Editor’s note: This commentary is by Hans C. Ohanian, a physicist and author of more than half a dozen physics textbooks and also the biography “Einstein’s Mistakes.” He lives in Charlotte and was a member of the Charlotte Energy Committee for several years.
[G]iven the unsavory reputation ex-Gov. Peter Shumlin acquired by his nexus with the EB-5 scandal, his self-congratulatory comments about Vermont’s high ranking in nationwide clean-energy efforts (Burlington Free Press, April 30, Vermont ranks No. 2 in US for renewables; and May 10, We created jobs, put money in people’s pockets…) made me think I should not trust, but verify.
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) awarded to our state a rank of second-best in the nation on the basis of a net score calculated from “metrics” in 12 categories, such as renewable energy generation, residential solar energy, energy savings, electric vehicle adoption, etc. What makes Vermont’s high net score suspect is that in almost all categories Vermont was not near the top, and it achieved the second-place rank only by sky-high scores in two categories: carbon emission reduction targets and clean-energy jobs per capita. But these are the two categories with the “softest” data, highly susceptible to fraudulent manipulation. Furthermore, analysis of Vermont’s score for renewable energy generation shows it is invalid, because it rests on the fanciful fiction that Vermont Yankee is still in operation.
Talk is cheap, and any state can set its carbon emission reduction target as high as it pleases, as if cows could fly. The Vermont target of reducing CO2 emissions in 2030 by more than 60 percent from 2005 levels is wildly in excess of the target set by any other state, which immediately suggests this target is unrealistic and unattainable. If Vermont actually reaches this target, it will not be by honest effort, but because Vermont’s accounting of carbon footprints relies on the fraudulent practice of keeping off the books all the CO2 emissions from wood-burning electric power plants and heating plants. Today, these plants pump 1.6 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year. The Vermont Comprehensive Energy Plan proposes to double the burning of our forest wood in the future.
And the statistics for the numbers of clean-energy workers are dubious. UCS naively and uncritically took the number of 10,352 Vermont energy-efficiency and solar-energy jobs from a report by E2, a trade organization of the clean-energy industry, which claims it collected jobs data by “surveys.” No information is given on how these surveys were performed, and it’s a good guess that they are no more reliable than Vermont’s own surveys, on the basis of which Shumlin claimed a year ago that there were a total of 17,715 clean-energy jobs, a wild exaggeration that includes in the count all employees who “spend at least some amount of time supporting business activities … related to clean energy” and also includes “all workers that spend any amount of time conducting clean-energy activities.” So if Shumlin and the Seven Dwarfs jointly screw one single energy-saving light bulb into its socket on the 12th day of Christmas, that counts as eight clean-energy jobs in Vermont (and it counts even if they break the bulb).
“If Shumlin and the Seven Dwarfs jointly screw one single energy-saving light bulb into its socket on the 12th day of Christmas, that counts as eight clean-energy jobs in Vermont (and it counts even if they break the bulb).”
From a Vermont jobs perspective, there is also the awkward problem of the shutdown of Vermont Yankee, which lost us 600 full-time, high-paying jobs, with an average pay of $105,000 per year (not counting another estimated 600+ jobs of adjunct workers whose livelihood depended on “trickle down” from workers directly employed at the nuclear plant). Vermont Yankee produced totally clean energy, and by any objective standard these 600 jobs qualify as “clean-energy” jobs. How does the financial bottom line of these lost jobs compare with the dwarfs-and-light-bulb jobs that Shumlin brags about? Instead of vague statistics about numbers of jobs, UCS and Shumlin should have relied on statistics for total wages paid by the clean-energy industry.
Furthermore, the shutdown of Vermont Yankee introduces a fatal error into the first of the “metrics” used in the UCS evaluation of state rankings. This metric awards scores for renewable energy generation in 2015, but instead of simply calculating the scores according to the amount of renewable energy per capita, UCS elected to calculate the scores from the percentage of renewable energy in each state’s total electric energy production. In Vermont, 99 percent of the in-state electric energy production is renewable (if we accept the controversial claim that wood-burning power plants are renewable), but Vermont actually uses much more electric energy than it produces in-state, and it imports a large supply energy from out-of-state “unclean” energy sources, so as to fill the gap in electric supply that resulted from the shutdown of Vermont Yankee.
The UCS scientists couldn’t think of any reasonable way to deal with this anomaly (or “outlier,” as they called it) in Vermont’s energy budget. Instead of simply conceding that their first metric is inapplicable to Vermont, they adopted the daft pretense that Vermont Yankee did not shut down in 2014 and is still merrily producing electric energy for Vermonters. Under this pretense, they evaluated the percentage for the renewable energy in relation to the fictional 2015 Vermont-Yankee energy. Such a substitution of fictional data for factual data is a serious offense against scientific ethics, which suggests to me a conflict with the goal of “accuracy” that UCS likes to project. And the absence of any critical analysis of this mistake suggests incompetence on the part of the journalists who reported on this story and lackadaisically claimed that the UCS study “took that [shutdown of Vermont Yankee] into account.”
If the three questionable scores for emission reduction targets, number of jobs, and renewable energy generation in Vermont are deleted from the calculations of the net scores (for Vermont and for all other states), then Vermont’s rank drops from second to fifth. In the Olympic tradition, a gold medal is awarded for first place, a silver medal for second, and a bronze medal for third, while everybody else is quickly forgotten. Fifth place is perhaps a respectable achievement for Vermont, but nothing much to brag about. Hurrah, hurrah, drum rolls and trumpets … we made fifth place?
