65 Comments

I get the feeling the climate alarmists don't think at all about the downstream impacts of the radical changes they are trying to force upon us. I am in transportation and wonder what those impacts will be when they ban the diesel engine. What do you do with 3 million diesel trucks that can no longer be used? Where do you put thousands of rail locomotives if they can no longer be operated? Perhaps just build a rail line out to the desert and build a new "iron mountain" out of all this obsolete equipment. But who knows? With cloud seeding maybe you could turn the mountain into a ski resort.

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That’s the spirit!

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Great question. They believe they're saving the world, so all of that is of secondary concern.

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I'm for saving the world, but in a scalable way using the good side of capitalism. For that, the thing has to make money. Like Nuclear fuel is one million times cheaper than fossil fuel. Nobody should be planning on burning a hundred trillion on a "transition". Not gunna happen and arguably would set the climate back. Buying trillions of dollars of batteries would cause pollution now, hoping to make it back later.. but we can't afford to move backwards.

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Locomotives, like companies, are fully recyclable. Metal has been recycled forever.

But useful and unique locomotives, tractors, combines, airplanes, can be fueled by synthetic hydrocarbon fuels made with environmental carbon, plus hydrogen, plus lots of nuclear energy. So net zero aviation is already demonstrated by Lufhansa, using normal planes and fuels, synthetic. They think the fact they would need half of all of Germany's electricty is a reason not to do it at scale. I think that's a reason to scale up nuclear energy!

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There is another factor that at least the climate alarmists are missing. Single family homes and businesses have begun adopting and installing home generators. These are rarely if ever "renewable power" but instead are diesel, gasoline, and propane powered. At this point I have 15 kW of my own, plus a truck with a 75 gallon fuel tank that can power the house if need be. When the power goes out now, after Uri, I hear a small fleet of generators kicking on and the lights barely flicker. That cost should probably be factored into your calculations. The real losers in this are apartment dwellers and low income families that can't afford all these extra modifications. Small businesses in commercial strip centers or malls likely don't have the facilities to put in generators, so again the higher density areas are the ones unable to cope. Blackouts are probably racist and should be stopped just for that reason, right?

There are some other costs/effects that I observed during a 24 hour power outage in San Diego. When the traffic lights quit working (within a few hours) there were accidents all over town, some fatal. Also, the same businesses watching their food spoil, discovered that almost none of their customers used cash, so without credit cards, no one was able to do any sales transactions. Of course, most people don't seem to realize that you can't buy gasoline when the power is out, so everyone ran out of gas too. But possibly the worst was when the water in the public water system lost pressure due to inability to pump, and no one had any water supply. That took less than a day to deplete the water in the public system. No flush for you! Solar and wind did nothing because the grid was down. Myself, I had a portable generator, gasoline and water reserves but I was the only place on my block with lights as I grilled steak and drank cold beer on the patio that night. This is what happens when you get accustomed to hurricanes.

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It was the damn PG&E PSPS outages that had me say "never again". 17kW NG unit on my house.

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That's only the start. Generator use can become permanent. Business sometimes solidifies terrible patterns. Example the once middle class nation of Lebanon. Now half the power is supplied by the generator "mafia".

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I grew up in Africa and my family still live in Zimbabwe. About 1.5 billion people in Africa have no power and no running water. If you run a business there, large or small, you have a deisel generator due to frequent blackouts. Those households that rely on electricity, if they can afford it, have a generator. During frequent blackouts the noise of generators is continuous and during longer blackouts (+8 hours) only those with sufficient fuel (cost at least 4x what Americans pay) have power. My Zimbabwean family (well off in Africa) ALWAYS have gallons of drinking water available and use water from their swimming pool for bathing and laundry (wash by hand and dry in the sun). Due to their bore hole pump which they can't afford to run. Domestic water systems have long broken down.

Is this our future?

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I have posted this several times now, I really hope it's not the future my friend.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/figure-of-the-week-deployment-and-use-of-back-up-generators-in-sub-saharan-africa/

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I disagree fundamentally with non despatchable " renewable" energy as a replacement for generators. What is required desperately in Africa is constant load, single source power sources such as coal, gas, nuclear and hydro. The World Bank refuses to loan any African country funds for power generation unless they are renewable! Idiots. Our western society was built on cheap energy from coal and once we had it we insisted on clamping down on emmissions that do not cause "climate change". For at least 30 years China have funded African coal power generation at high cost to the mostly corrupt governments in Africa - as one who grew up there the US and Europe cannot apply their mealy mouthed principles on African governments who lie, cheat and steal from their own people, and savagely put down any hint of dissent. Here is a Heartland Article that just scathes the surface of Africa.

https://heartland.org/opinion/china-recolonizes-africa/

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💯% agree. You cannot get the reports on small generator use without the green energy propaganda. Economy of scale is the answer. I would say coal if they have a domestic supply. But combined cycle gas turbines are probably the best answer, easy to build, can burn a variety of fuels. But before anything can happen, the government corruption has to be handled or it will never get off the ground.

