I like a lot of the ideas Ms. Flegal put forward but she was completely wrong about one thing she stated as a fact. All the countries that have achieved low carbon electricity generation have a lot of nuclear. Of the top five countries that have the lowest carbon electricity generation, only France has significant, actually the most nuclear electricity of generation. It is true that these countries have natural advantages that most others do not. For example abundant geothermal (iceland), abundant hydro (Norway), and so on.
My intent is not to rebuke all nuclear but to refute the implicit assumption that we must have nuclear to provide 100% reliable power supply. No individual technology can provide that as your point makes clear. There will always have to be a diverse mix of power technologies to minimize risk. While some people are willing to accept coal and gas as part of that diversification strategy, I believe their use must be phased out because the climate destabilization they cause increase the risk to all the other power technologies. Many grids already have more nuclear than renewable power generation thus adding more detracts from the benefit of diversification and because nuclear is so expensive and slow itimpedes the implementation of the fastest, cheapest resources, renewables and storage.
I completely agree. Nothing is completely firm: maintenance, supply disruptions, and environmental disruptions all impact every technology. It is a system of transmission, generation, storage, and use coordinated together. It never was as simple as shoveling coal into a furnace and turning a light on at the other end.
Diversification: cheap solar, wind with less cheap zero carbon baseload (geothermal, nuclear) with storage is essential, but it has to be agile diversification. I think shifting away from centralized models toward a dynamic, storage-backed network is the only way to build true grid resilience against both supply shocks and climate destabilization.
Is it just me or has the bicoastal wonk community been fully nuke-geo-firm-transmission pilled?
They need to listen to Dave's pod with the guy from Uruguay.
We got plenty of space for wind and solar in flyover land, really all the way to Coast Ranges from the Appalachians. Sadly, the locals are believing "Landman" dissing wind, and our pols are throwing sand in the gears of storage or wind or solar or anything with inverters, or whatever, depending on the week.
I think with a full court press on reconductoring and plenty of storage, maybe not many new transmission towers are needed to get to 80% wind/solar/storage with gas backup ("firming") for a 90% electrified economy in flyover land. Any "models" look at that question?
The most important framing here is that data-center demand is not simply a load problem. It may be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to finance a stronger, more intelligent grid...but that requires utilities, regulators and hyperscalers to agree on who pays, who bears the risk and how the benefits extend beyond the data centers themselves. Without that alignment, abundance quickly becomes an affordability fight.
This was a great discussion and I learned a lot. But I am feeling vaguely unsettled by it. My vision of "the way out" is distributed solar and storage, at the household and business level, the neighborhood and business park level, the city and county level. I would love to see the equity that has build up in the utilities be distributed also, to individuals and communities. I guess I am not satisfied with just patching up the large central utilities, whatever your fix for them is, public power, permitting reform, ROE reform, better utility commissions, etc. Big generation, big transmission, big distribution should be our backup plan and providers of last resort, which of course destroys their business model, so it kind of has to be public in the end.
Even w/o data centers, in most of US, realistic scenarios using roof and brownfield areas don't support this. Especially anywhere remotely urban. Especially anywhere with a real winter. Especially if that cold urban area is heated with heat pumps and folks have EVs.
I have and adore rooftop solar but realistically it needs to be supplemented with wind farms, solar farms, storage wherever and I'm fine with some gas backup and I don't believe in any need for clean, firm here in CO.
Solar over parking lots, canals, even farms adds costs. In the case of the first two, many multiples. My solar cost 2.5x what a utility solar array costs.
I hated on Xcel/PSCO when their coal power plants were poisoning the mountain streams. Since they are now 25% coal (w/well controlled SO2, NOx & PM), 25% gas and the rest wind and solar I'm OK with their generation and transmission. (They have other "performance" issues.) For most folks in my town our municipal water and trash service costs more than electricity. Now "climate activists" celebrate with "affordability" folks when the PUC cuts back Xcel's plans for 1000 MW wind and solar and 300 MW of gas backup, which would be part replacing 1000+ MW of coal. They said it was "overbuilding," I say go for it.
Disagree with Ms. Flegal's claim that solar takes 10-20X more land than natural gas, including drilling and transport. I do not think she is including all the land impacted in the entire fuel cycle. Perhaps I am wrong but I need to see how that claim is supported.
