Crunch Time for Renewable Energy Deployment

Trump and Netanyahu’s ill-considered war on Iran has brought us to a situation where 20% of the world’s oil supply is bottled up in the Persian Gulf. If the war continues–and none of the participants show signs of backing down–the price of crude oil is expected to double over time. Other raw materials are bottled up in the Gulf as well, fertilizer, and helium, important for chip manufacture.

At Shinycroak: Nuclear Fusion, "AI," and Big Science

It's complicated. The post straddles the line between economics and politics, but I put it up there for Reasons.

Israel, Palestine, and the World: Fractally Bad

I open a book and get a report on future events that even God would like to file and forget. - Philip K Dick

A Black Christmas in Israel-Palestine

(And not the good sort of Black.)

The immediate need in Israel-Palestine, right now, is to remove Benjamin Netanyahu from power, and stop the genocide in Gaza. Afterwards, there may be time to think of solutions. – Justice in Israel-Palestine, Dec 3, 2023

Notes On Russia, and the Russia-Ukraine War

(I have written this, rather than a much longer essay. I hope it will be of some value.)

1. One of the questions that has haunted me since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war is “How is it to be ended?” And the best answer I see is “With Russia pushed back to its border, and that border guarded,” which is not a happy answer. Russia is still a nuclear power, and in extremity may turn to weapons of mass destruction.

2. The Russian populace is thoroughly propagandized, and the overwhelming majority believes in this war. Russia needs a second glasnost, opening, so that its people see the truth. For Russia, if it comes out of the fugue it is in, it has to go on to something else. What it had is over. Communism failed. Oligarchy failed. So, then, what?

3. The peace of Europe is not adequate, as the post-World War I peace was not adequate. The German nationalists were allowed to regroup and to evade the reparations by inflating the Deutsch Mark (and destroying most people’s savings, creating a disaffected population which could easily be propagandized by the Nazis.) (That was muddled economic history, I've struck it out.) What would a positive world peace that included Russia look like?

Redemption Arc

I recently read a rather fun YA book series wherein all the characters who were not completely evil got some sort of redemption. The author herself says that these were her pandemic comfort writing project. There’s a lot to like about the books; the ethics of empire are discussed, and the ethics required of superheroes are demonstrated – if you, in your person, are a weapon of mass destruction, what rules do you live by, so that you do not turn into a monster?

But I don’t believe. Not everyone can be redeemed. Some people lack empathy. Others lack the capacity for introspection that allows them to recognize their failings. Still others have made irrevocable choices that turn them into monsters in human skin suits. What redemption was there for Hilter’s captains? What for the people who decided, monstrously, to spread covid throughout the United States? To the group that probably plotted to give the cruel murderer Mohammed bin Salman the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons, and may have successfully done so? Not only do I not see redemption for these, I do not even see that they ought to be allowed to live.

Yes, Donald J. Trump has led me to reconsider the death penalty. He is not only an alleged rapist and a likely traitor, he has not only likely started a civil war in the USA, he seems to have taken actions that might yet cause World War III. He has had numerous opportunities to recognize the damage he has done and make amends and has not done so – he is one of those who both lack empathy and the capacity for introspection. Do we allow him to continue his depredations?

On Cutting Off Fossil Fuel Imports From Russia

Or, “In Russia, energy buy you.”

One of the contradictions of the Western support of Ukraine in her defense against the Russian invasion is that Western Europe is still buying fossil fuels from Russia. So, on the one hand, Europe opposes the Russian invasion. On the other hand, Europe is funding it. Without those fossil-fuel exports, Russia would probably not be able to sustain its invasion of Ukraine. And it is not clear that anything is going to persuade the Russian leadership to back down. They seem prepared to fight to the last Ukrainian.

The genocidal invasion of Ukraine continues. There is increasing support for direct NATO intervention, which would bring nuclear powers into conflict, something the world has avoided for 70 years. A massive war would be inevitable. It might escalate to nuclear war. And the fuel imports would be cut off. So, instead…

Cut them off ourselves. Immediately abandon European fossil fuel imports from Russia, restart the German nuclear power stations, and start a crash alternative energy program. The privation in Europe would be enormous, but it would still be less than a war between Russia and the NATO powers.

