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May 08, 2025 08:18 AM UTC

Thursday Open Thread

  • 27 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after the other.”

–Walter Elliot

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27 thoughts on “Thursday Open Thread”

  1. What Everyone Needs to Understand About the Power Grid

    If you're following energy, here's the constraints

    And a follow-on question. On the PUC's present path, with the enthusiastice support of the CEO, we're headed for a doubling of our electric bills (after inflation), a less reliable grid, and likely still be emitting a fair amount of CO₂ from backup generation.

    How do I get a critical mass of Colorado voters to look at this? Is my best bet to try and get a critical mass of state legislators to look at where we're headed?

    1. Now that the 2025 Legislature is completed, you might be able to ask that question and get an answer from legislative leaders (or your local representative/senator). 

      Might also direct the question to all those who have announced for the 2026 Colorado Governor's race, and see what the candidates want to say about it.

      Seems like the Chamber of Commerce types and League of Women Voters might also be willing to consider a longer-range problem such as this.

      1. Thank you! I hadn't thought of the Chamber or League. Good ideas.

        I'll have to think about how to hit the Governor candidates on this – I don't want my notmal interview of them to be 1/2 energy.

        I do have a number of legislators who have promised me I can interview them once session is over. I'm going to wait a week to let them catch their breath first.

    2. The high cost you describe is due to your assumption of replacing 100% of carbon electricity. This is due to ensuring the last 10% and last 1% of replacement under worst-case scenarios. I could agree that nuclear might be the best and cheapest way to cover the last 10% or 1%, but also we don’t really NEED a 100% non-carbon grid – Let gas-plants cover the last 10%.

      What are the real costs if you relax your 100% requirement?

      Also, your costs are driven by some assumptions that I question:

      • Cost reduction in battery & solar technology due to production and technology improvements
      • Load shifting via smart meters and grid load signaling

      The first 90% is not expensive because utilization averages around the clock are much lower than the grid capacity. My electrical usage behavior is already “smartish-metered”: I charge my EV during the day because my city utility sends me price “signal” called 7cents/KWhr. In some places (Finland?) they actually pay you to charge during low-utilization times.

      Here is a really good podcast/article on smart meters. 

      Arch Rao:

      But I think there’s a real opportunity for us to say, “What if I can save money not just for an individual customer, but we can actually reduce the cost of capital expenditures that go into overbuilding the distribution grid?” And let me share some metrics there that I think you and your listeners might appreciate: the average utilization rate of the US distribution system is around 42%. What I mean by that is the loading factor. On any given day, the average utilization of the available capacity on the distribution grid is only about 42%.

      David Roberts

      That’s actually higher than I would have thought. You know, like, I think maybe Volts listeners know, maybe. But it’s worth emphasizing, you know, like electrical systems are generally built for peaks.

      Arch Rao

      Exactly.

      David Roberts

      Peaks are, by definition, the exception. So, when you’re not peaking, you’ve got a lot of spare capacity lying around. I t’s just like cars; cars are sitting around 95% of the time. People don’t really think about it. And this is really interesting right now since, as you I’m sure are very well aware, there’s this huge stampede on to find more electrical capacity. So, it’s a little crazy that everybody needs new capacity and simultaneously more than 50% of our existing capacity basically goes unused. Like, that’s kind of the background fact here.

       

      1. How smart grids or micro grids work. Example for a single house.

        Arch Rao

        … 100 amps [service-panel], for what it's worth at a 240-volt 2-phase grid, is 24 kilowatts of instantaneous power to your home. Right. The largest appliance we have in our home right now is an EV charger that draws about 9.6 kilowatts instantaneously.

        So, you have to imagine a corner case when your EV is charging at the same time, your water heater is running at the same time, your HVAC air conditioning system is running at the same time, perhaps your induction cooktop is on before you're at that peak demand. And what Span has, I think, very elegantly done is to say, "Look, if and when that situation arises, I have a control system built into your panel that can regulate just a handful of loads. I just have to throttle your EV charger back for 10 minutes, I just have to slow down your compressor speed for 15 minutes, I just have to pause your water heater for 30 minutes." And that's plenty.

