GREEN ENERGY HEADING TO RED STATES

 When you’re green you’re growing; when your ripe, you’re not. ~ Ray Kroc 

Unexpectedly, the winds of green energy are blowing towards red territories. It’s still in the early rounds of states racing to claim the gigantic amounts of federal funds available for greening the energy we use on a daily basis. Nevertheless, politically red states are doing unexpectedly well in the nascent green energy sweepstakes. The Rocky Mountain Institute thinks that red states will get $623 billion (B) in total clean energy investments by 2030, compared with $354B for blue states.

The misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that President Biden signed into law in last August will be providing $367,000,000,000 for loans and subsidies to upgrade or replace the nation’s energy infrastructure, improve energy technology and promote electric vehicles (EVs). Even in Washington, DC this $367 billion (B) is not chump change. The IRA is offering the largest opportunities for climate enhancement and green energy in the nation’s history. Such fiscal largesse is even changing policy makers minds in red states. Hopefully these abundant funds will not go to chumps; we’ll see.

Red states are now receiving significant federal funding for renewables. The table below shows much larger solar and wind electricity generation in Republican-controlled red states like Texas, Iowa and Oklahoma than in blue California. The sun shines nearly everywhere on our worthy planet, but where winds are constantly blowing is more circumscribed. This is due in large part because Aeolus, the Greek ruler of the winds, provides the most favorable wind conditions for producing electricity – winds steadily blowing between 10 to 50 mph – in the Great Plains states from Texas to North Dakota. This fact is illustrated by 4 of the 5 top renewable energy producing states shown in the table below are predominantly wind-driven. Texas produces 85% of its renewable electricity from wind; 3 of them – Iowa, Oklahoma and Kansas produce renewable energy only from the wind. California has substantial wind farms, including the nation’s largest, but just 34% of its renewable energy comes from wind. Two-thirds of its green energy comes from solar PV panels on urban rooftops and more remote solar farms.

Top 5 Solar and Wind Electricity Producing States and their Political Control  

State & Rank	2022 Solar +Wind Generation (MWhr)	Gov-ernor Party	Legis-lature Party	Overall Control
1.Texas	136,118 (85%)*	Repub (R)	R	R
2.California	52,927    (34%)	Dem (D)	D	D
3.Iowa	46,058  (100%)	R	R	R
4.Oklahoma	37,500  (100%)	R	R	R
5.Kansas	29,536 (100%)	D	R	Mixed
Total	302,139	3-R;    2-D	4-R;   1-D	3-R; 1-D; 1-Mixed

  *Indicates percent of Total renewable energy from wind generation. Sources: DOE/EIA, Multistate chart of governors and legislatures.

Red states like Texas are ironically doing quite well generating green energy, despite their on-going solid preference for good ol’ fossil fuel produced electricity. Certifiably blue states like California have not yet overcome existing rules and regulations that can hinder swift implementation of “getting to green” policies, like constructing new transmission lines to serve newly-built, remote solar and wind facilities.

Adding to California’s green energy paradox is the California Public Utility Commission’s (CPUC’s) December ruling that drastically cut payments (up to 80%) to new rooftop solar customers who sell their excess solar energy to the grid. The CPUC mistakenly rationalized its anti-solar decision solely on equity grounds, not California’s green energy policy goals. Lower-income residential electricity customers have not participated nearly as much in rooftop solar installations as higher-income customers have. Thus, the CPUC judged that heretofore inequitable solar payments will be reduced for the latest solar customers, to diminish the inequality. By design, this decision de-incentivizes solar rooftop installations. Apparently the CPUC did not get Governor Gavin Newsom’s memo about the state’s solar-reliant energy goals.

These tribulations in California illustrate that progressive liberalism may lead to seriously-stymied construction of much-needed new facilities, whether it’s new housing, solar rooftops/farms or infrastructure. This frustration is echoed by the governor when he stated, “’People are losing trust and confidence in our ability to build big things. People look at me all the time and ask, ‘What the hell happened to the California of the ’50s and ’60s’” when we got things built? This issue is squarely allied with governor’s vexation about his new prioritizations to add evermore solar and wind farms and mandating that car dealers sell only non-fossil, non-polluting new EV or PHEV vehicles by 2035.  By then California will need at least 1.2 million EV charging stations; it currently has 73,000.

