Wind & Solar 'Green Industry' Fantasyland #2 Rick Dunn, P.E. from Rick Dunn, P.E. - Pro Nuclear, Experience & Common Sense <rickdunn@substack.com>Mon, Apr 1, 2024 at 2:00 PM
I call it Greenwishing.
Wind & Solar 'Green Industry' Fantasyland #2
Rick Dunn, P.E. from Rick Dunn, P.E. - Pro Nuclear, Experience & Common Sense <rickdunn@substack.com>Mon, Apr 1, 2024 at 2:00 PM
Reply-To: "Rick Dunn, P.E. from Rick Dunn, P.E. - Pro Nuclear, Experience & Common Sense" <reply+2cixl1&2jv7g&&e8c30f195246fb2cc15e092c82418e9404c7ac22eafa1001f880947dd5a8a068@mg1.substack.com>
To: stephenheins@gmail.com
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more
Wind & Solar 'Green Industry' Fantasyland #2
How Big Tech's 100% renewable deception, detached from reality politicians, and the legacy of Northwest hydropower are fueling false hopes of industrial development in Washington and Oregon.
APR 1
Welcome to Wind & Solar ‘Green Industry’ Fantasyland #2, the sequel.
In the prequel I pointed out ‘Big Tech’s’ 100% renewable deception and how Amazon, like their colleagues at Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, is engaging in a deceptive environmental virtue signaling campaign when it comes to promoting wind and solar farms as adequate for “powering” their huge data centers.
As if responding to the appeal I made in Fantasyland #1 for Big Tech companies to come clean, and get on board with funding a forward-lookingnuclear renaissance, Amazon Web Services (AWS) made headlines on March 4th with a huge investment in nuclear power.
As a strong supporter of nuclear, the AWS announcement was highly encouraging news for me, and I’m sure countless others who are trying to shine the light on the dark future offered by those living in wind and solar fantasyland.
But we have a long way to go as the wind and solar bandwagon is rolling faster than ever thanks to unrealistic emission-reduction based, and seemingly perpetual, federal tax incentives included in the Inflation Reduction Act which continue to be vigorously supported by detached from reality state politicians like Washington Governor Jay Inslee.
In the introductory paragraphs of a previous post titled Tilting at Windmills and the Great Northwest Land Grab I included the following quote from Inslee who was interviewed for an ABC This Week segment:
“We knew this beast of climate change was coming for us, but now, it's pounding on the door. . . This is a solvable problem. But we need to stop using fossil fuels.”
In the balance of my post, based on a dispassionate review of real-world data, I made the case for the following conclusions:
So, the “beast” Governor Inslee says we are fighting is being fed and is growing completely outside his or United States control, effectively becoming imaginary due to the scale and trends of global CO2 emissions.
We must come to terms with this reality and slow implementation of irrational and foolish 'bumper-sticker' clean-energy policies that will hurt the poor most and possibly cripple western civilization through unaffordable and unreliable energy.
It continues to amaze me that Jay Inslee is taken seriously and that his foolish and clearly unrealistic claim that modern civilization and the developing world can “stop using fossil fuels” anytime soon goes basically unchallenged and is apparently supported by the majority of voters living in Washington.
To be fair, Inslee’s signature legislation, the Clean Energy Transformation Act (CETA) which requires 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045 does allow for nuclear power. And yes hydropower which currently provides about 60% of Washington’s annual electricity also counts.
With that said, Inslee, the majority of elected officials in the Washington legislature, and energy officials from the State Department of Commerce continue to clamor for the rapid development of massive amounts of resource-intensive and land hungry wind and solar power as the foundationof their fossil-fuel replacement strategy.
And with every mention of clean energy and our desperate need for wind and solar farms, Washington’s energy ‘visionaries’ never fail to mention the promise of ‘green jobs’ and ‘green industry’.
A great case in point was an Inslee press conference back in November 2023 when he showed up to proclaim the wonders of “green energy” and take some credit for a new battery factory being built in Moses Lake, Washington.
While I suppose some would consider a battery factory being built to supply the electric vehicle (EV) industry as representing green energy, it’s important to understand, the battery factory didn’t come to Moses Lake for access to wind and solar power.
