President Donald Trump surrounded himself with coal miners at the EPA yesterday as he signed an executive order calling for a clean sweep of federal policies hindering development of fossil fuel production in the United States. The order instructs EPA to kill Obama’s Clean Power Plan and thus, according to Trump’s rhetoric, revive coal-fired power generation and the miners who fuel it. The electric power sector, however, responded with polite dismissal. What separates President Trump and some of his top officials from power engineers and utilities? The latter operate in a world governed by science and other measurable forces. Unlike President Trump, scientists, engineers, and executives suffer reputational and financial losses when they invent new forms of logic that are unsupported by evidence. And a world of fallacies underlies the President and his administration’s rejection of climate action. Continue reading “Commentary: Photo Ops with Miners No Substitute for Climate Policy”
Tag: electric power
Electric Vehicles Can Cut Power Plant Pollution
Last week we saw that doing right by the environment is more complicated than simply downsizing the carbon footprint. Shifting to soot-free power sources will reduce mortality in cities, we noted, while increased use of variable wind power could jack up emissions of smog-forming NOx from the ‘peaking power’ plants that ramp up and down to balance electrical supply and demand.
Now power grid modelers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory add another twist to this story with a report that electric vehicles (EVs) plugged into the grid can reduce NOx emissions and possibly more. Their report “Emissions Impacts and Benefits of Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles and Vehicle-to-Grid Services” appears in the January 22 issue of the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
Continue reading “Electric Vehicles Can Cut Power Plant Pollution”
Peter Fairley 