The Biden administration keeps pushing electric vehicles with subsidies for the wealthy. Bad enough in itself, but doubly bad: they are doing so without first getting the problem of generating clean electricity solved. If you aren’t using clean electricity in your EV, it does nothing to save the planet.
The best way for us to get clean electricity would be to build enough nuclear plants to meet our needs. France has used nuclear for 70 or 80 percent of their electricity for decades. No problems. If the French can do it, seems to me we should be able to do it also.
But Biden is hoping solar and wind can do the job. Using solar and wind, however, creates some tough problems. Solar and wind are variable sources, sometimes going to zero output; but society (you know, people, businesses and such) need a steady, reliable source of electricity. So you need some way to make up the needed power when the solar and wind run low. The usual strategy proposed is to have back-up stand-by generation available using some fossil fuel. Natural gas is the favorite choice.
It is, however, a tough, complicated problem to figure out how much back-up is needed. Depends on how much solar and wind capacity you have, how much sun and wind there’s been, how much power is needed, and of course, the weather, hot or cold. That’s a lot of variables to consider.
And it’s expensive to build a stand-by power plants that merely stands by a lot, not making electricity or money when it’s sunny and windy.
Texas, which has one of America’s three electric grids (the East grid, the West grid, and Texas), has been trying to solve the back-up stand-by problem with incentives and subsidies to encourage businesses to build the stand-by capacity they think they might need. Trouble is, no-one wants to do it! It’s a big investment with no assurance of return.
That’s a tough problem for Texas to solve and it’s even tougher for the much larger and more geographically and industrially diverse Eastern and Western grids. It could possibly be a research program for some University’s engineering department. A huge sophisticated computer program might be written and run with different scenarios for weather, electricity demand, capacities of available solar and wind power, and amount of back-up. Also, the grids need to be redesigned. The difficulty of doing all that, though, should not be underestimated. It isn’t going to be done by some Washington bureaucrats or politicians some slow afternoon on their yellow pads. It needs to be taken seriously, and given serious attention.
Instead of serious, though, Biden’s pushing EV’s and hoping the clean electricity generation problem will just go away or solve itself. It won’t. Just Sayin’.
John R. Dixon 