Clearly, this is an aggressive mandate. My sense is the 2035 terminal date for selling any new internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles will slip, because the state of California cannot force customers to buy zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs), many of whom inconveniently for the California Air Resources Board (CARB) won’t likely buy a new or used EV just because the state mandates and offers incentives for it.

The governor has forgotten the multiple postponements that were required for the CARB’s previous and premature ZEV mandates that CA vehicle dealers were to sell more ZEVs that represented the CARB-mandated percentage of total vehicle sales. The CARB grudgingly eliminated its 1998 and 2001 ZEV mandates, keeping only the requirement that 10% of all vehicles sold in California have zero emissions by 2003. Why the elimination? Because most vehicle buyers had other priorities than purchasing an expensive EV to satisfy the CARB. California ZEV annual new auto sales finally reached 10% 17 years later, in 2020. EVs now represent 2.7% of all registered vehicles in California.

The governor’s aggressive goals will require electricity transmission line additions to be built in a timely manner, not just new green energy facilities. Pictured below are high-voltage transmission lines that are part of the Pacific Intertie system. The Intertie has been the state’s electron throughway since 1970. It is the longest electricity transmission system in the US, crossing 850 miles from far northern Oregon to Los Angeles. During the coming years, the Pacific Intertie will be shipping more electricity, largely from renewable sources in new California locations and beyond.

 

The 500 kV Sylmar Converter Station on the Pacific Intertie

 No small contributor to this growth is Gov. Newsom’s green energy policy goal: by 2045 California will be carbon neutral and running its electricity grid, operated by the California Independent System Operator, on 100% renewable energy. This date may seem distant, but not after realizing that meeting this goal will require quadrupling quickly the amount of green electricity generation. In 2021, renewable power accounted for 34.8% of California’s electricity generation. Attaining 100% renewable power in just 22 years will not happen unless regulatory process gets modified. Such changes will be resisted and require trade-offs to be made by regulators, environmentalists and regular citizens. There’s been little public discussion, let alone agreement about how to counter this resistance and make such trade-offs to achieve policy deadlines. Its resolution will require time-consuming deep thought and administrative lingering. Furthermore, these public goals speak nothing about the various behavioral changes we Californians will need to accept in getting to 100% green energy.

Other changes that began during the Covid pandemic are continuing to wallop the SF Bay Area area’s public transit systems especially BART, the commuter rail system in the East Bay and the City. In 2020 the federal government provided almost $10B in temporary “operational relief to stabilize California’s transit agencies” as the pandemic hit. Many of these agencies, like BART, are now exhausting this extraordinary relief funding at the same time as ridership has plummeted below pre-pandemic levels. Public transit is facing an acute “fiscal cliff.”

BART’s commuting patterns and ridership have profoundly changed. Ridership has sunk to only 37% of what it was before Covid, probably the worst drop in the nation (see image below). At the same time, BART customer complaints regarding personal safety and cleanliness have dramatically risen.

 

A recent BART rush hour that’s not at all rushy. Source: NYTimes

 In the best of times BART’s passenger fares only provide 60% of the system’s costs. It’s currently nowhere near the best of times. The system’s public subsidy has been estimated to be over $6 per person-trip before ridership collapsed. California will likely provide a needed $1.1B bailout for customer-poor, fiscally-decrepit BART, only about half of what it requested. BART has already begun increasing fares and fees for its riders. Also likely are new requests for higher Bay Area sales taxes aimed at avoiding transit’s fiscal cliff. Train and bus services will surely be reduced to save costs. Such cliff-avoidance procedures in turn will further diminish transit ridership.

