Fred Stafford
@fredstaffordcs
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STEM professional on the Left, @jacobin @catalyst_theory @theintercept @TheBTI contributor. @damagemag editor. Interested in decarb, tech, power sector, labor.
Joined January 2018
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Pinned Tweet
ICYMI:
@Matthuber78
& I were interviewed on Odd Lots podcast last week, discussing electric utilities, monopoly vs competition in the sector, public power, how offshore wind projects in deregulated areas differ from the only one by a utility, and the TVA.
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Cool photos inside UK nuclear plants but editorialized as "hell" and "sinister" for no reason at all.
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Peep the banner behind Fain - IBEW local 175, who built the VW plant and have been letting UAW use their hall and office space for the campaign. LU 175 also represents linemen for TVA and construction and refueling workers for TVA's Watts Bar and Sequoyah nuclear plants. 💪
Shawn Fain, president of the
@UAW
, just spoke to the victorious Tennessee VW workers:
"The talking heads and the pundits said to me repeatedly before we announced this campaign, you can't win in the South, and Southern workers aren't ready for it."
Next up, Mercedes in Alabama.
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This claptrap is what passes for serious analysis of power sector on degrowth left. Nuclear requires monopoly and domination while solar panels are democratic and can be run by coops.
So what localist entity is balancing the grid? How is 24/7 industrial baseload supplied? 1/
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Returning to this observation from Lenin, recalled by
@OlufemiOTaiwo
recently, alongside my argument in another thread why decarbonization politics must involve industrial unions: socialists and progressives are wildly overestimating their understanding of these key sectors.
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Imagine the New Deal programs in the presence of today's NGOs. Nothing would've happened! The CCC, the WPA, the PWA, the TVA, Bonneville, etc etc - everything would be mired in process arguments about legitimate use of public resources instead of delegating to govt agencies.
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A former chairman of Rocky Mountain Institute writes strong criticism of "100% renewables" proponents for ignoring real political & economic problems and promotes nuclear energy as an obvious solution we must expand. Many of same args we made in Jacobin.
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That Biden failed to bring up how much manufacturing the climate legislation brought to America, and instead talked up the American Climate Corps, is really maddening, but also matches the priorities of many climate advocates
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with DiCaprio, De Niro, and Ralph Lauren, taking in a total of $1.6 million in one night from a bunch of elite liberals, helping his NGO Riverkeeper to take down Indian Point nuclear power plant. A real people's hero for the environment.
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A tale of two energy infrastructure demolitions:
Below, Germany destroying cooling towers at a safe, effective nuclear plant, far cleaner than grid.
In video from yesterday, TVA destroying smoke stacks at old Paradise coal plant, far dirtier than grid.
In a few minutes, Germans will blow up two cooling towers at the world-class Grafenrheinfeld nuclear plant.
In past generations, it took a lot of American lives and money to destroy Germany's infrastructure.
Now they do it to themselves.
Hardly an improvement I have to say.
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There's a lot that's misleading and flat-out wrong from leftist Joshua Frank about nuclear power and us pronuclear socialists, but wanted to highlight this aggressively moronic statement from him, equating us to the capitalist class:
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It's backwards to insist that household backup generators - whether expensive EVs or expensive Tesla Powerwalls - will be the salvation of the electrical system. We need public investment in infrastructure not subsidized household consumer goods.
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A lot of magical thinking from Marxists who've drifted away from world of industrial production & producers. Their complete ignorance of said production - replaced with a scholarly devotion to its *effects* only - manifests as assertions of its inherent political flaws. 🤔 3/
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NEW: Why TVA's Grid is Greener Than Greens Grant.
