This commentary is by Hans C. Ohanian, a physicist and author of half a dozen physics textbooks, who lives in Charlotte and was a member of the Charlotte Energy Committee for several years.
[T]he recently published 2016 update of the Vermont Comprehensive Energy Plan is not a plan, but merely a menu, like the menu of a Chinese restaurant, which confounds you with a long list of exotic dishes, so you won’t know what to select. Likewise, the energy plan menu confounds you with a long list of options that rely on renewables or on energy savings — solar photovoltaic (PV), wind turbines, solid biomass, liquid biofuels, biogas, hydropower, heat pumps, weatherization, etc. But the plan gives you no quantitative analysis of these different options, so you won’t know what is the best path toward the trumpeted final goal of 90 percent renewables and 75 percent reduction of carbon footprint by 2050.
This lack of quantitative analysis is already evident in the introductory pages, where a colorful flow chart sketches an “illustrative path” of proposed changes of energy use, for instance, increased use of electric energy for vehicles and home heating, and decreased use of fossil fuels. But the devil is in the details, and the details are left fuzzy. The chart gives no numbers and no quantitative information at all — the chart is merely a figment of the imagination, like a geographical chart of the Land of Oz.
The “recommendations” listed at the ends of the chapters are mostly fatuous platitudes about what we should consider, investigate, identify, evaluate, study, assess or map out. Much the same recommendations already appeared in previous version of the plan, and I wonder why all these considerations, investigations, etc. have not yet been completed. Maybe this foot-dragging merely reflects the usual bureaucratic inertia and incompetence, but I fear there is more to it. Maybe our government is stepping aside to give carte blanche to the renewables industry, which will fill in the blanks in the plan according to its own mercenary interests. This will unleash a biblical flood of subsidies, incentives, grants, feed-in tariffs, tax credits and other welfare benefits for renewables profiteers — and the biggest turds will float to the top.
Only in the electric-energy chapter of the plan do we find a prevalence of concrete, focused recommendations and prescriptions. Some of these are on target, for instance, the acquisition of the Deerfield and Connecticut hydroelectric dams and the installation of more dams and more turbines on suitable Vermont rivers.
But many other recommendations are off target and display a deplorable lack common sense, for instance, the recommendation to convert fossil-fuel heating systems to “clean” wood-heating systems. The burning of wood emits more CO2 and pollutants into the atmosphere than oil or natural gas, and the trauma inflicted on forests by harvesting of wood reduces their ability to absorb and store carbon. The Paris Climate Accord specifically warns against deforestation and forest degradation and recommends the enhancement of forest carbon stocks. Instead of burning forests for heat, we should adopt air-source heat pumps, powered by clean hydroelectric energy.
The Vermont energy plan brags about job gains and the “vibrant economy” of the renewables industry but forgets the inconvenient truth that the most important ingredient for a vibrant economy is low cost of energy, especially electric energy. Widespread adoption of expensive renewables, and the concomitant increase of cost of electric energy, will reduce employment in all sectors of the economy — except, of course, the renewables sector. In a 2009 study, analysts of the Department of Public Service gave a concise description of the debacle that excessive incentives for renewables caused in Spain: “… the cost of implementing the renewable energy program ultimately cost the economy thousands of jobs and more than $29 billion in fiscal impacts. Further, after an initial spike in employment, the higher energy prices and economic losses led to a dramatic halt in the program which led to a crash in the industry, not just in Spain but throughout the global marketplace.”
The renewables lobby likes to point to Germany as their poster child. But this poster child came at a high cost. To pay for their profusion of renewables, Germans are today burdened with hefty surcharges on their electric bills, so their residential rate is 33 cents per kilowatt-hour, more than twice what Vermonters pay. The government protects the economy from the depressive effect of this high cost of energy by a gift of low rates for their industries — residential customers are forced to subsidize low rates for industries by surcharges on their own bills. This works well enough in Germany, where the population has a long tradition of unquestioning obedience to the commands of their government leaders. But will Vermonters be equally submissive and obediently swallow such surcharges?