They came for what 2,170 megawatts (MW) of hydropower owned and operated by Grant County Public Utility District (Grant PUD) can provide; low-cost and reliable electricity.
Thanks to big hydro, Grant, along with Douglas and Chelan PUDs (aka Mid-C Utilities) have for decades been in a class by themselves when it comes to low cost electricity. And good for them, and the founders of their respective utilities who had the vision and foresight to invest in hydroelectric dams with more than 4,900 MW of combined nameplate generating capacity.
It’s no secret, low-cost and abundant hydropower was the primary reason for the development of electricity intensive data-centers and other industry in Central Washington, which really hit it’s stride in the early 2000’s.
While I do not speak for the Mid-C Utilities, based on publicly available information it appears Grant and Douglas PUD’s hydroelectric dams are operating at or very near their maximum firm capability which is limited by low-water scenarios in the Columbia River.
One indication Grant PUD is reaching their maximum firm hydro capability was their public announcement they are considering exercising their statutory rights to 207 average megawatts (aMW) of the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) hydro and nuclear portfolio, which until now they haven’t needed.
This was followed by Grant issuing an all-source request for proposals (RFP) in December 2023 through which they are seeking to secure an additional 300 MW of firm generating capacity and energy.
Additionally, in June 2023 it was announced that Microsoft's newest 180 MW data center in Douglas County would be served with electricity sourced by Powerex; a Canadian entity primarily responsible for marketing BC Hydro’s surplus hydroelectricity. Douglas PUD’s role will be to transport (wheel) the electricity supplied by Powerex across their transmission and distribution systems for delivery to the Microsoft facilities.
I mention Grant and Douglas PUD’s situations to bring additional awareness to a fact I emphasized in Fantasyland #1 regarding the 31 federal hydroelectric dams marketed by BPA.
As we think about bringing jobs to Washington and Oregon centered on electricity-intensive ‘green industry’, it is critical to understand BPA’s firm energy capability from which their lowest-cost rates are derived, is 100% spoken for through existing contracts they have with the 142 customers and beneficiaries of their generating portfolio.
All of this to say, if Washington is going to attract and land electricity-intensive ‘green industry’, with rare exceptions, it’s going to have to be without the help of firm hydropower.
Yes, there will be years when the Columbia and Snake Rivers are flush with water and hydroelectric dams will deliver surplus energy available for purchase. But as I have said previously, utilities cannot support new industrial development on the hope that hydro will show up. Particularly when they are in a state with 100% carbon-free electricity mandates hanging over their heads.
And while tens-of-thousands of megawatts of solar and wind power is in the queue for possible future development in Washington and other northwest states, it’s important to understand their were only two utility-scale solar farms operating inside Washington boundaries as of May 2023, with a combined nameplate capacity of just over 20 MW.
Further, solar and wind power accounted for 86 aMW (0.83%) and 839 aMW (8.09%) of the 10,376 aMW of retail electricity sales to Washington customers in 2022.
Clearly green energy in the form of solar and wind power are not driving economic development in Washington today.
And the idea these intermittent and variable technologies will function as an affordable and reliable foundation for powering electricity-intensive ‘green industry’ promised by Jay Inslee and Washington’s electrify everything clean energy policies is clearly an unrealistic fantasy.
INSLEE’S QUESTIONABLE SUPPORT FOR HYDROPOWER
Given the inherent deficiencies of wind and solar power, you might think Jay Inslee, who constantly crows about Washington’s ‘climate leadership’ and 100% carbon-free electricity mandate would be an unabashed supporter of hydropower, well think again.
As I wrote in Sawing Off the Branch We’re Sitting On, Inslee and Washington State agencies have been at the forefront of undermining hydropower through increased regulatory control and political maneuvering for many years, including the release of a report in August 2022 co-sponsored by Senator Patty Murray titled the “Lower Snake River Dams: Benefit Replacement Report”. With Inslee concluding (emphasis added):
“The state and federal governments should implement a plan to replace the benefits of the Lower Snake River Dams to enable breaching to move forward,” Gov. Jay Inslee said.
While the ‘Inslee-Murray’ report and accompanying press release may sound quite pragmatic to the casual observer, it’s important to understand that Inslee, like he does with countless issues, always invokes his version of ‘the science’ as unquestionable and certain when it supports his politics.