Perhaps, perhaps. I am not an international relations expert, so I am not sure of either the economics or the politics here. Before taking such a momentous decision, people who know more than I ought to be consulted. Still, we know that eventually Europe and the entire world is going to have to stop relying on fossil fuels. This might be the moment to start.

Ukraine: Peace In Our Time and Climate Change, Too

This is outside my usual ambit, but it seems important enough to comment on.

Germany is apparently preparing to throw Ukraine to the tender mercies of Vladimir Putin. Germany, remembering World War II, is all for not fighting, as long as someone else is doing the not-fighting. Besides, they want that gas. Germany should have kept those nuclear reactors going. France, on the other hand, is equivocating, though my earlier remarks, based on an inflammatory Politico article, were incorrect. (For future: do not trust Politico.)

“Peace in our time” and climate change, too – what's not to like?

Energy budget charts: France, Germany.

Aristocracy in the United States

About two weeks ago I found myself wondering how it was that the deadlock in Congress in our time looked so remarkably like the deadlock in Congress in the antebellum period. Different players, but still the same game. This is my attempt to explain the game. This is a historical opinion piece; it runs from the founding of the United States of America to our time. For a blog post this is a long piece. Printed, it would run six pages. Bear with me, please. There is a lot of ground to cover.

Contents

1. The Slaveholders Constitution
2. After the ratification: the fight for the government
3. Postbellum
4. The Great Depression
5. World War II, the Cold War, and After
6. In the Second Gilded Age
7. Prospect

How did we fall so far?

In answer to Jim Wright’s (Stonekettle Station) cri de coeur on Twitter:

---

You know, we could be beyond this thing by June. We could. It could be over. Life could return to normal – whatever the hell THAT is nowadays, anyway, but we're not going to be, it's not going to be over, not for a long, long time. Maybe never. Because these ignorant, backward, foolish, selfish, brainless, stupid, fearful, toothless redneck fucks would rather believe insane baseless conspiracy theories from TV pundits and hysterical internet “experts” instead of actual science and actual doctors. That's why.

[…]

Green New Deal: Why Run the Numbers?

An Essay on Global Systems and Project Management

 

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know I’ve been saying “run the numbers” for about a year now.

It occurred to me to wonder why no-one else is saying this. (This turns out not to be quite true. There is a group of futurists who do say it, but I had to go looking.) And then it occurred to me to wonder, why am I saying this?

Bitter Environmental Croaks: Things We Cannot Say

(At least, without provoking huge fights. Also on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RavenOnthill/status/1196302838604812288?s=20.)

The environmental movement went overboard in its opposition to nuclear power. We failed to compare its risks to expanding fossil fuel usage, and the world is worse off as a result.

We have too many people partly because of patriarchy, because too much of the world treats women as brood mares.

It seems to this old bird that our ruling class, or whatever you want to call it, has decided to settle our environmental problems the good old-fashioned way – via the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

The Cost of Clean Power

It is a commonplace on that we are building no more nuclear plants and shutting down existing plants because they are too expensive. But…

They are more expensive than wind and solar – variable renewable energy (VRE.) Good, fine. But VRE has its limits, and somewhere between 60% and 90% of grid power, and something more reliable is needed for the balance, either fossil energy, large-scale long-term storage, large-scale hydro, or nuclear. Right now, that something is fossil energy, derived from natural gas and coal, both environmental problems. Natural gas plants is what we currently building and we have to stop burning natural gas. Not only is it a fossil fuel, and therefore a contributor to carbon emissions, it is itself a potent greenhouse gas, though a less persistent one than CO₂.

So, a bit of qualitative economic modeling. While we are building the smart grid, everything is fine for a while. VRE is ramping up and fossil fuel plants are shutting down. But when we arrive the limit of VRE (60%? 90%?) we have to either keep the fossil fuel plants going, driving the warming of the world, turn out the lights (or life-support) somewhere, or find something else to fill in the gap. By that time it will be very late and the necessary work will be very expensive. It would be wiser to start investing and researching now.

What We Now Are Building Instead of Nuclear Plants

Natural gas plants. Burning natural gas creates CO₂, a greenhouse gas. Natural gas production leaks methane which is itself a greenhouse gas, more potent but less persistent than CO₂. This is all crazy and this is what we are doing.