Besides, the German poster child has a snotty nose, dribbling carbon dust. In conjunction with their photovoltaic and wind installations, Germans operate huge brown-coal power plants, which negate most of the carbon-footprint reductions from their renewables. Even with their dirty coal plants, Germans do not have a sufficient reserve of electric power to dispatch on demand, when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. On these occasions, they rely on the help of their neighbors, especially France, where nuclear power plants get cranked to maximum output whenever the German lights begin to flicker.
And the energy plan imitates the German mistake of a cavalier dismissal of the nuclear-energy option. Today’s low prices of natural gas and oil inhibit construction of new nuclear reactors, but within the 35-year time frame of the plan a resurgence of interest in nuclear reactors is unavoidable. Construction of new types of reactors (fast-neutron reactors) will ultimately become imperative because of a lack of viable depositories for spent nuclear fuel. The Nobel-physicist Burton Richter said about spent fuel, “Love it or hate it, we have it.” In the U.S., there are about 60,000 tons in temporary storage (including 1,000 tons at Vermont Yankee), with 120,000 tons more to come from our existing nuclear reactors over their remaining lifetime. Fast nuclear reactors can consume the spent fuel from ordinary nuclear reactors, and they thereby eradicate nuclear waste, including the dangerous plutonium isotopes used for nuclear weapons.
Each time I drive by the Ferrisburgh Solar Farm on Route 7 near Vergennes I hope the sun will stop shining so I won’t have to pay the extra 25 cents that each kWh of energy generated by this renewables boondoggle inflicts on me.
As a byproduct of this eradication process, we gain a rich supply of electric energy. The “spent” fuel still contains 95 percent of its nuclear energy, and fast reactors can extract almost all this energy. Besides, they can extract energy from our vast stockpiles of “depleted” uranium, that is, uranium left over from the enrichment process that produced the U-235-enhanced fuel for our current reactors. By burning both the spent fuel and the depleted uranium, we would have enough nuclear resources for hundreds of years, without any need to mine fresh uranium.
A rational energy plan must give us concrete prescriptions for what mix of energy sources we should adopt now and in the future. Such prescriptions must be based on financial calculations, but no quantitative cost analysis is given anywhere in the Vermont energy plan, except for a few levelized-cost calculations in the chapter on management of electric energy and efficiency. Vermonters are supposed to buy the cat in the bag and not ask about the price tag. This absence of cost analysis follows the example set in 2009 by our clueless legislators when they decreed the creation of renewables projects at any cost, no matter how high. With electric energy at a market price of about 5 cents per kWh, they awarded long-term contracts for installation of solar PV at 30 cents per kWh (by now, competitive bidding has trimmed such awards to 11 cents per kWh — better, but no cigar). Profiteers lined up at the Public Service Board, and “solar farms” sprouted up in our fields and pastures. Each time I drive by the Ferrisburgh Solar Farm on Route 7 near Vergennes I hope the sun will stop shining so I won’t have to pay the extra 25 cents that each kWh of energy generated by this renewables boondoggle inflicts on me.
Thoughtless squandering of financial resources on overpriced renewable energy showpieces is not a viable strategy for global reduction of greenhouse gases. The dire warnings about global warming issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which motivated the Paris Climate Accord, were based on extensive quantitative analysis of climate models that explored hypothetical worldwide socio-economic and environmental policies by calculating the resulting effects on global climate and temperature. Investigation of such models has demonstrated that renewables are often a high-cost technology, to be eschewed in favor of lower-cost technologies that achieve the same reduction of carbon footprint. Even if we adopt lowest-cost strategies, adequate mitigation of the global carbon footprint will not come cheap — according to one of the representative models contemplated by the IPCC, by 2100 we might have to pay a carbon-cost surcharge (or fee, or tax, call it what you will) of $220 per ton of CO2.
How does the Vermont energy plan compare with the Paris Climate Accord? The focus of these documents is markedly different. The energy plan sets a goal of 90 percent renewables in Vermont by 2050, whereas the climate accord sets a goal for a long-term global temperature increase of no more than 2°C (3.6°F) relative to the temperature in 1850, or an increase of 1°C relative to today. These goals have only a vague correlation. On a map of the world, Vermont is merely a fly speck, much too small for its renewables to produce any detectable effect on global warming.
