I’ve come to the conclusion that environmentalists and their allies will never come around on nuclear, because, like the old saying goes, they didn’t arrive at their opposition based on reasoning or facts. A glance at the death rates attributable to various forms of energy per kilowatt hour generated should have made nuclear a slam dunk proposition years or decades ago. The fact the Western world, directed by environmental concerns, decommissioned nuclear plants in the 2010s-2020s shows environmentalists aren’t serious people. Germany doing what they did, NY state doing what it did, should be scandals.
People put a lot of weight on novel risks and little weight on mundane risks we have become habituated to.
This is why people started getting scared of the potential adverse heart risks associated with Covid vaccines and disregarded the greater cardiovascular risks associated with an acute Covid infection.
We had a real meltdown at Three Mile Island. Nobody was hurt. The utility lost their investment. That was it.
The idea baked into public consciousness is wrong. They think China Syndrome which is pure fiction, or Chernobyl. And not even the real version, which is bad enough, but the fictionalized version. A Chernobyl type event is not how a Western reactor fails. Although if the Democrat Socialists of America take power, they could I suppose bring some of that sweet Soviet goodness our way.
This doesn’t sound true. Covid vaccines and acute Covid were both novel. People worry regularly about ordinary things like job loss, and seem to heavily weight the chance of car accidents when buying cars and making safety decisions for kids. Conversely, nobody is much interested in asteroid hits or engineered pandemics.
I don’t know what makes one thing more worrisome than another in public consciousness, but I don’t think it’s mostly novelty.
Covid vaccine (approved for widespread use) came along about 9-10 months after Covid, so it was certainly more novel in a sense, although the real problem was vaccine hesitancy, and vaccines are not novel at all.
I think many of the Skynet adjacent AI takes fall into this novel risk formula. It seems much more likely that the same people who already use currently available technology to do bad stuff will use AI technology to do bad stuff than the neural networks will decide to take over the world. But it's more strange and scary to talk about the latter.
My fears of AI are they are information destroying. Basically LLMs provide easy queries to information that has been either provided freely or scraped without credit or attribution.
This removes the incentives for people to answer questions on say Stack Overflow and Reddit (people stop asking questions and participating in discussions.)
Then you have AI firms wanting to replaced specialized knowledge with their LLM systems. This strongly incentivizes people to withhold information, not share knowledge digitally, and keep things close.
But maybe that’s just a failure of your imagination; “novel things won’t happen” is an unreliable heuristic these days too. (See: existence of talking computers; Trump’s election)
“Neural networks decide to take over the world” is a bit unnecessary here - all you need is a sorcerer’s apprentice/monkey’s paw situation where the machine that does whatever you want it to do does the thing you want it to do before you have a chance to say “no, not like that!”
Matt wrote a wonderful column. He's right about the current and (especially) past leadership of the Sierra Club etc., but let's take Matt's advice on coalition building in general and welcome the significant abundance-friendly subset of environmentalists. Within the Club (where I briefly held a local leadership position in order to make it less NIMBY), there are people working for energy abundance. They just don't hold the overall reins. Our goal should be to encourage people who identify as environmentalists to embrace energy abundance, not to beat them up for associating with degrowth.
You did join one of the most explicitly ideological environmental groups. I agree that the Sierra Club should be significantly less ur-left than it is now.
The big argument in favor of nuclear power is that it can give you lots of electric power that is consistent and emits no CO2. Compare with solar/wind (no CO2, but intermittent) or coal/gas (consistent but CO2 emitting).
I know you can't have just intermittent sources in your power grid, but is there a reason you can't have just base load kinds of sources like nuclear and coal? I mean, "we are producing more power than we need right now" seems like an easier problem to deal with than "we are not producing the power we need right now," but this isn't something I've studied, so maybe I'm confused.
That's why we need lots of things. Nuclear is great -- is most economically efficient -- as part of the base load. I'd love to see it replace more of the fossil fuel-generated electricity as part of that base load. And as we electrify more, we'll need a bigger base load, so yay more nuclear (if we can get its total costs down).
No coal, though. But that debate has been ended and rendered kaput. It's leaving the building.
There is no reason in the law of physics of which I am aware, but demand is sufficiently variable that if you had literally no ability to smooth it or to modulate you would have to vastly, vastly overbuild.
Which is why it should be part of a mix of green energies like wind and solar. No intelligent and knowledgeable person disagrees with you but base load as was the case in Germany turns out to be very important for reducing duck curves
Yeah, you could build nuclear power in the 1960s and 1970s and somehow it was possible, but now no longer. The Chinese are building out nuclear, I wonder what magic they’re using to make it economical.
I suspect the long arm of the regulatory state.
And if it is really not economical, you’d think the Western world should have been treating the nuclear plants as remnants of a more advanced civilization, rather than decommissioning them.
That's pretty much it, so much regulation to get these new plants going. Folks don't realize how much safer they are (and nukes were already very safe) so they put ridiculous safeguards on installations. The nice thing about the new SMRs is their modular design facilitates scaling up production in a way traditional plants couldn't (one of the big reasons costs went out of sight for new traditional plants was that every nuke in the US was a custom design, a prototype if you will, and we all know how prototypes can take a while to get the bugs out). Another cost saver is to put these modular plants on existing retired coal power sites and using the existing grid infrastructure. Solar is great but when you add in the costs of battery backup, virtual plant regulators, and grid expansion for maintaining a consistent baseline energy supply SMRs start looking a lot better and less complicated.
This is interesting. I reckon that just the general high cost of construction these days is a major part of the problem. Unless it’s a highway, we can’t really build *any* infrastructure anymore, not just nuclear power plants. Some of that’s regulatory, but a lot of that seems to be uncompetitive markets for the builders, corrupt consultants and lawyers, and the Baumol effect.
Yes you're right, there's the general increase in labor costs and safety nets that successful civilizations have in addition to situations like California where they will only hire contractors paying 'prevailing wages' which are crazy high. A lot of bloat in the system which is unfortunately self-inflicted.
Also, I think that there’s probably a lot of truth to David R’s statement later in this section about how we’ve lost the industrial memory of how to build the supply chain for specialized infrastructure after the China shock
This slagging of the regulatory state for clear deficiencies in US management practices is tired.
Wrote this on another energy thread.
"Each project is approved on the assumptions at the time. And there is a cushion built in to absorb risks that arise. This is project management 101. Projects that don't hit their cost target are bad projects. Why the project did not work out at the budget is the question that a post mortem answer. So I would love to see what the post mortem on Vogtle. And here it is. via archive.org go look at https://liftoff.energy.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/20230320-Liftoff-Advanced-Nuclear-vPUB-0329-Update.pdf Read 29 to 31 for details on why Vogtle had cost overruns. Lawsuits and regulatory changes are not mentioned as a significant source. Its all crappy management - for example "Known test failure rates of components have ranged from 40–80% over different time periods". p30.
Every utility CEO and board is high on their own supply about their management chops. And they have none. Can't let the Koreans in cause that would be unmanly. They take positional power as a proxy for competence.
Oh come on. I need to know about Korean university practices to have an opinion on nuclear energy? This is like saying you need to know dust mitigation best practices if you think San Francisco to build more housing.
Meanwhile, I'm just a pro-nuclear guy that wants us to do all the industrial policy that's necessary to make it happen, whatever that necessity is. It's perhaps the top thing I'm most pilled on doing an industrial policy for.
I'd be curious to read a full post diving into this, if you had one handy to link. It's more important to me to advocate for true things than to advocate for nuclear, and I already know the libertarian position, so...if the facts are not as I believed, I'd like to change my mind. (If the perception-safety gap *does not* actually play a large role, I would find this surprising, since it's what I've heard for decades. Father would always go off on a rant at the grocery store about how we coulda had irradiated steaks with no expiration date, but nooo...)
I'm not an expert by any means on this, but I've learned a lot by watching some youtube videos of this nuclear expert/advocate named James Krellenstein.
There's a (many hour) 4 part series that goes into great detail on what went wrong with Vogtle starting here:
For a more brief taste of the type of analysis you get with him, here's a deep link into another video where he's talking about the US versus China experience building AP1000s and some similarities and differences and why the blame the NRC nuclear bro approach falls flat:
Yes ... its the anti-Nukes game to use regulation to make it infeasible and then say 'Look it's infeasible''
I am not personally across the board pro-Nuke but there is great dishonesty on the Greeny case (somewhat similar to their bait-and-switch tactics of using the pricing that we get in RE on utility and industrial scale using to push their touchy-feely community small scale that isn't at all the same economics).
Well I will absolutely grant that (a) one shouldn't go all monocausal and (b) the US has forgotten and tied itself up such that doing any damn infra or large scale industrial build project that's not a as you said a superhighway or a highway bridge has become an absolute struggle
however the total body of permit and process paralysis - as a collective impact is a major explainer of this. It's not just one set of regs in isolation, it's layer upon layer of cruft and process-paralysis.
1) The CCP is not concerned about stranded capital or efficiency. This is a big issue with coal power build outs in the 2010s and beyond.
2) The CCP’s capital controls lets firms/state borrow at negative real interest rates (this used to be true until they started facing deflationary pressure.) Basically, they squeezed workers/households by forcing them into low interest rate savings accounts while inflation was well above those rates.
Nuclear power needs state subsidization. It’s a defense policy. One reason a bunch of projects died after 3 Mile Island is that interest rates spiked and forced government austerity. The erosion of public support (along with lawsuits from Utah over the NTS) made it easy to shelve projects.
Because the CCP doesn’t care about stranded capital, efficiency, and uses capital controls to direct investments towards their initiatives at the expense of public welfare????
"One reason a bunch of projects died after 3 Mile Island is that interest rates spiked and forced government austerity."
I don't think this is accurate at all. The oldest operating reactor in the US now was built in 1969 and the vast majority of operating reactors were built between 1970 and 1990. If you look at a history of treasury rates, that's when rates were the highest!
Nor if you look at government spending did we have significant austerity as spending in real dollars has gone down very rarely and generally only after a spike due in spending from major event (e.g. great recession, covid, etc.) Though we did shift spending as a percentage of spending more and more toward government benefits and away from military and infrastructure building.
Three Mile Island was in 1979. Permitting slowdown follows that. Interest rates take a sharp hike and remain elevated above 1970s average throughout the 1980s. This all coincides with a broader slow down in investment in public infrastructure (like city metros, power transmission, highway construction.)
There was a real fiscal crunch, especially at the municipal and state level. This is one reason we have a large amount of deferred maintenance today.
Interest rates have been below the 1960 average for 20ish years and far below the 1970-1990 average. If that was the key point, why haven't we caught up on maintenance and restarted public investment?
“Nuclear power needs state subsidization. It’s a defense policy.”
Well, considering how many lives would be saved, seems like you could figure out exactly how much subsidy was worth based on Quality Adjusted Life Years. Or even where the state would make money on the subsidy based on the cost of QALY saved.
Politicians don’t make decisions based on QALY, nor do voters. Benefit Cost analysis is generally used to justify an action post hoc and support executive actions when it comes to litigation. It could change NRC rules and guidance but that still won’t change the politics of public financing (which has been mostly to make state subsidies to nuclear more opaque and invisible to public discourse.)
Thank you for communicating that you lack basic reading comprehension and are unable to identify the subject of the discussion.
Parroting an irrelevant point contributes nothing. Ignoring the substance of what is written contributes nothing. How does your lazy and empty “dunk” refute anything I wrote? It does not. It isn’t even an attempt.
The amount of capital isn’t fixed—you can just print more as long as you are producing goods and services to back it up (and the fact that China is in deflation suggests they have room to print more). The economic problem facing China and other developing countries is not misallocation of capital but the fact that they have much less capital to begin with. So their goal should be to figure out how to produce more things so they can have more capital—if they had the same amount of capital per capita as the US they would be in mega-abundance and all their economic problems would be gone.
> and the fact that China is in deflation suggests they have room to print more
I am going to just point out the reason they are facing deflation in China is due in part due to capital investment. Capital investment increases output but if there aren’t consumers for said output then price levels drop.
The ability to finance capital investment increases output Mainland China is through capital controls that reallocate income from workers away from consumption towards investment.
Applying Solow’s Growth Model and generalizing does not negate actual imbalances or actual distortions in an economy.
Even a cursory look at China’s deflation or the CCP’s statements on involution would show your generalization is misapplied.
"Yeah, you could build nuclear power in the 1960s and 1970s and somehow it was possible"
It was a combination of factors. There were a lot less rules back then, with the result being 3-mile Island and Chernobyl. The competition - essentially coal power - was more expensive than today's world, where it's of solar, wind, and natural gas.
As to how China is doing it, the answer is probably government subsidies. The reason for the subsidies being a bet that, if they are able to get the costs down, then nuclear will become another industry that China dominates around the world.
The high cost of nuclear is mostly an illusion coming from two factors. First is accounting. When we compare costs of electricity from different sources, we tend to only look at generation. That's not the biggest part of the picture. Renewables like solar and wind are estimated to require about$10T (per the Biden admin) in grid upgrades, because of the need for transmission and stability. That's trillion. With that kind of money, we could replace our entire US generating capacity with nuclear, which can mostly use the present grid. Even at the actual costs of Vogtle.
Second is scale. First of a kind anything is expensive. And the US has never gotten behind a standardized design, so everything has been first of a kind. This is where countries like France and China, with stronger industrial policies, are doing better. If we built a hundred of a kind, the price would be about half or less. The hope with SMRs is that if we build thousands of a kind it could drop even more. Do what SpaceX did to launch costs.
There was a debate in Energy Economics whether there were economies of scale for nuclear power (there is definitely for nuclear components but that is mostly proprietary knowledge, must construction costs are not reactor components.)
Basically the only country that looked like it had declining or flat costs per nuclear plant was South Korea. This however was an illusion due to a issue with a currency deflator for Korean Won.
In short, there is little evidence that building nuclear plants results in a learning by doing that results in lower costs per project. This makes sense since each project is kind of bespoke, takes a long time relative to other infrastructure project, and has unique challenges.
Also our comparison between solar and wind costs ignores the fact that you would still need to spend a considerable sum on transmission infrastructure under nuclear and dismisses timelines and capital lock up.
First, the countries that scale build for about 1/4 the cost of the US. Even if it's flat from there, you can't just discount that opportunity. And I only claimed 1/2, because the US sucks at building.
Second, nuclear would not need much transmission. You can put a plant close to demand. Some additional distribution is needed as homes and industries electrify. But that is relatively cheap.
