Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
In a series of panels about promoting North American gas, oil, and uranium energy in ways that will boost the economy and make North America strong and independent vis-a-vis world challenges, people are worried about the effects of Trump’s proposed tariffs which will hurt both countries’ economies and make energy more costly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkoFy1itP9I
“Volatility in natural gas prices, including the huge spikes following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has certainly contributed to some price increases on the supply side. But the transmission and distribution costs have actually been going up at twice the rate of inflation nationwide, the report’s author, Brendan Pierpont, told me.
“That trend of increasing transmission and distribution costs is something that is noticeable all across the country, and so I think it’s an underlying factor in rate increases everywhere,” Pierpont said.
Utility companies have a lot of freedom in setting rates for transmission and distribution — and that directly contributes to how much profit they make. Utilities get to pick what gets upgraded when, and they also have an incentive to spend heavily, thanks to regulations that allow them to collect return on investment, usually around 10 percent, for those expenditures. This is actually built into the price most people pay for electricity.
Here’s how it works: Every year, utility companies ask regulators to approve a “revenue requirement,” which is basically a budget for what the utilities think it will cost to deliver enough electricity to their customers. Those estimates include spending on new equipment but not the cost of repairing old equipment. It also includes that return on investment, or profit, which regulators regularly approve. In Pierpont’s words, “That rate of return has a direct link to the costs that customers pay for electricity.”
What utilities don’t seem to be doing, however, is expanding the grid in a way that would benefit clean energy producers, the Energy Innovation report finds. Investments tend to cover local upgrades, like installing new metering equipment, rather than installing the high-voltage transmission lines that renewable energy sources need to connect to the grid. Meanwhile, consumers are facing more frequent outages that last longer, while utilities keep making more money for installing new, potentially unnecessary equipment.
“It’s like the utilities have a rewards credit card,” said Joel Rosenberg of Rewiring America, a nonprofit focused on electrification. “And they get to keep the rewards for how much they spend, and the [customers] have to pay off the bill, even if that bill takes 80 years to pay off.”
This plays right into the misconception that investment in renewables leads to higher rates.
Many of the states leading the way to clean energy are actually seeing lower energy prices than the rest of the country. Data from the US Energy Information Administration shows that 17 states, including California and Massachusetts, have increased their share of renewable energy sources by more than 20 percent since 2010. And with the exception of California, all of those states have seen the price of residential rate increases rise more slowly than inflation. The higher rates in California can be explained, in part, by rate increases to account for wildfire prevention. In Massachusetts, natural gas is the problem.
States where residents are seeing electricity bills that outpace inflation tend to be the ones with the highest reliance on natural gas, as highlighted in the Energy Innovation report. Some states in New England, including Massachusetts, have depended on natural gas for around 60 percent of electricity generation since 2020 and have seen prices increase by around 10 percent in the same period. Volatility in the price of natural gas also means that some of the highest price spikes are spread out over several years, so there could be more high prices in these states’ futures.”
https://www.vox.com/technology/366885/utility-power-bill-price-clean-energy
“the pause is a limited one. It will only affect exports of LNG to countries with which the U.S. does not have a free trade agreement, and it does not prevent exports from the eight LNG export facilities already operating—though it will slow construction on several other export facilities, including one in Louisiana that would be America’s largest when finished. Even with the “pause” in place, the White House says America’s LNG exports are expected to double by the end of the decade, thanks to America’s booming natural gas industry and the energy needs of a world that’s getting wealthier.
While it is all a bit complicated, what the Biden administration announced last week amounts to an attempt to slow the growth of America’s natural gas exports—underpinned by the rationale that the slowdown will reduce global carbon emissions.
That’s a rationale based on some dubious assumptions. The climate activists who pushed the White House to consider the “pause” on new LNG export facilities point to an analysis released in November by former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) policy advisor Jeremy Symons. Among other things, that report found that planned expansions of LNG exports in the U.S. would cause an increase in carbon emissions equal to the current level of emissions from the entire European Union.”
“Even if Symons’ report is right—indeed, an increase in natural gas exports seems likely to result in more global use of natural gas, even if he’s wrong about the scale of the increase—there’s a huge blind spot in that analysis. On his Slow Boring Substack, liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias points out that Symons “doesn’t even purport to estimate the net impact on emissions.”
