Energy
What doubling the grid really means
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
” imagine if someone said in the next 25 years and 11 months, we must twin every single freeway, highway, grid road, street and alleyway, across the entire country, at the same time. And along the way, we have to replace up to 89 per cent of the existing infrastructure, as well, because it is no longer considered adequate “
Recently my daughter called me while on her way back from a Costco run in Regina, heading home to Weyburn.
She noted that it appears they are twinning the highway between Regina and Weyburn. Indeed, they are, I explained. And several years later, they’ll probably get it all the way to Weyburn. Maybe by the time I retire, if I live that long, they’ll get as far as Estevan.
Indeed, those timelines are likely pretty close to reality, if the twinning of Highway 16, from Saskatoon to Lloydminster, was any indication. I used to drive from Saskatoon to North Battleford to get the newspaper I was working for printed, with road construction for much of that. And it took several more years to complete the Battlefords to Lloydminster portion. I was fortunate enough to be present at the ceremony for that. It was significant enough that Premier Lorne Calvert came out.
Twinning a major highway is a substantial undertaking. Historically, Saskatchewan could usually only afford to work on three separate areas at a time, typically doing 20 kilometres per year in each stretch. That was all the provincial finances could handle.
By adding an additional two lanes, you are effectively doubling the capacity of that major piece of infrastructure. It’s not easy, not cheap, and not fast.
Now imagine if someone said in the next 25 years and 11 months, we must twin every single freeway, highway, grid road, street and alleyway, across the entire country, at the same time. And along the way, we have to replace up to 89 per cent of the existing infrastructure, as well, because it is no longer considered adequate.
You’d probably think they were living in a dreamland, or quite possibly stark raving mad.
And yet this is precisely what the federal government is proposing, nay, demanding, of Canadians from St. Johns to Victoria to Tuktoyaktuk.
In order to save the world from anthropogenic (manmade climate change) and attain a “Net Zero by 2050” economy, we must increase the size of the electrical grid by a factor of 2.5x. And for Saskatchewan and Alberta, who on any given day get up to 88 and 94 per cent of their power, respectively, from fossil fuels, they must also replace that existing gas and coal power generation with non-emitting sources, at the same time as they’re building out the truly massive expansion.
The first reference I saw of the federal Liberal government’s intentions of this was in the 2023 budget, which noted expanding the electrical grid by a factor of 2.2 to 3.4 times. By August, when they released the proposed Clean Electricity Regulations, the government seemed to settle on a factor of 2.5 times for the high demand scenario.
So in the highway twinning example, that would be adding three lanes, not two, to every two lane highway, grid road, street and alleyway. For an existing four lane highway, you would need to add six lanes. For a six lane freeway like Ontario’s 401, you’d need to add an additional nine lanes, finding the right of way space, concrete, rebar, gravel, and asphalt for all of this. Again, all at the same time, in 25 years and 11 months.
There are several thrusts that the federal government is pushing. First, by 2035, they want to totally eliminate gasoline and diesel from new light vehicle sales. There’s currently only eight retail hydrogen fueling stations listed by the federal government and Shell in the entire country. There could be more, but they’re not listed. Realistically this means battery-powered electric vehicles (EVs). But nearly all of those EVs will require charging at home each night (and especially during winter, pre-conditioning those batteries, keeping them warm).
So every residence in the country will require 30 amp chargers for cars, and 80 amp chargers for pickups.
But the government is also now moving away from fossil fuels for home, heating, too. This was indicative of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s pause on the carbon tax for home heating oil (primarily used in Atlantic Canada, although I grew up in a house with that system). To do so, the feds are offering “free” installations of heat pumps (which are wholly inadequate at -30 temperatures, let alone the -44 seen in Alberta in mid-January). And those could be up to another 50 amps, per heat pump.
And that’s just residential, never mind commercial or industrial.
The Clean Electricity Regulations are meant to force fossil fuel power generation to go away. And since wind frequently drops to nothing, and the sun goes down every day, the only real alternative is massive expansion of nuclear power across Canada. We’re talking small modular reactors by the dozen in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and to a lesser extent, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
On Jan. 30, SaskPower announced a formalized agreement with General Electric-Hitachi for small modular reactors. But when I asked how many they plan on building, the CEO wouldn’t say. But he did speak of increasing the provincial grid from 5,400 megawatt now to 13,000 to 15,000 megawatts.
Hydro Quebec just released their plans to double their grid. Yet, perhaps miraculously, they’re not saying how many, if any, new dams will need to be built.
