Some things seem predictable about volatile energy rule

From an Editorial of the Morgantown Dominion Post, August 15, 2019

It was almost predictable that the other shoe would drop. And that the other shoe would be on the other foot. But what was not predictable were some of the toes on that other foot, among other things.

In 2016, 27 states sued the Obama administration to block the Clean Power Plan (CPP). That plan, launched in 2015 was designed to reduce power plant emisssions 32% below 2005 levels by 2030.

Some estimates show our country is already anywhere from a third to two-thirds of the way to meeting that goal despite that lawsuit resulting in a stay from the U.S. Supreme Court. That stay bought time for the Trump administration to begin repealing the CPP following the president’s election.

In June, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency eliminated the CPP and replaced it with a new rule — the Affordable Clean Energy Rule (ACE). What the ACE does is constrict the EPA’s regulatory responsibilities under the Clean Air Act, setting a low bar on emissions nationwide and empowering states to determine their own limits, among other things.

This week, 21 states, the District of Columbia and six major metropolitan areas sued the Trump administration over its move to ease those restrictions.

Their lawsuit argues not only is the Trump administration trying to prop up an outdated industry — coal — but the ACE is also bad for emerging new energy markets. Of course, it also notes that the science of climate change is indisputable and also comes at a human cost — additional air pollution as a result of the ACE will cost thousands of additional lives, according to the EPA’s own analysis.

Of course, some are going to immediately turn this into a political argument and by all appearances it looks like it. The 27 states that sued the Obama administration were Republican-led while the 21 suing the Trump administration are Democratic-led states.

But a closer look at these 21 states presents some problems with that argument. For one thing, four of those states — Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — all voted to elect President Trump in 2016. Another thing that might be disconcerting for pro-coal business groups and some of our state’s leaders, is Maryland and Virginia also joined Pennsylvania in this lawsuit.

Numerically, these 21 states represent nearly two-thirds of the nation’s population, too. We reject any efforts, and hope courts do too, to roll back carbon restrictions.

It’s unlikely our newspaper will sway the nation’s high court to reject efforts to repeal the Clean Power Plan. But technological trends, energy markets and the power sector decarbonizing faster than expected just might.

By the way, that is predictable.

Elizabeth Twp. includes Monongahela & Youghiogheny Rivers

Facing opposition, Invenergy eyes second site for Elizabeth gas plant, southeast of Pittsburgh

From an Article by Daniel Moore, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 7, 2017

Facing a lengthy legal dispute with Elizabeth Township, a Chicago-based energy developer wants to move its proposed natural gas-fired power plant to what it hopes will be a less contentious plot of land.

Invenergy, which has for more than a year pursued putting a 550-megawatt plant in the township, is offering Elizabeth commissioners a deal: It will drop its court challenge if they allow the plant to go forward on the site of a scrap yard, roughly 10 miles from the original site. The township’s zoning board rejected the original plan in June.

Nick Cohen, director of thermal development at Invenergy, said he had met with many people who were part of successfully halting the company’s efforts to begin developing the original site along the Youghiogheny River, which had been contaminated with coal sludge and industrial waste in the 1980s.

“The idea is to try to find a site that’s still in Elizabeth Township but not where the people of Mt. Vernon neighborhood will be,” Mr. Cohen said, referring to the community closest to the site proposed last year.

Mr. Cohen said he believes the plant has plenty of backers — the company submitted the names and addresses of nearly 500 supporters as evidence in its court challenge — but hopes the move could help win over more.  “We’ve heard from a lot of the opposition,” he said. “There’s no doubt they’re a force in the township.”

Mr. Cohen was scheduled to appear at a commissioners’ meeting Monday night to share the company’s change of plans. The new site, he said, will be on a property currently owned by Casturo Iron & Metal, a McKeesport company, and used as a junkyard.

The new site is zoned rural-residential, according to county zoning maps, and Mr. Cohen acknowledged the company would have to again seek a change in zoning.

It’s unclear to what extent opponents, some of whom organized under the name Protect Elizabeth Township, would be appeased by the move. The site change would not negate the damage a plant would do to the environment, said Krissy Kasserman, Youghiogheny Riverkeeper.

“Regardless of location, a gas-fired power plant like this has no place in Elizabeth Township,” said Ms. Kasserman, who oversees protection of the entire Youghiogheny watershed. “It’s a residential area. There are a lot of homes nearby. The concerns we had about the Fiore property are the same concerns we have about this property.”

