EVs Are Not the Future

July 13, 2022 by Steven Hayward in Elon Musk, Energy Policy @ Powerline.com

• Editor's Note:  I often wonder if all these misfits demanding we abandon our cars and trucks in favor of electric vehicles do they really believe that's possible?  It's clear if they do believe it, they're delusional.  Also, since most of what appears here are quotes from sources I'm posting this in full.  RK 
  

Today’s guest appearance features Kenneth P. Green, my former colleague and frequent writing partner back in our days at AEI over a decade ago. In the intervening years Ken has worked at the Fraser Institute in Canada, and has just lately completed a dazzling manuscript on the problems with all of the models (COVID, climate, you name it) beloved of our policymakers. Podcast listeners may remember him from our episode on science fiction and the defects of all the successors to the original Star Trek. Even further back in his career he worked as an engineer with one of the major aerospace companies that once prospered in California but now no longer exist, on early electric car technology. What did he learn from that experience, and what does the current scene look like? No much has really changed about the fundamentals.

EV’s are not the future – the consensus grows

Have you noticed that when it comes to EVs, the smartest guys in the room—the ones who study energy/technology trends, run successful energy-tech investment firms, and more importantly, the guys who actually build the things—are uniformly dubious about their future?

Akio Toyoda (CEO of Toyota): “TOKYO—Toyota Motor Corp.’s leader criticized what he described as excessive hype over electric vehicles, saying advocates failed to consider the carbon emitted by generating electricity and the costs of an EV transition…Toyoda said Japan would run out of electricity in the summer if all cars were running on electric power. The infrastructure needed to support a fleet consisting entirely of EVs would cost Japan between ¥14 trillion and ¥37 trillion, the equivalent of $135 billion to $358 billion, he said.

“When politicians are out there saying, ‘Let’s get rid of all cars using gasoline,’ do they understand this?”

The short answer there is “no,” but let’s continue.

Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla, natch): “Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Tuesday that electricity consumption will double if the world’s car fleets are electrified, increasing the need to expand nuclear, solar, geothermal and wind energy generating sources. Increasing the availability of sustainable energy is a major challenge as cars move from combustion engines to battery-driven electric motors, a shift which will take two decades, Musk said in a talk hosted by Berlin-based publisher Axel Springer.”

Of course, Musk. Gotta love the man, but he’s not exactly consistent. Musk is also hedging his bet with research into hydrogen (foolish, if you ask me), and has warned about problems with mining enough battery elements to allow for the “EV transition” Still, he did successfully bogart the name of one of the world’s greatest electrical engineers (Nikola Tesla)…so maybe he knows a few things.

Jim Farley (CEO, Ford): “Ford CEO Jim Farley explained to Automotive News that not all of its customers are ready to make the transition, due to their specific needs. “We have a lot of rural customers at Ford that a lot of other brands don’t have. We have Super Duty customers who do heavy-duty towing: horse trailers, people in the energy business who are towing big-time loads over very long distances. It’s hard for me to imagine that all those customers will go electric in the next 10 years,” Farley said.

In other words, “Dude, we sell a hell of a lot of trucks, and you’re not powering an F450 with Duracells or Energizers…”

Hey, when the guys who are building these things warn you that they might not be able to live up to the hype? Our “fearless leaders” might want to pay attention.

STEVE adds: Since Ken filed this story, Vanity Fair—Vanity Fair!— has weighed in with a critical story whose subhed tells the thesis: “Could the electric car market collapse under its own weight?“

Electric vehicles require components that are so in demand that miners and producers of the necessary metals and chemicals simply can’t keep up. Electric-car batteries, for example, are typically made of cobalt, nickel, and lithium, the price of which have risen significantly, according to the consulting firm AlixPartners. “Due to multiple global factors, the E.V. market is currently experiencing some unusual bumps,” says Josh D. Boone,executive director of Veloz, a nonprofit advocate for electric cars.

Arnaud Deboeuf, chief manufacturing officer for Stellantis, an automotive manufacturing company, told Bloomberg that the transition to electric cars is “doomed” unless the prices start to fall. “If E.V.s don’t get cheaper, the market will collapse,” Deboeuf said. In other words, if manufacturing electric cars becomes so expensive that consumers decide they aren’t worth the price, then automakers could be forced to drop prices below what it costs to make them, profit margins could collapse, and the entire system could fall in on the weight of itself.

