News

Originally published on Complete Colorado Page 2

American Clean Power says Colorado has nearly 6,300 MW of wind, solar, and storage capacity that can power 2.3 million homes at a cost of $12 billion. So why don’t they? Because they can’t. The power they provide is intermittent and unreliable. Sometimes they can’t provide power at all.

The bitter cold and rolling blackouts Colorado experienced over Christmas should be a wake up call for the political class to clean up its energy policy, dump the unachievable 100 percent renewable goal, and go nuclear.

Reliable and clean

When the temperature plummeted well below zero in Colorado, so did power output from wind. Xcel Energy and other utilities relied on coal and natural gas to keep Coloradans and their holiday visitors from freezing. Still some residents lost power. At our house in Greeley, power was out for over two hours in the wee hours of Christmas morning.

For a state that fancies itself a leader in clean energy, ignoring popular, reliable, and clean nuclear energy is perplexing.

According to the fall 2022 American Climate Perspectives Survey, roughly 70 percent of respondents support nuclear power “because it reliably generates a lot of electricity … while reducing pollution to our climate.” They’re right. At 92.5 percent, nuclear has by far the highest capacity factor of any energy source. It makes sense that nuclear is enjoying a renaissance across all demographic groups – except Colorado’s political class.

In my adopted state of North Carolina, where overnight wind chills plunged below zero during the holidays, solar provided no power. To be fair, solar did contribute minimally during the short daylight hours, but nuclear was the workhorse (see Figure 1). Clean, reliable nuclear has provided the state nearly 30 percent of its electricity for decades.

While coal and natural gas production declined due to equipment failures, their contribution was higher and more reliable than solar. Still, higher than anticipated demand left roughly 450,000 residents without power at some point during the brutal cold spell. Some because high winds knocked out power lines, others because of rolling blackouts.

No state should tolerate the “new normaling of blackouts.” Capacity shortfalls once unique to California are rolling from west to east “faster than even Imperial College London modelers would find believable,” in the words of my John Locke Foundation colleague Jon Sanders.  Telling people to use less power, put on a sweater, or throw another log on the fire aren’t long-term solutions to bad climate policies that have forced the misallocation of ratepayer dollars to energy sources that don’t produce power when needed.

Consider this confession from a North Carolina solar power application, “Solar is an intermittent energy source, and therefore the maximum dependable capacity is 0 MW.”  When people need energy the most, solar’s contribution may be zero. The same is true for wind. Investment in unreliable sources and throttling investment in reliable sources will result in more blackouts, especially as the political class embraces green building codes and electric vehicle mandates that increase electricity demand.

Colorado does pay lip service to nuclear. In 2018 the legislature passed a law requiring the Colorado Energy Office (CEO) to promote nuclear as a “cleaner” energy source, but the head of the agency, Will Toor, has ignored that instruction. A search for a mention of nuclear on the agency’s website yields no results.

A model for Colorado

North Carolina’s bipartisan legislation H.B. 951 “Energy Solutions for North Carolina” could be a model for Colorado. The policy goal is 70 percent CO2 reduction from 2005 levels by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2050, but the legislature doesn’t mandate the generation mix to do it. Instead, it provides guardrails to protect the grid and ratepayers, encourages innovative technology, and includes some flexibility on the timeline. For instance, any new “generation and resource changes must maintain or improve upon the adequacy and reliability of the existing grid” and it must be the least cost for compliance.

The John Locke Foundation’s influential study, titled Energy Crossroads: Exploring North Carolina’s Two Energy Futures, provided the intellectual foundation for H.B. 951. We didn’t debate the zero-carbon dioxide emissions policy goal. Rather, we compared alternatives to achieving the goal and then provided the least-cost, most reliable method to do so. Spoiler alert: The answer is nuclear energy. When factoring in the need for significantly greater capacity, backup generation, transmission, and failure rate, our paper shows renewables are prohibitively expensive.

There was a similar finding in a 2019 Independence Institute paper, The Radical Reorganization of Colorado’s Electric Grid: The Cost of Keeping the Lights On. Modeling showed even greater costs to Colorado ratepayers – $941 billion plus – to reach 100 percent renewable energy by 2040. Nuclear is the solution.

H.B. 951 also allows for improved carbon capture technology for natural gas and coal, avoiding the need for premature retirement of baseload coal.

H.B. 951 is landmark legislation. It prioritizes ratepayers, economic health, and environmental stewardship over special interests. It could be a model for Colorado, but only if the political class is willing to clean up its energy policy and go nuclear. Otherwise, Coloradans should prepare for something worse than the Christmas 2022 cold spell.

Amy Cooke is the CEO of the John Locke Foundation, a state-based free market think tank in North Carolina. Prior to joining Locke, Ms. Cooke served as the executive vice president and the director of energy policy for the Independence Institute in Colorado.