And don't overlook the stability issues. Current renewables are backed by layers of gas turbine, batteries, and magnetic or inertial storage. This is crazy expensive, and for some reason does not get accounted as renewable costs.
"This is crazy expensive, and for some reason does not get accounted as renewable costs."
It does get accounted for. People have done the math and calculated that solar is still the cheapest form of electricity, even after adding batteries to make it a 24/7 energy source. Batteries are not nearly as expensive as they were 10 years ago.
It’s always annoying when people ignore the downsides of their preferred technology and then pretend the bottlenecks to renewables are insurmountable (all while said problems are being surmounted.)
The parameters to do this are truly breathtaking. Solar only generates about 1/3 of the time. This means that if I want 1 GW 24/7, I need 3 GW peak generation capacity, 1 GW for the grid and 2GW to charge my batteries. And I need 16GWhr of battery to get me through the night. And that doesn't help with rainy days.
Demand curves are not flat, so numbers are not exact. Don't quibble over precision, because nobody is coming even close to this on a utility scale. Abu Dhabi, and a few other places with gold-paved streets like the Google campus are trying. But it is not economical. Not even close.
Renewables are backed by all these things because they can't always meet peak demand. If you rely on nuclear to meet peak demand, given that it's not dispatchable, you'll be talking about an incredible amount of over-capacity buildup of nuclear. I shudder to think how much that would cost.
Oh, and btw, solar+wind+*battery storage* is definitely included in renewable costs.
The battery storage for electric projects is not sufficient for 24/7. They provide just enough storage to get some of the peak demand rates in the evening. They depend on a reliable generator carrying the baseload overnight, and when the weather is adverse. If they really could do 24/7/365, they would be crazy expensive.
And this is while offloading the costs of transmission and frequency regulation to the grid operator.
Don't confuse an economic optimum for the utility (and especially its financiers) with the optimal solution for the customer.
You are underestimating the projected growth in transmission demand (current grid infrastructure is bottlenecked, it’s one reason PJM and the Northeast have had price spikes). Then there is the fact that transmission infrastructure is just old and needs replacement regardless and that Biden admin number rolled those costs into that figure.
Also storage and intermittency are accounted for in renewable investment (grid scale). If you look at the Duck Curve in California, it’s driven in large part due to subsidies for household solar (which is not planned additions to the grid).
And to elaborate on my capital lock up. If you put 100 billion into nuclear plants it is going to be locked up for many more years than a competing solar, wind, or gas turbine project.
Then you also split costs up over more projects which lowers the risk of stranded capital from failed projects and unlock funds by canceling projects if you need to reallocate.
The only ‘quick’ nuclear projects involve recommissioning nuclear facilities (generally ones in the middle of decommissioning.) Also wage costs are one major driver in differentials in costs and that is why you should look at trends within countries rather than between.
I understand there is projected growth in transmission demand. This is due to assumptions (and current realities) about renewables. If you just build a handful of nukes in any market that needs it, your transmission demand evaporates.
Storage and intermittency aren't honestly accounted for. Projects assume 2 hours of storage at half the nameplate capacity. This does not get you through even a mild weather event. These scenarios assume there is plenty of baseload capacity, or else the customers get dropped. But the finance and accounting are driving out the baseload. And we will see more and more in places like CA and NE what happened in TX.
These analyses are performed by people who are selling money, not reliable electric service. They are fundamentally self-serving in that they will maximize the demand for money. Like Biden's $10T.
Yes, I understand that. My concern is that hiding the true costs of renewables (in fact, charging coal and nuclear customers for them) shifts the economic optimum mix farther from nuclear than it should be.
I don’t think this Stuart guy has an understanding of how electricity generation actually works, dispatch ordering, or how nuclear plants achieve low marginal costs per MWH.
There's also the fact that they require a big up-front investment whose feasibility depends on long-term energy costs staying high enough. That's not a regulatory problem, just an economics/technology/reality problem.
A third factor (and IMO the most significant) is the regulatory environment – ALARA effectively mandates that any cost savings have to be plowed back into safety requirements even if they don't achieve any meaningful real-world safety gains, and that keeps the price artificially high to no real advantage.
>>No matter how you deal with safety and fuel disposal issues, new nuclear power in too damn expensive.<<
Completely true, but also fixable if Congress wanted to. The two newest Vogtle (Georgia) units came in at around $17 billion per. But that excessive cost (basically about quadruple what South Korea pays) could be remedied. We know what works when it comes to bringing on new nuclear energy capacity in cost-effective fashion. We just refuse to do it.
I know politics is a very real impediment ("Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln?"). Still, atoms aren't 4x as expensive in Asia.
Realistically, NY did what it did because the denizens of Westchester just didn’t want to be next to a nuclear power plant. Whether that justifies such a boneheaded decision, well that’s of course a separate matter. But I think the environmentalists’ role was overrated.
The problem is, the reason why the risk of a nuclear meltdown is so low is precisely that the government has so many regulations to manage the risk. Of course, some of these rules are probably overkill and could be safely eliminated, but separating what's actually necessary to protect public safety from unnecessary red tape is not an easy task. It requires a bureaucracy of people who are not only experts in the nuclear industry, but are willing and able to balance cost and safety in a way that benefits the public in good faith.
Unfortunately, I don't have faith in government, at least not the U.S. government, anymore, to be able to do this. Regulators who will just rubber stamp anything to make their donors happy, figuring that the eventual nuclear meltdown will happen 30 years down the line, under somebody else's watch, is not acceptable. But, neither are regulators who are adamantly opposed to very idea of nuclear, and will either reject everything, or impose constraint after constraint, whose real purpose is not really to protect public safety, but to make the project unprofitable.
I don't see how this country can have a safe renaissance of nuclear power without first fixing the problem of government regulators doing their job in good faith - a problem that has gotten drastically worse under Trump, and will be very difficult to undo, now that the precedent is set.
I’m not a scientist and don’t have a strong view one way or the other but the anti-nuclear position doesn’t seem obviously crazy like it’s made out to be sometimes. Chernobyl and Fukushima was both extremely bad even if few people were killed—Wikipedia puts the costs of Chernobyl at $700 billion (IIRC post-Soviet Ukraine and Belarus were spending over 10% of their GDP on cleanup) and Fukushima displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
Chernobyl is an accident that occurs in a Soviet system, where literally multiple layers of bureaucratic Soviet madness that no sane non-Soviet (not even PRC, although NK maybe) could achieve in wrong design wrong executation, compeltely staggeringly wrong-headed test that provoked the actual accide,t and typical Soviet system reaction to the actual accident.
Chernobyl is not a warning about Nuclear any more than the destruction of the Aral sea is a warning about irrigation - both of them are warnings the Communism is terrible and the Soviet Union was an unmitigated catastrophe.
Many say we were saved by dumb luck that Three Mile Island didn't turn catastrophic. Had the hydrogen bubble that formed mixed with some oxygen and ignited . . . oh boy.
I always thought the lesson of Fukushima was that living in Japan is risky. The earthquake and tsunami did most of the damage, but people don't seem to care about those.
A lot of Chernobyl’s estimated bad effects ended up not occurring; I was just reading a study about how the predicted cancer rates, etc have been dramatically lower and studies of animals living near the site have been basically fine for generations at this point. So you may be anchoring more to what was expected to happen (even as of scientific consensus not too long ago) rather than what actually did. Also don’t exclude five mile island which basically had zero negative consequences.
Also you’re not taking into account the rarity of these events. Of course they sound big and scary. But almost every energy source we have is more dangerous. The fact that the environmental movement was down playing these solutions while mines around the world were pumping out dirty coal and killing who knows how many miners every year is just unconscionable.
The main problem at Chernobyl was design. We don't do anything remotely like that in the West. The NRC would answer the initial correspondence with "drop dead, you idiot."
Not even just the design, also the build and then the complete idiocy of the test that actually triggered the event where in any healthy (i.e. Not Soviet System) it would have been rescheduled but wasn't because the engineers were afraid of being off to Gulag...
Our light water fleet is designed to generate fissile materials to use for the navy and military. The Japanese have similar designs. There are safer options, but all civilian nuclear is a defense policy and keeps a reserve army of experts available in case you need a nuke.
This is why Iran’s civilian program is a military program. (And the U.S. under Clinton proposed but didn’t provide non-militarized civilian nuclear to North Korea in exchange for them ending their program.)
I think the problem with Fukushima is that 1. pretty much all land is Japan is seismically active and 2. Japan has pretty much no other domestic source of energy - you can see how much they've been impacted by the Strait of Hormuz closing and spiking LNG prices.
Love this! If this argument has a flaw, it might be the assumption that the green movement is actually interested in solving climate change. Based on their actions, climate “action” is for them more of a means to the end of degrowth environmentalism and a bunch of other kooky things too ridiculous to list.
Wanting well conserved green spaces is a perfectly coherent policy preference. Most conservationists aren’t misanthropes, they just have aesthetic preferences with misanthropic second order effects. Attributing scandalous motives to people whose main commitment is literary flora and fauna doesn’t seem that productive.
"aren’t misanthropes, they just have aesthetic preferences with misanthropic second order effects." I love this. I plan to generalize it to "They're not dumb, they just want things with dumb unintended consequences." Of course for eloquence we can't top MLK's, "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity,"
ISTM that the issue here is that we want some conserved green spaces, but we also want (and need) to build some stuff. If we want to address global warming without convincing voters to all don a hairshirt (which ain't gonna happen), we need to build stuff--wind farms, solar farms, HVDC lines, gas turbine plants, etc. The local "don't mess up the nearby green space" desire conflicts with the global "generate electricity in ways that don't mess up the climate over the next several decades" thing.
This problem is really easy. Maine exists. Western Massachusetts has plenty of forests other than the iconic ones in the Berkshires.
Enough trees are being clear cut in New England that building solar farms on recently logged land would work. Smallish suburban forests are precious. A few thousand people might get real pleasure from a few dozen acres.
If they genuinely don’t care about climate change, just green space and certain animals, that is fine, though of course green space in some places and some animals will be lost due to climate change. If that’s what the environmentalists stand for, they should admit to it and stop talking about climate change.
I get the sense that many environmentalists care far more about conservation than climate change, yes. Climate change was a vehicle to power in the United States that the unscrupulous wing of the environmental movement embraced until it had become the raison d’être for the bulk of environmental advocates. That said, if you made the trade off explicit as Matt does in this article, my sense is that a majority of environmentalists would trend towards conservation over climate.
I’m not sure where Maine popped up, but I would guess no? Take a look at the recent Twin Metals mine controversy near the BWCA in northern MN. I saw similar polling for people in Wisconsin saying they were opposed to the project as people in Minnesota.
Beat me to it. It's always going to be a game a whack a mole with many environmentalists, because their view of what's clean is much more than "does not emit greenhouse gases", and it will always going to lead to degrowth.
Nuclear will never be clean because of the waste, no matter how manageable.
Hydro will never be clean because of disruption to aquatic life.
Mass solar and wind will never be clean because of disruption to wildland, no matter how desolate.
Geothermal will get flack due to the disruption of mining. And indeed, all of the above will get flack due to the disruption of mining
But without all of that and without fossil fuels, you're left with only dramatic sipping of a small bit of energy they'll allow that generated in developed areas. And that also means dramatic degrowth, which would be miserable and most people wouldn't stand for it.
Don't forget. It also means telling the majority of the world: Hey I know we emitted tons of carbon and warmed the planet, but we're sorry and promise to stop and you guys also need to promise not to buy cars or get running water and electricity. Cause that's bad.
After the omnicause conglomeration of ideas, environmentalism became a vehicle to discuss and deploy anticapitalist rhetoric/policies/goals. Enviros are the calvinists of progressive orthodoxy, “we are destined to be punished by an angry superbeing, we are predestined and powerless to change our fate, and we must atone for our sins”.
Most people don’t realize this was a vicious intracoalitional battle in the ‘60s and ‘70s which resulted in early environmental leaders like Dave Foreman becoming minimized.
Many people also don’t realize that the Sierra Club took a committed pro-nuclear stance in the late ‘60s which tore the environmental movement apart and led to the creation of Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and several other modern juggernaut environmental groups.
In other words I don’t really think the SB commentariat understands a whit about the environmental movement, what they care about, what makes them tick, and which specific issues animate them or are considered less important.
Environmentalism has been a vehicle for anti-capitalism since at least the 1970s, and honestly you can see the roots of that as far back as William Blake.
Most of my social circle is made up of people who consider climate change their number one issue. They hold the mish-mash of conventional environmental views for the most part. This isn’t bad faith or anything, they’re just normal, non-wonky people. That probably is true for a large part of people with such views. Professional advocates are a different matter—it’s their job to be knowledgeable in their subject area and so are more deserving of criticism.
I, for one, welcome our new crunchy socialist stay-at-home moms married to Republican engineers and accountants and homeschooling their three free-range-raised kids....
My grandma loved nothing more than her precious grandkids. Every year I would call on her birthday and the conversation would go:
"Happy birthday grandma! I love you!"
"Thank you so much for the call! Are you doing well in school?"
"Yes, school's goin-"
"Ok bye!"
Eventually I asked my mom what the deal was - does grandma have something better going on whenever I called her? And she told me that I had to remember that grandma grew up very poor when phone calls, especially long-distance ones, were a luxury. And 50+ years later that was a hard mindset to break.
I was going to say phone calls are like meetings - you need a lot of communication first to decide if it’s worth it to set aside the time and schedule it. But then I realized that I average multiple meetings per weekday, but I don’t think I have more than one or two phone calls a week.
I have 11 phone calls since April 1, and more than half of them are with my partner arranging something like picking up a grocery item or two before coming home (or calling across the grocery store).
I definitely don’t coordinate before a phone call — I wonder if this is some side effect of millennial / Gen Z neuroticism that I don’t happen to have? If I want to call a friend, I just call them. If someone in my life wants to call me, same thing.
Yeah, that's one weird bit of the past--the idea that making a long-distance phone call was a really big deal you might do only for some important thing like a major holiday or an important transaction.
the ubiquity of WhatsApp in Europe is apparently primarily a result of unlimited texting not being a feature of phone plans there until quite recently.
When I was a freshman in college, my ex's parents would refuse to pay for sufficient minutes, then get mad at her when she wouldn't call them when she didn't have minutes.
Even more importantly, a now-dying-off generation of engineers who learned how electronics and engineering and such worked by f--king around with the phone syste.
Think about all the unused wire sitting around in people's houses, if regulators forced all the smartest people at phone companies to dedicate years into making it work we could create a Virtual People's Phone (VPP) and aggregate all those wires into a large enough pot that it would reduce the need for new underseas cables by 1%, resulting in 0.5% per minute reduction of long distance phone calls!
