We're on "Odd Lots," and Some Greatest Hits
Fred Stafford and Matt Huber talk electric utilities, electricity restructuring, nuclear, and public power on the popular Bloomberg podcast.
My regular collaborator
and I are the featured guests on yesterday’s episode of Odd Lots, the popular Bloomberg podcast that zooms in and zooms out on miscellaneous economic subjects. Hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway invited us on to talk about our recent Damage essay, “The Utility of Utilities,” which I posted about here last month. Our conversation ranged from the history of electric utilities and the sector’s restructuring; the key difference between offshore wind project execution and finance in New York vs. Virginia; why the power markets aren’t good for nuclear; the need for big public power; and the inspiring history and continuing importance of the Tennessee Valley Authority.The episode from Wednesday, an interview with The Price is Wrong author Brett Christophers, serves as an excellent companion episode to our own. Read Matt’s review of the book in Jacobin from earlier this week, explicitly connecting the dots between Brett’s arguments about wind and solar’s unprofitability and our own arguments about utilities.
Greatest Hits
For those new to my writing on these subjects, besides the aforementioned essay check out the following:
In Defense of the TVA (Jacobin)
The Tennessee Valley Authority was one of the greatest achievements of FDR’s New Deal. But a new generation of liberals and leftists are turning against the dream of “big public power” in America.
Here, mine and Matt’s first collaboration, we lay out the broad strokes of our critique of progressive energy ideas in the NGO world — like the emphasis on decentralization and small-is-beautiful thinking, and the technical absurdity of “100% renewables” — and urge the left to return to the Big Public Power model of the TVA.
In this essay I believe we’re the first people on the political left to draw attention to how the renewable energy tax credits have been denied to public power organizations like TVA and the utilities of the whole state of Nebraska, leading to wind and solar plants in these territories being developed, for profit, by third parties.
Indeed only about 0.02 percent of TVA’s renewable energy capacity is owned by TVA itself. The largest solar farm in the TVA system — built for Facebook’s “100 percent renewable” claim for a new data center, despite 24-7 operations that depend on the whole TVA grid — generates tax credits that flow to owner-investor Wells Fargo. …
… Today a quarter of Nebraska’s electricity generation comes from merchant generators — all of it wind and solar.
We Need a Nuclear New Deal (The Breakthrough Institute)
And the Tennessee Valley Authority is the perfect utility to manage it.
The Breakthrough Institute’s journal editors asked me to write a socialist argument for nuclear as public power, and I was happy to oblige. I open with the 2016 birth of TVA’s long-dormant Watts Bar 2 nuclear plant, offering a key statistic that I think is quite telling and worthy of broader awareness:
[Since that birth] this one reactor in eastern Tennessee has generated almost as much carbon-free energy as all the wind turbines and solar panels in New England combined. In fact, TVA’s whole nuclear fleet of seven reactors … has generated more over that period than … California’s great wind and solar industry has brought to market, and with only a minuscule fraction of the land (and rooftop) footprint.
The essay stands as both a socialist argument for nuclear and a critique of the market failure that solidified its decline. Once again, especially the Inflation Reduction Act’s reversal of decades-old federal clean energy incentives denied to public power, I argue that we need to return to a New Deal model of public power — starting right there at the TVA.
This article was written in late 2022. More recently, HuffPost reporter Alex Kaufman covered the very real possibility of new conventional “large” nuclear plants at the TVA, using the AP1000 design that was just completed in Georgia.
How Liberals Created, Then Destroyed, Publicly Owned Nuclear Power (Jacobin)
The battle over New York’s Indian Point power plant was quietly a battle for the soul of American liberalism.
My print magazine debut, in Jacobin’s Infrastructure issue in 2022. Here I chart the public power birth and Green market death of New York City’s Indian Point nuclear power plant. Unlike other Indian Point retrospectives, I give a sweeping history of New York energy politics, covering the New York Power Authority, environmental legal battles of the past that bled into the present, the labor union perspective on progressive environmental opponents of the plant, and the surprising role of not just Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the story — his direct involvement in killing the plant is common knowledge now — but also his father, as a champion of nuclear public power. I guarantee there’s something new you’ll learn in this story of the changing winds of liberal views on energy over the course of the plant’s lifetime.
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