UTILITY POLICY, EPA REGS, STRATEGIES, PERMITS, COMPLIANCE

Anthony Cirillo - SunEast Development

Over the past decade it has become clear that a confluence of ‘stuff’ has permeated and corrupted the sensibilities of the U.S. population in general, and in particular endangers its power industry in much the same way that it has already infected the European energy industry. This ‘stuff’ is not gray matter, but green matter --- where nothing but green matters. It seems that once the ‘green’ monicker is attached to a cause, a piece of legislation, an action or inaction, a person, place or thing, etc. it must be embraced, and if queried, the inquirer must be silenced rather than engaged in rational, constructive dialogue. However, there are recent past and current emerging signs that this green-way or no way, is turning red.For aesthetic reasons the NIMBYs and the land use/open space factions are seeing red when windmills and solar farms are being permitted along their vistas and in their neighborhoods. For partisan reasons, politicians and regulators are drowning, in red tape, those power generation forms they do not deem green enough while pursuing their party’s self-styled green initiatives. Initiatives creating hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies and incentives pushing fiscal budgets, now over $30 trillion, further into the red while concurrently making the taxpayers see red as the ballooning national debt hits their wallets in the form of inflation and higher energy bills. Animal and human-right advocates are attaching a blood-red stigma to the sudden rise in unexplained whale and porpoise beachings and mortalities, in the vicinity of concentrated sonar-based ocean bathymetric and geotechnical surveys for offshore wind farms, and to the human injuries and deaths associated with third-world country mining practices for rare earth battery metals and minerals, respectively. Compounding the latter, the convoluted logic of scarring the earth with mining and refining operations to save it, often done in impoverished and remote parts of the globe, makes social justice supporters red-hot as the toil and wares of the less-fortunate ultimately wind up in countries able to afford being ‘green.’ To dispel the red-herrings and incessant code-red apocalyptic alarm broadcasts made under the pretense of green energy, this presentation will pose sound technical, measured, and reasonable approaches to socially protect both the environment and the reliability of the ever-evolving U.S. power industry.