It's complete coincidence I work at the electric utility and that had no influence on my comment.
Just an anecdote. I was driving by the Baltimore harbor and they were storing segments of offshore wind turbine poles off of Keith Ave. It was kind of cool to see how large they are compared to onshore wind turbine pole (which can be split onto semi trailers.)
It’s kind of pathetic that one man’s aesthetic preferences are arbitrary rescinding funding and permitting for such projects.
There are more meaningful issues for desalination in terms of emissions of highly concentrated salt/brine. Not hugely important, but also worth considering when siting a plant.
Desalination creates a bunch of pollution. You wind up with toxic brine. If you dump it back into the ocean all that concentrated salt and other nasty stuff (concentrated heavy metals and pollutants) kills all the aquatic life.
You can dump it in Bakersfield because it’s already a dump.
But there is an energy cost to mixing the brine with water, or else it settles to the bottom as a toxic concentrate. Hey another problem cheap energy would fix!
Excessive salt concentration leading to localised toxicity and die-offs (killing e.g. lots of fishies, of which also commercially useful fishies).
One can however do dispersion. Cost basis is problematic but not incoherent according to some designs I have seen (I don't finance desal but can look at Renenergy on desal)
"Again, though, if electricity became radically cheap, then everything would be different. If we had the energy for vertical farming, we could easily quadruple national parkland..."
I don't follow the logic here. The only crops that are efficient in vertical farming are vegetables which only use a tiny bit of land in the US. Grains and feedstock will likely never be cost effective for vertical farming even with the high end abundance agenda. Also, freeing up farmland doesn't equate to new national parkland, I mean if you free up alfalfa growing lands in the Imperial or San Joaquin Valleys it will just revert to flat featureless desert. I as a plant nut could find this fascinating but I don't think they're going to be putting in RV sites and interpretive learning kiosks there, lol.
Not irrigating deserts if you don't have to is probably wise. We do it because it's easier to control, but it's not hard to imagine less wastage of fresh water via vertical farming.
Yeah growing alfalfa in California is one of those "stare at this and you stare into the soul of pure Lovecraftian insanity" things. Those lands should be flat featureless desert! We should be using them for sheep grazing and sending the water to cities!
I am very much in favor of making the Great American Desert a real thing again... also hive cities so big and energized that they can be seen from the moon.
I agree that the incentives are off, but they're not growing alfalfa to sell - they're growing alfalfa to feed cattle, which they sell as meat.
If groundwater is essentially free, or they have 19th-century water rights that let them pull as much water from the Colorado as they want, that's a viable business model.
I wonder sometimes if cities like Los Angeles can buy out farmers and take their share of the water. I'm not sure if that's a rights issue or the math doesn't pencil out.
I couldn't care less what they're doing with the alfalfa.
If groundwater is essentially free, or they have 19th-century water rights that let them pull as much water from the Colorado as they want, that's a sign that our common natural resources have been corruptly given away without commensurate benefit to the public good. They should be reclaimed forthwith.
I don't think they were corruptly given away. I think they (or their great great grandpappys) bought it when water was cheap and there were 50 million fewer people in there.
You could expropriate it, but it's probably easier (and maybe cheaper) to buy it.
Read Cadillac Desert so you're up to speed, then get back to me.
So much of America's wealth was just given away to people with friends in high places, it's mind-boggling. It's why I can never take anyone who claims that the US is a "free market" society seriously. There was never some point in the past when all property rights were neutrally agreed upon and then everyone got to operate under the same rules. It's turtles (and by turtles I mean guys with guns taking shit from poor people or the land itself and giving it to the rich) all the way down.
Loving the dig at corn subsidies... burning diesel and fertilizer to make ethanol that in turn makes my gasoline shittier is the absolute worst. Iowa should pay for its sins.
Laugh all you want at corn ethanol - it's no surprise we started the program during the energy shock of the 70s. Now that there's another energy shock, Asian countries are switching to biofuels (fun ones from coconuts and oil palms) as quickly as they can:
I'm not laughing; I'm griping. Much like growing corn to feed it to a cow is ridiculously inefficient (the cow exists to turn stuff I cannot eat into food) burning fuel/water/agrochemicals to make a crappy fuel additive that is only financially viable because of government handouts is even worse.
I know what you're getting at, and agree, but the pedant in me is compelled to note that much of the corn fed to cows is genuinely inedible to humans. I can only assume if we switched those fields to sweet corn production would decrease somewhat.
Look across the pond for how badly energy transition can go. Electricity in the UK is extortionate because of the cost of subsidising renewables (mainly wind, far away from population centres) as well as having backup gas generation. A new nuclear power plant is being held up because of the cost of adding in ridiculous wildlife protection features.
Only yesterday, the 'Net Zero' government minister Ed Miliband (and potential new PM) decided he wants to stop allowing new licenses for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea.
Environmentalists do not want people to be rich and happy. They instead:
- Want rationing as an end in itself.
- Want government supplied, artificial fertiliser free, oatmeal and beans for everyone, assuming the crops haven't failed.
- Want not only meat to be banned, but any wasteful rich tasty food to be banned. Who needs Ozempic if food is meagre and boring?
- Want dingy cubicles for all instead of wasteful large houses.
If they could have a world where there was abundant carbon free energy they would not want that, because that is not consistent with a precarious and impoverished lifestyle that they want everyone to live.
Your cost problem on RE is not in fact subsidising wind up in North Sea & land of Scots. Its from the non-building (due to indeed the Nimby enviros blocking) of necessary transmission grid upgrades for the power to get South.
That and a pricing regime off of NatGas as last-highest-cost that's incoherent.
Being rigidly ideological AND blocking building the infra that was and is needed to get the scrumptious wind power south is of course madly incoherent - so 2nd part I do agree.
This is so strange to me. I would have thought that the relatively low standard of living in the decades after WWII (and of course the war itself) would have been quite enough deprivation. The UK I knew while working as a policy analyst for the FCO in the Blair era didn’t seem to be on this track. But I didn’t think Brexit would pass, so obviously I didn’t know Britain as well as I thought I did.
The incompetence of the Tories after 2010 seemed to flick a switch in peoples brains, from one where growth for all was possible to one where zero sum thinking prevails. Labour have intensified the trend. Indeed, Labour have made one extraordinary achievement - making the previous Tory government look good.
You would think that deliberately cutting off a source of good jobs and economic growth with domestic oil and gas extraction, and instead importing the oil and gas would be obviously self defeating to everyone: but you would be wrong.
Labor is currently bleeding votes to the Green Party. Multi-party politics with first past the post voting may be the worst political design of all. Labor should impose proportional representation or an instant run off system before the next election.
Wind power in Scotland makes a lot more sense. But apparently there are a bunch of regulations around grid access that lead to high curtailment, and have thus undermined the economics of new Scottish wind farms. Plus eventually you would need some major new North-South transmission. A big undersea HVDC line from Edinburgh to London seems very sensible for that. but you very quickly get back to the intense NIMBYism (and related defeatism) of UK politics. Just look at HS2.
If you superimposed the CCP on the UK, this would be done by next year.
We are expanding solar capacity but in winter we get few hours of sunlight, even in the south. We are doing tons of (mostly offshore, in England) wind but it remains much more expensive than solar. One option we do some of but could do more (with transmission upgrades) is pumped hydro. In practice we are highly dependent on gas during winters and that has been painful due to high prices / supply constraints for obvious reasons.
The main problem with UK wind is that it's in the north and all the demand is in the south. Transmission is so constrained they're considering building new transmission lines underwater because building in such a built up country is so difficult.
Well no - because the UK has self-handicapped to make it difficult via extreme paralysis and NIMBYism, there's really not any actual good reason that high-capacity transmission can't be built, they've just self-handcuffed themselves into imobility.
I visited Scotland and saw a lot of windmills and a lot of them weren't spinning at all.
I asked and my host said it was because the supply was more than the demand at that point. It seems insane that you cannot *generate demand* whenever you want it. Tell the populace "hey, absolutely free electricity for the next 2 hours" and they couldn't find something to do with it??
My understanding is that the UK prices electricity such that the most expensive form of generation on the grid determines the price that all generation on the grid gets paid. So, no matter how much wind and solar you add, unless the wind and solar produces a full 100% of electricity needs, the public is still stuck paying the price as if the entire grid were generated with natural gas.
Of course, the windfall the system produces for wind/solar generators definitely leads to more wind/solar being built. But, the problem is that, if all the windfall goes to the energy companies, and none of it to lower bills for the public, you end up losing public support.
I believe there is supposed to be some form of bill working its way through parliament to try and fix this. I don't know how successful it will be.
You gotta love MY's observation that if we had imposed this week's energy-price regime via a carbon tax, it would have been politically DOA. But if you add in the supposed benefit of "N% chance of Iranian regime change or behavior change" then suddenly over half the ruling party supports it.
Right now efficiency and cost for enablement of RenErg installation is bounded by Transmission (long-distance) and Distribution (local/short distance) grid limitations (and the staggeringly outdated US overall grid infra that's literally 60s-70s era design and often base infra) and the fact for Fuck's sake US has a maddenly fragmented grid that's just incoherent for modern strategic purposes. Permitting reforms for expansion, federalisation of backing financing for modernisation and especially transmission upgrading to allow for continental level power wheeling.
So this is precisely spot on: "Clean energy abundance is identifying the barriers to deploying wind and solar and nuclear and geothermal power and breaking them down. It’s about parcel assembly in the Northeast. It’s about interregional transmission and interconnection. It’s about Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules. It’s about getting companies that want to build data centers to pay for innovative first-of-n projects so we can bring new ideas to scale. It’s about manufacturing synthetic hydrocarbons instead of scolding people about the carbon footprint of their cookout."
Generally in my world now, even with the Trumpian idiocies, the greatest hurdles are grid, permitting and inappropriate outdated regs on permitting.
And the cost of grid upgrades to enable renewables are several times the cost of the generation itself.
You wonder why you always hear about how cheap solar and wind are getting, but your electric bill still gets higher every year? Grid. We're playing shell games with costs.
Grid upgrades are needed now for response to consumption increase being driven by
A. Data
B. industrial systems electrification
C. Wider electrification
The pricing increases are not driven by solar or wind, they are demand over generation and congestion.
Supply, demand.
Grid upgrading is generation agnostic now and fundamentall necessary to enable the market demand without having massive price spiking, it is not 1990 nor 2000 any more and outdated understandings on this are part of the problem.
Of course part of the problem is equally the fragmented incoherent nature of the US overall grid system which is extremely inefficient in getting these projects to execution and as well doing at the regional so that the costs on the long-term infra are correctly distributed. It is Policy level incoherence.
Dispatchable power approximately co-located with demand is infinitely easier to build a grid for. Inter-regional transmission backed with battery and magnetic or inertial storage is insanely expensive. And those are only needed by renewables.
A data center cluster could be served by 5-10 (n+1 or 2) SMRs located on site behind the meter. Zero grid cost. Try that with solar.
You're not totally wrong about distribution. The last few miles would need some work if everyone had electric cars. But that's relatively cheap. And it's not where the expenses showing up in your electric bill are currently going. They're going to tie in wind farms and to stabilize the grid when the wind stops.
Edit: People don't realize it, but when a utility builds a GW of solar, they also have to install a GW of gas turbine. Because what else are they going to do when the wind stops blowing? They advertise the per kWhr cost of the solar capacity, but they never include the gas turbine. In terms of fixed cost of generation, renewable is in addition, not instead of. Funny, eh?
Cool stories. Based on systems that provide 2 hours of storage for half the nameplate. A lot of people are going to lose whatever is in their freezers. But the finance guys making the Powerpoints will get paid, as always.
"Edit: People don't realize it, but when a utility builds a GW of solar, they also have to install a GW of gas turbine. Because what else are they going to do when the wind stops blowing?"
That may have been true 20 years ago, but I don't think that's true anymore. First off, you have battery storage. Second, electricity demand is not constant, it rises and falls on a 24-hour cycle. The peak demand only happens for a few hours in the evening, not 24/7, and can be covered quite well, most days, simply by using a batteries to save excess solar produced during the day for use in the evening.
Where the gas turbines come in is when you have several days in a row which are cloudy, and it's not cost-effective to build enough battery storage to make up to several days in a row of reduced solar output. But, even then, you don't need as much gas capacity as you think. If the solar panels are geographically distributed, if it's not sunny in one place, it will probably be sunny somewhere else. And, solar panels can be complemented with wind. Again, if it's not windy some place, it will probably be windy somewhere else. On top of that, the highest levels of electricity demand usually happen on exceptionally hot days (due to air conditioners), but those days are usually sunny, not cloudy, because clouds make the temperature cooler. And then, of course, there's a lot of opportunity to reduce demand during energy crunch by getting cryptominers and other industrial facilities to suspend operations for a few hours. At the moment, while some gas capacity is still needed to make a grid that is 99.99% reliable, it doesn't need to be anywhere near 1:1 with solar.
It is a common misconception that renewable energy projects are backed by battery storage in any meaningful way. They are not. Typically even the best of them have storage for only half their capacity, for only a couple of hours.
This can help marginally with the economics of the other problem: peak electrical demand occurs hours after peak sunlight. Electrical demand is still in its peak well into the evening after the sun sets.
But none of this storage handles bad weather, such as cloudy or still days. If you're depending upon wind from another region, then you're dealing with very long transmission lines and high losses.
All these economics depend on reliable generation for approximately half the total supply. Renewables get very expensive if you try to make them cover more than about half. Many markets are already approaching this.
I'm not saying there's no role for renewables. I'm saying that the economic books are cooked to favor them for political reasons. And to the extent this kills off stable generation, it is making electricity more expensive and less reliable.
Historically, solar projects were built with insufficient battery storage, as, until recently, batteries were too expensive to use for more than a couple hours of storage. But, as the technology gets better and cheaper, that's changing fast, and as a result, the threshold of what percentage of grid power needs to be renewable before costs start going up, rather than down, keeps moving higher each year. Back around 2010, it was something like 10-20%. Then, it was 50%. I've read some reports that, in sunny areas, it may, today, be be closer to 80-90%.
The problem arises when people take what was the limitations of batteries 10-20 years ago and treat it as a fundamental law of physics, while ignoring the underlying march of technology.
And long-distance transmission don't have to have super-high losses. The key to avoid that is is to ramp up the voltage and use DC power, rather than AC power. China is already doing this in an effort to power Beijing and Shanghai with vast solar arrays out in the Gobi desert. If it works there, it can work here too, the key is to get the costs down.
