I am reminded this morning of the odd contempt that conservatives have for renewable power—There's no sun at night! The wind doesn't always blow!—paired with their seemingly inexhaustible love of nuclear power, which survives even $17 billion overruns on $14 billion nuclear plants.
I myself have mixed views on nuclear. On the one hand, new Gen 4 technologies hold out the hope of reliable, modestly priced, carbon-free power. On the other hand, waste disposal can't be blithely waved away and existing construction of nuclear plants is wildly expensive. It's hardly a slam dunk for either side.
So why the endless love from right-wingers? And why the equally endless mockery of solar and wind? Even if you're deeply invested in pretending that climate change is a big liberal delusion, clean energy is still something to root for, isn't it? At the very least it reduces air pollution of all kinds, and who's against that? And it's hardly a secret that modern, utility-scale renewable installations include battery storage that allows them to provide electricity all day long.
But conservatives nevertheless jump gleefully on any reported hiccup with renewable energy. They even hate electric vehicles. Ron DeSantis has enshrined this in his "Declaration of Economic Independence," and red states are passing regulations to rein in charging stations and increase EV registration fees for no reason other than an inchoate grudge against anything "green."
The obvious answer to all this, I suppose, is that the libtards like solar, wind, and EVs, so MAGAnauts don't. Ditto in reverse for nuclear power. It seems like there has to be more to it than just this, but I sure can't figure out what it might be.
The chorus to Taylor Swift's "Look What You Made Me Do" remains the conservative movement's theme song.
Oil and coal companies have money, and they bamboozle everybody that they can bamboozle to support it. That means mainly right-wing cranks (which KD for some mysterious reason calls "conservatives").
Indeed there is more marginalism going it is likely than not.
Expansion of self-interest in the economics on RE should help address this noise, which Mr Biden rather cleverly looks to be achieving (as Financial Times has covered a few days ago: https://www.ft.com/content/3b19c51d-462b-43fa-9e0e-3445640aabb5)
Coal supporters rant and rave about renewables, when it’s primarily natural gas from fracking that is putting coal miners out of work.
The coal corporations don't think they can fight oil corporations, so they join them fighting renewables.
Isn't it fun how, for all the explainers imploring us to "understand" conservatives better, we never get a clear, honest answer to issues like this?
Just, endlessly pleading for us to "understand" and reciting all the things conservatives want us to choke down... but never an actual explanation of those things or why they believe them.
Recently read an article noting that there are no equivalent pleas for right wingers to understand liberals.
My snark answer is that "understand" is a liberal idea.
+1
Occam's Razor says: your "obvious" answer is 100% correct. Anything they think "libtards" want they are reflexively, unthinkingly, and vehemently against. Their hatred of "libtards" rules them.
+1
+ 1 more
There's economic self-interest behind some of the opposition: gas stations, automobile dealerships, service stations will be hurt by changing to EV 's; coal mining, oil and gas extraction all will be hurt. There's also the psychic pain of facing the fact that your occupation has been hurting the world and is doomed.
Farmers and conservationists can be roused to opposition over installation of turbines; renewable energy has been linked to climate change, which has its own set of opponents: opposition to big government, one worldism, etc.
An article in the Times today said the way to sell renewable energy is financial--it saves money. In the old days of the previous century that wasn't a feasible argument; now it's our best bet.
Wise comment.
As an actual invesment manager for RE - and moving hundreds of millions of Euros - indeed, *Utility Scale* RE on-shore wind, scale solar PV is now on levelised cost basis market beating [this is not true of house-scale]. As I tell the investors, I do not sell touchy feely green impact, I sell bottom-line savings.
Biden's IRA may be quite useful in building enough self-interest - economic self-interest to eat away at opposition, self-interest is qutie powerful psychological lever.
Of course you need massive grid expansion reforms relative to the permitting and the build out - give Mr Manchin his pipelines so long as one gets the grid extension, upgrade and connexions reforms - and utility scale RE will beat coal into the ground and starve gas. The infra investment market knows this, we are putting €€ and $$ into what's competitive. But grid, grid, grid.... reform on smoothing and accerlating extension or train-wrekc.
Sans grid, you head to the Yellow Vests result of backlash and decredibilisation.
Double Plus Good!!
Is that with storage, or without?
You need to ask?
Yes.
Okay then: No, it does not include the cost of storage. That these twits bury the lede and then do everything in their power to pooh pooh that simple reality makes them infinitely mockable.
It is without storage.
Storage economics remain poor and economically uncompeitive by a long country mile.
