US ENERGY POLICY

We're going to be talking about the current incoherent world of US ENERGY POLICY. ANNA KRAMER joins the podcast to help us get our arms around the future of energy in the United States. Anna is a reporter for NOTUS, a non-partisan longform journalism outlet. She has written a series of stories on the the disconnect and frustration around US Energy Policy and paths forward. We talk about: The chaotic policy at the federal level (and beyond) The huge cost overruns and administrative complexity The role of nuclear The increased energy demand in this country Finally, we muse about what can be done about it going forward. https://youtu.be/3k-N-AGTNfU Outline Section 1: The US Energy Policy Transition: The Goals and the Problem. Discussing Brandon Shores Coal Plant and electricity prices in the Mid-Atlantic Region. https://www.notus.org/policy/biden-clean-energy-coal-maryland-brandon-shores https://www.notus.org/policy/electricity-prices-spiking-biden-clean-energy-transition https://www.notus.org/policy/nuclear-power-energy-crisis-cost Evidence that the transition is happening. Electrifying = efficiency. Cheap wind and solar, look at the free markets in Texas — ballooning wind and solar there The reliability, capacity, and resource problem: Needing certain amounts of energy and voltages at all times of day. Leads to keeping coal plants online past scheduled retirement dates, plus spiking prices How much do emissions and climate change goals matter to the industry? What role does nuclear energy play? Section 2: Interconnection Queues and Permitting Reform. Bipartisan and Industry wish for Permitting Reform: Why is it so hard for US Energy Policy?  https://www.notus.org/policy/permitting-reform-bill-manchin-environmentalists https://www.notus.org/policy/solar-farm-culture-war-biden-climate-change Section 3: Trump’s US Energy Policy “dominance agenda” disappointing every part of the energy industry. Idea is not aligning with reality. DOGE cutting into the basic functions of energy governance. https://www.notus.org/policy/doge-cuts-trump-drill-baby-drill https://www.notus.org/policy/donald-trump-tariffs-trump-energy-agenda Transcript Frazer Rice (00:01)Welcome aboard, Anna. Anna Kramer (00:03)Thanks for having me, really psyched. Frazer Rice (00:04)I went through a bunch of your articles covering the power industry and energy generation and a lot of things that are happening federally, state level, and it's going to be a lot to get our arms around, but you were the person to do it. So just generally speaking, we're at a point in time with energy and transition ⁓ that policy is moving. Maybe take us through a little bit about the goals and the problem we face. Anna Kramer (00:31)So there are sort of two, I would say, competing problems right now. ⁓ The first one is load growth, which means basically more demand on the electricity grid. And that is something that we haven't seen in this country in decades. for really around 2000 up until maybe a couple of years ago, energy demand on the grid has been fairly constant or even declining slightly. And the reason for that is that everything has become more efficient. Like every appliance you use, every light bulb, your car, everything that could possibly have a demand on the grid is more efficient than it used to be, which is awesome. There's a lot of wonderful benefits that we get from that, including the fact that for a long time utilities and transmission planners and states and the federal government have not really ever had to think about the grid or about like where you get your power aside from these sort of technical conversations that the average person doesn't really pay any attention to. That has really started to change as of the last few years. There's a large number of reasons for that. Basically for the first time in decades we have significant demand expected on the grid. We expect it to grow over the next several decades. The reasons for that are widespread and hotly debated. A lot of people talk about data centers and artificial intelligence which require huge amounts of energy to power At the same time, there's a lot of research that shows that some of the larger sources of demand are actually going to be manufacturing facilities built in the United States for things like semiconductors. Electric vehicles are a huge demand source on the grid. Basically, the more that we electrify, the more demand there is on the grid. So for the first time in decades, we have the need for a lot more power. And then at the same time, we also have climate change. And for those who really care about With the emissions we create in the United States or globally, there's a compelling argument that we should be addressing the emissions from the power sector. These are quite significant between coal and gas plants, and then the emissions that come from regular vehicles. Those are somewhat competing because if you have increasing demand on the grid, while you're trying to reduce emissions, you're both trying to transition the economy from fossil fuels while increasing the amount of power that's available. There are a lot of competing tensions there. Frazer Rice (03:06)So as we're trying to get more efficient ⁓ and we're sort of transitioning to electricity, how do you think about sort of the downstream effects of that? To me, energy generation is a symphony of measures you've got in everything from coal, the natural gas, to oil, to nuclear, to hydro, to solar, ⁓ hydro or sort of hydrogen based things, that type of scenario. Getting power generated and where it's needed, everything you just described, that's the part that's tougher for everybody to understand. Anna Kramer (03:44)Yeah, definitely. And this is really where all the debates come in because… It's not as simple as just creating the power in one place. The act of moving it to the place where it's needed is complicated and equires transmission infrastructure. That's the grid that everybody sort of sees, right? Your power lines, your substations. And there's only a maximum amount of power that can move, know, or sorry, maximum amount of electricity. My power and energy sources would be very mad at me if I said power. There's only a maximum amount of electricity that can move on any given part of the grid at any given time. So you need your transmission infrastructure to be really well built to sort of facilitate maximum movement of electricity to the people that need it. And it's really hard to do that. And our…Transmission infrastructure system in the United States is not well built. It's quite old. It's aging. It hasn't been well maintained. There are some incredible technologies that can be applied to transmission infrastructure to make it better. They can make one line have the ability to carry a lot more electricity than it does currently. There's a lot of politics around who has to pay for that. When it comes to gas fire generation, one thing you can do is build a gas plant near a place that needs the electricity to minimize the transmission infrastructure that is needed. But there's a lot of politics there too because the question is sort of like who bears the cost for building, for example, a gas plant next to a data center? If a gas plant isn't going to contribute to the transmission network, should they have to avoid the costs that somebody would normally have to pay in to maintain it. There's so many complicated political questions involved in all of this ⁓ down and there's so many fights about who pays for what. And at end of the day, the average electricity consumer doesn't know any of this is happening and doesn't want higher electricity bills. But we're now in a situation politically and practically speaking where Everyone has to understand how electricity moves around and everyone's going to have to reckon with higher bills if we're trying to meet all this new demand. Frazer Rice (05:59)So let's take as a given, which it isn't a given, but let's take it that the costs could be figured out and we print lots of money and do all that stuff. Where does the world of NIMBYism kick in here? When do people say, "I don't want the power line to go through my backyard or I'm worried about the externalities of a power generation plant within five miles of my house. I don't want to breathe difficult air or radioactivity is a problem" - that type of thing. Anna Kramer (06:04)It's probably the single greatest problem getting in the way of all of this. It's not just NIMBYism necessarily. In general this very anti… It's not just like I don't want things built in my backyard, but people in general don't really like to change the status quo, broadly speaking. So you have a number of things that happen there. The first thing is that… Anytime you try to build a transmission line, takes years to longer to build it than it should because people are fighting it in in local systems. The same thing goes for a gas plant and wind turbines. The same thing goes for a coal plant that, you know, might need upgrades and instead the local community wants that coal plant to close because of air pollution issues. But it's even broader than that. One of the stories that I wrote was about a solar farm that was going to be built in somebody's backyard. Basically they have a large farm, they were gonna cover a lot of the land with solar panels because the farm isn't financially sustainable and the solar panels were going to help. And the local community essentially revolted against the farmer and prevented them from building the solar infrastructure. Not necessarily because any of them would ever interact with or see it,