In other words: How much would the increase in global natural gas consumption offset emissions from dirtier forms of fuel like coal and oil?
That’s the key question to ask. A significant reason why the United States has seen an overall decrease in carbon emissions in recent years is due to natural gas supplanting coal as the country’s top energy source.
The Biden administration is well aware of how exporting more natural gas could facilitate a similar transition in other parts of the world. When the Department of Energy signed off on a new LNG export facility in Corpus Christie, Texas, in March 2022, it concluded that “to the extent U.S. LNG exports are preferred over coal in LNG-importing nations, U.S. LNG exports are likely to reduce global [greenhouse gas] emissions on per unit of energy consumed basis for power production.””
…
“this looks like a politically motivated maneuver aimed at garnering election-year praise from environmental activists on the left”
https://reason.com/2024/01/31/bidens-natural-gas-export-ban-is-based-on-bad-math/
“Whether LNG is better for the climate than other options is a topic of intense debate. If it replaces coal, then in general, yes. Since it’s made mostly of methane, it burns more cleanly than coal, producing roughly half of the greenhouse gas emissions. But it’s still a fossil fuel that contributes to warming, and every new gas terminal, transport tanker, and power plant implies these emissions will continue for decades more.
By one estimate, US LNG shipments to China reduced the intensity of greenhouse gas emissions — the amount of greenhouse gases released per unit of energy — by as much as 57 percent. Other analyses have also found that countries that import LNG produce power with lower emissions than with local coal. Another advantage is that gas produces fewer air polluting substances like particulates, so turning away from coal has immediate health benefits. And having more cheap gas on the global market could undermine the case for new coal power plants in some countries, if they can secure a reliable gas supplier.
But some environmental activists say this paints too optimistic a picture. For gas importers like the United Kingdom, LNG has a greenhouse gas footprint four times larger than gas extracted locally. Methane is itself a heat-trapping gas, about 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide, so small leaks from gas infrastructure — as little as 0.2 percent — can quickly overwhelm any environmental advantages. The added steps of chilling and shipping gas create even more opportunities for LNG to escape, and the industry has done a poor job of tracking its fugitive emissions. In addition, some LNG exports will simply fill in existing gas needs, as they do in parts of Europe, so the climate impact overall is at best a wash, though likely worse than more locally produced gas. At the same time, renewable energy is already the cheapest source of electricity in many parts of the world, and climate activists argue that gas no longer serves as a bridge to a low-carbon world.”
https://www.vox.com/climate/24055711/lng-export-pause-biden-liquefied-natural-gas-climate-change
“Austria’s continued reliance on Russian natural gas, which accounts for about 55 percent of the country’s overall consumption. Though that’s down from 80 percent at the beginning of 2022, Austria, in contrast to most other EU countries, remains dependent on Russia.
Confront an Austrian government official with this fact and you’ll be met with a lengthy whinge over how the country, one of the world’s richest, is struggling to cope with the economic crosswinds triggered by the war. That will be followed by a litany of examples of how a host of other EU countries is guilty of much more egregious behavior vis a vis Moscow.
The unspoken, if inevitable, conclusion: the real victim here is Austria.
The myth of Austrian victimhood has long been a leitmotif of the country’s bilious tabloids, which serve readers regular helpings of all the ways in which the outside world, especially Brussels and Washington, undermines them.”
…
“most Austrians only see the upsides to neutrality; yet that’s only because the West has refused to impose any costs on the country for freeriding.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/its-time-to-end-austrias-gemutlichkeit/
“Clean energy is rapidly rising on the Texas power grid, but regulators in the Lone Star State are now considering a plan that could give fossil fuels a boost.
The zero greenhouse gas emissions trio — wind, solar, and nuclear energy — provided more than 40 percent of electricity in the state in 2022. It was a year when several Texas cities experienced their hottest summers on record, driving electricity demand to its highest levels ever as fans and air conditioners switched on. Winter proved stressful too, with freezing temperatures last month pushing winter electricity peaks to record-high levels, narrowly avoiding outages.”
…
“Texas leads the US in oil and natural gas production, but it’s also number one in wind power. Solar production in the state has almost tripled in the past three years. Part of the reason is that Texas is particularly suited to renewable energy on its grid. Wind turbines and solar panels in Texas have a high degree of “complementarity,” so shortfalls in one source are often matched by increases in another, smoothing out power production and reducing the need for other generators to step in. That has eased the integration of intermittent energy sources on the grid.
