Show notes
Allen, Phil, and Rosemary continue the discussion from Tuesday's episode, diving into renewables opposition and TPI's financial situation.
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Allen Hall: So what we're talking to energy, everything is difficult, so we wind and solar can be difficult to make money in. But some of the discussion about moving back to coal or, or moving back to older sources of electricity generation, their money losers too.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, probably even more efficient money losers. And on a larger scale, you know, at least wind and solar, you could lose, lose money a little bit at a time and you don't lose money on the operation.
Um, you know, it's, it's all in the, the, the capital cost. Whereas coal can lose money ev every single, every single day that the plane operates. So I [00:01:00]guess that that's, uh, yeah, that's true. It's not as, not as bad as that.
Allen Hall: So is there a industry fix or is there a hope for the future? Right now, I don't see it.
Rosemary Barnes: I was reading this book for a little while and I stopped reading 'cause I, um, it had some good ideas, but it wasn't like totally rigorous in its, um, exploration of all the ideas. I think it's called The Price is Wrong, or something like that. And it's about how like, it's not possible to have a renewables industry that isn't subsidized by the government.
And, um, there's some, I I, I think that there's some truth to that, but I would replace. That there's, it's impossible to have a renewables industry if that's not subsidized. Rather say it's impossible to have an electricity system that's not subsidized in some way by the government. Um, and yeah, I mean, just rec recognize that and maybe we don't need to to fight that, but, um, it, it is always turns like so tribal that everyone's arguing over who's got the more subsidies or who's.
More dependent on subsidies. Um, yeah, it'd be easier [00:02:00] if we could all, you know, get on the same page about climate change and just acknowledge what we needed to do. But, you know, if, if wind and solar power never came along and we didn't care about climate change, then we'd still be subsidizing, uh, yeah, like coal and, and gas and, uh, all the transmission and, uh, I don't know, infrastructure.
You need to transport those fossil fuels around. Like, you know, we'd, we'd still be subsidizing because people still need electricity and still get upset if it's, um, you know. So expensive that you are stuck, you know, choosing whether you want to eat this week or heat your home this week. So,
Allen Hall: well, is it because electricity was late to the game?
The railroads sort of blew through the United States and everywhere else in the world because it was easy.
It missed Australia, but yeah, would would've been nice.
Allen Hall: But here, here in America, the railroads pretty much owned most of America very quickly. Uh, and got it done before there was any real. Feedback like they would be today, as soon as you wanna put a transmission tower in somebody's farm field.[00:03:00]
Huge, huge uproar. States are involved, senators are involved. The government's all over it. There's committee meetings. Everything gets really slowed down versus 1860s. It just happened.
Rosemary Barnes: But I think the difference as well, like it's not like transmission didn't have these obstacles the first time around, right?
When cities or towns were getting electricity for the first time because there were transmission lines going to them, then it was more obvious what the need was. Whereas now people, they're like, I already have electricity. And um, you know, they don't, they don't wanna be disturbed further when the. Yeah, the case isn't as obvious to them for what the benefit will be to them.
Allen Hall: Is it such that the general public doesn't realize that their survival depends upon electricity? On some measure, we were just driving and Claire and I, our producer, were just driving through a certain part of the Midwest and we were noticing there were no houses, and then it became obvious, well, there's [00:04:00] no power.
To this part of the country. There are no transmission lines. There are roads, but there are no transmission lines until you get to a railroad track. And then there are power lines running alongside the railroad tracks, so the railroad and electricity go together. And whenever those two sort of meet, there is a little town, but outside of that zero, that happens on a bigger scale, if you don't have electricity to power your industry, your cities, your communities.
You're really in a world of hurt competing against the rest of the world. When do we realize that? Isn't that why China is going so fast, so hard to electrify? Because it brings civilization, advanced civilization? India's trying to do the same thing. It seems like in some aspects we just go, well, I don't need it.
You do need it. Your kids need it, your grandkids need it.
Rosemary Barnes: But there's a different, um, argument you're trying to make because, I mean, I [00:05:00] doubt that there's many towns in the US that aren't connected to the electricity grid. There's at least there's some, there's, there's quite a few in Australia, but, um, you know, with microgrids and, and stuff like that.
So maybe that's a, a bit of a special case. Um, but what you're talking about in most. Yeah. Places like Australia and the US you're not talking about getting electricity to places for the first time, which is what they are doing in, um, in China and in India when they're rolling out, um, new renewables infrastructure, um, you know, like big transmission lines to connect up.
Good. Uh, yeah. Both those countries have, um, high voltage DC. Uh, long, long connections that are, yeah, electrifying parts of the country that haven't, um, been connected to the grid before. So they're more, the, the people there are gonna be more like people were a hundred years ago when they were getting connected for the first time in America, or, um, Australia or, or wherever.
Um, their, you know, [00:06:00] the, the benefit to them is obvious. I do think that it's like with most new technologies where you gotta find the niches where people, like, it's a, it's a real solution for them. That's the first place to roll it out. And people who aren't really suffering don't see as much need to change until the technology gets like, so much better.
Allen Hall: Who are the proponents, the loud vocal proponents to bring more electricity to New York City or to Los Angeles or to Houston? I don't hear them though those voices aren't nearly as loud as the voices that are saying, we don't need wind, we don't need solar. We're totally fine the way that we are. What am there?
There is a, a very quiet opposition or proponents of electricity, I would say, uh, versus the opposition, which are very vocal about. We don't need wind and solar. I think they totally do. I don't understand where they're even coming from in terms of big picture
Rosemary Barnes: in the big [00:07:00] cities, you kind of maybe hit from two ends because there's this one kind of, um, one group of people who are climate concerned.
Um, and so they do want renewable energy. However, they think that the solution is that you just need to use less electricity. And so, uh, I think there's like a really large proportion of city populations of people who. Who are cared about climate change that think that you can solve it by, um, consuming less.
All the things that are left over are, you know, like little incremental things that don't add up to anything. Like what we're gonna need to have everyone move to electric vehicles and have everyone move off the gas network and onto heat pumps for heating. Um, you know, there's so many huge chunks of load that need to be added in order to.
Decarbonize and I don't think that, I think that, yeah, like the half of the general population, like non-expert population, that should be on the side of the energy transition. I don't think they realize that. We've been really, really conditioned to believe [00:08:00] that if it's not, you know, if it's not hurting, it's not working.
So like it's like you have to. You have to suffer as a condition for a solution to be plausible. So I think that, yeah, there, um, there's a lot of, a lot of people that are really obsessed with individual action and how we've just gotta convince people that they should, you know, do all those little things.
Um, and I'm not sure they're aware of just, yeah. Extent of the problem. I
Allen Hall: think you're right about that. And been listening to a couple of podcasts while working that are still focused on the climate action slant, I'll call it, to drive, uh, people to do something about their electricity or the coal factory or whatever they got going that.
But that argument is just a losing argument today in the climate we're in. [00:09:00] You're not competing against, uh, someone who's gonna have a discussion with you about climate. You're competing about someone who is trying to have an economic argument, a strength argument versus a weakness argument. Uh, so the.
You're talking on the sidelines about climate. When your world economies are colliding,