Hearings in the company’s lawsuit, filed in July against the zoning board, have been postponed at least twice.  “We’re committed to Elizabeth Township because there are a lot of people who want to see the benefits,” Mr. Cohen said.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Alexander "Sandy" MacDonald, NOAA (retired)

Grid for Renewables Could Slash Emissions

From an Article by Bobby Magill, Climate Central News, January 25, 2016

Switching from fossil fuels to renewables is considered a challenge to the existing electric grid, which was not built to handle solar and wind power. However ….

Carbon dioxide emissions from generating electricity could be cut by 78 percent within the next 15 years if the country makes the same Herculean effort to expand solar and wind technology that it did to build the Interstate Highway System.

That’s the conclusion of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) study published Monday in Nature Climate Change, which shows that a new system of transcontinental transmission lines connected to wind and solar farms nationwide is the key to dramatically reducing emissions from the nation’s power plants.

Alexander MacDonald, retired director of NOAA’s Earth System Laboratory and the study’s lead author, said weather occurs on a very large scale and any system capturing sunshine and wind has to be built on a scale to match it. MacDonald said putting such as system in place would be like building a new Interstate Highway System, but the stakes are higher because of climate change.

“There is an opportunity to start very serious (emissions) mitigation right now, that’s what the study says,” MacDonald said. “The idea that wind and solar are too intermittent, or wind and solar are too expensive, or we have to wait for a breakthrough, this study shows that’s not true.”

Generating electricity, mainly from coal-fired power plants, is the globe’s largest single source of carbon dioxide emissions causing climate change. Power plants account for about 31 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The Obama administration’s climate goal under the Clean Power Plan is to reduce power plant emissions by 32 percent under 2005 levels by 2030.

Switching from fossil fuels to renewables is considered a challenge to the existing electric grid, which was not built to handle solar and wind power. Renewable energy flows intermittently onto the grid only when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. Batteries are seen as one solution to that problem because they may be able to store electricity when it’s sunny or windy, and then release that power onto the grid at night or when the weather is calm.

The NOAA team’s study shows that batteries may not be necessary to fully harness wind and solar power. The key is putting renewables in the best places to harness wind and solar at all times of day.

The team used a complex computer model to simulate the ideal system to produce a steady stream of renewable energy. The result is an entirely new system of transcontinental high-voltage transmission lines.

Wind and solar power plants would be spread across the U.S., supplemented by existing nuclear and hydropower plants in addition to some natural gas power plants. Each plant would feed into the new direct-current grid, allowing power to flow between each region.

“As the size of the connected system grows, the amount of wind and solar (photovoltaic) generation increases,” the study says. “The cost of electricity decreases as the area increases because the system has access to more remote, rich resources.”

The new system would deliver renewable power at 10 cents per kilowatt hour, cutting carbon emissions by 78 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, assuming the cost of renewable power by then will be less than power produced by natural gas. If the cost of renewable power stays higher than natural gas, fewer emissions would be cut — 33 percent — by 2030 at a cost of 8.6 cents per kilowatt hour. Electricity cost 9.4 cents per kilowatt hour in 2012.

In a separate paper, Stanford University civil engineering professor Mark Z. Jacobson, who is unaffiliated with the NOAA study, wrote that no other study has considered the limits of wind and solar power without ways to store the electricity they generate. The NOAA study “pushes the envelope” to show that existing renewable power technology along with new transmission lines can nearly eliminate fossil fuel electricity and its emissions, putting U.S. climate goals within reach, he said.

Jeremy Firestone, director of the center for Carbon-Free Power Integration at the University of Delaware who is also unaffiliated with the study, said it shows that the country can easily achieve the carbon emissions cuts called for in the Clean Power Plan, and that government investments in electric transmission can make a lot of progress in cutting emissions without putting a price on carbon.

It is unlikely that such a system will be built before 2030 because states that may be opposed to a renewables transmission system have too much control over how and where it is built, Firestone said.

This article is reproduced with permission from Climate Central. The article was first published on January 25, 2016.

Bradford County borders NY State

First Marcellus NatGas-Fired Power Plants Complete

From an Article by Jamison Cocklin, Natural Gas Intelligence, June 24, 2016

The first two natural gas-fired power plants designed and proposed to utilize Marcellus Shale gas have been completed and turned over to the project developer Panda Power Funds LP for commercial operations.

