California tattered grid, Oklo's 1.5 MW reactor, American Wonk
A short note for Friday afternoon:
In today’s blast:
California's blackouts show perils of "electrify everything" push
New podcast with Caroline Cochran, the COO of Oklo Inc.
Avik Roy had me on his American Wonk podcast
California blackouts
Most of the media coverage on the widespread blackouts in America's largest state has examined why the lights went out. The backward-looking analysis is needed. But the blackouts also show that California's efforts to ban natural gas and push every sector to fully electrify is headed for tears. It will cost untold billions of dollars and send the state's already-sky-high energy prices even higher.
Here's what I wrote In Forbes:
The blackouts that hit California over the past few days exposed the fragility of one of the most-expensive and least-reliable electric grids in North America. They also show that California’s grid can’t handle the load it has now, much less accommodate the enormous amount of new demand that would have to be met if the state attempts to “electrify everything.”
The push to electrify everything would prohibit the use of natural gas in buildings, electrify transportation, and require the grid to run solely on renewables (and maybe, a dash of nuclear). But attempting to electrify the entire California economy will further increase the cost of energy at the very same time that the state’s electricity rates are soaring. That will result in yet-higher energy costs for low- and middle-income Californians.
The future of small reactors
On Tuesday, we released another episode (number 9!) of the Power Hungry Podcast. My guest: Caroline Cochran, the COO and co-founder of Oklo Inc., a seven-year-old company that aims to license the first small -- and I do mean small -- modular reactor. California-based Oklo wants to build a reactor with just 1.5 megawatts of electrical output. (Cochran is from Tulsa, which is always a plus.) We discussed the hurdles Oklo faces in getting to market, why small reactors may have advantages, and when and where the first reactor, named Aurora, might be deployed.
During our discussion, I asked her one of my favorite questions: what's the hardest part of your job? Her answer, in short, was keeping the faith in the project. She said, that overcoming all the hurdles they've faced in trying to deploy a new reactor design has been "such a long road...I've already been doing this for seven years. And we just got an application in [to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission]. So it does take, like it's a long road, and you have to really care about it, you genuinely, actually, have to care about it in order to care enough to live the startup life for a decade of your life."
Give it a listen. While you are at it, please subscribe to the Power Hungry Podcast and encourage your friends and family to do the same. And if you love it, please go to Ratethispodcast.com/powerhungry and give it a 5-star rating. If you want to watch the video version of the podcasts, we are posting them on YouTube. And if you have a suggestion someone who would be a stellar guest on the podcast, please let me know.
And finally, I was on the American Wonk podcast
This week, I was a guest on the American Wonk podcast, which is hosted by my colleague, Avik Roy, the president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.
We talked about the energy situation in California (we recorded the episode before the blackouts), the difficulty of building new energy infrastructure of any type, and why much of the climate-change push is resulting in what are, in reality, regressive taxes. I also got to give my take on the concept of NIMBY, or "not in my backyard."
As I told Avik, blaming "NIMBYism" for the resistance to big renewable-energy projects, pipelines, drilling sites, mines, and high-voltage transmission lines, is a slur. Rural landowners, like urban landowners -- in fact, like people everywhere -- care about their neighborhoods. They care about their property values, their wildlife, their landscapes, and their viewsheds.
And they are going to fight to protect them. That's why it is getting harder and harder to build big energy projects. This relates to points I make in my new book, A Question of Power, some of which I discuss in my piece that ran in the New York Post back in March. The growing number of land-use conflicts stem "from the vacant-land myth: the notion that there’s plenty of unused land out there in flyover country that’s ready and waiting to be covered with wind turbines, solar panels, power lines and other infrastructure."
The truth is far different.
In any case, Avik asked challenging questions and the 40 minutes flew by.
Have a great weekend.
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