Nuke Jersey! (In the Best Way)

I am a big booster of nuclear power. It's probably the single issue I've moved furthest on over the past five years (from "not caring about it one way or the other" to "big booster"). The reason is simple: nuclear power (which is carbon emission-free) is an essential part of moving to deep decarbonization in the electricity sector, and deep decarbonization in the electricity sector is essential to stopping global warming.

On this score, recent (good) news out of New Jersey provides a compelling illustration. A new energy package offers subsidies that will keep nuclear power plants operational for the foreseeable future, while also supporting new renewable power resources. Why does that matter? Well, consider the alternative we're witnessing in Ohio and Pennsylvania:

[T]here are four nuclear plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania that are slated to close prematurely. Last week, the research consultancy Brattle Group released a report analyzing the impact of those retirements, which are all taking place in the PJM regional energy market. 

The results are startling. Closing those four nuclear plants would wipe out the carbon emissions benefits of all the renewable energy installed in the PJM energy market in the past 25 years. 

Simply replacing the lost nuclear power with renewable energy would cost $2 billion a year, and that enormous investment would not replace or prevent any fossil fuel generation.

The emphasis is mine, but read it again. In terms of carbon emission cuts, losing nuclear power is equivalent to losing 25 years worth of renewable energy installation. Without these nuclear plants, just getting back to even (not replacing any new fossil fuel plants) would cost $2 billion/year.

If the nuclear plants in New Jersey closed, the same thing would happen. New renewable installations would simply be replacing lost nuclear energy -- which means no net reduction in carbon emissions. With the nuclear plants still operating, by contrast, new renewable resources will knock out natural gas plants -- providing a genuine reduction in carbon emissions.

As the linked article concedes, the New Jersey package isn't policy optimal (a carbon pricing scheme would be best). But given politically feasible options, it isn't bad. Importantly, when states treat nuclear power as a linchpin of deep decarbonization, that's a major net win for climate policy hawks.

So kudos, New Jersey. Nuke away.

Post- (and Pre-)National Roundup

No, this isn't about Tillerson (or Goldstein, or McEntee ... goodness, this was a hell of a morning). I delivered the lecture on Nationalism in our Political Theory class today -- which went fine, except that I also have to teach a section on Nationalism tomorrow and now I've used up all my knowledge on the subject. Time for many rounds of my old standbys -- "say more on that", "well, what do you think?", and of course "break off into small groups to discuss."

Anyway, roundup time!

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Advances in turbine technology are making wind power a real player in electricity market -- and not grading on the "renewable energy" curve either.

A powerful story on a UC-Berkeley student living in an unheated trailer with no sewage hookup .... that he's about to be evicted from. This is an extreme story, but it gets to why I get very defensive when Berkeley students are attacked in the media as supposedly epitomizing careless, unserious millennial frivolity. Many of the students here are coming from places and backgrounds where they're well aware of what it means to be attending UC-Berkeley, and are behaving accordingly under conditions that God willing I'll never come close to. When they're lazily stereotyped as aimless hippie stoners, it disrespects them, their work ethic, their talent, and their perseverance.

U. Penn. Law Professor Tobias Barrington Wolff on his colleague, Amy Wax, whom he persuasively argues has converted into the academic equivalent of an Ann Coulter provocateur. This passage is also generally applicable:

What academic freedom does not provide, however, is a free pass entitling faculty who say inflammatory things to escape denunciation or to engage in toxic behavior without consequence. Invoking academic freedom to delegitimize sharp criticism or to claim impunity for improper conduct is a misuse of that principle.

Many people have seen Adam Serwer's excellent commentary on Tamika Mallory's relationship with Louis Farrakhan (a sterling example, incidentally, of how to explain the NoI's appeal to certain segments of the Black community without washing away it's hideously bigoted track record), but Stacey Aviva Flint is another good addition to the list of Black Jews whose opinions you should read on this matter.

Gretchen Rachel Hammond -- the half-Indian Jewish transwoman best known for breaking the story of the Chicago Dyke March expelling Jewish marchers and then being fired from her own newspaper for covering the story -- has a powerful piece detailing her experience and her "divorce" from the trans community in its wake. It is a poignant, cutting, and often very sad piece -- not the least because, for all her fulminations against "intersectionality", the concept in its original manifestation would be very well suited to articulating the sort of marginalization and exclusion Hammond details (one would not be off the mark in summarizing Hammond's experience as one of being "split at the root" -- Adrienne Rich's felicitous phrase which has often been approvingly quoted in the intersectionalist literature).