Originally published on Complete Colorado Page 2

American Clean Power says Colorado has nearly 6,300 MW of wind, solar, and storage capacity that can power 2.3 million homes at a cost of $12 billion. So why don’t they? Because they can’t. The power they provide is intermittent and unreliable. Sometimes they can’t provide power at all.

The bitter cold and rolling blackouts Colorado experienced over Christmas should be a wake up call for the political class to clean up its energy policy, dump the unachievable 100 percent renewable goal, and go nuclear.

Reliable and clean

When the temperature plummeted well below zero in Colorado, so did power output from wind. Xcel Energy and other utilities relied on coal and natural gas to keep Coloradans and their holiday visitors from freezing. Still some residents lost power. At our house in Greeley, power was out for over two hours in the wee hours of Christmas morning.

For a state that fancies itself a leader in clean energy, ignoring popular, reliable, and clean nuclear energy is perplexing.

According to the fall 2022 American Climate Perspectives Survey, roughly 70 percent of respondents support nuclear power “because it reliably generates a lot of electricity … while reducing pollution to our climate.” They’re right. At 92.5 percent, nuclear has by far the highest capacity factor of any energy source. It makes sense that nuclear is enjoying a renaissance across all demographic groups – except Colorado’s political class.

In my adopted state of North Carolina, where overnight wind chills plunged below zero during the holidays, solar provided no power. To be fair, solar did contribute minimally during the short daylight hours, but nuclear was the workhorse (see Figure 1). Clean, reliable nuclear has provided the state nearly 30 percent of its electricity for decades.

While coal and natural gas production declined due to equipment failures, their contribution was higher and more reliable than solar. Still, higher than anticipated demand left roughly 450,000 residents without power at some point during the brutal cold spell. Some because high winds knocked out power lines, others because of rolling blackouts.

No state should tolerate the “new normaling of blackouts.” Capacity shortfalls once unique to California are rolling from west to east “faster than even Imperial College London modelers would find believable,” in the words of my John Locke Foundation colleague Jon Sanders.  Telling people to use less power, put on a sweater, or throw another log on the fire aren’t long-term solutions to bad climate policies that have forced the misallocation of ratepayer dollars to energy sources that don’t produce power when needed.

Consider this confession from a North Carolina solar power application, “Solar is an intermittent energy source, and therefore the maximum dependable capacity is 0 MW.”  When people need energy the most, solar’s contribution may be zero. The same is true for wind. Investment in unreliable sources and throttling investment in reliable sources will result in more blackouts, especially as the political class embraces green building codes and electric vehicle mandates that increase electricity demand.

Colorado does pay lip service to nuclear. In 2018 the legislature passed a law requiring the Colorado Energy Office (CEO) to promote nuclear as a “cleaner” energy source, but the head of the agency, Will Toor, has ignored that instruction. A search for a mention of nuclear on the agency’s website yields no results.

A model for Colorado

North Carolina’s bipartisan legislation H.B. 951 “Energy Solutions for North Carolina” could be a model for Colorado. The policy goal is 70 percent CO2 reduction from 2005 levels by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2050, but the legislature doesn’t mandate the generation mix to do it. Instead, it provides guardrails to protect the grid and ratepayers, encourages innovative technology, and includes some flexibility on the timeline. For instance, any new “generation and resource changes must maintain or improve upon the adequacy and reliability of the existing grid” and it must be the least cost for compliance.

The John Locke Foundation’s influential study, titled Energy Crossroads: Exploring North Carolina’s Two Energy Futures, provided the intellectual foundation for H.B. 951. We didn’t debate the zero-carbon dioxide emissions policy goal. Rather, we compared alternatives to achieving the goal and then provided the least-cost, most reliable method to do so. Spoiler alert: The answer is nuclear energy. When factoring in the need for significantly greater capacity, backup generation, transmission, and failure rate, our paper shows renewables are prohibitively expensive.

There was a similar finding in a 2019 Independence Institute paper, The Radical Reorganization of Colorado’s Electric Grid: The Cost of Keeping the Lights On. Modeling showed even greater costs to Colorado ratepayers – $941 billion plus – to reach 100 percent renewable energy by 2040. Nuclear is the solution.

H.B. 951 also allows for improved carbon capture technology for natural gas and coal, avoiding the need for premature retirement of baseload coal.

H.B. 951 is landmark legislation. It prioritizes ratepayers, economic health, and environmental stewardship over special interests. It could be a model for Colorado, but only if the political class is willing to clean up its energy policy and go nuclear. Otherwise, Coloradans should prepare for something worse than the Christmas 2022 cold spell.

Amy Cooke is the CEO of the John Locke Foundation, a state-based free market think tank in North Carolina. Prior to joining Locke, Ms. Cooke served as the executive vice president and the director of energy policy for the Independence Institute in Colorado.

