A Sunday Roundup
Osage Tribe tells Enel to pound sand. HV transmission going nowhere. Juice hits 1 million views. Hertz ousts CEO over Tesla debacle as EPA readies new EV mandates.
The past few weeks have been busy. I’ve been traveling, writing, crunching numbers for future Substacks, updating the Renewable Rejection Database, and developing slides for upcoming speaking engagements. (I have nine speeches between now and the end of April.) Today, rather than publish an extended essay, I’ve assembled a roundup of the issues and news I’ve been following.
Osage Minerals Council tells Enel To Pound Sand
Enel executives in Rome have been shitting kittens since December 20, trying to figure out how they can avoid having to take down the 84 wind turbines they built in Osage County a decade ago. You may recall that on that date, a federal court judge in Tulsa sided with the Osage Tribe in the longest-running legal battle over wind energy in American history. The judge, Jennifer Choe-Groves (who was appointed to the bench by Barack Obama), ruled the Italian company had violated the Osage’s sovereignty and granted injunctive relief, finding that “ejectment of the wind turbine farm for continuing trespass” was justified. As I explained here on December 23, in “Federal Judge Sides With Osage Nation, Orders Removal of 84 Wind Turbines,” the decision is a massive black eye for Big Wind and a stunning embarrassment for a company like Enel that never tires of promoting its “green” credentials. The ejectment of the 84 turbines will also be enormously expensive. Enel has estimated removing the 150-megawatt wind project could cost $300 million and take 18 months to achieve.
Given the stakes, it’s no surprise that Enel is trying to find a way to avoid taking down the turbines. And it has retained a flotilla of super-expensive law firms in its effort. A February 22 court filing on behalf of the Enel subsidiaries asking the court to delay the decision to remove the turbines was signed by seven lawyers. Three of them were from Gibson Dunn, which is based in Los Angeles and has about 1,900 lawyers. Two of the attorneys are from the mega-firm Norton Rose Fulbright, a global outfit with more than 3,000 lawyers that does a lot of work for solar and wind companies. One attorney is from Tulsa-based Norman Wohlgemuth, and another is from Albuquerque-based Modrall Sperling. Retaining that much legal firepower could be costing Enel hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. But Enel will gladly spend that much on lawyers to continue the litigation and delay the cost and embarrassment of taking the turbines down for as long as possible.
As Tulsa World reporter Curtis Kilman explained on March 10, the company asked Choe-Graves to approve a scheme that involves “removing backfill material owned by the Osage Nation and replacing it with backfill” that doesn’t infringe on the tribe’s mineral estate. It’s not at all clear how that would work in practice. Further, the tribe and the federal government are having none of it. In response to Enel’s filing, two assistant U.S. attorneys based in Tulsa replied:
faced with the impending prospect of all 84 turbines and the entirety of the wind farm being removed from Osage County, Defendants are desperate to have the Court reconsider the form of injunctive relief it will implement, and focus their Brief on selling the Court on its preferred “Replacement Option.” That ship has sailed.
It's not clear when the court will rule on Enel’s latest filing, but it’s evident that Enel faces hundreds of millions of dollars in losses if the court follows through on the order to remove the turbines. It also faces huge compensatory damages. In a recent interview, Everett Waller, the chairman of the Osage Minerals Council, declined to tell me how much the tribe would seek from Enel. But he did say the sum “rhymes with millions.”
The trial on the damages begins May 21 in federal court in Tulsa.
The High-Voltage Transmission Buildout May Be Even Slower Than What I’ve Reported
On February 20, in “Out Of Transmission Revisited,” I noted that the amount of high-voltage transmission being built in the U.S. is declining and that prices for building new HV capacity are soaring. I wrote, “America isn’t building anything close to the amount of high-voltage transmission capacity that the wind promoters, solar advocates, and spreadsheet jockeys claim is needed.” That matters because the all-renewable scenarios put forward by academics at Princeton, Stanford, and elsewhere claim we need a massive acceleration in the pace of transmission.