The New Trump Administration Push To Blow Up Energy Markets

David Roberts has a great post on efforts by Energy Secretary Rick Perry to essentially blow up the wholesale energy market in a naked effort to protect coal (and, to a lesser extent, nuclear) power plants from free competition. Basically, he proposed a new rule that would guarantee coal and nuclear power plants a positive return on their investments, regardless of whether their power capacity was used or even is economical. Whereas other power plants (ranging from wind to natural gas) make money based on their ability to compete effectively in the marketplace, a few preferred operators would get their profits guaranteed.

Nominally, this is because they uniquely contribute to grid "resilience" by being a source of power able to ramp up quickly in the event of a major disruption (like, say, a major weather event). The problem (well, the short version of the problem) is that all the relevant studies -- including those conducted by the DOE under the supervision of Secretary Perry in the hopes that they'd confirm his political preferences -- conclude that coal and nuclear power don't actually improve grid resilience, and that, in fact, the grid is generally quite reliable and resilient right now (and only improving). So the only real upshot is to serve as a massive intrusion on the market in favor of uneconomical coal power.* It's thus no surprise that one Republican former FERC commissioner described it as "the antithesis of good economics," or that simply said it would "blow the market up."

The whole article is worth your read, both as an introduction to how energy markets work (Roberts is great at explaining for a lay audience) and as an entry in the infinite-series of "Republicans don't actually care about market competition.

After laying out a litany of obstacles to passing the rule -- ranging from wall-to-wall opposition in the energy sector (outside of coal/nuke lobbyists) to severe time pressures to a complete lack of legal or policy justification necessary under the relevant statutes, Roberts concludes by saying the future of this proposal depends "on just how hackish and partisan FERC is willing to get." In other words, hold on tight.**

* As Roberts notes, while nuclear power is in a somewhat different boat from coal, this rule is also terrible policy as applied to supporting nukes.

** FERC is actually normally a relatively well-run agency, but at the moment it is controlled by Trump partisans who are, shall we say, not typically concerned with abiding by standards of technical expertise. So we'll see.

Nuclear Power: The Macho Man's Manly Path to Global Salvation

I've written a bit about nuclear power before, and how it may be our best hope at achieving deep decarbonization in a reasonable time frame while still meeting our electricity needs. Put simply, nuclear power has three characteristics that make it extremely attractive from a decarbonization perspective:

1. It's high capacity.
2. It's zero-emission.
3. It's dispatchable.

Back in the day, nuclear energy was attractive for a fourth reason -- people thought it would be inexpensive. Nuclear energy would famously be "too cheap to meter". This turned out to be a less than oracle-esque prophecy. Nuclear power plants have long been plagued with cost overruns, and their skyrocketing expense (along with a few very public safety scares) is what caused a long freeze in nuclear construction from which we are only just beginning to see a thaw.

But from my vantage, the issue blocking us from pursuing necessary anti-climate change action isn't monetary. We have the resources to do it. The problem is, for lack of a better word, cultural. Conservatives have gotten it into their heads that fighting climate change and promoting renewable power is something only woolly liberal hippies care about, because they hate capitalism or something. And since Cleek's Law states that "Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily," that means conservatives oppose pretty much anything on the clean power agenda.

Enter nuclear energy. Nuclear power is not coded as liberal -- if anything, its public valence is probably still more anti-environmental stemming from "nuclear-free zone" politics emerging out of the 70s and 80s (nuclear waste controversies stemmed from whether holding sites designed to last 10,000 years were sufficiently permanent. Given that we're staring down catastrophic climate change by the end of this century, that timeframe looks adorably quaint). It's muscular -- nuclear energy is something big, bad-ass countries produce -- unlike solar power which might turn your calculator on if you're not in a dark room. Sure some people fret about "safety" (although nuclear power is on net actually quite safe), but conservatives actually tend to be less risk-averse when it comes to nuclear energy than liberals. And conservatives actually have no problem expending resources when it comes to things they care about -- like funneling money to really rich people or building jet fighters.

Basically, nuclear energy is culturally coded in a way that makes it acceptable to conservatives in a way that other clean power sources aren't. And so regardless of whether it's theoretically possible to go 100% clean power without resort to nukes, nuclear energy is unique in its ability to not be rejected out of hand by conservatives who hate what renewable energy represents -- limp, paternalistic liberalism that wants to take away American muscle and replace it with some Dutch windmill and hippie solar communes.

