Crawford County is 330th wind rejection, Bremmer on Power of Crisis, & Eastern Bluebirds

May 20, 2022

Crawford County rejects Big Wind, Ian Bremmer talks Power of Crisis, EEI webcast, Eastern Bluebirds

I’ve been on the go. On Tuesday, I was in Branson, Missouri speaking at a meeting of Associated Electric Cooperative Inc., the Springfield-based generation coop that serves about 2.1 million people in Missouri, northeast Oklahoma, and southeast Iowa. I presented on the same program as my friends Maynard Holt and Colin Fenton. They recently launched a new company, Veriten, which blends think-tank wonkery, research, the Close of Business Tuesday podcast, and an investment arm. The other speaker was Louis Finkel, the senior VP of government relations at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. During my presentation at the Associated meeting, I talked about the US electric grid, regulations, and, as usual, why the US needs to embrace nuclear power. In a fun coincidence, on Wednesday, Associated announced that it was working with NuScale Power, the SMR company that went public earlier this month. Per the press release: the two will “will work together to evaluate NuScale’s U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission-approved design as a part of Associated’s due diligence to explore reliable, responsible sources of energy.” On Thursday, I was in Florida at an event sponsored by National Fuel Gas Company, where I talked about the Texas blackouts, ERCOT’s challenges, the insanity of the closure of Indian Point, and why natural gas is going to stick around for a while.

I don’t want to diminish what I do because every talk I give is different. But whether it’s Associated or National Fuel Gas, or any of the more than 400 invited lectures or keynotes I’ve done, I have been focusing on the same themes for more than a decade. Those include the four imperatives -- power density, energy density, cost, and scale -- land-use conflicts, why we must accelerate nuclear development and deployment, N2N (natural gas to nuclear), and why hydrocarbons are here to stay. Lately, I’ve also been focused on the commodity crunch that’s hitting everything from steel and diesel fuel to copper and neodymium.

All of the travel and speaking has been exhilarating and exhausting. But as you’ve probably noticed, I often squeeze in a bit of birding while on the road. I did a quick visit to Fort Frederica National Monument yesterday. It’s a historic place and I was happy to see an Eastern Bluebird. But the place was also infested with biting flies. I only spent about 20 minutes walking around because I spent so much time swinging my Spurs cap trying to keep the damn flies at bay. Enough about that. Four items today:

Crawford County veto marks 330th rejection of Big Wind
Ian Bremmer on the podcast talking about The Power of Crisis
YouTube video of my EEI webcast
Eastern Bluebirds in Texas and Florida

The photo of the Bluebirds above was taken in Michigan in 2010.

On Thursday, Real Clear Energy published my piece on the 330th rejection of Big Wind. I began:

Rural Americans keep rejecting wind projects. On May 5, commissioners in Crawford County, Ohio voted 2-1 in favor of a measure that prohibits the construction of wind projects in the county. The move halts a 300-megawatt project being promoted by Apex Clean Energy called Honey Creek Wind. The Crawford County vote matters for several reasons. First, it provides yet another example of the backlash in rural America against the landscape-blighting encroachment of giant wind turbines; and those rejections are piling up. The vote in Crawford County marks the 330th time that government entities from Maine to Hawaii have rejected or restricted wind projects since 2015. (Details on those rejections can be found in the Renewable Rejection Database.)
The Crawford County vote also matters because it is happening at the same time that the Biden administration and renewable energy promoters in academia are pushing for yet another extension of the production tax credit, the federal subsidy that is the key driver of the wind sector. The PTC, which expired at the beginning of this year, is the single most-expensive energy-related provision in the federal tax code. Between 2020 and 2029, the PTC will cost the federal treasury some $34 billion. Big utilities like NextEra Energy and MidAmerican Energy, which are collecting hundreds of millions of dollars in tax credits, want even more federal tax gravy.
Congress shouldn’t give it to them. Academics, climate activists, and politicians never get tired of claiming that weather-dependent renewables are the cheapest forms of power generation. But if wind is so cheap then the industry surely doesn’t need the PTC, a subsidy that has already been extended 13 times.

I concluded:

The wind industry doesn’t need more of our federal tax dollars. Instead, it should be forced to stand on its own. As I show in the graphic above, which is based on Congressional Research Service data from 2018, when measured by the amount of energy produced, the wind industry gets about 158 times more in tax credits than the nuclear industry and about 44 times more than the hydrocarbon sector. Crawford County and hundreds of other rural communities across America have vetoed wind energy. Congress should do the same when it comes to more subsidies for the wind industry.

Again, here’s a link. Please share it.

