Biden has weakest climate plan among front runners
By: Michael Barnard
Tags: Politics, Climate Change, Democratic Party, Elections, United States

Electrical generation

Biden’s plan related to electrical generation is … mixed.

The answer to low carbon generation is clear after the past decade: wind and solar. They are cheap, fast to build and reliable. There’s some good news in Biden’s plan on that front.

“…establishing targeted programs to enhance reforestation and develop renewables on federal lands and waters with the goal of doubling offshore wind by 2030.”

(Note: all quoted text is from Biden’s campaign documents unless otherwise stated.)

Like Warren, he’s focused on federal lands and waters for renewables, which is good. It’s under federal control. The offshore wind generation thing is nonsensical, as there is exactly one small 30 MW wind farm in operation offshore. so that’s obviously a misstatement. But unlike Warren, he doesn’t say clearly what he would do to make this real.

“Using the Federal government procurement system — which spends $500 billion every year — to drive towards 100% clean energy and zero-emissions vehicles.”

This is an excellent idea, but very poorly quantified. How much of that annual expenditure would go toward clean energy? If the federal government mandated that all new and renegotiated electricity contracts had to be 100% low-carbon electricity starting in 2021, that would be a target. As it is, weak sauce. It’s a lever, but it’s completely unclear how far Biden would pull it. By comparison, Warren’s plan is costed at US$1.5 trillion of federal expenditures across clean technologies with bulk purchases that states and cities can get in on.

“A more integrated energy grid from Mexico through Central America and Colombia supplied by increasingly clean energy.”

That’s interesting, as it’s kind of a Chinese Belt and Road promise. And that’s a theme of his plan, which is a good thing. His climate plan has a lot of foreign policy elements, and the President has to consider both foreign policy and domestic policy. Assisting the hemisphere to be lower-carbon is a solid policy. And as Canada and the US already have an integrated grid, extending that through Central America and into South America has benefits. A shared electrical grid that allows US clean energy to flow south and Central American clean energy to flow north as needed makes a lot of sense. Continent-scale grids are a key part of the energy transformation that’s required, as they make the challenges with intermittency from renewables diminish to a very manageable level.

“In 2017, China invested $3 in renewable energy for every $1 in America, giving China an edge on the technologies of tomorrow that will generate well-paying jobs. By 2030, the Biden Administration will put the United States back in the driver’s seat, making America the world’s leader in clean energy research, investment, commercialization, manufacturing, and exports.”

That’s a good statement and a nice-sounding target. Once again, China. And…

“Stop China from subsidizing coal exports and outsourcing carbon pollution. China is far and away the largest emitter of carbon in the world, and through its massive Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing is also annually financing billions of dollars of dirty fossil fuel energy projects across Asia and beyond. Biden will rally a united front of nations to hold China accountable to high environmental standards in its Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure projects, so that China can’t outsource pollution to other countries.”

Yes, Biden spends a lot of his time in his climate plan pointing at China, both for good and bad. He’s a lot noisier on the bad than the good, but that will play well with voters. No one in the US really wants to know how badly China is outclassing the US on actual climate action, from HVDC to renewables to EVs to reforestation.

“By engaging key leaders, including in China, Biden will secure a global commitment to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies by the end of his first term. He will lead by example, with the United States cutting fossil fuel subsidies at home in his first year and redirecting these resources to the historic investment in clean energy infrastructure (outlined in Part I of this plan).”

This is good too, but Biden already committed the US to cutting fossil fuel subsidies in 2009 and then did nothing to deliver on that. Congressional research puts the minimum number of US subsidies for fossil fuels at US$4.6 billion annually. An NRDC G7 annual analysis puts the number at US$27.4 billion annually. The NRDC report makes it clear that while the G7 all committed to this a decade ago, the US has done the least to make it real. And Biden was VP from 2009 to 2016. Why will people believe he’ll do it differently this time?

And did you spot China in there again? Oddly, the second biggest economy in the world isn’t part of the G7, but is part of the G20. And guess what? It’s already committed to eliminating fossil fuel subsidies by 2030, and undertook and published its own deep assessment of the subsidies it provides. It’s doing more than the US already on this front, as a 2019 assessment of G20 action points out:

“The United States and China were the most committed to this process but only China implemented some of the recommendations. The rest of the countries were criticised for not including all types of subsidies. As volunteers, they aren’t bound to anything,” said Gerasimchuk.

Then there’s the ARPA-C initiative. That’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Climate. And of course, ARPA used to exist (twice) and was change to DARPA (twice) and is focused on defense. So this will somewhat confusingly re-create ARPA with a climate focus, while DARPA will continue to operate as well.