Prohibiting ICE sales by 2035, achieving carbon neutrality by 2045 as well as returning BART and other transit agencies to stable, long-term existence ASAP seem positively utopian to me. Mind you, I have nothing against utopias, beginning with Thomas More’s that I read in high school. But as literary worlds, they’re far more interesting than any of the real-world ones that never succeeded,

Maybe the ambitiously bold policy deadlines mentioned above aren’t really fixed, they're only innuendoes. It’s an unfortunate mystery that no one apparently really knows how these diverse, consequential goals will be threaded through our blue state’s arduous permitting, site licensing and fiscal regulatory processes to meet these aspirational deadlines. Here's hoping. 

 

URBAN TRANSIT, STUCK BEYOND THE SHOULDER

It was a nightmare. The band had to tour Greenland by bus. ~ Fred Schneider, a founder of the B-52s 

Have you ridden a bus, hopped on a subway or taken a train recently? Fewer folks than ever have been using public mass transportation to get places near and far. The resurgent Covid pandemic hasn’t helped. Local bus and rail systems – public mass transit – remain stuck, beyond the shoulder of thoroughfares that count, as both customers and transit drivers have abandoned them.

Mass transit is not a pedestrian matter; its status affects millions, can alter our environment and over time has been influenced by many factors. In econo-speak, mass transit has been considered an inferior good, one whose demand declines as consumers’ income rises. It wasn’t always inferior.

After my mother graduated from the University of Massachusetts during an early stage of the Great Depression, she boarded a Greyhound bus in Boston and over the next six months travelled around the country. To visit friends, she first headed to Florida and then across the deep south and south-western US to Los Angeles, where stayed nearly a month. From LA she took train rides on the Union Pacific, Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads during a 5-day jaunt back to Massachusetts.

At that time, trains and buses were the most popular means of travelling long distances. Greyhound had over 4,800 stations across the US. Railroads’ passenger carriage was more than five (5) times what Amtrak’s is now.

Public transit ridership has never since been higher than it was in 1926. Automobiles were certainly present then, but were not nearly as fast or convenient for a single person undertaking a long, cross-country trip. My mother saw first-hand the sights of America at ground-level, riding Greyhounds and the rails. The picture below shows the classic Scenicruiser bus, designed by Raymond Lowey, that Greyhound operated for about 20 years.

A great deal has changed in mass transit during the past 80 years, most of it unfavorable. Municipal transit systems have been owned and operated by city and regional governments since the 1950s. Greyhound remains the country’s largest inter-city motorcoach operator, but now operates in less than 60% of the cities it did at its peak before WWII.

 

The Greyhound Scenicruiser bus, used from 1954 to the mid-1970s.

Transit ridership essentially plateaued with subsequent gradual declines for decades, as the automobile gained dominance. President Eisenhower’s groundbreaking federal funding of the Interstate highway system in 1956 confirmed the government’s commitment that it needed to meet the increasing challenge of evermore cars on US highways. 

It wasn’t until eight years later that the government first began providing sizeable financial assistance to local transit systems with the passage of the Urban Mass Transportation Act (UMTA) in 1964. The UMTA funding paid for two-thirds of the costs of local transit systems’ equipment and facilities. By the 1970s this federal funding had allowed cities to build new, heavy-rail mass transit systems like the San Francisco Bay area’s BART, Washington DC’s Metro and MARTA (not our first president's wife; it's Atlanta's subway system).

During the 1980s and thereafter many cities built less capital-intensive light-rail transit systems, including Philadelphia, St. Louis, Seattle and San Jose. Light-rail, surface systems operate on dedicated rights-of-way with power provided via overhead wires. These additions to cities’ transit coverage have been helpfully modernizing.

Despite this sizeable public investment, the share of US workers commuting by public transportation fell from 12.1% in 1960 to about 5% in 2019. Annual growth in public transit ridership is a minute 0.6% since 2000. Adding to urban transit’s miseries, current ridership now is less than one-half of what it was pre-Covid.

Transit advocates advise that the costs of urban driving are too low and need to increase if transit is to recover ridership. This could involve instituting congestion fees, increasing parking costs and pumping up state and local gasoline taxes.