Well, you have to pay for the capital costs of wind/solar too, even if it's cheaper than the alternative, which will make your bill go up if you say stuck with an old gas or coal plant instead and didn't build anything yet. It's not really the grid.
The policy agenda here is sound — parcel assembly, transmission, NRC reform are all real levers. But "too cheap to meter" is doing rhetorical damage to your own case. Electricity at 2¢/kWh is genuinely transformative and probably achievable in 30 years; it's also still very much worth metering, because aluminum smelters and data center operators will pay different prices than households, and the metering infrastructure has near-zero marginal cost. Strauss's slogan was always sales copy, not economics. The abundance case is stronger when it names actual thresholds — cheap enough for synthetic fuels, cheap enough for vertical farming — than when it gestures at a price point that never made physical sense
I agree with a lot of this, but as I've commented here before, sadly we still haven't been able to get Matt VPP pilled. Let me try again...
The key flaw in Matt's thinking is that electricity generation only accounts for around 40% of the cost people pay for electricity. The rest is for infrastructure like transmission lines and the distribution grid. The key here, is that this infrastructure is a huge and unavoidable cost driver for electricity and even too cheap to meter nuclear power doesn't reduce it. Free nuclear still gets you an electric bill that's 60% of what you pay today.
This is where VPPs, demand response, batteries, and other technologies that don't make any power at all can help a ton with lowering costs and producing abundance. On average, transmission assets are only utilized 50% of the time. VPPs smooth out demand and if done right, can increase that avg utilization substantially. It's as close to a free lunch as it gets. Distribution grid infrastructure is only utilized at around 30% on average, so the opportunity for cost reduction there from VPPs is even higher.
On top of the cost savings, there's also the permitting problem and land use issue. Sure, we need permitting reform, but even after it's done, building stuff will still be hard and expensive and if there's a way to avoid or delay the need for some buildout - with almost NO tradeoff - why wouldn't we want that in the mix?
I was disappointed to see that hobbyhorse led to the trough again, since in this case it seemed like a willful misunderstanding based on (to be fair) sloppy partisan messaging, not an objection to the actual technology itself. You could take the exact same thing, frame it as a "yes, and all of the above" lever to get to Too Cheap To Meter faster: any electricity not pointlessly wasted is electricity that someone actually in demand can use productively elsewhere. It's like saying we shouldn't care about leaky pipes during the quest for Water Abundance, or leaky buckets in the quest for Redistribution Abundance, even though those are both huge loss centres and we could do a lot more of both abundii by efficiency-maxxing. Also, of course, moving bits is a lot cheaper than moving atoms, both in terms of capital and GHG emissions...wholesale abandonment of VPP would let you build one fraction of an actual powerplant, maybe? I know political capital isn't quite as fungible, and defer to Matt's expertise there, but...it's not like degrowth-by-default enviros are gonna disappear in a puff of logic by someone pointing out they're not "really" pro-abundance. Tilting at rhetorical windmills isn't the same as building actual windmills.
At some level I don’t understand the traditional green movement even though I feel like I share their basic goals and am much more of a Lorax style environmentalist instead of a climate hawk.
But their movement seems weird ass hell and committed to a vision from the 1970s.
This is probably true for contemporary green parties, but real socialists at least had their own view for abundance, whether or not it was as workable.
>The idea of a virtual power plant is to use software and connected devices to manage demand timing so that you can get by with less overall generation.
I agree with the overall argument of this piece, but in a healthy and sane grid that *isn't* trying to do crazy things like stop growth of energy use, a VPP doesn't reduce how much you need to generate. Especially not in a high-renewables grid, or in a region that's farther along on electrifying energy use, or even in a high-nuclear grid where load following is limited. It reduces how much you need to *store* or how much you need to *overbuild capacity and waste,* It replaces (some of the) batteries and grid upgrades that you'd need, not PV and wind turbines. It lets you run every power plant at its maximum operating efficiency and ensure the energy gets used productively.
You're right that it *can* be used that way, and that it sometimes is. But I think that's largely an artifact of the crude and outdated ways we manage our grids and buy and sell energy and ancillary services. Although I'm surprised you included DER in your comment - that's still generation, just by someone that isn't the utility.
At a fundamental level, you can only get people to use less energy by raising its price or paying them more than the value they get from it. That incentivizes efficiency, true.
But once you get beyond a very modest scale with very occasional use, what a VPP is really good for is time-shifting demand, not eliminating it.
If my factory runs at 80% capacity, I may not really care if once in a while I accept a DR payment instead of running some piece of equipment. But I'm much more willing, more often, to run at night instead of daytime, or vice versa. I'm more willing to invest in thermal energy storage and phase change materials so I can heat and cool things not at the exact moment I draw electricity, then I am to not heat and cool things at all. At a residential level, I'm happy to change the exact shape of the time curve for when I charge an EV or wash and dry my dishes and clothes or run my water heater, as long as there's hot water when I shower and clean clothes and dishes when I get dressed and eat.
Those things are much larger in aggregate potential and don't really reduce total consumption. But they let you run every generating asset in its most efficient way (steady output at peak efficiency for gas and nuclear, whatever-we-can-get for wind and solar, traditional hydro is still dispatchable, etc.). They minimize the amount of dispatchable power needed: load following, spinning reserves, peaker plants, BESS.
If you look at the places in the world that have encountered harder energy transition problems first, you can see the beginnings of this. South Australia is one example. Hawaii is another. Smaller, more isolated grids with higher RE and DER penetration. These are not places trying to limit energy use growth. Hawaii wants to build enough RE to replace its reliance on oil by 2045. South Australia explicitly wants to build enough solar to meet 5x its current electricity demand. Without VPPs that's a whole lot harder to do.
Why are you surprised I included DERs when a DER aggregation is a VPP? That’s why I don’t get the premise of your original comment because it can be an aggregation of behind the meter generation. By giving them a pathway to wholesale market revenue, they incentivize their development. Do you think, like Matt does, that a VPP is only demand response?
Not quite. I admit I was running with the framing of Matt's post when I posted my first comment, but on reflection I think it's unclear what "you" Matt was referring to in, "so that you can get by with less overall generation."
From the POV of a typical utility, yes, that's what a VPP does. From the POV of a community, no, it isn't. For a community, it lets you more freely build DER, and incorporate it into the grid, and get more benefit out of it. It changes the required balance of DER vs DR vs BESS you need as you increase both DER and grid-scale non-dispatchable power. It enables greater electrification of energy usage without breaking critical infrastructure.
In other words: viewing DER as part of a VPP is a useful abstraction for a utility trying to manage an increasingly complex grid using the legacy infrastructure and conceptual framework as they do for an old-fashioned one-way grid. The abstraction works great when there's only a little DER going on.
But if you get to the point that you're shutting down part of the (almost free to use!) VPP's generating capacity (while there are still dispatchable power sources supplying power) more than extremely rarely, or if you're preventing people from building DER (especially when that DER is less than their own average consumption) in the first place? Then you're using the wrong tool to solve the wrong problem. Probably because you're either too hidebound to adapt to changing conditions, or too constrained by regulation to do so. Which most utilities are. At that point, you should be using real-time pricing to encourage increased electricity use at times of peak production, including charging BESS and EVs, or paying people to do so in exchange for a promise to let you buy back later. You should be using more complex contracting mechanisms to let every entity on the grid sell ancillary services. You should be investing in the equipment needed to enable more DER-produced electricity to move freely between parts of the distribution grid, and the sensors and software to even have a clue what's going on with such production and consumption.
While A VPP is not really a substitute for growth in generation over the long term, VPP does buy time by allowing more to be wrought out of existing infrastructure, for the many years it takes to get new electricity generation online. That, in itself, is still worth a lot.
Very true. Unfortunately in practice there are so many weird and arcane rules about building generating capacity that I fear in many places VPPs will just be used to delay (or deny approval for) expanding capacity even when it's (in any practical sense) obvious it will be needed by the time it would come online.
I get where you're coming from and agree wholeheartedly with the premise, but two points: (a) organizations like Rewiring America are dealing with both the current infrastructure and political reality. There's lots of opposition to adding new solar and wind farms, and finding ways to help consumers save energy in that framework makes a huge amount of sense. And (b) I know induced demand gets dirty looks around these parts, but that's exactly what you'd get with energy too cheap to meter. The benefits would be large enough that we should strive for that world, but the consequence would be no reason to conserve, which would add demand until we put strain on the grid again. I'd like to see how that modeled.
Re: (b) if there’s one fundamental critique I would level at Matt’s writing it’s that he never solves for the equilibrium. Why stop at 10,000 acres? Given what he’s juxtaposing it with, ‘limitless’ means limitless, right?
My issue with "induced demand" is that the implication a lot of people mean it with is that creating more supply will create demand that didn't previously exist. But that demand was always there, just at a price ("price" used not just in a money sense) that people weren't willing to pay.
People already want to keep their homes at a crisp 68 degrees in summer, the cost of doing so is currently just too high. People already want to make trips on the highway, but the traffic cost is too high (so increasing the supply of lanes makes the cost to people lower). People already want to move to desirable neighborhoods, but they just haven't bothered inquiring about housing there because it's too expensive. "Induced Demand" is just an increase in the quantity consumed exactly according to supply and demand, just with a demand curve that's more difficult to measure.
This is all well and good but it's important to note this is all taking place in a world where MAGA basically despises clean energy for bizarre cultural war reasons. See Trump trying to create a national ban on new wind projects via the Pentagon https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/climate/wind-power-delays-trump-pentagon.html or the push to ban new utility grade solar projects at the local/county level in lots of parts of the country. Even if Matt can convince the Sierra Club to change their ways, you're not going to get to a new energy policy paradigm without figuring out how to get conservatives to stop being so utterly nuts about this stuff.
The goal with conservatives is to message to them effectively. Don't sell green energy that's a non-starter, sell nuclear as national defense (you don't have to sell nuclear hard to cons honestly), and sell them coal but sell them on supercritical coal turbines and tell them it's so coal and white blue collar people have a future. We get less pollution and more energy, they get their warm ignorant fuzzies
I’ve come to the conclusion that environmentalists and their allies will never come around on nuclear, because, like the old saying goes, they didn’t arrive at their opposition based on reasoning or facts. A glance at the death rates attributable to various forms of energy per kilowatt hour generated should have made nuclear a slam dunk proposition years or decades ago. The fact the Western world, directed by environmental concerns, decommissioned nuclear plants in the 2010s-2020s shows environmentalists aren’t serious people. Germany doing what they did, NY state doing what it did, should be scandals.
People put a lot of weight on novel risks and little weight on mundane risks we have become habituated to.
This is why people started getting scared of the potential adverse heart risks associated with Covid vaccines and disregarded the greater cardiovascular risks associated with an acute Covid infection.
I agree with this. The idea of a nuclear meltdown is pretty baked into the public consciousness.
We had a real meltdown at Three Mile Island. Nobody was hurt. The utility lost their investment. That was it.
The idea baked into public consciousness is wrong. They think China Syndrome which is pure fiction, or Chernobyl. And not even the real version, which is bad enough, but the fictionalized version. A Chernobyl type event is not how a Western reactor fails. Although if the Democrat Socialists of America take power, they could I suppose bring some of that sweet Soviet goodness our way.
3.6 Roentgen... not great, not terrible.
It was all Dyatlov’s fault anyway, right? Nothing to see here
The crazy thing is, Ukraine of all places still gets a lot of its power from nuclear.
Partial meltdown, the core was partially melted
I'm not going to get rich writing a novel in which the world ends because of smog.
This doesn’t sound true. Covid vaccines and acute Covid were both novel. People worry regularly about ordinary things like job loss, and seem to heavily weight the chance of car accidents when buying cars and making safety decisions for kids. Conversely, nobody is much interested in asteroid hits or engineered pandemics.
I don’t know what makes one thing more worrisome than another in public consciousness, but I don’t think it’s mostly novelty.
I think there's some kind of trolley problem situation in which people are more OK with risk of inaction than the risk of action.
“and seem to heavily weight the chance of car accidents when buying cars and making safety decisions for kids. “
I think lots of people think it’s safer to drive than fly when the drive to the airport is more dangerous than the flight.
Covid vaccine (approved for widespread use) came along about 9-10 months after Covid, so it was certainly more novel in a sense, although the real problem was vaccine hesitancy, and vaccines are not novel at all.
I think many of the Skynet adjacent AI takes fall into this novel risk formula. It seems much more likely that the same people who already use currently available technology to do bad stuff will use AI technology to do bad stuff than the neural networks will decide to take over the world. But it's more strange and scary to talk about the latter.
My fears of AI are they are information destroying. Basically LLMs provide easy queries to information that has been either provided freely or scraped without credit or attribution.
This removes the incentives for people to answer questions on say Stack Overflow and Reddit (people stop asking questions and participating in discussions.)
Then you have AI firms wanting to replaced specialized knowledge with their LLM systems. This strongly incentivizes people to withhold information, not share knowledge digitally, and keep things close.
Good for them, though
I swear it’s an ouroboros that will wind up collapsing in on itself.
Sooner rather than later, I hope.
But maybe that’s just a failure of your imagination; “novel things won’t happen” is an unreliable heuristic these days too. (See: existence of talking computers; Trump’s election)
“Neural networks decide to take over the world” is a bit unnecessary here - all you need is a sorcerer’s apprentice/monkey’s paw situation where the machine that does whatever you want it to do does the thing you want it to do before you have a chance to say “no, not like that!”
Matt wrote a wonderful column. He's right about the current and (especially) past leadership of the Sierra Club etc., but let's take Matt's advice on coalition building in general and welcome the significant abundance-friendly subset of environmentalists. Within the Club (where I briefly held a local leadership position in order to make it less NIMBY), there are people working for energy abundance. They just don't hold the overall reins. Our goal should be to encourage people who identify as environmentalists to embrace energy abundance, not to beat them up for associating with degrowth.
I joined the Sierra Club in the mid-nineties because, why not? I love me some wilderness.
But once you're on the inside, the message turns really hardcore communist and anti-natal. At least it did then. I never renewed.
A non-insane environmental movement would be most welcome.
You did join one of the most explicitly ideological environmental groups. I agree that the Sierra Club should be significantly less ur-left than it is now.
I consider myself an environmentalist, or at least sympathetic to them, and I’m in favor of nuclear!
The big argument in favor of nuclear power is that it can give you lots of electric power that is consistent and emits no CO2. Compare with solar/wind (no CO2, but intermittent) or coal/gas (consistent but CO2 emitting).
Nuclear is great as a base load but terrible for dispatchable electricity.
