Jesse Jenkins Archives - Nucleation Capital

California faces a very tough choice. Politicians and many environmental advocates would like to solve the need to eliminate emissions by building renewables as much as possible, and allowing natural gas (and its well-heeled donors) to thrive and grow hidden behind the curtain of renewables. They'd prefer that the back door given to natural gas to stabilize the grid not be given that much attention—or the fact that spending double or triple to let everyone get into the action, renewables, gas and battery manufacturers—not get much focus.

Unfortunately, these charades don't stand up to any economic analyses for the most effective or even cost-effective pathway to full decarbonization and three separate analyses all show the same result. Despite distinct approaches to the calculations, all three models, done by froups from Princeton University, Stanford University, and Energy and Environmental Economics (E3), a San Francisco-based consulting firm, yielded very similar conclusions. The most important of these was that solar and wind can’t do the job alone (as some environmentalists want you to think).

Instead, the modeling finds that almost any combination of firm clean power—existing nuclear, geothermal, advanced nuclear or even natural gas with carbon capture and sequestration—could deliver a 100% carbon-free electricity supply with generation and transmission supply costs of about 7–10 cents per kilowatt-hour, which compares well with the current average of 9 cents per kilowatt-hour, and is about one-third less than the cost of an all-wind-and-solar approach.

Read more in Issues in Science & Technology's Clean Firm Power is the Key to California's Carbon-Free Energy Future, by By Armond Cohen, Arne Olson, Clea Kolster, David G. Victor, Ejeong Baik, Jane C.S. Long, Jesse D. Jenkins, Kiran Chawla, Michael Colvin, Robert B. Jackson, Sally M. Benson, Steven P. Hamburg, published March 24, 2021. Also see the full report, published by EDF and available at edf.org/cleanfirmpower.

Published by Nucleation Capital in Advanced Nuclear, Brilliant thinkers, Carbon emissions, Climate change, Climate innovation fund, Climate policy, Construction costs, Future of Energy, International support for nuclear, LINKS, Macro Energy Systems, Nuclear competitiveness

Ted Nordhaus bravely calls out the deceptive tactics used by anti-nuclear activists—some operating as academics with cover from similarly duplicitious "peer reviewers," to promote what are ideologic viewpoints unsupported by science. This is not an easy area to write about—with the ever increasing threat of lawsuits—but the evidence is mounting that much of what has passed as academic studies falsely showing negative or no benefit from nuclear power, has been "peer reviewed" by people with ideologic aims.

Increasingly, these reports advocating for 100% renewables have been widely debunked by real scientists using the same data. Such academic "fights" have even poured out into the courts, as in the case of the devastating take-down of Mark Jacobson's almost entirely bogus 100% renewable study which was published by the National Academy of Science and received an award as one of the best studies of the year, but whose glaring flaws were broadly debunked by a rather serious and impressive cadre of some thirty other scientists.

Jacobson, hurting from the smack-down, chose to employ the courts in his behalf, having ample funding from renewable and fossil fuel supporters—all of whom benefit from the failed RPS policy approach that he advocates—but found, instead, that the courts sided with those calling "bullshit" on him and he was forced to pay for both his own failed litigation as well as the legal expenses of the scientists he has attempted to intimidate into silence.

While it is tempting and appealing to think that we can address climate change with the aesthetically appealing technologies of just wind and solar, in fact, the data increasingly shows that such a plan isn't even remotely feasible. Yet, there remain many for whom that vision is their brand.

Many of these ideologues continue to rail against the use of nuclear energy, and Nordhaus reports on the most recent publication of a new paper by Harrison Fell, Alex Gilbert, Jesse Jenkins and Matteo Mildenberger with the take-down of the a study published last fall in Nature Energy by Benjamin Sovacool and others at the University of Sussex Energy Group.

Read Ted Nordhaus' exquisite examination of the difference between bullshit and lying in "On Anti-Nuclear Bullshit," published at The Breakthrough Institute.

Published by Nucleation Capital in Anti-nuclear campaign, Brilliant thinkers, Climate change, Climate mayhem, Climate policy, LINKS, Scientific debate, Solving climate

Clean Firm Power is the Key to California’s Carbon-Free Energy Future

Examining Anti-Nuclear Bullshit