This doubling of the grid (actually 2.5x, but that’s not easy to say), means we’re going to need not only additional generation, but transmission lines, distribution lines, back alley pedestals, and wiring to every home, business and factory in the country. Where the materials come from? The contractors and workers? Will Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) be universally trampled on by eminent domain orders, for the good of the planet? Or will it be a continuation of Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything Syndrome (BANANAS)?
A very real example is the Trans Mountain Pipeline. The original was built in something like 16 months, from scratching dirt to oil flowing. The expansion is taking a hell of a lot longer. Work started in 2018, and it is still not done. Any change in the plan had to go back to the Canadian Energy Regulator. Some First Nations fought it every step of the way.
Now do this for every single piece of existing power infrastructure. Wrap your head around that for a minute.
This supposed energy transition, from fossil fuels to electric everything, does not work if you cannot build out the electrical infrastructure, everywhere, and essentially all at in the next 25 years and 11 months. Either the timelines need to be stretched to a generational scale, or more realistically, the whole concept needs to be entirely rethought.
As Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe has said more than once, “We will not attempt the impossible when it comes to power production.”
Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online, and occasional contributor to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He can be reached at [email protected].
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
For two years now, I and others have been pointing out the reality that there is no real “energy transition” happening around the world. Two new items of information came to light this week that irrevocably prove the point.
It is true that governments across the western world appear to be working to bankrupt their countries by pouring trillions of debt-funded dollars, Euros and British pounds into central planning efforts to subsidize renewables and electric vehicles into existence. That reality cannot be denied. The trouble is that no amount of debt money can turn the markets and the markets aren’t cooperating.
Despite all the government largesse that has spurred major additions of wind and solar generation capacity, those weather-reliant energy sources can’t even keep up with the pace of rising demand for electricity. As a result, the markets dictated that the world consumed record levels of coal, natural gas, oil and even wood during 2023. Yes, we are still burning vast amounts of wood for electricity, despite an alleged “transition” from wood to coal which began 500 years ago.
That is reality, dictated by the markets.
Two new bits of data came to light this week that pound the final nails into the coffin of the narrative around the energy transition. A report in the Financial Times, citing data compiled by Grid Strategies, reveals that the buildout of new high-voltage transmission lines in the United States slowed to a trickle in 2023, with just 55.5 additional miles installed. That collapse comes despite the Biden government’s recognition that a massive expansion of this type of transmission lines must happen to accommodate the demands of any true “transition” to renewables.
The Financial Times quotes a 2023 assessment by the Department of Energy that found that “regional transmission must more than double and interregional transmission must grow more than fivefold by 2035 to meet decarbonization targets.” DOE admits such a pace would add more than 50,000 miles of new transmission in just 11 years, which is almost 1,000 times the pace of adds during 2023. Yikes.
A crucial aspect of that DOE study to understand is that it was conducted before we began to understand the true magnitude of additional power demands that will result from the explosive growth of AI technology just now starting to come to full bloom. It was just this past January, at the WEF Forum in Davos, where OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told the audience he believes generation capacity on the grid will have to double over the next decade just to fill the AI demands alone. That is what is needed in addition to the rising demands for EV charging, industrial growth, population growth and economic growth.
The second piece of compelling data arising this week comes from a Bloomberg story headlined, “Data Centers Now Need a Reactor’s Worth of Power, Dominion Says.” The key thing to understand about this story is that the piece is only referencing the needs of planned new data centers being built in Northern Virginia to feed AI development in that tiny sliver of the United States.
This key excerpt from the story says it all: “Over the past five years, Dominion has connected 94 data centers that, together, consume about four gigawatts of electricity, Blue said. That means that just two or three of the data center campuses now being planned could require as much electricity as all the centers Dominion hooked up since about 2019.”
That is not just rapid growth, it is exponential growth in power demand from a single developing technology.
Demand growth needs such as this aren’t going to be filled by unpredictable, unreliable, weather-dependent generation like windmills and solar arrays. And let’s face it: The United States is not going to be able to continue expanding renewables without finding some way to create a massive expansion of transmission. Why build the generation if you can’t move the electricity?
What it all means is that all the grand Biden Green New Deal plans to shut down America’s remaining coal fleet and much of its natural gas generation fleet are going to have to wait, because the market will not allow them. That’s reality, and reality does not care about anyone’s green transition dreams.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Economy
‘Gambling With The Grid’: New Data Highlights Achilles’ Heel Of One Of Biden’s Favorite Green Power Sources
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By NICK POPE
New government data shows that wind power generation fell in 2023 despite the addition of new capacity, a fact that energy sector experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation demonstrates its inherent flaw.
