Adios, Mailchimp. Hello Substack! New articles in Forbes & RCE, Rapier on the podcast, Nuthatches aplenty

You are getting my Friday "news" letter on Sunday because on Friday afternoon, I pressed the "send" button on this epistle only to be hit with this message from Mailchimp: "Our automated abuse-prevention system, Omnivore, has detected an action or content in your account that may be in violation of our Acceptable Use Policy." 

It took nearly eight hours for Mailchimp’s "customer service" to respond to my appeal and acknowledge that there was no prohibited content (was it the use of “booby” the collective noun for Nuthatches?) in my message. I tried sending the same epistle yesterday morning only to be denied again. I appealed and Mailchimp still hasn’t replied. Thus, I’m done with Mailchimp. I’ve been thinking about moving to Substack for a long time and I guess that spate of stupidness was the nudge that I needed. In any case, I am finding the Substack interface to be pretty easy to manage.

I may add a paid element to Substack. But my Friday epistle will always be free. In any case, here are the updates you should have received two days ago: 

Lorin and I got back from Oklahoma on Saturday afternoon. It was great to be with my family over the Thanksgiving holiday. (As I mentioned in this “news” letter last week, I come from a large clan and almost all of them live in Tulsa). Plus, it’s always a joy to see Oklahoma in the fall. The colors of the leaves there are more vibrant than what we usually see here in Austin. But it’s even better to come back home to Austin and to be able to swim in Barton Springs and hike on Barton Creek. Four items today: 

• RCE: Siemens CEO confirms Iron Law of Power Density

• Forbes: Revisiting my 15-year-old interview with Jesse Ausubel

• Rapier talks diesel, refining, and investing on the podcast

• A booby of Red-breasted Nuthatches in Tulsa

The photo above was taken in 2010 in Quebec.

On Friday, Real Clear Energy published my piece on the Iron Law of Power Density. As you know from my books and articles, I continually use power density because it is such a critical metric. I began:

• Last month, the CEO of Siemens Energy, Christian Bruch, appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” to talk about the myriad problems facing the wind industry. And during his appearance, he confirmed the Iron Law of Power Density. Bruch said his firm was “in the heart of the energy transition” but there were “challenges” in wind energy, particularly with regard to supply chains. And this is where his comments revealed what I call the Iron Law of Power Density, which says the lower the power density of a given source, the higher the resource intensity. Bruch said: “Never forget, renewables like wind roughly, roughly, need 10 times the material [compared to] ... what conventional technologies need...So if you have problems on the supply chain, it hits … wind extremely hard, and this is what we see.” 

• Siemens and other companies that produce wind turbines are being hammered by huge losses. Siemens just posted a net loss of 647 million euros, which was up from a 560 million euro loss in the previous year. In October, GE announced that its renewable energy business will lose a staggering $2 billion this year. Those losses are being driven in large part, by the surging cost of metals like zinc, nickel, neodymium, and copper. If your power plant requires 10 times more of those commodities than other forms of power generation, it’s readily apparent why the Siemens boss is saying his company is having “problems on the supply chain.”

I concluded:

• There are many reasons why N2N, natural gas to nuclear, is the obvious way forward if we are serious about reducing CO2 emissions. Low material intensity is just one of them. Add the fact that both sources are proven, low- or no-carbon, affordable, and scalable, and it quickly becomes clear why I’ve been advocating for N2N for more than a dozen years. 

• In summary, the Iron Law of Power Density will not be repealed. While it’s great that the CEO of Siemens is underscoring wind energy’s fatal flaw, his warnings need to be heeded by the policymakers, NGOs, and elite academics who continue hyping the dead end of wind energy. 

Again, here’s a link. 

On Wednesday, I published a piece in Forbes that revisits an interview I did 15 years ago with Jesse Ausubel. I have written about Ausubel many times in my books, articles, and in this “news” letter because his work has had such a big influence on my career. I won’t belabor the point, but I decided to reprint that long-ago interview because it remains relevant today. I began:

• Last Friday, Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal, published an article, headlined “’Climate Reparations’ Are a New Name for Foreign Aid.” The piece includes quotes from an interview I did with Rockefeller University’s Jesse Ausubel back in 2007 when I was writing for the now-defunct Energy Tribune. Jenkins cited Ausubel from that 15-year-old interview thusly: “I do not think energy policy matters much over the long run. Certainly diplomats do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In general, politicians are pulling on disconnected levers.”

• Jenkins concluded his piece by writing that “the evolution of human society and technology will determine how much CO2 goes into the air. It won’t be controlled by bureaucrats and diplomats. And climate politics, as the U.N. showed last week, can only become more nakedly than ever an opportunity to sprinkle money among corporate welfarists and influential elites here and abroad.”

• Of course, I was pleased, and more than a little surprised, that Jenkins excavated that long-ago interview. (I had to hunt for it myself)... Given Jenkins’ mention of my September 2007 interview with Ausubel, and the fact that Energy Tribune is no longer in business, I decided that it makes sense to reprint that long-ago interview here in Forbes so that more people can find it. Note in particular that his comments about the rising use of natural gas (and the need for more pipelines) occurred before the start of the shale revolution here in the U.S. He also mentions high-temperature, gas-cooled nuclear reactors, which are just now being commercialized. (For more on that, see my piece in these pages from January 31, that discusses China’s deployment of HTGRs).

