CCS in RCE, King of Tik Tok!, Grid Brief, Elizabeth Muller, & Blue-gray Gnatcatchers
CCS in RCE, King of TikTok!, My first piece in Grid Brief, Muller on Deep Isolation, & Gnatcatchers
We’ve had workmen at the house this week so I’ve been distracted. But the energy news keeps coming and there is plenty to write about. In particular, I’ve been studying the Congressional Budget Office report on the Manchin-Schumer reconciliation bill. It's astonishing how much corporate welfare is in that piece of legislation. It’s also disappointing that the bill, which will have widespread impacts on the economy, the electric grid, and energy costs, is not getting the scrutiny it deserves, either by Congress or big media outlets. As I wrote a few weeks ago, the bill is a perversion of the parliamentary process. This weekend, I will be publishing a piece on the staggering amount of corporate welfare contained in the bill. I published two pieces this week and recorded a bunch of podcasts. Lorin and I have a full day today, so I’ll cut to the chase. Five items:
Grid Brief: What’s Good for Generac is Bad For America
Elizabeth Muller talks Deep Isolation
Blue-gray Gnatcatchers
I snapped the image of the Blue-gray Gnatcatcher (Polioptila caerulea) above from the pages of my 1960s-era copy of Petersen’s Guide To the Birds of Texas.
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On Tuesday, I published a piece in Real Clear Energy on the problems with carbon capture and sequestration. Nothing has changed my mind about CCS since I published my fourth book, Power Hungry, back in 2010. Indeed, the problems are the same ones I identified 12 years ago in a piece I published in the New York Times. So rather than write something new, I re-published the entire thing in RCE. Why? Because policymakers continue to allocate money for it. I began:
It appears the reconciliation bill that includes some $370 billion in energy-related spending is going to become law. The measure includes a panoply of tax credits for alternative energy technologies, including incentives for electric vehicles, hydrogen, energy storage, and of course, billions of dollars in tax credits for wind and solar energy.
The measure also includes, according to the Congressional Budget Office, some $3.2 billion in tax credits for carbon capture and sequestration, a technology that has plenty of supporters but precious little in the way of commercially successful projects. Back in 2018, Al Gore blasted CCS, calling it “nonsense” and an “extremely improbable solution.” The new tax credits for CCS remind me that I published a piece in the New York Times on May 12, 2010, about the technology. In looking back, the piece is still relevant today. In fact, I wouldn’t change a word of it.
I then republished the full text of that New York Times article, which began:
On Wednesday, John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman introduced their long-awaited Senate energy bill, which includes incentives of $2 billion per year for carbon capture and sequestration, the technology that removes carbon dioxide from the smokestack at power plants and forces it into underground storage. This significant allocation would come on top of the $2.4 billion for carbon capture projects that appeared in last year’s stimulus package.
That’s a lot of money for a technology whose adoption faces three potentially insurmountable hurdles: it greatly reduces the output of power plants; pipeline capacity to move the newly captured carbon dioxide is woefully insufficient; and the volume of waste material is staggering. Lawmakers should stop perpetuating the hope that the technology can help make huge cuts in the United States’ carbon dioxide emissions.
Read the rest at Real Clear Energy. Again, here’s a link.
I'm gonna be the King of TikTok!
This week, I posted my first videos on TikTok. Mary has been my sherpa on the project. We have spent several weeks working through technical issues and making sure that the tone and quality of the videos were right. Mary has been encouraging all through the process, saying things like, “Dad, you can talk!” Yes, well. That’s probably true.
Why am I doing TikTok? Three reasons: I like trying something new. More particularly, I like the idea of trying to reach a different (and younger) audience by giving them meaningful content on energy and power. Lord knows they’ve been indoctrinated with hype about renewable energy. Second, I like the challenge of trying to explain things in about a minute. I have a bunch of ideas teed up, including power density, energy density, why coal keeps sticking around, and several others. Third, I'm also planning to post the short videos on Twitter and my YouTube channel.
In any case, it has been great fun to work with Mary and to take on a new challenge on a social media platform that has – get this – 1.2 billion active monthly users. Furthermore, some 57% of TikTok users are female and 43% are between the ages of 17 and 24. The initial (anecdotal) results have been encouraging. A female friend of Jacob’s who lives in Austin pinged him yesterday to say that I had popped up on her TikTok feed. She watched the second video I posted on TikTok. It was on the premature closure of Indian Point. That makes me happy. Follow me on TikTok (my handle is the same as on Twitter: @pwrhungry) and encourage your friends to do the same.
