The hydrogen economy is a pipedream. It takes more energy to create and isolate 1 kg than it inherently contains (MJ/Kg). Hydrogen is useful as a chemical feedstock for many important processes though.
I think most of this can be challenged in court, but will anyone do it? The gas and coal plants have been repeatedly told they are going out of business soon, and I expect they have been deferring maintenance. They may just walk away.
The wait list for 500KV circuit breakers is now over 5 years, lower voltages a little shorter. This will effectively stop grid upgrades to connect renewables until at least 2030. The grid will not be able to accept enough renewable power to affect the current energy mix by the end of the decade. This is nuts. Hopefully sanity will return, but maybe too late.
We have seen specific mentions of deferred maintenance in resource planning documents for this exact reason. The agency can’t tell the people they will shut down coal and not expect an increase in the forced outage rate.
I feel that a person should be able to make a case that this was imprudent operation of assets. The ratepayer doesn't get the benefit of productive assets that are off depreciation and out of the rate base but rather pays for a reserve account composed of undepreciated portion of closed plants that is then amortized. The ratepayer shouldn't be responsible for the cost. It should be on the shareholders. I say this as owner of a lot of utility stocks myself.
Who's going to bother to complain? Ratepayer are without a representative since that function has been taken over by ideologies in most regional utilities. Operators will simply be railroaded due to legal costs and the dangled carrot of green subsidies as a way to induce action.
Very interesting. So much of the grid is made of components that are not "off the shelf."
I am pretty well convinced that adding wind and solar, decades ago, started the process of physically destroying the thermal plants and is the reason they are retiring "early" as Mark Christie of the FERC said. Utilities are never going to admit this. PACE, the balancing area I know best, has about 10,000 MW of thermal power total. It is not out of the ordinary to see just the coal plants ramp by 3,000MW in 3hours to balance solar and wind that have vanished. Everyone has probably experimented with their coal plants to try to see what lower limits to operation are, and what ramp rates can be achieved without undue damage. I know Xcel has.
The trouble in proving that adding wind and solar was more like vandalism than it was modernizing the grid, is that damage from excessive ramping looks just like damage from aging in normal operation -- its just far more rapid.
I’m most familiar with CAISO balancing area. The fossil plants are owned by third parties that don’t have an obligation to serve. The plants are old and fully amortized. They have been abused as you describe for a decade. They were slated to be closed because they used ocean water for cooling. That was temporarily suspended. Now this. Only a fool would put money into long term maintenance or improvement under these conditions. They are kept in business by “must run” contracts and capacity payments, which could end tomorrow. I think the owners will walk away rather than try to comply with new requirements.
50 cents per kg is not even theoretically possible using wind and solar as sources per Gogan and Ingersoll. Getting below 1.50 per kg will take huge investments in advanced high temperature nuclear, and it is going to take years to build out that infrastructure. How they can state these numbers with a straight face is beyond me. I wish the EPA would focus on important things like Hg and SOx again…
The authors of this report use phrases like "livable climate" and keeping temperature rise below 1.5 or 2 C. They are strongly pro-renewable and Paris treaty goals. This means, they have failed my litmus test. They are thoroughly invested in the source of our current craziness. For example,
" For example, if we miss the 2°C target, half the world’s population would be exposed to summertime ‘deadly heat,’ Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheets would collapse, droughts would increase by 500%, and the Sahara Desert would begin to expand into southern Europe."
Thoroughly convinced, apparently, of stuff they cannot, nor can anyone else, possibly know; so, why do we trust anything else they say?
I would humbly suggest to not write off good work done by others just because you disagree with part of it or the framing. Different people have different levels of concern. I’m not really bothered by people that worry about it as long as they put forward something plausible and positive. It is the degrowthers and doomers that I can’t stand.
Also the report isn’t written for people of a right leaning bent- they don’t need to be sold on nuclear. It is written for a left wing audience, and you have to talk to them on their terms if you want to convince them, even if it seems ridiculous.
Perhaps, but feeding the sense of apocalypse leads to knee jerk policy. Left leaning people need to hear from authoritative people that we are not going to die from deadly heat if we don't "fix" the problem in ten years. They need the sense that this problem is fixable and can be transitioned reasonably.
A very good read on how the EPA is clamping down on reliable power supply with is new carbon rules. Thankfully, it's not as bad as the initially proposed rules. But we're living in the day and age when "it could be worse" is the best we've got...for now.
There needs to be a new agency closely accountable to congress that is tasked with regulating the other agencies in the public's interest!
