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Why are Americans becoming more anti-renewable?
Landman really is that popular, huh? Battery tech has only gotten better and cheaper, and the LCOE of renewables even with storage added is competitive with or better than fossil fuels, yet public opinion is backsliding. Gas is still great because the US has so much of it, but the DoE is even trying to force coal plants to keep running at cost to consumers, even when states and operators want them retired. Coal miners can't be that large of a constituency, surely, so what's driving this obsession in particular?
There have been a lot of green energy initiatives in my area. Every time, the initiative claims that it will create jobs and lower utility prices, and do so with minimal disruption to the local environment and community.
This is, inevitably, bullshit. The jobs never materialize. Our power bill goes up even faster than it had been rising before. Entire sections of forest get torn out and replaced with a few half-assed plantings of non-native softwoods. Even us dumb, cousin-fucking rednecks catch on to the game eventually.
Beyond that, I've noticed that "green energy" is for the peasants. For the things that actually matter to the neo-aristocracy right now, like data centers, we're burning fossil fuels like never before with local gas turbines.
At this point, I'm thoroughly fatigued by it. Whenever somebody hectors me about installing grid scale renewable energy, my default response is "you go first".
Good, the more jobs necessary for power generation the less efficient it is for society (the workers can now go do something else people want and utility rate increases!) and the more costly it will be for people who need power.
Unfortunately due to NIMBYism, companies have to convince the local shortsighted idiots who don't understand the point of a job is to get something done and not to just give random citizen Joe some money so they'll often over promise on that.
Yeah, there's been a huge surge in demand for electricity now what with the data centers and whatever else. New power generation is like a +10 while power demand is a -20 right now and we need to get even more power so it can be like a +25/-20 situation instead. Unfortunately state regulations and local zoning laws are hostile to new construction of basically any kind, so electricity NIMBYism is fucking us over just like housing NIMBYism is screwing over homebuyers and renters.
All energy production is disruptive, so is it much worse than other methods is the important question.
Ideally the point of a job is to get something done.
The problem is, the message that our society sends people through both words and actions is that hard, productive work is for idiots and if you want to ever escape the rat race you should hustle and cut corners and only focus on your own bottom line no matter what.
The average person might actually be most likely to succeed in life by doing good, honest, productive work. But even if that's true, the data that supports it being true would be buried in dry statistics somewhere. Meanwhile, we see an endless parade of people like Pelosi with her remarkable investment acumen, Trump the narcissistic bully who was born rich and genuinely does not seem to know any way of life other than corruption, and all the Kardashians of the world who are famous for being good at being famous.
Which is not to say that politics and entertainment can't be productive work. Politicians can do a lot of good to organize society. Entertainers bring joy to people. But the most visible exemplars of both politicians and entertainers are people who charismamaxxed their way to the top and/or are corrupt.
To be a successful politician for this long does take some genuine skill somewhere. Tons and tons of people try and fail. There's tons of competition and political threats to you and getting away with such brazen corruption like Trump or Pelosi requires continued popularity and support. Often the skill is the same sort of thing that the Kardashians provide, taking short term victories and turning it into their long term empires. They easily could have been like the many many people who only see minor fame for a few years (or even just a month), but they took it and turned it into a greater opportunity. They might seem trashy to us, but that doesn't change that they're providing entertainment or hope or whatever to tens/hundreds of millions of people worldwide and those people are willing to pay money/watch commercials/etc other forms of profiting off that. The Kardashians are getting stuff done too, even if I don't personally enjoy them.
Or another way to look at it. I think religion is mostly hogwash, but I can still understand what the point of churches and pastors and religious movies and music is. Other people do believe in it, and thus those things are still getting stuff done
Yes. Of course politicians and entertainers are people who generally appeal to some meaningfully sized subset of the population. Trump has basically formed a roughly 30-35% cult of personality around him, where like the only thing I can think of where he didn't manage to control his followers brains around in circles is with vaccines. This helps make him very successful against any would be conservative challengers or criticism.
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The only renewable energy that's indefinitely sustainable on a large enough scale is nuclear.
People forget that manufacturing SP's pollutes the hell out of the environment. It’s also economically more expensive. The amount of energy that goes into both making and maintaining solar panels is so enormous, that the net gain we get back from those panels before they expire is paltry. There's also specialized maintenance costs even when you subtract the fact that they lose about 1% of the ability to capture per year. Extrapolate that out on a long-term national scale. There's also the hidden costs in power storage. They only generate during the day and batteries or any other storage system also entails economic other costs in waste: mining, manufacturing, transportation, disposal, recycling; etc., and they also lose a lot of what they hold (no battery system is 100% efficient; especially when you count the energy cost to make them, and their variable efficiency at temperature), so they waste energy, too (and hence, they're also consuming energy).
Nuclear though outperforms every other source of electrical power. It pollutes 'way' less, kills less people, and generates far more energy in proportion to input. Most nuclear plants today are old and it's the old plants are the most dangerous, which the public doesn't take into account. New plants implement safety and security and efficiency advances that vastly reduce the dangers and risks of nuclear power, and also greatly reduce the amount and potency of nuclear waste as well.
We have today a much safer plant design. It's way harder to damage with natural disasters or terrorist attacks, and producing much less waste material with a much lower radioactivity or lifespan. The newest designs actually consume nuclear waste and burn it into electricity. And further investment will only lead to more improvements in these respects. The most contemporary version is the molten salt reactor, which has been around a long time, but it's also been upgraded into the most advanced nuclear reactor in tested use. It has numerous safety advantages (e.g. it's meltdown proof; it consumes no water; etc.); and by actually consuming nuclear waste as a fuel it reduces the environmental impact of even old reactors, and produces less environmental impact itself.
Can you show your work here? Just googling "solar panels lifetime EROI" gives me tons of papers that come to the exact opposite conclusion, even including storage to make it more comparable. Given that EROI figures are easily manipulated that's not strong evidence either way, but a great many countries have rolled out solar at scale so I tend towards believing it to be roughly true. If it were not, what would those countries' motive be to do this? I've heard arguments to the effect of "China is subsidizing the panels to hide their ineffectiveness as a scheme to wreck their opponents' economies", but they're building out solar capacity massively as well, so if energy-wise solar is a long-term zero sum scam, they've fallen for it too.
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Nuclear does have the best EROI, but that doesn't really matter in a comparison if both sources manage to stay above the required threshold of 3 or 7 or whatever. The additional energy costs will be subsumed into LCOE anyways. Which also incorporates all those maintenance and construction costs. Batteries obviously add cost and reduce EROI but it's also getting better every year.
China's doing some interesting work with pebble bed/molten salt reactors, but it's still going to be years before large scale deployment and renewables just keep getting better in the meantime.
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Datacenters use gas turbines because it's the fastest way to bring online a shit ton of reliable power. The goal is first to AGI, costs (and disruption to neighbors) be damned. That being said, some companies have already signed contracts with renewable farms for next year.
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