However, in the 2024 edition of his annual energy paper, Michael Cembalest of J.P. Morgan published a graphic that confirms my analysis, which is based on data from the C Three Group in Atlanta. In fact, my figures may be far too optimistic. Here’s a chart I published in my February 20 piece, which shows about 1,251 miles of HV transmission were built last year.
Here’s a slide I made using the graphic from Cembalest’s new report.
Regardless of which estimate is correct — 500 miles or 1,251 miles — it’s readily apparent that the U.S. is not adding anything near the amount of transmission that the spreadsheet jockeys say is needed. This shows, again, that claims that the U.S. can shift its economy to run solely on sources like wind and solar won’t happen. It won’t happen because it can’t happen. The electric grid cannot be expanded fast enough to make it happen in a reasonable time frame or at a reasonable cost.
A Cool Million Views On YouTube!
Our five-part docuseries, Juice: Power, Politics & The Grid, has been out for six weeks and now has over 1 million views on YouTube. It’s great to see the series getting traction. If you haven’t watched it, please do so and share it. Remember: juicetheseries.com
Hertz CEO Ousted After Tesla Debacle Just As EPA Is Expected To Release New EV Mandates
The carnage in the electric vehicle sector continues. On Friday, Hertz Global Holdings, the parent of car rental giant Hertz, announced that its CEO, Stephen Scherr, “has decided to step down” effective March 31. The press release didn’t mention Scherr’s disastrous decision to buy 100,000 Tesla EVs, but plenty of other media outlets made the connection. As Fortune reported, “Hertz doubled down on EVs in the months after Scherr took over,” but “Those bets went awry last year, when Tesla slashed prices across its lineup to keep growing vehicle sales. This hammered the resale value of used Model 3 sedans and Model Y crossovers just after Hertz had added tens of thousands of those vehicles to its fleet.”
In January, the company announced it was dumping a third of its EVs due to, as Fortune explained, “lackluster demand, costly depreciation and expensive repairs.” The company took a $245 million charge and reported its biggest quarterly loss since Covid.
What’s stunning about Hertz’s ouster of Scherr, and the billions that big automakers like Ford are losing on EVs each year, is that they didn’t bother to do much market research before making such massive bets. As I explained in my January 11 testimony to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, EVs have never lived up to the hype, auto dealers can’t get rid of the darn things, and EVs only appeal to a very narrow segment of the population. Further, they will make our automobile sector dependent on Chinese batteries, metals, minerals, and magnets.
The timing of Scherr’s ouster is also noteworthy because it’s coming just days before the EPA unveils its final tailpipe emission rule for automobiles, a move that is expected to happen on Wednesday. That measure could require two-thirds of new vehicles sold in the U.S. to be all-electric by 2032. Thus, despite the debacle at Hertz, which should be a clue as to what motorists really want, despite some 4,500 autodealers’ recent letter to President Biden telling him the EV mandate is “unrealistic based on current and forecasted customer demand,” despite the fact that EVs are a niche product that is primarily being bought by wealthy, white men who live in heavily Democratic parts of the country, the EPA appears ready to push forward with a truly terrible mandate. I’ll close this segment with the conclusion to my testimony to the Senate ENR in January:
The hard reality is that the Biden Administration’s EV mandates are bad for U.S. energy security and national security. The mandates are unrealistic and unattainable. They will give China control over critical supply chains and increase costs for consumers and taxpayers. The EPA’s EV mandates should be scrapped.
What I’m Reading
1. Lorin and I have been avid birdwatchers for nearly 40 years. My love of birds is one of many reasons I thoroughly enjoyed Richard Rhodes’ 2006 biography, John James Audubon: The Making of An American. Lorin has been telling me for years that I should read it, and I finally did. I read it cover to cover, something I seldom do, and was continually amazed by Audubon’s incredible physical endurance and his unwavering belief in his pursuit of making The Birds of America into a commercial success. In addition, Rhodes’ writing is vivid, and it seems, almost effortless.
