New York environmental groups like Third Act and Public Power NY are citing a new paper from a researcher at UPenn's climate and media group to denounce Gov Hochul's plans for new nuclear as an unaffordable fiasco.

The paper, by Joseph Romm, makes substantive mistakes and omissions. Here are some of my rebuttals, which are by no means complete, in the thread below. 1/
Before I start, you can find Romm's paper at the link below. 2/ bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/web.sas.upenn.…

1/ NEW from me & @Matthuber78, "The Utility of Utilities." We've written plenty of leftwing arguments for public power, so here's a leftwing argument for the monopoly utility model itself - yes even investor-owned - contra deregulation & more competition. damagemag.com/2024/04/01/the…
2/ Take offshore wind as ex. The byzantine auctions & competitive development of big projects in coastal blue states have floundered over past year, leading to cancellations, rebids, & higher subsidies. But utility Dominion's massive project soldiers on w/ economy of scale.

The Sunnova biz practices should make your blood boil. Liberal energy wonk world has nothing to say about scamming people into five-figure loans for home solar, in mainland US & Puerto Rico, b/c it's "financed consumer goods qua public infrastructure" model they support.

https://twitter.com/EENewsUpdates/status/1735265310452707710

Obviously GOP trying to sink IRA - a shame. But greater shame these stories of poor & elderly being screwed over by this company cannot be acknowledged as the problem with wanting decarb to rest on huge consumer goods competing against regulated utilities. freebeacon.com/energy/biden-a…

Returning to this observation from Lenin, recalled by @OlufemiOTaiwo recently, alongside my argument in another thread why decarbonization politics must involve industrial unions: socialists and progressives are wildly overestimating their understanding of these key sectors. @OlufemiOTaiwo Where does the institutional capacity to organize, manage, and produce in extraordinarily complicated systems like electric power actually come from? Who will be today's New Deal technocrats who confront the thorny details of, say, public power, in oppo to the capitalists?

Fun fact: Of the ~1 GW of wind and solar operated by the TVA, *none* are *owned* by the TVA. All are private power undermining the not-for-profit, public power system, owned by, e.g., Goldman Sachs. Hmm is it b/c TVA bad and pro-fossil? Or b/c renewables policy designed this way? Similarly, in Nebraska, where *all* power has been publicly owned since New Deal days, the first private power producers were introduced in late 2000s: wind farms. Now merchant generators in NE total 24% of all NE's generation - all of that wind and solar.

Click thru this op-ed from #1 scientific practitioner of cancel culture and see his cited evidence for 100% wind water solar in TX assumes whopping 7,000 GW of batteries, w/o explanation or further attention to the magnitude. ERCOT has about 86 GW total generating capacity today. Here's the brief analysis in question, updated March 15, 2021: web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jac…

Report from new energy journo site Canary on CA elec supply concerns w/ Diablo Canyon nuclear retirement. Experts at 4 diff renewables industry + env NGO groups quoted. Canary part of Rocky Mountain Inst, longtime env NGO totally opposed to nuclear. 🤔 canarymedia.com/articles/calif… Graph from Union of Concerned Scis, from report & author quoted in article, shows (1) Diablo Canyon is *important for lowering emissions* yet greens still oppose it and (2) model shows trade-off in which keeping it running is mut exclus w/ more clean energy (hence 1st gap) 🤔

100% renewables is to energy justice what police abolition is to criminal justice. Needlessly absolutist moral position that fires up a minoritarian ideological base while stoking culture war more than political struggle over power, capital, and freedom. Both fantasies rest on a fantastical premise that any adult could - and does - question: What happens to ppl who commit violence? What happens when weather doesn't cooperate w/ our needs? Both come from progressive NGO land w/ assist from young middle class leftwing activists.

Another day, another big clean energy model that uses only 2011 and 2012 weather data for load and wind/solar output. "Carbon-Neutral Pathways for the U.S." from Berkeley Lab. One big ERCOT mistake was using only 2011 weather data for extreme forecast. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…

https://twitter.com/fredstaffordcs/status/1368639263261261832

The dependability score used by the model is an attempt to capture weather variability. They adjust the load data by 106% to reach a peak load due to weather (ERCOT saw peak load of 111% their extreme estimate based on 2011) and their VRE generation by 80% to actual data.

New Just Transition report treats coal & nuclear plants identically - both got to go. Why exactly do certain workers & communities need to be justly transitioned? Because NGOs & affiliated academics don't like them, or for rational nationwide decarb plan? labor4sustainability.org/jtlp-2021/jtlp… Not trying to dismiss these researchers as mere Friends of the Earth, Sierra, NRDC lackeys. I agree w/ most of what they're arguing. But like Skinner interview on Jacobin this week, it's bizarre that nuclear workers are seen by these academics as contributing to climate crisis.