Bogged-Down In Bullshit: The US is Now a "No Can Do" Country

Excessive Government, Biased Courts, Incompetence, Hysterical Environmentalists, Lawyers, Over-Regulation, NIMBYs, Costs and Excessive Complexity All Contribute; Nothing Can Get Done in this Country

The so-called “Green Transition,” which is an enormously expensive boondoggle based on a hysterical misunderstanding of global warming, will not be possible. You’ll see below that, at the grassroots level, there are a surprisingly abundant number of alternative energy projects awaiting for grid modifications and connections. And at the current rate of progress, we’ll literally need 100 years to complete them. Of course, by then the US will be anything but united, definitely broke and/or completely collapsed or Balkanized.

Nothing can happen in this country in a timely way. And it’s not just the “Green Transition” that’s bogged-down in bullshit, nothing else is working either. Air travel is increasingly disrupted. 1000’s of flights per day are being cancelled with massive inconvenience to passengers at increasing frequencies. Pilots fled the airlines during the Coronavirus scam, then many were injured or dropped dead from the Fraudci vax. They’re still dropping —not just pilots, but so many and everywhere. Another example, if one stewardess is late to work, then “regulations” demand that the flight is delayed or even cancelled. Whenever “government” is involved there is no flexibility allowed—unlike private businesses. They can “get ‘er done” but not the “government.”

Take the long-disputed Mountain Valley Gas pipeline project (MVP). That project was a 300 mile long pipeline to take West Virginia natural gas to Virginia. The map below shows the route including a future connection to consumers in North Carolina:

Natural gas and LPGs are magic and quite inexpensive fuels: they burn clean with low emissions and even lower CO2 emissions than liquid fuels. Also, the USA has 1,200,000 miles of hydrocarbon pipelines installed, so 300 miles is peanuts. This energy network is vital infrastructure for most US consumers and is amazingly safe.

The MVP was proposed in 2014 and is nearly complete, but it’s completion has been stymied by courts, environmentalists and their lawyers for many years. The Wall Street Journal said that

“Three judges on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals are doing the legal equivalent of lying down in front of tractors to block the Mountain Valley Pipeline. For the umpteenth time, a three-judge panel on Monday halted pipeline construction even though Congress and President Biden have stripped the court of jurisdiction.”

The 304-mile pipeline to deliver natural gas from Appalachia to the Southeast is 94% complete. But the final parts have been stuck in permitting purgatory as the same three Fourth Circuit judges—Stephanie Thacker, James Wynn and Roger Gregory—nit-pick environmental reviews and order regulators to redo them.“

Finally, in July 2023, the project was approved by the US Supreme Court. (Wikipedia has a pretty good article about the MVP including a timeline.) That means that construction can now be completed. (Question to ponder: If there were no conservative majority at the SCOTUS, would it have been approved???) But such project delays hurt the utility company cash flows due to huge sunk costs and no revenues. Nobody thinks about the poor utility companies as victims, but they are. And because of the delays and costs, the price of natural gas delivered to the end consumer will go UP—hopefully not too much.

Or take the TransWest Express electrical transmission line from Wyoming wind farms to the Las Vegas area and ultimately SoCal. Seventeen years ago, that transmission line was proposed to link wind farms in Wyoming to Las Vegas and SoCal. Wyoming, on the high plains, has A LOT of wind. The same can be said for Montana. But all those wind projects have been on-hold for 17 years while the above ground transmission line was “bogged-down in bullshit” until this year.

From the LA Times: “TransWest Express transmission line, which will move electricity from the $5-billion, 3,000-megawatt, 600-turbine Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind farm in WY to Southern California, a place legally mandated to switch to clean energy. The wind farm(s) will be the country’s biggest yet.”

It took them all those years to get all the final permissions. THEY JUST STARTED CONSTRUCTION this year. So there are even more years before the lines are energized. 

That ONE project is just one of THOUSANDS that are “bogged-down in bullshit.” Additionally grassroot resistance to unsightly wind farms and the huge tracts of land for solar PV power is growing.

From an excellent article A Silent Threat to the Energy Transition: America’s Broken Infrastructure Policy, indicates the extent to which alternative projects are UNAPPROVED. They said:

“There’s a massive gap between our efforts to transition to sustainable energy and our ability to make it happen. Countless examples and data points bear this out. Here are just a few:

• The Inflation Reduction Act included hundreds of billions of dollars for solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and other technologies to tackle climate change. Yet if we can’t build new transmission at a faster pace, around 80% of the emissions reductions expected from that bill might not happen, according to researchers at Princeton University’s Repeat Project. [Doug here— Read: IT WON’T HAPPEN]

• At the end of 2022, there were over 10,000 projects in the U.S., most of them wind, solar, and batteries, waiting for permission to connect to the grid, up from 8,100 the year before, according to researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

• In 2021, backlogged projects sitting in the queue represented 1,300 gigawatts of solar, wind, and battery projects – technically enough to supply about 80% of the country’s electricity demand. [Doug here: Remember, installed capacity and actual generation are two entirely different things. Solar is guaranteed offline for 1/2 of the day on average, so the installed capacity is double the delivered quantity of energy.]

• Most energy storage projects never get built. A Clean Energy Group report found that “lengthening wait times and rising interconnection costs dramatically restrict the rate at which renewable generation and energy storage resources are installed.” This creates obstacles to hitting so many goals, including emissions reduction targets, renewable generation and energy storage procurement targets, and grid modernization plans.

• California’s big three utilities may need to invest up to $50 billion by 2035 to upgrade their grids in order to meet the state’s ambitious electric vehicle goals. That’s a staggering sum, what is arguably the greenest and most forward-looking state regarding renewables, and it highlights the needs every state will face when tackling energy infrastructure investment.

A recent Department of Energy draft analysis cited “a pressing need for additional electric transmission,” especially between different regions. The McKinsey study framed it more dramatically: The U.S. grid will need to expand by 60% by 2030, and doing so would require “a mind-boggling acceleration of the typical ten-year capital project timeline. It is, arguably, a century of work to do in less than a decade.”

Yes, 2050 will come and go and, if the US still exists, not many of the “Green transition” ambitions will be fulfilled. Wait until people realize we need $trillions of entirely new grid additions, modifications and interconnections when they close down too many coal, nuclear or gas power plants and loads go up due to MANDATED electric cars; they'll be frequently in the dark for about 50 years waiting for new power lines. In the meantime, I’m guessing, is that electric cars owners will only be able to only charge between 12 am and 5 am, if then, and during all other times there will be huge penalty pricing. Suddenly, all the cost advantages of using electricity “fuel” vs. gasoline will go away. Bye bye electric cars for now.

None of this will be fixed because there are nothing but fools and idiots in power. The only reason that the Mountain Valley pipeline project, a small-ish project, was finally finished was due to deal-making by Joe Manchin during the debt ceiling negotiations.

Also, people don’t understand that the nine regional grids must be interconnected so that wind power in Wyoming can be delivered to other areas when Texas is seriously cold and windless across that state, for example. To do so will take DECADES if ever.