Never one to humble himself and admit science is really never settled, and is in fact not represented by the consensus opinion of certain scientists, Inslee’s official statement regarding the Lower Snake River Dams includes:
“The scientific review affirms that breaching these specific dams offers the greatest benefit to the salmon.”
What his official statement doesn’t say is the “greatest benefit to the salmon” is a very small percentage increase in the survival of juveniles on their trip down river derived from salmon survival computer modeling which attributes the majority of salmon deaths to delayed mortality theory.
This theory hypothesizes that young salmon encounters with dams causes cumulative trauma on their migration to the ocean. And that this trauma results in death after the salmon has migrated passed the last dam and has made it into the estuary or ocean.
And while the Independent Scientific Advisory Board (ISAB) agrees hydroelectric dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers cause some fish to experience delayed mortality, they have also concluded the magnitude of the impact of delayed mortality on salmon survival is highly uncertain and cannot be scientifically proven because there are too many dynamic variables in the ocean environment.
Despite the fact dam caused delayed mortality clearly represents unsettled science, salmon survival computer modelling which attributes the majority of recent declines in returning adult salmon and steelhead is often promoted by dam breaching advocates as conclusive evidence adequate for justifying the removal of the Lower Snake River Dams. And Jay Inslee has fallen for this version of ‘the science’, hook, line and sinker.
So, the question remains; if theoretical fractional increases in salmon survival are adequate to justify breaching the Lower Snake River Dams, then why stop there. Why not breach all of the dams? A question Jay Inslee should be required to answer, given that his 100% carbon-free electricity mandates are pure fantasy without hydropower.
WRECKING THE PLANET
Back to the battery factory in Moses Lake and Governor Inslee’s press conference during which he was quoted as saying:
“When we bring good-paying, consistent, environmentally friendly jobs in Washington, it helps everybody,” Inslee said. “It brings in new neighbors, it helps fund our schools. And it’s a group of people who share values, the people in these clean tech jobs, it’s very interesting when you talk to them; they’re highly motivated to build an environment that won’t wreck the planet.”
Says Inslee who’s 2021 State Energy Strategy envisions the Northwest covered by 63,000 megawatts (MW) of industrial wind farms.
And without blinking, Inslee’s Department of Commerce proudly proclaims that 97% of the wind farms representing an area equivalent to more than 100 times that of Seattle would be built in states other than Washington. Namely Montana and Wyoming which have been targeted by Washington’s clean energy visionaries as sources for imported electricity, which they expect will represent 43% of what will be used in the state by 2050.
So much for domestically generated electricity and ‘green energy’ jobs in Washington.
Speaking of wrecking the plant. How about the raw material extraction and industrial processing (done mostly in China with coal-fired electricity) needed to produce the more than 100 million individual solar panels required to build the 40,000 MW of Northwest solar Inslee and his Department of Commerce believe will also be needed.
And we shouldn’t forget the impacts on the planet caused by the construction of countless high voltage transmission lines that will be required to move electricity from rurally located wind and solar farms to urban population centers.
“I guess if we “wreck the planet” in foreign countries and in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, nobody will notice,” said Rick Dunn.
One thing you will notice that is missing from the Washington’s 2021 Energy Strategy and the previous charts is any reference to nuclear power which represents exactly zero of the colored bars.
Yes, nuclear power is allowed by Washington’s CETA, and many Washington politicians, including Jay Inslee say they support nuclear. But a panickedstate energy strategy with a foundational belief in rapid development of wind and solar power results in a massive drain of limited intellectual and financial capital that could be focused on a more reasoned and rational natural-gas-to-nuclear strategy.
Once again, giving credit where it’s due, the Washington legislature recently closed their 2024 session which included approval of a conditional $25 million contribution to the development of Energy Northwest’s Site-1 Small Modular Reactor (SMR) project. The funding condition being that Initiative 2117 which would erase the state's two-year-old Climate Commitment Act (CCA) does not pass in November.
Also, keep in mind that in 2023, Washington’s cap-and-invest auctions (aka carbon tax) required by the CCA raised $1.8 billion dollars. Which begs the question. If you really want to be a global ‘climate leader’ and are serious about not wrecking the planet, why not do even more for nuclear, and not make it conditional on a political outcome.