Brief Note: the Costs of Supplementing Green Electricity

One of the chief arguments against building more nuclear facilities is that various forms of renewable energy are less expensive. The problem there is the one that energy researchers are finding; some predictable source of power or long-term large-scale ("grid scale") energy storage technology is necessary. Yet all current designs for grid-scale energy storage are physically large, with extensive environmental impacts, and expensive as well. The cost argument against nuclear power is much weaker when one considers the costs of grid-scale storage.

Some links:
  University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Systems Grid Energy Storage Fact Sheet
  Stanford's Energy's Grid Scale Storage page.
 

Brief note: restarting research into nuclear energy

I think we need to reactivate nuclear energy research. The energy industry has the large-scale light water reactor and no interest in doing other designs. These are hard to operate and extremely expensive. But there is utterly no interest in the industry in researching and developing better designs. So it is time to put the nuclear engineers at the national labs back at to work. We also need to pull together and archive the design work from early nuclear power plant design. A lot of that material is buried in reports, probably not even digital form, and it is important to preserve it because we may need it now.

The Green New Deal: Running the Numbers

The technologies definitely exist to meet our 2030 requirement reaching 60% [renewables] by 2030. We think that we have all the technologies in hand to reach 100% carbon-free or 100% clean by 2045, but it's a little bit less clear what that pathway looks like. And the reason is because when you start talking about really high levels of renewable energy generation technologies on the grid, you need to find ways to store that electricity because it's coming from sources like the wind and sun, so it's not coming 24/7 the way something like stored natural gas is. So, there are some unique technical challenges associated with running a grid with very, very high levels of renewables. We are making a lot of progress on figuring out how to run a grid like that, and we are very confident that by 2045, we will be able to get there. – Laura Wisland, interviewed in Union of Concerned Scientists podcast “Got Science: Clean Energy Momentum: From Goals to Gigawatts.” Accessed August 24, 2019. https://www.ucsusa.org/ep62-wisland.

The Technical Issues

In other words, the technologies we need to make the Green New Deal work do not yet exist. California can provide about 60% of its electricity via renewables. After that, what is needed is technology that can store energy not just for hours and days but for weeks and months. Currently that technology does not exist. It is hoped that it will be available by 2045. Lacking that technology there is large-scale hydroelectric or nuclear energy. There are not many greenhouse gas neutral electric generation technologies.

Laura Wisland is an expert on and advocate for green power with over a decade’s experience. But she must be politic in what she says. I do not need to be, and ravens are supposed to be harsh-voiced, so I will say it plainly: The Green New Deal is not enough. If we believe otherwise, we are deceiving ourselves and putting our nation and perhaps our world at risk

I wrote the Got Science producers on Twitter, and they wrote back with citations. Wisland herself was quoted: “We ‘think’ we can get to 100% carbon free power, but work continues to identify the most cost-effective pathways. E3 (consultant that runs electricity models for the energy agencies in CA) has done some analysis showing that we can get to about 90% and it's that last 10% that is the hardest to decarbonize. SB 100 (the law that created the 100% clean power goal) provides the state with flexibility to decide whether ultimately the power sector will be completely decarbonized or whether it's better to keep a little bit of carbon (gas) on the system to manage cost and reliability issues.”

A very bad mistake was made in the unequivocal opposition to nuclear power on the part of environmentalists. The nuclear plants were not built. Instead, coal and natural gas plants were built, both directly aggravating global climate change and producing the huge pollution and waste of coal and natural gas production and use. Worse still, this set an example for the developing world, with India and China building energy systems heavily relying on coal. Yet the Sanders Green New Deal proposal has the USA shutting down nuclear power plants before the long-term energy storage technology needed to replace them exists.

The Political Issues

The credibility of environmentalism

What is going to happen to environmentalism when the public realizes that they are in part responsible for putting us into this position? The opposition to nuclear power, all the unfounded rumor-mongering all the lies, it played right to the hands of the fossil fuel industries and brought us to crisis more quickly then had we built those nuclear facilities.

This is not to say that nuclear power does not carry real risks, but these were dramatically overplayed by the environmental opposition to nuclear power. Worse still, no comparison with alternatives was done. Voices in the environmental movement who pointed out that coal was in many ways more environmentally troublesome than nuclear power were not heard.

Climate change is not the only environmental problem. The success of humans on earth depends on the human ability to manage our population and use of resources. If the environmental movement loses credibility in one area, we may lose many voices that defend our world and its ecosystems.

