system or another. The plan is to exact massive financial revenge against these evil oil companies.
  • And how about another line of attack seeking to destroy these fossil fuel producers? It now comes to my attention that there is a campaign to introduce bills in state legislatures (all in blue states, to the extent I have learned so far) seeking to impose on fossil fuel producers an obligation to fund a type of “superfund” mechanism to pay the states large amounts to “mitigate” supposed climate damage. Here is the text of such a bill recently introduced in the Vermont legislature in 2024, and here is another one from my own New York from 2023. I’m given to understand that comparable bills are somewhere in the works in other states, including Massachusetts and Maryland. I have the same question that I had about the “nuisance” lawsuits: Why not just impose a tax? The only answer I can think of is that a mere tax does not give a sufficient demonstration of anger and revenge.
  • And now for the most recent escalation, to yet another whole new level. Yesterday, there appeared in the left-wing magazine The New Republic an article with the headline: “The Case for Prosecuting Fossil Fuel Companies for Homicide.” I’m not making this up. Brief excerpt (from a long article): “Climate change is not a tragedy, it’s a crime.” This refrain, increasingly common among climate activists, encapsulates rising moral outrage at major fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP as more information has come to light about their knowledge and conduct regarding global warming.” You might think that this is completely unhinged, but believe me, the authors (and the “climate activists” that they refer to in the quote) are completely serious. Their anger is intense, and their goal is revenge.

And yet at the same time, all of the people engaged in these campaigns of anger and vengeance are major users themselves of the fossil fuels. If these products and their producers are so evil, wouldn’t a better strategy be to go out and produce substitutes that are better and cheaper and lack the environmental downside? Ah, but those better substitutes don’t exist. The world is investing trillions in the effort to come up with such substitutes, but so far nobody has succeeded. And by the way, nobody is going to succeed at this during my lifetime.

So far, the overall strategy of the major energy companies has been to lie as low as possible and hope that before long these people will come to their senses and this will all blow over. That may have made sense when this started. Ten years ago, I would not have believed that this insanity could possibly have gone as far as it has. However, given where we are today, I think that the time for lying low has passed.

Here’s my proposal for the next phase of this game. The fossil fuel producers, either individually or through trade associations, should pick a state, logically a relatively small one (Vermont might be a good place to start), and go to the legislature with this proposition: Ban us! Make the sale or use of fossil fuels in your state illegal, starting at some early date, like for example tomorrow. We will then withdraw. And your citizens will then find out whether they prefer life with fossil fuels, or without them.

In other words, stop being such pansies. It’s time to call their bluff.

A Semi-Competent Report On Energy Storage From Britain’s Royal Society

From The MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN

Francis Menton

If you want to power our modern economy on intermittent renewables (wind and solar), and also banish the use of power from fossil fuels and nuclear, then the only option remaining to make the grid work reliably is energy storage on a massive scale. And then it turns out that energy storage on the scale needed is enormously costly — almost certainly so costly that it will in the end sink the entire “net zero” project.

Failure adequately to address the energy storage problem is the fatal defect of nearly all “net zero” plans that are out there. For an example of a thoroughly incompetent treatment of this problem, you might look at New York’s so-called “Scoping Plan” for its mandated “net zero” transition. This Scoping Plan was issued quite recently in December 2022. As examples of its stunning incompetence, it almost entirely discusses the storage problem in the wrong units (watts versus watt-hours), and regularly posits the imminent emergence of magical “dispatchable emissions-free resources,” that have not yet been invented, to cover the gaps in wind and solar generation. The people who issued this Plan have no idea what they are doing, and are setting up New York for an energy catastrophe some time between now and 2030.

But now along comes a report from Royal Society addressing this energy storage problem in the context of Great Britain. The Report came out earlier this month, and has been brought to my attention by my colleagues at the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The title is “Large-scale energy storage.”

Having now put some time into studying this Report, I would characterize it as semi-competent. That is an enormous improvement over every other effort on this subject that I have seen from green energy advocates. But despite their promising start, the authors come nowhere near a sufficient showing that wind plus solar plus storage can make a viable and cost-effective electricity system. In the end, their quasi-religious commitment to a fossil-fuel-free future leads them to minimize and divert attention away from critical cost and feasibility issues. As a result, the Report, despite containing much valuable information, is actually useless for any public policy purpose.

On the plus side of the ledger for this Report, the authors use the correct units to calculate the amount of energy storage needed to back up intermittent wind and solar generation; and their arithmetic appears correctly done as far as I have checked. Also a plus is that it takes them almost no time to conclude that there is essentially no possibility that battery technology will ever be able to solve the energy storage problem for a nation’s grid powered by intermittent sources, no matter how much the technology may improve and no matter how much its costs may decrease.

