About that goal of Net Zero by 2050, the holy grail of John Kerry and the Climate freaks.
A couple of recent reports from the utility industry are, to say the least, extremely skeptical.
In September, the Electric Power Research Institute, the research arm of the U.S. electric utility industry, released a report titled Net-Zero 2050 U.S. Economy Wide Deep Decarbonization Scenario Analysis.
The EPRI report concludes that the utility industry cannot attain net zero. This study shows that clean electricity plus direct electrification and efficiency . . . are not sufficient by themselves to achieve net-zero economy-wide emissions.
In other words, no amount of wind turbines, solar panels, hydropower, nuclear power, battery power, electrification of fossil fuel technologies or energy efficiency technologies will get us to net zero by 2050.
The other recent report is 2022 Long-Term Reliability Assessment from the North American Electric Reliability Corp., a government certified grid reliability and standard-setting group. NERC concluded that fossil-fuel plants are being removed from the grid too fast to meet continuing electricity demand, and that is putting most of the country at risk of grid failure and blackouts during extreme weather.
The U.S. just got another taste of this during the Christmas electric-grid emergency.
So there you have it: We are dangerously dismantling our electric grid while burdening it with more demand in hope of attaining the goal of net zero by 2050, which the utility industry has admitted is a fantasy.