The Tennessee Valley Authority is "one of the dirtiest utilities" according to many environmental nonprofits and to their sympathetic journalists, politicians, and wonks. They're all wrong. 1/
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Those localist democratic solar panels, by the way, spring straight from anarcho-syndicalist communes without any mineral extraction or domination, like Athena springing from Zeus's forehead. As do whatever resources make their electrical output useful on balanced grid. 2/
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Sometimes it's worth stepping back and seeing that unions have democratically elected representation, member constituency, and member funding, while activist NGOs generally have zero democracy and top-down positions/priorities chosen by old guard and nudged by wealthy financiers
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Click thru this op-ed from
#1
scientific practitioner of cancel culture and see his cited evidence for 100% wind water solar in TX assumes whopping 7,000 GW of batteries, w/o explanation or further attention to the magnitude. ERCOT has about 86 GW total generating capacity today.
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People rightly identify that individual car ownership (which I'm not antagonizing) cannibalized potential interest & investment in mass transit. But they don't extend that idea to distributed solar, which seeks to expand personal property over infrastructure held in commons.
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The Senate just voted 88-2 for the most significant clean energy bill to pass since the IRA, a massive package to speed up licensing and construction of new nuclear reactors at home and overseas.
Only Sens. Ed Markey and Bernie Sanders opposed.
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My article in
@jacobinmag
on the electricity crisis in Texas and how it's a failure of markets and the invisible hand. But instead of joining the Right in culture war over renewables, let's get serious about how to more effectively produce for social need.
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New(ish) from me: My big feature on the life and tragic death of the Indian Point nuclear power plant outside NYC.
From FDR public power, to OPEC crisis, to deregulated markets, to privatization, to elite Green attacks using the state. Published in
@jacobin
print, now online.
New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s closure of the Indian Point nuclear power plant was championed by many liberal activists — but it was a disaster for workers and the environment.
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I'm flabbergasted that the consumer technology reporter gets everything so wrong and trumpets the same tired neoliberal view of the energy system and its trajectory
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Who needs public infrastructure when you can turn everyone into a prosumer who (believes they) can go rugged individualist when needed
Giving everyone rooftop solar and batteries is cheaper and safer than fixing Maui’s grid. 🤷🏽♂️
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IBEW and others chanting "save our nukes" outside Illinois legislature, urging passage of bill to protect clean energy jobs in nuclear. If socialists and progressives aren't backing this campaign from
@ClimateJobsIL
and others then they have a severe case of cultural politics
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There's interest on the left in public power and yet our nation's primary living example is beleaguered by largely disingenuous attacks from well-funded, unrepresentative environmental groups who inform all the media coverage on that system in the absence of any other voices
ICYMI: I crunched the numbers & showed, in multiple ways, why the Tennessee Valley Authority, a New Deal public power system still going strong, is one of the cleaner parts of our electricity system, contra unscrutinized claims from environmental groups.
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Latest from
@Matthuber78
and me in
@jacobin
. Though we open with a brief defense of the TVA, we actually present a broad political critique of the dominant left mindset on decarbonization, and a call for a return to the politics of Big Public Power. 1/x
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You might think this NGO huckster was being counter-sued *by Stanford* but nope his minor victory here isn't about his scientific integrity but his ability to force his employer to pay his legal fees.
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The Green NGOs made up of NYC area elites promised a just transition for workers after they, Cuomo, and RFK Jr. practically forced the insane closure of Indian Point nuclear plant. Now just recently they have screwed over **the decommissioning workers** over bullshit science.
One of the big sticking points for Indian Point Nuclear's closure was the fate of the workers. Politicians like
@SenatorHarckham
and NGOs like
@riverkeeper
and
@SloopClearwater
promised a "Just Transition." New on our blog: what happened with all that?
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From complaints of nuclear subsidies in IL to general cultural attitudes about renewables, I love how ostensibly leftwing people think capitalism controls the fossil and nuclear industries but not the renewables industries. Folks, it's labor vs. capital all the way down
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Very sad. Climate activists blocking people's routes to work in tiny little isolated protests do nothing for a majoritarian progressive program of decarbonization, jobs, and freedom. If anything, probably puts off the needed working-class base
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Mfers take investment decisions by the investor class as indicative of the relative utility of different kinds of infrastructure and thereby rationalize the continued dominance of said class in infrastructure investment that is favorable to them.