Now I want to be 100% clear: This is a profoundly stupid reason to push for nuclear power (there are good reasons, but "nuclear power is manly" is not one). As a human, I'm embarrassed that the argument has come to this -- that we can only convince people to endorse global salvation if we can frame in a way that allows them to feel sufficiently manly about it. But we're past the point where my pride matters. If conservatives need to feel like they're sticking it to liberals and environmentalists by promoting nuclear energy, har-dee-harharhar, I say we indulge them.

So let's go, conservatives. Make electricity great again. Back a big nuclear energy push. That'll show me and my liberal pals what's what. It's the macho, manly way to save the planet.

The Next Wave of the Net Metering Wars

The New York Times has an article about utility efforts to roll back "net metering"* for solar power.

The article is pretty clearly slanted -- utilities aren't making up the free-riding problem. But it's also evident that utility companies aren't just interested in insuring grid stability but want to kneecap solar outright, because it is a threat to the monopoly utility model. In many of the states, rooftop solar is so nascent that it's almost impossible to imagine it poses any serious immediate threat to utility business models.

The fact that very liberal states like Hawaii have rolled back net metering should suggest that there's more to it than just greedy conservatives hating renewable power and protecting incumbent power producers (recall that Hawaii has actually set a 100% renewable power goal they plan to meet by 2045). But the Trump administration and allied conservative state governments are certainly sympathetic to net metering "reform" proposals which are best characterized as "greedy conservatives hating renewable power and protecting incumbent power producers."

* Net metering is the practice where households with solar panels get paid retail price for any excess power they return to the grid. If my house consumes 1,000 kWh of power, and the panels on my roof produce 1,000 kWh of power, my electricity bill nets out to zero. The reason it's a "net" is that, on a minute-to-minute basis, there will be times when my solar panels are producing more than I'm using (and the excess gets sold onto the grid) and likewise times when the panels aren't covering my usage (e.g., when it's cloudy) and I need to draw from the grid. The reason this aggravates utility companies is that my house is still hooked up to and uses the grid (to sell the excess power, to draw from non-intermittent dispatchable power at night or in the rain), but it isn't paying for any of the costs of maintaining it. As rooftop solar becomes more prominent, this becomes a genuine regulatory puzzle for utility commissions. But in most jurisdictions, we're nowhere near the point where it will make a dent.

Will Nukes Save the World?

David Roberts has a good beginner's rundown on what it will take to decarbonize the economy (and, accordingly, avoid the catastrophic global warming scenarios that are likely if we stay on our current path). As we've discussed on this blog, decarbonization is inextricably linked to electrification -- we want more of our energy needs met by electricity, and specifically carbon-emission free electricity.

The big challenge is that the most obvious renewable resources -- wind and solar -- have massive scalability issues because they are not dispatchable power resources. They don't generate power on an as-needed basis, they generate when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. And because electricity supply must meet demand on an instantaneous basis, the inability to control when wind and solar resources generate power is a huge problem that makes it virtually impossible for them to meet 100% of power load requirements without massive overbuilding.

What we need, then, is a dispatchable resource that can lower our carbon emissions. Natural gas is a possibility -- kind of. It is much cleaner than coal, but still emits carbon. Roberts estimates that switching primarily to natural gas could get us to roughly 60% decarbonization. That sounds pretty good, even if the target we need to hit is actually 80% - 100%. But there's a big problem:

Natural gas is cleaner than coal (by roughly half, depending on how you measure methane leakage), but it’s still a fossil fuel. At least without CCS [Carbon Capture Sequestration], it is incompatible with decarbonization beyond 60 percent or so.

If you build out a bunch of natural gas plants to get to 60 percent, then you’re stuck shutting them down to get past 60 percent.

It would be very difficult to strand all those assets. There would be a lot of resistance. It’s just one example of path dependence in energy — choices, once made, tend to perpetuate themselves through inertia. Leaning too heavily into natural gas in the next 20 years will make it more difficult to pull away in the subsequent 20.

Enter nuclear power, the new darling of (some) environmentalists. Nuclear power has a high capacity (it can generate a lot of power), zero-emission (no carbon), and dispatchable -- a holy trinity if your only goal is to decarbonize. It isn't renewable (though I don't think there's any immediate risk to our nuclear fuel reserves), and of course nuclear power has other risks and associations which make it politically controversial. But it strikes me as the most straight-forward, feasible, and immediately accessible method for taking big chunks out of our carbon footprint right now.

What are the alternatives? The best one is high-capacity energy storage (which can convert a variable resource like wind into a dispatchable one like nuclear). But the technology to have such storage on the scale and flexibility necessary is just not there yet, and while it's more than an eye-twinkle, it's also not particularly close at hand. After that, we could simply engage in massive, massive overbuilding of wind and solar. But even then we'd need to also basically globalize our transmission network (and massively upgrade that too), so that we could be confident that the wind is blowing/sun is shining somewhere.