To illustrate the unique planet-friendly attributes of energy-dense, small-foot print, non-emitting advanced nuclear, check out the following slide highlighting one of the results of a 2020 study commissioned by Energy Northwest.
What this slide illustrates is that under a 100% greenhouse-gas reduction scenario, SMR technology offers the possibility of avoiding the construction of 91 GW (gigawatts)] of non-firm wind, solar and energy storage in the Pacific Northwest by building 5.3 GW of SMRs.
The avoided construction of 44.8 GW of wind and 37 GW of solar shown in the previous chart represents between 80 and 150 Seattle-sized wind farms and 112 million individual solar panels respectively. How’s that for not wrecking the planet.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
The thesis of this post is that Governor Jay Inslee’s clean energy vision is detached from reality and that he is living in wind and solar fantasyland. But he’s not the only one living there. Every citizen in Washington and other states with clean energy policies myopically focused on elimination of CO2 are living there too; whether we like it or not. So how did we get here?
It starts with the law-of-the-land from which no citizen is immune. Consider the following quoted text from the preamble of Washington’s Clean Energy Transformation Act (CETA) (emphasis added):
“The legislature finds that Washington must address the impacts of climate change” including “modernizing” the electricity system. Even with the “wealth of carbon-free hydropower . . . electricity remains a large source of emissions in our state.”
“The transition to one hundred percent clean energy is underway, but must happen faster than our current policies can deliver” and “[t]he prices of clean energy technologies continue to fall, and are, in many cases, competitive or even cheaper than conventional energy sources.”
Reality check #1. The following graphic sourced from the Washington Department of Ecology indicates electricity represented 16.3% of 2018 Washington Greenhouse Gases.
This chart is aged, but I can assure you the percentages are in the ballpark of where we are today. In fact, if Washington has a good hydro year, the number can be even smaller by several percentage points.
Yes, “large” is a relative term, but has anyone living in reality ever said large and 16% in the same sentence. Remember, this claim is in Washington State law and is the driver of the elimination of dependable coal-fired power from utility portfolios by 2025 before adequate replacements are in place.
Reality check #2. The following graph shows Washington’s electricity sector CO2 emissions represented 0.62% of the US total in 2022.
Furthermore, if you consider energy-related CO2 emissions across all sectors, Washington has on average represented about 1.5% of the United States total for all of the years Jay Inslee has served as Governor. And over this same time period, Washington’s energy-related carbon dioxide emissions per capita have been 35% less than the average of all states.
I think it’s safe to say, Washington isn’t even close to having a ‘dirty energy’ problem. And for the law-of-the-land to say “Washington must address the impacts of climate change”, as if eliminating the relatively small amount of CO2 produced within the state will make a global difference, either directly or by setting a good example, is truly a fantasy.
A fantasy that even in it’s infancy is already increasing the risk of blackouts while also increasing the cost of electricity, gasoline and natural gas.
Reality check #3. While Washington’s electricity is about 60% hydro on an annual basis, hydro only represents about 6% of total US electricity. Just look at the scale of Washington and Oregon based hydroelectric energy on an annual basis represented by the size of the bubbles on the following map.
Remember this map when you hear Jay Inslee and members of the Washington State legislature bragging about their ‘climate leadership’ which is based on seeing how much wind and solar can be built in other states and force fed into a massive base of hydroelectric power unlike anywhere else in the United States.
And just to drive the point home, take a look at the following map which shows how dependent most of the US is on natural gas fired electricity which currently produces 39.8% of electricity followed by coal at 19.5% and nuclear at 18.2%.
The reality is that Washington State’s wind and solar centric 100% carbon-free electricity vision represents nothing that is scalable to anywhere else in the US.
In fact, it’s fair to say Washington is actually way behind the rest of the country where fuel switching from coal to natural gas since around 2007 has driven the majority of the 760 million metric ton (MMT) reduction in emissions in the US electricity sector.
And what has happened in hydro rich Washington as a rational energy transition occurred in ‘coal country’ over the last 16-years. Well, over this period, electricity sector emissions in Washington averaged 10.8 MMT, which is precisely where we landed in 2022.
