Colorado following the Fed’s example on environmental boondoggles? What about the water rights that closing coal plants had? Hey CDPHE, steam is not smoke.
Will Colorado follow the Fed’s example on environmental boondoggles?
Let me start with a quote from the Washington Post article linked below (links left intact):
"The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which Biden signed in November 2021, included $7.5 billion for EV charging. Of that, $5 billion was allocated to individual states in so-called “formula funding” to build a network of fast chargers along major highways in the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, or NEVI, program. But after two years, that program has only delivered seven open charging stations with a total of 38 spots where drivers can charge their vehicles, according to a spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration. (The funding should be enough to build up to 20,000 charging spots or around 5,000 stations, according to analysis from the EV policy analyst group Atlas Public Policy.) Stations are open in Hawaii, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania and under construction in four other states."
I stick mainly to local news, so let me tell you how this is relevant to Colorado.
The federal government is a whole other animal compared to a state government, Colorado's included.
Still, there is some overlap. Government is government. With Colorado just as eager to push EV's (including having chargers which will supposedly ease our transition to electric cars) as the Biden Administration are we going to have similar problems?
Will our state money (from your pocket) be (or is it being currently) spent in a such a wasteful and inefficient manner? Are we rushing as eagerly to be seen as climate-righteous to the extent that our money is tied up in projects waiting to be "shovel ready" when it could be put to more immediate needs?
Boy, that'd be a great question for the media to look into wouldn't it?
Governments, federal and otherwise, do not spend their money using the same criteria as business does. When, say, choosing a heating system for a new library, they don't make an analysis based as much on costs.
Less tied to constraints like that of the private sector (why would they be, they didn't have to work to earn the money), governments are freer to spend according to what they feel is a moral good.
So you get a speculative passive cooling system that works ... sometimes. And it also might cost a lot more both in terms of initial outlay and/or maintenance because it's brand new and the kinks aren't worked out yet.
I see these chargers and EV infrastructure similarly. This push to electrify transportation is not (repeat NOT) being driven by the market at large. That is, I submit it's not being done by the aggregation of thousands of cost/benefit analyses summed over thousands of consumers.
It's being rushed by the government because our elected officials see it as a moral good. I'm concerned that since it fits in this class, we'll have the kinds of outcomes you see here. We'll have them in a hurry, true, but we'll have them at great expense and with lots of waste.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/03/28/ev-charging-stations-slow-rollout/
What do we do with the water rights that closing coal plants had (before the Democrats in this state forced their closure)?
SB24-197, linked first below, codified into law the recommendations of a task force on water. The Sun article linked second goes into more detail on the specifics of the law. Worth a read.
There's more there than I want to cover, but I did want to touch on something which I have mentioned before because this bill (and article) provide something of an update.
When the Democrats forced the closure of coal fired power plants in this state, something was left hanging. Coal plants need a large supply of water and thus those operations had sizeable water rights. If the plant was shuttered, and care was not taken with regard to the electric utility's water rights, they could be considered abandoned.**
This bill allows the utilities to keep their water rights even as they taper down and eventually stop using the water in coal-fired plants. See the attached screenshot from the bill's fiscal note.
I would have preferred some sense in not closing these plants so abruptly, but I'll take good ideas where I can find them. This is one.
**See the third link below for a related earlier post I did about the Shoshone Power Plant's water rights. See also the power point linked fourth, starting on p 39 for an in-depth look at "tolling" and abandoned water rights.
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb24-197
https://coloradosun.com/2024/05/24/water-bill-protections-electric-utilities-others/
https://coloradoaccountabilityproject.substack.com/p/when-do-we-stop-assisting-suicide?utm_source=publication-search
https://www.coloradomesa.edu/water-center/documents/Kurath2-11-15.pdf
Just in case the social media people at CDPHE aren't aware, steam is not the same as pollution.
A friend sent me a screengrab of CDPHE's tweet inviting people to an online meeting about pollution (see the screenshot) with wording that ran something like "they do know the difference between smoke and water vapor right?"
I had to chuckle. Now, to be fair, I'm not sure what CDPHE's little graphic here represents, but in case it represents cooling towers, a little lesson is in order.
They, like the Jason Gonzales from Chalkbeat (see the screenshot of his article linked at bottom), are getting smoke and steam confused.
Cooling towers like those at the top of this post are there to cool. There is no combustion happening inside. Therefore, what you see out of cooling towers is steam. Not pollution. Not smoke. Steam.
More often than not** the smoke from powerplants and factories is completely clear. Especially at more modern plants that have more scrubbers on their stacks than a hotel maid has in her toolkit.
**There are time you'll get white out of a smokestack. My dad's old detroit diesel 8V-71 puts out white smoke when cold but there again you have a case of water vapor giving the white.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/colorado/2021/2/11/22278204/community-college-craig-coal-sunset-just-transitions/