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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/3616688
As soon as today, Michigan lawmakers are expected to vote on a sweeping package of environmental bills, including legislation that requires the state to reach 100 percent clean energy by 2040.
which means the existing gas-fired plants will just get a perpetual waiver making the legislation worthless. Not that it was intended to actually do anything to begin with.
If the legislation passes in its current form, it explicitly shuts them down.
That’d be cool. I’ll stay pessimistic until I see a new nuclear plant commissioned, or maybe they just buy power from coal/gas power plants outside of michigan.
Renewables are significantly cheaper than nuclear for the first 80% or so of decarbonization, so I don’t expect to see nuclear plants commissioned until the very end, and then only if they cost of storage doesn’t drop sharply.
Michigan has a shit load of renewables already, if they didn’t they wouldn’t even be considering this piece of legislation at all. But renewables are also cheap and require very little investment, plus you get a lot of cheap political points. But building an actual clean power plant, i.e. a continuous always on source of power, that requires capital investment and will only be done if the proposal is serious. Hence the pessimism. I expect this bill to look more like Germany where they talk about clean energy, but wouldn’t you know it, it turns out coal is actually cheaper, so they went ahead and built more of those.
I should also note that Michigan isn’t unique in having a ton of windmills/solar power generation. That kind of infrastructure is everywhere. But there is large gap between building a wind farm, and building a clean power plant.
Germany managed to cut their emissions:
The only real question is whether they could have cut it faster if they had not shuttered nuclear power at the same time; it’s not actually clear because they had fairly expensive to operate nuclear facilities.
While overall Germany has managed to cut it’s emissions since the 80’s, that little uptick since 2020 was what I was referring to when I said they would choose what was cheaper over what was cleaner. Anyway, my digs at Germany are beside the point.
Proposals like this often sound good on paper, but in practice if they are just using accounting tricks to achieve “net-zero” emissions, they are ultimately nothing more then feel-good measures that will be ignored as soon as it’s economically or politically expedient.