Policy Conclusions

My preference would be to roll forward on the Green New Deal, to continue research into the smart grid and long-term energy storage, and also to restart research into nuclear power generation. This seems to me likely, though, to be a counsel of perfection. I fear we are likely to come up short when it is too late to act, and many people will be left, literally, out in the cold, or perhaps the burning heat.

Citations

California Public Utilities Commission. “Proposed Preferred System Portfolio for IRP 2017-18: System Analysis and Production Cost Modeling Results.” California Public Utilities Commission, January 11, 2019. https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/uploadedFiles/CPUCWebsite/Content/UtilitiesIndustries/Energy/EnergyPrograms/ElectPowerProcurementGeneration/irp/2018/Attachment%20A_Proposed%20Preferred%20System%20Portfolio%20for%20IRP%202018_final.pdf.

Herman K. Trabish. “Getting to 100% Zero Emissions in California: Beyond CAISO’s Eight-Solution Menu.” Utility Dive, January 3, 2019. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/getting-to-100-zero-emissions-in-california-beyond-caisos-eight-solution/544467/.

Getting Started: the Green New Deal

The Green New Deal proposes to solve environmental problems by hiring a lot of people to do the work, but what is the work? We don’t know what those jobs are, yet. We don’t even know what is to be done. Build wind, solar, tidal, nuclear? (I suspect a lot of GND supporters don’t want to think about nuclear, but nuclear power does not produce greenhouse gases.)

If only there are experts to consult.

And there are. There are 17 US national laboratories. One, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), is focused on renewables. Several of the others do renewables work as well.

I recently wrote an old colleague at one of the US national labs (we corvids get around), asked him how things were going, and what, if anything, was being done by the labs on the Green New Deal. They said that their work was going well though they now had to seek high-level approval for publication and that he had not read anything about the Green New Deal beyond the headlines.

If anything like a green new deal is to be implemented, the US national labs will be the primary research and development institutions. So, what are the national labs doing?

Each of the 17 US national laboratories has their own particular history and research focus. One, The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is focused on renewables. Another, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, does all kinds of civilian research, including renewables work, a third, the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), was founded in 1910 to support fossil fuel production and use and continues in that role. The other 14 are largely focused on high energy physics, nuclear weapons, and nuclear energy, though many do work in other fields. Notably, Argonne National Labs in Illinois houses the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), which works on battery technology, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) near Hanford in Washington State, has its Energy Policy and Economics Group.

And this is all very good, and all very fine, and we still don’t have a plan.

We don’t know how to make the Green New Deal work, yet, but we do know how to build a nuclear power system that will do the job – that’s where we have spent most of our efforts over the last 70 years.

Whatever we do, we need to get started.

Reflections on the Green New Deal

It's good, it's not perfect, and it's not enough.

It's a resolution. I support its passage. You can read it here. The bill as it stands mandates nothing and collects no revenue. Instead, it sets out an ambitious list of goals. The basic proposal is to switch the USA off of fossil energy and onto "renewables" (not completely defined – is nuclear power renewable?) and to hire a lot of people to do the job. There is also something of a laundry list of moderate left goals: indigenous rights, "equal pay for equal work," and so on. It's not a bad list. Some of the goals probably conflict with others, global policy must be addressed, and I hate the callout to family farms. (See Sarah Taber's critique.)

But it should have been passed 25 years ago.

By now we should have run the numbers and be implementing the programs. That we have not run the numbers worries me. A lot. We are near to the breaking point, and we haven't even tried to figure out a plan that will work. Will wind and solar power be enough? How many climate refugees will there be? We don't know any of this. We don't even have estimates.

If it were up to me, I would put some of my old colleagues at the national labs on the job. Time has run out.

We need a real plan, not just ambitious goals.

Climate Change: Reconsidering Nuclear Power

We may be able to use nuclear power if we become competent socialists.

I have been reading James Mahaffey’s Atomic Accidents, an account of failures of nuclear technology. This is merging in my mind with responses to climate change, which are now desperately needed.

For a long time, my position on nuclear power has been that it would be an excellent technology if we could find saints and angels to run the system. Lacking a supply of those, we had probably best solve our energy problems in another way. This book, if anything, confirms me in that position. But time is running out to avert planetary disaster from climate change and nuclear power does not contribute to global climate change. Perhaps it is time to rethink nuclear power.