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Excellent. I had been wondering why Avista here in Wash was expanding its gas system despite the new idiotic laws. The decision lists American Gas Association as helping the plaintiffs, so presumably Avista was informed on the progress of the case.

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Our condo board ruled that condo owners shall not use charcoal BBQs on their outdoor decks. But electricity or gas are allowed. Who is in control of how we heat our homes and cook? We are.... And those who try to control us are blowing smoke up our asses.......Incompetent leadership causes citizens to lose respect for officials which, in turn, leads towards anarchy. We will not be controlled by idiots.

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In 2021 our (Mr. Bryce's and my) home city tried to pass an ordinance banning gas in new construction and phasing it out of existing houses by 2030.

Happily, also in 2021, the Texas legislature passed a law saying the municipalities could not pass ordinances favoring fuel sources. So Austin was preempted at the state level.

I hope this circuit court decision will ultimately mean that such action is also preempted at the federal level.

I would dearly love to know the influence path that led to Austin's City Council (of idiots) trying to pass this anti-gas ordinance. Or were they just thoughtlessly imitating big-brother California?

The amount of stupidity coming from Austin is just breath taking. In 2009 they could have participated in an expansion of their largest source of clean electricity, South Texas Nuclear Plant. They did not claiming that the consultants worst case prediction of $.08/KWHr was too expensive. But every single source of electricity they've spent money on since then has been guaranteed from the outset to be more expensive than $.08/KWHr, never mind worst case.

If you de-prorate the costs of transmission lines for wind in Texas, by using the ERCOT charge on every single KWHr consumed, it's clear that transmission alone is costing between $.10 adn $.15 per KWHr for the Wind energy Austin so dearly loves. Austin promised its citizens that the Green Choice (wind) subscribers would pay the full price for their choice (and enjoy the benefits, if any), yet the rest of us are subsidizing their transmission costs.

And the Nacogdoches wood burning plant is an amazing study of waste in the name of "green"-ness. Austin agreed to pay it $110M per year for 20 years just to be available. Any electricity, if purchased would be $.15 - $.16 per KWHr -- twice what the STNP expansion might have cost -- and finally when a tiny bit of sanity returned, after years of throwing $110M a year down this wooden outhouse, the city finally bought the plant outright (for $460M) as the only way to get out of the poor contract.

Austin squandered over (say it like Dr. Evil) ONE BILLION DOLLARS on this wood burning boondoggle and as far as I know not a single KWHr of electricity was ever delivered to Austin.

Sorry, digressed a bit. Austin angers me sooo much. I've been here since '75, but insane people seem to have taken over.

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Thank you. I'll take a look.

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I think your arguments are strong enough that you don't have to put so much focus on where the money comes from. There's deep pockets on both side. While it's helpful to remind people of that, too much isn't giving folks on the other side their due. They're not all dupes, corrupted or hoodwinked by evil billionaires. Most are smart people who come to different conclusions for a variety of reasons.

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On the other hand, I welcome all "follow the money" excursions. It helps point a clarifying finger at the motivations of these would-be policy pushers.

And it seems impossible that anyone of sound mind could reach the conclusions of the gas banners. The thermodynamics, as mentioned in the last paragraph, do not support banning use of gas at the end user.

Either these people are dishonest, or they are utterly incompetent and none of their policy recommendations should be taken seriously in either case.

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I think the thermodynamic point is more complicated than Robert presented. It depends on the end use (cooking vs home heating) and the energy mix of the locale. I'm not with the "ban all gas crowd", but I suspect their arg is that energy mix will be moving to RE anyway, so the point is moot. That's a questionable arg, but at least one that we could talk through.

Surely you're right that some of them are dishonest or incompetent, because lots of humans are. But assuming they *must be* is really the root of our political polarization problem, which tends to make things worse, not better. At least, that's my argument.

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In some cases that polarization shines a light on dishonest participants.

For 40 years pro nuclear folks treated the anti-nuclear forces as honest actors. That never ended well. We didn't start making progress until we flat out acknowledged that these are not honest debaters with the good interests of society at heart, but a different way of thinking. These are corrupt money grubbers hiding behind a patina of activism.

Some times you must expose the dirt. And there is a military latrine's worth of dirt in the energy policy right now.

And yes, there's one case where the thermodynamics might not work out, by a few percentage. However, the more wind/solar penetrate the grid, the less likely that gas used for electricity will be generated in a combined cycle plant. Combined cycle can't cycle up and down with wind/solar. So the likely efficiency for gas electricity generation really is closer to 30 or 40%.

