There are a number of factual errors and misunderstanding in this article.
"New research suggests that wind and solar will never fully replace today’s electricity sources. We will always need more reliable sources of energy—ones that don’t fluctuate with the weather."
Why no proper reference to this "new research"? Especially since it looks like conventional wisdom which new research has shown is not the case:
https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(19)30225-...
That paper shows that for continent sized grids (the US is a continent sized country), electrification of heat and transport creates a demand profile that can be matched by a renewable portfolio in every 30 second time period in a year.
Not to mention that the perfect complement to high capex intermittent generation with no marginal production cost is not a steady-producing technology with high capital costs but low to no marginal production cost like nuclear. The perfect complement is low capital cost, high marginal cost gas reciprocal engines. No surprise that this is a fast growing area of generation and that gas turbine manufacturers are hard at work adapting their designs to deal with greater intermittency.
"Joe Biden puts the cost of his plan at $1.7 trillion over ten years. Some analysts estimate the total cost of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal at over $50 trillion."
Conveniently not looking at the cost per year explicitly in the Biden proposal or giving a timescale at all for (one interpretation of) the AOC plan. 1.7 trillion over 10 years is 170bn/yr. That's 8% of US GDP. Quite a lot of money, but it just doesn't seem reasonable to only look at the cost of something which is a set of long life capital investments that way. That's because:
1) The lifetime of renewable generation and transmission infrastructure (and nuclear generation of course) is measured in decades and the operating costs are <<< capital costs.
2) We don't treat capital investments the way we treat recurring expenditures. I "spent" several times my income buying a house. You need to look at the annualised cost over the lifetime of the investment not at the capital cost.
3) Looking at the total upfront cost is only relevant to the degree that in-year budgets or borrowing are constrained. Those constraints are effectively set by the capital markets and by monetary policy for countries borrowing in their own currencies. In government decision making, this distinction is expressed by calculating economic value for money separately from affordability.
4) Only stating the total capital cost doesn't take into account the capital and operating costs in the alternative nor does the author make any attempt to quantify the cost of the nuclear option.
"Moreover, these plans call for unprecedented regulation of the energy sector, something closer to a command economy than a free market."
Dumb as a rock. The energy sector is second only to healthcare in the amount of regulation that applies to it already. The most regulated part of the energy sector is... nuclear.
"But what if there were sources of zero-carbon electricity that didn’t require heavy-handed regulation to make them viable in the marketplace?"
I'm glad to hear that nuclear SMR's will be able to buy private insurance rather than relying on the government to backstop them. Again, the size and complexity of the "regulatory surface" is much bigger for nuclear than for renewables.
Not only that, but basically all the expensive basic research and prototyping for GenIV nuclear has been done by governments. That's true for renewable generation as well of course, but it does seem strange to see descriptions of private sector start-ups as being basically scrappy entrepreneurs when in most cases they are attempting to commercialise ideas that were tested at great expensive and sometime substantial scale using government money in the 1980s.
"New research suggests that wind and solar will never fully replace today’s electricity sources. We will always need more reliable sources of energy—ones that don’t fluctuate with the weather."
Why no proper reference to this "new research"? Especially since it looks like conventional wisdom which new research has shown is not the case: https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(19)30225-... That paper shows that for continent sized grids (the US is a continent sized country), electrification of heat and transport creates a demand profile that can be matched by a renewable portfolio in every 30 second time period in a year.
Not to mention that the perfect complement to high capex intermittent generation with no marginal production cost is not a steady-producing technology with high capital costs but low to no marginal production cost like nuclear. The perfect complement is low capital cost, high marginal cost gas reciprocal engines. No surprise that this is a fast growing area of generation and that gas turbine manufacturers are hard at work adapting their designs to deal with greater intermittency.
"Joe Biden puts the cost of his plan at $1.7 trillion over ten years. Some analysts estimate the total cost of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal at over $50 trillion."
Conveniently not looking at the cost per year explicitly in the Biden proposal or giving a timescale at all for (one interpretation of) the AOC plan. 1.7 trillion over 10 years is 170bn/yr. That's 8% of US GDP. Quite a lot of money, but it just doesn't seem reasonable to only look at the cost of something which is a set of long life capital investments that way. That's because:
1) The lifetime of renewable generation and transmission infrastructure (and nuclear generation of course) is measured in decades and the operating costs are <<< capital costs.
2) We don't treat capital investments the way we treat recurring expenditures. I "spent" several times my income buying a house. You need to look at the annualised cost over the lifetime of the investment not at the capital cost.
3) Looking at the total upfront cost is only relevant to the degree that in-year budgets or borrowing are constrained. Those constraints are effectively set by the capital markets and by monetary policy for countries borrowing in their own currencies. In government decision making, this distinction is expressed by calculating economic value for money separately from affordability.
4) Only stating the total capital cost doesn't take into account the capital and operating costs in the alternative nor does the author make any attempt to quantify the cost of the nuclear option.
"Moreover, these plans call for unprecedented regulation of the energy sector, something closer to a command economy than a free market."
Dumb as a rock. The energy sector is second only to healthcare in the amount of regulation that applies to it already. The most regulated part of the energy sector is... nuclear.
"But what if there were sources of zero-carbon electricity that didn’t require heavy-handed regulation to make them viable in the marketplace?"
I'm glad to hear that nuclear SMR's will be able to buy private insurance rather than relying on the government to backstop them. Again, the size and complexity of the "regulatory surface" is much bigger for nuclear than for renewables.
Not only that, but basically all the expensive basic research and prototyping for GenIV nuclear has been done by governments. That's true for renewable generation as well of course, but it does seem strange to see descriptions of private sector start-ups as being basically scrappy entrepreneurs when in most cases they are attempting to commercialise ideas that were tested at great expensive and sometime substantial scale using government money in the 1980s.