Transition & Redundancy

High Cost, Low Benefit

The pursuit of the transition of the energy economy has resulted in massive investments in redundant facilities. Redundancy is expensive and wasteful. It has contributed significantly to the inflation in the general economy, primarily as the result of the incentives, subsidies and mandates imposed to advance it.

The US had adequate electric generation infrastructure to provide reliable and affordable electric service to all classes of customers. This infrastructure included hydroelectric, nuclear coal, natural gas and geothermal generation and very limited pumped hydroelectric storage. These generation resources were all dispatchable on demand.

The US federal government and numerous state governments decided to promote the use of behind-the-meter solar generation, offering a variety of incentives including net metering to encourage electric customers to install solar systems. The electric output of these systems was primarily consumed on-site, but continuing connection to the electric utility grid was available to provide power when the output of the solar system was unavailable or inadequate, and to receive power from the solar system when the solar generation output exceeded the requirements of the host site.

The electricity generated by these solar systems reduced the quantity of energy required to be produced by the existing generation assets serving the grid, but did not reduce the need for those assets to supply the grid when solar system output was insufficient to meet site demand. Therefore, the behind-the-meter solar generating capacity is redundant. The grid remains able to serve the load without the solar generation. The phase out of subsidies will likely slow the expansion of behind-the-meter generation.

The US federal government and numerous state governments also decided to promote grid-scale solar and wind generation capacity and related electricity storage capacity. They offered massive incentives and subsidies to encourage renewable generation and established mandatory market penetration requirements to accelerate market penetration. The resulting solar and wind generating capacity is also redundant because, while its output displaces output from existing conventional generation assets, it cannot replace them because the solar and wind generation are intermittent and non-dispatchable.

Solar and wind generation might be able to render existing conventional generation redundant if it were dispatchable, but that would require massive investment in electricity storage facilities, which are currently extremely expensive and also not suitable for long-duration backup. The solar and wind developers have little interest in adding the required storage to their systems because it would negate their Levelized Cost Of Energy (LCOE) argument. The required storage investment would likely fall to the utilities or RTOs and ISOs.

The phase out of renewable generation subsidies will likely slow the expansion of renewable generation.

The US also had adequate vehicle manufacturing capacity prior to the federal and state requirements for the production and sale of electric vehicles. The transition to EVs required the construction of new manufacturing facilities, obsoleting existing facilities, or the repurposing and re-equipping of existing facilities. The transition also required major investments in equipping the dealer service network and retraining dealer service personnel. The transition, to the extent that it occurred, also reduced the sales of motor fuels by the existing vehicle refueling stations, rendering a portion of their capacity redundant, and the construction of both private and public EV charging facilities.

The termination of EV subsidies and mandates has reduced EV sales and rendered a portion of the investment in EV production, service and charging investment redundant.

Originally published here.