In the SW US, water use is a land use issue. Water is now a zero-sum game. Every added use needs to be considered as a "buy & dry" trade.
A 350 MW SMR as "baseload" evaporates cooling water which could irrigate five square miles. Or a whole bunch of golf courses or subdivisions. Solar and wind have already reduced water previously evaporated by coal plants but get no credit for it.
I live in a county with 1000s of gas wells. The gas land use stats are a crock. The area of land "affected" is far greater than the area of the pad, which is what Sec. Wrong likes to cite. There are connecting roads and pipelines, etc. But to give some credit, horizontal drilling has greatly increased the spacing between pads. Actually the same with current larger wind turbines.
And all gas & oil seams get depleted, and the drillers need to move on and hammer the next greenfield. Geothermal depletion is likely, but slower. With solar and wind, the hardware wears out and gets "repowered" and should be in that spot forever. For both solar and wind, real recent repowering projects have actually increased the energy yields per acre.
CO's leading agrivoltaics advocate spoke here recently and he commented that he assumes that his grandkids will be farming around the same thick galvanized steel piles that currently support arrays above his five acres under solar.
A solar farm in the SW offsets the need to burn coal that would cover the field almost ten feet deep in the 30 yr life of the 1/4" thick panels. Then they get replaced with tandem modules that will produce 25% more energy on the same acreage.
I agree that paying for utility infrastructure via on bill financing is regressive but paying for it through taxes should only occur if those infrastructure assets are nationalized or publicly owned otherwise you are just subsidizing private utility shareholders.
Sir, you too seem to have listened to the whole pod! Anyway, American taxpayers have been paying for 30%+ of utility wind and solar generation infrastructure costs for decades now. I view it as a reverse carbon tax. Clearly it has been keeping my rates lower, even if the IPPs or regulated power companies that own the wind farms and solar farms are the direct recipients. (I got $6000 or so myself.)
What may go on electric utility bills here, and what should be on general fund taxes, are subsidies for low-income consumers. Like food stamps. We don't put fees on everyone else's groceries to pay for food stamps for the income-challenged.
Our Xcel bills are a cluster of line items. Even energy wonks are challenged to understand the meaning or need for much of this itemization.
Fun and interesting show, Dave and Jane. Thank you!
Dave, I think you've got the right idea that the resistance to data centers may have jumped the leash of rationality on a case-by-case basis but is rational in the sense that the public is doing it what it can to exercise control over the buildout of data centers.
With good faith action I assume that the technical problems around data centers (power, water, noise, pollution, taxes, permitting) can be resolved. And I assume that the data centers can generally be used for beneficial purposes.
The problem is the "in good faith" part. Our technology industry is governed by people and by incentives that have no respect for public needs or public input. The only way to force consideration of the greater good onto the table is to deny any further buildout. It's a blunt tool but it's the tool that's available.
Most of your conversation seemed to dwell on the technical problems of building and running the data centers. What needs just as much consideration is what they're running *for*. Building more data centers to mine crypto, make surveillance more universal, make dynamic pricing ubiquitous, and process sports gambling - I don't care if the data center runs or pure solar and is whisper-quiet. That's not a good purpose for data centers to exist, and their buildout should halt until we can agree to focus data centers on things that people actually benefit from.
I generally find NEPA discussions discouraging, but this quote resonates:
David: “… If in fact you end up with a playing field where you’ve made it easier for oil and gas, but then it’s still hard for clean energy because you have this rogue administration shutting everything down. Like, you could imagine people making the argument, this is not a political environment in which it’s fair to ask people.”
And it’s not just the current administration. Data centers are so desperate for electricity that they don’t care how much it costs, so if we bake “rational behavior” into the formula, we could lose regardless of the administration.
I’m just always amazed that the first victims of clean grids are assumed to be environmental protections and not reforms of, say, the Farm Bill or the Renewable Fuel Standard.
I do agree with her on one thing. I feel politically homeless also.
I've only voted for one Republican in 50 years. School board in Boulder when the controlling Dems seemed too woke in like 1978 or something.
In the last contest in my Colorado CD3, I would not vote for the Dem after he said "the energy transition was happening too fast." OMG, we are reducing FF use in electricity at 2% per year! Pretty much no other progress, other than fixing gas leaks.
