507 private links
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the president signed into law the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act, bipartisan legislation to provide a major boost to the future of nuclear energy in America. //
The ADVANCE Act will:
Facilitate American Nuclear Energy Leadership by:
Empowering the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to lead in international forums to develop regulations for advanced nuclear reactors.
Directing the Department of Energy (DOE) to improve its process for approving the export of American technology to international markets, while maintaining strong standards for nuclear non-proliferation.
Support Development and Deployment of New Nuclear Energy Technologies by:
Reducing regulatory costs for companies seeking to license advanced nuclear reactor technologies.
Creating a prize to incentivize the successful deployment of next-generation reactor technologies.
Requiring the NRC to develop a pathway to enable the timely licensing of microreactors and nuclear facilities at brownfield and retired fossil-fuel energy generation sites.
Directing the NRC to establish an accelerated licensing review process to site and construct reactors at existing nuclear sites.
Preserve Existing Nuclear Energy by:
Modernizing outdated rules that restrict international investment.
Strengthen America’s Nuclear Energy Fuel Cycle and Supply Chain Infrastructure by:
Directing the NRC to enhance its ability to qualify and license accident-tolerant fuels and advanced nuclear fuels that can increase safety and economic competitiveness for existing reactors and the next generation of advanced reactors.
Tasking the NRC to evaluate advanced manufacturing techniques to build nuclear reactors better, faster, cheaper, and smarter.
The federal government recently made a big move to streamline the nuclear regulatory process. The ADVANCE Act, signed into law on July 9, will make building new nuclear reactors easier everywhere in the country. //
First, it will streamline the process for converting “covered sites” (land formerly used for coal plants, factories, etc.) into nuclear reactor sites. Missouri is moving toward shuttering its coal plants—meaning that many covered sites will become available. //
Second, the ADVANCE Act mandates that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) expedite the “combined license” process for applicants building at a site where a nuclear plant currently operates or has previously operated.
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.
A bipartisan bill that will advance the development of nuclear energy power plants in the nation was passed by the United States Senate on Tuesday. In an 88-2 vote, the Senate voted to pass the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act, which is part of the Fire Grants and Safety Act (S.8.70), according to a press release from the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW). The ADVANCE Act will now move forward to President Joe Biden’s desk to be signed. //
The Bill only needs to be 2 lines long as expressed by poster #7. However, the ADVANCE Act is 156 pages so I fear what else is in there. That said, the Union of Constrained Anxientists is already attacking it so it must be good for America. //
This wouldn't have anything to do with Bill Gates recent investment, would it?
Nuclear power could be America’s saving grace — if progressive activists would only stop kneecapping its spread.
Although it’s both clean and abundant, nuclear power is often overlooked by a misinformed public and environmental activists alike.
But change makers like Bill Gates are championing the technology, and should be celebrated for doing so.
The billionaire philanthropist has invested $1 billion in TerraPower, a brand new nuclear power plant which commenced construction in June in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
A 345-megawatt Natrium reactor — the next-generation of nuclear technology — it’s expected to be safer than traditional fission power plants because sodium is used to cool the reactor.
The plant, which has an estimated total cost of $4 billion, is yet to be approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but Gates said that he’s confident TerraPower will hold up to scrutiny.
To get specific, the Bureau of Land Management shows that 3,377 permits were issued in 2023, supposedly outpacing the 2,507 that Trump's admin approved in its third year in office. This would bring the total number of permits approved to 9,522, leaps and bounds over the 6,541 permits approved by the Trump admin. This was heralded as a victory by press outlets like Politico, despite them all being eco-warriors in every other situation.
But the real numbers were revealed later when technical errors they blamed on the Trump administration were fixed according to the Beacon:
The spokesman added that the agency couldn't vouch for the data from the Politico report in January. And he noted the "online reporting tool can be interpreted in various ways."
BLM's online system was undergoing a system outage at the time of this report.
In February 2023, meanwhile, BLM quietly revised separate figures, lowering the number of unused fossil fuel drilling permits it had approved. The agency changed that number from 9,000 unused permits to less than 6,700, blaming the error on a Trump-era technical change.
The actual number from the Trump administration was 10,795. I'm not a mathematician, but that seems a far larger number to "less than 6,700."
Biden’s latest grand energy plan:
President Joe Biden is prepared to release more oil from the country’s strategic reserves if gas prices increase during the summer. //
The strategic petroleum reserve was set up for a purpose:
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), the world's largest supply of emergency crude oil was established primarily to reduce the impact of disruptions in supplies of petroleum products and to carry out obligations of the United States under the international energy program. //
Dieter Schultz
6 hours ago edited
In a letter sent last month to energy secretary Jennifer Granholm, senior Republican politicians called on the administration to “ensure that the SPR is not abused for political purposes in this election year” and described Biden’s SPR release in 2022 as “a transparent attempt to influence the midterm elections”.
Discouraging the use of the SPR shouldn't be done by an appeal the the administration, it should be accomplished by law.
Sadly, I think we have too many laws but the use and abuse of the SPR by all administrations is one where Congress should be more specific about when the SPR can and can't be used as well as how to minimize the carrying costs by specifying firm requirements for buying on the cheap and selling when oil is dear.
Edit: Given that a few years ago we came very close to filling up US oil storage infrastructure, maybe we ought put a provision in the law to offer to let US oil producers use the SPR rather than building more of their own storage tanks.
Urenco is an international supplier of enrichment services and fuel cycle products for the civil nuclear industry, serving utility customers worldwide who provide low carbon electricity through nuclear generation. //
SWU stands for Separative Work Unit. It is the standard measure of the effort required to separate U235 and U238.
