The case for clean energy abundance
It’s a good idea — and strikingly different from conventional environmentalism.
I believe contentiousness and disagreeability can play a productive role in the discourse, so I’ve been meaning to say for a while that many of the people and institutions who believe that they have embraced an “abundance” approach to clean energy have not, in fact, done any such thing.
What they’ve done is adopt a kind of fanboy attitude toward a few booming technologies, notably solar panels and electric cars, and post charts showing their rapid adoption in some jurisdictions.
That’s great! I think it’s good for people to be excited about things. And the progress that’s been made in driving down the cost of batteries in particular is wonderful for the world.
It’s even possible that this kind of solar cheerleading could be a gateway that leads to a genuine clean-energy-abundance mindset.
Traditionally, solar power has been expensive, so advocacy for it was, almost by definition, not advocacy for abundance; solarheads were instead obsessed with conservation and efficiency. The idea was to get total energy use low enough that humans could conceivably meet their electricity needs with the generation that was possible via expensive solar installations on rooftops. The fact that you can now build cheap utility-scale solar projects genuinely does change the game and means that solar is actually a possible path to abundance.
But it’s still the case that an abundance mindset is a hard conceptual break from the old-time vision of humanity eking out just enough to get by through rinky-dink small-scale solar installations.
In 1954, Atomic Energy Commission Chair Lewis Strauss1 spoke of his aspiration to use nuclear reactors to generate electricity that was “too cheap to meter.”
And that’s abundance: a desire to create so much electricity that nobody’s bothering to conserve electricity.
The organization Rewiring America says that it’s “forging a path to limitless clean energy for everyone.” That’s a great slogan for an advocacy organization whose mission centers clean energy abundance. But they recently put out a report with a bunch of policy proposals that in turn are downstream of some efforts to model around incredible levels of uncertainty.
I am not a detail-oriented energy wonk, just a guy who knows how to search a PDF. The report includes 14 instances of the word “efficiency” and goes on at some length about the benefits of virtual power plants. I am not against virtual power plants, but a virtual power plant is not a power plant. It does not generate any electricity. 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.
The report claims that this is good because “aggregating household-based energy resources is a faster, lower-cost way to meet rising electricity demand than building new power plants.”
But in a world of limitless clean energy for everyone, we would not be fussing around with “aggregating household-based energy resources” or bragging that “efficiency avoids unnecessary capital investment.”
It’s fine if you work for, donate to, sit on the board of, or are a politician who listens to environmental organizations that are uninterested in clean energy abundance. But I would ask people like that to stop lying to themselves and the world about what they think and care about so that politicians who want to advocate for clean energy abundance can start listening to people who favor clean energy abundance.
Imagining abundant solar
Back on May 4, a blogger who goes by Soub wrote a post arguing that Massachusetts “should assemble several large parcels of land totaling 10,000 acres and make it available for utility-scale solar farms.”
I think that what’s important to understand about clean energy abundance as a concept is that this is a hot take. Massachusetts is a very liberal state. It’s a place where the environmental movement has a lot of political clout. Of course in Massachusetts and elsewhere that clout is not unlimited. Green ideas that greatly increase household costs are hard to enact even in Massachusetts. So are ones that would make the business climate much worse. So are ones that are harmful to the interests of labor unions. But assembling large parcels of land for utility-scale solar isn’t bad for labor and it’s not bad for business and it’s not bad for household energy costs either. If environmental organizations and their donors and members supported this idea, they could make it happen. And maybe someday they will decide that clean energy abundance is the way forward and they will support ideas like this. That would be great, because a lot of them seem to think they favor clean energy abundance and I do hold out some hope that this is a “fake it ’til you make it” kind of situation.
For now, though, assembling large parcels of land and making them available for utility-scale solar is not what environmentalists are about. That’s because, as Soub concedes, the only way to make this work is to cut down a bunch of forest.
Now Soub argues it’s not really that much forest relative to the extent of woodland in Massachusetts and that climate change and energy affordability are very important so they should do it. And I’m inclined to agree. But clearly the powers that be in the environmental community — including organizations that say they are very focused on climate change or that (like Rewiring America) try to own the label of abundance or affordability — disagree.
Which is fine. What I don’t think is fine is that lots of elected officials who like the slogan “clean is cheap” don’t understand or want to acknowledge that the policy organizations they have picked this talking point up from are mostly not interested in a vision of energy abundance. If you read the Roosevelt Institute’s effort to outline a progressive vision for energy permitting reform, not only are they relentlessly hostile to any compromise with the fossil-fuel industry, they are not actually eager to make it easier to build utility-scale renewables either. The report is full of stuff about “the power of conducting regional planning to discern how land should be allocated to value environmental protection, the energy transition, and other factors like agriculture, cultural significance, and more” and how “according to a recent study by the Nature Conservancy, the U.S. could limit land-use change by 70 percent through strategies like colocating wind and solar.”