And cooking is a tiny percentage compared to home or water heating. It's really red herring to bring it up at all.

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Like I said, I'm just pointing out the arguments they would likely believe, which could be misguided. I'm not so willing to write off the whole lot, because, like I said, there's dirt on both sides, so who really is going to come out clean?

And yeah, there were plenty of anti nuclear fanatics acting in bad faith. But for a lot of Americans, nuclear advocates made a lot of promises they didn't keep (safety, at least initially, and cost). That the fanatics got listened to was a testament to the generalized mistrust of anything nuclear as a result of these mistakes. So, it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. And the nuclear industry has yet to figure out how to earn that trust back.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/democracy-and-the-nuclear-stalemate

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I keep hearing that nuclear advocates made promises they didn't keep, but I don't see any. What specifically did they do? Every western reactor has been safe. TMI's accident harmed no one. Zero. Zilch. The safety systems worked.

As far as I've seen, all those claims are more stories from the anti-nuclear bad actors.

Certainly, you do have a point that many folks are not acting in bad faith, but rather just parroting what they've heard/been told. But the stuff they're parroting comes from dishonest or incompetent actors. For those folks, a cooler approach probably is more productive. Perhaps they can be taught to parrot a fact-based narrative, instead of the made up narrative the NGOs have been providign so far.

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Quick question: does the Ninth Circus' overturning of the natural gas ban, based on the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, apply to other fuels as well? In other words, does this ruling provide a way to overturn progressive efforts to pick one fuel (electricity) over others (gasoline and diesel) in regards to automobiles? Or solar/wind over coal/natural gas/nuclear in regards to electricity generation? If so, this would be a HUGE victory!

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Apr 18, 2023·edited Apr 18, 2023

Gas stoves are around 40% efficient at getting heat into your pan.

A combined cycle gas plant is around 60% efficient at turning gas into electricity. Induction is around 84% efficient at getting heat into your pan. You need to multiply these together to to a total efficiency of around 50%.

Qualifications as a nuclear engineer are largely irrelevant to understanding the impact on the environment of fossil fuels. You might as well tell us that the guy has brown hair or likes chocolate. Instead you told us that he can't successfully multiply 2 numbers.

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And cooking is a tiny percentage of gas use in the home. Additionally, combined cycle gas plants can only be used to support steady baseload. On grids with "renewable" penetration, it's going to be a less efficient (~30%) gas plant that can cycle up and down complementing the wind/solar's total lack of reliability.

Additionally, the cycling that wind/solar force, make the gas plant even less efficient.

So I think the original numbers stand pretty well.

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You can't penalise fossil gas generators because renewables are making baseload generators less efficient, while at the same time ignoring .. the renewables that will often be powering the electric stove.

Thinking of an investment which last many years, you can't use the emissions profile of the electricity generation network now. You have to look at it over the lifecycle of the installed gas equipment.

You would think a nuclear engineer should be thinking about how to get cooking and heating powered by .. nuclear energy. The way to do that is to electrify it.

Gas stoves, like fossil fuel cars and gas heating are stranded fossil fuel assets. We have limited resources. We should be investing in technologies we want to have in the future.

In grids which are completely powered by renewables and storage, which is where we need to get to in the next decade or so, then rather than roughly equal amounts of emissions, the a fossil fuel gas stove produces infinitely more emissions.

In a renewable world you have to look at the cost of producing that gas renewably, perhaps from electricity and hydrogen.

The combined cycle gas plants I worked with ran both ways. As a gas turbine peaker and as a baseload boiler.

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Yes, I can penalize the entire system concept. Wind/solar on teh grid make the gas generators so inefficient, that in many cases one would burn about the same amount of gas if one did away with the wind/solar and just relied on combined cycle gas.

Same electricity for the same emissions, without the wind and solar. This is documented in at least five studies, starting with one from Colorado. Why waste the money on wind/solar again, when they're providing zero or only marginal benefit?

Regarding electrification, we're nowhere close to that nirvana point of having a clean grid. I learned long ago that it's foolish to buy something until you're actually, immediately ready to use it. There's just too much uncertainty in the world.

Making folks purchase expensive, unneeded equipment, because the grid might get rid of natural gas some day in teh future is a fool's choice. When the grid is all nuclear, then sure, go for it, although I'll still favor a personal choice argument.

Your paragraph about grids power by renewables and storage is fantasy and demonstrates that you have not examined this issue sufficiently and/or have not applied sufficient math. You need to gain a much greater understanding of how the grid works and the state of the art, scale and expense of wind/solar and the available storage options.

