A new study has found that a vast majority of climate policies enacted since 1998 across 41 countries have been utterly ineffective. //

The study, published in the Journal of Science, evaluated about 1,500 climate policies implemented between 1998 and 2022 by 41 OECD countries (The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). The study found only 63 policies (about 4 percent) that, combined, had successfully “reduced total emissions between 0.6 and 1.8 Gt CO2.” Due to the low success rate, researchers estimate the CO2 emissions from the 41 nations they studied will exceed the Paris Climate Agreement target by 23 billion metric tons by 2030.

More importantly, the study found that two popular tools most governments’ climate policies rely on — subsidies and regulations — rarely reduce emissions. Researchers found some form of carbon tax approach was more effective at reducing emissions. //

Following the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) that pledged over $110 billion in climate and energy funding, the administration introduced its Green New Deal with a grossly misleading label, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), in 2022, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the deciding vote in the Senate. The IRA purported to allocate $369 billion for climate change and energy over the next decade. However, the latest Congressional Budget Office’s projection of the IRA’s climate tax credit through year 2033 has already jumped to a staggering $428 billion, a rapid 16 percent increase than the IRA originally planned. //

The Harris-Walz campaign, as pointed out by The Wall Street Journal editorial board, has shamefully used the word “freedom” to “disguise that Democratic policies seek to restrict liberty across American society.” Voters who want to be free from the government’s wasteful spending and infringement on individual rights should not fall for the Democrat’s and Harris’ deception in the upcoming election.

"At last a book that comprehensively reveals the true facts about sustainable energy in a form that is both highly readable and entertaining."

Last November, Virgin Atlantic Airways made headlines for completing the world’s first transatlantic flight using “100 percent sustainable aviation fuel.”

This week, the Advertising Standard Authority (ASA) of the U.K. banned a Virgin radio ad released prior to the flight, in which they touted their “unique flight mission.” While Virgin did use fuel that releases fewer emissions than traditional supplies, the regulatory agency deemed the company’s sustainability claim “misleading” because it failed to give a full picture of the adverse environmental and climate impacts of fuel.

Todd Lewis, a commenter on my previous article on PJ Media, put it succinctly. “It is a way for governments to advance totalitarian control of the populace, wreck the economy, and disempower the middle class.” His thesis is backed up in Joel Kotkin’s masterpiece "The Coming of Neo-Feudalism." Kotkin chronicles how the once-numerous and thriving middle class is relentlessly being phased out of existence by a power elite intent on re-medievalizing society while advancing their own social, political, and economic supremacy. Like the serf who lacked freedom of movement and was bound to the lord’s estate, the enfiefed EV owner for various reasons is tethered to a sort of manorial orbit.

The fact is that EV obsession has nothing to do with “saving the earth,” replacing fossil energy with presumably “clean” alternatives, or reducing across-the-board costs involving transportation and maintenance — all of which reasons are contra-indicated by the facts. They are delusions, mere fetishes, or outright lies that a modicum of sober research would render null and void. The real issue has to do with the ongoing battle between a market economy and a command economy, between a business-oriented system and a centripetal Marxist political organization, and between an individualistic political economy and oligarchic socialism.

The EV project is a major strategy in a political program that envisages replacing not simply fossil fuel propulsion with electrical power, which is neither feasible nor even conceivable, but swapping a free market economy, in which the law of supply and demand determines output and prices, for a centralized government authority that dictates production, prices, and distribution. Top-down control supersedes private enterprise.

In a command economy, the managerial class and state officials control the means of production, set prices, determine production goals, and limit or prohibit competition — as opposed to private individuals and joint-stock companies freely transacting business for personal profit or in the interest of stockholders, their decisions based on consumer demand. //

FrankD92
16 hours ago
“It is a way for governments to advance totalitarian control of the populace, wreck the economy, and disempower the middle class.”

These are exactly the purposes of the entire climate change hoax and associated "green new" scam.

While on the subject of Equinor, I would like to recommend a fabulous piece written by energy expert Robert Bryce. He noted that The NGOs have been shameless in their collusion with foreign corporations, including Equinor, which are collecting billions in federal tax credits to construct wind projects.

