Democrats Say They Support Green Energy. Why Do Their Policies Say Otherwise?

“Greater reliance on green energy also requires a stupendous increase in mineral extraction to provide the needed materials. Even if the world unquestionably possessed the mineral capacity necessary for the global energy transformation envisioned by President Joe Biden, Democrats in practice are enemies of mining. The U.S. Mining Association estimates that the country has $6.2 trillion of recoverable mineral resources like copper and zinc available for mining on millions of acres of federal, state, and private lands. Unfortunately, our labor, health, and climate regulations often make it practically impossible to profitably mine. As a result, these precious resources stay in the ground, which explains why the United States went from being the world’s No. 1 producer of minerals in 1990 to seventh place today.
Democrats committed to a green energy transition should make it a priority to reform counterproductive regulations like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and to implement other permitting reforms. Yet for the most part they won’t do so, as we saw when they helped strike down the permitting deal cut last year between Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.).”

The delayed impact of the EU’s wartime sanctions on Russia

“There is one key factor explaining why imports to the EU from Russia haven’t fallen further: energy — and its price. During the five years that preceded the war, energy-related products represented two-thirds of all imports from Russia, in monetary terms.
European countries needed to find alternative providers before they could stop buying from Moscow — and even when they reduced their energy purchases, soaring prices meant that cash flows to Russia did not decrease proportionally.”

We have a genuine fusion energy breakthrough

“Researchers at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, home of the world’s most powerful laser, announced on Tuesday that they crossed the critical threshold in their pursuit of fusion power: getting more energy out of the reaction than they put in.
This is 1) a massive scientific advancement, and 2) still a long, long (long) way off from harnessing fusion, the reaction that powers the sun, as a viable source of abundant clean energy. On December 5, the team fired 192 laser beams at a tiny fuel pellet, producing slightly more energy than the lasers put in, “about 2 megajoules in, about 3 megajoules out,” said Marvin Adams, deputy administrator for defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, at a press conference Tuesday.

To make fusion something that could actually produce electricity for the power grid, it can’t just inch over the ignition finish line; it has to blow past it. This announcement is an important incremental advance, but the breakthrough doesn’t go far enough to be of practical use. Because NIF itself is a research laboratory, its technology is not intended to produce power. So designing a fusion reactor to harness this new approach will be its own engineering challenge.”

Subsidies Won’t Fix the Energy Industry

“If Congress isn’t willing to end energy subsidies entirely, it could still make energy technologies more competitive by simplifying all 44 energy tax provisions. For instance, it could offer tax credits to companies based on what their emissions are, without requiring that they use any specific technologies to hit those targets. Unlike targeted subsidies, such performance-based provisions have historically led to less greenhouse emissions.”

https://reason.com/2022/11/26/subsidies-wont-fix-the-energy-industry/

How Federal Energy Regulations Make Dishwashers Worse

“The increase in unused dishwashers is correlated with federal energy efficiency standards that have made newer models less effective. In the last 20 years, the U.S. Department of Energy has twice tightened those standards, which limit the amount of water and electricity that dishwashers use. Manufacturers have met those standards by building machines that recirculate less water over a longer wash cycle.
Data compiled by D.C.’s Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) show that average cycle times rose from just over an hour when the first standards were adopted in 1987 to nearly two-and-a-half hours as of 2018. In complaints collected by CEI, many consumers said the longer cycle times had led them to start handwashing dishes.

The regression in dishwasher use is a great lesson in unintended consequences. As Procter & Gamble points out in its “do it” campaign, handwashing uses far more water than machine washing. Environmental standards that discourage the use of machines undermine the original goals of those rules.”

“The Trump administration briefly liberalized dishwasher standards, but the Biden administration quickly reimposed the old rules. Millions of Americans will now spill needless gallons of water down the drain by cleaning their dishes in the sink while a machine that could have done the work for them sits sadly handicapped and idle.”

Japan Is Reopening Nuclear Power Plants and Planning To Build New Ones

“Speaking of Fukushima, according to the Financial Times, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has announced that the government plans to allow the restart of at least 10 more of the nuclear power plants it shuttered after the 2011 disaster. In addition, Kishida is pushing for research on and the construction of new safer nuclear plants as a way to protect Japanese consumers from erratic global fossil fuel markets and reduce his country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Kishida foresees Japan becoming a major exporter of nuclear generation technology to power hungry developing countries around the world.”

https://reason.com/2022/08/25/japan-is-reopening-nuclear-power-plants-and-planning-to-build-new-ones/

How the Western drought is pushing the power grid to the brink

“It takes a lot of water to make power.

