James A. Bacon
Complying with proposed Environmental Protection Agency rules on carbon emissions would cost Dominion Virginia Power customers an extra $5.5 billion to $6 billion, according to the State Corporation Commission staff — and that doesn’t include the cost to Virginia’s smaller utilities, which are even more reliant than Dominion upon coal.
The EPA plan calls for cutting carbon emissions from existing power plants 30% below 2005 levels by 2030 in an effort to fight climate change, improve public health and provide “affordable energy,” reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Writes Peter Bacque:
The EPA’s own model predicts that Virginia utilities will have to shut down fossil-fuel power plants reliably producing 2,851 megawatts of electricity, and replace that generation with just 351 megawatts of unreliable land-based wind power. This raises alarming regional reliability concerns, the staff said.
The power plants involved today ensure reliable service to Virginia customers, have years of useful life remaining, and cannot be replaced overnight or without regard for impacts on the electric systems. …
Even if the operational concerns of replacing dependable fossil-fuel generation with variable, intermittent and “nondispatchable” — unreliable — wind and solar energy could be managed, the staff said, “there is still zero probability that wind and solar resources can be developed in the time and on the scale necessary to accommodate the zero-carbon generation levels needed” to meet the EPA’s mandatory carbon-reduction goal for 2020.
This massive and expensive transformation of Virginia’s electrical generation system is a huge, huge issue. Once upon a time, Virginians could reconcile themselves to tighter environmental regulations on the grounds that they got cleaner air in return. There was a tangible payoff to air cleansed of particulates, sulfur dioxide and mercury. There is no tangible payoff (except to the alternate fuels industry) from the EPA rules. The whole purpose is to reduce CO2 emissions in order to save the globe from the catastrophic consequences of global warming.
The administration seeks to transform America’s energy economy despite the fact that, even as CO2 levels in the atmosphere have increased dramatically, global temperatures have remained stable for 18 years now — contradicting the forecasts of virtually every major climate model ever cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. While the Global Warming hysterics maintain their prattle that the “science is settled” and “97% of all climate scientists agree,” the science is most assuredly unsettled. Warmist scientists who pay attention to the reality that temperatures are not rising are desperately concocting ex-post-facto explanations of why their predictions went wrong and why, despite all appearances to the contrary, the world is still doomed unless we abandon fossil fuels now.
That’s not to say that alternate fuels are a bad thing. At some point, the technologies will improve to the point where they will be competitive with fossil fuels and it will be prudent to add them to the fuel mix. Energy conservation is always a good idea. Building automation offers a high economic return on investment. More compact, walkable human settlement patterns can save energy and offer tangible health and lifestyle benefits in the bargain. There are lots of ways to reduce CO2 emissions (if that’s a goal you really care about) without saddling Virginia’s economy with an unnecessary burden of $6 billion or more.
This is bad, bad policy, and Virginians need to fight back. Voters need to ask Virginia’s congressional candidates — most prominently Senatorial candidates Mark Warmer and Ed Gillespie — what they think of the EPA mandates and what they, as congressmen, can do to mitigate the impact on Virginia ratepayers.
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