New nuclear becomes financeable by shifting construction, financing or revenue risk toward governments, state institutions and regulated electricity customers.
Nuclear power works. It produces low-carbon electricity, avoids the health burden of fossil-fuel combustion, provides firm generation and can operate for many decades. My skepticism about building large new nuclear fleets has never depended on pretending otherwise. The more interesting question is why countries that have built nuclear successfully have … [continued]
Transition claims become serious only after they survive the science, beat the alternatives, and pass through adoption reality.
A lot of transition analysis gives too much credit to technologies that can be made to work and not enough scrutiny to whether they matter. The difference shows up across carbon capture hubs, synthetic fuel claims, small modular reactor schedules, cement decarbonization pathways, aviation fuel projections, ammonia shipping forecasts, grid … [continued]
Doyne Farmer believes the world of economics has too many mathematicians and too few physicists, leading to inaccurate predictions.
It looks to me like a perfect storm for energy is coming to the United States. The Trump administration is trying to push energy resources that cannot be built quickly, while attempting to kill some that can. And this is happening just as demand is increasing. I believe we will … [continued]
ChatGPT generated create a panoramic image of climate business professionals sharing a meal and talking in Brussels
When people found out I was going to be in Brussels, invitations for lunch and dinner came out of the woodwork, and people started booking train rides, including two from London. Lengthy conversations on different decarbonization challenges ensued, around the main event itself, the book launch of the second edition … [continued]
I recently came across a somewhat old spreadsheet from the U.S. Department of Energy, “Public Retail Gasoline Stations by State and Year,” which covered data from 1996 to 2012 (xlsx file found HERE). It was clear that the numbers in it were not precisely accurate, but there was something very … [continued]
As the cost of releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere goes up, so does interest in carbon capture.
It is not just the carbon footprint. During the Civil War, a postage stamp to mail a letter cost 3¢. It was still 3¢ when I was a kid. There had been times of inflation, but the price of the stamp had not changed. In fact, during the Civil War, … [continued]
I had the title written before I saw this tweet, but it’s a good metaphor for the overall topic:
I have come to believe that the end of oil & gas could look very different than what people expect. In ways it could appear even to defy the accepted law of supply and demand. If I am right, loss of demand in the face of continued availability of the resources could drive retail prices up instead of down. And once this process has begun, the consequences could quickly become disruptive.
