Tag: zero-emissions

America is Watching the World’s Movement to Nuclear Power Generation

To meet the growing demand for continuous, uninterruptable, and emissions-free electricity, the world economies are pursuing Nuclear Power generation.

From The CO2 Coalition´s Substack

By Ronald Stein and Dick Storm

To meet the growing demand for continuous, uninterruptable, and emissions-free electricity, the world economies are pursuing Nuclear Power generation.

Most California politicians have hated the zero-emissions generated electricity from nuclear generations since 1976 when they passed the moratorium on new nuclear power plants. Nuclear is the cleanest, safest, proven, least emitting fuel of all and yet, most of California’s politicians hate it. Once California had multiple operating nuclear power plants including San Onofre, Diablo Canyon, Rancho Seco and a partial ownership in Palo Verde located in Arizona. Now, only Diablo Canyon and Palo Verde remain in operation.

For many years the politicians enacted policies and laws that were anti-nuclear. The Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 created the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) Fiscal Year (FY) 2027 budget request is $892.3 million, which includes 2,606 full-time equivalents (FTE).

Not too long ago, coal and nuclear together provided about 70% of America’s electricity generation. Since the enormous investments from federal and state subsidies for electricity generation by wind turbines and solar panels, electricity prices across the country have more than doubled.

Fortunately, worldwide nuclear generation has survived despite the demonization of it by California celebrities and politicians.

The World Nuclear Association shows about 80 nuclear reactors are under construction across the world. About 120 further reactors are planned. Most reactors under construction or planned are in Asia.

The list of multiple nuclear reactors under construction is as follows:

  • China 37
  • India 8
  • Russia 5
  • Egypt 4
  • Korea 4
  • Turkey 4
  • Bangladesh 2
  • Japan 2
  • Ukraine 2
  • UK 2

In America, President Trump has incentivized the nuclear industry with up to $300 billion in loan authorities, sponsored a slate of permitting reform legislation, and issued executive orders to modify the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and streamline reactor licensing approvals from a decade to 18 months.

California was one of the largest producers of U.S. crude oil and petroleum products. Today, with oil production in California in terminal decline, the State imports between 60% and 70% of its crude oil from foreign countries to meet State’s demand at operating refineries.

It’s shocking that the State imports most of its crude oil demands when California’s Pacific Outer Continental Shelf contains massive, mostly untapped, and undeveloped heavy oil reserves that are among the largest reserves in the world.

California’s estimated undiscovered technically recoverable resources (UTRR) range between 4 and 14.2 billion barrels of oil, depending on the region and the specific federal assessment. The lower end corresponds with long-term downgrades of onshore shale, while the upper end highlights the potential of the Pacific Outer Continental Shelf (OCS).

The California economy runs on transportation. The 4th largest economy in California demands from the remaining 7 refineries operating in the State, a reliable supply chain of 48 million gallons of transportation fuels DAILY (these include jet fuel for 40 military airports and 9 international airports, three grades of gasoline for its 30 million vehicles, and diesel for the trucking and construction industries). During the 1970’s there were dozens of refineries in California. Today, because of demonization of fossil fuels to inflame the public, harmful laws, rules and restrictions have been applied. Now, only 7 operating refineries remain to provide the supply chain of those transportation fuels that are running the 4th largest economy in the world.

Now let’s move on to affordable electricity generation. A popular misunderstanding is that intermittent solar and wind are “free”, but increasing electricity costs are caused by at least three factors:

  1. Two electricity generating systems need to be built. The fact is that because wind and solar are intermittent, two power generation systems need to be built. The renewable system that is powered by wind and solar energy and then a backup generation system powered by coal, gas, nuclear or other “Dispatchable” generation. The second generating system is necessary to provide uninterrupted generation when the sun sets and the wind doesn’t blow.
  2. The gas fuel for the gas turbine backup power is volatile and usually at a higher cost than coal or nuclear fuel.
  3. Wind and solar farms require vast acreage away from populated areas; thus, transmission lines and substations must be constructed to connect the power generation from remotely located solar and wind farms. to bring that “free” electricity back to where people and businesses are located.

Of course, there are numerous and complicated reasons unique to each area. However, the pattern of results is clear. The more solar and wind is installed, the higher the cost of electricity. At this point in time the end results of other states and other countries cannot be ignored.

  • Hawaii which prematurely shut down their 180 MW coal plant about five years ago has the highest electricity rates in all the U.S. Hawaii is an energy island and cannot backup the wind and solar that is installed with gas turbines or imported power from neighboring utilities. There are no gas lines in Hawaii so, the backup is Diesel fueled generation.
  • Germany tried to transition to wind and solar and the high electric rates created de-industrialization because energy intensive industries could not compete in the world markets.
  • Then there are numerous other U.S. states that have shut down their coal plants with a similar result as Germany and Hawaii. Extreme price escalation. These are simply facts from published electricity rates and state energy profiles of generation by fuel.