• Do Democrats have any comprehension of how intentionally destructive their energy policies are? Do they care? -  July 11, 2022 By Jack Hellner - There are all kinds of nonsense going on now over the issue of global warming that Democrats fawn over.  It's an unscientific theory that has gripped big-money Democrats and their media allies for decades, and what they are trying to do is force this non-science into every area of society — destructively so. Let's take airports to start.  Here are some headlines:...........
•  Tucker Carlson’s latest on ‘green’ energy is mandatory viewing July 13, 2022 With the examples of Sri Lanka and Ghana already before us, Tucker spells out exactly where the Biden administration’s policies are taking us........... 
• Electricity Blackouts Are Here, and Regulation Wishful Thinking Won't Cut It - By Tony Clark July 11, 2022 - Hardly a week goes by without reports regarding the growing threat of electricity blackouts in the U.S.  It brings to mind Ernest Hemmingway’s line in The Sun Also Rises about bankruptcy happening “two ways…gradually, then suddenly.”  For years, electric reliability has been an increasing concern.  Nonetheless, it’s all a bit jarring to see evidence that much of the U.S. is shifting from the “gradually” phase of electric reliability decline and into the “suddenly” phase............ 
• Like a third-world country, California is facing rolling power blackouts July 3, 2022 To defeat the resurgence of this pre-modern darkness, California is reluctantly turning to a hated product to keep the lights on.

America’s Summer of Rolling Blackouts

Green energy policies are making the nation’s electric-power grid increasingly unstable. 

By The Editorial Board May 27, 2022

Summer is around the corner, and we suggest you prepare by buying an emergency generator, if you can find one in stock. Last week the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) warned that two-thirds of the U.S. could experience blackouts this summer. Welcome to the “green energy transition.”

We’ve been warning for years that climate policies would make the grid more vulnerable to vacillations in supply and demand. And here we are. Some of the mainstream press are belatedly catching on that blackouts are coming, but they still don’t grasp the real problem: The forced transition to green energy is distorting energy markets and destabilizing the grid.

Progressives blame the grid problems on climate change. There’s no doubt that drought in the western U.S. is a contributing factor. NERC’s report notes that hydropower generators in the western U.S. are running at lower levels, and output from thermal (i.e., nuclear and fossil fuel) generators that use the Missouri River for cooling may be affected this summer.............To Read More......

Robin's Take - Exactly as I and so many others have been warning for years now. The push for "green/renewable/sustainable" energy is immoral, unethical, and horribly harmful - it's costing lives already, and has been for a number of years. That's only getting worse and worse as more of it is installed.

New York can't buy its way out of coming blackouts

Even if battery backup worked, its astronomical costs put the idea in Fantasyland

David Wojick

New York City will soon be home to the world’s biggest industrial-scale battery system. It’s designed to back up the city’s growing reliance on intermittent “renewable” electricity. At 400 megawatt-hours (MWh), this cluster of batteries will be more than triple the existing 129 MWh world leader in Australia.

Mark Chambers, NYC’s Director of Sustainability (I am not making this title up), is ecstatic. “Expanding battery storage is a critical part of how we advance momentum to confront the climate emergency,” he brags, “while meeting the energy needs of all New Yorkers. Today's announcement demonstrates how we can deliver this need at significant scale.” [emphasis added]

In the same nonsensical way, Tim Cawley, president of Con Edison, New York state’s power utility, gushes thus: “Utility-scale battery storage will play a vital role in New York’s clean energy future, especially in New York City, where it will help to maximize the benefit of the wind power being developed offshore.”

In reality, the scale here is vanishingly insignificant. The official enthusiasm puts the Con in Con Edison. (And few New Yorkers and other East Coast residents are going to tolerate thousands of 850-foot-tall wind turbines off their shores. People don’t want them in their onshore backyards either.) 

When it comes to the scale needed to reliably back up unreliable pretend-renewable electricity generation – and keep business, industry, social media and civilization functioning – New York’s and America’s policy makers need to start living in the Real World. Otherwise blackouts will become common.

For simplicity, let’s suppose New York City is 100% wind powered. (Including solar in the generating mix makes it more complicated but does not change the unhappy outcome very much.)