It is truly a fantasy for Jay Inslee to claim Washington State is leading on ‘climate’ and the so called ‘energy transition’. Thanks to hydropower, Washington was a clean energy state before Inslee was elected governor and the only thing his ‘leadership’ has done is unnecessarily erode grid reliability, increase energy costs, and set the stage for possible dam breaching in the future.
Reality check #4. So what about the claims in Washington’s CETA preamble that “clean energy technologies” are, in many cases, competitive or even cheaper than conventional energy sources.
The reality is no matter how “cheap” wind and solar farms become on an individual basis, their intermittency and variability is a fatal flaw when it comes to meeting the minute-by-minute supply and demand balancing required by the unforgiving laws of power grid physics.
This fatal flaw essentially requires the construction of two grids; the 100% CO2 free grid and the reliable grid. As a consequence, utilities and their rate payers will be double-paying to some degree.
If you want to take a deeper dive into the wind and solar levelized-cost-of-energy (LCOE) deception, I highly recommend reading the latest Substack post from The Energy Bad Boys titled How to Destroy The Myth of Cheap Wind and Solar as they answer the question:
If Wind and Solar Are So Cheap, Why Do They Make Electricity So Expensive?
So, no matter what politicians promise, the retail cost of electricity will always go up as the power grid integrates higher and higher levels of wind and solar; assuming you want to maintain reliability.
Just look at the residential cost of electricity in Europe shown in the following graph where Germany has integrated more wind and solar capacity on a per capita basis than any other country. German residential customers are now paying more than 35 cents per kilowatt-hour compared to the utility I work for with an all-in cost of just under 9 cents, and a US average of around 13 cents.
As if it wasn’t bad enough for German citizens, high electricity costs driven by wind and solar power delusions, have also decimated Germany’s industrial sector.
If you want to get of glimpse of where Washington (and Oregon) could be headed, check out the Substack post by Robert Bryce titled The Deindustrialization Of Europe In Five Charts, with the subtitle:
Industrial electricity use in the EU is collapsing. US policymakers “Have no excuse for not looking at Europe and learning.”
Robert also recently wrote about the consequences of California’s all-in bet on solar and wind power in a post titled: California’s Electricity Disaster In Seven Charts.
As of the end of 2022, California had more than 17,500 megawatts of utility-scale solar power capacity, more than any other state. When small-scale facilities are included, the state had almost 32,000 megawatts of total solar capacity. California ranked eighth in the nation in wind-powered generation.
So what has the investment in wind and solar done for electricity prices so far? You guessed it, residential electricity prices are through the roof.
As Wind and Solar penetration increased to 25.7% of total electricity generation in California between 2008 and 2023, residential electricity costs have increased by 109% during that same time period.
This makes one wonder how long California residents will put up with the ridiculous increases in the cost of electricity which have also come with an increasing risk of blackouts. And California politicians are just getting started with the wind and solar powered energy transition.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Wake up Washington (and Oregon) residents!
The wind and solar experiment has been tried in Europe, California and elsewhere; and the results are terrible across the board. Why not learn from their mistakes.
It is critically important to recognize that implementation of Jay Inslee’s wind and solar fantasyland has just barely gotten started. And we are already seeing dramatic increases in wholesale power market prices and increasing risk of blackouts.
Take a look at the following set of curves which represent the cost of electricity on a forward basis for calendar year contracts (Cal Strips) at the northwest power market hub called the “Mid-C”.
The x-axis begins with January 1, 2022 and ends with February 1, 2024. The y-axis is in dollars per megawatt-hour, with the upper set of three curves representing the wholesale electricity price for heavy-load-hours (HLH) between 6 am and 10 pm. And the lower set of curves are for light-load-hours (LLH) between 10 pm and 6 am.
As a point of reference, all three calendar years were priced at less than $50 per MWh for HLH on January 1, 2022. And then in just one year, Calendar Year 2025 (CAL 2025) prices increased to as much as $105 per MWh, representing a more than 200% increase.
While prices softened somewhat in 2023, CAL 2025 HLH prices have ticked back up to over $100 with CAL 2026 and CAL 2027 at $95 and $92 respectively.