Coal, meanwhile, has lost more than half of its share in Texas since 2006. For a long time and across much of the country, the story was that cheap natural gas from hydraulic fracturing was eating coal’s lunch on the power grid. Coal was also facing tougher environmental regulations like stricter limits on mercury, requiring coal power plants to upgrade their equipment, and raising electricity production costs.”
…
“in Texas, natural gas’s share of the electricity mix has been holding around 40 percent for more than a decade. On the other hand, renewable energy has surged as coal withered. Wind alone started beating out coal in 2019 and is now the second-largest source of electricity behind natural gas in the state.
An important factor is that the state has its own internal power grid, serving 26 million customers and meeting 90 percent of its electricity demand. It’s managed by the nonprofit Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT. In the freewheeling Texas energy market, the cheapest sources of electricity become dominant, and wind and solar — with low construction costs, rapid build times, and zero fuel expenses — have emerged as winners.”
…
“Some lawmakers are now working to tilt the balance toward fossil fuels. “There are different political figures who are trying to incentivize gas power plants or deny, prohibit, or inhibit renewables,” Webber said.
Last year, the Texas legislature passed a law that would prevent the state’s retirement and investment funds from doing business with companies that “boycott” fossil fuels.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said one of his legislative priorities for this year is to secure more support for natural gas-fired generation. “We have to level the playing field so that we attract investment in natural gas plants,” Patrick said during a press conference last November. “We can’t leave here next spring unless we have a plan for more natural gas power.””
…
“While wind and solar power are ascendant, they are intermittent, and regulators want to make sure there is enough dispatchable power like natural gas to ramp up on still, cloudy days. The new proposal would create a credit scheme that would encourage more of these dispatchable plants to come online and extend a lifeline to some existing generators that are struggling to compete. But it would also raise the costs of electricity production.
Environmental groups like the Sierra Club noted that the proposal leaves the door open for other tactics for balancing electricity supply and demand, like energy storage, increasing energy efficiency, and demand response.”
“Sen. Joe Manchin on Tuesday railed against what he called “revenge politics,” as liberals in the House and Senate team up with Republicans to oppose his plan to speed permits for natural gas pipelines and other energy projects.
Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate Energy Committee, secured a commitment from President Joe Biden and Democratic leaders to include the permitting package in a stopgap government-funding bill in return for his support of a landmark law to curb climate change.
But in the weeks since Biden signed so-called Inflation Reduction Act last month, Democrats and environmental groups have lined up to oppose the permitting plan, calling it bad for the country and the climate. Climate hawks such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, along with dozens of House members, say the permitting plan should be excluded from the must-pass spending bill.
Many Republicans agree. Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the top Republican on the Senate energy panel, called the permitting deal a “political payoff” to Manchin, whose vote on the climate bill was crucial to the law’s passage.
Manchin’s actions on the climate — including secret negotiations with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. — “engendered a lot of bad blood” among Republicans, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told reporters. “There’s not a lot of sympathy on our side to provide Sen. Manchin a reward.”
At a news conference Tuesday, Manchin expressed bewilderment at such sentiment, saying he’s “never seen” such an example of “revenge politics,” with Sanders and the “extreme liberal left siding up with Republican leadership” to oppose his plan.
“It’s revenge towards one person — me,” Manchin said.
“I’m hearing that the Republican leadership is upset,” he added. “They’re not going to give a victory to Joe Manchin. Well, Joe Manchin is not looking for a victory.”
While legislative text of his permitting plan has not been made public, Manchin called the bill “a good piece of legislation that is extremely balanced” and does not “bypass any environmental review.″ Instead it would accelerate a timeframe that can take up to 10 years for a major project to win approval.”
“Global known reserves of natural gas would last nearly 50 years at current rates of consumption. Burning natural gas to generate electricity emits about half of the carbon dioxide that coal does. This is why many environmental activist groups a little more than a decade ago hailed natural gas as “the bridge to the clean energy future.”
In fact, the mostly market-driven switch from coal to natural gas to generate electricity in the U.S. has served as a bridge to a cleaner energy future. The replacement in the U.S. of coal-fired power plants by those fueled by natural gas is responsible for a 32 percent reduction since 2005 in carbon dioxide emissions from that sector. Overall, annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have fallen by around 23 percent since 2005. Despite the undeniable role that the switch from coal to natural gas has played in significantly reducing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, many environmental activists now perplexingly denounce natural gas as a “bridge to nowhere.””
