Everything about our modern lifestyle, from the food we eat to the clothes we wear to the computer, tablet, smartphone, or other device you're reading these words on, is reliant on one thing: Abundant, cheap energy. There are ways we can achieve cleaner, cheaper, more reliable power, which is necessary for our modern technological society.
As we are learning, solar and wind power, among other "green" energy schemes, may fulfill some niche roles, but they aren't reliable on any scale. Now there are those in the "green energy" movement who are convinced they can make these things work if they believe really, really hard, but that's not how reality works.
Mitch Rolling and Isaac Orr, the "Energy Bad Boys," do know how reality works, and when it comes to green energy schemes, they are presenting some, shall we say, inconvenient truths.
Last May, Mitch Rolling and Isaac Orr, also known on Substack as the “Energy Bad Boys,” modeled the cost and reliability impacts of the Environmental Protection Agency’s new power plant rule for the Industrial Commission of North Dakota. The rule requires unproven carbon capture technologies on power plants. The investments to implement the technology aren’t feasible for coal-fired power plants and costly for new natural gas-fired generation. As critics have pointed out, taking large amounts of reliable power off the grid and making it costly to add new reliable power will create reliability problems.
The analysis Orr and Rolling conducted found that the EPA performed a regulatory impact analysis, but in that analysis, the agency never performed a reliability assessment. Instead, it measured the impacts of the policy using a resource adequacy analysis, which the agency has stated isn’t adequate for measuring regulatory impacts on grid reliability. The EPA also used assumptions that Orr and Rolling found to be “shockingly unrealistic” and “irresponsible.”
The EPA - which has regulatory power over energy production, for some reason - never performed a reliability assessment. One would think that reliability would be the first assessment of any new rule or technology - but that's not what the EPA is concerned with.
Now, there is a multi-state lawsuit resulting from Rolling and Orr's findings.
This analysis was part of a 27-state lawsuit filed against the EPA, which argues the agency exceeded its authority in passing the rule. A federal appeals court in July declined to block the rule while the legal challenge makes its way through the courts, and the plaintiffs are appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court in hopes of getting the injunction.
The beginnings of a return to sanity? Or just a delaying action?
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The problem with the analyses that have been done in the past, according to Orr and Rolling, is that they are comparing alternate scenarios for green energy schemes against each other, but not against the system already in place; this seems like it would be kind of an obvious starting point for any such assessment, yes?
That's not what's been done.
Orr said that a lot of the modeling done by renewable energy advocates uses a “bait and switch” baseline to claim that their policy proposals will save money relative an alternative scenario. So, they’ll compare their plan to another plan to incorporate wind and solar on the grid, rather than comparing the proposal to the grid as it exists today.
“So that's how they get away with promoting this fiction that we can reduce our emissions and also provide lower cost. It's not lower cost compared to today. It’s compared to some other kind of made-up scenario that would potentially exist in the future,” Orr said.
This should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been following this green energy, climate change hooraw. Oh, yes, as I've written many times, the climate is changing, and has been changing; it always has and always will. And I've never denied that humans have an impact on that change, as does everything else; one good volcano can make us look pretty puny by comparison, even producing a year without a summer.
That's not the question. The question, as always, is around the claims that we must impoverish ourselves, reduce or eliminate our modern technological lifestyle - one that allows me to reach all of you readers from a small office building in Alaska - in the name of minimizing that human impact.
Increasingly, we're seeing holes in the various claims and analyses of the climate scolds and green energy advocates. We counter bad information with good information, and now Mitch Rolling and Isaac Orr are starting their own business aimed at promoting that good information.
The business they’ve founded offering these services, Always On Energy Research, had so much demand, they didn’t start advertising until a few months after they opened their doors.
Rolling and Orr may well be a pair of Davids contending with the federal government's regulatory Goliath. But they seem to have laid in an ample supply of stones to sling at the giant. And not even the most powerful giant can stand up forever against a barrage of facts.
