An Over-Belief in Electrification Is Harming the Climate

January 16, 2023

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by Gustav Melin (Bioenergy International/Swedish Bioenergy Association) ... The energy transition cannot be expedited by support and subsidies -- However, it is difficult to be re-elected on increased carbon dioxide taxes and more expensive energy prices. That’s no excuse, as there are plenty of applications where biofuels or renewable electricity are cheaper than fossil energy.

There are also many opportunities to “help” citizens to switch to renewable energy sources, opportunities that are not being used.

Politicians are happy to use support and subsidies to bring about change. These are important for testing new technology, and for research and development. But for wider use, subsidies often have a detrimental effect by coercing investments into a specific technology or solution at the expense of others – a technology lock-in.

Upgraded biogas – biomethane aka renewable natural gas (RNG) is commonly used as a renewable transportation fuel in public transport in Sweden.[/caption]

For example, what is the climate benefit of changing biomethane-powered buses in many Swedish cities to electric buses?

What is the climate benefit of the bonus-malus system when we know that a diesel car that runs on renewable diesel (HVO100) emits less CO2 during its life cycle than an electric car that runs on Norwegian hydroelectricity?

Why should society pay for electric car charging equipment at the homes of those who can afford to buy an electric car, when society has never otherwise paid for the refueling of cars?

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However, electrification must compete on equal terms with other technologies and solutions. The cost of solving the climate issue with electrification on a global level is unreasonable and impossible within the time frame the climate issue is decided.

Many see electrification as a means to do away with harmful emissions from combustion. But renewable fuels in modern engines, stoves, and cogeneration plants do not cause dangerous emissions.

There is therefore no reasonable or logical environmental reason to give electrification a special position in climate work.

Overhead power lines require vegetation management.

On the contrary, one should be restrictive with building new power lines over forests and land. The environmental problems surrounding battery manufacturing including mining must also be addressed before they are sold on a large scale.

Above all, an over-focus on electrification pushes politicians to postpone important climate decisions.

Believing that you will solve the transport sector’s climate problems solely with electric vehicles is a typical climate disaster caused by propaganda around electrification.

This applies throughout Europe and it applies not least in Sweden if the new government implements its proposal to drastically reduce the use of renewable and sustainable biofuels. READ MORE

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Excerpt from Politico's Power Switch: But utility regulators have rejected a request from renewable energy developers to adjust their power contracts to account for inflation, and Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul vetoed a bill that would have enabled an offshore wind project to connect to New York’s power grid on Long Island.

The state’s overall emissions now exceed pre-pandemic levels. Without adding more renewables to the grid, analysts say, New York will struggle to shift cars, building heating and cooking from fossil fuels to electricity. READ MORE

Excerpt from Politico's Power Switch: To reach its climate goals, the U.S. needs to overhaul the electric grid by adding carbon-free renewable power and retiring power plants that run on coal, oil and natural gas. The challenge is that electricity companies are relying on natural gas to keep power flowing as more energy-intensive factories are built, even as more wind and solar power is brought online.

...

An electric utility in Kansas City, Missouri, is planning to build 1,300 megawatts of natural gas generation as a response to its new customer — a $4 billion electric vehicle battery plant under construction nearby. The company did not have plans for new fossil fuel generation a year earlier.

Atlanta-based Georgia Power predicts its electricity demand will grow 17 times faster than the level initially projected in 2022. It’s seeking approval for new gas turbines and securing contacts with nearby gas-powered plants. READ MORE

Excerpt from Washington Post: The situation is sparking battles across the nation over who will pay for new power supplies, with regulators worrying that residential ratepayers could be stuck with the bill for costly upgrades. It also threatens to stifle the transition to cleaner energy, as utility executives lobby to delay the retirement of fossil fuel plants and bring more online. The power crunch imperils their ability to supply the energy that will be needed to charge the millions of electric cars and household appliances required to meet state and federal climate goals.

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The nation’s 2,700 data centers sapped more than 4 percent of the country’s total electricity in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency. Its projections show that by 2026, they will consume 6 percent. Industry forecasts show the centers eating up a larger share of U.S. electricity in the years that follow, as demand from residential and smaller commercial facilities stays relatively flat thanks to steadily increasing efficiencies in appliances and heating and cooling systems.

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Utility projections for the amount of power they will need over the next five years have nearly doubled and are expected to grow, according to a review of regulatory filings by the research firm Grid Strategies.

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Officials in Columbus, Ohio; Altoona, Iowa; and Fort Wayne, Ind. are being aggressively courted by data center developers. But power supply in some of these second-choice markets is already running low, pushing developers ever farther out, in some cases into cornfields, according to JLL, a commercial real estate firm that serves the tech industry.

...

It is all happening at the same time the energy transition is steering large numbers of Americans to rely on the power grid to fuel vehicles, heat pumps, induction stoves and all manner of other household appliances that previously ran on fossil fuels. A huge amount of clean energy is also needed to create the green hydrogen championed by the White House, as developers rush to build plants that can produce the powerful zero-emissions fuel, lured by generous federal subsidies.

Planners are increasingly concerned that the grid won’t be green enough or powerful enough to meet these demands.

Already, soaring power consumption is delaying coal plant closures in Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin and South Carolina.

...

Microsoft and Google are among the firms hoping that energy-intensive industrial operations can ultimately be powered by small nuclear plants on-site, ....

...

But going off the grid brings its own big regulatory and land acquisition challenges. The type of nuclear plants envisioned, for example, are not yet even operational in the United States.

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“These problems are not going to go away,” said Michael Ortiz, CEO of Layer 9 Data Centers, a U.S. company that is looking to avoid the logjam here by building in Mexico. “Data centers are going to have to become more efficient, and we need to be using more clean sources of efficient energy, like nuclear.”

