Nuclear and Renewables

I've mentioned my interest in a residential microreactor for our farm in this series. Now we're talking ... several kilowatts you say...

here

Ethanol and Carbon Sequestration

I found an article some months back on 'farming carbon". With the push in the midwest for an ethanol carbon pipeline (Im opposed, but probably for differnt reasons than most), I thought I would write my current thoughts on the subject. I've long opposed the use of eminent domain to build it. I also think the curent incentives offered to farmers to adopt practices to store more carbon in the soil are too low. The ethanol pipeline group reinforced that belief in winning an incentive of $85 dollars a ton for carbon sequested by the pipeline. When I checked a few months ago, some companies were offering carbon payments to farmers in the $15 dollar a ton range. Side note - A farmer friend who has been a no till farmer for more than 10 years applied and was rejected because the company only wanted "new" no till farmers.

Quick takeaways - Farms in South dakote are already storing some carbon , with much better potential. Instead of incentivising a pipeline , why not pay farmers directly to store carbon instead of a pipeline that tramples on private property rights. Would direct payments to farmers also in turn qualify ethanol as a low carbon fuel? I bet a researcher might prove I'm correct, but funding opportunities probably lie with the carbon pipeline or the companies offering to pay farmers currently.

I recommend the article, but here's some closing thoughts. Why didn't incentives for wind farm development (wind production tax credit) reward farmers to develop wind themselves to offset carbon , instead of large absentee corporations years ago ? Looks pretty similar to the carbon pipeline issue, but for the environmental groups laughably opposing the pipeline while cheering on corporate wind development. Also note the bipartisan pipeline efforts by the reublicans such as the brandstands and tom vilsack's son. Farm groups have endorsed the pipeline as well instead of their farmers here. Why is that? I should tell the story about one major farm groups postion on Iowa wind development one day...

This photo is remind you to check out my featured post on wind farm property taxes ... I think you can guess I'm a huge proponent of farmers owning renewable energy tech instead of the largely corporate ownership in place now. I also detest calculating carbon offsets instead of just improving the environment and improving farm life... Sometimes though, someone does a much mich better job of putting my thoughts into words though, so please check this out.

Nuclear and Renewables

Another con with wind. Looks like not much has changed. tldr version ... Blades piling up because tax incentives caused wind developers to dispose of baldes prematurely. If you do check my past posts on this,This also probably resulted in a property improvement without an increase in property tax valuations. And tax incentives to replace blades were passed without consideration that little to no blade recycling options were available...just the landfill option. Plus there's the pesky wealth extraction that I noted in the previous post :). New article on wind turbine blade disposal that I found.

I wrote about this issue several years ago... here ...and here

Photo above explanation is in the featured post.

Nuclear and Renewables

So, to continue my thoughts on Nuclear and Renewables, pros and cons, I don't have an organized plan. Having done a few posts on nuclear, I want to switch to wind energy, and start with some cons. To date, most wind energy development in Iowa has been done by large absentee owned corporations. Most of the net profits leave the rural areas, leaving only property tax revenue, and annual lease payments to land owners. Many of those land owners are also absentee. Development has been done mainly at the industrial scale. Industrial is a word frequently used to criticize farming in Iowa by folks with connections to the environmental community, though most of these same folks remain silent or even actively promote industrial wind here in Iowa.

thoughts about Eminent domain - I'm always against private companies having eminent domain capability. I mention it here, because I think a lot of the environmental groups fighting the proposed ethanol - carbon pipline (eminent domain use) development proposed here, would quickly contradict themselves if, say, a private comapny wanted to use eminent domain to site a transmission line to expand industrial scale wind energy in the state. Note - I'll be posting about ethanol and carbon sequestration in the future.

So, having touched on the money flow out of the rural areas with wind, Let's talk more about if the revenue that stays (property taxes) is properly assessed. I've compiled a long list of instances in my featured post that causes me to think it may not be (midamerican or any other developer mentioned there is welcome to discuss this with me, and I'll happily correct - update the post if I've made an error).

The other local revenue that can stay local is annual lease payments for siting wind turbines on farm land. However 53% of Iowa land is not owned by the people that farm it , so it's safe to say all that annual lease income is certainly not retained locally as well. The other issue with annual lease payments, is that I'm guessing leases signed a decade ago (or more) have not kept up with inflation. Area farm news broadcaster Duane Murley, was interviewing an Iowa farm land auctioneer ( can't recall who) a few months ago. The auctioneer mentioned annual leases for wind turbines are as high as $20,000 per year, with one haveing an escalator that would eventually increase the annual wind lease payment to $36,000 per year. Check with Duane if you want more details. I'm guessing a lot of wind lease receipients might be disappointed with the income they are receiving for older wind leases in Iowa. Here I should mention that I hope that farmers receiving annual payments for carbon sequestration haven't entered into long term leases for for those programs (post on that topic coming as well).

edit - so the format won't let me keep this from displaying as a long run on sentence , so I'm adding some images to break it up a bit. The explanation for the pictures is in the featured post.

Nuclear and Renewables

I've promised to discuss claims made about wind , solar, battery storage,etc, but I thought that I'd do another on Nuclear before moving on. I'm not an expert on this tech at all, but I'm definetely wanting to learn more when companies are promoting decentralized uses for it. I recently (today) saw new info on micro reactors. I checked the company website and here is some of that info.

It's not new tech, They are using a design tested by the guv many years ago. I don't know why it wasn't adopted. Maybe it wasn't cost effective back then. Maybe the guv is slow walking things so the many companies benefitting from the current business as usual model are not affected (probably not). :)

About the size of a ski lodge, with production rated at 15 megawatts. This is the smallest micro reactor that I've seen (I'm guessing they can be made a lot smaller). As a farmer, I would love a smaller scale one of these... In this case , an oil company is in talks to use these in remote locations.

Tracy is a good one to follow for info on the energy business. So who knows, maybe we'll see break throughs yet on this tech (even if 60 years late ) :). Sometimes the people who say things can't be done, get passed by people doing it.

Last of all, (and maybe most important) it appears this design can use used reactor fuel, and it doesn't produce high grade fuel that can be used for other things. I would think that might greatly simplify the regulatory process, but it still looks like several years before we'll know anything definite. Isn't 60 years enough? :)

edit- I should mention that I wrote an opinion piece years ago when the fukashima disaster happened in Japan (it probably can still be found online). It was pro distributed generation and not friendly to nuclear. If this micro scale nuclear design will really shut down safely in emegency situations,and can be done in a cost efective manner, I may need to update some past opinions. edit 2 - I didn't realize that Oklo was backed by Sam Altman, so it seems that Oklo is probably more interested in data center sized reactors than than the micro size than I'm interested in ... wanted to mention that.