Meaning, we need advances in lots of different things (generation, storage, transmission, efficiency actions) to build the future electricity system.
I know you can't have just intermittent sources in your power grid, but is there a reason you can't have just base load kinds of sources like nuclear and coal? I mean, "we are producing more power than we need right now" seems like an easier problem to deal with than "we are not producing the power we need right now," but this isn't something I've studied, so maybe I'm confused.
That's why we need lots of things. Nuclear is great -- is most economically efficient -- as part of the base load. I'd love to see it replace more of the fossil fuel-generated electricity as part of that base load. And as we electrify more, we'll need a bigger base load, so yay more nuclear (if we can get its total costs down).
No coal, though. But that debate has been ended and rendered kaput. It's leaving the building.
There is no reason in the law of physics of which I am aware, but demand is sufficiently variable that if you had literally no ability to smooth it or to modulate you would have to vastly, vastly overbuild.
Which is why it should be part of a mix of green energies like wind and solar. No intelligent and knowledgeable person disagrees with you but base load as was the case in Germany turns out to be very important for reducing duck curves
Some amount of batteries seem like it would be able to smooth this just fine. I don’t know how big an amount of batteries would be needed.
No matter how you deal with safety and fuel disposal issues, new nuclear power in too damn expensive. None of the projects, both proposed and being built now have shown that they can be economically competitive, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/business/energy-environment/kairos-small-modular-nuclear-power.html?unlocked_article_code=1.iVA.DPw0.PIUsxAcwUceF&smid=url-share.
Yeah, you could build nuclear power in the 1960s and 1970s and somehow it was possible, but now no longer. The Chinese are building out nuclear, I wonder what magic they’re using to make it economical.
I suspect the long arm of the regulatory state.
And if it is really not economical, you’d think the Western world should have been treating the nuclear plants as remnants of a more advanced civilization, rather than decommissioning them.
That's pretty much it, so much regulation to get these new plants going. Folks don't realize how much safer they are (and nukes were already very safe) so they put ridiculous safeguards on installations. The nice thing about the new SMRs is their modular design facilitates scaling up production in a way traditional plants couldn't (one of the big reasons costs went out of sight for new traditional plants was that every nuke in the US was a custom design, a prototype if you will, and we all know how prototypes can take a while to get the bugs out). Another cost saver is to put these modular plants on existing retired coal power sites and using the existing grid infrastructure. Solar is great but when you add in the costs of battery backup, virtual plant regulators, and grid expansion for maintaining a consistent baseline energy supply SMRs start looking a lot better and less complicated.
This is interesting. I reckon that just the general high cost of construction these days is a major part of the problem. Unless it’s a highway, we can’t really build *any* infrastructure anymore, not just nuclear power plants. Some of that’s regulatory, but a lot of that seems to be uncompetitive markets for the builders, corrupt consultants and lawyers, and the Baumol effect.
Yes you're right, there's the general increase in labor costs and safety nets that successful civilizations have in addition to situations like California where they will only hire contractors paying 'prevailing wages' which are crazy high. A lot of bloat in the system which is unfortunately self-inflicted.
Also, I think that there’s probably a lot of truth to David R’s statement later in this section about how we’ve lost the industrial memory of how to build the supply chain for specialized infrastructure after the China shock
We can’t really build highways either, just expand current rights of way.
This slagging of the regulatory state for clear deficiencies in US management practices is tired.
Wrote this on another energy thread.
"Each project is approved on the assumptions at the time. And there is a cushion built in to absorb risks that arise. This is project management 101. Projects that don't hit their cost target are bad projects. Why the project did not work out at the budget is the question that a post mortem answer. So I would love to see what the post mortem on Vogtle. And here it is. via archive.org go look at https://liftoff.energy.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/20230320-Liftoff-Advanced-Nuclear-vPUB-0329-Update.pdf Read 29 to 31 for details on why Vogtle had cost overruns. Lawsuits and regulatory changes are not mentioned as a significant source. Its all crappy management - for example "Known test failure rates of components have ranged from 40–80% over different time periods". p30.
So can we let the Koreans build nuclear plants in the US? I'm fine with that.
Every utility CEO and board is high on their own supply about their management chops. And they have none. Can't let the Koreans in cause that would be unmanly. They take positional power as a proxy for competence.
Oh come on. I need to know about Korean university practices to have an opinion on nuclear energy? This is like saying you need to know dust mitigation best practices if you think San Francisco to build more housing.
Meanwhile, I'm just a pro-nuclear guy that wants us to do all the industrial policy that's necessary to make it happen, whatever that necessity is. It's perhaps the top thing I'm most pilled on doing an industrial policy for.
I'd be curious to read a full post diving into this, if you had one handy to link. It's more important to me to advocate for true things than to advocate for nuclear, and I already know the libertarian position, so...if the facts are not as I believed, I'd like to change my mind. (If the perception-safety gap *does not* actually play a large role, I would find this surprising, since it's what I've heard for decades. Father would always go off on a rant at the grocery store about how we coulda had irradiated steaks with no expiration date, but nooo...)
I'm not an expert by any means on this, but I've learned a lot by watching some youtube videos of this nuclear expert/advocate named James Krellenstein.
There's a (many hour) 4 part series that goes into great detail on what went wrong with Vogtle starting here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGySq7QBRiY
For a more brief taste of the type of analysis you get with him, here's a deep link into another video where he's talking about the US versus China experience building AP1000s and some similarities and differences and why the blame the NRC nuclear bro approach falls flat:
https://youtu.be/bGySq7QBRiY?t=1168
Yes ... its the anti-Nukes game to use regulation to make it infeasible and then say 'Look it's infeasible''
I am not personally across the board pro-Nuke but there is great dishonesty on the Greeny case (somewhat similar to their bait-and-switch tactics of using the pricing that we get in RE on utility and industrial scale using to push their touchy-feely community small scale that isn't at all the same economics).
Well I will absolutely grant that (a) one shouldn't go all monocausal and (b) the US has forgotten and tied itself up such that doing any damn infra or large scale industrial build project that's not a as you said a superhighway or a highway bridge has become an absolute struggle
however the total body of permit and process paralysis - as a collective impact is a major explainer of this. It's not just one set of regs in isolation, it's layer upon layer of cruft and process-paralysis.
Two reasons.
1) The CCP is not concerned about stranded capital or efficiency. This is a big issue with coal power build outs in the 2010s and beyond.
2) The CCP’s capital controls lets firms/state borrow at negative real interest rates (this used to be true until they started facing deflationary pressure.) Basically, they squeezed workers/households by forcing them into low interest rate savings accounts while inflation was well above those rates.
Nuclear power needs state subsidization. It’s a defense policy. One reason a bunch of projects died after 3 Mile Island is that interest rates spiked and forced government austerity. The erosion of public support (along with lawsuits from Utah over the NTS) made it easy to shelve projects.
And this is why nuclear plants might be on the top of my list for what I want my tax dollars to go to.
Because the CCP doesn’t care about stranded capital, efficiency, and uses capital controls to direct investments towards their initiatives at the expense of public welfare????
"One reason a bunch of projects died after 3 Mile Island is that interest rates spiked and forced government austerity."
I don't think this is accurate at all. The oldest operating reactor in the US now was built in 1969 and the vast majority of operating reactors were built between 1970 and 1990. If you look at a history of treasury rates, that's when rates were the highest!
Nor if you look at government spending did we have significant austerity as spending in real dollars has gone down very rarely and generally only after a spike due in spending from major event (e.g. great recession, covid, etc.) Though we did shift spending as a percentage of spending more and more toward government benefits and away from military and infrastructure building.
Three Mile Island was in 1979. Permitting slowdown follows that. Interest rates take a sharp hike and remain elevated above 1970s average throughout the 1980s. This all coincides with a broader slow down in investment in public infrastructure (like city metros, power transmission, highway construction.)
There was a real fiscal crunch, especially at the municipal and state level. This is one reason we have a large amount of deferred maintenance today.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS10#
Interest rates have been below the 1960 average for 20ish years and far below the 1970-1990 average. If that was the key point, why haven't we caught up on maintenance and restarted public investment?
“Nuclear power needs state subsidization. It’s a defense policy.”
Well, considering how many lives would be saved, seems like you could figure out exactly how much subsidy was worth based on Quality Adjusted Life Years. Or even where the state would make money on the subsidy based on the cost of QALY saved.
Politicians don’t make decisions based on QALY, nor do voters. Benefit Cost analysis is generally used to justify an action post hoc and support executive actions when it comes to litigation. It could change NRC rules and guidance but that still won’t change the politics of public financing (which has been mostly to make state subsidies to nuclear more opaque and invisible to public discourse.)
>The CCP is not concerned about stranded capital or efficiency. This is a big issue with coal power build outs in the 2010s and beyond.<
Yeah, but the CCP doesn't run the Republic of Korea.
Thank you for communicating that you lack basic reading comprehension and are unable to identify the subject of the discussion.
Parroting an irrelevant point contributes nothing. Ignoring the substance of what is written contributes nothing. How does your lazy and empty “dunk” refute anything I wrote? It does not. It isn’t even an attempt.
Thank you for communicating that you have a major caffeine issue.
The amount of capital isn’t fixed—you can just print more as long as you are producing goods and services to back it up (and the fact that China is in deflation suggests they have room to print more). The economic problem facing China and other developing countries is not misallocation of capital but the fact that they have much less capital to begin with. So their goal should be to figure out how to produce more things so they can have more capital—if they had the same amount of capital per capita as the US they would be in mega-abundance and all their economic problems would be gone.
> and the fact that China is in deflation suggests they have room to print more
I am going to just point out the reason they are facing deflation in China is due in part due to capital investment. Capital investment increases output but if there aren’t consumers for said output then price levels drop.
The ability to finance capital investment increases output Mainland China is through capital controls that reallocate income from workers away from consumption towards investment.
Applying Solow’s Growth Model and generalizing does not negate actual imbalances or actual distortions in an economy.
Even a cursory look at China’s deflation or the CCP’s statements on involution would show your generalization is misapplied.
"Yeah, you could build nuclear power in the 1960s and 1970s and somehow it was possible"
It was a combination of factors. There were a lot less rules back then, with the result being 3-mile Island and Chernobyl. The competition - essentially coal power - was more expensive than today's world, where it's of solar, wind, and natural gas.
As to how China is doing it, the answer is probably government subsidies. The reason for the subsidies being a bet that, if they are able to get the costs down, then nuclear will become another industry that China dominates around the world.
The high cost of nuclear is mostly an illusion coming from two factors. First is accounting. When we compare costs of electricity from different sources, we tend to only look at generation. That's not the biggest part of the picture. Renewables like solar and wind are estimated to require about$10T (per the Biden admin) in grid upgrades, because of the need for transmission and stability. That's trillion. With that kind of money, we could replace our entire US generating capacity with nuclear, which can mostly use the present grid. Even at the actual costs of Vogtle.
Second is scale. First of a kind anything is expensive. And the US has never gotten behind a standardized design, so everything has been first of a kind. This is where countries like France and China, with stronger industrial policies, are doing better. If we built a hundred of a kind, the price would be about half or less. The hope with SMRs is that if we build thousands of a kind it could drop even more. Do what SpaceX did to launch costs.
There was a debate in Energy Economics whether there were economies of scale for nuclear power (there is definitely for nuclear components but that is mostly proprietary knowledge, must construction costs are not reactor components.)
Basically the only country that looked like it had declining or flat costs per nuclear plant was South Korea. This however was an illusion due to a issue with a currency deflator for Korean Won.
In short, there is little evidence that building nuclear plants results in a learning by doing that results in lower costs per project. This makes sense since each project is kind of bespoke, takes a long time relative to other infrastructure project, and has unique challenges.
Also our comparison between solar and wind costs ignores the fact that you would still need to spend a considerable sum on transmission infrastructure under nuclear and dismisses timelines and capital lock up.
First, the countries that scale build for about 1/4 the cost of the US. Even if it's flat from there, you can't just discount that opportunity. And I only claimed 1/2, because the US sucks at building.
Second, nuclear would not need much transmission. You can put a plant close to demand. Some additional distribution is needed as homes and industries electrify. But that is relatively cheap.
And don't overlook the stability issues. Current renewables are backed by layers of gas turbine, batteries, and magnetic or inertial storage. This is crazy expensive, and for some reason does not get accounted as renewable costs.
"This is crazy expensive, and for some reason does not get accounted as renewable costs."
It does get accounted for. People have done the math and calculated that solar is still the cheapest form of electricity, even after adding batteries to make it a 24/7 energy source. Batteries are not nearly as expensive as they were 10 years ago.
It’s always annoying when people ignore the downsides of their preferred technology and then pretend the bottlenecks to renewables are insurmountable (all while said problems are being surmounted.)
The parameters to do this are truly breathtaking. Solar only generates about 1/3 of the time. This means that if I want 1 GW 24/7, I need 3 GW peak generation capacity, 1 GW for the grid and 2GW to charge my batteries. And I need 16GWhr of battery to get me through the night. And that doesn't help with rainy days.
Demand curves are not flat, so numbers are not exact. Don't quibble over precision, because nobody is coming even close to this on a utility scale. Abu Dhabi, and a few other places with gold-paved streets like the Google campus are trying. But it is not economical. Not even close.
Renewables are backed by all these things because they can't always meet peak demand. If you rely on nuclear to meet peak demand, given that it's not dispatchable, you'll be talking about an incredible amount of over-capacity buildup of nuclear. I shudder to think how much that would cost.
Oh, and btw, solar+wind+*battery storage* is definitely included in renewable costs.
The battery storage for electric projects is not sufficient for 24/7. They provide just enough storage to get some of the peak demand rates in the evening. They depend on a reliable generator carrying the baseload overnight, and when the weather is adverse. If they really could do 24/7/365, they would be crazy expensive.
And this is while offloading the costs of transmission and frequency regulation to the grid operator.
Don't confuse an economic optimum for the utility (and especially its financiers) with the optimal solution for the customer.
You are underestimating the projected growth in transmission demand (current grid infrastructure is bottlenecked, it’s one reason PJM and the Northeast have had price spikes). Then there is the fact that transmission infrastructure is just old and needs replacement regardless and that Biden admin number rolled those costs into that figure.
Also storage and intermittency are accounted for in renewable investment (grid scale). If you look at the Duck Curve in California, it’s driven in large part due to subsidies for household solar (which is not planned additions to the grid).
And to elaborate on my capital lock up. If you put 100 billion into nuclear plants it is going to be locked up for many more years than a competing solar, wind, or gas turbine project.