This year the Dem candidate's website sez he supports "affordable" and "traditional energy," which I assume means FFs in my district with its 30,000 O&G wells, 2000 MW of coal generation and related cluster. But it has awesome solar potential all over, wind potential in the SE, and pumped hydro potential which is roundly ignored. Oh, yeah we mine sodium bicarbonate which can be a raw material for sodium-ion batteries. (It's not salt.) Apparently his education in Ass-pain has not prepared him to challenge the dominant FF paradigm, or he's just embarrassed to be from Amory Lovins' hometown, while the whole rest of world is getting on the "Soft Path." Protect Our Winters endorsed him, but mostly they pester me with the usual "protect some river/forest/desert" emails. I hope he doesn't believe what he says, but I'll just vote for the GOP candidate, though he promised to moderate anti-renewable GOP jive two years ago, but didn't.
And now I read in Heatmap that the Dumbocrats won't defend wind and solar tax credits while agreeing to make these sources more expensive via every Sinophobic tariff imaginable, and failing miserably to reduce permitting costs and delays for BTM solar in their over-regulated burgs and utilities. Meanwhile the local young "activists" swoon over "regenerative" cattle grazing. Good luck.
One aspect of local opposition to data centers that seems to be missed in much of the media is that fighting data centers has become a way to "fight" big tech, and its tentacles everywhere. The social media algorithms, the tracking, the markup by Amazon, etc., the advertising fees, the inscrutable apps, untrustworthy reviews, the streaming charges, the updates and changes, un-repairability, and the general enshitification.
Folks who don't have jets and superyachts can band together with the neighbors and exercise what local power they have to make life difficult for the tech bros.
This tees up a dive into the value of think tanks in developing rationale and spreading the cognition that precedes policy, opening the Overton Window:
"Man, this is such a good question, and it’s something that I’ve really been grappling with lately because I’ve been working a lot on, like, what does a federal agenda over the next few years need to look like if you care about climate in this new moment? And my response to answering that question has basically been to, like, identify the 30 smartest people I know… On, like, the topics I think matter and been like, “Tell me what you think we should do.” And that is because I think I share your frustration or skepticism about the ability of, like... I think, A, I’m sort of... The sort of, like, obsession with consensus-based coalitional politics within the Democratic Party, I think does us no favors because it elides the trade-offs and it, like, just makes it really hard to, like, say true things, honestly, sometimes."
Think tanks pull the best ideas out of the soup of discourse, study the strategies to accomplish them in the real and legal world, and they develop the narratives and the channels to persuade a majority of people to support a policy direction.
I'm not sure there are think tanks established to help build a big, abundant, clean grid. Maybe that's something that donors might pony up quid to establish.
The reason there is so much litigation in NEPA is because it is being so badly gamed by industry and federal agencies. Dave needs to do a deep dive into this because a lot of people are throwing out the idea of NEPA reform assumes NEPA is broken. It may be, but it is not correct to assume only the green groups are to blame. The fact is that NEPA slows down projects that are conducted illegally, not those that are done properly.
The grid needs a social license. This has a large aesthetic dimension: pylons are ugly. The standard and visually fussy designs date from the 1930s and are structurally lattices, bolted together on site, which may have been efficient in 1935. One thing I miss in the permitting debate is any recognition that pylons don't have to be ugly. France's "Roseau" pylon is actually beautiful. The T-pylon of National Grid in the UK is acceptable - in fact its lower height allows maintenance from mobile cherrypicker trucks, at a considerable saving. Even a pure philistine will concede that if a better-designed pylon costs more but dampens community opposition, it is worth considering. The local distribution grid in the USA is even worse aesthetically, even in cities, supplied by a revolting tangle of overhead wires just like Kinshasa. Go to any German village: you won't see amt overhead cables. Everything is buried, expensively but also reliably. US SAIDI is a bad joke: it's an order of magnitude worse than the best European countries, so poor that there is apparently no reporting requirement.
Hi Dave, great show as always!
I like a lot of the ideas Ms. Flegal put forward but she was completely wrong about one thing she stated as a fact. All the countries that have achieved low carbon electricity generation have a lot of nuclear. Of the top five countries that have the lowest carbon electricity generation, only France has significant, actually the most nuclear electricity of generation. It is true that these countries have natural advantages that most others do not. For example abundant geothermal (iceland), abundant hydro (Norway), and so on.