But then there are the negatives. The authors share the conceit of all green energy advocates — and of all central planners everywhere — that their models and projections have anticipated all costs and problems of their massive schemes. And thus, they think, they know all the answers to how this will work, and can dispense with the tiresome need for any physical demonstration project to prove function and cost. And then there is the discussion, or lack thereof, of ultimate cost to the consumer of these grand plans. The treatment of this subject is inadequate, and characterized by what appears to be an effort to divert the reader’s attention from the subject before too many questions are asked.

But let’s start with some pluses. This is from the “Major conclusions” section of the Executive Summary, page 5:

Wind supply can vary over time scales of decades and tens of TWhs of very long- duration storage will be needed. The scale is over 1000 times that currently provided by pumped hydro in the UK, and far more than could conceivably be provided by conventional batteries.

Go to the body of the Report, and you find that the authors have collected data on generation from wind and solar sources Great Britain over a 37 year period, 1980-2016. Those data show that the intermittency problems of wind and solar generation are far worse than even I had thought. In additional to diurnal and even annual cycles, there prove to be periods of relatively low wind that can persist literally for years. To deal with such situations requires putting huge amounts of energy in storage and then keeping it there for years, maybe decades, in anticipation of these low wind years.

Here is one of my favorite charts from the Report. It depicts the storage balance in a hypothetical 123,000 GWh storage facility for Great Britain over the 37 year period 1980 to 2016. The storage balance never goes much below about 80,000 GWh during the 23 year period 1984 to 2006 — which might have led the incautious to conclude that about half as much storage would be sufficient. But then there was a big low-wind period from 2009-2011:

The authors describe the situation as follows (page 31):

Figure 13 exhibits two striking features. First, a study of the 23 years 1984 – 2006 would have found a storage volume very much smaller than found by studying 1980 – 2016. Second, there is a very large call on storage in the period 2009 – 2011 which reflects persistently low wind speeds that lead to the large deficits seen in figure 2 (some of the energy that fills these deficits would have been in the store since 1980). These features reinforce the conclusion that it would be prudent to add contingency against prolonged periods of very low supply and the possible greater clustering of 2009 to 2011-like years.

As a result of observations like this, the authors, I think correctly, conclude that batteries are completely out of the question to solve this problem. The only storage medium that could conceivably work would be a combustible chemical substance that can be put in massive underground facilities for decades. Only two possibilities are out there — hydrogen and ammonia. And ammonia is far more expensive and far more dangerous. So that leaves hydrogen.

Since hydrogen is the one and only possible solution to the storage problem, the authors proceed to a lengthy consideration of what the future wind/solar/hydrogen electricity system will look like. There will be massive electroayzers to get hydrogen from the sea. Salt deposits will be chemically dissolved to create vast underground caverns to store the hydrogen. Hydrogen will be transported to these vast caverns and stored there for years and decades, then transported to power plants to burn when needed. A fleet of power plants will burn the hydrogen when called upon to do so, although admittedly they may be idle most of the time, maybe even 90% of the time; but for a pinch, there must be sufficient thermal hydrogen-burning plants to supply the whole of peak demand when needed.

I find the treatment of the potential cost of all of this to be totally inadequate. There is never a mention of the most relevant subject, which is how much electricity prices to consumers might increase. The closest thing I find is this chart on page 32:

This is cost “to the grid,” thus wholesale cost. Will there be a huge multiplication of final price to the consumer? At first glance this doesn’t look too bad. About 50 pounds/MWh for the wind/solar input, and then 60-70 pounds/MWh for the storage makes about 110-120 pounds/MWh total. Add about 33% to convert to dollars, and you would have about $143-156/MWh, or 14.3 to 15.6 cents per kWh. It’s high, but not completely in the stratosphere.

But wait a minute. Are these guys leaving anything out?

  • How about the new network of pipelines to transport the hydrogen all over the place?
  • How about the entire new fleet of thermal power plants, capable of burning 100% hydrogen, and sufficient to meet 100% of peak demand when it’s night and the wind isn’t blowing.
  • They use a 5% interest rate for capital costs. That’s too low by at least half — should be 10% or more.
  • And can they really build all the wind turbines and solar panels and electroayzers they are talking about at the prices they are projecting?

The whole thing just cries out for a demonstration project to prove feasibility and cost. I’m betting that that will never occur before the whole “net zero” thing falls apart from the disaster of skyrocketing electricity prices. Time will tell.