From spinning turbines to hydraulic fracturing to refining fuel, the flow of water is critical to the flow of electrons and heat. About 40 percent of water withdrawals — water taken out of groundwater or surface sources — in the United States go toward energy production. The large majority of that share is used to cool power plants. In turn, it requires energy to extract, purify, transport, and deliver water.

So when temperatures rise and water levels drop, the energy sector gets squeezed hard. The consequences of water shortages are playing out now in swaths of the American West, where an expansive, decades-long drought is forcing drastic cuts in hydroelectric power generation. At the same time, exceptional heat has pushed energy demand to record highs. As the climate changes, these stresses will mount.

The United Nations Environment Programme warned..that if drought conditions persist, the two largest hydroelectric reservoirs in the US — Lake Mead and Lake Powell —could eventually reach “dead pool status,” where water levels fall too low to flow downstream. Lake Mead fuels the Hoover Dam, which has a power capacity topping 2,000 megawatts while Lake Powell drives generators that peak at 1,300 megawatts at the Glen Canyon Dam.”

Europe’s Energy Wounds Are Self-Inflicted

“”In 2000, Germany launched a deliberately targeted program to decarbonize its primary energy supply, a plan more ambitious than anything seen anywhere else,” Vaclav Smil wrote in 2020 for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ IEEE Spectrum. “The policy, called the Energiewende, is rooted in Germany’s naturalistic and romantic tradition, reflected in the rise of the Green Party and, more recently, in public opposition to nuclear electricity generation.”
The problem, as Smil noted, is that government-favored and subsidized solar and wind are intermittent. Wind doesn’t generate electricity when the air is still, and solar is of little use at night and on cloudy days. That means old-school generating capacity has to be maintained in parallel to the new systems.

“It costs Germany a great deal to maintain such an excess of installed power,” Smil added. “The average cost of electricity for German households has doubled since 2000. By 2019, households had to pay 34 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to 22 cents per kilowatt-hour in France and 13 cents in the United States.”

The German news magazine Der Spiegel came to a similar conclusion in 2019.

“The state has redistributed gigantic sums of money, with the [Renewable Energy Sources Act] directing more than 25 billion euros each year to the operators of renewable energy facilities,” the authors observed. “But without the subsidies, operating wind turbines and solar parks will hardly be worth it anymore. As is so often the case with such subsidies: They trigger an artificial boom that burns fast and leaves nothing but scorched earth in their wake.”

Making the matter worse is the extent to which Europe has sourced its fossil fuels from Russia. That’s a dependency partly based on easy accessibility by land to Russia’s resources. It’s also an artifact of economic diplomacy from the Cold War era intended to build trade ties to reduce the risk of conflict. But what was supposed to give the West leverage over the old Soviet Union has instead handed modern Russia enormous clout.

Comparatively clean nuclear energy might have made the difference, but the 2011 Fukushima disaster spooked Germans more, perhaps, than people anywhere else, and the country resolved to abandon nuclear power, leaving it dependent on unreliable solar and wind and, especially, imported fossil fuels. Only now, with Russia throttling the supply of natural gas to 20 percent of capacity, is the governing coalition considering extending the life of the last two nuclear power plants past the end of the year.”

The Sinema-Manchin split that shaped Dems’ deal

“After Manchin agreed with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on the party-line tax, health care and energy bill, the West Virginia Democrat found himself bargaining with fellow moderate Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. Both hard-nosed negotiators, the Arizona Democrat’s business-friendly tax-approach clashed sharply with Manchin’s more progressive positions on taxes.

Manchin sought to target the wealthy and ended up agreeing with Schumer to target the so-called carried interest loophole that allows some people to pay lower tax rates on investment income. He also signed off on a corporate minimum tax package that most Democrats believed Sinema supported.

Ultimately, Sinema took a scalpel to the corporate minimum tax and scuttled any changes to carried interest, which Manchin called particularly “painful.” Triangulating between them through all of it: Schumer, whose job was harmonizing the views of the very public Manchin with an often-silent Sinema.”