Saturday, June 01, 2024

EPA to Shut Down Electricity in Mid-South

A seriously destructive agency of the Obama/Biden Revolution is the EPA.  We say "revolution" because we mean it.  The stuff they are pulling is exactly that.

Critics of the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant rules, which were finalized in April, warned that the rules would shut down coal-fired power plants and discourage investments in new gas plants to replace them, which would undermine grid reliability. ...

Reliability is the key issue here.  But EPA doesn't concern itself with that at all.

...The North Dakota Transmission Authority, which oversees development of transmission infrastructure in North Dakota, hired Rolling and Orr to model the reliability and cost impacts of the EPA’s rules in the SPP, which is a regional transmission organization (RTO). These entities coordinate electricity delivery over a multi-state electric grid. The area served by SPP stretches from the U.S.-Canadian border down through the Great Plains to Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle

In analyzing its regulatory impact, the EPA doesn’t perform a reliability assessment. Instead, it goes by a resource adequacy analysis, which the agency has stated isn’t adequate for measuring regulatory impacts on grid reliability. That resource adequacy analysis estimates all generation sources’ capacity to provide power when it’s needed the most. All the resources’ capacity are then added together until the EPA can meet projected demand in a region and a reserve margin. 

Such an analysis works fairly well with generation sources that aren’t dependent on the right weather conditions, as is the case with wind and solar. Dispatchable sources powered by coal, natural gas or nuclear can be expected to be available as needed, in most cases, whereas intermittent wind and solar generation may or may not. ...

So EPA only measures whether there's enough power, ignoring whether that power may be actually "On".  

But it gets worse.

...Rolling and Orr found the assumptions the EPA uses in the resource adequacy analysis are “so shockingly unrealistic that they border on gross negligence.” The EPA estimates that solar resources in the SPP range from 80% to 100%. ...

...This means the EPA expects the SPP region to rely on solar resources being available nearly all the time, which is, of course, impossible due to the rotation of the Earth and cloud cover....

A third-grader working with Crayolas can show you the difference between "night" and "day".  The EPA's highly-paid "scientists" cannot?

It's about time that EPA gets zeroed out.

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