“Power plants, usually natural gas, must be kept in spinning reserve, ready to come online when the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining. There is the cost of natural gas to keep these units operating off-line, as well as maintenance costs from the added wear and tear on these units.”
“The strongest winds, which are the best for generating electricity, are found hundreds, if not a thousand or more miles away from where the electricity is used. [Fossil-fuel] power plants are located closer to where the electricity is used.”
“Coal-fired and NGCC power plants were built to operate as baseload plants operating continuously. Cycling results in an increase in the number of cold-starts and shutdowns.”
The renewable-energy lobby has the advantage of many citizens having short attention spans and not being experts in the field.…
“… getting 195 countries to establish the same price on carbon would be an impossibility as each country would attempt to establish a price that would benefit itself in international trade.”
One could say two former Republican secretaries of state, Messrs. Baker and Shultz, are naive and badly informed. Their proposal for a carbon tax smacks of fools rushing in.
Their proposed carbon tax is part of a proposal by the Climate Leadership Council. This “carbon tax” is a tax on CO2 emissions, based on the supposed need to cut CO2 emissions to prevent a climate catastrophe.
Major Flaws
A “carbon tax” is fundamentally a bad proposal for several reasons.
First, Baker and Shultz propose to return a dividend to the poor, because it’s the poor who are hurt the most by any attempt to cut CO2 emissions.…
“In cities, piping exhaust steam to closely packed buildings can make sense. But trying to impose CHP in typical American suburbs where there are no industrial uses, or to where buildings are widely spaced, is irrational.”
“Combined Heat and Power has become a political football in the service of government energy planning to cut CO2 emissions. CHP can be used effectively in specific applications where it can be justified economically, but it shouldn’t be forced on Americans by government edict.”
Combined Heat and Power (CHP) is dragged out periodically by anthropogenic global warming (AGW) activists who want to replace central-station electricity with distributed power from wind and solar. Power Magazine recently highlighted this movement in the section, “Global Developments Giving CHP a Much Needed Boost,” with two articles devoted to CHP installations.…