Manhattan, NY now appears to be edging back onto the roadway for implementing substantial congestion fees. It may work in Manhattan, but it’s not clear there are many politicians willing to brave public resistance to elevating driving-related fees and taxes. Travelling that political pathway to change decades of commuting behavior is likely to be a fully pothole-filled trail.

In November, President Biden signed the $1.2 trillion (T) Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. This legislation’s fiscal largesse will be spread wide and far. Confusingly, this trillion-dollar number is not the amount of actual new infrastructure spending. Nope. The large, legislative budget number also includes typical annual expenditures for public roads, bridges, ports, railroads and water infrastructure, such as filling potholes, replacing worn-out pipes and equipment and operations & maintenance expenses.

New expenditures in the bipartisan Infrastructure Act sum to about $550 billion (B). This hefty number represents only 46% of the Act’s total $1.2T sticker-price. It’s these new outlays, not pothole-filling, that the president and Dems proclaim will significantly improve America’s transit infrastructure and consequently its citizens’ lives.

Such efforts will hopefully benefit many folks in many ways, which is a good thing. But this confusing reporting of funding level is an example of how Congress swells the apparent significance of its legislative efforts. Dems believe bigger is clearly better, even though it’s misleadingly stated. So it goes.

Public transit is due to receive $39B, 7.1% of new infrastructure expenditures. This tidy sum will serve to upgrade our 2,200 public urban and rural transit systems nationwide. The Act will also provide money to create new bus routes, electrify bus fleets and assist in making public transit more accessible to seniors and disabled Americans. Interestingly, urban rail lines are already reported to be at least 90% handicap-accessible; buses are 99% accessible.

Berkeley has its own ideas for improving its bus system. The City Council is considering a program that will offer free AC Transit bus rides in a portion of the city. If the Council approves, if they find funding for it and if AC Transit (the bus operator) agrees, one bus route that travels through several low-income neighborhoods will be renewed and fare-free on Sundays for a year. That’s three very big “ifs,” especially the last one. The Council believes this program would remedy in part systemic inequalities that Berkeley, being Berkeley, is very attuned to.

Among several issues with the program, picking Sunday as the free-fare day is regrettable. Sunday has the lowest ridership of any day of the week, and excludes virtually all commuters and students, the bulk of bus riders in Berkeley. Sundays are not a representative day of transit usage for most systems, including Berkeley’s.

The number of Berkeleyans who use buses regularly to commute to work is quite small, less than 8%. It’s not because bus fares are too high. Transit takes much longer to get places and ridership does not depend that much on fare level.

AC Transit studies indicate that reducing bus fares will not produce a significant or proportionate increase in ridership. Factors that promote bus ridership include the lack of a car for personal use, a positive assessment of buses relative to autos and close proximity to the bus route from one’s residence.

Unfortunately for transit, folks have become increasingly wary of traveling where crime and Covid may occur. As elsewhere, Bay Area residents are voting with their steering wheels to lower these risks, opting to drive and not use buses. AC Transit’s ridership dropped precipitously, 70% during the year ending April 2020. Now, its ridership is down a mere 60%.

Free fares are not going to solve these significant issues. It’s hard to imagine how this program will produce worthwhile information that could be useful beyond the one bus route that’s involved. But that’s not likely the true purpose of the program.

The Berkeley City Council has few qualms about undertaking this program that it’s not going to directly pay for. It could follow the Council’s well-established predilection of hurling other organizations’ money at issues like those facing underprivileged people in the hope that something useful might happen eventually.

With enough time, effort and searching, money will likely be found for this interim program. Possible funding sources include the American Rescue Plan Act and the new infrastructure Act. California expects to receive nearly $9.5B from the new Act to improve public transit infrastructure across the state. Berkeley stands ready to claim some.

However, AC Transit, who would have to implement the program, does not favor it as currently proposed by the city. Being very aware of the surrounding politics, AC Transit is on record supporting the idea of a free-fare program, just not this one. So far, Berkeley’s free-fare transit program, like public urban transit itself, seems parked far beyond the shoulder of transportation priorities.