“The Biden plan will double down on this approach to create the industries of the future by investing $400 billion over ten years.”

Presumably this is the ARPA-C funding line item more than anything else. And several of the pieces in this make sense, but some don’t based on what we know in 2019. I’ll cover the various pieces of ARPA-C in the sections of the analysis that they apply in.

“…grid-scale storage at one-tenth the cost of lithium-ion batteries”

That’s good, one assumes. But it’s somewhat irrelevant. For longer term grid storage, pumped hydro and turning existing hydro plants into passive storage are the obvious choices. The Australian assessment of global pumped hydro potential shows enormous resources in the western mountains and in Appalachia, where there are a lot of coal miners looking for work. By 2050, there will be about 20 TWh of batteries in electric cars alone that will be available for demand management and vehicle-to-grid schemes. Short term storage for grid balancing is already economically viable with Tesla battery systems, and they are coming down in price. And storage just isn’t as big an issue with continent-scale grids. This isn’t a fully solved problem, but it doesn’t take a moonshot. Making it the first line item in ARPA-C’s proposed mandate overstates the problem and ignores the existing solutions.

And then the really bad stuff starts.

“…small modular nuclear reactors at half the construction cost of today’s reactors”

There is zero need for more nuclear power. Wind and solar are going to be US$20 per MWh unsubsidized by 2030. Nuclear power is US$100 to $150 per MWh today, so cutting that in half will make it $50 to $75 per MWh, still multiple times the cost of wind and solar. And there’s certainly no need for nuclear for grid reliability. Globally, the most reliable grids are the ones with most renewable energy, not the ones with nuclear energy. Germany and Denmark have minutes of grid downtime per customer per year compared to the hours experienced in the US and France. Texas’ grid reliability has shot up as it’s gone from 6% to 20% renewable electricity in the past decade.

It’s 2019. The data is in. We know what works. It’s wind and solar. Nuclear need not apply.

“…using renewables to produce carbon-free hydrogen at the same cost as that from shale gas”

Similarly, hydrogen is not a need in particular. It’s barely used today, it’s only about 45% efficient as an energy storage mechanism and it’s certainly not going to be a major player in transportation. The hydrogen economy was arguably a viable alternative if you squinted at it in 1999, but it’s 2019. We know better now. Why should more federal money be thrown at it?

And then there’s this gift to the fossil fuel industry.

“…capturing carbon dioxide from power plant exhausts followed by sequestering it deep underground or using it make alternative products”

There is no merit in spending more money on failed bandaids for coal plants. By far the cheapest way to deal with their emissions is by replacing them with wind and solar utility scale generation at an accelerated rate. The global history of CCS is wasted money and enhanced oil recovery leading to 2–3 times the emissions of CO2 as were sequestered.

No federal money should be spent on CCS for coal and gas plants. It’s purely greenwashing for the fossil fuel industry. Price carbon, make sure it applies to fossil fuel generation and let the market eliminate them. Don’t spend more money on trying to make them greener. Fossil fuels are already sequestered. Just stop digging them up.

And it gets worse.

“…he will double down on federal investments and enhance tax incentives for CCUS”

Outside of biological pathways, this is a waste of money and will simply replace fossil fuel subsidies with different ineffectually spent money.

How will he do much of this? Day one executive orders. He has a list of them. Let’s assess them.

“Requiring aggressive methane pollution limits for new and existing oil and gas operations”

That’s pretty good. Methane is potent, so preventing its leakage until we stop using fossil fuels makes a lot of sense.

“…banning new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters, modifying royalties to account for climate costs”

That’s good as well, and aligned with Warren’s approaches. Modifying the royalties is a nice touch.

What’s missing or me is who is going to vote for Biden based on these initiatives. It’s clear that Warren is targeting jobs for middle Americans and Yang is clearly focused on selling himself to Independents even more than to Democratic voters. But Biden’s plan doesn’t seem crafted to appeal to Independents as much as committed Democratic voters. That’s not bad in some ways, as he needs to secure the nomination first, but the electability assessment starts in the primaries.

Yes, Biden’s energy policies are better than the Obama-era All of the Above, in that they don’t include natural gas. But he obviously has a bunch of advisors who are stuck in the early 2000s, when it was possible to argue with a straight face that hydrogen, nuclear and mechanical carbon capture and sequestration approaches were potentially viable approaches. But it’s 2019. We know better now. Biden needs some new advisors.