Head of Science at Watershed | Energy systems modeling, economics, policy | IPCC, NCA, Stanford/CMU alum | Views my own
John Bistline
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Respect to 1991 Mt. Pinatubo for briefly pulling the vibe back.
The $850M coal rescue is ~35x smaller than what's retired since 2010. The fleet has shed ~43% of peak capacity. A chart.
Fully phasing out fossil fuels by 2050 requires 1.6-1.8x more power generation than a standard 1.5°C pathway. And it’s not just more solar and wind: it means a much bigger role for nuclear and green hydrogen, too. Defossilization is a different beast than decarbonization.
Two contradictory nuclear puzzles: Bears say deployment lags, so it’s not needed. Bulls say it deploys regardless of carbon policy. Scenarios say otherwise: nuclear is much more limited when emissions don’t matter. If you care about decarbonization, you should care about nuclear.
The U.S. battery storage market is essentially two markets.
California builds 4-hour batteries because policy demands it. Texas builds 2-hour batteries because markets reward it. The national average lands at 3 hours, one number that hides a deeply divided grid.
No fanfare but, at some point in the last 4 years, California stopped being a grid that occasionally beat fossil fuels and became one that does it on a daily basis.
Data note: This was made with EIA-860 data, which I only recently learned has nameplate MWh data (unlike 860M which I typically use with its capacity-only data for energy storage).
Locusts cost $25 billion a year in stunted child growth when monitoring fails. The monitoring system costs $37-77 million a year to run. That’s a benefit-cost ratio between 160:1 and 680:1. One of the best investments in public health you’ve never heard of.