Then came politically driven energy laws that forced coal plants to shut down.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) owned a large portion of the well designed, well run, clean and affordable 1900 MW Intermountain Power Coal Plant in Delta Utah. The power from Delta, Utah flowed over special high voltage D.C. power lines very reliably for many years. The Intermountain Power Coal plant was shut down in 2025 and no longer operates on coal fuel. Almost a fifth of LADWP electricity was generated from coal fuel as recent as 2016. Now, zero generation is from coal fuel.

The escalating power costs are likely to force any electricity intensive industry to move toward continuous, uninterruptable, and emission free electricity. Thus, America is watching the world’s movement to nuclear power generation.

Please share this information with teachers, students, and friends to encourage Energy Literacy conversations at the family dinner table.

Click this Link to Sign up for Energy Literacy from Ronald Stein

Originally published at America Out Loud, August 3, 2026.

Ronald Stein, P.E., is a CO2 Coalition member, engineer, columnist on energy literacy at America Out Loud NEWS, and advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations.” He is also the recipient of an unsolicited Tribute to Ronald Stein from Stephen Heins.

Dick Storm is a Registered Professional Engineer with over 50 years’ experience in coal electric power generation. Today, Mr. Storm serves as a consultant to Storm Technologies and as a part-time instructor of short courses in continuing education programs for the University of South Carolina Beaufort – Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (UCSB-OLLI) related to current needs for energy and electricity generation. Over the years he has authored numerous articles for POWER Magazine and has published numerous technical papers and presentations. He is a member of the CO2 Coalition.

What’s New!

The CO2 Coalition has released its new episode of the Climate Debrief Podcast, The Forgotten Science of Preventing Wildfires with Dr. Bob Zybach Part 1, featuring Dr. Bob Zybach. Watch the full video on YouTube here!

The Climate Debrief Podcast is now also available on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and iHeartRadio!

Debate: Is A Demonstration Project Really Necessary?

My repeated calls for a Demonstration Project of a zero-emissions electrical grid have led to a spirited debate among knowledgeable commenters. While most back my position, some say that a Demonstration Project is really not necessary and would be a waste of effort.

From Manhattan Contrarian

By Francis Menton

My repeated calls for a Demonstration Project of a zero-emissions electrical grid have led to a spirited debate among knowledgeable commenters. While most back my position, some say that a Demonstration Project is really not necessary and would be a waste of effort.

The gist of the argument of those disputing the necessity of a Demonstration Project is that it is so obvious that a zero-emissions grid powered predominantly by wind and solar generation cannot be achieved that the expense and effort of building an actual physical facility cannot be justified. Before the building of a physical demonstration project there would inevitably be an engineering feasibility study, and such a feasibility study would not get through its first day before everybody involved realized that this could never work. All it would take would be a few back-of-the-envelope calculations using basic arithmetic and the whole endeavor would be sunk.

Regular commenter Richard Greene leads the forces arguing against a demonstration project. From a comment by Richard on my August 10 post:

A good demonstration project that included manufacturing and farming is very likely not needed. A real local utility Nut Zero grid engineering plan on paper would have grid engineers laughing hysterically. The money allocated for backup batteries would be nowhere close to paying for the battery GWh capacity needed. Backup natural gas power plants could do the job, but gas backup is not wanted. . . . 100% wind and solar can never work due to compound energy droughts, wind drought and solar droughts (batteries are far too expensive).

Representative of the pro-demonstration project side is a comment from “dm” on the August 13 post. Excerpt:

Because many people doubt paper analyses, lived experience is a necessary teacher. Thus, demonstration projects are NEEDED to prove the folly of “sustainable” electricity grids. Furthermore, the demonstration projects MUST be in regions heavily populated with nut zero enthusiasts, and ALL costs MUST be paid SOLELY by households, businesses, institutions … located within the demonstration areas.

My natural sympathies here would lie with Richard’s side of this debate. How can spending what would likely be billions of dollars of public money be justified when calculations that I have made or verified myself show that the project will never come close to success?

But then we must look at what is happening in large states and countries that are proceeding toward the stated goal of a zero-emissions grid without ever having had a working demonstration project. In some of these cases (Germany, UK) the wasted resources are now into the trillions, not billions. And at some point the whole effort will inevitably be ended with some kind of hard-to-predict catastrophe (long blackouts? multiplication of consumer costs by a factor of ten or more?). By then, many of the working resources that have made the grid function will have been destroyed and will have to be re-created, at a cost of further trillions.