Then you also split costs up over more projects which lowers the risk of stranded capital from failed projects and unlock funds by canceling projects if you need to reallocate.
The only ‘quick’ nuclear projects involve recommissioning nuclear facilities (generally ones in the middle of decommissioning.) Also wage costs are one major driver in differentials in costs and that is why you should look at trends within countries rather than between.
I understand there is projected growth in transmission demand. This is due to assumptions (and current realities) about renewables. If you just build a handful of nukes in any market that needs it, your transmission demand evaporates.
Storage and intermittency aren't honestly accounted for. Projects assume 2 hours of storage at half the nameplate capacity. This does not get you through even a mild weather event. These scenarios assume there is plenty of baseload capacity, or else the customers get dropped. But the finance and accounting are driving out the baseload. And we will see more and more in places like CA and NE what happened in TX.
These analyses are performed by people who are selling money, not reliable electric service. They are fundamentally self-serving in that they will maximize the demand for money. Like Biden's $10T.
You understand we couldn't be 100% nuclear. Electricity demands vary too much. Could it be a lot more? Sure. How soon? Probably not too soon.
Yes, I understand that. My concern is that hiding the true costs of renewables (in fact, charging coal and nuclear customers for them) shifts the economic optimum mix farther from nuclear than it should be.
I don’t think this Stuart guy has an understanding of how electricity generation actually works, dispatch ordering, or how nuclear plants achieve low marginal costs per MWH.
There's also the fact that they require a big up-front investment whose feasibility depends on long-term energy costs staying high enough. That's not a regulatory problem, just an economics/technology/reality problem.
A third factor (and IMO the most significant) is the regulatory environment – ALARA effectively mandates that any cost savings have to be plowed back into safety requirements even if they don't achieve any meaningful real-world safety gains, and that keeps the price artificially high to no real advantage.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/noah-smith-is-too-down-on-nuclear
>>No matter how you deal with safety and fuel disposal issues, new nuclear power in too damn expensive.<<
Completely true, but also fixable if Congress wanted to. The two newest Vogtle (Georgia) units came in at around $17 billion per. But that excessive cost (basically about quadruple what South Korea pays) could be remedied. We know what works when it comes to bringing on new nuclear energy capacity in cost-effective fashion. We just refuse to do it.
I know politics is a very real impediment ("Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln?"). Still, atoms aren't 4x as expensive in Asia.
We can dump all the spent fuel in Bakersfield!
Ugh, that smell
Vogtle was a public sector boondoggle, yes, private energy markets would lead to much more price efficient construction with fewer overruns
We might just want to ask why it’s so expensive now. Most advanced technologies become cheaper as they advance.
This is part of it https://x.com/AukeHoekstra/status/2054519663346725029
Realistically, NY did what it did because the denizens of Westchester just didn’t want to be next to a nuclear power plant. Whether that justifies such a boneheaded decision, well that’s of course a separate matter. But I think the environmentalists’ role was overrated.
The problem is, the reason why the risk of a nuclear meltdown is so low is precisely that the government has so many regulations to manage the risk. Of course, some of these rules are probably overkill and could be safely eliminated, but separating what's actually necessary to protect public safety from unnecessary red tape is not an easy task. It requires a bureaucracy of people who are not only experts in the nuclear industry, but are willing and able to balance cost and safety in a way that benefits the public in good faith.
Unfortunately, I don't have faith in government, at least not the U.S. government, anymore, to be able to do this. Regulators who will just rubber stamp anything to make their donors happy, figuring that the eventual nuclear meltdown will happen 30 years down the line, under somebody else's watch, is not acceptable. But, neither are regulators who are adamantly opposed to very idea of nuclear, and will either reject everything, or impose constraint after constraint, whose real purpose is not really to protect public safety, but to make the project unprofitable.
I don't see how this country can have a safe renaissance of nuclear power without first fixing the problem of government regulators doing their job in good faith - a problem that has gotten drastically worse under Trump, and will be very difficult to undo, now that the precedent is set.
I’m not a scientist and don’t have a strong view one way or the other but the anti-nuclear position doesn’t seem obviously crazy like it’s made out to be sometimes. Chernobyl and Fukushima was both extremely bad even if few people were killed—Wikipedia puts the costs of Chernobyl at $700 billion (IIRC post-Soviet Ukraine and Belarus were spending over 10% of their GDP on cleanup) and Fukushima displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
Chernobyl is an accident that occurs in a Soviet system, where literally multiple layers of bureaucratic Soviet madness that no sane non-Soviet (not even PRC, although NK maybe) could achieve in wrong design wrong executation, compeltely staggeringly wrong-headed test that provoked the actual accide,t and typical Soviet system reaction to the actual accident.
Chernobyl is not a warning about Nuclear any more than the destruction of the Aral sea is a warning about irrigation - both of them are warnings the Communism is terrible and the Soviet Union was an unmitigated catastrophe.
In Soviet Russia catastrophe mitigates you
Many say we were saved by dumb luck that Three Mile Island didn't turn catastrophic. Had the hydrogen bubble that formed mixed with some oxygen and ignited . . . oh boy.
I always thought the lesson of Fukushima was that living in Japan is risky. The earthquake and tsunami did most of the damage, but people don't seem to care about those.
"Kill 20,000 people" - I sleep
"Displace 30,000 people" - REAL SHIT
It also occurred when a party with little governing experience came to power.
A lot of Chernobyl’s estimated bad effects ended up not occurring; I was just reading a study about how the predicted cancer rates, etc have been dramatically lower and studies of animals living near the site have been basically fine for generations at this point. So you may be anchoring more to what was expected to happen (even as of scientific consensus not too long ago) rather than what actually did. Also don’t exclude five mile island which basically had zero negative consequences.
Also you’re not taking into account the rarity of these events. Of course they sound big and scary. But almost every energy source we have is more dangerous. The fact that the environmental movement was down playing these solutions while mines around the world were pumping out dirty coal and killing who knows how many miners every year is just unconscionable.
You’re still exaggerating. It was Three Mile Island, not Five
Animals living there have been more than fine. People aren't allowed there, so it's a de facto nature preserve.
Well with all the bloodsuckers and pseudogiants it's a rough area. The deer at least can avoid the anomalies.
One might ask why people aren't allowed to move back there.
Poorly run and maintained reactors and building them on actively seismic land both seem like extra risky scenarios.
The main problem at Chernobyl was design. We don't do anything remotely like that in the West. The NRC would answer the initial correspondence with "drop dead, you idiot."
Not even just the design, also the build and then the complete idiocy of the test that actually triggered the event where in any healthy (i.e. Not Soviet System) it would have been rescheduled but wasn't because the engineers were afraid of being off to Gulag...
Our light water fleet is designed to generate fissile materials to use for the navy and military. The Japanese have similar designs. There are safer options, but all civilian nuclear is a defense policy and keeps a reserve army of experts available in case you need a nuke.
This is why Iran’s civilian program is a military program. (And the U.S. under Clinton proposed but didn’t provide non-militarized civilian nuclear to North Korea in exchange for them ending their program.)
I think the problem with Fukushima is that 1. pretty much all land is Japan is seismically active and 2. Japan has pretty much no other domestic source of energy - you can see how much they've been impacted by the Strait of Hormuz closing and spiking LNG prices.
Totally. I just don’t think it necessary represent the typical risk for nukes.
Love this! If this argument has a flaw, it might be the assumption that the green movement is actually interested in solving climate change. Based on their actions, climate “action” is for them more of a means to the end of degrowth environmentalism and a bunch of other kooky things too ridiculous to list.
Wanting well conserved green spaces is a perfectly coherent policy preference. Most conservationists aren’t misanthropes, they just have aesthetic preferences with misanthropic second order effects. Attributing scandalous motives to people whose main commitment is literary flora and fauna doesn’t seem that productive.
"aren’t misanthropes, they just have aesthetic preferences with misanthropic second order effects." I love this. I plan to generalize it to "They're not dumb, they just want things with dumb unintended consequences." Of course for eloquence we can't top MLK's, "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity,"
Hatred and violent contempt are far more inimical than liking trees or whales or artisanal production
ISTM that the issue here is that we want some conserved green spaces, but we also want (and need) to build some stuff. If we want to address global warming without convincing voters to all don a hairshirt (which ain't gonna happen), we need to build stuff--wind farms, solar farms, HVDC lines, gas turbine plants, etc. The local "don't mess up the nearby green space" desire conflicts with the global "generate electricity in ways that don't mess up the climate over the next several decades" thing.
This problem is really easy. Maine exists. Western Massachusetts has plenty of forests other than the iconic ones in the Berkshires.
Enough trees are being clear cut in New England that building solar farms on recently logged land would work. Smallish suburban forests are precious. A few thousand people might get real pleasure from a few dozen acres.
If they genuinely don’t care about climate change, just green space and certain animals, that is fine, though of course green space in some places and some animals will be lost due to climate change. If that’s what the environmentalists stand for, they should admit to it and stop talking about climate change.
I get the sense that many environmentalists care far more about conservation than climate change, yes. Climate change was a vehicle to power in the United States that the unscrupulous wing of the environmental movement embraced until it had become the raison d’être for the bulk of environmental advocates. That said, if you made the trade off explicit as Matt does in this article, my sense is that a majority of environmentalists would trend towards conservation over climate.
wouldn’t a majority of massachusetts voters be ok with building solar farms in interior maine?
I’m not sure where Maine popped up, but I would guess no? Take a look at the recent Twin Metals mine controversy near the BWCA in northern MN. I saw similar polling for people in Wisconsin saying they were opposed to the project as people in Minnesota.
All they want is everything they’ve ever loved, regardless of whether it ever existed. Easy peasy!
Beat me to it. It's always going to be a game a whack a mole with many environmentalists, because their view of what's clean is much more than "does not emit greenhouse gases", and it will always going to lead to degrowth.
Nuclear will never be clean because of the waste, no matter how manageable.
Hydro will never be clean because of disruption to aquatic life.
Mass solar and wind will never be clean because of disruption to wildland, no matter how desolate.
Geothermal will get flack due to the disruption of mining. And indeed, all of the above will get flack due to the disruption of mining
But without all of that and without fossil fuels, you're left with only dramatic sipping of a small bit of energy they'll allow that generated in developed areas. And that also means dramatic degrowth, which would be miserable and most people wouldn't stand for it.
Don't forget. It also means telling the majority of the world: Hey I know we emitted tons of carbon and warmed the planet, but we're sorry and promise to stop and you guys also need to promise not to buy cars or get running water and electricity. Cause that's bad.
100%,
After the omnicause conglomeration of ideas, environmentalism became a vehicle to discuss and deploy anticapitalist rhetoric/policies/goals. Enviros are the calvinists of progressive orthodoxy, “we are destined to be punished by an angry superbeing, we are predestined and powerless to change our fate, and we must atone for our sins”.
Most people don’t realize this was a vicious intracoalitional battle in the ‘60s and ‘70s which resulted in early environmental leaders like Dave Foreman becoming minimized.
Many people also don’t realize that the Sierra Club took a committed pro-nuclear stance in the late ‘60s which tore the environmental movement apart and led to the creation of Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and several other modern juggernaut environmental groups.
In other words I don’t really think the SB commentariat understands a whit about the environmental movement, what they care about, what makes them tick, and which specific issues animate them or are considered less important.
Environmentalism has been a vehicle for anti-capitalism since at least the 1970s, and honestly you can see the roots of that as far back as William Blake.
Most of my social circle is made up of people who consider climate change their number one issue. They hold the mish-mash of conventional environmental views for the most part. This isn’t bad faith or anything, they’re just normal, non-wonky people. That probably is true for a large part of people with such views. Professional advocates are a different matter—it’s their job to be knowledgeable in their subject area and so are more deserving of criticism.
Every Bernie girl who js cute enough and committed enough has it within her power to convert a conservative dude. Most would rather feel superior.
I, for one, welcome our new crunchy socialist stay-at-home moms married to Republican engineers and accountants and homeschooling their three free-range-raised kids....
I thought this demographic already converted to Republican anti-gay & anti-vaxxers & Q-Anoners.
Dad's probably an old-school Republican who holds his nose and votes for Trump, Mom's only supporting Trump because of RFK Jr.
None of them really hold their noses anymore. If you've been with Trump this long you've learned to love the crazy.
For an example of what abundance looks like, think 'long-distance phone calls.'
My grandma loved nothing more than her precious grandkids. Every year I would call on her birthday and the conversation would go:
"Happy birthday grandma! I love you!"
"Thank you so much for the call! Are you doing well in school?"
"Yes, school's goin-"
"Ok bye!"
Eventually I asked my mom what the deal was - does grandma have something better going on whenever I called her? And she told me that I had to remember that grandma grew up very poor when phone calls, especially long-distance ones, were a luxury. And 50+ years later that was a hard mindset to break.
Since the cost of calling someone has gone down to zero no one ever calls anyone on the phone anymore.
Phone calls are almost dead technology to me. Like 95% of the calls I receive are robots trying to steal my credit card information.
This is so wild to me. I call all the time. What version of life do you live where phone calls are that infrequent?
I was going to say phone calls are like meetings - you need a lot of communication first to decide if it’s worth it to set aside the time and schedule it. But then I realized that I average multiple meetings per weekday, but I don’t think I have more than one or two phone calls a week.
I have 11 phone calls since April 1, and more than half of them are with my partner arranging something like picking up a grocery item or two before coming home (or calling across the grocery store).
I definitely don’t coordinate before a phone call — I wonder if this is some side effect of millennial / Gen Z neuroticism that I don’t happen to have? If I want to call a friend, I just call them. If someone in my life wants to call me, same thing.
At work we use Microsoft Teams video calls. In my personal life it's mostly messaging by text/WhatsApp/Signal and video calls on WhatsApp.
I think it's been replaced by a superior technology (texting and Facetime)
Just last night, we were explaining to my son that when we were young, we had to pay per call and length of call, which surprised him.
Yeah, that's one weird bit of the past--the idea that making a long-distance phone call was a really big deal you might do only for some important thing like a major holiday or an important transaction.
Back in my day, you had to ride your bike to Target to buy the $25 prepaid card to reload your T-Mobile account to send texts for 10 cents a pop.
the ubiquity of WhatsApp in Europe is apparently primarily a result of unlimited texting not being a feature of phone plans there until quite recently.
That’s interesting
When I was a freshman in college, my ex's parents would refuse to pay for sufficient minutes, then get mad at her when she wouldn't call them when she didn't have minutes.
Proud to say I'm the only millennial in the world who has always paid for his own phone :)
Then you can take it to the next level by explaining the scumminess of 900 numbers.
