Palisades closed, coal soars, Penney & Kugelmass, Barn Swallows
Palisades closure is a blunder, China & India go big on coal, Penney and Kugelmass on the podcast, Barn Swallows at Warbler Woods
A busy and interesting week. I have been prepping for speaking engagements, travel, and catching up on writing. After more than 30 years as a reporter, I am finding that these days I write to please myself more than anything else. In the past, when I had the misfortune of working for other people, I felt pressure to produce a certain number of articles or reports. Now, as an independent journalist, the pressure comes from my own interest or anger. (Or both.) Over the past few months, I've been writing more articles and putting out more podcasts than ever before because I am publishing to satisfy myself. And I'm finding the more I publish, the more fun I have. I subscribe to the great line from muckraking journalist and author Jessica Mitford, (The American Way of Death) who said, "You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty." Five items this week:
The Hill: Get ready for electricity shortages
Emmet Penney on who killed nuclear & energy Lysenkoism
Bret Kugelmass: Uranium is “everywhere” & the future of nuclear
Barn Swallows drinking on the wing
The photo of the Barn Swallow above was taken in 2004.
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On Sunday, I published a piece in The Hill about the foolish closure of the Palisades Power Plant in Michigan. I wrote:
America’s electric grid is being mismanaged and consumers will pay a heavy price for that mismanagement.
More evidence of that came with the recent closure of the Palisades Power Plant in Michigan. The 811-megawatt nuclear plant was shut down on the same day that the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) issued a report saying the U.S. electric grid doesn’t have enough generation capacity and that blackouts are almost certain to occur across the country this summer.
In particular, NERC noted that the Midwest is facing a capacity shortfall that could lead to a “high risk of energy emergencies during peak summer conditions.” Palisades was located in the heart of the Midwest, immediately adjacent to the area served by the Mid-continent Independent System Operator (MISO), the region that NERC identified as being particularly short on juice. NERC said the MISO region has 3,200 megawatts less generation capacity this summer than it did in 2021. Despite this loss of generation capacity, NERC expects demand in the region to increase by about 1.7 percent this summer and warned that “extreme temperatures, higher generation outages, or low wind conditions” will mean that MISO will have a “higher risk” of “load-shedding to maintain system reliability” — the industry’s preferred term for rolling blackouts.
I concluded:
Just like last year’s premature closure of the Indian Point, the loss of Palisades, which has been operating safely since 1971, is an inexcusable government failure. By any relevant metric — climate action, energy security, or resilience — the loss of Palisades is a blunder that could have and should have been avoided because it will further weaken our electric grid. The grid is the Mother Network for all of our critical systems: health care, GPS, communications, traffic lights, water, and wastewater treatment. Essayist and podcaster Emmet Penney had it right when he declared last year that “there is no such thing as a wealthy society with a weak electrical grid.”
In short, the closure of the Palisades Power Plant will increase emissions, reduce energy affordability, and hurt the resilience and reliability of America’s electric grid. That’s a lousy quadfecta.
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Today, I published a piece in Real Clear Energy, an outlet that I like a lot. I began:
If you think the world is moving beyond coal, think again. The post-Covid economic rebound and surging electricity demand have resulted in big increases in coal prices and coal demand. Since January, the Newcastle benchmark price for coal has doubled. And over the past few weeks, China and India have announced plans to increase their domestic coal production by a combined total of 700 million tons per year. For perspective, US coal production this year will total about 600 million tons.
The surge in coal demand in China and India – as well as in the U.S., where coal use jumped by 17% last year – demonstrates two things: that the Iron Law of Electricity has not been broken, Second, it shows that it is far easier to talk about cutting emissions than it is to achieve significant cuts.
I concluded:
On Thursday, John Hanekamp, a St. Louis-based coal industry consultant, told me that “the incremental coal production in India and China is exceeding whatever coal-fired generation capacity that was retired in the US and Europe. Whatever policymakers thought they were achieving by getting rid of coal, they’ve effectively done nothing but increase the cost of energy,” he said. “We haven’t changed anything but make ourselves energy poorer.”
I will conclude with two points I have been making for more than a decade. First, soaring global electricity demand will largely be met in the near term, meaning the next decade or so, by burning more coal, oil, and natural gas. Why? Renewables cannot, will not, be able to scale up to meet soaring global demand for power.
