Weekend Digest #10

A Curated Assortment of Scrolls

Happy holidays, Barbarians.

Housekeeping

1. This is the last newsletter of 2021. One more podcast will be released with the fantastic Aidan Swanson. Be on the lookout for that. He’s the kind of young man that gives you hope. Thank you all for your support. See you in the new year!

2. Energy Crisis Update ft. Mark Nelson. I’m sure most listeners are familiar with Mark Nelson from his appearances on Decouple. He’s a dear friend and I had a great time talking to him about COP 26, his visit to Ghana, the energy crisis and how it's changing minds about nuclear.

3. Brain Smart: Common Core and the Downfall of the Humanities ft. Catherine Liu. Author and professor of media studies Catherine Liu joined me on my other podcast, ex.haust, to talk about why the humanities are in such rough shape. We talk about how wokeness has destroyed liberal education, how Common Core sours kids before they even start (I worked on the curriculum and talk at length about its origins), the death of masculine virtues, and tons more.

4. I received an Emergent Ventures grant. For some reason, I’m listed as a fusion, rather than fission, advocate. But whatever! I’m grateful to get the money along with my friend Katherine Dee.

News

1. Rentiers of the low-carbon economy? Renewable energy's extractive fiscal geographies. This new research from Sarah Knuth digs into how renewables are, as we all probably guessed, little more than an upward wealth transfer. I’m going to have to reread this one, but here was one of the key paragraphs for me: “In key ways, today's renewable tax subsidies have recreated patterns of the 1980s with a more powerful set of tax investors, in modern tax equity. As discussed above, renewable energy project developers continue to use SPVs, and rely on third-party investors to monetize these tax benefits. However, tax-motivated investors in today's renewable energy deals are typically a highly restricted set of the US's largest banks, insurance companies, and financial institutions—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Berkshire Hathaway are leading and indicative players today. They have been joined more recently by a handful of giant corporations like Google and Amazon. Tax benefits from the PTC, ITC, and MACRS are monetized for these entities via a series of complex deal structures (partnership-flips, sale-leasebacks, and inverted leases), which contractually bind SPV partners and allow legal transfer of tax benefits.”

2. In Praise of…Enron? Here’s Russell Gold in Texas Monthly doing a little Enron rehab, twenty years after the companies downfall. Gold wants to take a second look at Enron and consider its dynamism. Did you know they tried a proto-Netflix with Blockbuster? Me neither. Nor did I know they were responsible for getting a bunch of wind on the Texas grid. They also spawned a roster of wind and solar hucksters who’ve since gained their wings. After reading the above research and watching the blackouts roll through this I guess I can’t say I’m surprised Enron played a role in some of those scams. Gold seems to think that’s a silver lining—I see it more like the hull of the Hindenberg.

3. Chronic outages produce outrage in Mecklenburg; NYSEG CEO responds. Rural New York is suffering blackouts. I thought this litany of issues these people face helped put the problems blackouts cause into perspective: “Homeowners detailed that when the power goes out in the rural town of Hector, they lose the ability to run water. Many said they need sump pumps running in their basements for risk of flooding during rainstorms which, unfortunately, often coincide with outage events. When they lose electricity, they risk having to contend with water damage in their basements. People talked about how they’ve made investments into generators to keep the lights on and water running, as well as pellet stoves for homeowners who use electricity to heat their homes.” Most of the outages are from negligence—not cutting trees—born of insufficient funds so says NYSEG.

4. NuScale merger to accelerate SMR commercialization. NuScale has merged with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp in a bid to ramp up its commercialization efforts. According to the article “NuScale is currently working with Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems to deploy a NuScale VOYGR power plant in 2029, on a site at the US Department of Energy's (DOE's) Idaho National Laboratory. It has also been working to develop its customer pipeline beyond the USA, and has some 19 Memoranda of Understanding or agreements in 11 countries.” I wish them all the luck in the world.

5. Norway will subsidize high electricity prices with oil revenues. Here’s friend of the pod Isaac Orr of the Center of the American Experiment with a smart look at what’s going on in Europe. “Unfortunately,” he writes, “subsidies of this nature will likely become more frequent in the future because too many countries in Europe are shutting down their reliable coal and nuclear power plants to rely on wind, solar, natural gas, and imports of electricity from neighboring countries. This means that much of continental Europe is using Norway’s vast reserves of hydroelectric power as their dispatchable power plants. The problem with this strategy is that eventually, you run out of other people’s electricity.”

Commentary

The more people I talk to the more I realize that, as far as I can tell, the 1970s were a watershed moment for America. However, I mostly only see it discussed as the hangover from the sixties rife with cocaine, urban blight, political resentment, the rise of neoliberalism, and diminishing expectations. The energy crisis of ‘73 features in this story, but only as background.

This strikes me as a real shortcoming in our national memory. The downfall of the utilities had a cascading impact through the present until now. The energy and electricity sectors were as shaped and reshaped by the decade as any other industry, if not more so.

I’m going to open next year with a lot of research into the history of utilities and of nuclear. My aspiration is to pierce the veil of amnesia and figure out what happened to this most crucial sector of our economy. I will report back with what I find.

See you in the new year, Barbarians.