It seems clear that the EPA has decided to just legislate away since by the time the Supreme Court gets a chance to rule against them again coal and gas generators will recognize that the EPA will just do it again afterwards
If the agencies are going to legislate then the legislators are fully justified in taking control
I disagree. Any new agency can and will be co-opted by undermining forces. What agency that came about for good reason cannot be used for exactly the opposite one in quick order?
Excellent analysis, gentlemen. Thank you. In its editorial today about this latest EPA action, the Wall Street Journal noted that “EPA says Inflation Reduction Act tax credits and funding in the 2021 infrastructure bill will “incentivize and facilitate the deployment” of carbon capture.” They do not explain, however (neither does the EPA) how the IRA or their new regs will make the metals and materials available to build all of this renewable stuff.
To meet “net zero” by 2050, the US would have to install 88 new 3-MW wind turbines EVERY DAY between now and 2050. In terms of metals and minerals, that’s about 2.8 million tonnes needed. Does anyone have any suggestions as to where that will come from? More importantly, how will that material be mined with the new emission regs? Did the EPA consider production emissions in its calculations?
You discuss in your essay the time to permit new pipelines and injection wells. How about the time required to permit a new mine?
It seems to me that Washington bureaucrats are losing touch with reality.
What's your over\under call on number of major media headlines that will blame climate change if a mid summer heat wave crashes some meaningful piece of the MISO grid?
I'm going with 50, but only because Chicago is on a different grid.
Coal is mostly carbon, w sulfur, hydrogen and ash. Most of the Btu come from carbon, little from hydrogen. So, coal's lb CO2/MWh is very high, 2,000+.
Natural gas, CH4, is 25% hydrogen + H2 has a very high Btu content. Its lb CO2/MWh is around 1,000 for Rankine (steam) or simple Brayton CT (hot gas). A NG fired combined cycle (Brayton over Rankine) does about 750.
Sorry that I am late Isaac, I am at Barber Motorsports Park this weekend enjoying the mega burn of fuel as I enjoy the smell of ethanol fumes. Nothing like a race weekend!
You can almost see Mike Regan with his goodie bag heading back to the office from the Sierra Club meeting over at the DNC, then rolling his sleeves up to do the difficult work of ruining America's energy policy. After several minutes of nose to the grindstone effort, he and his flunkies drive their Teslas home to the Navy Yards or Takoma Park or some equally nauseating SJW neighborhood for an evening's emissions free BBQing of meatless burgers accompanied by artisanal, free trade cocktails and joyless banter.
"The biggest change to the finalized rule is positive for near-term grid reliability because it exempts the nation’s existing natural gas plants from any restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions."
is only positive compared to everything else these nutcases are up to. Yes, it does allow natural gas plants to run unmolested for a time, but it also pushes more burden onto natural gas which considering that natural gas prices are far more volatile than coal to begin with, is simply going to raise consumer prices. Perhaps by a lot. Coal prices are far more predictable. But as anyone who has read the utility IRPs knows, the utilities are abandoning coal almost everywhere by 2035 anyway. They have financial incentives to do so.
And then there is "green" hydrogen. The mind boggles at the prospect. I really thought that West Virginia vs. EPA was supposed to put adult supervision back into government policy. Hydrogen produced at great difficulty, with large expenditure of work, is to be put back into power plants to be burned at low thermal efficiency and the electrical energy thus produced will be used to do what? One fears the whole system will become so opaque that hydrogen will end up producing hydrogen.
As you undoubtedly know, the Biden-Harris Administration also proposes to force "zero emissions" freight. The assaults continue.
Great visual comparing costs of hydrogen and nat gas. I always knew hydrogen was not economically feasible because it takes so much energy to produce hydrogen in the first place. The chemical bond between hydrogen and oxygen in water, for example, is so strong that it takes too much energy to separate them. Same with CH4, methane.
"...The chemical bond between hydrogen and oxygen in water, for example, is so strong..." i.e. part of the reason that combustion is hard to top in terms of energy released.
The notion that CCS is BSER for coal or new natural gas plants is laughable. There are ZERO full scale operational CCS installations in the world.
One of the few things more laughable than that is the notion of apocalyptic climate change driven by anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
Concise synopsis, thank you.
The hydrogen economy is a pipedream. It takes more energy to create and isolate 1 kg than it inherently contains (MJ/Kg). Hydrogen is useful as a chemical feedstock for many important processes though.
I think most of this can be challenged in court, but will anyone do it? The gas and coal plants have been repeatedly told they are going out of business soon, and I expect they have been deferring maintenance. They may just walk away.