"Clean power" is not a useful analytical category:
We have wind & solar growing exponentially.
And we have nuclear, hydro, bio struggling to stagnate.
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For more on Kennedy's decades-long commitment to fighting Indian Point nuclear power plant, despite his father's earlier help enabling the New York Power Authority to build and own nuclear - including Indian Point Unit 3 - check out my feature:
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1/ NEW from me &
@Matthuber78
, "The Utility of Utilities." We've written plenty of leftwing arguments for public power, so here's a leftwing argument for the monopoly utility model itself - yes even investor-owned - contra deregulation & more competition.
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NYSERDA used to be Atomic and Space Development Authority, until the Safe Energy Act of 1975 changed state policy to abandon nuclear and promote solar + alt energy sources instead.
Below is the actual logo used in one of their annual reports I found in NYS library!
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When your progressive politics has absolutely no concern for industrial production, no relationship w/ industrial workers, no interest in markets, and idealizes a decentralization that obfuscates the actual processes themselves: mining, manufacturing, financing, & grid balancing.
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@OlufemiOTaiwo
Where does the institutional capacity to organize, manage, and produce in extraordinarily complicated systems like electric power actually come from? Who will be today's New Deal technocrats who confront the thorny details of, say, public power, in oppo to the capitalists?
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I wish I could convey how insightful it is to hear about the electricity sector from union representatives with careers spent in the sector, and not just from wonks and environmental NGO staffers. The left's shift away from the former and embrace of the latter is a crying shame.
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A couple years ago Christian Parenti wrote "A Left Defense of Carbon Dioxide Removal," part of a larger collection not available online. With his permission, because I think it's so excellent and deserving to be read, I'm sharing it here. 1/
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Liberal critiques of the TVA never fail to **omit** the fact that TVA's grid area is **less carbon intensive** than neighboring market-based grid areas that have a lot more wind and solar. How can you trust them?
The federally owned Tennessee Valley Authority could be leading the clean energy transition. Instead, it's poisoning the countryside,
@dorothyslater_
writes.
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Biden-era policies continue to incentivize, support, and even help resurrect (Palisades in MI) nuclear power in America. For all the talk of conservatives and Republicans being the nuclear supporters, it's a Dem administration that's bolstering the economic viability of nuclear.
DOE
@ENERGY
announces its decision to award credits to PG&E under the Civil Nuclear Credit (CNC) Program for the continued operation of Diablo Canyon Power Plant Units 1 and 2
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1/ My latest essay is out, my first for
@TheBTI
. They asked me to write about nuclear & public power, so I was happy to oblige. In short, it's a socialist case for public investment in nuclear, the TVA, and a return to New Deal politics of public power. 🧵
With the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act,
@fredstaffordcs
argues it’s time to revive a New Deal politics of public power—one in which nuclear energy and the Tennessee Valley Authority should be front and center:
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The useless, misleading commentary about this position is that it exists basically nowhere in mainstream American politics, whereas the inverse, 100% renewables advocates, enshrine that goal in state & fed legislation and falsely report it in media as actual fact on the regular.
I think a lot of the "No renewables, only nuclear" Twitter bros don't even care about nuclear. What they want is to keep using fossil fuels. But they hold up the idea of nuclear as a talisman to ward away people who want renewables.
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Battery production is essential for keeping potentially good jobs in the electric vehicle manufacturing process. All the more reason why it's **amazing** that UAW has now won a concession from GM to get all their battery workers on the same GM master contract as the auto workers.
HUGE story by
@emilypont
.
For years, we’ve believed that EVs will require fewer workers than gas cars do.
It’s become a truism repeated by CEOs, politicians, journalists.
But recent evidence suggests it’s not true—and that EVs might use *more* workers.
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To those worried about state of rail system after decades of staffing cuts to wring profitability, may I also interest you in worrying about city electrical grids.