...

The logjam is already pushing officials overseeing the clean-energy transition at some of the nation’s largest airports to look beyond the grid. The amount of energy they will need to charge fleets of electric rental vehicles and ground maintenance trucks alone is immense. An analysis shows electricity demand doubling by 2030 at both the Denver and Minneapolis airports. By 2040, they will need more than triple the electricity they are using now, according to the study, commissioned by car rental giant Enterprise, Xcel Energy and Jacobs, a consulting firm.

“Utilities are not going to be able to move quickly enough to provide all this capacity,” said Christine Weydig, vice president of transportation at AlphaStruxure, which designs and operates clean-energy projects. “The infrastructure is not there. Different solutions will be needed.” Airports, she said, are looking into dramatically expanding the use of clean-power “microgrids” they can build on-site.

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The process runs through state regulatory agencies, and fights between states over who gets stuck with the bill and where power lines should go routinely sink and delay proposed projects. The amount of new transmission line installed in the United States has dropped sharply since 2013, when 4,000 miles were added. Now, the nation struggles to bring online even 1,000 new miles a year.

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While the proliferation of data centers puts more pressure on states to approve new transmission lines, it also complicates the task. Officials in Maryland, for example, are protesting a plan for $5.2 billion in infrastructure that would transmit power to huge data centers in Loudoun County, Va. The Maryland Office of People’s Council, a government agency that advocates for ratepayers, called grid operator PJM’s plan “fundamentally unfair,” arguing it could leave Maryland utility customers paying for power transmission to data centers that Virginia aggressively courted and is leveraging for a windfall in tax revenue.

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An analysis by the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie found that the energy needed by crypto operations aiming to link to the grid would equal a quarter of the electricity used in the state at peak demand. READ MORE

Excerpt from Washington Post: At issue is the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, a habitat for bald eagles and other migratory birds, through which the power line would run. On March 21, three environmental groups persuaded a federal judge to stop construction temporarily. They hope to stop it for good.

The Cardinal-Hickory Creek line episode is just one conflict pitting the environment against, well, the environment. Solar plants and wind farms, transmission lines and carbon-capture projects face opposition from conservationists and other environmental groups asking courts to stop new infrastructure from encroaching on wetlands, forests and other ecosystems.

Such trade-offs are not new. Unfortunately, neither is the system by which this country evaluates the costs and benefits of protecting the eagles against those of stringing up new power lines. Established by laws such as the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the rules generally lean against developers, written in an era before those developers included promoters of the green power that humanity needs to stave off climate change. “There are a couple of trillion dollars available to develop the clean-energy economy,” noted Ted Nordhaus, who runs the Breakthrough Institute, a nonprofit supporting technological solutions to environmental challenges. “Except we can’t build anything.”

...

Environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, have joined a roughly six-year effort to stop transmission lines that would bring hydropower from Quebec to New England. They have opposed the development of solar energy facilities in the Mojave Desert. Opposition to offshore wind power facilities off the Northeast coast involves a peculiar assortment of bedfellows, including local environmental groups, fisheries and seafood producers, a hotel association and former president Donald Trump. READ MORE

Excerpt from Frederick News Post:

The Public Service Enterprise Group, an energy company based in New Jersey, plans to build a new 500,000-volt transmission line across parts of Frederick, Baltimore and Carroll counties as part of updates to the regional power grid to accommodate growing power needs.

The project, also called the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project (MPRP), will be about 70 miles long. It will extend from northern Baltimore County through Carroll County and into the Doubs substation in southern Frederick County, according to a website about the project.

It is expected to go into service and start delivering power in June 2027.

The transmission line is an update to the regional power grid operated by PJM Interconnection, which coordinates the movement of electricity through multiple states, including all of Maryland.

PJM has predicted a significant increase in power demand on the regional grid due to new data centers to be sited in Maryland and Virginia that are estimated to require up to 7,500 megawatts of electricity, according to the company.

Additionally, 11,000 megawatts of power generation across the regional power grid slated be deactivated, meaning less power will be made even as the demand for electricity keeps growing.

In Frederick County, Quantum Loophole plans to build a campus of data centers on the former site of the Alcoa Eastalco aluminum smelting plant, which is about 2,100 acres, near Adamstown.

The company has already begun building infrastructure and installing fiber optic cables. The campus will be connected to the “data center alley” in Loudoun County in Virginia, which contains 31 million square feet of data centers.

A spokesperson for Quantum Loophole did not respond to requests for comment on the project on Thursday.

In a news release from January, PJM estimated that all of the necessary grid upgrades could cost about $5 billion.

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Since MPRP is a regional project, it is subject to state and federal approval, according to Jen Specht, a spokesperson for the Frederick County Division of Planning and Permitting.

PSEG spokesperson William Smith said the company will be applying for a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity (CPCN) from the Maryland Public Service Commission later this year after gathering public feedback.

A CPCN allows someone to construct a new generating station or high-voltage transmission lines, according to the commission’s website.

PSEG will host several public information meetings in July in each of the counties the project will be built in. The Frederick County sessions will take place at the Brunswick Volunteer Fire Company on July 10.

The first session will be from 2 to 4 p.m., and the second will be from 6 to 8 p.m.

Smith said PSEG will eventually have to apply for some county permits as well, but that won’t come until after the transmission line route has been approved for the CPCN process by the Public Service Commission.

He said that potential routes for the project will be presented to attendees at the public information sessions.

...

Because the transmission line is a regional project, customers served across PJM’s power grid will pay for the project under a cost allocation methodology approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. READ MORE

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