Consider the case of Germany. Germany is a very substantial country (80+ million people, making it twice the size of California and four times the size of New York), with the world’s fourth largest GDP at over $4 trillion annually. Germany was one of the first to start down the road to a zero-emissions grid back in the 1990s, and formally adopted its “Energiewende” fourteen years ago in 2010. Germany has proceeded farther than any other large country in converting its electricity generation to wind and solar.

And yet, as I look around for information on Germany’s progress toward zero-emissions electricity, I can’t find any concern or recognition that this might not be doable in the end. Perhaps that exists in German language sources that I can’t read. But from anything I can find, it looks like Germany is forging ahead in the blind faith that if only they build enough wind turbines and solar panels at some point they will have the zero-emissions electricity that they crave.

Go to the website of the Umweltbundesamt (Federal Environmental Agency) for the latest information. At least on the electricity front, you will not find any indication that there may be problems in achieving the zero-emissions utopian future:

The “Energiewende” – Germany’s transition towards a secure, environmentally friendly, and economically successful energy future – includes a large-scale restructuring of the energy supply system towards the use of renewable energy in all sectors. . . . [T]he switch towards renewables in the electricity sector has been very successful so far. . . . While in the year 2000 renewables accounted for 6.3 percent of electricity demand only, its [sic] share has been growing significantly over the past years, exceeding 10 percent in the year 2005 and 25 per cent in the year 2013. In 2023 renewable energy sources provided 272 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and account for 51.8 percent of German electricity demand. With wind power being by far the most important energy source in the German electricity mix.

Some 30+ years into this process, and they’re only up to barely over 50% of their electricity from “renewables.” And while they may claim that “wind power [is] by far the most important source in the German electricity mix,” in fact when you get a breakdown you find that wind and solar together provided well less than 50%. According to solar advocates Fraunhofer Institute here, in 2023 “biomass” provided some 42.3 TWh of Germany’s electricity (about 8%), hydro provided 19.5 TWh (about 4%), and “waste non-renewable” (I think that means burning garbage) provided 4.5 TWh (about 1%). That leaves under 40% for wind and solar.

If they keep building solar and wind facilities, and expect batteries to be the backup, has anybody calculated how much battery storage they will need? Not that I can find. Here is a website of a company called Fluence, which is an affiliate of German industrial giant Siemens. They excitedly predict a rapid expansion of grid storage in Germany:

Storage capacity will grow 40-fold to 57 GWh by 2030.

Wow, a 40-fold increase! It may sound like a lot. But Germany’s average electricity demand is about 50 GW, so the 57 GWh of battery storage in 2030 will come to about 1 hour’s worth. Competent calculations of the amount of energy storage needed to back up a predominantly wind/solar grid run in the range of around 500 to 1000 hours.

Here from another website is a chart of the growth of energy storage in Germany up to this year.

Look at that acceleration! But the 10 GWh of storage that they currently have will last no more than about 10 minutes when the wind and sun quit producing on a calm night.

In short, this large and seemingly sophisticated country is completely delusional, with no sane voices anywhere to be heard. A demonstration project that fails spectacularly is the only thing with any hope of saving them.

Finally, the Europeans Revolt Over Net Zero Mandates and the Electric Vehicle Kool-Aid

You may not know it if you rely solely on American media, but there is a growing revolt across much of Europe against Net Zero mandates in general and electric vehicle mandates in particular.

From Real Clear Energy

By Duggan Flanakin

You may not know it if you rely solely on American media, but there is a growing revolt across much of Europe against Net Zero mandates in general and electric vehicle mandates in particular.

It seems that, led by luxury carmakers, the future may be bright for the venerable internal combustion engine if new synthetic fuels technologies can produce an affordable replacement for gasoline and diesel fuels.

The revolt had been brewing ever since Europe got a wakeup call with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that upset the Net Zero applecart and led even Germany to reopen coal-fired power plants. Still, the EU last November had struck a provisional deal on a new vehicle emissions law that would have banned the sale of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles by 2035.

Two months later, though, the new Meloni government in Italy began to raise objections. The forced transition to EVs has already hit the Italian auto industry with job cuts, leading Transport Minister Matteo Salvini to argue that it makes no sense to put thousands of jobs at risk when there are plenty of reasons to keep ICE vehicles on the road with a carbon-neutral fuel.

Italy’s balking opened the door for German Finance Minister Christian Lindner to switch his government’s position to demand an exception for hydrogen-derived, carbon-neutral synthetic e-fuels (produced by electrolysis with added carbon) that can power ICE vehicles. Porsche, which has invested $75 million in a pilot plant to make e-fuels, and Ferrari could preserve their rich heritage and iconic models and still comply with zero-emissions requirements with e-fuels.