Let’s not forget what happened to nuclear this summer as rivers dried up, the nuclear solution became much less firm.
My intent is not to rebuke all nuclear but to refute the implicit assumption that we must have nuclear to provide 100% reliable power supply. No individual technology can provide that as your point makes clear. There will always have to be a diverse mix of power technologies to minimize risk. While some people are willing to accept coal and gas as part of that diversification strategy, I believe their use must be phased out because the climate destabilization they cause increase the risk to all the other power technologies. Many grids already have more nuclear than renewable power generation thus adding more detracts from the benefit of diversification and because nuclear is so expensive and slow itimpedes the implementation of the fastest, cheapest resources, renewables and storage.
I completely agree. Nothing is completely firm: maintenance, supply disruptions, and environmental disruptions all impact every technology. It is a system of transmission, generation, storage, and use coordinated together. It never was as simple as shoveling coal into a furnace and turning a light on at the other end.
Diversification: cheap solar, wind with less cheap zero carbon baseload (geothermal, nuclear) with storage is essential, but it has to be agile diversification. I think shifting away from centralized models toward a dynamic, storage-backed network is the only way to build true grid resilience against both supply shocks and climate destabilization.
Is it just me or has the bicoastal wonk community been fully nuke-geo-firm-transmission pilled?
They need to listen to Dave's pod with the guy from Uruguay.
We got plenty of space for wind and solar in flyover land, really all the way to Coast Ranges from the Appalachians. Sadly, the locals are believing "Landman" dissing wind, and our pols are throwing sand in the gears of storage or wind or solar or anything with inverters, or whatever, depending on the week.
I think with a full court press on reconductoring and plenty of storage, maybe not many new transmission towers are needed to get to 80% wind/solar/storage with gas backup ("firming") for a 90% electrified economy in flyover land. Any "models" look at that question?
I scratched my head at that comment too.
The most important framing here is that data-center demand is not simply a load problem. It may be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to finance a stronger, more intelligent grid...but that requires utilities, regulators and hyperscalers to agree on who pays, who bears the risk and how the benefits extend beyond the data centers themselves. Without that alignment, abundance quickly becomes an affordability fight.
This was a great discussion and I learned a lot. But I am feeling vaguely unsettled by it. My vision of "the way out" is distributed solar and storage, at the household and business level, the neighborhood and business park level, the city and county level. I would love to see the equity that has build up in the utilities be distributed also, to individuals and communities. I guess I am not satisfied with just patching up the large central utilities, whatever your fix for them is, public power, permitting reform, ROE reform, better utility commissions, etc. Big generation, big transmission, big distribution should be our backup plan and providers of last resort, which of course destroys their business model, so it kind of has to be public in the end.
Even w/o data centers, in most of US, realistic scenarios using roof and brownfield areas don't support this. Especially anywhere remotely urban. Especially anywhere with a real winter. Especially if that cold urban area is heated with heat pumps and folks have EVs.
I have and adore rooftop solar but realistically it needs to be supplemented with wind farms, solar farms, storage wherever and I'm fine with some gas backup and I don't believe in any need for clean, firm here in CO.
Solar over parking lots, canals, even farms adds costs. In the case of the first two, many multiples. My solar cost 2.5x what a utility solar array costs.
I hated on Xcel/PSCO when their coal power plants were poisoning the mountain streams. Since they are now 25% coal (w/well controlled SO2, NOx & PM), 25% gas and the rest wind and solar I'm OK with their generation and transmission. (They have other "performance" issues.) For most folks in my town our municipal water and trash service costs more than electricity. Now "climate activists" celebrate with "affordability" folks when the PUC cuts back Xcel's plans for 1000 MW wind and solar and 300 MW of gas backup, which would be part replacing 1000+ MW of coal. They said it was "overbuilding," I say go for it.
Disagree with Ms. Flegal's claim that solar takes 10-20X more land than natural gas, including drilling and transport. I do not think she is including all the land impacted in the entire fuel cycle. Perhaps I am wrong but I need to see how that claim is supported.
In the SW US, water use is a land use issue. Water is now a zero-sum game. Every added use needs to be considered as a "buy & dry" trade.