NYC currently peaks at around 13,000 MW – just to keep the city running during extreme summer heat. If Mr. Biden makes all the cars and trucks electric, total demand could eventually hit 20,000 MW. But let’s stick to present day reality.

This peak occurs because of enormous air conditioning demand during summer heat waves, which is bad enough. But to make matters even worse, those heat waves are caused by stagnant high pressure systems called Bermuda highs. These highs often last for a week and because they involve stagnant air masses – and an absence of breezes – there is no wind power generation.

Wind turbines require something like sustained winds of 10 mph to move the blades and more like a whistling 30 mph to generate full power. During a Bermuda high, folks are happy to get the occasional 5 mph breeze. These huge highs cover many states, so it is not like we can get the juice from next door.

So for reliability we need, say, seven days of backup: 168 hours. Here’s the math:

13,000 MW x 168 hours = 2,184,000 MWh of stored juice needed to just make it. Mind you, for normal reliability we usually add 20% or so as a safety measure. Did I mention electric cars? Replacing natural gas with electricity for cooking, water heating and other needs? Charging all those batteries? Maybe they need to add 40% to account for all this, plus emergency circumstances. But let’s ignore that for now.

Let’s also ignore the energy and raw materials required to manufacture (and replace) all those batteries.

The key point is, 400 MWh is not “significant scale.” It is trivial, infinitesimal scale. Virtually nothing.

Nada. A piddling 0.02% of what the City would need amid a 7-day heat wave. It might as well not exist. It might be enough to power Gracie Mansion and City government offices during a summer heat wave, but that’s about it.

More specifically, 2,184,000 divided by 400 = 5,460. That means New York City just needs another 5,459 additional battery clusters to meet those peak needs.

On the other hand, this measly 400 MWh battery array may well cost half a billion dollars, which is significant, especially to the New Yorkers who will have to pay for it. No cost figures were given, because the system is privately owned (and the numbers would be hugely embarrassing).

However, the Energy Information Administration says the average utility scale battery system runs around $1.5 million per MWh of storage capacity. That works out to $600 million for this insignificant climate-obsessing toy.

So what would it cost to reliably back up wind power, at this MWh cost and NYC scale? Just over $3,000,000,000,000. THREE TRILLION DOLLARS! I have not seen this stupendous sum reported in the media. Perhaps Con Ed has not mentioned it. (You think?) They certainly know about it.

But hey, maybe the cost will come down a trillion – though not if we create a seller’s market by rushing into intermittent renewables, which is certainly where we are headed. After all, this is just New York City. Imagine what backing up America with batteries might cost. Don’t bother because it is impossible.

I should also add that we have no idea how to make 2 million MWh of batteries work together. The tiny 400 will be a challenge. Millions of megawatt hours on demand may not be possible.

Then too, New York State has the same problem. Only much bigger if New York City is included, which it often is. New York State peaks at about 32,000 MW, which works out to 5,376,000 MWh of stored juice at a cost of EIGHT TRILLION DOLLAS for enough batteries to make 100% wind reliable. And again, this is without phasing in electric cars and trucks, phasing out gas heat, a 20-40% reserve, etc.

Note that New York State has a law saying they will build at least 3,000 MWh of batteries over the next decade. Like NYC’s grand 400 MWh battery system, this is nothing compared to what is needed to keep the lights on. Nor does the New York Power Authority mention the many trillions of dollars needed to make renewables reliable.

All of this battery backup hype is a scam, and not just in New York. The papers are full of this con, from coast to coast. Solar plus batteries or wind plus batteries, as though the batteries mattered, when they do not. The utilities know perfectly well that these loudly touted battery buys are a hoax, but they are getting rich building the mandated and subsidized wind and solar systems the politicians are calling for. Adding a trivial battery makes it sound like renewables work. Which they don’t.

On a larger scale, consider PJM. This is the electric power coordinating group of utilities that oversees the central part of the Eastern USA (not including New York State). Its primary mission is system reliability, so it should be very interested in this impossible battery cost problem.

PJM peaks at around 150,000 MW, so a week of backup battery juice is 25,200,000 MWh. At $1,500,000 per MWh, that is just under a mere THIRTY-EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS! This too is without electrifying all our fossil fueled cars, trucks, buildings, appliances and whatever else the climate emergency central planners can think of. Yet PJM says not a mumbling word about the impossibility of delivering reliability using all renewables and batteries.