The engineering and construction firm, Gemma Power Systems LLC, said this month that the 829 MW Liberty generating station in Bradford County, PA, was completed on April 30, while the 829 MW Patriot generating station in Lycoming County, PA, was finished earlier this month. Combined, the facilities will generate enough electricity to power more than two million homes, Gemma said. The company built the facilities for Panda through a joint venture with the Lane Construction Corp.

The Liberty facility is located in Asylum Township on a 33-acre site. The plant received its air quality permit from the state in October 2012, which was later revised in July 2013. The Patriot facility is located in Clinton Township on an 85-acre site, and it received an air quality permit in August 2013. Ground was broken on both facilities in 2014. At the time, Panda said both facilities would enter commercial operation sometime in 2016.

The facilities are the first in the U.S. to use state-of-the-art Siemens’ H-class turbines. The single-shaft power train, Gemma said, makes them “among the most flexible and most efficient natural gas-fired generating plants in the United States.”

Completion of the facilities marks another milestone for development of the Marcellus Shale. Since 2012, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s Air Quality Program has issued plan approvals for more than two dozen natural gas-fired power plants. Several more applications are currently under review.

Related Article: “Natural Gas Fired Electricity (Still) Under Development in West Virginia”
See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Costs from Pollution and Damages

Air Pollution from Energy Industry Costs $130 Billion a Year

From an Article by Reid Frazier, Allegheny Front, February 19, 2016

For years, scientists have known that pollution from burning fossil fuels is bad for us. But just how bad? And can we place a dollar amount on the hidden costs of burning coal and other fossil fuels for electricity?

Paulina Jaramillo, an assistant professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, wanted to find out. She and her colleague, Nicholas Muller of Middlebury College, used a model to tabulate the cost of pollution from the energy sector in the U.S.

The researchers plugged in emission inventories from the EPA for power plants, oil and gas drilling, refineries and coal mines. They then incorporated weather models and population data and added up the expected costs of pollution on crops, forests, infrastructure and human health.

LISTEN: “Adding Up the Health Costs of Burning Fossil Fuels” — Audio Player in Original Article

The findings were pretty clear. Since the early 2000s, emissions from sources like coal-fired power plants have been decreasing. And because of this, Jaramillo and Muller found that the annual cost air pollution exacts on the American economy declined by about 25 percent from 2002 to 2011. The total price tag now comes to $130 billion a year, or around $400 for every person in the U.S.

“Because we started reducing these emissions, we reduced health impacts,” Jaramillo says. “We cannot pinpoint who specifically benefitted, but on a population basis, there are benefits.”

Jaramillo says the reason for the big change is that new regulations imposed by the EPA on the coal industry forced many coal-fired power plants to control their emissions. And for a few years, the Great Recession lowered overall demand for electricity. Cleaner sources of power, like natural gas, have also cut into coal’s share of the electricity market.

Jaramillo and Muller’s estimate came in around double earlier estimates. It also captured regional differences in air pollution’s costs. The region that paid the highest price for air pollution is an area stretching from Illinois to Pennsylvania.

“These are the states with the highest social damage because that’s where coal is produced,” Jaramillo says. Lowering emissions in these regions would produce the biggest gains, she says. “[The effect of] a ton of emissions emitted in downtown Pittsburgh is really different from a ton of emissions in the middle of the ocean.”

Arvind Venkat, an emergency physician at Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Health Network, says that air pollution is “a well-recognized trigger” for patients to come into emergency rooms for breathing conditions.

“What happens a lot with these patients is they have allergies due to air pollution, or they get a virus of some sort—that really triggers them,” Venkat says.

Air pollution from the energy sector costs Americans $130 billion a year, or around $400 for every person in the U.S.

Studies show that emergency room visits for heart and lung ailments go up on days when pollution is highest. And at around $1,000 a visit, costs for ER visits for people with breathing problems can quickly add up.

Jason Hill, an associate professor of bioproducts and biosystems at the University of Minnesota, says this type of analysis is useful in evaluating the impact of different industries on the economy.

“Whenever you can convert damage to economic cost, you can then compare easily among different options. That’s one of the values of converting to the common metric of the dollar.”

Jaramillo says the takeaway from her study was pretty simple—anti-pollution policies are successful. “We need to continue regulating these emissions, because [it] has been effective.”

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net