2. The New Atlantis has an excellent piece by Ted Nordhaus called “Did Exxon Make It Rain Today?” The thesis paragraph perfectly captures the catastrophist rhetoric that dominates today’s energy and policy discussions. Nordhaus writes:
The capture of the media by a catastrophist climate narrative has directed public attention away from straightforward measures that policymakers can take to reduce our vulnerability to the climate’s extremes. It has allowed politicians, in the wake of climate-related disasters, to divert attention from their own failures by pointing the finger at fossil fuel companies. It has amplified the claims of an increasingly unhinged climate movement that has consistently polarized public sentiment on the issue and undermined practical efforts to reduce emissions and transition the world toward cleaner energy. And it has left many people gripped by a terror about the future that solves nothing and isn’t justified to begin with. (Emphasis added.)
3. Travis Fisher published his recent Congressional testimony on the electric grid on his Substack, The Fishtank.
Substack is becoming the destination site for analysts with deep expertise in energy and power issues. Travis, who used to work at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, certainly fits that description. That expertise shines through in his comments to the Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs within the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. He provides a deep dive into the politics and policy of electricity and why bad policy is increasing costs and imposing a regressive tax on the poor and middle class. I particularly like this segment:
Policymakers should understand the profound impacts that increases in electricity costs can have on the daily lives of Americans. The availability of low‐cost electricity can make the difference between light and darkness (or between comfort and worry) in living rooms across the country. Likewise, if policymakers want to retain American industry for purposes of national security, maintaining a low‐cost and reliable power grid is one of the strongest selling points in keeping or drawing industrial customers to the United States. Germany’s failed Energiewende is the poster child for unwise energy policy becoming dangerous industrial and foreign policy (not to mention ineffective climate policy). (Emphasis added.)
Travis also explains that the Inflation Reduction Act “threatens to undermine the well‐functioning of the power grid by flooding it with subsidized, intermittent energy.” And he reminded House members that the total cost of the IRA’s electricity-related subsidies could total a staggering $3 trillion. He concluded, “The way to ensure a robust grid is simply to remove the harm inflicted by unwise energy policy.” If you aren’t subscribing to Travis, you should be.
Podcast Appearances
1. My friend, Freddy Gray, interviewed me recently for the Spectator’s Americano Podcast. It came out last Wednesday. It’s always good talking to Freddy, a Brit who works to explain American politics to his (primarily British) audience. You can listen to it here.
2. I was also on Tom Nelson’s podcast last week, talking about our docuseries. You can watch it here.
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Hi Robert, here in the UK we are decimating any steel industry that we have left, closed our coal industry, demolished most of our coal fire power stations and even converted one of our largest coal fired power station to burn biomass which we are feeding with wood chip imported from the US and Canada. All utter madness and a unforgivable political act of self harm and all for moralist climate cult bragging. After all the UK produces 1% or so of the worlds anthropogenic carbon dioxide. So that is 1 % of 3% when expressing on the earth global co2 production. Energy security, prices and our economy are in tatters. The UK and Germany are an example to the world of how not to run a successful energy policy.
I never fail to learn something new from Robert.
If you want to see a truly enormous waste of electricity, try bitcoin mining. One of these operations puts a typical data center to shame. And because the crypto industry owns alot of politicians, bet on it getting priority access to juice both before and after the blackout.
And, yes, the Audubon bio is a great read. Its impossible to imagine most contemporary Americans roughing it the way ordinary folks of his era did - to say nothing of an outdoorsman like JJA. If you're ever in northern Kentucky, the museum at JJA State Park (across the river from Evansville, IN) has many of the original paintings on display, along with exceptionally detailed accounts of his life. And its a fantastic birdwatching site.