Lithium chemistry battery model being the wrong model on multiple levels, other modes required whether thermal or alternative chemistries at lower cost (also lower density but for fixed installations one doesn't particularly care about density if the chemistry is cheap enough, e.g. iron chemistries).
In nearest term, one needs base service - nuclear being best as non-carbon - and one needs transversal continent spanning grids expansion to maximise potential on wheeling power across production zones to give RE the maximum price competivenss across the widest span of consumption time.
Thus again
Grid Grid Grid Grid Grid.
It is like the observation about armies and logistics. Arm chair generals talk strategy and debate individual weapons systems. Professional generals talk logistics, and scale/volume has as Stalin put it, a quality all of its own.
Grid is the logistics system of electrons.
A continent-spanning grid (losses aside, I assume by grid you mean transmission capacity) may be a worthwhile, perhaps even a necessary thing, but when it is dark in New York it is dark or still at peak demand in Los Angeles. Which still needs power itself. And when it is dark in Los Angeles, it is at best first light in New York. Oh, and of course whatever else there may be in-between - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Avenue 🙂 And that doesn't include times when the country is (virtually) covered in clouds - which while I have tried to web search I have not been able to find how often that is. From my armchair I ass-u-me it would be in winter time if it happens much.
Even with Grid Grid Grid Grid Grid - or even GRID GRID GRID GRID GRID 🙂 You still then need a reliable baseload or a metric craptonne of storage and really over-built "generating" capacity.
And you have states with large fossil fuel economies that are effectively captured by that industry.
I heard an interview with the mayor of a Texas town that had just gone 100% renewable. He said "We love green energy, especially when it comes on little green rectangles with Benjamin Franklin printed on them." That's the way to convince everyone. This stuff is cheaper, and it's cleaner, and it's the future, not all these dead trees from the Carboniferous.
Well, the buggy whip makers were opposed to the newfangled horseless carriages, too. Any new technology threatens the status quo.
A few years ago, we installed solar + a backup battery. Now we rarely use electricity from the grid and our utility bills are lower. A big bonus is that when the power goes out in the neighborhood, we still have juice. When we first got it, our neighbors across the street lost power and were trying to figure out how widespread the outage was. They were puzzled to see the lights blazing at our house, until they remembered we had told them about our new system. We didn't even know there was a power outage!
Let me preface this with the observation that I do indeed want PV solar on my roof, and I've tried to get to 100% electrical in my house (including an EV charger for my Bolt - but I stumbled at hot water). I also, however, have become quite adapted to the idea that whenever I flight the switch, the light will come-on. With that...
Just how rare is rarely? Is your solar+battery a "five-nines" solution whereby you'd be using the grid connection only about 5 minutes a year? "Four nines" where that would be not quite 8 minutes shy of an hour a year? "Three nines" which would be 8 and three quarters of an hour a year? "Two nines" which would be a bit over three-and-a-half days? "One nine" which would be 36 days and change? (Figures from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_calculation)
Now imagine the grid was as available as your own setup - how often would the grid be there for you?
That is the difficulty faced. Getting to a sufficient number of "nines" across the grid.
I pretty much agree with everything in this post, but I would like to point out that the U.S. blew it by ignoring the thorium fuel cycle. There was, in fact, a prototype thorium reactor (the MSRE) at ORNL which operated for some 15000 hours but the program was shut down by Nixon. Why? You don't get bomb fuel as a reaction product from a thorium reactor so they are essentially worthless to the "defense" agencies. Before anyone points out that turning the prototype into a functioning power plant would have required more money, I will remind you that the laser fusion program has received untold billions in funding in the last 50 years. They are not even close to "break even" when you include the energy it takes to create the laser pulses, but then the point of the laser fusion project always was to enable the design of better bombs.
Totally correct re: thorium.
Anyone interested in the non-dogmatic take on nuclear should check out:
https://substack.com/@jackdevanney
I also support Thorium, but it has been terribly neglected by the US government, and needs research and development. I have also heard that China is actively pursuing the technology. Normally, wouldn't that be a stimulus for us to get our program going?
Given no military byproducts hence no sweet, sweet DOD/DOE money, doubtful. But maybe if the Chinese put out the word that they wanted to sell and install thorium systems around the world, that might get domestic competitive juices flowing, set off a rush for American companies to design and sell their own thorium systems-- with their manufacturing in China, of course. Sigh.
I don't think there is anything more to it than that. I used to argue with this guy online who swore there would never be useful hybrids, much less EV's.
I grew up in the Bay Area in the 70's and 80's, I remember driving up to San Jose, and it was just a wall of smog. Today you can usually see completely across the Bay. This was due to Catalytic Converters. Try and get something like that through the Republican wall today.