But more importantly, Bryce examines the green energy realities based on the science of physics:

…Big Wind is facing a crisis caused by simple physics. The turbines now being deployed onshore and offshore are failing far sooner than expected. Why? They have gotten too big.

Yes, bigger wind turbines are more efficient than their smaller cousins. But the larger the turbine, the more its components get hit by the stresses that come with their size and weight.

The GE Vernova Haliade-X wind turbine used at Vineyard Wind stands 260 meters high and sweeps an area of 38,000 square meters. That means the turbine captures wind energy over an area five times larger than a soccer pitch.

But here’s the critical part: its blades are 107 meters (351 feet) long and weigh 70 tons. In addition, the rotor of the massive machine spans 220 meters. For comparison, the wingspan of a Boeing 737 is 34 meters.

In other words, the turbines at Vineyard Wind are nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower and each of their blades weighs more than a fully loaded 737. piece has an eye-opening piece on the physics associated with the massive wind projects that touches upon blade size.

PJM’s capacity auction has competitively secured resources to meet the RTO reliability requirement for the 2025/2026 Delivery Year. Auction prices were significantly higher across the RTO due to decreased electricity supply caused primarily by a large number of generator retirements, combined with increased electricity demand and implementation of FERC-approved market reforms.

While the overall resource mix is adequate, two zones cleared just short of their reserve requirement, resulting in prices being set at the zonal cap.

The higher prices send a clear investment signal across PJM’s 13 states and the District of Columbia. //

The auction cleared a diverse mix of resources, including 48% of gas, 21% of nuclear, 18% of coal, 1% of solar, 1% of wind, 4% of hydro, 5% of demand response and 2% from other resources. //

The amount of supply resources in the auction decreased again this year, continuing the trend from recent auctions and underlining PJM’s stated concerns (PDF) about generation resources facing pressure to retire without replacement capacity being built quickly enough to replace them. Approximately 6,600 MW of generation have retired or have must-offer exceptions (signaling intent to retire) compared with the generators that offered in the 2024/2025 Base Residual Auction (BRA).

Meanwhile, the peak load forecast for the 2025/2026 Delivery Year has increased from 150,640 MW for the 2024/2025 BRA to 153,883 MW for the 2025/2026 Delivery Year. Additionally, FERC-approved market reforms contributed to tightening the supply and demand balance by better estimating the impact of extreme weather on load and more accurately determining resource reliability value.

These reliability concerns associated with reducing supply and increasing demand are not limited to PJM; the North American Electric Reliability Corporation has identified elevated risk to the reliability of the electrical grid for much of the country outside of PJM. To facilitate the entry of new resources, PJM is implementing its FERC-approved generation interconnection reform, with approximately 72,000 MW of resources expected to be processed in 2024 and 2025. //

The auction produced a price of $269.92/MW-day for much of the PJM footprint, compared to $28.92/MW-day for the 2024/2025 auction. Capacity auction prices fluctuate annually based on the need for investment in generation resources.

This year’s auction procured 135,684 MW for the period of June 1, 2025, through May 31, 2026. The total Fixed Resource Requirement (FRR) obligation is an additional 10,886 MW for a total of 146,570 MW.

The total procured capacity in the auction and resource commitments under FRR represents an 18.5% reserve margin, compared to a 20.4% reserve margin for the 2024/2025 Delivery Year.

The TYNDP 2024 will assess how 176 transmission and 33 storage projects respond to the TYNDP scenarios. Learn more about the projects by clicking on their location on the map below or filter projects by country, type of infrastructure or status. More information about the projects will become available with the release of TYNDP 2024 for public consultation at the end of 2024.

EU is planning power lines from the wind fields on the Atlantic down to the south – and from the sunny deserts up to the north.

https://tyndp2024.entsoe.eu/projects-map

President Joe Biden’s climate agenda is likely to deliver blackouts for millions, according to a North Dakota state assessment of new rules finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

In May, the North Dakota Transmission Authority published a report with the firm Always On Energy Research examining implications of the EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations on the state’s power grid.

