Biden and Big Green

 Vince Bielski:

Joe Biden needs to put the pedal to the metal as he races toward his goal of ridding America’s energy sources of carbon emissions by 2035. But the president-elect’s headlong rush toward a green future may be slowed by a snarl of political speed limits in the states.

One of Biden’s most ambitious aims is to completely clean up the electrical grid, today powered mostly by fossil fuels, in only 15 years. Many energy executives consider that goal quixotic because it would require a breathtakingly fast transformation of the massive power industry -- from replacing hundreds of dirty power plants to upgrading thousands of miles transmission lines.

To do that, Biden needs to engineer a major expansion of federal power over the regulatory authority of the states – a daunting political task. States control energy policy and their mishmash of requirements to boost wind and solar power don’t go far enough to achieve Biden’s 2035 goal. That is why he is expected to push for a federal clean electricity standard – a law forcing utilities to provide a lot more power from carbon-free sources.

A federal standard – perhaps the single most important piece of Biden’s sweeping climate plan – is likely to face stiff opposition in Congress. Major utilities, even those voluntarily pursuing clean energy, don’t like to have their hands tied by government mandates and have successfully opposed them in the past. Lawmakers from states dependent on fossil fuels have shot down proposals for a federal standard, including one backed by the Obama administration, on concerns that their residents would see their bill rise to pay for clean power purchased from regions rich in wind and solar energy.

“A federal standard is so important because it provides the incentive to investors and developers to scale up those renewable resources, which we need to do at a much faster clip to achieve a safe climate future,” says Mike O’Boyle, director of electricity policy at Energy Innovation. “But the politics around a standard can be very difficult.”

Many items on Biden’s long climate to-do list are low-hanging fruit for his new team, led by former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, nominated to be secretary of energy, ex-Secretary of State John Kerry, who will serve as climate czar, and New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland, who is slated to head the Interior Department. Biden will have the authority to mandate the federal purchase of zero-emission vehicles, rejoin the Paris Agreement, restrict energy drilling on public lands, and restore stringent fuel economy standards for cars and trucks.

But the truly transformational part of his agenda, greening the grid by 2035, would require an almost fantastical acceleration of the rollout of wind and solar farms across the nation with buy-in from Congress and the states. Last year developers installed 13 gigawatts of new solar capacity and 9 gigawatts of wind power – a pace that would have to more than triple starting immediately for Biden to come close to hitting his goal, according to a study by the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

As the coronavirus economic slump drags on, Biden is selling his climate agenda as a job creator. It would require developers to build hundreds of additional massive wind and solar farms annually for the next 15 years. Employment in the energy industry alone would increase by the equivalent of about 8.5 million jobs lasting a year as positions in the renewable sector more than replace those lost in retrenching coal and natural gas operations, the UC study says.

Biden’s ambition is roughly in keeping with the findings of climate scientists who say the U.S. economy needs to be carbon-free by 2050 as part of a global effort to stave off the worst effects of climate change. To achieve that, the grid must be cleaned up first to enable the other big sources of carbon pollution – transportation and industry – to slash emissions too. Plugging an electric car or “green” assembly line into a dirty grid amounts to running in place.
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There is more.

Wind and solar are extremely poor substitutes for fossil fuels.  They take up a lot of real estate and give little bang for the buck.  They are inefficient and unreliable and they require fossil fuel backups which means they doubling or more the cost of producing electricity for an inferior product.  California has already experienced the loss of power by embracing this model.  It would be even worse if everyone had to use cars and trucks powered by the grid.  Even if the US did all this it would do little or nothing to reduce CO2 emissions because other countries would not spend that kind of money to provide an inferior product.