You missed Australia and all the issues that are going on in Queensland. Their huge push to renewables has come home to roost with outages and instability.
You’re of course correct regarding nuclear power: we’ll get there, once the ideologues have incinerated literally trillions of taxpayer dollars proving that wind, solar and batteries won’t work.
The other aspect of W, S, & B that deserves attention is that they all have relatively short lifespans and need to be rebuilt and replaced frequently. Nuclear plants have a lifespan 4x as long.
First, intermittent renewable energy generation which is usually located far from demand centers, while clean, cannot possibly power America. Only nuclear generation can. We should be using the sites of current coal fired power stations which have in place transmission and cooling infrastructure and are close to locations where energy is needed to build new nuclear capacity. Democrats largely reject new nuclear power plants.
Secondly, we are not on track to reduce carbon emissions adequately to halt disastrous climate change. At this stage of the problem only geoengineering can save humanity. Republicans largely reject geoengineering and because they believe in crazy conspiracy theories refuse to support even research into how it might help.
With both parties standing in the way of necessary solutions to the looming climate disaster we are clearly fucked.
I mean, I can’t really because China is so opaque nobody outside the Politburo really knows the scale of the subsidies going to renewables.
But as always the question is: what do you do when the sun’s not shining and the wind’s not blowing, and in China the answer is not ambiguous: you fire up the trusty old coal burning power plant!
China very carefully controls the information flow out of the country to preserve the image needed to sell their products. Since industry is government owned, all information is basically advertising for a nation corporation. Negative information affects sales and must not be allowed. So you will always see rosy reports out of China if they are trying to sell a product.
Beliefs are filters through which we see reality, and we all tend to forget what we're looking through.
Quico, you're a smart guy and I enjoy reading your essays, but you think that your faith in the next "nuclear renaissance" is purely rational,despite the failure of the previous ones and all of the obvious reasons to conclude that none of the reactor designs so far is likely to work well enough to meet a payroll. You are certainly right about the undesirablility of relying on wind and solar to keep the lights on and the beer cold. But if you rewrite that part of this essay by replacing "wind and solar" with "nuclear power", it makes just as much sense.
And your pop psychology analysis of modern environmentalism has an obvious parallel in the faith in a nuclear future.
I'm not suggesting that the anti-nuclear movement, past or present, is devoid of irrational belief systems, though I like to think that I myself am relatively free of "religious" or irrational filters that distort my view of energy and economic reality. And proving that one's political opponents engage in irrational thought and exaggerated claims is much easier than proving that we ourselves and our allies do not.
My own views are much less apocalyptic about climate change than Greta's or even yours, and my views about the attainability of a Net Zero energy transition in the foreseeable future is much more pessimistic. With any luck at all, we will continue to adapt to the reality of the weather and the climate and we will return to focusing on providing economic growth to humanity including the world's poorest, who have become wealthier and healthier faster than the rest of us until "climate action" deprived them of access to the increased supply of affordable reliable energy that they so sorely need. China and India are not places where I'd like to live, but they are dealing with energy and economic reality, and both nuclear energy and wind-and-solar are sensibly taking a back seat to the expansion of fossil energy. That's reality, IMO.
We know it's possible to decarbonize a grid using nuclear because we've done it. France did it. Sweden did it. Ontario did it. Their power is cheap and reliable.
That's not religion. That's everyday life for millions of French, Swedish and Canadian people.
Here in Ontario we didn't really decarbonize completely, and what we did we didn't do mostly with nuclear power. We did have some nuclear units shut down, and some came back online around the time of our coal phaseout, but most of the phaseout was facilitated by building new gas-fired stations. No new nukes were ordered or completed then. So I'd say NO.
Existing nuclear may be affordable, but from what I’ve read and heard, new nuclear is a boondoggle and extremely expensive (not to mention the problems of radioactive waste and plant meltdowns / radiation release in a world where extreme weather events are more risky).
I forget who first said "If a problem is too hard to solve, you don't prove that you've solved it by pointing out all your efforts." but I've come to believe that it applies to building a nuclear generating station that can pay its mortgage and meet a payroll.
Frankly, I expected to see a station design by now – actually by years ago — that met my criteria for a good investment and I good neighbor. If you think you have one, please share because I still haven't seen it.
Zero data.
You missed Australia and all the issues that are going on in Queensland. Their huge push to renewables has come home to roost with outages and instability.
You’re of course correct regarding nuclear power: we’ll get there, once the ideologues have incinerated literally trillions of taxpayer dollars proving that wind, solar and batteries won’t work.
The other aspect of W, S, & B that deserves attention is that they all have relatively short lifespans and need to be rebuilt and replaced frequently. Nuclear plants have a lifespan 4x as long.