What these curves mean is if a utility is looking to purchase electricity in the regional power market on a forward basis, dependable generating resources have become very scarce.
And there is little hope utilities will be able to procure large amounts of electricity to support a fast turn around (less than 3 years) needed to land ‘green industry’. At least not if you are aiming to meet a price point comparable to Washington’s current average retail industrial rate of $62 per MWh which is 33% lower than current forward wholesale market prices for the highest demand hours.
It’s also important to recognize, even off-peak (overnight hours) wholesale electricity is currently priced at around $70 per MWh which is also well aboveaverage retail industrial rates in Washington today.
And if you are thinking mid-to-long-term and the possibility of buying wind and solar electricity from new farms under development. Well there’s bad news on this front as well.
It turns out the feeding frenzy in the wind and solar supply chain driven by the energy transition fantasies of developed nations has caused a supply and demand problem. And I don’t see any reason to believe there will be a reversal of the increasing cost curves anytime soon.
As shown in the following chart, commodities represent 60% to 70% of the cost of batteries and solar modules which has driven an upturn in the capital cost of these technologies. The same upturn is being observed in the cost of capital for wind farms as well.
I confirmed the increasing price trend for wind and solar by doing a quick review of the latest data from Lazard which indicates the unsubsidized (not including federal tax credits) levelized-cost-of-energy (LCOE) for wind and solar have gotten as high as $75 and $96 per MWh respectively, having both been previously as low as $24 per MWh.
And don’t forget, just as The Energy Bad Boys documented in their post, you have to look deeper than LCOE if you want to understand the true cost of wind and solar.
Finally, check out the following headline from March 22, 2024 and consider reading the article with a free trial from ClearingUp.
What the map featured in the ClearingUp article is showing is the Northwest relied on importing 4,745 megawatts of electricity into the region during early evening hours (4pm to 8pm) to avoid blackouts during the deeply cold temperatures experienced this past January.
And if that wasn’t eye opening enough, the analysis by Powerx refenced in the article also revealed that imports averaged 5,241 megawatts across all 120 hours of the January 2024 event. This means the Northwest had more than a peak-demand problem; we had a deeply-concerning fuel supply problem, including relatively low levels of water available for hydropower.
As you read about how close the Northwest came to blackouts, keep in mind, Jay Inslee led the charge to eliminate coal power from Washington by 2025, while demonizing and chilling investments in new natural gas plants; the only logical replacement for the dependable capacity being lost.
And while blackouts were close to happening in 2024, think about the risk some northwest electricity customers will be living with when the final 730 MW coal-fired unit at the Centralia Power Plant located in Washington’s Interstate-5 corridor shuts down at the end of 2025.
Jay Inslee is on his way out, but unfortunately his legacy will live on.
Washington’s CO2 emissions have long been some of the lowest in the nation across all sectors of the economy, most notably in the electricity sector. And yet, Jay Inslee’s myopic focus on “eliminating fossil fuels” has unnecessarily resulted in some of the highest priced gasoline in the nation, double-digit increases in the cost of natural gas, and a power grid being pushed to the edge of a blackout cliff.
100% clean electricity mandates in Washington are critically dependent on hydropower, and yet Jay Inslee has been a leader in normalizing Lower Snake River dam breaching as a “centerpiece action” for salmon recovery.
Low-cost and abundant hydropower has been the economic engine of the Northwest for decades, but the firm capability of federal hydroelectric dams is tapped out and 100% spoken for. And yet Jay Inslee continues to invite ‘green industry’ to the northwest with false promises of cheap and abundant ‘clean energy’.
Washington electricity prices have been some of the lowest in the nation but are on their way up and risk deindustrializing many counties as Jay Inslee and the Washington State legislature continue to perpetuate the deception that wind and solar can provide the basis of “cheap” and reliable CO2 free energy.
I look forward to the opportunity for Washington to elect a new governor. And while it will take a small miracle, I hope the next governor will have some common sense and listen to utilities, particularly not-for-profit utilities like the one I work for.
Simply put. Washington and Oregon need every drop of hydropower we can get; and we must make room for cleaner-burning natural gas on our way to a nuclear future.
This is common ground every citizen in Washington (and Oregon) should be able to live with and support. That is unless you want to end up like Germany and California.