The moment you add storage, even if you were getting your electricity for free, the electricity becomes the most expensive in the world. There is no affordable storage.

One thing which is often overlooked is lifetime. Wind wears out in 20 years, solar in 30 or less, storage via batteries will need replacing in less than 10 years.

The life cycle costs are horrible.

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The combination of wind / solar plus storage is the cheapest electricity, and has been for a long term, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-12/is-renewable-power-cheaper-than-coal-nuclear-malcolm-turnbull/11495558

South Australia is a grid where wind and solar have mostly replaced fossil fuels:

https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/consumers/energy-grid-and-supply/our-electricity-supply-and-market

Pretty much all the growth in world electricity is renewables.

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Australia has some of hte highest electricity prices to consumers in the world.

If renewables are so cheap, why is their electricity so expensive.

Now you're just spewing lies.

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Historically, before any renewables, South Australia had Australia's most expensive electricity. Minimal coal reserves, long gas pipeline runs, large transmission distances, low population density.

After moving to renewables South Australia is now the cheapest.

The State with the most coal, Queensland, is the now the most expensive.

> Wholesale electricity spot prices in the two Australian states with the most renewable energy generation -- South Australia and Tasmania -- are the lowest in the nation and have been for years.

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So let's start with the simplest one to calculate: land area is a deal breaker for wind and solar.

What is your calculation for land area for wind and solar?

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Do you want to repeat clearly false talking points, or do you want to think?

There is no issue with land area and renewables, so stop saying it.

The total area required to power the entire USA with solar PV is less than 300km by 300km.

Offshore wind requires zero land area.

Not only is the area for renewables small, it often can be used for other purposes, for example solar can be installed on roofs and in public car parks.

As you say, nuclear and renewables are not complementary.

Nuclear is efficient running at a high consistent load, which does not match the demands of the grid. So nuclear, like renewables, works well with storage, which is why Japan built 40GW of pumped hydro. The problem nuclear has is price. Solar is now the cheapest energy in human history.

It is possible to install solar and batteries where the power is needed and eliminate the need for transmission lines. In fact depending on the (currently unknown) trajectory of ever cheaper prices for solar and batteries, the cost of installation may go below the cost of transmission, making any central generation system unviable.

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Is it though? Isn't the burn from hydrogen (waste product water) overall superior to LNG. By my measure For hydrogen, the lower and upper flammability limits are 4% and 75% respectively, as compared to natural gas at 7% and 20%. This should mean that hydrogen will burn with lower amounts of air present and with higher amounts of air present when compared to natural gas. So if you crack methane you should get (depending on the temperature and method) 4 hydrogen atoms for every molecule and, frankly the fuel source is infinite and you don't need to burn or frack coal. Not sure why you say it's superior. Please enlighten me.

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founding

Great piece

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Maybe the auto makers should sue over the preference for electric cars.

Very nice piece Robert. It raised my hopes that maybe....

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Except the automakers like getting subsidies and government forcing new markets.

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As always, climate BS is where science goes to die.

These people would make Lysenko blush.

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I’m puzzled by 501c3’s not having to disclose donors...it makes it hard to track where the $ are coming from and going. Does anyone know why this is?

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Apr 18, 2023·edited Apr 18, 2023

Does this ruling have broader implications for things such as California's electrification goals or CARB's requirement for carbon permits for certain types of fuel (fossil) but not others (renewables)?

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Bob: Good job on this summary. The lawsuit decision is also a fascinating read. The Left lawyers are desperately pushing nonsense. For example, the verdict by the judges says: "Berkeley’s main contention is that its Ordinance doesn’t regulate 'energy use' because it bans natural gas rather than prescribes a 'quantity of energy.' While Berkeley concedes that a prohibition on natural gas infrastructure reduces the energy consumed by natural gas appliances in new buildings to zero, it argues that 'zero' is not a quantity, so the Ordinance is not an energy use regulation."

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the malthusian nature preachers incite culture wars against normal people over rational preferences like cooking with gas or drinking from plastic straws, in their heroic fantasy this counts as saving the planet. meanwhile they obstruct energy, transport, industrial food, and cloud technology that will actually conserve habitat. not unlike another democratic party constituency the intersectional peacocks who incite culture wars against normal people who simply get along instead of joining ritual praise of and legalizing crimes by chosen 'victim identities'. meanwhile the hip peacocks are laisse faire or protectionist when it comes to distributing technical frontier jobs outside metropolitan areas, and hostile to family and student discipline -- both of which are essential to reskill the real victims of the real problem - technical advance which always begets creative destruction. if you learn social development you have less time for inventing enemies

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