The ARC of a New Energy Covenant – Watts Up With That?

By David DesRosiers

For American energy, the Overton Window has gone from almost shut under President Biden to fully open under Trump. Energy scarcity and its policy of Net Zero by 2050 has been replaced by energy abundance and a “Drill, Baby, Drill” mindset.

That said, the American mind is very divided and needs to unite around an energy standard that can connect its right and left lobes. We need a real energy standard by which to judge the energy stack. ARC — affordable, reliable, and clean — is it.

The policy commitments of the Net Zero camp are a product of strong emotion and weak science and economics: mankind’s use of fossil fuels and the attendant CO2 emissions are killing the planet and our future on it. However, the net effect of Net Zero — globally and domestically — is a politically induced green inflation and a Hunger Games logic that hurts the world’s poor and middle classes for no net environmental gain.

The ARC standard brings needed economic, scientific and policy clarity and literacy to a divided American and global mind. The value of any given energy input is best understood as a blended average of affordability, reliability, and cleanliness.

Here’s the ARC ranking of our energy stack, according to a new study by The Heartland Institute:

It shows natural gas as the clear winner when all three criteria are taken into account. Across the A, R, and C, natural gas gets 1 point in each category, for a combined score of 3 — with lower scores closer to perfect power sources and higher scores being least compatible with ARC. By contrast, while solar performs well in the emissions category, it accumulates a number of strikes against it due to factors like its price per megawatt-hour, intermittency, and poor performance on land conservation, animal kills, and soil impacts.

Let’s look at each of the ARC measures separately, which will show the commonsense value of this energy formula.

Affordable is the energy bang for the energy buck. The affordability of any unit of energy is a product of extraction costs and the regulations that govern them. For example, the Biden administration’s regulation of oil and gas artificially increased its market price at a huge cost to the larger economy. Raise the cost of fossil fuels and your raise the price of chemicals used for farming, clothing, medical devices, as well as the cost of creating windmills and solar that are petroleum dependent. One of my favorite scenes in the popular Paramount series “Land Man” is when Billy Bob Thornton’s character explains how much fossil fuel goes into creating a windmill to his shark lawyer conflicted by her green values. For a windmill, the concrete slab, the extraction cost for the materials, the grease to keep it spinning, and the asphalt roads needed to service it, all use fossil fuels — and it takes 20 years for the fossil debt to be paid off and turn a green profit. It’s crushing logic.

Reliable means always-on energy — a prerequisite of modern civilization. The Net Zero crowd favors wind and solar above all others in the present stack. The problem with these politically favored energy sources is that they’re not reliable. The sun does not always shine, and the wind does not always blow, and the battery tech required to make up for their natural limits is neither on-hand nor on the horizon.

Clean is the measure of an energy unit and its impact on the physical environment. Solar, wind, and nuclear are the cleanest by CO2 standards. Among the fossil fuels, natural gas is the cleanest of all the Jurassic energy gifts.

Imagine if we had an energy source that could meet society’s ever-growing energy needs without CO2. What a breakthrough that would be. We’ve been chasing the engineering unicorns of hydrogen and fission for decades. All the while, nuclear is the cleanest in the stack. Nuclear’s CO2 output is zero. Nuclear’s problem is regulatory, and its barriers come from the Net Zero crowd. If they cared about avoiding the fast-approaching gloom and doom of their models, they would embrace nuclear and clear its regulatory path. Fortunately, under this administration, the voracious appetite of A.I. and advances in nuclear tech help change nuclear’s ARC score and proportion in the stack.

Not all inputs are equals with regards to affordability, reliability, and cleanliness. Based on present regulatory conditions natural gas is the undisputed champion in America’s energy stack. On its ARC merits, natural gas should be the baseline green standard of energy. It’s the trifecta — the best-of-class blended average. Because of this, natural gas should be prioritized, favored, and enlisted in building our energy infrastructure and industrial policy for the future. ‘Our County tis of thee’ has over a hundred years of sweet supply under our feet — in service to our economy and way of life. Unlike wind and solar, it’s always-on, reliable energy, and the cleanest of the hydrocarbon work-horses.

Twenty years ago, I worked at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and we had as our guest T Boone Pickens, a Texas billionaire and prophet of a better, more affordable, more reliable, and more clean American energy future. Pickens saw from the beginning what fracking and natural gas abundance could mean if boldly seized for the American economy.

What most caught my attention was the self-evident logic of switching American heavy trucking to affordable, reliable, and clean natural gas. This was 3 years after the advent of Amazon Prime’s free shipping and the CO2 goosing that it unintentionally but necessarily unleashed. I’m sure there’s a quant out there that could easily run the numbers and show the green and clean environment benefit to the United States and the planet if the Pickens Plan was allowed to check the negative externalities of the Amazon plan.

Today, 17 years later, new futurists speak of “transitioning” our nation’s heavy trucking fleet away from petroleum gas and onto the electric grid via batteries. This 16,000-pound, rare-earth battery on wheels is an energy pig with moral preening lipstick. It’s an 18 wheeled-windmill, traveling down the short-range, long-charge highway. The consequence of a tilting-at-windmills mindset that would make Don Quixote blush.

Mr. Sheridan, your “Land Man” fans would enjoy a story line ripped and retold from the Pickens Gospel that has still yet to happen. Do not give the lines and story arc and ARC standard to Billy Bob. This is a role for his character’s son, Cooper, who is just as logical as he, but not yet jaded by the weight of a status quo that does admit doing what is self-evidently in our enlightened, immediate, and long-term self-interest. Your American artistry just might keep apace with fast approaching, unleashed energy abundance that is going to fuel the on-shoring of American manufacturing and Make America Great industrial policy.

If you are interested in big thinking like this, check out RealClear’s Future of Energy Forum, scheduled for May 19 in D.C.

David DesRosiers is Conference co-chair & President, RealClear Foundation.

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.

Related