A 350 MW SMR as "baseload" evaporates cooling water which could irrigate five square miles. Or a whole bunch of golf courses or subdivisions. Solar and wind have already reduced water previously evaporated by coal plants but get no credit for it.
I live in a county with 1000s of gas wells. The gas land use stats are a crock. The area of land "affected" is far greater than the area of the pad, which is what Sec. Wrong likes to cite. There are connecting roads and pipelines, etc. But to give some credit, horizontal drilling has greatly increased the spacing between pads. Actually the same with current larger wind turbines.
And all gas & oil seams get depleted, and the drillers need to move on and hammer the next greenfield. Geothermal depletion is likely, but slower. With solar and wind, the hardware wears out and gets "repowered" and should be in that spot forever. For both solar and wind, real recent repowering projects have actually increased the energy yields per acre.
CO's leading agrivoltaics advocate spoke here recently and he commented that he assumes that his grandkids will be farming around the same thick galvanized steel piles that currently support arrays above his five acres under solar.
A solar farm in the SW offsets the need to burn coal that would cover the field almost ten feet deep in the 30 yr life of the 1/4" thick panels. Then they get replaced with tandem modules that will produce 25% more energy on the same acreage.
All excellent points with which I completely agree!
I agree that paying for utility infrastructure via on bill financing is regressive but paying for it through taxes should only occur if those infrastructure assets are nationalized or publicly owned otherwise you are just subsidizing private utility shareholders.
Sir, you too seem to have listened to the whole pod! Anyway, American taxpayers have been paying for 30%+ of utility wind and solar generation infrastructure costs for decades now. I view it as a reverse carbon tax. Clearly it has been keeping my rates lower, even if the IPPs or regulated power companies that own the wind farms and solar farms are the direct recipients. (I got $6000 or so myself.)
What may go on electric utility bills here, and what should be on general fund taxes, are subsidies for low-income consumers. Like food stamps. We don't put fees on everyone else's groceries to pay for food stamps for the income-challenged.
Our Xcel bills are a cluster of line items. Even energy wonks are challenged to understand the meaning or need for much of this itemization.
Fun and interesting show, Dave and Jane. Thank you!
Dave, I think you've got the right idea that the resistance to data centers may have jumped the leash of rationality on a case-by-case basis but is rational in the sense that the public is doing it what it can to exercise control over the buildout of data centers.
With good faith action I assume that the technical problems around data centers (power, water, noise, pollution, taxes, permitting) can be resolved. And I assume that the data centers can generally be used for beneficial purposes.
The problem is the "in good faith" part. Our technology industry is governed by people and by incentives that have no respect for public needs or public input. The only way to force consideration of the greater good onto the table is to deny any further buildout. It's a blunt tool but it's the tool that's available.
Most of your conversation seemed to dwell on the technical problems of building and running the data centers. What needs just as much consideration is what they're running *for*. Building more data centers to mine crypto, make surveillance more universal, make dynamic pricing ubiquitous, and process sports gambling - I don't care if the data center runs or pure solar and is whisper-quiet. That's not a good purpose for data centers to exist, and their buildout should halt until we can agree to focus data centers on things that people actually benefit from.
Germany's plug-in solar adds 10 percent more power to cleanly stabilize the grid.
I generally find NEPA discussions discouraging, but this quote resonates:
David: “… If in fact you end up with a playing field where you’ve made it easier for oil and gas, but then it’s still hard for clean energy because you have this rogue administration shutting everything down. Like, you could imagine people making the argument, this is not a political environment in which it’s fair to ask people.”
And it’s not just the current administration. Data centers are so desperate for electricity that they don’t care how much it costs, so if we bake “rational behavior” into the formula, we could lose regardless of the administration.
I’m just always amazed that the first victims of clean grids are assumed to be environmental protections and not reforms of, say, the Farm Bill or the Renewable Fuel Standard.
Wow! Fantastic episode. Ms. Flegal is informed and insightful.
I did not understand Jane's second priority. I'm guessing she meant the humility of science that eschews dogmatism.
I hope she dogmatically believes we need to
1. Stop digging deeper
2. Maximize efficiency
3. Electrify everything possible.
I do agree with her on one thing. I feel politically homeless also.