In NYC area, Con Ed shed ~1/2 its workers in same time. Knowledge of critical infrastructure being lost w/ retirees
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Kate Brown offers another ex of such belief that political powers of capitalist domination are inherently required for nuclear energy but not for wind & solar energy. Again forget *balancing*, or that those powers invest in latter, decidedly not former. 4/
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1/ For anyone arriving here from Odd Lots, I highly encourage you to read mine and
@Matthuber78
's
@damagemag
essay that was the basis of the discussion. There we give broader historical narrative and the perspective of organized labor.
NEW ODD LOTS:
How we got the modern electricity grid. And how nuclear got squeezed out.
@tracyalloway
and I talked to
@fredstaffordcs
and
@Matthuber78
about power market structure, and how "small is beautiful"-liberalism set back decarbonization
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Do they extend same thinking to healthcare? Hospitals often owned by corp conglomerates; their boilers are heavily polluting; they handle radioactive materials & waste; military operates them for its needs too. Yikes! We should prefer small democratic decentralized healthcare. 5/
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Imagine a political project that sees opposition to nuclear power as commensurable with support for universal public programs of ecological, economic, and social renewal for the masses. Completely insane.
The Republicans are lying to you. The only way we can have 100% energy independence is through a 100% green energy infrastructure. You do not need to import the wind, water, sun, and waves. We want a
#GreenNewDeal
.
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Indeed this happened w/ Indian Point. Dirty old peaker plants around NYC, in primarily working class areas, emitting more pollutants after closure to compensate. Plus new gas plants coming online.
Now trust some of same green NGOs who cheered this on w/ new NY power policies!
New MIT study finds that:
- Closing nuclear power plants leads to thousands of deaths from air pollution
- Black people are disproportionately affected by the increased pollution
- More people die even when the power plants are replaced by ‘renewables’
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Reminder that it sucks that Puerto Rico's electrical grid was privatized & lacks sufficient investment in resilience, but progressive NGO world is pushing literal degrowth 100% renewable model of *no* load growth (incl pop decline & manufacturing loss) & magic efficiency gains.
Re "degrowth": UTIER+NGOs' 100% renewable PR modeling explicitly assumes *zero* electrical demand growth all the way to 2035 (new mfr jobs? more A/C? electric vehicles? who needs it!).
Cherry on top is extra 25% reduction "for, uhh, energy efficiency."
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Really funny that the absolutism of "100% renewables," in which the vast majority of jobs involve transient workforces going around site to site for extended periods of time, inhibiting family and care for dependents, is portrayed as the anti-chauvinistic position by NGO academia
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🚨 📣 Finally a report on the case for, and political context around, new nuclear as public power at the Tennessee Valley Authority. And not just small modular reactors but more AP1000s like in Georgia. Will have more to add later, but everyone should read this. 🇺🇸
A Century-Old Company The Government Owns Wants To Solve A Big Energy Problem
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Why on earth are you modeling *no new nuclear* in this 100% clean transition, despite TVA's nation-leading commitment to deploying *20 small modular reactors* and enthusiasm from mgmt & labor? Does it have something to do with renewables industry advisors on the report?
NEW Study by
@SynapseEnergy
@GridLabEnergy
@CenterForBioDiv
: TVA can retire fossil fuels by 2035 to reach 100% clean energy, save $250 billion, & create 1000s of jobs.
It's up to
@TVAnews
@POTUS
to make
#TVALeadTheWay
in our just energy transition.
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2021 Winter Storm with blackouts in multiple states: only a single nuclear reactor out of 90+ in the US trips offline during storm
2022 Winter Storm with blackouts in multiple states: only a single nuclear reactor out of 90+ in the US trips offline during storm
🤔
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Re exciting VP pick of Walz, recall that Minnesota is one of the states with a law against any new nuclear. But unions in the state have been arguing in favor of new nuclear to meet the Walz-signed carbon-free energy goals. Here's an example from Feb last year:
Labor unions that helped pass 100% carbon-free electricity legislation in Minnesota now also supporting a GOP-led bill to study advanced nuclear reactors, alongside private & coop utilities, against oppo from some (not all) progressives. cc
@KevinPranis
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Efforts coming together to re-open Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan that closed last year b/c it couldn't find an economical taker for its power in the restructured market. Labor union (UWUA), local Dem pol, and even biz groups want it back.
