Loren Lippincott
As economies grow, so does the need for electrical power. Research shows a 90 percent correlation between the use of electricity in our country and our economic growth. Meanwhile, electrical power is vital to every aspect of modern life in America. Just imagine your world without electricity. Everything comes to a stop and life, as we know it, ceases to exist. It’s a frightening thought!
While the need is growing, the U.S. has the necessary natural resources to provide enough energy of all kinds for ourselves and others around the world. Under Donald Trump’s first term as president our country became not just energy independent, but for the first time in 70 years, it became an energy exporter, helping reduce our balance of trade.
However, under the Biden Administration total energy costs have increased 39 percent. The price of gasoline has jumped 53 percent and home energy costs have risen 25 percent. Proponents of Electric Vehicles (EV) need to consider that China possesses a near monopoly on minerals needed to make the batteries for them. Currently China controls 70 percent of global EV battery production, whereas the U.S. is at less than 10 percent. In April 2023 the Biden EPA proposed new emission regulations that would require EV sales to increase from 6 percent to 67 percent of all U.S. car sales by 2032. That would make us dependent on China for our energy needs.
Meanwhile, our electrical grid is already under strain. The search engine Google itself presently consumes more electricity than half the countries in the world and its need is increasing with the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Increases in consumption along with regulations are changing the world’s economic landscape. In 2008 the economy of the European Union was larger than the U.S. but after years of radical climate regulation in Europe, their electricity is the most expensive in the world and now the U.S. economy is a third larger than the EU and Britain combined. The departing administration has attempted to drive us the way of Europe by increasing costs through regulation.
Over the past four years the cost of oil and gas drilling leases here have gone up 50 percent and the available acreage for drilling has decreased by 80 percent. While the world’s economy depends heavily on oil, coal and gas, our emergency Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been drained to 46 percent of its capacity. That is the lowest level in 40 years, and a million barrels of this oil was sold to China! This energy reserve is for national energies, not to lower gas prices due to poor energy policies.
Driving this growing need for electricity are new technologies like AI, bitcoin mining, quantum computing and EV transportation. Consider that AI servers use 50 times more power than traditional computer servers and statistics show AI computational usage doubles every 100 days. Bitcoin mining involves vast amounts of computations done over time with powerful computers which require a lot of energy. Mining bitcoin presently consumes the same amount of energy as the entire nation of Poland!
One proposed solution is the use of Small Modular Reactors (SMR) similar to the power plants used on Navy ships and submarines. Currently 82 U.S. Naval ships are nuclear powered and can go up to 50 years without refueling. Often such ships will be deployed to areas in the world that are hit with natural disasters, because the ship can “plug in” to the electrical grid to provide virtually unlimited power. SMRs are expensive and obviously do not produce as much power as a full-sized nuclear power plant, but advances are being made in this technology. Here in Nebraska our power producers are looking at this closely.
The Council of State Governments reported in 2022 that Nebraska’s electrical power comes 49 percent from coal, 25 percent from wind, 18 percent from nuclear and 4 percent from natural gas. As a state and nation we need to be developing energy in all forms while not allowing ourselves to be subject to climate alarmism. We cannot allow ourselves to become dependent upon any other country to meet our increasing energy needs.
Loren Lippincott represents Legislative District 34 in the Nebraska State Senate. Read his column in the Nance County Journal.