Roberts indicates that there is a debate between those who think we can go 100% renewable (no nuclear, no CCS) versus those who want those options on the table. Count me decisively in the latter camp. It might theoretically be possible to design a grid system available today that is zero-emission and entirely renewable. But the political, economic, and technological obstacles to putting it together are more than formidable, they are towering. Nuclear power is a technology we have now, that checks all of the key decarbonization boxes.

Electrification, Electric Utilities and the System Working

When it comes to social change, I tend to prefer working within the system rather than seeking its radical overhaul. This isn't due to any particular love for the system we have. Rather, it's for the more prosaic reason that widescale systematic change is really hard, and so if you can achieve your ends through the system that's already in place you might as well go for it. I also have a belief -- perhaps naive, perhaps not -- that the modern liberal state and society presents such a variegated slate of interests, motives, and desires that the creative reformer should be able to concoct a cocktail where it is in the interest of system-level players to spit out the social good you want.

On that note, I found very interesting this article by David Roberts on the potential synergy between large-scale electrical utilities and environmentalists seeking decarbonization. The first part of the argument is the observation that, if you want to decarbonize our economy, you want as much of it running on electricity (as opposed to, say, petroleum) as possible. Instead of gasoline-powered cars, electric cars. Instead of oil heaters, electric heaters. Instead of gas stoves, electric stoves. And so on. Electricity isn't always renewably produced, but it can be -- through wind, solar, hydro, or nuclear. So the more we switch over to running things on electricity, the more opportunities there are to replace carbon-intensive fossil fuels with zero-emission sources.

The second part of the argument asks what large-scale utilities -- big legacy corporations that are more or less the definition of "the system" -- want. And the answer is, intuitively enough, more electricity demand. Over the last few decades, electricity demand has begun to flatten -- a large problem for utilities who generally make their money not on the sale of electricity (they only recover marginal costs) but on returns on capital investments (e.g., building a new power plant). If there is no increase in electricity demand, there's no need for new plants, and so there's no new capital investments to make a return on.

Putting two and two together: Utilities want a world in which they need to build more power plants. Environmentalists want a world in which more of our energy comes from electricity -- specifically, zero-emission electricity. It seems like a deal can be struck: environmentalists support electrification on the condition that the new electricity produced be primarily zero-carbon.

In short, there's a massive and influential player inside the system with a vested incentive to promote environmental reform. Leveraging that may not be as fun as seeking to blow up the system of large corporations who profit on energy sales, but it is far more likely to actually happen.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume XXV: The Price of Power in Guatemala

I do a lot of work on contemporary anti-discrimination, especially anti-Semitism. I also research in energy law (right now much of my time is spent preparing for the Energy Law class I'll be teaching this summer). So imagine how excited I was when I saw those two great tastes combine together in Guatemala:

Demonstrators in Guatemala used anti-Semitic language to protest the Central American country’s major power company, which is owned by an Israeli group. 

Energuate, a private power supplier owned by Israeli company IC Power, was targeted by protests last week that included congressmen, businessmen and members of the military, the Estado de Israel news portal reported. 

“Jews have killed me on the cross. Now Jews from Energuate are killing my people in Guatemala with the light,” read the Spanish-language banners and posters at the protests. “Out with Jewish Energuate from Guatemala. Let’s unite for the nationalization of power electricity.” 

The anti-Semitic material also included an image of a crucified Jesus and a New Testament passage about hypocritical “teachers of the law and Pharisees” neglecting justice, mercy and faithfulness.

Yet you might be surprised to know that I was initially hesitant about whether to add this as an entry to my series. Was it because it wasn't high-profile enough? No -- it was a big enough deal to elicit comment from Guatemala's vice president. Was it because it wasn't really "blaming the Jews"? Seems like it obviously was -- though no doubt someone is ready to explain how "Jews have killed me on the cross" is really just an indictment of Israeli state policies.

No, the reason for my hesitance is that I already did an energy speculation entry in this series, and I do try to vary my pitches. Ultimately, I decided that this was different enough from my early contribution (which was mostly about energy extraction, rather than electricity prices), so that it could sustain itself. But it is so nice to see that the former was not a one-off.

Net Metering in Nevada

At Vox, David Roberts has a really good piece on the status of "rooftop solar" programs in Nevada. What I particularly like about this post is that it gives a fair shake to the problems such programs cause for incumbent utilities, even though Roberts (like myself) is broadly sympathetic to rooftop solar and so opposes utility efforts to stifle them. If you're interested in the future of renewable power and electricity markets, and want to get a perspective on the situation that doesn't gloss over the real transition problems that exist (often called "stranded costs"), I highly recommend you take a gander.