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In new Catalyst essay,
@Matthuber78
& I lay out a socialist politics for the electricity system & its decarbonization - history, materialist understanding, priorities, and toward strategy - in direct contrast to enviro/climate movement. Dm/email for pdf.
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Ecosocialists continue to reject nuclear out of hand. Report from DSA/Squad-aligned think tank
@cpluscp
faults the IRA for "technology-neutral framing" b/c it "will drive the bulk of investment into *advanced nuclear*, CDR tech, gas, & other measures" instead of just renewables.
New from
@cpluscp
: we take a long, hard look at the Inflation Reduction Act. IRA includes some good spending, some terrible provisions, and some gaping oversights. But most importantly it reframes the fight for a Green New Deal
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Jacobin's web editors need a more careful eye. This screed they published not only dismisses legitimacy of
@iaeaorg
and its international laboratory testing of Fukushima water, they allow citation to article by one-man NGO as if it's peer-reviewed science.
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It's no coincidence. The trajectory of neoliberalism has involved parceling out state capacity into these entities instead. Why appropriate money from capitalist class to pay for and run public programs when they can donate to their preferred NGOs to do so instead.
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Looks to be pretty hot in Texas but turn off those ACs, loyal consumer citizens, because the profit-driven invisible hand of the market isn't keeping up with your needs
ERCOT has issued a Conservation Alert, and Texans are being asked to safely reduce their electric use.
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Presidents of the IBEW & the American Nuclear Society wrote a strong case for nuclear's critical role in decarbonization, based on jobs, reusing fossil infrastructure and workforce, and land use requirements. The Left can follow labor & science or it can follow academics & NGOs.
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Since TVA's Watts Bar Unit 2 came online in 2016, it's generated almost as much carbon-free energy as all the wind and solar in New England (~7x more capacity today), and in same time *all* TVA nuclear has generated more than all the wind and solar in California (~4x more cap).
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Spot the bullshit in this billionaire-funded green nonprofit report attacking TVA:
They say it's in top 10 for carbon emissions but that's by absolute emissions amount (in 2018). When you look at the same source data ranked by emissions *rate* then TVA is the 65th worst. 🤔
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If we should trust internat bodies of health on Covid, like WHO - as was rallying cry for US liberals last yr - then we should also trust the internat body devoted to effects of radiation, UNSCEAR, which just released revised study of Fukushima.
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The strategy of pouring capital into renewables doesn't seem to bear much fruit in decarbonizing California's electricity, among top states driving it.
Minor caveats: this is CAISO, not all CA (excl eg Sacramento, LA), and excludes rooftop solar (~10% of total in 2010s-today).
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My first thought was wow why does only the green part get bigger and not the blue? Then, ohh, "Source: International Renewable Energy Agency," the entity that sounds innocuous but actually promotes the absurdity of "100% Renewables" via financial accounting with RECs.
To do the energy transition we need to restart the process of global electrification that stalled in AE in the 1970s. A lot of power will need a lot of lines! Cant do it without connections.
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Speaking for myself only, demands to immediately halt fossil fuel production - to keep it all in the ground - are similarly divorced from reality, and the masses can surely smell that a mile away. To say this on the left of course is to be branded a climate denier, heretic, etc.