The EPA’s strict emissions standards, researchers reported, “is not technologically feasible for lignite-based power generation facilities.” State investigators say the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Rule, finalized this spring, will force the premature retirement of reliable coal plants so they can be replaced by intermittent, weather-dependent sources such as wind and solar. //

“We determined the closure of lignite-fired powered plants,” they added, “would increase the severity of projected future capacity shortfalls, i.e. rolling blackouts.”

Larry Behrens, the communications director for the energy non-profit Power the Future, called less power and higher energy prices “two guarantees of Joe Biden’s energy failures.”

“Sadly, the threat of blackouts is the logical result of efforts to destroy reliable energy sources in favor of intermittent wind and solar,” Behrens told The Federalist.

The North Dakota state findings corroborate warnings issued by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC) 2024 Summer Reliability Assessment published last month. The Atlanta-based non-profit cautioned that the power grid will face extreme stress under higher-than-average temperatures expected this summer. //

Alex Epstein @AlexEpstein
·
Replying to @AlexEpstein
To function at its potential, AI requires massive amounts of power. E.g., state-of-the-art data centers can require as much electricity as a large nuclear reactor. ["several gigawatts"]
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Alex Epstein @AlexEpstein
·
Electricity demand from US data centers already doubled between 2014 and 2023. Now with the fast growth of energy-hungry AI, demand from data centers could triple from 2.5% to 7.5% of our electricity use by 2030, according to Boston Consulting Group.
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3:17 PM · May 23, 2024

Councilwoman Vickie Paladino @VickieforNYC
·
We must destroy the environment to save it!

Once every Joshua Tree is uprooted to make room for acres solar panels and the whales and birds are killed by windmills, and electricity is expensive and intermittent for all but the wealthiest, we’ll have saved the planet!

This is all much better than building a few modern nuclear plants.

John Solomon @jsolomonReports
Joshua trees growing for over 100 years will be cleared for solar farm in California https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/energy/joshua-trees-growing-over-100-years-will-be-cleared-solar-farm-california
8:55 PM · Jun 7, 2024

In June of last year, a 14,000-panel 5.2 MW solar panel farm called the Scottsbluff Community Solar Array in Nebraska was blasted by baseball-sized hail. There wasn’t any question that the array would be brought back online because the power company had no choice. Leaving it would have been a PR disaster worse than having the array destroyed by hail.

It took 7 months to bring it back online. //

Solar releases a nasty thing called nitrogen trifluoride. And, what, pray tell is NF3’s impact on the environment? It is reportedly 17,000 times worse for the atmosphere than the dreaded CO2.

And there are other inconvenient facts like 80 percent of the silicon torn from the earth during the mining is eventually lost making crystalline silicon. A cancer biologist named David H. Nguyen noted that toxic chemicals associated with solar farms include cadmium telluride, cadmium gallium, copper indium selenide, and a bunch of other nasty toxins. Sometimes you have to wreck the environment to save it.

Solar acolytes will grudgingly admit that there is a chemical downside to manufacturing solar panels – like a byproduct called silicon tetrachloride. It’s toxic and, if not handled properly, will cause severe burns. If it is inadvertently combined with water it can create hydrochloric acid. But hey, they are made in China so, never mind. //

Northeast of Edward Air Force Base sits the tiny town of Boron. The surrounding desert is home to desert wildlife including the Joshua tree. It will soon be home to a vast solar farm owned by Aratina Solar Center. Joshua trees can survive 200 years in the desert heat but they won’t survive in Aratina’s heat sink of a project.

About 3,500 Joshua trees will be uprooted and destroyed to make room for the solar farm. Aratina (owned mostly by a private equity group known as KKR). To mitigate the bad press, Aratina is shredding trees on-site rather than piling them like so many corpses. //

On completion, the project will blacken about 2,300 acres but it will generate power for up to 180,000 homes. //

Sometimes you gotta kill a tree, to save a tree.  

As global governments push for a rapid transition to electric vehicles and to wind and solar power, they are creating a demand for copper that threatens to undermine the very goals they seek to achieve.

