Demand the physically, financially and politically impossible — and they shall build it?
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Similarly, once the new coal plant rules are in place, “then we’ll see people make investments in the technology,” and the price will fall she said.
Like cheap photovoltaic power: just around the corner but running like hell.
Ten years ago, economically viable cellulosic ethanol was “five years away”. It still is!
This sounds a lot like “we have to pass Obamacare to find out what is in it” and look where that got us.
‘invest’–at the point of a gun
Just 7 years ago congress mandated that cellulosic ethanol would be cheap and readily available in 5 years. Now fines are paid because fuel companies cannot buy what is not commercially produced. I hear there is something in the pipeline that will produce cellulosic ethanol at only a 50% premium over the corn based stuff while the excess corn based ethanol is over capacity due to the blend wall. Meanwhile, we import sugar cane based low carbon ethanol from Brazil because its considered a low carbon biofuel while we export corn based ethanol to Brazil because the sugar cane crop was low due to poor weather. I’m sure that Congress will be able to write legislation that makes it commercially viable to separate out the CO2 and pump it into subterranean caverns while wasting a third of the energy produced by the coal fired power plant in the first place. Just don’t be surprised to see some crazy routing of gasses to meet some over defined standard milk some subsidy that we will all have to pay in our electric bills.
If the EPA is challenged in court ( the DC circuit court has the Amicus brief on this) their 3 lines of evidence for enacting all this will be destroyed, Lets pray that this makes it way to the light of day
My term for this is “mandatoritis.” Large organizations often think that making something mandatory will also make it feasible. They are often wrong. Governments are oftener wronger, especially the federal government, which is oftenest wrongest.
“We have been doing so much, with so little, for so long, that we are now capable of doing anything with nothing.”