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Everybody in my neighborhood has a nat gas generator. We had a car-pole last night and lost power. It sounded like the Daytona 500 for about 6 hours.

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Additional information along the same lines

https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/640791573016682618/pdf/Summary.pdf

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While it is certainly no surprise this is the case, thank you for working on quantifying the impact. while the climate hysterics don't really care about data because it feels bad, i'm guessing policymakers will figure out pretty quickly that if they don't keep the lights on, they will be looking for new jobs, and that is the strongest incentive any of them will ever have.

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That’s our hope!

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Refrigeration and heat will always be the things that drive the hard currency impacts of a blackout. You do a good job of identifying the grocery store example. The FDA has some pretty stringent temperature guidelines on when that product has to go. Another is a fiberglass insulation plant. Many use an electric furnace because gas introduces impurities. These are continous flow furnaces, a 15 minute power outage means the glass crystallizes in the furnace, and they literally have to tear the furnace apart and jack hammer out the glass.

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Back in olden times, oil refineries used grid power. They all have on-site generation now. A power outage there is expensive and dangerous

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It’s like we’re opening Pandora’s box and we have no idea what the consequences will be

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Or care .....

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The refineries also figured out all that refinery gas they used to flair off makes decent gas turbine fuel. So why not save/make some money.

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Interesting.

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This great. I have a lot to learn about industrial power needs and is awesome to have readers that can help teach us new things

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And that's before you add things like factories. From what I hear, the hump of their marginal cost of power outage is a lot closer to the left than to the middle, depending on how you measure it. I think it's to the point that they see it fit to have their own generation on site.

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Yes, co-generation is looking better all the time.

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While I can't really relate to combined heat and power (tropical country, heat is everywhere), having your own generator feeding your process heat and electricity is a good idea if grid doesn't do it for you.

Hype for small nuclear for maximum power.

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I think new data centers will use on site generation. Grid power is too expensive and too unreliable. They’ll still say they are 100% green, of course.

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So, which generator manufacturers we buying shares in?

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🤣🤣 I can tell you Generac outspending everyone else at least 20:1 on advertising/marketing. There product quality is hit and miss at best, and their customer support is pretty poor, but man can they work the sales. Cummins has the best quality, and does the least marketing. Everyone else is in between.

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I have a Honeywell 20kW (rebranded Generac). My decision came down to what is the most common and easiest to service. The Generac is so ubiquitous that anyone can work on them (including me) and parts are available everywhere. Cummins makes a great engine but it’s also slightly less common. I had strongly considered Briggs and Stratton but realize they haven’t penetrated the market as well as Generac.

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Generac is sold rebranded under a few labels, but yeah same machine. You are absolutely correct about parts, there is a Generac Dealer every 3 blocks. There is also a pretty healthy aftermarket parts pool now. I have a Cummins because I was an Onan factory certified tech back in the day. Cummins haven't changed things that much.

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You sound similar to me - I keep all the likely parts that need replacement on-hand - spark plugs, oil filters, air filters, and a stepper motor. A Generac tech told me the stepper motor can randomly fail so I just keep one on-hand.

I’ve got about 40 hours on it now and it hasn’t skipped a beat but I know you have to keep an eye on these air-cooled units.

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Yes Sir! If you have mechanical lifters it's important to stay on top of the valve adjustments. If you hydraulic it's all good.

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Full context thinking is missing from much of today’s public debates. Thanks for showing how it’s done!

Value calculations are hard. For example:

Gas costs the same whether it’s fuelling a life saving ambulance ride or a last minute whim to drive to the ski hill, thanks to the concept of marginal utility.

But the value of the gas in the both cases is orders of magnitude apart. Putting a single value on it misses important insight.

Most of the time people use (marginal) cost as a proxy for value. Whereas cost is just the minimum value someone puts on it in a given context.

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I think the graph showing the marginal cost to a grocery store, depending on the outage length, could significantly under estimate the actual impact.

The graph focuses on the loss of perishables . If the outage impact was severe enough, the business itself might fail. Small businesses are especially impacted by even modest outages. It is estimated that almost 18,000 small businesses were shut down or destroyed as a result of the 9/11 attack and the outages that followed. They could not remain viable without ongoing incoming revenue. In the case of the grocery store, how long would they remain closed if they lost all their perishable food? Would they loose employees that would look for other jobs?