I used to fly back and forth from SJ to LAX and in the late 60's. Yes, SJ smog was a red cloud on approach. My late wife always got sick in the late summer when the smog built up. As smog was reduced, the late summer sickness went away.
Back in the day, when I spent high school summers with my older brother in San Bernardino, you could see the wall of smog to the west. My dad retired to Sedona and said the smog eventually got to AZ.
like we've all been saying for years now: conservatism has become a death cult. it celebrates just about every single instance of vice (if the vices belong to the social groups that matter to them) and disdains virtue (especially if the virtues belong to the outgroups they want to immiserate and kill).
it's the same reason they turned on Bud Light. they thought they had their nice weak shitty beer that was only for tough manly-men, and then the brand ruined that for them by advertising that it would prefer to sell their beer to trans people as well rather than immiserate and kill them. the guiding principle of their death cult is that anyone saying society should somewhat change in ways that make things better for everyone is a libtard who deserves immiseration and death. to adopt green energy is to acknowledge that a) the status quo re fossil fuels is environmentally catastrophic; b) that the environment matters for society; c) that **society**, not just whatever their individual lizard brains want that day that makes them feel good, actually matters. so...yeah.
I think there isn’t more to it than that. This started around Clinton and was perfected under Obama - if the democrats think it’s a good idea it has to be opposed and destroyed.
That is 90% of the GOP party DNA these days.
This YouTube video helped me understand problems with renewables: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTxPZdeKZgM
It's about Energy Return on Energy Invested, and our society will run into problems if we need to depend on energy sources that are low intensity, which describes most renewables.
Like we don't have problems now?
I watched that video and I didn't see anything that argued against pursuing renewables, only for making them more efficient, and efficiency comes with use and development of infrastructure. The guy concludes by saying that the environment is fucked. Well, we can either accept that or look for ways to reduce fossil fuel use.
I think Nate Hagens supports renewables, it's just that they won't support our current lifestyle, which is based on cheap and abundant energy. If you look with a whole systems view, renewables won't be as cheap as fossil fuels, so we'll spend a lot more time creating energy, and less time in other pursuits.
Conservatives badly need some rhetorical cudgel they can use to try and claim that environmentalists/the left/etc are Actually Hypocrites, and nuclear power gives them that cudgel.
There's also this thing with conservative intellectuals now where they claim that the Nuclear Future of the mid-20th century was ruined by Evil Environmentalists, rather than the public souring on the technology due to perceived risks and the industry responding to cope with that. Since then, any perceived lessening of nuclear power safety restrictions gets met with an overwhelmingly negative public response, but conservatives don't really have any answer to that - so instead they blame Democrats.
The Hell of it is, they're actually at least partially right on this one. The are certain groups claiming to be 'environmentalists' and 'green' who have adobpted as policy the tactic of deliberately making nuclear as expensive as possible through lawfare: construction delays via court challenges they know they will lose, lobbying for ever more stringent regulatary hoops to jump through, etc. And they're _proud_ of that; in this respect they are every bit as bad as their right-wing counterparts.
Hardly a surprise. The “conservative movement” has been funded by the oil industry for decades now.
I am afraid that there is no proper foundation for US Conservatives out-moded broad and rabid anti-RE than indeed pure anti-Democratic Party knee-jerking. Some components could be explained by populist reaction but the broad American right rabid antiposition really has no commonalities in general right politics globally.
Perhaps partially for both Left and Right in USA there does seem to be some quite queer frozen mentality rooted in the 70s-80s (here perhaps the Boomer demographic impact for once has some proper point)
Of course the Green Left is entirely daft and wrong-headed about Nuclear, but that's quite independent as a subject and not merely American, even the French Greens are infected by such idiocy.
That is because the polities in other countries (Russia possibly excepted) are generally not as broad-spectrum insane as US conservatives are. Sure, they might be very nutty with respect to a narrow set of issues (often nationalism, irredentism, etc. is deeply involved in these). But they do not generally define every fiber of their being by their opposition to **being a member of their own society** in the way that the US rightwing does.
It's to avoid the conversation that requires them to admit that they were profoundly, galactically wrong about climate change being significant and caused by humans.
Totally agree with that. The climate-change-as-hoax strategy was Karl Rove's strategy to trump Gore highest card. You'd think the Rs would have let the pretense drop after the 2000 election dust settled but instead they have doubled down, and doubled down again. At this point they would be admitting that they have been opportunistic, hypocritical assholes for the last 23 years for pretending climate change is a hoax.
There is the thing about TFG trying to stop an offshore wind farm off his Scottish golf course, and the Scots telling him to f-off.