I've only voted for one Republican in 50 years. School board in Boulder when the controlling Dems seemed too woke in like 1978 or something.
In the last contest in my Colorado CD3, I would not vote for the Dem after he said "the energy transition was happening too fast." OMG, we are reducing FF use in electricity at 2% per year! Pretty much no other progress, other than fixing gas leaks.
This year the Dem candidate's website sez he supports "affordable" and "traditional energy," which I assume means FFs in my district with its 30,000 O&G wells, 2000 MW of coal generation and related cluster. But it has awesome solar potential all over, wind potential in the SE, and pumped hydro potential which is roundly ignored. Oh, yeah we mine sodium bicarbonate which can be a raw material for sodium-ion batteries. (It's not salt.) Apparently his education in Ass-pain has not prepared him to challenge the dominant FF paradigm, or he's just embarrassed to be from Amory Lovins' hometown, while the whole rest of world is getting on the "Soft Path." Protect Our Winters endorsed him, but mostly they pester me with the usual "protect some river/forest/desert" emails. I hope he doesn't believe what he says, but I'll just vote for the GOP candidate, though he promised to moderate anti-renewable GOP jive two years ago, but didn't.
And now I read in Heatmap that the Dumbocrats won't defend wind and solar tax credits while agreeing to make these sources more expensive via every Sinophobic tariff imaginable, and failing miserably to reduce permitting costs and delays for BTM solar in their over-regulated burgs and utilities. Meanwhile the local young "activists" swoon over "regenerative" cattle grazing. Good luck.
One aspect of local opposition to data centers that seems to be missed in much of the media is that fighting data centers has become a way to "fight" big tech, and its tentacles everywhere. The social media algorithms, the tracking, the markup by Amazon, etc., the advertising fees, the inscrutable apps, untrustworthy reviews, the streaming charges, the updates and changes, un-repairability, and the general enshitification.
Folks who don't have jets and superyachts can band together with the neighbors and exercise what local power they have to make life difficult for the tech bros.
This tees up a dive into the value of think tanks in developing rationale and spreading the cognition that precedes policy, opening the Overton Window:
"Man, this is such a good question, and it’s something that I’ve really been grappling with lately because I’ve been working a lot on, like, what does a federal agenda over the next few years need to look like if you care about climate in this new moment? And my response to answering that question has basically been to, like, identify the 30 smartest people I know… On, like, the topics I think matter and been like, “Tell me what you think we should do.” And that is because I think I share your frustration or skepticism about the ability of, like... I think, A, I’m sort of... The sort of, like, obsession with consensus-based coalitional politics within the Democratic Party, I think does us no favors because it elides the trade-offs and it, like, just makes it really hard to, like, say true things, honestly, sometimes."
Think tanks pull the best ideas out of the soup of discourse, study the strategies to accomplish them in the real and legal world, and they develop the narratives and the channels to persuade a majority of people to support a policy direction.
I'm not sure there are think tanks established to help build a big, abundant, clean grid. Maybe that's something that donors might pony up quid to establish.
The reason there is so much litigation in NEPA is because it is being so badly gamed by industry and federal agencies. Dave needs to do a deep dive into this because a lot of people are throwing out the idea of NEPA reform assumes NEPA is broken. It may be, but it is not correct to assume only the green groups are to blame. The fact is that NEPA slows down projects that are conducted illegally, not those that are done properly.
The grid needs a social license. This has a large aesthetic dimension: pylons are ugly. The standard and visually fussy designs date from the 1930s and are structurally lattices, bolted together on site, which may have been efficient in 1935. One thing I miss in the permitting debate is any recognition that pylons don't have to be ugly. France's "Roseau" pylon is actually beautiful. The T-pylon of National Grid in the UK is acceptable - in fact its lower height allows maintenance from mobile cherrypicker trucks, at a considerable saving. Even a pure philistine will concede that if a better-designed pylon costs more but dampens community opposition, it is worth considering. The local distribution grid in the USA is even worse aesthetically, even in cities, supplied by a revolting tangle of overhead wires just like Kinshasa. Go to any German village: you won't see amt overhead cables. Everything is buried, expensively but also reliably. US SAIDI is a bad joke: it's an order of magnitude worse than the best European countries, so poor that there is apparently no reporting requirement.