According to a recent International Energy Forum report, electrifying the global vehicle fleet would require the opening of 55% more new copper mines than are already needed, and twice the total amount of copper that has ever been mined throughout human history over the next three decades. //

Since copper is a core component in electronics, raising the cost of copper makes it far more difficult for developing areas of the world to access energy. Copper is a crucial component in electric vehicles. A typical EV requires nearly 200 pounds of copper, or about four times the amount needed for a combustion-engine vehicle. //

The energy industry is facing government mandates for wind and solar. A typical 3-megawatt wind turbine requires 9 tons of copper, more than the weight of a school bus. Wind power requires more than seven times the amount of copper to produce the same amount of energy that natural gas or coal does, and five times the copper as nuclear power. //

Policymakers pushing for a rapid shift to EVs and renewables are also responsible for the red tape in mining for critical minerals. Without more mining, the planned EVs won’t be built. Even Chinese critical materials won’t get America all the way to its EV targets.

40% of US need for lithium could be covered by Pennsylvania's fracking byproduct.

flailed like a beached fish trying to explain why the Biden administration has only built eight electrical vehicle charging stations despite the fact they've promised over half a million by 2030. //

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the massive infrastructure package Biden signed in 2021, earmarks $7.5 billion for EV charging programs while the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act expands tax credits for EVs and charger installations.

To date, only eight have been built since Biden signed the legislation, according to reporting by Autoweek. //

RNC Research
@RNCResearch
·
Follow
CBS plays a clip for Pete Buttigieg of President Trump slamming Biden's insane electric vehicle mandate: "We're spending hundreds of billions of dollars subsidizing a car that nobody wants!"

MARGARET BRENNAN: "He's not wrong."

BUTTIGIEG: "Oh, he's wrong."

BRENNAN: "He's not."

3:39 PM · May 26, 2024
2.1K
Reply

When I finally plugged the Hyundai Ioniq 6 into a 120V outlet outside of my home, the battery level was 36% with an estimated range of 135 miles. Fast forward 14 hours and 33 minutes later, I proceeded to get into the Ioniq 6 only to realize it managed to get to just 42% overnight — roughly giving it a range of 162 miles. This tacked on an estimated 27 additional miles from where it started the previous night.

I think this is worth pointing out because there needs to be an expectation put forward for first time EV buyers. I was certainly shocked by the results after charging it overnight, so while Level 1 charging is convenient, it would take days for it to fully charge due to the slower charging speed. However, if your daily commute amounts to less than 20 miles in total, charging at Level 1 speed shouldn’t be a problem. //

For example, the Ioniq 6 can get up to an 80% charge in 73 minutes using a 50kW charger. And if you can somehow find a station around you that offers 350kW charging, it would take 18 minutes worth of charging to get the Ioniq 6 to 80%. I often tell prospective and first time EV drivers that they should reserve charging at a station when it’s an emergency or if they plan on driving long distances.

On Tuesday, a series of tornadoes ripped across central Iowa, dealing an as-yet unknown amount of damage and resulting in multiple deaths.

Tornadoes are nothing new to Iowa residents, especially in this rolling farm country southwest of Des Moines. It's tornado country; it has been since longer than people — any people — have lived in the area, and it always will be tornado country. //

Granted the human cost of these storms far, far outweighs any concern about windmills. But that doesn't preclude us from examining yet another failure of the whole "green" energy agenda. //

Bear in mind that not only have these windmills, installed at great expense, been flattened by what every Iowan could have said would happen sooner or later — a tornado — but the aftermath of those tornadoes, along with the human and property cost, has generated what looks to be a great deal of toxic smoke but also has compromised one leg of central Iowa's electrical generation capacity.

The same issue could easily arise with solar panels. Look at any solar panel field and consider the likely outcome of a tornado — or any other major storm, with high winds or hail.

Last week, leading lights of the global fossil power industry gathered at a conference in Houston, Texas, for CERA, known in the sector as the “Davos of Energy”. They reportedly got the shock of their professional careers.