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Interview with conservative FERC commissioner who's got heretical ideas compared to prevailing wisdom on power markets: maybe more restructuring, more market pricing, isn't good. Kudos to
@MattZeitlin
for this interview, a real rarity in climate journalism
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Peep this beautiful design for the New Deal Public Works Administration's 1939 book "America Builds." You can see influence of public power: the PWA helped build hydro for TVA, Bonneville, Grand Coulee, etc, plus 71 new, 173 expanded power plants around US
End of the day, when public power was ascendant, it was either before investor-owned utilities had foothold in electricity across the country, or it was in the presence of federal policies designed to promote them. In particular, *there used to be cheap power/financing for them.*
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Good thread with lots of examples how certain ecosocialist strains will try to parse Marx's late B sides in order to argue "see, the stuff I care about is where Marx was headed intellectually, but he died before completing the album"
I've read this & I have many thoughts. I will write a review, but not sure when I'll have time or where it will end up. In the meantime, I can't help but address what I think is a totally unsubstantiated claim in the book: Marx *abandons* historical materialism late in life. 1/x
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Federal waters along most of US coastline will soon be *leased to private developers* to build and sell output of offshore wind. We're a long way from New Deal ideas about public power, sadly.
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2/ A solar developer says it's unfair b/c they can't provide energy overnight, when storm really caused issues across the region, so they should be seen as having planned outage and thereby avoid penalty ... every single night. Don't sell *capacity* then?
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Very cool that the energy transition means, for many liberals, leashing individuals to scammy solar small biz with questionable financial setups, locking them into contracts for years, all without the same state-regulated contracts as with utilities
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1/ Fascinating. PJM forces sellers of capacity resources to pay up if they don't provide power when needed, and now some are mad after getting bill from Winter Storm Elliott.
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Billionaire funded NGOs tag team against TVA, with misleading claims only rebuttable w/ sufficient technical knowledge, and w/o an iota of interest in organized labor or protecting public power institutions from privatizing their power systems. Even new nuclear ignored entirely.
The biggest public utility in the U.S.
@TVAnews
is defying the Biden
@WhiteHouse
's national climate pledges by pushing more dirty fossil gas plants.
It’s time for
@POTUS
to ensure TVA cleans up their act and their energy.
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100% renewables is to energy justice what police abolition is to criminal justice. Needlessly absolutist moral position that fires up a minoritarian ideological base while stoking culture war more than political struggle over power, capital, and freedom.
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As someone on the left who, unlike David Roberts, actually bothers to interview and disseminate the labor movement perspective on the power system, I feel comfortable saying he's exactly the problem he ascribes to others. 1/
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The problem with treating NGOs as voices of the public, with respect to legal system, is that unlike governmental bodies they have no mandate to promote the general welfare. Their ultimate constituency is the funders who sustain them, and their particular, narrow interests.
The more I learn about this project, the more absurd the "environmental" opposition is! The new 345 kV line will be located alongside an EXISTING road already bisecting the Upper Mississippi Wildlife Refuge and it will ELIMINATE an pair of existing transmission corridors!
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I'm skeptical about such claims of toxic metals and minerals "leaking" from solar panels into natural environment. Can anyone point me to evidence that rebuts it?
In yet another massive L for 'green' energy boondoggles, a massive swathe of solar panels in Damon, Texas were taken out by a hail storm
And not only were the expensive panels rendered useless by the weather, but now they're leaking a toxic compound, cadmium telluride, into the
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NEW in
@damagemag
: BIG PUBLIC POWER, then & now, from
@Matthuber78
& me. Damage issue 1 features "Then" & "Now" short essays, so we wrote:
Then: "Big Public Power from the River"
Now: "Big Public Power from the Atom"
Read both online now for free w/ newsletter signup. 🧵: 1/
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Interesting read about the groups that helped campaign for the legislation to preserve the IL nuclear plants. Key partnerships between pronuclear groups (dare I say NGOs!), science and engineering groups, and labor unions.
