From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

MIT Innovation Fellow and former Biden economic advisor Brian Deese explaining why everyone should be doing more to help.

The Next Front in the War Against Climate Change

By Brian Deese

Clean-energy investment in America is off the charts—but it still isn’t translating into enough electricity that people can actually use.By Brian Deese

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Because even though unprecedented sums of money are flowing into clean energy, our current electricity system is failing to meet Americans’ demand for clean power. If we don’t fix it, the surge in investment will not deliver its full economic and planetary potential.

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For decades, the biggest obstacle to clean energy in the U.S. was insufficient demand. That is no longer the case. The problem now is the structure of our electricity markets: the way we produce and consume electricity in America. We need to fix that if we want the biggest clean-energy investment in history to actually get the job done.

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Many utilities, however, won’t prioritize installing batteries, and they won’t invest in solutions that let consumers do more with less energy. That’s becausethese programs lower utilities’ capital expenditures, which lowers the rates they charge consumers and, in turn, their profits. If utilities don’t get paid for innovating, they’re unlikely to do it.

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On a policy level, this isn’t rocket science. In Australia, households are paid for sending electricity back into the grid. Lo and behold, Australia today has the highest rate of rooftop solar panels per capita of any country. In the U.S., state legislatures and regulators in places as varied as Utah and Hawaii have figured out how to pay households to install batteries and send electricity back to the grid. Last year, Montana unanimously passed a law that gave utilities a financial incentive to use more advanced materials in their transmission lines. But these remain the exceptions to the rule.

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Shifting this approach will not happen without a new vocabulary and new coalitions. The climate movement must recognize that its primary target is no longer just Big Oil; it’s the regulatory barriers that keep clean energy from getting built and delivered efficiently to American homes. The movement also needs to pressure Big Tech companies, whose AI offerings are driving upenergy demands, to follow through on their lofty climate talk by supporting reform in the utility system as well.

…Read more: 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/climate-change-investment-utilities/678455/

According to his bio, Brian Deese is an innovation fellow at MIT, who served as director of the White House National Economic Council from 2021 to 2023.

How many times have we read or heard left wing politicians and academics whining others didn’t do enough to help?

Big Tech companies don’t want to invest in more grid capacity, they want co-located nuclear reactors, to minimise their exposure to the USA’s incompetently managed electricity grid.

Nobody is investing in batteries at anything like the required scale because batteries are too expensive. Battery capital costs make nuclear reactors look cheap.

Saving energy is a bad joke in the context of the AI revolution – you can have an AI powered future, or you can save energy, but you cannot have both.

As for citing Australia as an example, that is the biggest joke of the whole article. Citing the Australian grid as aspirational is an utter absurdity. An Australian state government just cut a deal to pay a single coal plant $225 million per year to stay open, in a desperate bid to stave off a total collapse.

Deep down I suspect Brian Deese knows his precious green energy revolution will not survive the AI revolution – which is likely why he devoted a paragraph to abusing tech giants.

The skyrocketing demand of the AI revolution is the final nail in the coffin of green energy. What we are watching now is its death throes.