Second, if the countries of the world are serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and providing more electricity to the 3 billion people now living in energy poverty, the only way to do it is with nuclear energy and lots of it.
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Emmet Penney: "my life's work is trying to report on this stuff"
Over the past year or so, Emmet Penney has become one of my favorite writers on energy and power. He brings a sharp new perspective to the issues that have made me think about them in a new way. On Tuesday, Penney, the editor of Grid Brief and host of the Nuclear Barbarians podcast, made his second appearance on the podcast (his first was July 13, 2021). We talked at length about the May 20 closure of the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, his recent essay, “Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it,” the effort by NGOs, policymakers, and climate activists to push “degrowth,” a move he calls “energy Lysenkoism,” and why we cannot take the electric grid for granted. Emmet and I also talked about his motivation and purpose for doing what he does. I was struck by his comment “my life’s work is trying to report on this stuff.”
As I said, I like Emmet a lot and have deep respect for him and the passion he has for his work. Subscribe to Grid Brief. And yes, give this episode a listen. As usual, the video of our chat is also on YouTube.
Bret Kugelmass: Nuclear "has to succeed elsewhere" before we will see a resurgence in the U.S.
Today, we released another podcast (#118) with Bret Kugelmass. Bret is the managing director of the Energy Impact Center and host of the Titans of Nuclear podcast. In this episode, Bret talks about energy security in Europe, why “uranium is everywhere,” mining, enrichment, reactor technologies, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and why the nuclear industry “has to succeed elsewhere” before it will see a resurgence in the United States.
Bret knows the global landscape for nuclear as well as anyone. His take on uranium supplies and why nuclear is essential to our energy future is concise and refreshing. Give the episode a listen. And of course, it's also on YouTube. (Be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel while you’re there.)
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Barn Swallows drinking on the wing at Warbler Woods in Cibolo
On Monday, Lorin and I returned to one of our favorite birding spots: Warbler Woods Bird Sanctuary in Cibolo, which is about an hour south of Austin. Our return to Warbler Woods was extra fun because we went with our pals, Bob and Susan, who recently took up birding. It was a hot day. The fields of the 124-acre sanctuary were pretty dry. We didn’t see any Warblers, nor did we see the bird that we promised Bob and Susan we’d see: the Painted Bunting. But we still had an excellent couple of hours wandering around the property. The highlight was the 15 minutes or so we spent at Scout Pond watching Barn Swallows (Hirundo rustica) swoop over the pond and drink water on the wing. I get my swifts and swallows confused and had to focus on what we were seeing. But they were definitely Barn Swallows. The long outer tail feathers were the key to making the identification. (The photo above of an adult feeding a juvenile was taken in Osaka, Japan in 2016.)
I spend a lot of time looking at birds and I am frequently amazed by them. To see so many Barn Swallows swooping down to the water and grabbing a drink while flying (and barely slowing down while doing so) was a joyous thing. Click here for some dazzling footage from BBC showing them doing just that.
Allaboutbirds.com says this:
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Glistening cobalt blue above and tawny below, Barn Swallows dart gracefully over fields, barnyards, and open water in search of flying insect prey. Look for the long, deeply forked tail that streams out behind this agile flyer and sets it apart from all other North American swallows. Barn Swallows often cruise low, flying just a few inches above the ground or water. True to their name, they build their cup-shaped mud nests almost exclusively on human-made structures.
The Barn Swallow is the most abundant and widely distributed swallow species in the world. It breeds throughout the Northern Hemisphere and winters in much of the Southern Hemisphere... once nested in caves throughout North America, but now build their nests almost exclusively on human-made structures. Today the only North American Barn Swallow population that still regularly uses caves as nest sites occurs in the Channel Islands off the California coast... parents sometimes get help from other birds to feed their young. These “helpers at the nest” are usually older siblings from previous clutches, but unrelated juveniles may help as well. Although the killing of egrets is often cited for inspiring the U.S. conservation movement, it was the millinery (hat-making) trade’s impact on Barn Swallows that prompted naturalist George Bird Grinnell’s 1886 Forest & Stream editorial decrying the waste of bird life. His essay led to the founding of the first Audubon Society.
Happy Friday to y'all. I hope you have a joy-filled weekend.
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