And you needed exact change to use a payphone, which is why teenagers used to collect call their parents to come pick them up.
And how 1-800-COLLECT and 1-800-CALLATT had such intense media campaigns in the 1990s.
Even more importantly, a now-dying-off generation of engineers who learned how electronics and engineering and such worked by f--king around with the phone syste.
I thought they called it phreaking?
Think about all the unused wire sitting around in people's houses, if regulators forced all the smartest people at phone companies to dedicate years into making it work we could create a Virtual People's Phone (VPP) and aggregate all those wires into a large enough pot that it would reduce the need for new underseas cables by 1%, resulting in 0.5% per minute reduction of long distance phone calls!
It's complete coincidence I work at the electric utility and that had no influence on my comment.
Just an anecdote. I was driving by the Baltimore harbor and they were storing segments of offshore wind turbine poles off of Keith Ave. It was kind of cool to see how large they are compared to onshore wind turbine pole (which can be split onto semi trailers.)
It’s kind of pathetic that one man’s aesthetic preferences are arbitrary rescinding funding and permitting for such projects.
This + desalination in California is the way.
Desalination is too energy intensive. We must keep it in the ground (sea)!
If electricity is too cheap to meter then desalination is in play. That could well be the most salient impact of cheap energy.
My comment was an attempted joke about how environmentalists might critique desalination. But it was not spelled out enough!
There are more meaningful issues for desalination in terms of emissions of highly concentrated salt/brine. Not hugely important, but also worth considering when siting a plant.
You can dump all the excess brine waste in the Salton Sea or Bakersfield.
Is there a reason why you couldn't just dump it further into the ocean? Or have I missed the point of a shot at Bakersfield?
Desalination creates a bunch of pollution. You wind up with toxic brine. If you dump it back into the ocean all that concentrated salt and other nasty stuff (concentrated heavy metals and pollutants) kills all the aquatic life.
You can dump it in Bakersfield because it’s already a dump.
Solution to pollution is dilution and the ocean is very, very large.
Brine is a real problem. It is also quite solvable.
Hence why I cited Bakersfield as a solution.
But there is an energy cost to mixing the brine with water, or else it settles to the bottom as a toxic concentrate. Hey another problem cheap energy would fix!
Putting Bakersfield underwater is its own (literal) spillover benefit.
And can we squeeze out another hydroelectric dam in the process of doing so?
Excessive salt concentration leading to localised toxicity and die-offs (killing e.g. lots of fishies, of which also commercially useful fishies).
One can however do dispersion. Cost basis is problematic but not incoherent according to some designs I have seen (I don't finance desal but can look at Renenergy on desal)
Not Bakersfield, but the Salton Sea could use more water to keep the toxic dust from blowing around.
One does not need a "point" to take a shot at Bakersfield.
That's how 80% of the country feels about California in general.
Why bother desalinating? Just add pepper
Probably need to start with Corpus Christi.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/us/texas-corpus-christi-water-crisis.html
"Again, though, if electricity became radically cheap, then everything would be different. If we had the energy for vertical farming, we could easily quadruple national parkland..."
I don't follow the logic here. The only crops that are efficient in vertical farming are vegetables which only use a tiny bit of land in the US. Grains and feedstock will likely never be cost effective for vertical farming even with the high end abundance agenda. Also, freeing up farmland doesn't equate to new national parkland, I mean if you free up alfalfa growing lands in the Imperial or San Joaquin Valleys it will just revert to flat featureless desert. I as a plant nut could find this fascinating but I don't think they're going to be putting in RV sites and interpretive learning kiosks there, lol.
Not irrigating deserts if you don't have to is probably wise. We do it because it's easier to control, but it's not hard to imagine less wastage of fresh water via vertical farming.
Yeah growing alfalfa in California is one of those "stare at this and you stare into the soul of pure Lovecraftian insanity" things. Those lands should be flat featureless desert! We should be using them for sheep grazing and sending the water to cities!
I am very much in favor of making the Great American Desert a real thing again... also hive cities so big and energized that they can be seen from the moon.
MADGA?
I agree that the incentives are off, but they're not growing alfalfa to sell - they're growing alfalfa to feed cattle, which they sell as meat.
If groundwater is essentially free, or they have 19th-century water rights that let them pull as much water from the Colorado as they want, that's a viable business model.
I wonder sometimes if cities like Los Angeles can buy out farmers and take their share of the water. I'm not sure if that's a rights issue or the math doesn't pencil out.
I couldn't care less what they're doing with the alfalfa.
If groundwater is essentially free, or they have 19th-century water rights that let them pull as much water from the Colorado as they want, that's a sign that our common natural resources have been corruptly given away without commensurate benefit to the public good. They should be reclaimed forthwith.
I don't think they were corruptly given away. I think they (or their great great grandpappys) bought it when water was cheap and there were 50 million fewer people in there.
You could expropriate it, but it's probably easier (and maybe cheaper) to buy it.
Read Cadillac Desert so you're up to speed, then get back to me.
So much of America's wealth was just given away to people with friends in high places, it's mind-boggling. It's why I can never take anyone who claims that the US is a "free market" society seriously. There was never some point in the past when all property rights were neutrally agreed upon and then everyone got to operate under the same rules. It's turtles (and by turtles I mean guys with guns taking shit from poor people or the land itself and giving it to the rich) all the way down.
And lots and lots of solar farms and windmills.
It’s MattY tossing a cheap bone to land conservationists without understanding whatsoever what they like and/or are interested in.
Loving the dig at corn subsidies... burning diesel and fertilizer to make ethanol that in turn makes my gasoline shittier is the absolute worst. Iowa should pay for its sins.
One of the truly, epically bizarre path dependencies caused by the presidential primary calendar.
A new Murphy Express opened near me with zero-ethanol 87 octane (I'm in Colorado, regular is 85 octane here). It's great.
Laugh all you want at corn ethanol - it's no surprise we started the program during the energy shock of the 70s. Now that there's another energy shock, Asian countries are switching to biofuels (fun ones from coconuts and oil palms) as quickly as they can:
https://www.economist.com/asia/2026/05/07/the-energy-shock-triggers-an-asian-dash-for-biofuels
I'm not laughing; I'm griping. Much like growing corn to feed it to a cow is ridiculously inefficient (the cow exists to turn stuff I cannot eat into food) burning fuel/water/agrochemicals to make a crappy fuel additive that is only financially viable because of government handouts is even worse.
I know what you're getting at, and agree, but the pedant in me is compelled to note that much of the corn fed to cows is genuinely inedible to humans. I can only assume if we switched those fields to sweet corn production would decrease somewhat.
It's just a mandate, not a subsidy anymore if it makes you feel better. Inefficiency is bad but not having fuel available is worse.
Look across the pond for how badly energy transition can go. Electricity in the UK is extortionate because of the cost of subsidising renewables (mainly wind, far away from population centres) as well as having backup gas generation. A new nuclear power plant is being held up because of the cost of adding in ridiculous wildlife protection features.
Only yesterday, the 'Net Zero' government minister Ed Miliband (and potential new PM) decided he wants to stop allowing new licenses for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea.
Environmentalists do not want people to be rich and happy. They instead:
- Want rationing as an end in itself.
- Want government supplied, artificial fertiliser free, oatmeal and beans for everyone, assuming the crops haven't failed.
- Want not only meat to be banned, but any wasteful rich tasty food to be banned. Who needs Ozempic if food is meagre and boring?
- Want dingy cubicles for all instead of wasteful large houses.
If they could have a world where there was abundant carbon free energy they would not want that, because that is not consistent with a precarious and impoverished lifestyle that they want everyone to live.
Your cost problem on RE is not in fact subsidising wind up in North Sea & land of Scots. Its from the non-building (due to indeed the Nimby enviros blocking) of necessary transmission grid upgrades for the power to get South.
That and a pricing regime off of NatGas as last-highest-cost that's incoherent.
Being rigidly ideological AND blocking building the infra that was and is needed to get the scrumptious wind power south is of course madly incoherent - so 2nd part I do agree.
This is so strange to me. I would have thought that the relatively low standard of living in the decades after WWII (and of course the war itself) would have been quite enough deprivation. The UK I knew while working as a policy analyst for the FCO in the Blair era didn’t seem to be on this track. But I didn’t think Brexit would pass, so obviously I didn’t know Britain as well as I thought I did.
The incompetence of the Tories after 2010 seemed to flick a switch in peoples brains, from one where growth for all was possible to one where zero sum thinking prevails. Labour have intensified the trend. Indeed, Labour have made one extraordinary achievement - making the previous Tory government look good.
You would think that deliberately cutting off a source of good jobs and economic growth with domestic oil and gas extraction, and instead importing the oil and gas would be obviously self defeating to everyone: but you would be wrong.
Ideologically blocking North Sea ... yes.... and at same time unable to cut throught to get the power down south, incoherence on incoherence.
Labor is currently bleeding votes to the Green Party. Multi-party politics with first past the post voting may be the worst political design of all. Labor should impose proportional representation or an instant run off system before the next election.
UK Labor exists solely to make US Democrats look good.
I too can win arguments by making unsupported claims that my opponents are eeeeeeevil people who want bad things!
The UK continues to sound so cooked.
Is solar power even discussed there at all, for obvious reasons of its climate?
Wind power in Scotland makes a lot more sense. But apparently there are a bunch of regulations around grid access that lead to high curtailment, and have thus undermined the economics of new Scottish wind farms. Plus eventually you would need some major new North-South transmission. A big undersea HVDC line from Edinburgh to London seems very sensible for that. but you very quickly get back to the intense NIMBYism (and related defeatism) of UK politics. Just look at HS2.
If you superimposed the CCP on the UK, this would be done by next year.
We are expanding solar capacity but in winter we get few hours of sunlight, even in the south. We are doing tons of (mostly offshore, in England) wind but it remains much more expensive than solar. One option we do some of but could do more (with transmission upgrades) is pumped hydro. In practice we are highly dependent on gas during winters and that has been painful due to high prices / supply constraints for obvious reasons.
The main problem with UK wind is that it's in the north and all the demand is in the south. Transmission is so constrained they're considering building new transmission lines underwater because building in such a built up country is so difficult.
Well no - because the UK has self-handicapped to make it difficult via extreme paralysis and NIMBYism, there's really not any actual good reason that high-capacity transmission can't be built, they've just self-handcuffed themselves into imobility.
I visited Scotland and saw a lot of windmills and a lot of them weren't spinning at all.
I asked and my host said it was because the supply was more than the demand at that point. It seems insane that you cannot *generate demand* whenever you want it. Tell the populace "hey, absolutely free electricity for the next 2 hours" and they couldn't find something to do with it??
Random people don’t have ideas for spinning up power usage. What would you do? Smelt some aluminum? Train 1/1000th of a new language model?
Charge my EV.
Batteries are the one solution I see!
Getting the power down south is a key and without Transmission upgrade they are just fucked.
Wind I definitely get would be viable there.
My understanding is that the UK prices electricity such that the most expensive form of generation on the grid determines the price that all generation on the grid gets paid. So, no matter how much wind and solar you add, unless the wind and solar produces a full 100% of electricity needs, the public is still stuck paying the price as if the entire grid were generated with natural gas.
Of course, the windfall the system produces for wind/solar generators definitely leads to more wind/solar being built. But, the problem is that, if all the windfall goes to the energy companies, and none of it to lower bills for the public, you end up losing public support.
I believe there is supposed to be some form of bill working its way through parliament to try and fix this. I don't know how successful it will be.
You gotta love MY's observation that if we had imposed this week's energy-price regime via a carbon tax, it would have been politically DOA. But if you add in the supposed benefit of "N% chance of Iranian regime change or behavior change" then suddenly over half the ruling party supports it.
It is funny that two of history's biggest climate change heroes will be Margaret Thatcher and Donald Trump.
As this is my field (as financier of industrial scale):
First I recommend familiarisation with Michael Liebreich's Electrification Staircase, it is useful: https://mliebreich.substack.com/p/the-electrification-staircase-is
Second: GRID GRID GRID.
Right now efficiency and cost for enablement of RenErg installation is bounded by Transmission (long-distance) and Distribution (local/short distance) grid limitations (and the staggeringly outdated US overall grid infra that's literally 60s-70s era design and often base infra) and the fact for Fuck's sake US has a maddenly fragmented grid that's just incoherent for modern strategic purposes. Permitting reforms for expansion, federalisation of backing financing for modernisation and especially transmission upgrading to allow for continental level power wheeling.
So this is precisely spot on: "Clean energy abundance is identifying the barriers to deploying wind and solar and nuclear and geothermal power and breaking them down. It’s about parcel assembly in the Northeast. It’s about interregional transmission and interconnection. It’s about Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules. It’s about getting companies that want to build data centers to pay for innovative first-of-n projects so we can bring new ideas to scale. It’s about manufacturing synthetic hydrocarbons instead of scolding people about the carbon footprint of their cookout."
Generally in my world now, even with the Trumpian idiocies, the greatest hurdles are grid, permitting and inappropriate outdated regs on permitting.
And the cost of grid upgrades to enable renewables are several times the cost of the generation itself.
You wonder why you always hear about how cheap solar and wind are getting, but your electric bill still gets higher every year? Grid. We're playing shell games with costs.
FALSE
Grid upgrades are needed now for response to consumption increase being driven by
A. Data
B. industrial systems electrification
C. Wider electrification
The pricing increases are not driven by solar or wind, they are demand over generation and congestion.
Supply, demand.
Grid upgrading is generation agnostic now and fundamentall necessary to enable the market demand without having massive price spiking, it is not 1990 nor 2000 any more and outdated understandings on this are part of the problem.
Of course part of the problem is equally the fragmented incoherent nature of the US overall grid system which is extremely inefficient in getting these projects to execution and as well doing at the regional so that the costs on the long-term infra are correctly distributed. It is Policy level incoherence.
Dispatchable power approximately co-located with demand is infinitely easier to build a grid for. Inter-regional transmission backed with battery and magnetic or inertial storage is insanely expensive. And those are only needed by renewables.
A data center cluster could be served by 5-10 (n+1 or 2) SMRs located on site behind the meter. Zero grid cost. Try that with solar.
You're not totally wrong about distribution. The last few miles would need some work if everyone had electric cars. But that's relatively cheap. And it's not where the expenses showing up in your electric bill are currently going. They're going to tie in wind farms and to stabilize the grid when the wind stops.
Edit: People don't realize it, but when a utility builds a GW of solar, they also have to install a GW of gas turbine. Because what else are they going to do when the wind stops blowing? They advertise the per kWhr cost of the solar capacity, but they never include the gas turbine. In terms of fixed cost of generation, renewable is in addition, not instead of. Funny, eh?