They had invited the most senior executives from the biggest network owner (Chine State Grid Corp) in the biggest energy market in the world (China). The organisers fully expected their Chinese guest to endorse the “all of the above” marketing pitch, which is underpinning the “keep coal” campaign.

No such luck. Despite prodding by leading oil industry commentator Daniel Yergin, the chairman of State Grid Liu Zhenya reportedly said the “fundamental solution was to accelerate clean energy, with the aim of replacing coal and oil.”

As the network operator builds out its clean power sources, they noted, coal-fired generators could only serve as “reserve power” to supplement renewables.

“The only hurdle to overcome is ‘mindset’,” Liu said. “There’s no technical challenge at all.” //

New data bears this out. In China, thermal power plant utilisation rates (capacity factors) declined from 56.2 per cent on average in 2014 to a record low of just 50.9 per cent in 2015.

“This highlights coal is not ‘base load’, even in China,” Buckley says. “It is the marginal source of supply. Coal-fired power plants aren’t designed to run only half the time, but that is what is happening in China, and increasingly that is occurring in India as well.” //

Indeed, CLP, the Hong Kong-based owner of the Yallourn and Mt Piper coal-fired power stations in Australia, revealed this week that its “flagship” Jhajjar coal plant in India ran at a capacity factor of just 49.9 per cent in 2015.

In Australia, it was even worse. The 1,400MW Mt Piper power station near Lithgow in NSW operated at just 45 per cent of its capacity, even after its neighbouring Wallerawang coal plant had been shut down.

Other black coal generators have been similarly afflicted, so much so that the Northern power station in South Australia is to shut permanently in May. //

A study by energy consultant Energeia suggests that wind energy will become the default “base load” generation in South Australia, and dispatchable power sources – which previously dominated the grid, the markets and the business models – will have to fill in the gaps left by wind and solar. //

The gaps would be filled by flexible plant such as solar towers, or battery storage, or from gas – as long as it can compete with the new technologies.

It costs less energy to get fossil fuels, but we can't use them as efficiently.

It doesn't take a lot of energy to dig up coal or pump oil from the ground. In contrast, most renewable sources of energy involve obtaining and refining resources, sophisticated manufacturing, and installation. So, at first glance, when it comes to the energy used to get more energy—the energy return on investment—fossil fuels seem like a clear winner. That has led some to argue that transitioning to renewables will create an overall drop in net energy production, which nobody is interested in seeing.

A new study by researchers at the UK's University of Leeds, however, suggests that this isn't a concern at all—in most countries, renewables already produce more net energy than the fossil fuels they're displacing. The key to understanding why is that it's much easier to do useful things with electricity than it is with a hunk of coal or a glob of crude oil. //

Focusing on utility makes a substantial difference. Using the 2020 data, the final, delivered-to-end-user EROI of fossil fuels is quite good, at approximately 8.5, meaning you get about 8.5 units of energy out for every one you invest. (This is averaged across all fuels and uses.) Once you try to do something useful with it, however, it drops dramatically so that the useful-stage EROI is only about 3.5. Which, to be clear, is bad—you want to be getting as much useful energy as possible for every unit of energy you put into things.

Different fuels have very different profiles, however. Natural gas has the highest useful-stage EROI at 9.5, coal is at 7.2, and oil products are only 2, meaning we only get about twice as much energy out of gasoline as we put into producing and using it. Most of these values have been largely unchanged for the past 50 years except for natural gas, which has seen a dramatic drop in the EROI of getting it ready to use (possibly due to the energy costs of fracking—the trend is most notable in the 1980s), and a smaller drop in useful-stage EROI.

A large contributor to these values is how these fuels are put to use. For example, the useful-stage EROI for natural gas in heating buildings is about 12, meaning it can be used reasonably efficiently. The value for heating with oil products is only about 5. Oil products used in road and rail propulsion are also terrible, being just above 2 for rail travel and under 2 for roads.

