Chris Nelder

At least there is finally (and suddenly?) some attention getting paid to those issues…e.g. @billmckibben.bsky.social citing Saul Griffith & Andrew Birch here www.motherjones.com/environment/...

Me here: ilsr.org/articles/aus...

Etc!

Can't afford to support renewable energy in places like remote Alaska where people in poverty are desperate to swap millions of dollars a year in diesel fuel for cheap renewables, but no problem funding a nuke on the moon!

I maintain that the energy transition is the one force that's fast enough, powerful enough, and unstoppable enough to dislodge the petrostate die hards who form the core of the global reactionary movement.

Hm, looks like the branching of the threads caused a lot of people to miss the main points I was trying to share, so here's the bottom of the thread, scroll up from here...

Yes there is a whole thread there making that point

bsky.app/profile/chri...

Boosting this exchange for others who might be interested, since these issues keep coming up.

So you can still have some PBS, but you have to pay for it privately. All public dollars must now flow to billionaires.

This chart.

Damn.

And I've heard not a peep from the GOP lawmakers who went to all those ribbon cutting ceremonies at the factories.

www.canarymedia.com/articles/cle...

(chart by @danmccarthy.bsky.social)

@zaneselvans.org But slowing down the market and making it less competitive globally will not increase those prospects!!

As for corn ethanol... a very different topic. I wouldn't even bring it into this conversation. 100% political.
/end

@zaneselvans.org And the greatest opportunity to cut costs will be in the aforementioned "soft cost" issues...not hardware. But those are already significant barriers. Have been for decades, and we're making precious little progress against them. We can fix them whenever we have the political will.

@zaneselvans.org So before even asking what a future market that doesn't need subsidies might look like, you have to actually get there! And the US is still a LONG way from there.

Now, once we get there, yes, the learning rate of hardware costs will probably slow down (asymptotically) .

@zaneselvans.org Because solar equipment flows to where the market is most vigorous. We had this problem when I was in the business 20 years ago and Germany's FiT was so good that they were sucking up half the world's supply of modules and we couldn't even get them to fulfill our jobs in the US.

@zaneselvans.org If you pull the incentives, you knock out ~25% of the support mechanisms of a healthy market. Does it keep growing? Yes, but at a much slower rate that gets you to unsubsidized viability much later. While other markets race ahead. Which puts you at an even greater disadvantage.

@zaneselvans.org That helps to maintain a healthy market even though solar + storage are already cheaper than grid power in many cases. So it's not a binary. It's a question of how many factors contribute to healthy growth in the market (including utility tariffs!!).

@zaneselvans.org What's important to understand is that even though Australia has the most vigorous residential solar market in the world, with costs like 20-25% of the US for the same installation, they still have subsidies! But they have been declining on a set schedule for years & will disappear

Australia’s Rooftop Solar Revolution: A Postcard from the Future — Episode 238 of Local Energy Rules - ILSR Energy Democracy Initiative Australia leads the world in rooftop solar adoption, offering crucial lessons for regulators and grid operators in the United States.

@zaneselvans I have been banging on about all of these issues since I was in the solar business 20 years ago. Mentioned them a few times on @transitionshow.bsky.social but had a proper rant about them on @johnffarrell.bsky.social's podcast recently: ilsr.org/articles/aus...

@zaneselvans.org Here's brief summary of the issues, courtesy our custom AI query engine trained on our corpus. This guy has a new tool designed to address some of those issues: www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_xV...

Australia 2024 Archives | The Energy Transition Show Chris travels to Australia and interviews Giles Parkinson, a longtime journalist and observer of the energy transition Down Under.

Just back at my desk. There's a bit to unpack here...

First, yes, the US solar market could eventually get to where subsidies aren't needed. We can already see how this might look by looking at Australia. See our recent miniseries: www.energytransitionshow.com/Australia2024

The key to getting them down the cost curves so they don’t need incentives is deployment. Seems to me that delaying that by years is a greater negative effect than the possible gains in efficiency, cost-cutting, etc. More gets built, faster, and the learning curve declines faster with incentives.

I can tell you for certain that there are several wind/solar/battery/transmission projects up here in the Arctic that may (or definitely will) NOT get built after the withdrawal of IRA grants

Yes… a field of 15 old decommissioned small turbines from the 90s, plus the solar farm that now reuses their grid connections, plus two large wind turbines that produce as much power as the 15 old ones did

Which also has some more scenic elements…

I came to the Arctic Circle to see a remote community’s microgrid.

Some people come to the Arctic Circle to fish, or see wildlife….

Huh. Turns out it's really easy to dismiss decades of careful scientific work on climate by thousands of researchers globally. You just need "an exercise in discretionary judgment!"

[Episode #253] – Bioenergy Illusions

@35:12 @mikegrunwald.bsky.social quotes Tim Searchinger:
"100 acres of corn grown for ethanol to generate the energy of a one acre solar array. So humanity would have to use 30% of its cropland to produce 2% of its energy. It just doesn't work."
@timsearchinger.bsky.social
@chrisnelder.bsky.social

🎙️What makes an effective and enduring green industrial policy?

IIPP Prof @mazzucatom.bsky.social spoke to @chrisnelder.bsky.social from the @transitionshow.bsky.social on rethinking industrial strategies to support a sustainable energy transition.

🎧 Listen to the episode here: buff.ly/TfbGfN7

Data center activity ‘exploded’ in Texas, spiking reliability risks: monitor AI data centers have power demand patterns similar to steel mills, with “very fast, very large ramps,” according to David Penny, director of reliability services for Texas RE.

quite the contrary... www.utilitydive.com/news/data-ce...

I've heard many claims by various companies that they can smooth load spikes and moderate AI data center demand to be a beneficial sort of flexible load.

I've seen no evidence that they actually do it. Nor any guarantees that they will.

But if there is empirical evidence, I'd like to see it.