I Never Intended to be a Cassandra
I had assumed Colorado's Energy Policy was well thought out
The primary issue in the German election is Energy. If blue states continue on their present path, it’ll likely be the primary issue in ‘26 & ‘28. And Democrats will lose.
This past November if there had been an initiative to increase our taxes to fund additional wind, solar, & batteries - I would have voted for it with only a very basic read of the initiative.
I do believe global warming is an existential crisis for the human race. I’m liberal (very liberal according to one of my daughters). And up until 2 months ago I was happily, if obliviously, very pro renewables. I accepted the arguments that wind+solar+batteries was our solution.
The Journey Starts
The need for data centers, to handle AI is going to grow. What is needed now is just the beginning. We’re going to need 10x, maybe 100x what we have now. So I started looking for companies to invest in that would increase in value from this, but that had not already been run up.
That took me to the grid. The increase in data centers means an increase in electrical generation and transmission lines. So I started learning about what went into the grid.
And I found myself fascinated. The grid is one of the two most amazing machines1 the human race has built so far. And so I started blogging about it and reading more and more. Still a cheerleader at this point.
And then I read about the two types of gas turbines, the SCGT and the CCGT. And how the CCGT is generally run 24/7 while the SCGT is used as a peaker plant, including to handle when the wind is at less than 100%.
I found the CCGT really interesting - leave it to engineers to see wasted heat and put it to use. It’s a very clever approach. And the end result is the CCGT is almost twice as efficient as the SCGT.
And then, for some reason, my curiosity2 looked at: wind basically runs 35%3 of the time tops. CCGTs are close to twice as efficient as SCGTs. So how much of a savings is wind actually?
Even at this point I still expected wind to come out on top. I just figured it would be lees of a reduction in CO2 than was being declared. And hey - batteries are coming to solve all this.
And then I ran the numbers. And tried to find holes in my logic. And showed it to others for them to find holes (one person found a significant math mistake). And the result was… Wind, because it uses SCGTs for backup, that system in total, emits more CO2 than a CCGT.
So then I turned to batteries. If we can have enough batteries to handle 2 days of no wind, that changes this a lot. Yeah it would. It’s also impossibly expensive. If Colorado floated bonds for this it would be ~ $4b/year. Every year. For 2 days.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Boy did this suck me down the rabbit hole. In no particular order I learned:
Any system other than nuclear requires us to keep our entire system of gas plants, gas piping, gas wells, etc. running to handle 100% of what the wind & solar can generate.
Germany who is further along the Wind + solar + batteries than anyone else is getting hammered with their Dunkelflaute. So badly it’s the primary issue in their upcoming election.
Battery improvements are leveling out. There may be a better design (different chemicals) coming. The existing designs will see some additional improvement. But at present batteries are not a solution for doldrums of even a couple of hours.
Wind makes no sense.4 No matter how you try to spin it or position it (puns intended), gas is better.
Every approach other than nuclear requires we keep our entire infrastructure for gas generation at a level that can replace 100% of the wind & solar.
We should be focusing all our efforts to replace coal, and eventually gas, with nuclear. Using the existing nuclear plant plans that work.
Yes that means getting rid of NEPA for clean energy.5
Yes that means getting the NRC to move quicker and stop adding unnecessary time & expense. Nuclear is safer than any other source except solar.
A lot of people do not want solar farms or wind turbines, especially wind turbines, anywhere near where they live, work, go to school, etc.
Voters get very upset when electricity used to be cheap & reliable and is now expensive & fragile. Fuck this up and it will decide elections.
The Colorado Energy Plan is wind + solar + pixie dust. And I don’t see any pixie dust.6
— Ella Rose - Colorado Nuclear Alliance
Going Forward
So what now? It’s not like anything I figured out was a secret. If not me others would have. It just took someone curious enough to work the math. And then stubborn enough that when people disagreed, asked them to show their work.
What’s important in terms of what’s best for the people is to drop wind and pivot to nuclear. My hope is that what I’ve put together is compelling enough it will force those making the policy to verify my assumptions & math. And once verified, they will stop wasting money on wind and invest it in nuclear.
What’s important in terms of politics is for the Democrats, across the country, to make this pivot. Otherwise in ‘26 and ‘28 democratic candidates will get hammered for making electricity more expensive and less reliable in blue states. And they’ll hold up the counter examples of red states where electricity is inexpensive and reliable.7
And we’ll see the German election redux here.
We have time. Nowhere in the U.S. is it close to as bad as Germany’s power configuration. We’re on the cusp of that disaster here, but just on the cusp.8 If we pivot, get it in gear on nuclear, and paint a picture of a future with energy that is clean, inexpensive, reliable, & abundant - that’s a policy that will win elections.
The other is the EUV lithography system.
My degree is in physics. I haven’t used that knowledge for the last 45 years but it instilled a desire to understand the details of things.
Wind turbines spin more than 35% of the time. But a lot of the time they are spinning below 100% of their max. Then end result is they are the equivalent of spinning at max 35% of the time and not turning 65% of the time. The match works out the same.
I hate having to say President Trump is right about something. But he’s right on this.
Stopping construction of a plant because it might eliminate a single sub-species when global warming is causing a mass extinction event is the height of absurdity.
Quote is from memory so I may have it slightly wrong.
MISO is in the worst shape - a hiccup away from rolling blackouts.
N2N
Natural Gas to Nuclear as Robert Bryce has been saying for years
It’s the only logical solution
I am always curious what makes a sensible person think that global warming represents an "existential crisis", because I don't think that claim can be sustained in the light of day. It seems to mostly occur from an overreliance on a Catastrophist narrative that is overtly political rather than scientific.
This can be seen perfectly clearly by looking at the new (10 Feb) Nature Communications peer-reviewed paper "A fire deficit persists across diverse North American forests despite recent increases in area burned." Look at not just the paper, but at the peer-reviewer comments in which the authors were asked to change their wording to "make it less useful to denialists". To their credit, the authors refused to do so and stuck to their conclusion: that NA forests are overloaded with fuel because they burn many times _less_ often then they did before the 1780s or so.
On the other hand, I think you've already seen that rushing to electrify everything before the grid can handle it would provoke a real crisis, and that was already true even before the Moss Landing catastrophe (q.v.) which deserves very close scrutiny.