The voters are oblivious to these impossible numbers, since they are repeatedly told that intermittent wind and solar are cheaper than reliable coal, gas and nuclear. That may be true only when the sun shines bright and the wind blows hard, which is not all that often. Now do the math for the entire United States.

Maybe fracked geothermal, the only reliable renewable, is the answer. Or how about reliable coal, oil, gas and nuclear power? Too bad they are all out of fashion.

Reality is just sitting there, waiting. 100% renewables cannot work, so they will not work. At this point it is just a question of how and when we find out the hard way. The key then is for voters and electricity users to learn this stuff, ask hard questions, demand honest answers, and not be Conned any longer.

David Wojick is an independent analyst specializing in science, logic and human rights in public policy, and author of numerous articles on these topics.

 

Opinion – Get Ready for Power Blackouts Under Biden Administration

By Letters to the Editor November 29, 2020

 

By Dr. Jay Lehr & Tom Harris

The power disaster unfolding in California will soon occur across the country if Joe Biden gets his way. Just as the former Vice-President plans for America as a whole, the Golden State is sweeping away the forms of energy that have been reliable for decades. Power outages are now commonplace in California. Last summer, the state suffered its first rolling blackouts in nearly 20 years. Imagine if this happened in Chicago in the middle of winter.

California’s trouble is explained by officials who now openly admit to an over-reliance on wind and solar power. The governor said there was not enough wind to keep the turbines going with cloud cover and nightfall restricting solar power. The Los Angeles Times reported:

“… gas-burning power plants that can fire up when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing have been shutting down in recent years, and California has largely failed to replace them …”

Consequently, the state has fallen thousands of megawatts behind its needs. Governor Gavin Newsom said, “we failed to predict and plan for these shortages” and took responsibility for the rolling blackouts. He wants everyone to conserve while they look for new sources of energy, likely fossil fuel-generated power from neighboring states.

All this is happening while California continues its intent to transition to 60% renewable energy by 2030 and 100% “climate-friendly energy” by 2045, as required by state law. Indeed, in their October 6^th open letter to Newsom, the heads of the California’s Energy Commission, Independent System Operator and Public Utilities Commission wrote: “We are unwavering in our commitment to meeting California’s clean energy and climate goals.” And, Biden plans to go even further, committing to making the nation 100% renewable within 15 years.

California’s shift toward so-called green energy, which is actually anything but, is being echoed by politicians across the nation. The result, especially in states that don’t enjoy California’s mostly benign weather, is going to be that those in the poorest neighborhoods and those on fixed incomes may be forced to choose between heating or eating.

Coherent energy systems are designed with the understanding that portions of the system will be offline from time to time. Thus, one compensates for this with reserve power at the ready. However, California has closed its margin for error in response to anti-nuclear sentiments and climate change concerns.

Power outages cannot always be avoided and are more common than one may think. For example, Illinois had 871 outages, the 10th most by state, between 2008 and 2017. Texas had nearly twice as many, giving it the dubious distinction of ranking number two in the list. But these pale in comparison to California which has the least reliable electrical power system in the nation. It leads in power outages every year. Between 2008 and 2017, they had 4,297 power outages.

The origin of the problem is partly California’s Senate Bill 1368 which, in 2006, established the state’s emission standards to reduce greenhouse gases from power plants. Following that year, 11 coal-fired plants were closed and three were converted to biomass. Only one remains. The state also reduced its normal reliance on energy from out of state coal plants.

Yielding to anti-nuclear activists, the state closed all but one nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, as well. That plant generates fully 8.6% of California’s total generation electricity every year.

But Diablo Canyon will soon be closed too. In 2016, the California Public Utilities Commission approved a Joint Proposal to phase out the remaining nuclear power in the state. So, the operating licenses for Diablo Canyon’s two units will not be renewed when they expire in 2024 and 2025. Ironically, the Commission did not approve Pacific Gas & Electric’s proposal for resources to replace the station’s output.

And it gets worse. California wants all citizens to switch their natural gas stoves to electric as part of their global warming initiatives. More than 30 cities have already enacted bans on gas appliances including San Francisco. The state is also hoping to eliminate all gasoline and diesel cars in favor of plug-in electric automobiles.