        1. Yes & no.

          Our water heater is the heat on use type. So no pausing that. Charging the EV in the middle of the day (usually I charge at 1:45am) – I just drove some distance, got home, and in an hour have to take someone to the airport. So no pausing that. Slow down the AC when I got home and the huse is way hot, and at full speed I'm looking at 45 minutes to get it cooled down. You want angry voters?

          What we've had with power to date is inexpensive, reliable, and abundant. You now want to make it expensive, unreliable, and limited. Why would voters go for that? Voters aren't even in favor of $100.00/year to address global warming.

      2. There's some good points in there but…

        Peak power is like fire stations. 95% of the time the peopel at the firestation aren't doing anything. But we don't reduce the number of fire stations because when there's something like the Marshall Fire, all that sit around time just paid for itself.

        Peak power is due to human activity. At present (gas heat, ICE cars) there's a smaller peak in the morning as people get up make breakfast, head to work and a larger peak in the early evening as people get home, crank up the AC, make dinner, etc. The steady-ish load during the day is higher than the steady load overnight. During the day you have solar, less when it's overcast or a blizard. During the night no solar but wind tends to be stronger.

        When we go all electric (heat pumps, EVs, etc) that moves everything up during the winter. So peak peak (highest peak values) which are presently in the summer (more solar) will now be in the winter (less solar). Right now solar is great because the hotter the day, the higher the peak peak, the more generated by solar. We need 4 hour batters but the peak demand maps to the peak generation. With winter becoming the peak peak, solar is not going to be that helpful.

        I don't think there's much of a way around that power usage curve over daily use. Yes you can set when to charge your car (I set mine to 1:45am) without much inconvience. But how do you shift when you heat or cool the house? Do you tell people to stagger when they cook meals? Do you tell working parents to only run the dryer overnight so one load of laundry/day?

        As to solar & battery costs, those cost curves have leveled out. Moore's Law is for semiconductors only (and it's becoming even more difficult there as we run up against quantum limits). Mining & refining minerals can only be optimized so far. Manufacturing physical goods, once automated, are at their optimum. Improvements due to growing volume level out and then tend to inch back up as the large manufacturers become complacent in their monopoly.

        We'll still see advances. But we can't count on any of them.

        As to getting to just 80% with gas the final 20%, even that is expensive. Aside from countries blessed with abundant hydro (or neighbors blessed in the case of Denmark), no one has pulled this off yet. Because it is so prohibitively expensive to buy that many batteries.

        The solution, which a lot of other countries are implementing (China & India are not stupid) is nuclear for baseload and a combination of everything else for peak.

        1. Nuclear power is your religion, David. You have all of the evangelism of the newly converted.

          But the facts don't back your faith up, as Parkhill pointed out above.

          Nuclear power is not cheaper. The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) from new nuclear power plants  in the United States is $7,442–7,989 per kilowatt. Onshore wind, by contrast, is $2,275–5,803 / kilowatt when it is distributed ( think many separate clusters of windmills, rather than one gigantic installation). Solar with storage comes in at $2,044 / kilowatt.

          This well-sourced Wikipedia article "Cost of Electricity by Source" draws on research from 146 authors over a period of ~50 years. It also cites research more favorable to your religious beliefs – Bank of America likes nuclear power, because solar "doesn't have backup" ?

          The article does contain a section on "External costs". Solar has little to none. Wind turbine blades are hard to recycle. Wind turbines do not kill eagles, contrary to $rump's imaginings.

          But nuclear power has  huge external costs in the mining of the fuel, and storage of radioactive waste, which other sources do not. You choose to ignore or minimize these. Navajo miners, (former) residents of Harrisburg, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, and Chernobyl would disagree.

           

          1. Past mining, of many materials, caused a lot of damage and has left runined areas. Chernobyl was a disaster. Three Mile Island & Fukushima showed that nuclear is safe even with the worst happeining at a Western designed & built plant.