I worked for IBM for 31 years. We worked with many mid-sized and large businesses on disaster recovery (DR) plans. A long power outage is a disaster. Small businesses usually cannot afford much in the way of DR. According to IBM, more than 40% of small businesses will not re-open after experiencing a disaster, and among those that do, an additional 25% will fail within the first year after the crisis.

The other thing that is not implied by the graph because it focuses on a grocery store (a very local business) is the downstream impacts to other businesses outside the blackout zone. If my business were to produce a component used by other businesses in other parts of the county, my outage could become their outage. If I make the furniture used by a number of nationwide furniture stores, my outage may translate to many stores losing sales.

United States businesses are increasingly dependent on long and just in time supply chains. An outage anywhere in their supply chain could have many unexpected results. We saw this with Covid.

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Great insight John! Thank you for sharing it.

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And the government does not care

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Your information is excellent! Some of my solar/wind advocate friends find your Energy Bad Boys name off-putting and they do not accept your information as reliable; I think for two reasons.

They are biased against it to begin with and second your name doesn't sound, to them, as serious.

I appreciate your work but please change your name.

Keep up the good work!

Bob Shaw

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Hi Bob and thanks for reading! We’re not changing the name though!

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Thanks for reading and the input! I'm sure they'd take issue with us regardless of the name.

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Please share this with RFK Jr. I want to vote for him, but he has his head in a darh place on energy, especially nuclear. He does say, to his credit, that the market, without government subsidy, should decide. Including LCOB in LCOE is an appropriate market analysis element, even more obvious than taking "opportunity cost" of your funds into account on an investment. Great read.

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I think Mr Kennedy is a lost cause on these issues

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RFK utterly believes in Climate Change and there is no way to shake that belief. Thus his energy policies will be the disaster that the current administration has foisted on us. You like the current system, then for RFK.

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The big battle on the horizon pits AI and data centers against the climate lobby. They know that they need real baseload, dispatchable generation to make money. Without that reliable power they also will have their own version of costs of blackouts. Funny to see tech bros slowly coming to this realization that they can’t have their solar/wind cake and eat it too…

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Exactly! It's a realization that has produced a few more nuclear advocates.

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“Someone stole a car from Issac’s garage” … casual

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I’m midwestern and this is the most I’m able to express myself haha

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Good thoughts.

The answer is always nuclear, no matter what the question. Water? Proper recycling? Pollution cleanup? Jobs? Health? Want to End War? In all cases dramatic increases in nuclear are the answer.

Remember, none of us know what the cost of nuclear power is. Because we can't. Because you don't know the cost until the factory that makes a tech product has had 5 years to streamline. And there is NO FACTORY at the moment making nuclear power modules. So... we are all just guessing how cheap and safe it could be. Without any approved improvements to safety or economics since 1975 due to stonewalling regultors, we have NO IDEA how good nuclear could be.

One correction I would like to suggest.

Coal and Diesel have a greater cost than the social cost of capital. It's the death and brain damage. 1/6 of All DEATHS of people are caused by fossil fuel air pollution. (Harvard study.)

People are quite expensive. And I am partial to them. :-) And they are expensive to repair.

And what kills people also kills wildlife, if that's what matters to you.

Gas doesn't cause as many deaths. But it does cause a lot of climate change. If 1% of the gas leaks in to the air between the fracking field and the consumer's appliance, then gas is worse than coal for climate. And the fracking business isn't clean at all, in fact doing more radioactive material dispersal than nuclear power in recent years. (Wildcatters mostly who improperly dispose of produced radioactive water.).

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Hi Grumpy and thanks for your comment and your support. I am very skeptical of claims about premature deaths from air pollution, mostly because U.S. EPA data show an enormous decline in particulates in the U.S. Air pollution in most areas is at background concentrations, and I think that applying a linear-no-threshold standard to things like PM is inappropriate, just as LNT is inappropriate for assessing the risks of nuclear power.

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Sorry about your car…taking it out of the garage…

Interesting analysis. I thought about power outages like snow days …everything shuts dow for a day, but it is much worse. A per Mw cost is really interesting

I agree that you need 5 times the generating capacity as you move to renewables..maybe more. People don’t think about what it takes to charge all those batteries on a daily basis, and you only have 6 hours of usable sunlight to do it, and then there are cloudy days, then there might someday be long term storage and you have to charge that! Impossible.

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Thanks, Lee. It was a crazy night especially because the dogs were barking. I came downstairs and suddenly heard the engine start so I ran into the garage to see the car pulling out. I decided it was a good idea to try and stop him (I was unsuccessful) and my wife had the better idea to call the cops.

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Thanks for the wholistic perspective on energy. Your approach reminds me of an investment principle called 'opportunity cost.' Opportunity cost is the loss of a benefit that a person could have received, but gave up, to take another course of action.

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