The People’s Republic of Vermont has a climate itch it can’t stop scratching. An irritation that persists to the point of bleeding if it were on your person. And it is. You, kind people of Vermont, will pay in ways they can’t or won’t explain.
Despite your objections, your ruling class has plans to get you all off oil and gas and running heat pumps. Separately, the peasants will be expected to trade in vehicles they need and want for Electric imposters. Pod vehicles that look like the real thing but don’t act it. This requires an exponential rise in power generation and the infrastructure to carry this increased load from the mystical place it is created (Captain Planet’s lair, perhaps) to the homes, businesses, and EVs meant to use it.
Over at Watts Up With That (WUWT), they’ve got a post about increased demand if everyone in the UK were forced into using Heat Pumps. They have the same sorts of idiots running their government as Vermont (where lunatics in its legislature rammed through the clean heat standard). It is a messy bit of business whose only redeeming characteristic is that no one tasked with implementation has a clue quite how to get started. We can hope it was all about resume pumping, but the dingbats seem serious about their fraudulent emissions reduction plan, just like the idgits in the UK.
Don’t get me wrong, they’ll find a way, but while they try to fit square pegs in round holes, look at this from WUWT.
If we assume then that the heat pumps are in use for 14 hours a day, that gives average hourly electricity demand of 2.1 KWh. This assumes that the heat pump runs at a constant power rating. In practice, the system would have to work harder in the early evening as temperatures drop.
There are about 24 million homes with gas and oil boilers, so a peak demand of 2.1 KW amounts to 50 GW for the country as a whole. To that we can add demand from offices, shops etc, which currently use gas and oil.
Along with demand from EVs, the UK would need well over 100 GW of capacity to meet peak demand.
Has anyone done similar math for the Green Mountain State? How many homes, number of offices, hourly demand, and total demand? Believe it or not, no, but that is a legislative priority – they say. But how serious are they about admitting anything past “ratepayers will pay more.”
How about a little game of truth or dare where the truth is the dare?
A commenter on the WUWT post noted that almost nowhere in the UK are the buried cables capable of carrying that sort of load, especially the end-of-the-workday variety when EVERYONE turns on (or turns up) the heat pump and plugs in the EV. It would all need to be dug up and replaced. It’s expensive and a colossal bother.
I’d guess most of that infrastructure in Vermont is above ground, but it would need to be replaced or rerun. All of it. Soon. But then not. Vermont’s sooty foot is already on the decarbonization path despite no one knowing where it leads or at what cost to not just ratepayers but the entire economy. Why rush things? Burlington’s carbon tax on buildings hasn’t been enacted yet (it starts Jan 1), but at least one councilor wants the rate hiked. That should buy them some time (/snark!).
On this side of the Connecticut River, the New Hampshire Legislature has introduced HB1644, which proactively asks the NH Department of Energy “to initiate a proceeding and conduct an investigation of the benefits and key considerations regarding support for clean or non-carbon emitting power generation, and report to the legislature in one year.” Benefits and risks. Reliability, security, and winter energy spikes. Cost-effectiveness, how it might impact economic growth – a list of things you’d want to explore in detail before making any more permanent grand gestures.
It also requests that the NH DoE define clean energy and investigate steps “taken by other states, including clean energy standards.” Presumably, to learn lessons from their mistakes, for which Vermont will be helpful – their 2024 legislative priority includes trying to back into what HB1644 requests upfront. Potential problems you’d want to sidestep or a workaround for in advance but that Vermont ignored before it latched onto the California standards. None of which addresses the genuine issue of cost.
What will it cost Vermonters, not just in dollars but in ‘sense.’ The state government is punishing everyone to reduce emissions – even if you believe that’s the problem or that a government could fix it – that China will erase in a wink of the Middle Kingdom’s military-industrial complex eye. A sum of emissions Vermonters might take decades to save, coughed into the earth’s atmosphere in a few industrial heartbeats by that Marxist regime to which Vermont’s Heat-Standard Climateers are (more than likely) most enamored.
Vermonters need to confront their legislature and demand a response. Why are they killing Vermont with these crippling initiatives when China, India, and Africa could do 100 times better – meaningful good if your goals are to be believed – in a fraction of the time, at no cost to us?
Or if we framed it another way. How does my paying more for a paper straw keep China from dropping tons of plastic into the ocean every day?
Shouldn’t they be pressuring the Feds to pressure China by any means necessary short of war instead of pressuring a few farmers and small business owners to give up so much for so little?