            As to costs, if solar + batteries is so much cheaper, why are so many countries going with nuclear for baseload? It's that + batteries that makes it expensive.

            I'm in favor of nukes because they're our best way to zero carbon. Wind & solar means gas backup and SCGT emit a lot of CO2.

            Oh and LCOE is worthless to compare nuclear/gas/coal/hydro vs wind/solar. Because it assigns no cost to variability.

            Anyways, once we get sufficient energy density at an affordable price for batteries I'll switch and be all-in on solar. 

              1. They need a straight down shaft that's reasonably wide. So there will be a couple but likely not that many. And then there's the issue of running HVAC lines to the mine. It presently takes 7 years to get permitting for those lines and they cost $1M/mile over level ground and god knows how much to go up the mountains to the mine.

          2. I think it's unfair to claim nuclear power is David's religion.

            I think he's an engineer/scientist (and perhaps accountant :-), so it would be more fair to say his religion is math and science, meaning that wrt nuclear power, his positioin is that it can be safe and cost-effective with proper design and construction.

            Obviously there are trade-offs and there are cost comparisons. And if a carbon economy is destroying the climate, and we require a sufficient and resilient electrical grid, then nuclear (plus renewables) will probably need to be an important component of our energy future.

            To argue that we don't need nuclear, you need to find ways to make renewables and energy storage cheaper, or to accept some carbon generation as backup.

            I'm a techno optimist, in that I believe the cost of solar, wind & storage will continue to decrease.

            1. Boy I've been insulted before but… "perhaps accountant" – OW!

              Yes, what you said. And even when batteries get cheap enough, it's not clear we can have them provide inertia the way a giant physical turbine does. We can probably figure that out but until we do, we need that 20% of power coming from the big honking turbines (nuclear, coal, & large hydro).

              ps – My degrees are in Physics & Math – Go Buffs and my career has been programming & management. But as CEO I looked at the cash flow monthly but mostly judged our financial situation by how big an expense had to be before my CFO started pushing back. So never even a little accounting.

              1. David have you done any study on reservoir batteries? At least in Colorado given the number of reservoirs we have hanging around we could implement that pretty well I would think.

                And a search is telling me we already do that to some extent. I don't know the capacity that exists. I'm curious what you think.

                1. Pumped hydro remains the most efficient storage system and is great. Unfortunately, like hydro itself, there's limited places where it makes sense. But a couple more pumped hydro stations are under consideration for here in Colorado.

                  And a good thing about pumped hydro, usually the base is somewhat close to transmission lines so not that expensive to connect them up.

    1. I would be interested to read your interview.  Although, there is a lot to admire about her.  There are a few things that give me pause.

        1. I guess that is why when we vote we don’t vote for every politician?  Usually just those one(s) who give us the least pause; no more than one per ballot race.

  3. Cost/Value of an Imported Nike Shoe. Brad DeLong.

    There is a strong tendency for normal people and also for economists who know better to fell that the “real value” of the shoe ought to be its marginal production cost of $20. That is, after all, what the commodity is: a shoe. That is its thingness. And that carries with it the idea that all the rest is somehow not really there, or there but not really real. 

    But that is completely wrong.

    …

    Back when my wife’s and my older kid was running high-school cross-country, we would get him Nikes to run in. 

    The exchange-value of the Nikes we got him was divided, roughly:

    • 10 bucks for the raw materials.

    • 10 bucks for the production labor

    • 20 bucks for Nike for design, organization, return on capital, and market-power profits. 

    • 10 bucks would be for the symbolic links created between the shoes on th one hand and athletic achievement kinds of things—“just do it”, the mental part of the game that made Michael Jordan an extraordinarily rich man in his day.

    • 15 bucks for transportation—1 buck from the Pearl River Delta to the Port of Oakland, and then 14 more about that to get the shoes to where we could see them and buy them and carry them home.