The wait list for 500KV circuit breakers is now over 5 years, lower voltages a little shorter. This will effectively stop grid upgrades to connect renewables until at least 2030. The grid will not be able to accept enough renewable power to affect the current energy mix by the end of the decade. This is nuts. Hopefully sanity will return, but maybe too late.
We have seen specific mentions of deferred maintenance in resource planning documents for this exact reason. The agency can’t tell the people they will shut down coal and not expect an increase in the forced outage rate.
I feel that a person should be able to make a case that this was imprudent operation of assets. The ratepayer doesn't get the benefit of productive assets that are off depreciation and out of the rate base but rather pays for a reserve account composed of undepreciated portion of closed plants that is then amortized. The ratepayer shouldn't be responsible for the cost. It should be on the shareholders. I say this as owner of a lot of utility stocks myself.
Hi Kevin, totally agree.
Who's going to bother to complain? Ratepayer are without a representative since that function has been taken over by ideologies in most regional utilities. Operators will simply be railroaded due to legal costs and the dangled carrot of green subsidies as a way to induce action.
Very interesting. So much of the grid is made of components that are not "off the shelf."
I am pretty well convinced that adding wind and solar, decades ago, started the process of physically destroying the thermal plants and is the reason they are retiring "early" as Mark Christie of the FERC said. Utilities are never going to admit this. PACE, the balancing area I know best, has about 10,000 MW of thermal power total. It is not out of the ordinary to see just the coal plants ramp by 3,000MW in 3hours to balance solar and wind that have vanished. Everyone has probably experimented with their coal plants to try to see what lower limits to operation are, and what ramp rates can be achieved without undue damage. I know Xcel has.
The trouble in proving that adding wind and solar was more like vandalism than it was modernizing the grid, is that damage from excessive ramping looks just like damage from aging in normal operation -- its just far more rapid.
I’m most familiar with CAISO balancing area. The fossil plants are owned by third parties that don’t have an obligation to serve. The plants are old and fully amortized. They have been abused as you describe for a decade. They were slated to be closed because they used ocean water for cooling. That was temporarily suspended. Now this. Only a fool would put money into long term maintenance or improvement under these conditions. They are kept in business by “must run” contracts and capacity payments, which could end tomorrow. I think the owners will walk away rather than try to comply with new requirements.
50 cents per kg is not even theoretically possible using wind and solar as sources per Gogan and Ingersoll. Getting below 1.50 per kg will take huge investments in advanced high temperature nuclear, and it is going to take years to build out that infrastructure. How they can state these numbers with a straight face is beyond me. I wish the EPA would focus on important things like Hg and SOx again…
https://www.lucidcatalyst.com/hydrogen-report
Thank you for posting this link! We’ll check it out!
The authors of this report use phrases like "livable climate" and keeping temperature rise below 1.5 or 2 C. They are strongly pro-renewable and Paris treaty goals. This means, they have failed my litmus test. They are thoroughly invested in the source of our current craziness. For example,
" For example, if we miss the 2°C target, half the world’s population would be exposed to summertime ‘deadly heat,’ Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheets would collapse, droughts would increase by 500%, and the Sahara Desert would begin to expand into southern Europe."
Thoroughly convinced, apparently, of stuff they cannot, nor can anyone else, possibly know; so, why do we trust anything else they say?
I would humbly suggest to not write off good work done by others just because you disagree with part of it or the framing. Different people have different levels of concern. I’m not really bothered by people that worry about it as long as they put forward something plausible and positive. It is the degrowthers and doomers that I can’t stand.
Also the report isn’t written for people of a right leaning bent- they don’t need to be sold on nuclear. It is written for a left wing audience, and you have to talk to them on their terms if you want to convince them, even if it seems ridiculous.
Perhaps, but feeding the sense of apocalypse leads to knee jerk policy. Left leaning people need to hear from authoritative people that we are not going to die from deadly heat if we don't "fix" the problem in ten years. They need the sense that this problem is fixable and can be transitioned reasonably.
Just another 3 letter government agency that hates me and my ability to live my life.
A very good read on how the EPA is clamping down on reliable power supply with is new carbon rules. Thankfully, it's not as bad as the initially proposed rules. But we're living in the day and age when "it could be worse" is the best we've got...for now.
There needs to be a new agency closely accountable to congress that is tasked with regulating the other agencies in the public's interest!
It seems clear that the EPA has decided to just legislate away since by the time the Supreme Court gets a chance to rule against them again coal and gas generators will recognize that the EPA will just do it again afterwards
If the agencies are going to legislate then the legislators are fully justified in taking control
I disagree. Any new agency can and will be co-opted by undermining forces. What agency that came about for good reason cannot be used for exactly the opposite one in quick order?