I have enough fingers and toes to count the number of US conservatives who are familiar with that issue. It of course stems from the same *impulses* as they have ("me awesome, me get rich, me play golf, F you and F your needs") but it is not a significant factor influencing their feelings about renewables, which long predated Trump's presidency. (One way we know it is not is that conservative beliefs are extremely *affiliational*: if they were familiar with the issue, they'd be constantly having Two Minutes' Hate sessions against the *country of Scotland and its people* rather than simply ranting against solar and wind farms. They *still* get riled up about the French because of Iraq.)
The Scottish wind farm only pissed off one “conservative”, Donald Trump. But shitting on windmills is now a standard part of Donald’s act, complete with “WHEEE-WHEEE …” sound affects supposedly resembling a wind turbine enacted by Donald. If you haven’t noticed, Donald has quite the following among the right wingers.
Nukes in France are interesting:
Électricité de France (EDF) – the country's main electricity generation and distribution company – manages the country's 56 power reactors.[5] EDF is substantially owned by the French Government, with around 85% shares in government hands.[6]
Nuclear power was introduced in large quantities in France following the 1973 oil crisis according to the Messmer plan. This was based on projections that large amounts of electric power would be required. In the end too much nuclear power capacity was installed, and this has led to relatively low production, load following, and high electricity exports.[7] France exported 38 TWh of electricity to its neighbours in 2017.[8] However, the country still becomes a net importer of electricity when demand exceeds supply, such as in cases of very inclement weather, as in February 2012 when "Germany powers France in cold despite nuclear u-turn" as "France heavily relies on electric heating", which "means that during cold snaps, French electricity demand goes through the roof, forcing the country to import".[9][10]
It isn't because liberals are in love with renewable energy. Some of them aren't and some never think about it. It's because their propaganda outlets tell them that liberals love renewable energy. And that is all they need to know.
I recall reading a study or survey about light bulbs, but cannot find it now. When right-wingers were told that the light bulbs saved money, they wanted them. When they were told that they were good for the environment, they didn't want them.
It's hard for a lot of people and it seems to be hard for Kevin, but right-wingers are not good people. Their bad acts flow from bad thoughts that are the product of bad beliefs about the world. They are ignorant, hateful bigots. We understand them quite well.
Although I am a card-carrying liberal I have to agree with some of the points of the conservatives. For one, it has not been demonstrated that renewables can actually be scaled up to the required level whereas this was demonstrated for nuclear. This makes renewables a risky proposition for being the solution to global warming.
Also, the economics for both renewables and nuclear are distorted, but in opposite directions: China is heavily subsidizing the production of renewables to corner the market, with great success, and also it uses a lot of cheap and dirty coal to do it. Nuclear, on the other hand, is made incredibly expensive with a lot of regulation and unnecessary safety requirements. It also doesn't help that in the US every NPP is a different design.
Ten thumbs up. Plus two.
A few points about renewables:
* You buy your solar collectors and they give you electricity. You don't pay every week for "fuel" to make them run. The sun's light is (still) free.
* Ditto for your wind farm/wind turbine. Does nobody remember all those windmills that farmers used to have, out on the prairie? My grandpa's pumped water into a tank for the cattle (probably also house water, too). He never had to fill a gas tank.
* You do not, repeat, DO NOT need a 1,000 Gigawatt renewable power station: much smaller installations can fuel towns, even neighborhoods. Of course, they even work for individual homes! More and smaller installations can provide better coverage, more redundancy, and less loss in transmission.
* Storage battery technology is improving and scientists are trying to make less rare elements do the job.
As far as the right wing goes, a long time ago, solar panels were prohibitively expensive. Since these folks never catch up with current developments, that's all they know. See also "vaccines lead to autism."
Vaccines > autism isn’t really a conservative thing. Pre-Covid, one of the least vaccinated areas in California, maybe the country, was one of its most liberal.
And that tank was ... storage. To accommodate the intermittency of the wind.
Better Batteries have been coming Real Soon Now for a long time now, in fact, for my entire life if not longer.
Kevin, you bring up two separate questions:
1. why the push for nuclear?
2. why the pushback against RE, e.g. electric vehicles
I think #2 is easy: fossil fuel companies have existing assets that will become stranded if RE takes over, so they push against RE. But why #1? The reason is .... #2. That is to say, "No, don't do RE, do *this here* (nuclear)!!!" It's just misdirection, meant to confuse, just like "Roe v. Wade was decided in the courts: what should have happened, was that it be decided in the legislatures!!"
And the tell, is that if they were really serious about nuclear power, they would be all-in on electrification, b/c nukes produce electricity, riiiight? But they're not. That's the tell.