Originally published in the Denver Gazette.

---

“In this house, we believe science is real.” Unless, of course, the science is about nuclear energy.

The majority Democratic Senate Transportation and Energy committee killed its first pro-nuclear energy bill of the session last Tuesday morning, voting 5-2 along party lines to table SB23-079 indefinitely.

The bill, admittedly modest in its ambitions, would have simply classified nuclear power as a clean energy source under state statute. Despite testimony supporting the bill outnumbering opposing comments nearly 12-1, Democratic Senators Faith Winter, Kevin Priola, Lisa Cutter, Sonya Jaquez Lewis, and Tony Exum voted in lockstep to seal its fate.

“You’re right, everything I’ve read says that up to 20 percent of the grid in the near term will require nuclear,” Committee Vice Chair Kevin Priola, the erstwhile Republican who now governs to the left of many in his new party on environmental issues, said to bill sponsor Larry Liston (R.) in his concluding remarks. “But the problem I have is with putting it in a definition. It doesn’t really even change anything, especially at the state level. The technology is getting better and will be a part of getting to net-zero, so I do agree with that. But I’ll be a no.”

You’d be forgiven for finding it hard to square those remarks, ostensibly in support of nuclear’s role in a clean future, with the outcome of the vote.

It should come as no surprise that the rationale for opposing this bill lacks coherence. There simply isn’t a justifiable reason for rejecting it beyond pure partisanship, recalcitrant 1970s-era nuclear phobia, or a bit of both. One look around at the modern political landscape, even among environmentalists, and you’ll find no shortage of widespread support for nuclear energy. The Biden administration supports nuclear power, as indicated by his clean energy platform. So does his Secretary of Energy, who says it “is going to play a critical role in America’s clean energy future.” Members of Congress from both parties in both chambers support it. So do globally respected scientific bodies that study energy and climate change, like the International Energy Agency (IEA).

“Alongside renewables, energy efficiency and other innovative technologies, nuclear can make a significant contribution to achieving sustainable energy goals and enhancing energy security,” says Faith Birol, Executive Director of the IEA. According to recent public opinion polls, even the general public broadly supports nuclear energy.

And yet the Democrats in the Colorado General Assembly decided to buck that consensus and kill a modest nuclear energy bill for the second year in a row.

I’m sure a handful of Democratic committee members know better than all those other folks.

None of this is to say that having good faith concerns with nuclear energy is impossible. There are certainly conversations to be had about plant construction time and cost. Even concerns about waste and safety, however overstated and easily manageable they may be, are perfectly legitimate.

But it’s worth considering just how limited in nature bill 079 was.

It did not mandate that the state suddenly pick a favorite in nuclear energy. It did not prescribe an immediate build-out of a new reactor fleet. It wouldn’t have even committed the state to ever building nuclear plants at all. It simply would have amended the state’s current statutory definition of “clean energy,” which at present farcically excludes nuclear by name alongside fossil fuels, to include the country’s largest single source of carbon-free electricity generation.

That would allow an enterprising electricity provider, be it a utility, co-op, or independent power producer, to evaluate a suite of technologies on an even playing field when deciding which course to take in meeting Colorado’s decarbonization goals.

As it stands now, if a utility were to consider pursuing nuclear generation, it would not be credited with using a “qualifying resource” to meet the state’s carbon goals, a de facto penalty for producing clean energy under the state’s renewable portfolio standard.

Meanwhile, despite necessitating fossil fuel backup when the weather doesn’t cooperate, wind and solar get to continue earning renewable energy credits while locking in gas-fired generation for the foreseeable future.

In plain words, the status quo is absurd.

Nuclear energy is a carbon-free, low marginal cost source of electricity capable of operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No backup fossil fuels are required. It doesn’t skip a beat on an overcast day or when the wind ceases to blow, and it can even be used to produce process heat for hard-to-decarbonize sectors of the economy, such as heavy industry.

It is among the safest and lowest emitting technologies humanity has ever produced on a lifecycle basis, on par with wind and solar. It is the most land-efficient energy source per unit of electricity generated, requiring 18 to 27 times less land than a utility-scale solar installation, which translates to fewer land use conflicts and NIMBY opposition, as well as a boon for conservation and species biodiversity that more land-extensive energy resources would otherwise disrupt.

The state has now erred two sessions in a row when presented with an opportunity to examine nuclear energy seriously. Meanwhile, surrounding states and allied countries are poised to reap the benefits of a clean energy future that includes advanced nuclear power.

If Colorado policymakers wish to avoid being left behind on the clean energy transition, they would do well to correct their irrational aversion to giving nuclear producers a chance to contribute to a clean, reliable future.

Jake Fogleman is a Policy Analyst for the Independence Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment.

Link to article.