Choose your relevant calculator from the list below. Enter the known quantities before pressing the calculate button to see the result.
The US is still regulating some enriched uranium based on an analysis from the 1950s. //
High-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) has been touted as the go-to fuel for powering next-gen nuclear reactors, which include the sodium-cooled TerraPower or the space-borne system powering Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO). That’s because it was supposed to offer higher efficiency while keeping uranium enrichment “well below the threshold needed for weapons-grade material,” according to the US Department of Energy.
This justified huge government investments in HALEU production in the US and UK, as well as relaxed security requirements for facilities using it as fuel. But now, a team of scientists has published an article in Science that argues that you can make a nuclear bomb using HALEU.
“I looked it up and DRACO space reactor will use around 300 kg of HALEU. This is marginal, but I would say you could make one a weapon with that much,” says Edwin Lyman, the director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of the paper. //
Material that’s under 10 percent uranium-235 is called low-enriched uranium (LEU) and is used in power reactors working today. Moving the enrichment level up to between 10 and 20 percent, we get HALEU; above 20 percent, we start talking about highly enriched uranium, which can reach over 90 percent enrichment for uses like nuclear weapons.
“Historically, 20 percent has been considered a threshold between highly enriched uranium and low enriched uranium and, over time, that’s been associated with the limit of what is usable in nuclear weapons and what isn’t. But the truth is that threshold is not really a limit of weapons usability,” says Lyman. And we knew that since long time ago. //
According to his team, an amount between 700–1,000 kg of HALEU is enough to build a bomb with a 15-kiloton yield—roughly as powerful as the Little Boy bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. Building one of these bombs would be a matter of days or weeks for a rogue country or a terrorist group.
Somewhere along the way, we dropped the original Los Alamos fine print mentioning quantities and tied our security requirements to enrichment levels only. //
Lyman’s team proposes to get back to the Los Alamos study findings and simply classify HALEU as a Category I material in cases when it’s being used in an amount large enough to build a nuclear weapon. “The point of our article is to highlight that pretending HALEU is not weapons-usable could lead to very serious gaps in security if these reactors really become viable and exported to all sorts of places,” Lyman says. //
SFC Ars Centurion
14y
359
Subscriptor++
So you need 1,000Kg to build a bomb. Let's say an armed foreign adversary managed to attack one of these facilities. Exactly how long is it going to take them to both break into the area where the fissile material is being used, get it out of where it's at, and into something to transport it. That is roughly #2,200 lbs we're talking about. Could you do that with a normal moving van? Absolutely. But can you do it in under an hour, without killing everyone involved via radiation poisoning? I'm skeptical. //
GottaSaySomething Ars Scholae Palatinae
7y
1,342
Ed: I totally missed the point. The point of the article is selling it to "iffy" states where you can't control what happens to it. Not it being stolen from the producing country's reactors. //
Quisquis Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
12y
6,846
Heads up for the discussion:
1 ton of uranium is only about two cubic feet. //
Pueo Ars Scholae Palatinae
10y
1,005
jandrese said:
I think it's more of a case where terrorists also get centrifuges...
HALEU still poses more of a risk if we're worried about covert enrichment because by the time you're at 20% you've already done about 90% of the separative work necessary to reach weapons grade uranium. This means you have only 10% of the signal or 10% of the time available to catch the covert enrichment of HALEU vs the cover enrichment of natural uranium. //
Atterus Ars Tribunus Militum
6y
1,663
Time to end the technological dark ages caused by nuclear fears. Nearly every issue surrounding the tech is the result of government meddling and red tape along with lying about providing a place to store what little waste there COULD be if reprocessing was allowed. All due to unfounded fear mongering largely based on a shitty film, braindead communist planners in Russia, and a journalist that thought it was scandalous concrete had elevated radioactivity... decades of stagnation as a result. //
Nick31 Seniorius Lurkius
7y
6
I was interested in this, until I saw that the only source was from the Union of Concerned Scientists, the same group who specializes in fear-mongering and hysteria with their ridiculous "Doomsday Clock." In this case they seem to be using their hypothetical disaster scenarios to ask for the last thing the nuclear power industry needs: more government regulations.
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
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.
Under the terms of the sale, Amazon not only acquired Cumulus' datacenter facilities and associated power infrastructure, but has direct — behind the meter — access to a sizable chunk of the energy generated by the nuclear plant's two reactors.
Over the course of its contract with Talen, Amazon expects to unlock upwards of 960 MW of power supply. However, we'll note that the cloud titan has the option to cap this at 480 MW if it doesn't actually need all of it.
We've now learned at least 15 new datacenters will be built adjacent and connected to the fission plant over the next ten years. As we've previously reported, an AWS campus with five buildings may take up 600,000 square feet, or around 13 acres, and capacity of between 50 and 60 megawatts. //
As generative AI has taken off, it's not uncommon to see clusters of 20,000 or more GPUs capable of consuming in excess of 25 megawatts of power, deployed.
40% of US need for lithium could be covered by Pennsylvania's fracking byproduct.
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.
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.
In more than 20 countries, with 40 Powerships, Karpowership has with more than 6,000 MW installed capacity. With our fleet composed of Powerships, FSRUs, LNG Carriers, Support Ships we provide universal access to power for people and communities on 4 continents around the world.
in 2020 a third addendum was signed to increase the capacity to 65 MW. Karpowership is operational in the country since 2018 and has been supplying 80% of Sierra Leone’s total electricity needs. ///
LNG