And furthermore, they don't actually care whether some sort of scaled-up easily-deployed nuclear power ever comes about: heck, they'd fight that it ever came close to reality -- because, again, this is all about trillions of dollars in what-will-be stranded assets in the ground if RE (or nuclear) really takes off.
I do have a secret conspiracy theory that Elon Musk is actually still a cool genius, and has only pretended to transform into a vocal right wing dumb ass in order to convince the MAGA herd to start buying electric cars.
Wait till the MAGA herd finds out in a Tesla you need to go two levels deep on the touch screen menu before you can open the glove box door and grab your 9 mm.
Some of his moves are clearly intended to get more buyers from the right-wing, and it is possible that he thinks he can make Xitter the "goto site" for the right-hand dumbos.
Being a climate activist, I've been thinking about this for a long time. My conclusion is that it's culture, culture, culture! Not only red-state culture, but MAN culture. This is why I suggest to my activist friends not to use the term "clean energy." I tell them "clean is a girl word." This is especially true in the working-class guy world, where one of the worst insults you can direct at another guy is "He can't stand to get his hands dirty." And it's not crazy because if you do manual labor, fixing cars or construction, getting "dirty" is a sign that you're working hard.
And getting back to the hatred for renewable energy, I think it's largely because of that same highly gendered culture issue. Digging up coal! Working on an oil rig! Those are manly tasks to deliver energy to our families!
It will take a while to change this. Once a person emerges from adolescence, these cultural points of reference are deeply embedded. Look for this to persist until Gens X and Z, where this nonsense seems to have fallen by the wayside, start acquiring institutional power.
I don't see why. People who decide their own favorite president's big COVID vaccine triumph was part of a globalist conspiracy are capable of any amount of random evidence-free irrationality.
Once you're convinced that radical Marxist globalists have taken over the institutions underpinning society, it's logical to reject anything those institutions tell you as a pack of lies designed to achieve a sinister hidden agenda. I'm not suggesting most right-wingers subscribe to detailed conspiracy narratives, but enough do - very forcefully - to make agreeing with their overall position a required sign of tribal loyalty for the masses. It s the same phenomenon that sees the lunatic fringe of the Trump Cult spinning ever-more intricate tales of the way Democrats steal elections, while the rest don't follow it closely but are convinced that something stinks about Trump's defeat in 2020.
"And it's hardly a secret that modern, utility-scale renewable installations include battery storage that allows them to provide electricity all day long."
Actually it is a secret. Ripudaman Malhotra, former Associate Director of the Energy and Environment Center at SRI International, calculates that providing 100 hours of backup for a 1000 MW power plant would require 32,000 tons of lithium. In 2018, the global production of lithium was 62,000 tons.
Batteries have their uses in the grid. They're good for peak shaving, and they can ramp up very quickly to help maintain grid frequency from second to second. But for long-term backup while the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, batteries cannot serve.
+10+2
As for nuclear--if the plants are in good shape, they should be kept running. A lot of green energy generation went to shutting down nuclear plants early since they cost more than fossil fuel plants to run.
New nuclear? Utility scale plants are way too expensive--especially since there's no real market for them. Each is a one off design. Possibly "research" one or twos. The move to small reactors--almost like fusion power, it's always around the corner. Unless there's a market for them, they'll never be economies of scale. But I don't see any design getting to production mode anytime soon.
"[Nuclear] waste disposal can't be blithely waved away." True, but a promising solution is emerging. Instead of excavating huge caverns, as in the moribund Yucca Mountain project, we can bury nuclear waste using the directional drilling technology developed by the oil industry, totally isolating it from the biosphere and eliminating any need to monitor it for thousands of years (a spectre often raised by nuclear opponents). A principal innovator of this technology is the firm Deep Isolation (https://deepisolation.com). Check it out.
I suppose part of the appeal of nuclear power to the right is that it can’t safely be scaled to global proportions— everyone needs power, but not every country should have nuclear materials. And of course even trying to manage those motivations will be destabilizing in foreign-relations terms. Creating more have-nots is a RW impulse.
To be a conservative, you have to embrace a particular hubris of religious dogma with regards to the sanctity of life. Then go on a fucking rampage killing every living thing in the name of God.
The alternative view is that conservatives being human after all, despite ostensibly embracing God, they cannot avoid being fucking human killing machines.
The extreme alternative view is that conservatives really believe in their bullshit that, even if they kill every living thing in their fucking way, all they need to do is ask forgiveness before then go back to killing every living thing in their fucking way.
And that, boys and girls, is why we have coal rolling.