First, intermittent renewable energy generation which is usually located far from demand centers, while clean, cannot possibly power America. Only nuclear generation can. We should be using the sites of current coal fired power stations which have in place transmission and cooling infrastructure and are close to locations where energy is needed to build new nuclear capacity. Democrats largely reject new nuclear power plants.
Secondly, we are not on track to reduce carbon emissions adequately to halt disastrous climate change. At this stage of the problem only geoengineering can save humanity. Republicans largely reject geoengineering and because they believe in crazy conspiracy theories refuse to support even research into how it might help.
With both parties standing in the way of necessary solutions to the looming climate disaster we are clearly fucked.
Curious if you could comment on the Chinese experience with solar and wind. It appears they have been able to avoid some of the issues you have cited.
I mean, I can’t really because China is so opaque nobody outside the Politburo really knows the scale of the subsidies going to renewables.
But as always the question is: what do you do when the sun’s not shining and the wind’s not blowing, and in China the answer is not ambiguous: you fire up the trusty old coal burning power plant!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China
I don't think it's wise to just dismiss China so easily. This recent article goes into a lot of detail and shows continuing drop in energy generated from coal in China: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-clean-energy-pushes-coal-to-record-low-53-share-of-power-in-may-2024/. There have been articles on UHV grids that enable moving energy over long distances.
China very carefully controls the information flow out of the country to preserve the image needed to sell their products. Since industry is government owned, all information is basically advertising for a nation corporation. Negative information affects sales and must not be allowed. So you will always see rosy reports out of China if they are trying to sell a product.
Beliefs are filters through which we see reality, and we all tend to forget what we're looking through.
Quico, you're a smart guy and I enjoy reading your essays, but you think that your faith in the next "nuclear renaissance" is purely rational,despite the failure of the previous ones and all of the obvious reasons to conclude that none of the reactor designs so far is likely to work well enough to meet a payroll. You are certainly right about the undesirablility of relying on wind and solar to keep the lights on and the beer cold. But if you rewrite that part of this essay by replacing "wind and solar" with "nuclear power", it makes just as much sense.
And your pop psychology analysis of modern environmentalism has an obvious parallel in the faith in a nuclear future.
I'm not suggesting that the anti-nuclear movement, past or present, is devoid of irrational belief systems, though I like to think that I myself am relatively free of "religious" or irrational filters that distort my view of energy and economic reality. And proving that one's political opponents engage in irrational thought and exaggerated claims is much easier than proving that we ourselves and our allies do not.
My own views are much less apocalyptic about climate change than Greta's or even yours, and my views about the attainability of a Net Zero energy transition in the foreseeable future is much more pessimistic. With any luck at all, we will continue to adapt to the reality of the weather and the climate and we will return to focusing on providing economic growth to humanity including the world's poorest, who have become wealthier and healthier faster than the rest of us until "climate action" deprived them of access to the increased supply of affordable reliable energy that they so sorely need. China and India are not places where I'd like to live, but they are dealing with energy and economic reality, and both nuclear energy and wind-and-solar are sensibly taking a back seat to the expansion of fossil energy. That's reality, IMO.
We know it's possible to decarbonize a grid using nuclear because we've done it. France did it. Sweden did it. Ontario did it. Their power is cheap and reliable.
That's not religion. That's everyday life for millions of French, Swedish and Canadian people.
I'm all in for nukes. Ontario gets 55% it's power from that source, 25% from hydro, 8% wind and then a mix of other in total 91% "carbon free".
Here in Ontario we didn't really decarbonize completely, and what we did we didn't do mostly with nuclear power. We did have some nuclear units shut down, and some came back online around the time of our coal phaseout, but most of the phaseout was facilitated by building new gas-fired stations. No new nukes were ordered or completed then. So I'd say NO.
Existing nuclear may be affordable, but from what I’ve read and heard, new nuclear is a boondoggle and extremely expensive (not to mention the problems of radioactive waste and plant meltdowns / radiation release in a world where extreme weather events are more risky).
I mean, yeah, the conventional wisdom really is that nuclear got worse as nuclear technology got better.
But think about it: that's *crazy!*
The question is how this literally absurd thing became conventional wisdom. I have a few posts brewing about that...
I forget who first said "If a problem is too hard to solve, you don't prove that you've solved it by pointing out all your efforts." but I've come to believe that it applies to building a nuclear generating station that can pay its mortgage and meet a payroll.
Frankly, I expected to see a station design by now – actually by years ago — that met my criteria for a good investment and I good neighbor. If you think you have one, please share because I still haven't seen it.
Emmett is the best!