Well, no, this is wrong top to bottom. I don't even know where to start.
Storage is no longer insanely expensive,
Frequency services / stability is a different topic than storage and hardly insanely expensive now, this is utterly outdated.
Lazards numbers from LCOE+ June 25 can be used : https://www.lazard.com/media/uounhon4/lazards-lcoeplus-june-2025.pdf
Cool stories. Based on systems that provide 2 hours of storage for half the nameplate. A lot of people are going to lose whatever is in their freezers. But the finance guys making the Powerpoints will get paid, as always.
"Edit: People don't realize it, but when a utility builds a GW of solar, they also have to install a GW of gas turbine. Because what else are they going to do when the wind stops blowing?"
That may have been true 20 years ago, but I don't think that's true anymore. First off, you have battery storage. Second, electricity demand is not constant, it rises and falls on a 24-hour cycle. The peak demand only happens for a few hours in the evening, not 24/7, and can be covered quite well, most days, simply by using a batteries to save excess solar produced during the day for use in the evening.
Where the gas turbines come in is when you have several days in a row which are cloudy, and it's not cost-effective to build enough battery storage to make up to several days in a row of reduced solar output. But, even then, you don't need as much gas capacity as you think. If the solar panels are geographically distributed, if it's not sunny in one place, it will probably be sunny somewhere else. And, solar panels can be complemented with wind. Again, if it's not windy some place, it will probably be windy somewhere else. On top of that, the highest levels of electricity demand usually happen on exceptionally hot days (due to air conditioners), but those days are usually sunny, not cloudy, because clouds make the temperature cooler. And then, of course, there's a lot of opportunity to reduce demand during energy crunch by getting cryptominers and other industrial facilities to suspend operations for a few hours. At the moment, while some gas capacity is still needed to make a grid that is 99.99% reliable, it doesn't need to be anywhere near 1:1 with solar.
It is a common misconception that renewable energy projects are backed by battery storage in any meaningful way. They are not. Typically even the best of them have storage for only half their capacity, for only a couple of hours.
This can help marginally with the economics of the other problem: peak electrical demand occurs hours after peak sunlight. Electrical demand is still in its peak well into the evening after the sun sets.
But none of this storage handles bad weather, such as cloudy or still days. If you're depending upon wind from another region, then you're dealing with very long transmission lines and high losses.
All these economics depend on reliable generation for approximately half the total supply. Renewables get very expensive if you try to make them cover more than about half. Many markets are already approaching this.
I'm not saying there's no role for renewables. I'm saying that the economic books are cooked to favor them for political reasons. And to the extent this kills off stable generation, it is making electricity more expensive and less reliable.
Historically, solar projects were built with insufficient battery storage, as, until recently, batteries were too expensive to use for more than a couple hours of storage. But, as the technology gets better and cheaper, that's changing fast, and as a result, the threshold of what percentage of grid power needs to be renewable before costs start going up, rather than down, keeps moving higher each year. Back around 2010, it was something like 10-20%. Then, it was 50%. I've read some reports that, in sunny areas, it may, today, be be closer to 80-90%.
The problem arises when people take what was the limitations of batteries 10-20 years ago and treat it as a fundamental law of physics, while ignoring the underlying march of technology.
And long-distance transmission don't have to have super-high losses. The key to avoid that is is to ramp up the voltage and use DC power, rather than AC power. China is already doing this in an effort to power Beijing and Shanghai with vast solar arrays out in the Gobi desert. If it works there, it can work here too, the key is to get the costs down.
Well, you have to pay for the capital costs of wind/solar too, even if it's cheaper than the alternative, which will make your bill go up if you say stuck with an old gas or coal plant instead and didn't build anything yet. It's not really the grid.
The grid is a fairly small part of the end-use customer's bill, like 10-15% as a rule of thumb. That will go up, but as we do that, we will need less capacity and wholesale energy costs will go down, so it's not one for one. Citation- https://www.naseo.org/Data/Sites/1/documents/publications/Managing%20the%20Grid-%20%20A%20Deep%20Dive%20into%20the%20U.S.%20Electric%20Transmission%20System%20for%20State%20Energy%20Offices%20%20%202%20%281%29.pdf
The policy agenda here is sound — parcel assembly, transmission, NRC reform are all real levers. But "too cheap to meter" is doing rhetorical damage to your own case. Electricity at 2¢/kWh is genuinely transformative and probably achievable in 30 years; it's also still very much worth metering, because aluminum smelters and data center operators will pay different prices than households, and the metering infrastructure has near-zero marginal cost. Strauss's slogan was always sales copy, not economics. The abundance case is stronger when it names actual thresholds — cheap enough for synthetic fuels, cheap enough for vertical farming — than when it gestures at a price point that never made physical sense
I agree with a lot of this, but as I've commented here before, sadly we still haven't been able to get Matt VPP pilled. Let me try again...
The key flaw in Matt's thinking is that electricity generation only accounts for around 40% of the cost people pay for electricity. The rest is for infrastructure like transmission lines and the distribution grid. The key here, is that this infrastructure is a huge and unavoidable cost driver for electricity and even too cheap to meter nuclear power doesn't reduce it. Free nuclear still gets you an electric bill that's 60% of what you pay today.
This is where VPPs, demand response, batteries, and other technologies that don't make any power at all can help a ton with lowering costs and producing abundance. On average, transmission assets are only utilized 50% of the time. VPPs smooth out demand and if done right, can increase that avg utilization substantially. It's as close to a free lunch as it gets. Distribution grid infrastructure is only utilized at around 30% on average, so the opportunity for cost reduction there from VPPs is even higher.
On top of the cost savings, there's also the permitting problem and land use issue. Sure, we need permitting reform, but even after it's done, building stuff will still be hard and expensive and if there's a way to avoid or delay the need for some buildout - with almost NO tradeoff - why wouldn't we want that in the mix?
OK Matt - Did I change your mind even a little?
He pretty clearly said he just wants to stop calling VPP a power plant. Because it’s not a power plant.
I was disappointed to see that hobbyhorse led to the trough again, since in this case it seemed like a willful misunderstanding based on (to be fair) sloppy partisan messaging, not an objection to the actual technology itself. You could take the exact same thing, frame it as a "yes, and all of the above" lever to get to Too Cheap To Meter faster: any electricity not pointlessly wasted is electricity that someone actually in demand can use productively elsewhere. It's like saying we shouldn't care about leaky pipes during the quest for Water Abundance, or leaky buckets in the quest for Redistribution Abundance, even though those are both huge loss centres and we could do a lot more of both abundii by efficiency-maxxing. Also, of course, moving bits is a lot cheaper than moving atoms, both in terms of capital and GHG emissions...wholesale abandonment of VPP would let you build one fraction of an actual powerplant, maybe? I know political capital isn't quite as fungible, and defer to Matt's expertise there, but...it's not like degrowth-by-default enviros are gonna disappear in a puff of logic by someone pointing out they're not "really" pro-abundance. Tilting at rhetorical windmills isn't the same as building actual windmills.
At some level I don’t understand the traditional green movement even though I feel like I share their basic goals and am much more of a Lorax style environmentalist instead of a climate hawk.
But their movement seems weird ass hell and committed to a vision from the 1970s.
You’ve heard the joke that many Greens are just watermelons?
Well you can look at the UK and see how far they have drifted from environmental issues as a priority… it’s disconcerting.
This is probably true for contemporary green parties, but real socialists at least had their own view for abundance, whether or not it was as workable.
>The idea of a virtual power plant is to use software and connected devices to manage demand timing so that you can get by with less overall generation.
I agree with the overall argument of this piece, but in a healthy and sane grid that *isn't* trying to do crazy things like stop growth of energy use, a VPP doesn't reduce how much you need to generate. Especially not in a high-renewables grid, or in a region that's farther along on electrifying energy use, or even in a high-nuclear grid where load following is limited. It reduces how much you need to *store* or how much you need to *overbuild capacity and waste,* It replaces (some of the) batteries and grid upgrades that you'd need, not PV and wind turbines. It lets you run every power plant at its maximum operating efficiency and ensure the energy gets used productively.
Can you elaborate on this " VPP doesn't reduce how much you need to generate."
It incentivizes DR/DER development, which directly reduces how much you need to generate. What am I missing?
You're right that it *can* be used that way, and that it sometimes is. But I think that's largely an artifact of the crude and outdated ways we manage our grids and buy and sell energy and ancillary services. Although I'm surprised you included DER in your comment - that's still generation, just by someone that isn't the utility.
At a fundamental level, you can only get people to use less energy by raising its price or paying them more than the value they get from it. That incentivizes efficiency, true.
But once you get beyond a very modest scale with very occasional use, what a VPP is really good for is time-shifting demand, not eliminating it.
If my factory runs at 80% capacity, I may not really care if once in a while I accept a DR payment instead of running some piece of equipment. But I'm much more willing, more often, to run at night instead of daytime, or vice versa. I'm more willing to invest in thermal energy storage and phase change materials so I can heat and cool things not at the exact moment I draw electricity, then I am to not heat and cool things at all. At a residential level, I'm happy to change the exact shape of the time curve for when I charge an EV or wash and dry my dishes and clothes or run my water heater, as long as there's hot water when I shower and clean clothes and dishes when I get dressed and eat.
Those things are much larger in aggregate potential and don't really reduce total consumption. But they let you run every generating asset in its most efficient way (steady output at peak efficiency for gas and nuclear, whatever-we-can-get for wind and solar, traditional hydro is still dispatchable, etc.). They minimize the amount of dispatchable power needed: load following, spinning reserves, peaker plants, BESS.
If you look at the places in the world that have encountered harder energy transition problems first, you can see the beginnings of this. South Australia is one example. Hawaii is another. Smaller, more isolated grids with higher RE and DER penetration. These are not places trying to limit energy use growth. Hawaii wants to build enough RE to replace its reliance on oil by 2045. South Australia explicitly wants to build enough solar to meet 5x its current electricity demand. Without VPPs that's a whole lot harder to do.
Why are you surprised I included DERs when a DER aggregation is a VPP? That’s why I don’t get the premise of your original comment because it can be an aggregation of behind the meter generation. By giving them a pathway to wholesale market revenue, they incentivize their development. Do you think, like Matt does, that a VPP is only demand response?
Not quite. I admit I was running with the framing of Matt's post when I posted my first comment, but on reflection I think it's unclear what "you" Matt was referring to in, "so that you can get by with less overall generation."
From the POV of a typical utility, yes, that's what a VPP does. From the POV of a community, no, it isn't. For a community, it lets you more freely build DER, and incorporate it into the grid, and get more benefit out of it. It changes the required balance of DER vs DR vs BESS you need as you increase both DER and grid-scale non-dispatchable power. It enables greater electrification of energy usage without breaking critical infrastructure.
In other words: viewing DER as part of a VPP is a useful abstraction for a utility trying to manage an increasingly complex grid using the legacy infrastructure and conceptual framework as they do for an old-fashioned one-way grid. The abstraction works great when there's only a little DER going on.
But if you get to the point that you're shutting down part of the (almost free to use!) VPP's generating capacity (while there are still dispatchable power sources supplying power) more than extremely rarely, or if you're preventing people from building DER (especially when that DER is less than their own average consumption) in the first place? Then you're using the wrong tool to solve the wrong problem. Probably because you're either too hidebound to adapt to changing conditions, or too constrained by regulation to do so. Which most utilities are. At that point, you should be using real-time pricing to encourage increased electricity use at times of peak production, including charging BESS and EVs, or paying people to do so in exchange for a promise to let you buy back later. You should be using more complex contracting mechanisms to let every entity on the grid sell ancillary services. You should be investing in the equipment needed to enable more DER-produced electricity to move freely between parts of the distribution grid, and the sensors and software to even have a clue what's going on with such production and consumption.
While A VPP is not really a substitute for growth in generation over the long term, VPP does buy time by allowing more to be wrought out of existing infrastructure, for the many years it takes to get new electricity generation online. That, in itself, is still worth a lot.
Very true. Unfortunately in practice there are so many weird and arcane rules about building generating capacity that I fear in many places VPPs will just be used to delay (or deny approval for) expanding capacity even when it's (in any practical sense) obvious it will be needed by the time it would come online.
I get where you're coming from and agree wholeheartedly with the premise, but two points: (a) organizations like Rewiring America are dealing with both the current infrastructure and political reality. There's lots of opposition to adding new solar and wind farms, and finding ways to help consumers save energy in that framework makes a huge amount of sense. And (b) I know induced demand gets dirty looks around these parts, but that's exactly what you'd get with energy too cheap to meter. The benefits would be large enough that we should strive for that world, but the consequence would be no reason to conserve, which would add demand until we put strain on the grid again. I'd like to see how that modeled.
Re: (b) if there’s one fundamental critique I would level at Matt’s writing it’s that he never solves for the equilibrium. Why stop at 10,000 acres? Given what he’s juxtaposing it with, ‘limitless’ means limitless, right?
My issue with "induced demand" is that the implication a lot of people mean it with is that creating more supply will create demand that didn't previously exist. But that demand was always there, just at a price ("price" used not just in a money sense) that people weren't willing to pay.
People already want to keep their homes at a crisp 68 degrees in summer, the cost of doing so is currently just too high. People already want to make trips on the highway, but the traffic cost is too high (so increasing the supply of lanes makes the cost to people lower). People already want to move to desirable neighborhoods, but they just haven't bothered inquiring about housing there because it's too expensive. "Induced Demand" is just an increase in the quantity consumed exactly according to supply and demand, just with a demand curve that's more difficult to measure.
I don’t actually think “too cheap to meter” was meant literally. Something can be really cheap but also have a price associated with it.
This is all well and good but it's important to note this is all taking place in a world where MAGA basically despises clean energy for bizarre cultural war reasons. See Trump trying to create a national ban on new wind projects via the Pentagon https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/climate/wind-power-delays-trump-pentagon.html or the push to ban new utility grade solar projects at the local/county level in lots of parts of the country. Even if Matt can convince the Sierra Club to change their ways, you're not going to get to a new energy policy paradigm without figuring out how to get conservatives to stop being so utterly nuts about this stuff.
The goal with conservatives is to message to them effectively. Don't sell green energy that's a non-starter, sell nuclear as national defense (you don't have to sell nuclear hard to cons honestly), and sell them coal but sell them on supercritical coal turbines and tell them it's so coal and white blue collar people have a future. We get less pollution and more energy, they get their warm ignorant fuzzies