Today marks a massive victory for the United States pro-nuclear movement as key laws were passed in the Illinois legislature that secure the futures of the Byron and Dresden Nuclear Plants. ✊⚛️
Article by: Gio Liguori and Eric Meyer
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The federal government's clean tech venture capitalist turned Dept of Energy administrator understands what so many on the political left bizarrely, maddeningly ignore:
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A big problem with energy democracy discourse is it's basically about empowering consumers to choose a project to "invest in" and then earn mild shared revenues from, eg, community solar. Nothing to do with democracy of *producers* (workers) or understanding of how it meets needs
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Had long phone call w/ policy staffer at major utilities union about electricity restructuring and workforce concerns in the power sector. Amazes me how much there is to learn from sources like this, and how my fellow researchers and writers on the left don't seem to talk them.
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New report commissioned by Sierra Club shows that - you'll never guess! - TVA's generation fleet should be slowly privatized in the form of contracted, for-profit renewables and hey why not contract with developers in neighboring restructured markets too!
ICYMI: Instead of switching to cleaner sources, Tennessee Valley Authority will spend more money & cause more harm to our environment by replacing 2️⃣ coal plants with fracked gas pipelines. Check out more in our latest report.
#NoTVAPipelines
#PassOnGas
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Good thing Hydro-Quebec listened to our Odd Lots episode this morning
Hydro-Quebec is going to become the prime contractor on large scale wind projects, it says that the old model of having the private sector build small wasn't working to meet its wind goals of 10gw by 2035
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... Look at these capitalist pigs, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, celebrating the concession of their bosses at UPS for agreeing to provide AIR CONDITIONING in their vehicles. 😂
🚨🚨🚨
BREAKING: TEAMSTERS SECURE AIR CONDITIONING FOR UPS FLEET IN MAJOR TENTATIVE DEAL
The
#Teamsters
and UPS agreed to tentative language to equip the delivery and logistics company’s fleet of vehicles with air conditioning systems, new heat shields, and additional fans.
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As Huber and I wrote last spring, on subject of decarb, the clearest example of what Lenin talked about - socialists being utterly unconvincing in their understanding of how to produce what capitalists currently do - is demand for "100% renewables"
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OH just now from a nuclear consultant: "There will be no new nuclear without the DOE Loan Programs Office, full stop."
LPO, America's clean energy investor - created by GOP admin in 2005 as part of nuclear renaissance goals - will likely be under crosshairs of new GOP admin.
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There's a new bill in Illinois to remove the moratorium on new nuclear plants. The current list of witnesses registered to speak for vs. against shows clear delineation between union members of different sorts in favor and Sierra Club and greens against.
Witness slip update:
• 204 union tradespeople, professors, urbanists for new nuclear in Illinois
• 76 fear mongers against (seriously what is gaia wisdom ??), also Sierra Club 😵💫
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Insane that the climate groups and the left *chose* to leave this entire, necessary terrain of clean firm power to the trade groups for merchant generators by limiting, from beginning of their campaign, the expanded purview of NYPA to *only* renewables. It should be part of this.
Power companies and environmentalists have battled for years over the role of non-renewable energy - like hydrogen and nuclear - in New York's future.
Energy regulators just announced they'll take a fresh look at the issue. Here's what you need to know.
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Bitcoin miners are like vampire doctors. They suck your blood and then, after you've gone faint and need medical attention, expect compensation for the service of stopping temporarily. And their "medical licenses" are happily granted by the state.
Texas avoided blackouts today. A Gigawatt of demand reduction from cryptocurrency miners helped.
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Me sowing deregulation, more market actors, competition, flexibility, intermittent renewables, and demand response: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!
Me reaping Bitcoin miners taking over the deregulated grid: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.
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Of course they were dead wrong. If Watts Bar 2 hadn't been finished TVA's power system would be far dirtier, far worse off for decarb. As I calculated for essay, since online this one reactor has generated more clean energy than all New England wind+solar.
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Listened to Brett Christophers on Volts. Mostly appreciated but it reveals limitation of focusing so much on energy finance, to excl of power system concerns like balancing. BC's answer to "why not utilities" lacking IMO. Think this review/essay still key
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