German Transport Minister Volker Wissing agreed, stating that, “We need e-fuels as there is no alternative if we want to operate our vehicle fleet in a climate-neutral way. Whoever is serious about climate-neutral mobility must keep all technological options open and also use them. I don’t understand this fight against the car and why people want to ban some technologies.”

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has long objected to the EU ban and had pledged to do “anything” to stop the “pseudo-green idea by rich countries and bureaucrats from Brussels” to ban gasoline and diesel engines. Polish families, he contended, cannot afford these expensive vehicles, and an ICE ban would cause Polish firms producing car components for well-known global brands to suffer irreparable harm.

As by simply abstaining from a final vote on the hard ICE vehicle ban, Germany could have killed the proposed EU legislation, the European Commission agreed to draft a compromise to allow the sale of ICE vehicles capable of running on e-fuels after 2035. Environmental groups objected, claiming that – because gasoline and diesel will still be available to power older vehicles – owners of e-fuel capable vehicles will cheat and fill up with gasoline.

Alex Keynes, clean fuels manager for the NGO Transport & Environment, claimed that e-fuels are too expensive to be given a seat at the table. He cited a T&E study that concluded that e-fuels would be 47 percent more expensive than petrol in France in 2030. [What he did not say was whether even that fuel cost differential would make e-fueled ICE vehicles more expensive to own and drive than lithium-battery EVs.]

Ferrari’s Benedetto Vigna scoffed at the T&E rhetoric. He expects the price of e-fuels to fall as they become more popular and that these fuels would allow carmakers to focus on producing lower cost e-fuels instead of expensive battery-powered cars that have their own limitations. Besides, suggested car industry veteran Andrew Graves, e-fuels may also be the answer for keeping older model vehicles on the road while further reducing emissions.

In the United Kingdom (no longer in the EU), former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in a move to one-up the EU, decreed a ban on new ICE vehicles by 2030 and on new hybrid vehicles by 2035.The adoption of this modified ban by the EU is putting pressure on the British government to follow suit.

Former Tory cabinet minister Sir John Redwood urged the Sunak government to consider the fact that, “Britain is in a desperate struggle to keep its car industry, and if we insist on phasing petrol and diesel out well before anyone else, we will find it harder to attract investment. The fewer bans there are,” he added, “the better to promote growth.” Like their Italian and German counterparts, British carmakers Aston Martin and McLaren are both investigating e-fuels for their future models.

There are other reasons that these bans on ICE vehicles are impractical. Graves says there is already a risk that there will not be enough EV charging stations or battery-making plants to satisfy demand in such a short timeframe. The still-fledgling industry remains beset with performance and safety concerns – as well as concerns over the environmental and societal damage done from the mining of critical metals used in EV batteries.

Another concern is cost, and thus popularity. EV sales have fallen across Europe with the lifting of subsidies. EV sales in Germany fell by a third from January 2022 to January 2023, and the market share fell from 55 percent of all car sales in December 2022 to just 15 percent in January 2023. The EV market share in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands fell by 50 percent month-to-month.

Automakers are still losing money in their quest to build all-EV fleets. Ford reported that its U.S. EV business had losses totaling $2.1 billion, a figure expected to rise to $3 billion in 2023. Ford finance chief John Lawler said it was normal for a startup to rack up losses, but if people have alternatives, not even the Inflation Reduction Act subsidies may be sufficient to turn car loving Americans into passive drivers of vehicles they cannot repair.

Finally, Europeans may be waking up to the realities of Chinese domination of the EV market and their attempted takeover of the European [and American] auto industry as well. The largest British auto dealership, Pendragon, has agreed with Chinese EV manufacturer BYD to sell its cars in the United Kingdom.

According to Ben Marlow, the Telegraph’s chief city commentator, the Chinese plan is to flood Europe with their own cheaper EV models to undercut European automakers and increase their market share. Not only does China control the market for many EV components, the Beijing government has thrown billions of dollars in subsidies to its EV industry.

And as Italy’s Matteo Salvini so eloquently put it, EU countries need to avoid “giving China entire industries and hundreds of thousands of jobs.”

NOTE: The concern over Chinese dominance of the EV market has reached the Colonies! Just days after Interior Secretary admitted that the Biden Administration’s push for EVs will deepen U.S. reliance on China, Chase Bank CEO Jamie Dimon, in his annual letter to shareholders, warned that China’s dominance of the green energy supply chain, coupled with the Biden EV policy, will imperil U.S. national security. Yet the juggernaut rolls on unimpeded.

Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and a frequent writer on public policy issues.