Published

1 year ago

February 10, 2025

Alice Rush

Today, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Region 4 filed their comments on the Enbridge/East Tennessee Natural Gas Pipeline Ridgeline Expansion Project Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS). They filed these “comments” after requesting an ominous two week extension “pending anticipated transitions in political leadership in Region 4.”

The proposed 122-mile pipeline would cross eight counties in order to supply fossil gas to the 1,450 MW Kingston fossil gas plant in Roane County.

SACE has significant concerns about the safety of this pipeline project, including the lack of safety regulations to address the increasing likelihood of landslides. We commented on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) and then followed up with additional concerns stemming from comments made by the pipeline industry itself.

The EPA Region 4 had found significant deficiencies with the DEIS for the TVA Kingston fossil gas plant almost a year ago.

But the EPA’s final word on this dangerous pipeline project is: nothing.

In its 3-page comment letter, the EPA Region 4 asks for one minor change in the characterization of jurisdiction of air pollution regulations, and recommends that public communications be translated into Spanish. No mention of safety, environmental harms, or public health harms.

Contrast this to the EPA’s response to the environmental review of a different new gas pipeline to serve a different new TVA gas power plant: the Cumberland pipeline and plant in middle Tennessee. In August of 2023 the EPA filed comments on the FEIS of the Cumberland pipeline stating that “the EPA has identified deficiencies in the final analysis that remain and should be addressed in future EISs.” The 2023 comment letter goes on with specific recommendations on the characterization of greenhouse gas emissions, measures to mitigate carbon emissions, and even the potential for carbon lock-in.

So it appears that the lights are indeed out at US EPA Region 4.

The post The Lights Are Out at EPA Region 4 appeared first on SACE | Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

The Lights Are Out at EPA Region 4

Renewable Energy

Renewable Energy Concepts Can’t Violate the Laws of Physics

Published

13 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Alice Rush

In the early days of 2GreenEnergy, my people and I were vigorously engaged in finding solid ideas in cleantech that needed funding in order to move forward.

I vividly remember a conversation with a guy in Maryland who was trying to explain the (ostensible) breakthrough that he and his team had made in hydrokinetics. When I was having trouble visualizing what we was talking about, he asked me to “think of it as a river in a box.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You mean you take a box full of standing water, add energy to it get it moving, then extract that energy, leaving you with more energy that you added to it.”

“Exactly.”

I politely explained that the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, make this impossible.

He wasn’t through, however, and insisted that, in his office, his people had constructed a “working model.”

Here’s where my tone descended into something less than 100% polite. I told him that he may think he has a working model, but he’s wrong; if he believes this, he’s ignorant; if he doesn’t, but is conducting this conversation anyway, he’s a fraud.

“But don’t you want to come see it?” he implored.

“No. Not only would not fly across the country to see whatever it is you claim to have built, I wouldn’t walk across the street to a “working model” of something that is theoretically impossible.”

—

I tell this story because the claim made at the upper left is essentially identical. You’re pumping water up out of a stream, and then claiming to extract more energy when the water flows back into the stream.

Of course, social media today is rife with complete crap like this. We’ve devolved to a point where defrauding money out of idiots is rapidly replacing baseball as our national pastime.