…
“What about nuclear power? The fact that splitting atoms to generate electricity produces no greenhouse gas emissions should be enough to establish nuclear power as a “climate-friendly” energy technology. Last week, the International Energy Agency released a report arguing that global nuclear power capacity needs to double from 413 gigawatts now to 812 gigawatts by 2050 in order to meet greenhouse gas emissions targets set in international agreements addressing the problem of man-made climate change. Meanwhile, in response to pressure from environmental activists, Germany is going in the opposite direction, shutting down perfectly good nuclear power plants while firing up electricity generation fueled by coal.
The ecomodernist Breakthrough Institute has just released a new study setting out various scenarios of how the development and deployment of advanced nuclear reactors in the U.S. could unfold over the next 30 years. In the optimistic scenario, U.S. nuclear power generation capacity would rise from 95 gigawatts from conventional nuclear plants today to as much as 470 gigawatts generated by advanced reactors in 2050. Expanding nuclear power production would both help smooth out the intermittency of wind and solar generation and further cut climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.”
“Despite Western powers’ broad condemnation of and efforts to isolate Russia, the country has managed to maintain ties and partnerships elsewhere around the world. In April, the UN General Assembly voted on a resolution to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council over its invasion of Ukraine. The resolution succeeded after it received a two-thirds majority of votes from member states with 93 nations voting in favor of Russia’s suspension from the body. But 24 of the body’s members voted against the action while 58 members abstained from the vote altogether.
Results of the UN vote signify the complexities of real-world diplomacy even in the face of war. Countries in Africa, South America, and Asia have increasingly sought to resist taking sides as the Russia-Ukraine war threatens to shape the world into political factions. But the West’s waning influence in other parts of the globe, combined with economic and political interests at stake, has resulted in many nations opting to maintain their independence when it comes to relations with Russia.
In Asia, where growing vigilance over China’s increasing influence is shared across borders, nations in the southeast and the south of the continent have expressed their intentions to remain on good terms with Russia in spite of the situation with Ukraine. Among Russia’s most loyal partners is India, with whom it has maintained a strong relationship since the Soviet Union’s backing of India during the 1971 war with Pakistan, even as India remained officially non-aligned during the Cold War.
Another factor behind their continued friendship is India’s reliance on Russia as a military arms supplier — from the 1950s to now the country has received an estimated 65 percent of firearms exports from the Soviet Union or Russia, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. India’s border disputes in the Himalayas with China, which triggered a bloody clash in 2020, is another motivating factor for India as Russia has functioned as an important mediator in the conflict with China.
China, another key Russian partner, has refrained from condemning Russia outright, instead asking for the warring countries to reach a peaceful resolution. In a March virtual meeting with France and Germany, President Xi Jinping called for “maximum restraint” on the issue and expressed concerns over the broader impact of sanctions on Russia. But some, like Herrera, doubt how far China will continue to toe the line if the situation worsens.
“China has not said they would not abide by the sanctions and they are so far going along with the sanctions against Russia,” Herrera said. A potential turning point, she said, could be Europe’s next sanctions, particularly any secondary sanctions it puts out, which will be “a big crossroads for China to decide whether to participate with those.”
But its ties with Russia could still end up serving China economically. President Vladimir Putin has stated Russia will “redirect” its energy exports to “rapidly growing markets” elsewhere to help buttress against sanctions, perhaps an effort to maintain support from its key ally.”
“Seismologists say that one of the state’s biggest industries is upsetting a delicate balance deep underground. They blame the oil and gas business — and particularly a technique called wastewater injection — for waking up ancient fault lines, turning a historically stable region into a shaky one, and opening the door to larger earthquakes that Texas might not be ready for.
The state is finally trying to change that. In December, the Texas Railroad Commission — the state agency that regulates oil and gas operations and no longer has anything to do with railroads — suspended wastewater injection at 33 sites across a region where more than half a million people live. This is a notable turnaround for the Railroad Commission, which until recently did not acknowledge a link between oil and gas operations and earthquakes, and might be a sign of just how serious the earthquakes have gotten.”