In a post earlier this weekI celebrated the passing of New York State scope plan that tells us how we will complete the amazing transition to 70% “renewable” electricity by 2030 and zero-emission electricity by 2040. The summary is: “just build more” offshore wind turbines and batteries.” Unfortunately, no one seems to have done the basic math to see if potential facilities have enough power to meet demand all the time. But then, this Scoping Plan is the product of the Important People, and why should the Important People bother themselves with such minutiae? After all, they have a planet to save.
What the previous post failed to consider is the possible cost to New York consumers of trying to buy electricity in the future at a time when the wind is calm, the sun is dark, and fossil fuels have been suppressed. . How high can costs get when everyone has to bid at the same time for the small amount of hydro or nuclear that might be left?
It turned out that three members of the Climate Action Council (the proponents of the Scoping Plan) disagreed with the Plan’s enactment. One of them, a guy named Gavin Donohue, is at least partially wary of consumer costs. His statement disagrees with the Scoping Plan can be found here. Among other things, he has this to say on the matter of cost:
It is irresponsible to lay out a plan to achieve CLCPA goals while at the same time preventing New Yorkers from understanding the impact on their energy bills and the economy. We are in a period where electricity bills are expected to increase by 30-40% and it is disappointing and disappointing for the Plan to not address how it will affect electricity payers. is a missed opportunity. The plan lacks a comprehensive, transparent, independent, unbiased and quantifiable consumer cost impact analysis and quantification that will ultimately be borne by New Yorkers through increased fees and taxes. and energy bills. For the past two years, I have requested this cost analysis.
The lack of consideration of the potential impacts on consumer costs is “disappointing” and a “missed opportunity”. That’s certainly a polite way of saying it. More precisely would be completely incompetent and irresponsible.
It’s not necessarily simple to figure out what future costs might be. The underlying problem is that this imaginary future almost completely reproducible system requires some kind of full redundancy, which may be used only occasionally, but when required, the need for will be huge and the price can go up to unimaginable levels.
How tall can those heights be? While it’s impossible to put any definitive limits on it, we can get a very good idea of how the process plays out by looking at what’s going on in Europe right now. In a legitimate fight to reduce carbon emissions, Europe has closed most of its coal plants, banned oil and gas extraction, and cracked down on nearly all fossil fuel infrastructure, except for fossil fuels. except for some pipelines from Russia. Economic trade brings Most recent prices for wholesale natural gas on the European market is 82.97 EUR/MWH. That, by the way, is down from a price above 100 EUR/MWH and a high of 350 EUR/MWH (short-term) in the last six months. Latest US prices is $5.12 per MMBTU. I give a factor of about 3.4 to convert from MMBTU to MWH, the dollar and euro are close to par, so the comparison is about 17 USD/MWH for the US and 83 USD/MWH for Europe . Europe’s crackdown on fossil fuels has resulted in prices about five times higher than US prices.
And so there is a consumer energy cost crisis currently raging in Europe – which you can barely read about here. The solution the Europeans have come up with is to provide massive subsidies to enable consumers (and businesses) to pay their energy bills. One Brussels-based consulting organization Brueghel has come up with a chart on subsidies that various European countries have agreed to pay (updated to November 29):
Germany, the European champion of the energy transition, is spending over 7% of GDP about these subsidies, and that’s just so far.
So, New York, when the same process happens to you, will you spend the equivalent of 7% of GDP protecting consumers from real prices, or will you let your electricity and heat bills go up by a factor of three – or five?
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