Abundance solves many problems
To be clear, these land use tradeoffs with wind and solar are real. This is why, traditionally, energy-abundance advocates have been more skeptical of wind and solar than environmentalists.
If you built coal-fired power plants on such a scale as to make electricity too cheap to meter, you would choke the country in smog. Truly abundant energy really does need to be clean. But ideas like geothermal and nuclear power are appealing to abundance advocates in part because they are compact. It’s not that traditional environmentalists never thought of these land use issues; they’re just genuinely skeptical of the energy-abundance vision. That’s what drives the push for things like rooftop solar, agrivoltaics, and solar-covered parking lots. Rather than seeking maximally abundant electricity, they want to squeeze as much electricity as possible out of the existing human footprint.
Then we have ideas like distributed energy resources and home efficiency retrofits to reduce the amount of new energy that we “need.”
But while this is all offered in good faith, I think it fundamentally underrates the merits of energy abundance.
For example, despite the considerable progress that’s been made with batteries, we are nowhere near being able to electrify things like aviation and maritime shipping. It is, however, chemically possible to manufacture liquid hydrocarbons (including jet fuel, bunker oil, and so forth) out of the carbon dioxide present in the air.
This is a lossy, energy-inefficient process for reasons of fundamental physics. If you snapped your fingers and generated enough clean energy to replace all the coal and gas currently burned to make electricity without raising prices for consumers and then snapped again to generate enough clean energy to electrify all cars and trucks and home heating, that would still leave you with electricity that’s wildly too expensive to make jet fuel.
But if electricity were abundant — too cheap to meter — then it wouldn’t matter that using electricity to manufacture liquid hydrocarbons is inefficient. It would still be cheaper to do it that way than to drill for oil and refine it. The problems of the “hard to decarbonize” sectors would be solved.
This is why, again, despite my disagreeable insistence on saying that clean energy abundance is different from conventional green politics, I sincerely think most adherents to conventional green politics should switch sides. A genuine abundance approach can solve the problem they’re trying to solve, and tweaking utility regulation or getting people to use better-insulated windows can’t.
This is also true of the land use problem itself.
By far, the biggest human footprint is not housing or commercial developments or renewable energy — it’s farms and pastures. Thirty million acres of that farmland are going to biofuels, which even given the not-so-sunny conditions of Iowa is a comically inefficient way to turn flat land into energy.
But beyond that, there’s occasional excitement when someone notices that we could produce food with a dramatically smaller land footprint by using vertical farms. Such farms would also involve radically less use of water and pesticides, with enormous ecological benefits. The problem is that while sunlight is free, vertical farming requires energy-intensive lighting and climate control. I believe the economics are loosely within the ballpark of working specifically for certain kinds of lettuce, but it basically doesn’t work for anything else.
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 while opening up tons of new space for housing development by relying on electricity rather than sunshine for food production. Every water-shortage issue you’ve ever heard of would be immediately solved.
A lot of scientific work has been done on growing real animal protein in labs, which would save even more land and eliminate a vast source of animal suffering. The problem, again, is it takes too much energy to be workable.
Shout your energy policy
Democrats have largely stopped talking about climate change during the 2026 election cycle, which seems to be mostly working for them. However, Bill McKibben and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse are upset about this and want Democrats “to talk about climate change now.”
I also agree that hushing is a non-optimal strategy. That said, it is a much better strategy than Whitehouse’s plan to make it harder for Mary Peltola and James Talarico and Sherrod Brown to win elections in states that have fossil-fuel industries.
I think it’s pretty scandalous that Whitehouse wants to sacrifice the interests of low-income Americans who are threatened by Trump’s Medicaid cuts, women who are worried about their reproductive rights, and decent people everywhere alarmed by Trump’s threats to democracy on the altar of some kind of ego trip.
I also don’t understand how he thinks electoral suicide will help solve climate change.
Most of all, I don’t really understand the Whitehouse/McKibben view that talking about climate change will address climate change.
What I think would be better would be to start saying and doing substantively different things about climate change. Sporadically blocking domestic fossil-fuel extraction and distribution infrastructure will not meaningfully curb global emissions. Trump’s war in Iran, which every Democrat agrees is unacceptably costly to the world economy, is actually a more effective version of this supply-constraint approach to climate than anything Whitehouse has ever put on the table. And while we should of course try to use our existing electrical grid infrastructure efficiently rather than wastefully, making it more efficient isn’t going to solve the problem either.
What really can solve it — and myriad other problems facing the world — is clean energy abundance.
But clean energy abundance is not posting levelized cost of energy charts or talking about community solar projects or bickering over the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
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.
Just recognize that if you embrace this vision, you’re breaking in a real way with what major green groups are advocating for.
Yes, the villain of “Oppenheimer.”
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.
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.