Renewable energy, in this analysis, is focused on things like wind and solar, which deliver electrons to the grid (things like renewable production of methane are pretty minor at this point). Those can be used for things like heating, rail and road transit, and other uses performed by fossil fuels. Many of these uses are extremely efficient—things like heat pumps and electric motors are much better at turning energy into utility than their fossil fuel equivalents. //

chekk Smack-Fu Master, in training
4y
47
A bit confused by the "Energy efficiency and utility" section:

final-stage EROIs, which tracked the energy used to get a unit of energy to where it's ready for use—so, all the energetic costs of extraction, processing, and delivery
and:
The one thing this doesn't include is the energy cost of the infrastructure needed to extract fossil fuels

What about the energy cost of the infrastructures for processing and delivery? Are those included or not?
To put it a different way, what does "all the energetic costs" actually mean? //

SnoopCatt Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
7m
524
Subscriptor
While the energetic cost of getting energy in the hands of people in a form that's ready for use is a "useful" metric, I think we also need to consider the cost of being able to use energy when we need to. For renewables, this means factoring the cost of batteries or other energy storage mechanisms. //

kevbo Seniorius Lurkius
5y
6
Subscriptor++
I'm looking at the paper: I'm not seeing anything about end-of-life disposal costs. That's one of the "renewable feels like it is more expensive" points: turbine blades and toxic solar panels and batteries need to be disposed of. Of course, it doesn't seem to account for disposing traditional power plants either. I don't know what that end of life cost does to this kind of calculation. I wish it was covered. //

jdbosma Seniorius Lurkius
13y
12
Subscriptor++
It's not clear that this study correctly accounts for the difference between work and heat.
Fossil fuels produce heat. Solar-thermal renewables do too, but photovoltaics and wind produce work (electricity).
Heat is energy that moves from one location to another only under the influence of a termperature difference. Work is energy that can (theoretically) be converted to lifting a weight in a gravitational field, among other useful tasks.
Both work and and heat are energy, i.e. measured in Joules. To convert heat to work is possible, using a heat engine, but under typical conditions no more than about 40% of the heat can be converted to work. The theoretical upper limit on heat engine efficiency is provided by the Carnot relation - achievable implementations always fall short of the maximum.
Direct generation of work energy, as performed by photovoltaics and wind power, is more flexible and in most cases preferable to generation of heat. For one thing, work as electrical power is readily transported over long distances by wire. Work can readily be converted to heat with no loss of energy. When the desired output involves moving heat, a unit of work can sometimes move several times its energy value of heat - this principle is applied in heat pumps for space heating.
It does not make sense to compare the EROI for the heating value of fossil fuels against the electrical value of wind power, since a Joule of work is worth roughly 3x a Joule of heat in some applications, and a Joule of work can always be converted to a Joule of heat when that is desired.
To be most useful, the study should separately compare the EROIs for processes where the output is heat vs. work. //

pete.d Ars Centurion
6y
259
Subscriptor
The article doesn't mention nuclear at all. Did the researchers even consider that energy source, or were they strictly comparing fossil fuels with renewables?

There has been a lot of debate, especially lately, regarding whether nuclear energy is in fact cost-competitive with renewables, even ignoring the lengthy construction times involved. It would've been really interesting to see where nuclear fit into this analysis.

U.S. electricity generation from wind turbines decreased for the first time since the mid-1990s in 2023 despite the addition of 6.2 gigawatts (GW) of new wind capacity last year. Data from our Power Plant Operations Report show that U.S. wind generation in 2023 totaled 425,235 gigawatthours (GWh), 2.1% less than the 434,297 GWh generated in 2022.

U.S. wind capacity increased steadily over the last several years, more than tripling from 47.0 GW in 2010 to 147.5 GW at the end of 2023. Electricity generation from wind turbines also grew steadily, at a similar rate to capacity, until 2023. Last year, the average utilization rate, or capacity factor, of the wind turbine fleet fell to an eight-year low of 33.5% (compared with 35.9% in 2022, the all-time high). //

anon-onh5
7 hours ago
I've driven across the west at night and I have a question that I've never seen addressed. People talk about light pollution all the time but no one mentioned that the NOTAM lights on these wind farms practically turns the night into day (granted reddish day but still day). I would truly hate to try to sleep anywhere near them. Now what does this do to the lifestyle and habits of the local wildlife? I'm not much of a naturalist but don't prey animals get a bit of a break on dark nights? Well there are no such things as dark nights on a windmill farm. So if the prey animals leave, there go the predators. And if the prey animals leave, there goes your ground cover also because it's the rodents and birds that scatter seeds. Am I right?