So, just as Biden promises for the country as a whole, California is sacrificing reliable electrical power as part of their impossible crusade to ‘stop climate change.’ If more rational heads don’t soon prevail, blackouts are indeed coming.

_________________________________________________________

Ohio-based Dr. Jay Lehr is Senior Policy Advisor to the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC). Tom Harris is Executive Director of ICSC.

The views, opinions, and positions expressed by all columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of NetNewsLedger.

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California Reveals Troubling Energy Future For The Nation

By Peter Murphy

The State of California was once the land of opportunity, captured by the song, “California Here I Come.” In the latter half of the 20^th century, following the end of World War II, the Golden State’s population more than tripled in size, from just over 10.6 million in 1950, to nearly 34 million by 2000.

Times have changed, and California’s glory days are long over. Chief among the many factors for the state’s decline was on full display in recent days: rolling power blackouts. This is no accident, and should come as no surprise to the state’s obtuse political class, beginning with Gov. Gavin Newsom who, like Claude Rains’ character in Casablanca, feigned outrage over the outages.

The governor also called for an “investigation” of the blackouts, as though anyone needed to learn the cause, and he completely ducked any responsibility. He should rather glance at a mirror.
California’s politicians, especially its former four-term loquacious governor, Jerry Brown, have made it state policy to force so-called “renewable” energy to replace fossil fuels. Accordingly, much of the state’s abundant energy sources underground and offshore are off-limits.  Gov. Newsom is another global warming disciple of Gov. Brown, only now such policies are palpably and increasingly harming the state’s residents.

The strategy has long been for climate alarmists to restrict access to fossil fuels and nuclear power by restricting development and closing power plants in order to create markets for renewable energy.  The result is people and businesses are forced to pay for higher-priced, less reliable wind and solar energy with limited fossil fuels accessible.  The problem is summers get hot, especially in southern California.  In fact, summers have always been hot there, and not because of “global warming.”

Renewable energy has nowhere near the capacity to make up for restricted fossil fuel supply.

Simple laws of economics say that insufficient supply to meet current demand results in shortages and higher prices.  In the case of electrical energy in California, lack of supply to meet demand means the lights don’t turn on and the air conditioner doesn’t work, along with everything else needing power.............To Read More....

Democrats Say California Is Model For Climate Action But Its Blackouts Say Otherwise

Michael Shellenberger

At the Democratic National Convention this week, presidential and vice-presidential candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will make the case for spending $2 trillion, or $500 billion per year, to transition the U.S. away from fossil fuels toward renewables like solar and wind.
Biden has said he would not “tinker around the edges” with his plan. “We’re going to make historic investments that will seize the opportunity.”

In many respects, the Biden-Harris plan is even more aggressive than California’s. “The plan is very bold,” Leah Stokes of the University of California, Santa Barbara, told the Financial Times. “There is no [US] state right now that has a target this ambitious.”..........  To Read More...

• What Contains 3 Times More Energy Than Gasoline, But Produces Zero CO2?
• Why California"s Climate Policies Are Causing Electricity Blackouts
• Blackouts Expose Perils And Costs Of California's "Electrify Everything" Push

The California blackouts and solar power

October 14, 2019

One valuable lesson has been learned from the California blackouts concerning the green’s much-vaunted solar power.   People with solar panels fitted to their homes have long acted under the impression that these granted them some immunity to blackouts. They now know better. Those who went to the heavy expense of purchasing and installing solar panels are in the same situation as their neighbors: no light, no heat, no power.

How does this make sense? If you’ve got a system that generates power all by itself, with no outside aid or assistance necessary, then it’s a sure thing that it’ll continue generating power even after the grid itself is shut down, right? Ah, but we’re dealing here with corporate policy. And when that enters the picture, then sense of any kind quickly departs the stage. It turns out that solar panels do not supply power to the homes they are attached to. Instead, they transmit power out into the grid itself.
A complex system of credits is employed to reimburse the homeowner.............. To Read More

My Take - I do love California.  Californians are just perfect example of what not to do they almost have a monopoly on being wrong.  I certainly hope they keep it up, because if we're ever confused about what to do about any given subject, we can just watch to see what California does and then just automatically do the opposite. 

Thank you California....keep it up!!!!!