Midweek Roundup: 5/20/15

Blog's been quiet, but a roundup will fix that!

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Even in the South, where entrenched utilities rule, Florida stands out for its anti-competitive electricity policies. But a rare Enviro-Tea alliance may change that to enable California homeowners to access the state's abundent solar resources.

Speaking of conservatives doing unusual things, Nebraska looks set to abolish the death penalty. Says one GOP state senator: "If government can't be trusted to manage our health care ... then why should it be trusted to carry out the irrevocable sentence of death?" Not quite the argument I'd make, but that's what happens when you work bipartisan.

Seeds of Peace is just one of many fantastic groups that approach conflict-resolution by bringing people together, rather than driving them apart. It's a great organization worthy of your support.

Reading about this conference, which focused on remedying growing gulfs in the Jewish community over various Israeli policies, is quite depressing. There's this weird disconnect wherein conference participants take views that really aren't that far from J Street, but are appalled that anybody would listen to a terrible group like J Street. It's a weird sort of denialism and it doesn't exactly inspire confidence at the ability to right ship.

Hey, remember that oft-heard complaint about how Palestinian leaders say one thing to Western audiences and another to the people at home? That's what springs to mind when I hear Bibi insist to an EU envoy that he supports a two-state solution.

Pre-Doctoral Roundup

Berkeley, California has been the fifth city I've lived in over the past five years (in order: Chicago, Champaign, Minneapolis, Washington, Berkeley). That city per year streak comes to a close, as Jill and I are sticking around in Berkeley for at least a few more years yet. I'm enrolling in Berkeley's Political Science Ph.D. program. Moreover, the law school is extending my fellowship (and funding) for at least one more year -- which (in addition to making graduate school considerably less impoverishing than it would otherwise be) means that I can keep my connection to the law community even as I embark on this new adventure.

It will be a bit odd to move over to the demand-side of the education marketplace. But I'm excited to get started, and excited to continue my involvement in the Berkeley community.

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Why "Ashkenormativity" Isn't a Thing. I did not expect this post to be good, and was pleasantly surprised. Not sure I'm ultimately persuaded, but very thought-provoking.

I get the technical objection Justin McBrayer is raising here, but I think "facts are things subject to proof, opinions are matters of pure belief" works as a rough-and-ready distinction suitable for elementary school students. And as one of those darned millennial skeptics of the existence of moral facts, I am obviously dubious that such a belief is responsibility for all the ills of Kids These Days.

My former colleague (and longtime electricity market expert) Bud Earley lays out two views on how distributed generation will effect electric utilities.

Interesting article on how various civil rights centered groups view the ongoing debates over standardized testing. This is, as the article notes, one of the few areas where the mainstream left really is pretty fractured.

Did Hillary Clinton steal Hadassah's logo? Spoiler: No! "H" with a red and blue color scheme is not as original as one might think.

A prominent activist on behalf of undocumented immigrants who warned he would be killed if deported back to Mexico, was killed after being deported back to Mexico. This sort of scenario was, by far, the worst part about clerking. There were many circumstances where I felt pretty confident that a regular person -- not always a saint, but not a monster either -- would be killed if sent back to their home country. But under the laws of the United States and the precedents of the 8th Circuit, their asylum claims were doomed to fail. And so I issued recommendations that I basically knew meant that regular people would be violently killed. It is something that everyone who touches our immigration system has to deal with.

Sunday Roundup: Jan. 25, 2015

Just because I'm a big Jewish media star doesn't mean that I don't have time for the little people my loyal readers. Here are some stories I've found interesting that have crossed my browser.

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A powerful story about a lesbian couple in Oklahoma planning their (suddenly legalized) wedding.

I honestly have no idea how someone who presumably identifies as a progressive can write this without it being immediately, blaring, obvious that it is identical to conservative mockery/dismissal of racism claims. Someone get the author a copy of Darren Lenard Hutchinson's Racial Exhaustion, stat.

Interesting piece (to me, at least!) by David Roberts on the proposed Exelon/Pepco merger.

An Israeli Druze student was beaten by a Jewish mob who overheard him speaking Arabic. The student, who recently finished his service in the IDF, had been posted at the Presidential Residence and received a call of support from Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.

As much as "WhatAboutTheMenz" annoys me, no Ruby Tuesday's, you can't just restrict posted bartender positions to women.