Builders of large wind and solar installations find the process complex and take years to start. Huge credits are available, and investors are eager to fund, but the process is overly difficult. Wind installations dropped 77% (2022, Q3) from a year ago. Utility-scale solar installations fell by 40%. Is this data surprising to you? News about a new renewable project does not make a solar farm or a windmill.
Reasons include:
Interconnections to the grid are time-consuming; utilities are inundated with requests and take 3.7 years to approve.
Supply chain difficulties are limiting access to large windmill parts. For example, in Solar, companies have a problem sourcing American-made panels demanded by the recent legislation.
Details of Federal tax policy unknown/uncertain - remember that legislation paints a broad brush while the bureaucracy takes years to put it in writing.
Only 20% of projected wind projects were ever built; solar is lower at 16%.
As with most government plans, they are much more complex to implement than ever imagined. The legislation usually is too focused (i.e., credits to help subsidize and demand to buy American parts). It doesn’t account for the other issues (unintended consequences) that will slow or stop 75% of the projects. Remember the massive projects to rebuild bridges, put new culverts in, and build new wifi towers (2021 law)? Have you heard any progress on these projects? Embarrassing; in private business, someone would be reporting monthly and fired due to inactivity. A quick search showed a few communities announcing their project had been approved, but none showed completed. If ever elected to President (hah), I would immediately implement a dashboard reporting system so Americans would see what happens to legislation that is supposed to be recovering the economy right now.
Graph Below: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - 1.1 TW of solar and energy storage capacity waiting in the interconnection queue.
Wall Street Journal, 01232023, Page B8, Jennifer Hiller
Details of Federal tax policy unknown/uncertain - remember that legislation paints a broad brush while the bureaucracy takes years to put it in writing.
Delay in this case may well be good thing. I predict the undelivered promises of Green E will become well understood and relegated to remote needs, much too impractical and absurdly expensive for any real grid benefit.
Supply Chain
A case can be made that the Biden Afganistan blunder by squandered our ability to harvest key green raw materials critical to green dreams.
The delays equate to unsquandered funds perhaps their availability could help restart Nuclear plants. It’s possible one of the planning team might ‘discover’ nuke is better than Green. Do I smell Nobel ?
The ability of that prize to drive change is well known among green leaders. A chance for the Noel’s redemption, is it at hand?
Ten years ago, Friends of the Earth led a successful campaign to shut down the San Onofre nuclear power plant near me after a botched upgrade by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. They pulled the wrong test software off the shelf to test their new cooling tube design and shipped a doomed-to-fail upgrade. The error was discovered post-installation by inspectors, a microscopic radiation leak due to cooling tube vibration not seen by old test software. Panic ensued, and a perfect opportunity to stampede both the public and the PUC into shutdown versus fix mode. The 2.15 Gigawatt plant was shut down in 2013. Current total estimated cost of the shutdown is now $10.5 billion. It was roughly ten percent of southern California's electric grid. We now pay approximately four times the national average for electricity.
Meantime, to the north, 4,731 windmills now desecrate the beautiful Tehachapi Pass, producing 3.2 Gigawatts, roughly a third more than San Onofre. Not one would exist without massive subsidy. A handful of Small Nuclear Reactors tucked out of sight behind the pass could replace the entire lot.
If John Muir, John Steinbeck and Caesar Chavez could rise from their graves and see what we've done to their beautiful Pass, they'd think we've gone bats**t crazy and they'd be right.
We can do nuclear safely now. The old reactor designs were targeted at making bomb material. During the Cold War, you just couldn't feel safe without 30,000 nuclear warheads. Getting the material involved running reactors at 800 pound water pressure...safely. Anyone who's ever tried to fix a 60 pound pressure leak can appreciate the near-impossibility of that mission. LFTR(Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) reactors run at 60 pounds, with a freeze plug that melts and drains the reactor fuel in case of power loss. We can do this. We're engineers.
The energy density of renewables simply can't pull civilization's train. Nuclear can, but we need leadership. It is sorely lacking. Fossil fuels will get us to nuclear if we push for it. No politician will touch it till we're in trouble I fear.
So if:
Details of Federal tax policy unknown/uncertain - remember that legislation paints a broad brush while the bureaucracy takes years to put it in writing.
Delay in this case may well be good thing. I predict the undelivered promises of Green E will become well understood and relegated to remote needs, much too impractical and absurdly expensive for any real grid benefit.
Supply Chain
A case can be made that the Biden Afganistan blunder by squandered our ability to harvest key green raw materials critical to green dreams.
The delays equate to unsquandered funds perhaps their availability could help restart Nuclear plants. It’s possible one of the planning team might ‘discover’ nuke is better than Green. Do I smell Nobel ?
The ability of that prize to drive change is well known among green leaders. A chance for the Noel’s redemption, is it at hand?
Ten years ago, Friends of the Earth led a successful campaign to shut down the San Onofre nuclear power plant near me after a botched upgrade by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. They pulled the wrong test software off the shelf to test their new cooling tube design and shipped a doomed-to-fail upgrade. The error was discovered post-installation by inspectors, a microscopic radiation leak due to cooling tube vibration not seen by old test software. Panic ensued, and a perfect opportunity to stampede both the public and the PUC into shutdown versus fix mode. The 2.15 Gigawatt plant was shut down in 2013. Current total estimated cost of the shutdown is now $10.5 billion. It was roughly ten percent of southern California's electric grid. We now pay approximately four times the national average for electricity.
Meantime, to the north, 4,731 windmills now desecrate the beautiful Tehachapi Pass, producing 3.2 Gigawatts, roughly a third more than San Onofre. Not one would exist without massive subsidy. A handful of Small Nuclear Reactors tucked out of sight behind the pass could replace the entire lot.
If John Muir, John Steinbeck and Caesar Chavez could rise from their graves and see what we've done to their beautiful Pass, they'd think we've gone bats**t crazy and they'd be right.
We can do nuclear safely now. The old reactor designs were targeted at making bomb material. During the Cold War, you just couldn't feel safe without 30,000 nuclear warheads. Getting the material involved running reactors at 800 pound water pressure...safely. Anyone who's ever tried to fix a 60 pound pressure leak can appreciate the near-impossibility of that mission. LFTR(Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) reactors run at 60 pounds, with a freeze plug that melts and drains the reactor fuel in case of power loss. We can do this. We're engineers.
The energy density of renewables simply can't pull civilization's train. Nuclear can, but we need leadership. It is sorely lacking. Fossil fuels will get us to nuclear if we push for it. No politician will touch it till we're in trouble I fear.