An update on Sen Winters' ethics complaint. The costs of switching from methane to hydrogen.
An update on Sen Winters' ethics complaint.
Well, it's official. By a 4 -1 vote (Senator Coleman, a Democrat, being the one no vote) the Senate Ethics Committee recently found Senator Winters violated CO State Senate ethics policy by attending a meeting of her constituents while tight as a jug.**
Before anything else, I'd like to note that I was (somewhat) wrong here in my earlier prediction. I figured the senators would all, those of both parties, hold to each other tighter than they would to decency. That is, I had predicted a finding of not much wrongdoing.
I was wrong about the finding, but I was write about the punishment at least. It is, to my mind, a slap on the wrist. Quoting the CPR article linked below:
"The committee did not recommend a reprimand, censure or expulsion, which would require a vote of the full Senate, but instead asked Senate President Steve Fenberg to send a letter of admonishment to Winter and to encourage her to continue her course of rehabilitation. Winter will also be invited to speak about her conduct to the full Senate when the legislature reconvenes next January and warned that any further issues could result in additional action, without the need for another ethics committee hearing."
Oh, go easy on 'em now!
I'm not a lawyer, but it's my understanding that they can't "fire" Senator Winter, meaning they can't un-elect her because she's there at the request of the voters in her district (and proud of her they must be). The voters could, in theory, do a recall if they wanted, but if they ain't done it yet, I doubt they will.
Still, a finger wagging and a talking to?
Wish that this would be the consequence I'd face if I showed up drunk to one of my job functions.
**One of my grandma's expressions for drunkenness which I've always liked.
https://www.cpr.org/2024/07/08/faith-winter-violated-state-senate-ethics-drunk-at-public-meeting/
The costs of switching from methane to hydrogen.
One of the ways our state government (and Xcel, among others) is trying to sit squarely on the fence rail with regard to eliminating fossil fuels without getting rid of combustion equipment is by replacing natural gas with hydrogen gas.**
A couple of things appeal here to people concerned about the environment: hydrogen can, in theory, be made by breaking apart water (which we'll do via electrolysis using excess solar and wind). And then in turn when you combust that hydrogen (or send it through a fuel cell --essentially the same thing) the exhaust is water vapor.
A couple of things here appeal to the people who want to keep their combustion appliances: hydrogen can (in theory -- there are some definite issues to be worked out like the effect of hydrogen on our current infrastructure because it may act differently in, say, steel pipe than natural gas does) simply be piped into homes and allow us all to not suffer the difficulty and expense of electrification. Hydrogen could also be burned in turbines to produce electricity (as natural gas is now, though I must admit to ignorance here as to whether or not you could use the same turbines and convert to H from NG or whether you'd need all new turbines).
Thus, the government tap has been turned on and now we have money available for this. After all, who wouldn't want a win/win and why would we bother letting families have their money back (or something really wild like paying down the crippling debt we'll pass to our children)?
The Independence Institute recently did a paper on the costs of a transition to hydrogen (an estimate), and I thought I would share. It's linked first below.
I'll leave it to you to read the whole thing if you'd like, but there are a couple top lines I want to highlight. I have written in the past about modeling coming out of the Colorado Energy Office(CEO), their estimates of the cost of various scenarios for our state's glorious de-carboned future.
II takes that report as a starting point and shares a couple of the scenarios from CEO's modeling. Quoting the issue brief linked second below (links intact in case you want to follow back to the CEO estimates):
"On April 17, 2024, the Colorado Energy Office released Pathways to Deep Decarbonization report. The report’s lowest cost plan for completely decarbonizing Colorado’s electricity sector (OT100) used wind, solar, and clean –made from renewable power – hydrogen. OT100 will add 6GW of hydrogen-fired power by 2040, costing $51.6 billion over 15 years to implement. Most of this will be spent on the wind and solar farms needed to power Colorado and to produce clean hydrogen. These costs will likely be passed onto Coloradans as the utilities responsible for building new generation will recover the costs of the hydrogen transition directly from their ratepayers. Under OT100,Coloradans could be paying as much as $1,272.31 more per year in electric utility service charges (See Table 1).Anticipating that the adoption of hydrogen could be delayed, the report also included a limited hydrogen scenario. The absence of 4 MW of hydrogen turbines is offset by additional renewable power, costing rate payers an extra $1,333.96 per year."
These results (with some of the numbers used to obtain them) are summarized in the table I attached as a screenshot.
The report goes on to detail some of the concerns with trying to either blend or replace natural gas with hydrogen in pipes. I will skip the details, it is enough here to say that this won't be as simple as a one for one swap.
If our policymakers and unelected boards decide this is the direction that Colorado needs to go in in order to meet past legislature's arbitrary deadlines we will have a lot of costs to pay and a lot of problems to solve.
Oh, and did I mention that problems to solve mean yet more costs to pay?
I am reminded here about the old story of the engineering triangle: you can pick two from among the list of fast, cheap, and good. In the Cold War, we wanted bombs and missiles and we wanted them fast and good. They were thus not cheap.
Guess what direction our state seems to be headed in with our glorious path to renewables? Fast for sure. We have to hurry to meet those statutorily-imposed deadlines or ... I guess we'll all die? I'm not sure.
What remains is whether we'll have it good or cheap. Neither case inspires confidence for me. I don't understand why we can't do this in a more considered fashion.
**I hope, that if this ever gains traction, they figure out a way to make a lot of it! Energy is conserved so if you're going to replace the amount of energy needed to move heavy trucks, heat water, and etc. by burning hydrogen instead of natural gas, sooner or later they'll have to reckon with the fact that molecular hydrogen (as a fuel) is not anywhere near as energy dense as natural gas. Similar to the energy density of diesel vs. gasoline, hydrogen has fewer bonds to break and re-form.