Wind generation fell by about 2.1% in 2023 relative to 2022 generation, despite the 6 gigawatts (GW) of wind power capacity that came online last year, according to data published Tuesday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). That wind power output dropped despite new capacity coming online and the availability of government subsidies highlights its intermittency and the problems wind power could pose for grid reliability, energy sector experts told the DCNF.
The decrease in wind generation is the first drop on record with the EIA since the 1990s; the drop was not evenly distributed across all regions of the U.S., and slower wind speeds last year also contributed to the decline, according to EIA. The Biden administration wants to have the American power sector reach carbon neutrality by 2035, a goal that will require a significant shift away from natural gas- and coal-fired power toward wind, solar and other green sources.
A table depicting the decrease of wind power generation in 2023 relative to 2022. (Screenshot via U.S. Energy Information Administration)
“Relying on wind power to meet your peak electricity demands is gambling with the grid,” Isaac Orr, a policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment who specializes in power grid-related analysis, told the DCNF. “Will the wind blow, or won’t it? This should be a moment where policymakers step back and consider the wisdom of heavily subsidizing intermittent generators and punishing reliable coal and gas plants with onerous regulations.”
Between 2016 and 2022, the wind industry received an estimated $18.6 billion worth of subsidies, about 10% of the total amount of subsidies extended to the energy sector by the U.S. government, according to an August 2023 EIA report. Wind power received more assistance from the government than nuclear power, coal or natural gas over the same period of time.
“This isn’t subsidies per kilowatt hour of generation. It’s raw subsidies. If it were per kilowatt hour of generation, the numbers would be even more extreme,” Paige Lambermont, a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the DCNF. “This is a massive amount of money. It’s enough to dramatically alter energy investment decisions for the worse. We’re much more heavily subsidizing the sources that don’t provide a significant portion of our electricity than those that do.”
“Policy that just focuses on installed capacity, rather than the reliability of that capacity, fails to understand the real needs of the electrical grid,” Lambermont added. “This recent disparity illustra
Wind power’s performance was especially lackluster in the upper midwest, but Texas saw more wind generation in 2023 than it did in 2022, according to EIA. Wind generation in the first half of 2023 was about 14% lower than it was through the first six months of 2022, but generation was higher toward the end of 2023 than it was during the same period in 2022.
In 2023, about 60% of all electricity generated in the U.S. came from fossil fuels, while 10% came from wind power, according to EIA data. Beyond generous subsidies for preferred green energy sources, the Biden administration has also aggressively regulated fossil fuels and American power plants to advance its broad climate agenda.
Biden’s Climate Bill Boosted An Offshore Wind Giant, But His Economy Brought It To The Brink https://t.co/AF7SPT2FNu
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) November 3, 2023
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) landmark power plant rules finalized this month will threaten grid reliability if enacted, partially because the regulations are likely to incentivize operators to close plants rather than adopt the costly measures required for compliance, grid experts previously told the DCNF. At the same time that the Biden administration is effectively trying to shift power generation away from fossil fuels, it is also pursuing goals — such as substantially boosting electric vehicle adoption over the next decade and incentivizing construction of energy-intensive computer chip factories — that are driving up projected electricity demand in the future.
“The EIA data proves what we’ve always known about wind power: It is intermittent, unpredictable and unreliable,” David Blackmon, a 40-year veteran of the oil and gas industry who now writes and consults on the energy sector, told the DCNF. “Any power generation source whose output is wholly dependent on equally unpredictable weather conditions should never be presented by power companies and grid managers as safe replacements for abundant, cheap, dispatchable generation fueled with natural gas, coal or nuclear. This is a simple reality that people in charge of our power grids too often forget. Saying that no doubt hurts some people’s feelings, but nature really does not care about our feelings.”
Blackmon also pointed out that, aside from its intermittency, sluggish build-out of the transmission lines and related infrastructure poses a major problem for wind power.
“Wind power is worthless without accompanying transmission, yet the Biden administration continues to pour billions into unreliable wind while ignoring the growing crisis in the transmission sector,” Blackmon told the DCNF.
Another long-term issue that wind power, as well as solar power, faces is the need for a massive expansion in the amount of battery storage available to store and dispatch energy from intermittent sources as market conditions dictate. By some estimates, the U.S. will need about 85 times as much battery storage by 2050 relative to November 2023 in order to fully decarbonize the power grid, according to Alsym Energy, a battery company.
The White House and the Department of Energy did not respond to requests for comment.
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