By Larry Bell

There was a time when the EPA provided vitally important services to clean up and protect America’s air, land, and water from truly toxic substances.

That was before climate change madness ensued and essential plant-nourishing CO2 was deemed a “pollutant” to be eliminated by replacing reliable hydrocarbons that provide more than 80% of our energy with anemic and intermittent wind and solar pipedreams.

Just as you might have imagined they couldn’t get crazier, consider EPA’s latest plan to force closures of coal and natural gas plants that keep lights on, homes comfortable and businesses open when those friendly breezes and sunbeams aren’t available.

This, also at a time when the Biden administration is trying to push millions of electric vehicles on overtaxed grids, and AI is also poised to gobble up all the extra juice it can manage to squeeze.

This month, the Biden EPA proposed to replace the Obama Clean Power Plan that the Supreme Court struck down with a rule requiring that coal plants and new gas-fired plants adopt costly and unproven carbon-capture technology by 2032.

This flies in the face of Section 111 of the Clean Air Act that says the EPA can regulate pollutants from stationary sources through the “best system of emission reduction” that is “adequately demonstrated,” failing to pass either prerequisite.

Carbon capture has never been supportable as the best nor adequately demonstrated technology with no commercial scale examples for either coal or natural gas in the U.S.

As of last year, only one utility coal plant in the world used it, and no gas-fired plant ever did.

Although according to EPA, Inflation Act tax credits along with funding in the 2021 infrastructure bill will “incentivize and facilitate the deployment” of carbon capture, Wall Street Journal editors believe such subsidies “would have to be two to three times larger to make the technology cost-effective at a coal plant” because carbon capture reduces the facility’s efficiency while raising costs.

Since carbon capture consumes 20% to 25% of electricity generated, this means that more generators will be needed to provide the original amount of power to the grid. On top of that, new gas-fired plants won’t be built either because the technology will make them uneconomical as well, particularly in competition with heavily taxpayer- and ratepayer-subsidized wind and solar boondoggles.

It’s not as if carbon capture is likely to curry favor with so-called “environmentalists” who oppose drilling and pipelines for CO2 just as they do for oil and gas.

Since CO2 must be stored underground in certain types of geologic formations principally located in the upper Midwest and Gulf Coast, permitting for new CO2 injection wells can take six years, with pipelines needed to transport the gas over long distances requiring even longer.

Rather than incentivizing and facilitating carbon capture, the Biden EPA is instead hell-bent to kill investments in gas-fired facilities needed to replace shuttered coal plants which currently provide about 16% of our nation’s electricity at a time when demands for reliable round-the-clock power are surging.

Last week the Texas grid operator updated its demand growth forecast by nearly double over the next six years to about 40,000 megawatts over last year’s projection. This represents about a seven-fold increase relative to the amount currently used in New York city alone.

Much of this demand is being driven by manufacturing and power needs associated with an artificial intelligence boom along with associated data centers and chip manufacturing plants.

How ironic when Texas, the nation’s oil and gas capital and leading wind power producer over the past 17 years as of 2022 with more than 26% of U.S. capacity (40,556 megawatts), recently had to tell power plants not to shut down for maintenance to avoid hot weather shortages.

According to a February case study by Quanta Technologies of PJM, a large utility company serving a dozen Mid-Atlantic states as a wholesale provider, the next several years will feature highest demand peaking in winter and less in summer, most particularly on West Coast and Northeast states that are banning gas heating in new homes forcing those households to rely on electricity for essential heating.

Heftily increased electricity demands are predicted to feature routine “load shedding” tactics in coming years as utilities like PJM are forced to aggressively shut down reliable coal and gas plants in their transition to seasonal and daily weather dependent wind and solar energy.

Load shedding refers to cutting and rationing power to customers — also known as rolling blackouts — to prevent total grid system collapse.

AI “data warehouses” which reportedly consumed 17 gigawatts of electricity in 2022, or about 4% of total U.S. power, are projected to double to 35 gigawatts by 2030.

PJM projects that growing AI data center load growth of 7,500 MW by 2028 in combination with deactivation of 11,100 MW of fossil fuel production will leave a huge 18.6 GW gap between new demand and remaining supply.

That is reportedly enough electricity to power roughly 3 million homes, or New York City three times over.”

Meanwhile, as the Biden EPA contrives to save the climate from deadly CO2 at any cost, China has added about 200 gigawatts of coal power over just the last five years.

This amounts to about as much as the entire U.S. coal industry the EPA is now sacrificing amid soaring inflationary electricity costs and energy deprivations in subservient suffrage to green fantasies.

CO2 Coalition Member Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is “Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design” (2022).