    • 35 bucks for getting him not just a shoe but the right shoe, in the right size, fitted to him by a half-crazed marathon working at an athletic shoe store in Walnut Creek, California.

    And over and above that 100 bucks in exchange value:

    • Figure another 100 bucks in use-value margin for getting him a really good shoe for the task rather than just running in converse sneakers.

    So 200 bucks in total economic value created for us from the athletic-shoe trans-Pacific value chain in the globalized value-chain economy late in the decade of the 2000s. And 100 bucks recorded in the National Income and Product Accounts—$100 in final sales in the U.S., minus $20 in imports, with the balancing $20 in exports counted in GDP over in Asia.

    Of this, $10 were raw materials from east and southeast Asia, and $10 were production labor costs in the Pearl River Delta.

    1. Brad Continues:

      Here is what I think is likely to happen with respect to China. America imports $500 billion a year of merchandise from China. That flow—$10 billion a week, in the context of U.S. GDP of $550 billion a week—is, as of two weeks from now, effectively stopped: embargoed. China will take that $10 billion a week and have to find some other use for it. They will find somebody else somewhere in the world to buy the shoes—not for $20 to feed into the $100 final-sales exchange-value value chain, but for, maybe, $12, a 40% haircut, as they go to somebody who is not rich and not really needing those shoes because they are running seven miles four days a week.

      Loss to China: $4 billion a week, which will create discontent and require redistributions to manage.

      Here is what I think is likely to happen with respect to America. The $10 billion a week of merchandise imports from China is effectively stopped. And that means that the labor going into design, organization, return on capital, and information-transmission now receives not its $10 billion a week, but rather zero. The $5 billion a week for symbolic links vanishes too. So does the $7.5 billion a week for transportation. Plus the $17.5 billion a week for wholesale and retail.

      Loss to the U.S.: $40 billion a week. Ten times the loss to China.

      And…

      China has plans for how to find and distribute the goods to alternative customers inside and outside of China.

      The Trump administration has no plans. The customers are going to come in to Saks to meet with their personal shoppers, who will then say: I am sorry, but the racks are empty. And there are no factories anywhere else in the world able to step up to make what is now made in China in any period of less than two years. And who will want to invest now in that stepping up, given that U.S. “policy” is made by a chaos monkey?

      The only silver lining—if you want to call it that—is that some of China’s goods production will show up in the United States. Women with needles and scissors in Vietnam will cut out “Made In China” and sew in “Made in Vietnam” labels, while people at computers with laser printers forge origin certificates, and the US Customs Service will look the other way. But at what scale will this take place, given that Trump has put a stake in the ground that the “fair” tariff rate on imports from Vietnam at 46%.

      IT'S NOT JUST SHOES:

      Plus there are the intermediate goods used in production locations in the United States—not just critical minerals, rare earths, and such, but little things where China has 60% of the global supply. When that stops, where are you gonna source it from? As a large chunk of intermediate inputs just disappear for a while, the loss to goods values flowing through the American economy will be bigger than $10 billion a week. How much bigger? I do not know. But I do know that the 84% is going to feel a hit from that as well.

  4. Have we heard from the failed Pope candidate yet? He must be devastated that he is not the first American pontiff. The bio of Pope Leo XIV is encouraging.

    1. AP says: 

      Trump spoke to reporters outside the West Wing, saying that for the new pope to be American, “What greater honor can there be?”

      “We’re a little bit surprised and we’re happy,” Trump added.

      Worth noting:

      In many ways, Francis saw Prevost as his heir apparent. But there had long been a taboo against electing a pontiff from a country whose geopolitical power loomed so large in the secular sphere. Prevost, a Chicago native, was seemingly eligible because he’s also a Peruvian citizen and lived for years in Peru, first as a missionary and then as an archbishop.

          1. What a fascinating dynamic shaping up here. The first post on daily kos was a photo of the new pontiff with his hand upraised. It was captioned…" Donald Trump loses another election!"

            And, oh those crowd sizes! Donald must be seething.

            I don't think they are going to be friends.

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