Bremmer on crises, China, vaccines, Ukraine, supply chains, and more

About a decade ago, Ian Bremmer and I shared the stage at an event sponsored by New York University. I ran into him again in New Orleans in March. We were both speaking at a meeting of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers. I followed up with Ian about the podcast and he suggested we key the episode around his new book, The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats – And Our Response – Will Change the World, which came out on Tuesday. Bremmer is the president of the Eurasia Group and the author of 11 books. In this episode, Bremmer talks about the three threats – pandemics, climate change, and new technologies – that are now facing global leaders, as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, disrupted supply chains, and why he is optimistic that the crises now facing the world can be overcome. Bremmer had a particularly interesting take on Ukraine. His interest in the region goes back decades. His doctoral dissertation was titled, "The politics of ethnicity: Russians in the Ukraine.”

One of the most interesting parts of the discussion was Bremmer’s take on what’s happening in China with the ongoing Covid lockdowns. China’s vaccines are not effective against the virus and some 370 million Chinese are still in lockdown. I asked Bremmer why China refuses to use Western vaccines and why Xi Jinping is still locking down the economy and in particular, the city of Shanghai. He said:

it’s both national pride and path dependency once they’ve already decided it. They’re stubborn. We’re frequently stubborn in the United States. Fair enough. We get dug in. Yeah. And they’ve just decided that there’s just no way, no how, that...[China] is going to go hat in hand to the Americans and Europeans and say, “Can we please have access to your vaccines and therapeutics? No way. They’re going to do it themselves. They’re going to show that they can do it. And then they also want to show that their way of managing COVID, which focuses I mean, completely strips away individual rights... you’ve got 30 million people in Shanghai that have been locked down for a month now. [It was] supposed to be a four-day lockdown and [it] keeps going and going in the largest, richest city in China.

Bremmer is an interesting guy. Please give the episode a listen. It’s also on YouTube. If you watch it there, please subscribe to my channel.

My April 25 EEI web event talking about A Question of Power

My friend at Edison Electric Institute, Lawrence Jones, sent me a link to the segment that we recorded last month. As you may recall, I spent about 45 minutes talking to Pedro Pizarro, the CEO of Edison International about the current electricity situation and of course, A Question of Power. The segment is now available on YouTube. Have a look/listen.

Eastern Bluebirds in Austin and Sea Island

I have seen Eastern Bluebirds (Sialia sialis) many times. But I still find them startlingly beautiful. This week, I’ve seen them twice, at locations 1,100 miles apart. Last Sunday, I saw them in Austin at Commons Ford Ranch Park. I saw them again on Thursday afternoon at Fort Frederica National Monument in Florida. At Commons Ford, we sat at a covered picnic table for a long while and watched the Bluebirds perch and depart and re-perch again for maybe 20 minutes. At some points, they were only six or eight feet away. At Fort Frederica, it was combat birdwatching. That is, not fun. As I explained at the top of this “news” letter, the biting flies were swarming. It was also broiling hot. Thus, I only got a few fleeting glances at the bird before I declared victory and headed straight back to the car. Still, it was fun. (The image of the Eastern Bluebirds above is from John James Audubon’s Birds of America.) The colors of the Bluebird are what make it such an enjoyable bird. That sentiment is confirmed by this Wikipedia entry, which is long, but has a cool discussion of Bluebirds in Bermuda:

a small North American migratory thrush found in open woodlands, farmlands, and orchards. The bright-blue breeding plumage of the male, easily observed on a wire or open perch, makes this species a favorite of birders. The male's call includes sometimes soft warbles of jeew or chir-wi, or the melodious song chiti WEEW wewidoo. It is the state bird of Missouri and New York...found east of the Rockies, southern Canada to the Gulf states, and southeastern Arizona to Nicaragua...tend to live in open country around trees, but with little understory and sparse ground cover. Original habitats probably included open, frequently burned pine savannas, beaver ponds, mature but open woods, and forest openings. Today, they are most common along pastures, agricultural fields, suburban parks, backyards, and even golf courses. Populations also occur across eastern North America and south as far as Nicaragua. Birds that live farther north and in the west of the range tend to lay more eggs than eastern and southern birds.
An isolated, insular subspecies of the Eastern Bluebird is found on Bermuda and has a distinctive, brighter blue coloration compared to mainland populations. This population was formerly thought to have predated the colonization of the islands (making it one of only three extant, resident pre-colonization Bermuda land birds, alongside the Bermuda White-eyed Vireo and Gray Catbird. However, analysis of fossil strata found no evidence for the existence of Bluebirds on the islands prior to European colonization. Using simulations and molecular evidence, a 2013 study found that the Bermuda Bluebirds likely descend from a very small founder population from a single colonization event during the 1600s. This colonization event could either be a natural one by migratory individuals or an anthropogenic introduction by early settlers, who are known to have introduced several other eastern North American birds like the Northern Cardinal to Bermuda very shortly after colonization. It is likely that the alteration to the islands' ecosystem due to the clearing of native forest facilitated this colonization by providing optimal bluebird feeding habitat, along with a lack of predators...Eastern bluebirds are social, and will sometimes gather in flocks of over a hundred. However, they are territorial during the breeding season and may continue to defend a feeding area throughout the winter.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

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