On Thursday, Grid Brief, a newsletter edited by my pal, Emmet Penney, published a piece of mine this week about Generac and the grid. I’ve written about the company before, but I was pleased to be able to use one of the slides I use in my speeches. I began:
Sometimes complex subjects can be grasped by looking at a single image. That’s the case with the chart above, which shows the revenue growth since 2010 at Generac Holdings, the Wisconsin-based company which manufactures about three-quarters of the home generators sold in the U.S.
As can be seen by looking at the chart -- which I copied from the company’s latest investor presentation -- Generac’s revenue has more than doubled since 2019. Over that same time frame, the company’s stock price has quintupled. Earlier this month, during Generac’s earnings call, the company’s CEO, Aaron Jagdfeld, said “second-quarter results were very strong with robust revenue growth, significant sequential margin expansion and all-time records in net sales, adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted EPS.”\
Generac’s soaring sales are evidence that the U.S. electric grid is becoming less reliable. And as the reliability of the grid declines, consumers are spending billions of dollars on home generators to make sure they are not left in the dark when the grid falters. And the grid is faltering all across the country. According to Department of Energy data, the number of what the agency calls “major electric disturbances and unusual occurrences” (read: blackouts) has jumped 13-fold.
The grid is the Mother Network. It’s the energy system upon which all of our most-critical systems depend: GPS, communication, traffic lights, water, and wastewater treatment. And yet, it is being undermined by bad governance and misguided federal tax policy.
I concluded:
The punchline here is obvious: what’s good for Generac is bad for America. That’s not a slam on the company. It’s providing a product consumers want. But homeowners all across the country are spending large sums of money to assure reliable electricity – a friend of mine in Houston is spending about $12,000 for her whole-house generator – that would be better spent on other things, such as education, a new vehicle, or saving for retirement.
Generac’s profits are a reflection of our failing electric grid. If America wants to stay a world leader, it must have a robust grid that delivers cheap, abundant, and reliable electricity 24/7/365. Consumers shouldn’t have to rely on Generac for that.
Read the whole thing here. While you are there, be sure to subscribe to Grid Brief, which is now coming out five times per week.
Elizabeth Muller: nuclear waste should not be an "unsolved problem"
Episode #129 of the Power Hungry Podcast came out this week. My guest is Elizabeth Muller, the CEO of Deep Isolation, a Berkeley-based company that seeks to resolve America’s nuclear waste challenge by using technology borrowed from the oil and gas business. In this episode, she explains why the waste issue must be solved before the nuclear sector can have a full renaissance, why Deep Isolation must have success overseas before it succeeds here, the advantages of using boreholes instead of a mined repository (think Yucca Mountain), and why, when it comes to nuclear, “the world has shifted over the past six months.” By coincidence, the episode was released the same day that Deep Isolation announced a partnership with Amentum, a waste services company. On the podcast, Elizabeth explained why she launched Deep Isolation. The issue, she said is that:
people like to complain about is the unsolved nuclear waste problem. And the industry is pretty good at explaining why the nuclear waste problem isn’t really a problem. And I’m sure you’re familiar with that. But it doesn’t change the minds of the public. And the public points to the fact that nobody has ever disposed of high-level nuclear waste or spent nuclear fuel. And they’re reluctant to support the future of nuclear power until we can prove that we can do it responsibly. I looked at that problem. And I said, that doesn’t look like it should be an unsolved problem.
It was a very good conversation. Again, here’s a link to the audio. And as usual, the video is available on YouTube.
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Blue-gray Gnatcatchers on Barton Creek
I’ve written about Blue-gray Gnatcatchers (Polioptila caerulea) before in this “news” letter. I’m writing about them again because Lorin and I saw several of them while hiking a few days ago. (The image above is from Audubon's Birds of America.) We watched them – there were four birds in the group – perch and re-perch on the dried-out bushes along Barton Creek. We weren’t in a hurry, so we followed them for several minutes. I began counting so I could tell how long an individual would stay on the same perching spot. On average, they would only stay on the perch for a count of five, or maybe eight. And then they would move on to the next spot. They aren’t much bigger than hummingbirds and according to my bird guides, they are only about 4 inches long and weigh about 6 grams. My iBird app says this:
By flicking its white-edged tail from side to side, the Gnatcatcher may scare up hiding insects. They remove the wings of larger insects and beat larger prey on a perch. The Blue-gray Gnatcatcher is the northernmost occurring species of Gnatcatcher and the only truly migratory one. Their breeding range is expanding northward, especially in eastern North America...Eats aphids, mepterans, beetles, moths, butterflies, ants, bees, wasps, and spiders; forages by moving up and down outer branches of trees or shrubs...monogamous, solitary nester.
Have a good weekend.
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