Promoters of renewables like to say that although the direct effects of Vermont’s renewables are miniscule, Vermont can “show the way” and serve as inspiration for the rest of the world. But, if anything, Vermont’s renewables program serves as an illustration of how not to do renewables. Vermont’s headlong rush to renewables is merely an opportunistic and greedy grab for maximum profits, without any quantitative analysis and planning of how this fits in with the global carbon-footprint mitigation effort.
By considering dozens of climate models based on alternative socio-economic-environmental policies, the IPCC reached the conclusion that it is necessary to limit the global temperature increase to 2°C, to avert disastrous climate changes, with drastic rises of sea level. One model that accomplishes this goal is the “Representative Concentration Pathway 2.6” (RCP2.6), which proposes changes in education and lifestyle to curb population growth, enhanced living standards in developing nations, and high carbon taxes to compel a decrease of carbon emissions.
In contradiction to the 90 percent renewables allocation prescribed by the energy plan, the RCP2.6 model contains an allocation of only 14 percent to 38 percent renewables (depending on how we count them). The quantitative analysis reveals that inclusion of more renewables is not cost-effective, in part because renewables are expensive to install and in part because the intermittent character of the renewable energy supply requires expensive back-up systems. These complications make it advantageous to utilize fossil-fuel power plants equipped with carbon-capture systems that trap CO2 gas and sequester it in deep subterranean saltwater aquifers, where it is absorbed in porous layers of rock. A carbon-capture system is not cheap, but it often is cheaper than renewables.
The modest worldwide significance of renewables in the RCP2.6 model can be seen in the list of energy resources it allocates for the year 2100: 17 percent nuclear, 14 percent renewables, 24 percent biofuels (mostly with carbon-capture systems), 50 percent fossil fuels (including a large amount of coal, mostly with carbon-capture systems). The notion that Vermont’s 90 percent renewables prescription can serve as a model for the world is delusional.
Analysis of RCP models also reveals that the “energy independence” craved by Vermont’s renewables enthusiasts does more harm than good. If different regions were to proceed independently in their efforts at CO2 mitigation, the outcome would be worse than that of RCP2.6, with disastrous and unstoppable temperature increases of 4°C or more by the end of our century. The Vermont energy plan provides an instructive example of how such troubles arise when one region tries to “go at it alone.” If Vermont continues its loony plan of energy independence by higher allocations of its own PV and wind energy, then Hydro-Quebec will have to send its surplus hydroelectric energy farther south, to Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, which requires the construction of longer transmission lines. This is not the lowest-cost alternative, because it imposes increased construction costs and transmission losses.
So, all things considered, the best strategy for Vermont, for Quebec, and for the global carbon footprint is to use Hydro-Quebec energy in the immediate vicinity of Quebec — which means use it in Vermont, and to hell with Vermont energy independence! Of course, this strategy implies that states south of Vermont won’t receive the Hydro-Quebec energy they might want; but, because they are farther south, they have more sun, and they are in a better position to exploit PV than Vermont.
Can we then conclude that the construction permit recently granted for the New England Clean Power Link (NECPL, a 1,000 MW transmission cable that will run along the bottom of Lake Champlain from Quebec to Benson, and then overland to Ludlow) is an example of enlightened global strategic thinking, which will bring Vermont an abundance of cheap clean energy from Hydro-Quebec? Not at all. The transmission cable will pass a few miles west of Burlington and a few miles south of Rutland, but it has no outlet at either of these population centers. Instead it delivers all its clean electric energy to the interconnection with the New-England grid at Ludlow, for the benefit of states south of our border.
A rich inflow of cheap clean NECPL energy into Vermont would have spoiled the production of expensive home-made juice by our rapacious renewables industry, and it would have set a scary precedent for future acquisitions of more Hydro-Quebec energy. So our government leaders, in thrall of our renewables industry, made sure to block this inflow, and they also extorted from NECPL a payment of $109 million for support of Vermont renewables. Something smells rotten in the state of Denmark?