While I don't like the sound of any new agencies, I do agree the legislature needs to rein in all the unelected bureauocrats in agencies like the EPA.
Sure! Let's make that agency filled with representatives that are elected every two years.
Sun, wind, or bust then. Time to add propane backup.
exactly, wealthy survive while others simply die from lack of power.
That would be truly terrible.
Find us the green hydrogen in quantity before making up these rules, please and thank you.
Excellent analysis, gentlemen. Thank you. In its editorial today about this latest EPA action, the Wall Street Journal noted that “EPA says Inflation Reduction Act tax credits and funding in the 2021 infrastructure bill will “incentivize and facilitate the deployment” of carbon capture.” They do not explain, however (neither does the EPA) how the IRA or their new regs will make the metals and materials available to build all of this renewable stuff.
To meet “net zero” by 2050, the US would have to install 88 new 3-MW wind turbines EVERY DAY between now and 2050. In terms of metals and minerals, that’s about 2.8 million tonnes needed. Does anyone have any suggestions as to where that will come from? More importantly, how will that material be mined with the new emission regs? Did the EPA consider production emissions in its calculations?
You discuss in your essay the time to permit new pipelines and injection wells. How about the time required to permit a new mine?
It seems to me that Washington bureaucrats are losing touch with reality.
What's your over\under call on number of major media headlines that will blame climate change if a mid summer heat wave crashes some meaningful piece of the MISO grid?
I'm going with 50, but only because Chicago is on a different grid.
Yeah that’s probably the low end. They’ll do anything but blame the real cause
BSME CU & 35 years in power generation.
It's chemistry, physics, & thermodynamics.
Coal is mostly carbon, w sulfur, hydrogen and ash. Most of the Btu come from carbon, little from hydrogen. So, coal's lb CO2/MWh is very high, 2,000+.
Natural gas, CH4, is 25% hydrogen + H2 has a very high Btu content. Its lb CO2/MWh is around 1,000 for Rankine (steam) or simple Brayton CT (hot gas). A NG fired combined cycle (Brayton over Rankine) does about 750.
lb CO2/MWh = MM Btu/MWh (heat rate) * lb CO2/MM Btu (1/heat content)
So, lb CO2/MWh is a function of both heat/carbon content and station efficiency.
Too few in industry understand this & of course none of the regulators.
Sorry that I am late Isaac, I am at Barber Motorsports Park this weekend enjoying the mega burn of fuel as I enjoy the smell of ethanol fumes. Nothing like a race weekend!
No need to apologize! Great to hear from you as always.
You can almost see Mike Regan with his goodie bag heading back to the office from the Sierra Club meeting over at the DNC, then rolling his sleeves up to do the difficult work of ruining America's energy policy. After several minutes of nose to the grindstone effort, he and his flunkies drive their Teslas home to the Navy Yards or Takoma Park or some equally nauseating SJW neighborhood for an evening's emissions free BBQing of meatless burgers accompanied by artisanal, free trade cocktails and joyless banter.
Guys, This right here...
"The biggest change to the finalized rule is positive for near-term grid reliability because it exempts the nation’s existing natural gas plants from any restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions."
is only positive compared to everything else these nutcases are up to. Yes, it does allow natural gas plants to run unmolested for a time, but it also pushes more burden onto natural gas which considering that natural gas prices are far more volatile than coal to begin with, is simply going to raise consumer prices. Perhaps by a lot. Coal prices are far more predictable. But as anyone who has read the utility IRPs knows, the utilities are abandoning coal almost everywhere by 2035 anyway. They have financial incentives to do so.
And then there is "green" hydrogen. The mind boggles at the prospect. I really thought that West Virginia vs. EPA was supposed to put adult supervision back into government policy. Hydrogen produced at great difficulty, with large expenditure of work, is to be put back into power plants to be burned at low thermal efficiency and the electrical energy thus produced will be used to do what? One fears the whole system will become so opaque that hydrogen will end up producing hydrogen.
As you undoubtedly know, the Biden-Harris Administration also proposes to force "zero emissions" freight. The assaults continue.
Volatility seems to be the goal.
Great visual comparing costs of hydrogen and nat gas. I always knew hydrogen was not economically feasible because it takes so much energy to produce hydrogen in the first place. The chemical bond between hydrogen and oxygen in water, for example, is so strong that it takes too much energy to separate them. Same with CH4, methane.
"...The chemical bond between hydrogen and oxygen in water, for example, is so strong..." i.e. part of the reason that combustion is hard to top in terms of energy released.