Toronto-based Hydrostor Inc. is one of the businesses developing long-duration energy storage that has moved beyond lab scale and is now focusing on building big things. The company makes systems that store energy underground in the form of compressed air, which can be released to produce electricity for eight hours or longer. //

Unlike some other long-duration storage companies, Hydrostor has proven its technology. The company has operated a small, 1.75-megawatt plant in Goderich, Ontario, since 2019, which can run for about six hours at a time. Compressed-air storage existed before Hydrostor—plants in Germany and Alabama have been around for decades and use variations on this approach.

Hydrostor’s system uses a supersize air compressor that ideally would run on renewable electricity. The system draws air from the environment, compressing it and moving it through a pipe into a cavern more than 1,000 feet underground. The process of compressing the air produces heat, and the system extracts heat from the air and stores it above ground for reuse. As the air goes underground, it displaces water from the cavern up a shaft into a reservoir.

When it’s time to discharge energy, the system releases water into the cavern, forcing the air to the surface. The air then mixes with heat that the plant stored when the air was compressing, and this hot, dense air passes through a turbine to make electricity.

Under the new plan, however, all such habitats would be categorically off-limits as soon as it is discovered that the land is occupied by a listed species. Any potential impacts to endangered species habitats that are discovered in the course of site surveys (usually after millions of dollars have already been expended on the project application) would kill the project entirely.

The permitting risk, already prohibitive for many new projects, could put whole states beyond the reach of all but the most hardy (or foolish) developers. The solar energy areas under the new solar plan overlap substantially with areas containing multiple endangered and threatened species. This endangered species exclusion alone would eliminate virtually all new solar development in Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, which lead the nation in solar capacity per acre. //

Even for the 14% of BLM land left available for solar project development after all these exclusions, the new plan imposes onerous permitting requirements. These include some 600 mandatory design elements.

Some of these verge on the comical. BLM proposes a blanket prohibition on “grading” (leveling out land), which is indispensable for access roads, utility-scale batteries, transmission poles, and construction staging. The plan also prohibits development within 200 feet of ephemeral streams (those that come into existence, for example, after heavy rainfall, and then go away) and requires 75% residual vegetation around the development.

These requirements will be impossible to meet economically for many projects, and even where possible, would significantly expand the amount of land required per unit of electricity, thus defeating the goal of conservation. //

Most surprisingly, the new plan does not address any of the major problems that years of experience have revealed in the permitting process for solar and other energy projects on BLM land. On the contrary, it makes the permitting challenges even worse for existing projects applications, which are not “grandfathered” in any respect. Many solar project applications already in process will have to start over, and many of those applicants will prefer to cut their losses instead.

Many projects’ applications have been pending for years, and companies have already negotiated operational and power-purchase agreements of various kinds and would be bankrupted by having to start over.

This demonstrates a problem with heavily regulated sectors: Officials feel all too free to “move the goal posts” with little concern for the enormous losses they are causing developers and investors and little understanding that these are social losses that impact everybody.

For Americans to avoid a prolonged period of energy scarcity in the high-demand decade ahead, the nation will require a significant expansion in electricity generation. The bulk of that will need to come from nuclear and fossil sources, which are significantly more abundant, “energy dense,” and reliable than renewable sources like solar and wind. //

The new solar plan is being promoted as a partial solution, but even a brief review shows clearly that it will only make those problems worse. The plan is a clear sellout to left-wing environmentalists. And it shows that while those environmentalists hate fossil fuels, they don’t particularly love renewable energy—or energy of any kind.

They mean to save the planet for what they think is the planet’s sake, not for our sake. And if in the process they plunge the world into energy scarcity—a much grimmer fate than all the doomsday climate scenarios put together—in their minds, that’s just too bad for us.