• I believe you will find Ausubel’s comments on energy, technology, and climate politics stand up very well despite the passage of 15 years.

Again, here’s a link. 

Robert Rapier on the Power Hungry Podcast

This week, we released the 150th episode of the Power Hungry Podcast. And I am pleased that it features my friend, Robert Rapier, the editor of Utility Forecaster. Rapier is a no-nonsense chemical engineer with more than 25 years of international engineering experience in chemicals, oil and gas, and renewables. He also writes for Forbes. I have known Robert for about a decade. We became acquainted because we were both writing lots of articles about the folly of biofuels. We quickly became friends because of our many shared interests and our deep Oklahoma roots. (Robert was born and raised in Hugo.) In this episode, Robert talks about the ongoing diesel shortage in the U.S., the mismatch between domestic crude production and domestic refining capacity, his stock-investment strategies, Vinod Khosla’s stupid  bet on biofuels, why cellulosic ethanol has never worked, and why he believes ExxonMobil is “going to be in business for a long time” to come.

The episode was recorded on November 15, 2022. The audio and transcript are here. As always, it’s also available on YouTube.

Red-breasted Nuthatches: "an acrobatic species"      

My pal, Chris, has an amazing yard in the Owen Park neighborhood in Tulsa. There’s a massive pecan in the backyard and a bunch of low bushes. He has also set up a couple of water features and a feeder. The result is that his yard attracts birds at all times of the day. Last week, Lorin and I were sipping our coffee on his back patio and were amazed by the influx of Red-breasted Nuthatches, (Sitta canadensis) a bird that we don’t ever see in Austin. They are tiny, active, beautiful birds. At first, I thought they were some type of creeper, but the distinctive eye stripe and red breast made them easy to distinguish. (The photo above is from the American Bird Conservancy.) And yes, the collective noun for Nuthatches is “booby.” Wikipedia says this:

• ...a small songbird. The adult has blue-grey upperparts with cinnamon underparts, a white throat and face with a black stripe through the eyes, a straight grey bill and a black crown. Its call, which has been likened to a tin trumpet, is high-pitched and nasal. It breeds in coniferous forests across Canada, Alaska and the northeastern and western United States...There are records of vagrants occurring as far south as the Gulf Coast and northern Mexico. It forages on the trunks and large branches of trees, often descending head first, sometimes catching insects in flight. It eats mainly insects and seeds, especially from conifers. It excavates its nest in dead wood, often close to the ground, smearing the entrance with pitch...Though it is primarily a full-time resident of northern and subalpine conifer forests, the red-breasted nuthatch regularly migrates irruptively, with both the number migrating and the wintering locations varying from year to year. They sometimes reach northern Mexico, where they are rare winter visitors to Nuevo León, Baja California Norte and south along the Pacific slope as far as Sinaloa. In the eastern United States, its range is expanding southwards. Though formerly resident on Isla Guadalupe, an island off the western coast of Mexico, it appears to have been extirpated there, with the last known record of the species on the island dating from 1971. There is a single vagrant record for Mexico's Isla Socorro...an extremely rare vagrant to Europe, with two records in the western Palearctic; one bird successfully overwintered in eastern England.

• Like all nuthatches, the Red-breasted Nuthatch is an acrobatic species, hitching itself up and down tree trunks and branches to look for food. It goes headfirst when climbing down. It can "walk" on the underside of branches. Unlike woodpeckers and creepers, it does not use its tail as a prop while climbing. It tends to forage singly or in pairs. The Red-breasted Nuthatch's diet changes depending on the season. In the summer, it eats mostly insects, occasionally even flycatching, while in the winter, it switches to conifer seeds. At feeders it will take sunflower seeds, peanut butter, and suet. It often wedges food pieces in bark crevices in order to break them up with the bill (as opposed to holding the food in their feet, like the black-capped chickadee does).

• The Red-breasted Nuthatch, like all nuthatches, is monogamous. The male courts the female with a peculiar display, lifting his head and tail while turning his back to her, drooping his wings, and swaying from side to side. This bird excavates its own cavity nest, 1.53–37 m (5.0–121.4 ft) above ground (usually around 4.6 m (15 ft)). Excavation is by both sexes and takes one to eight weeks. The pair smears sap around the entrance hole, presumably to help deter predators. The nest is lined with grass, moss, shredded bark and rootlets. Nest building is by both sexes, but mostly by the female.

• The female lays 2–8 eggs (usually 5–6), which are white, creamy or pinkish, and covered with reddish-brown speckles. The eggs measure 0.6–0.7 in (1.5–1.8 cm) long by 0.4–0.5 in (1.0–1.3 cm) wide. Incubation is by the female and lasts 12–13 days. The young are altricial and stay in the nest for 2–3 weeks, brooded by the female but fed by both sexes. Normally there is only one brood per year. Lifespan is around 6 years.

I hope you have wonderful weekend. 

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