excalibur
Diamond Member
- Mar 19, 2015
- 22,747
- 44,297
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More damage being done to Americans by the Biden junta.
Yeah, Trump's a threat.
This is Øbama's third term. We can't take much more of this.
Critics of the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant rules, which were finalized in April, warned that the rules would shut down coal-fired power plants and discourage investments in new gas plants to replace them, which would undermine grid reliability.
A new analysis shows that the rules could be more impactful than thought. Energy analysts Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling, who publish their analyses on their “Energy Bad Boys” Substack, estimate that 5.2 million people served by the Southwest Power Pool (SPP), an area covering much of the Great Plains, could experience blackouts during periods of peak demand, which includes heat waves and cold snaps.
Gross Negligence
Rolling and Orr explain that the EPA performed a regulatory impact analysis for its power plant rules, as all federal agencies adopting new regulations do, but that analysis has some flaws.
The North Dakota Transmission Authority, which oversees development of transmission infrastructure in North Dakota, hired Rolling and Orr to model the reliability and cost impacts of the EPA’s rules in the SPP, which is a regional transmission organization (RTO). These entities coordinate electricity delivery over a multi-state electric grid. The area served by SPP stretches from the U.S.-Canadian border down through the Great Plains to Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle.
In analyzing its regulatory impact, the EPA doesn’t perform a reliability assessment. Instead, it goes by a resource adequacy analysis, which the agency has stated isn’t adequate for measuring regulatory impacts on grid reliability. That resource adequacy analysis estimates all generation sources’ capacity to provide power when it’s needed the most. All the resources’ capacity are then added together until the EPA can meet projected demand in a region and a reserve margin.
Such an analysis works fairly well with generation sources that aren’t dependent on the right weather conditions, as is the case with wind and solar. Dispatchable sources powered by coal, natural gas or nuclear can be expected to be available as needed, in most cases, whereas intermittent wind and solar generation may or may not.
Besides the problems with a resource adequacy analysis, in their assessment of the EPA rules on the SPP, Rolling and Orr found the assumptions the EPA uses in the resource adequacy analysis are “so shockingly unrealistic that they border on gross negligence.” The EPA estimates that solar resources in the SPP range from 80% to 100%.
This “may be the most irresponsible assumption in an energy model we have ever seen,” the analysts write.
This means the EPA expects the SPP region to rely on solar resources being available nearly all the time, which is, of course, impossible due to the rotation of the Earth and cloud cover. Mitch and Rolling say the EPA also gives generous assumptions to wind power, as well as natural gas and coal resources, which the EPA assumes will be available 100% of the time. While thermal resources don’t require ideal weather conditions to produce electricity, they have maintenance and some unplanned outages.
As a result of these flawed assumptions, the pair conclude, 5.2 million people in the SPP could be sitting in the dark when they need energy the most.
...
Read the rest here.
Yeah, Trump's a threat.
This is Øbama's third term. We can't take much more of this.
Critics of the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant rules, which were finalized in April, warned that the rules would shut down coal-fired power plants and discourage investments in new gas plants to replace them, which would undermine grid reliability.
A new analysis shows that the rules could be more impactful than thought. Energy analysts Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling, who publish their analyses on their “Energy Bad Boys” Substack, estimate that 5.2 million people served by the Southwest Power Pool (SPP), an area covering much of the Great Plains, could experience blackouts during periods of peak demand, which includes heat waves and cold snaps.
Gross Negligence
Rolling and Orr explain that the EPA performed a regulatory impact analysis for its power plant rules, as all federal agencies adopting new regulations do, but that analysis has some flaws.
The North Dakota Transmission Authority, which oversees development of transmission infrastructure in North Dakota, hired Rolling and Orr to model the reliability and cost impacts of the EPA’s rules in the SPP, which is a regional transmission organization (RTO). These entities coordinate electricity delivery over a multi-state electric grid. The area served by SPP stretches from the U.S.-Canadian border down through the Great Plains to Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle.
In analyzing its regulatory impact, the EPA doesn’t perform a reliability assessment. Instead, it goes by a resource adequacy analysis, which the agency has stated isn’t adequate for measuring regulatory impacts on grid reliability. That resource adequacy analysis estimates all generation sources’ capacity to provide power when it’s needed the most. All the resources’ capacity are then added together until the EPA can meet projected demand in a region and a reserve margin.
Such an analysis works fairly well with generation sources that aren’t dependent on the right weather conditions, as is the case with wind and solar. Dispatchable sources powered by coal, natural gas or nuclear can be expected to be available as needed, in most cases, whereas intermittent wind and solar generation may or may not.
Besides the problems with a resource adequacy analysis, in their assessment of the EPA rules on the SPP, Rolling and Orr found the assumptions the EPA uses in the resource adequacy analysis are “so shockingly unrealistic that they border on gross negligence.” The EPA estimates that solar resources in the SPP range from 80% to 100%.
This “may be the most irresponsible assumption in an energy model we have ever seen,” the analysts write.
This means the EPA expects the SPP region to rely on solar resources being available nearly all the time, which is, of course, impossible due to the rotation of the Earth and cloud cover. Mitch and Rolling say the EPA also gives generous assumptions to wind power, as well as natural gas and coal resources, which the EPA assumes will be available 100% of the time. While thermal resources don’t require ideal weather conditions to produce electricity, they have maintenance and some unplanned outages.
As a result of these flawed assumptions, the pair conclude, 5.2 million people in the SPP could be sitting in the dark when they need energy the most.
...
Read the rest here.
