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.

Nuclear and Renewables

Is the Gov getting interested in microreators (I've had my terminology wrong calling them small modular) I hope so. Maybe the farm will be nuclear powered yet... :). See my previous posts on this subject. I was only being semi serious with these posts, but open minded.

Grid Security ? How Are We Doing?

Back in 2016, I posted this take on the condition of our electrical grid security. Not really my strong area of expertise, but I thought I'd take a stab at it. So several years later, how are we doing? Well....

This article that I found online seems to show little progress,a new threat was identified with the remote control of substations by countries who may not like us, though I think I noted risks involved in having our substations manufactured in other countries. So the problem was identified, executive order given to address the issue, then recinded by the current administration.

Also little progress on protection from solar storms, emp s, and low tech threats, though a surisingly "affordable" idea was mentioned for solar storm protection. Yet, no action...

So who are the groups oppsing progress here, Companies who profit from business as usual? maybe environmental groups who recieve funding from those companies ? Think tanks (who are funders?) ? I'll leave it to readers to draw your own conclusions, But I'd advise people to make plans to their homes and businesses to be able to generate their own electricity for extended periods. Yet another reason why I remain a fan of distributed electrical generation. Also please check my featured post on property tax shennanigans . The following photo is explained there.

Nuclear and Renewables

Nuclear proponents have been really touting that tech online lately. It would be nice to be able to stop events like this from happening.If a distributed - farm scale powerplant ever became available, it would be nice if it wouldn't turn the farm into a superfund site. :)

Nuclear and Renewables

My last post was a serious one,although the sarcasm was pretty heavy. I really don't expect the regulatory environment to allow distributed scale nuclear installations anytime soon. However, I'm guessing it wouldn't be impossible to scale down compments to distributed scale.Here's an example, though the scale is still quite large that touts its ability to supply electricity, district heating, desalination , etc. Kind of sounds like my swimming pool idea in the previous post. Here's another example - 1 megwatt At any rate, I feel that most of the new energy tech breakthroughs these days favor distributed applications. I'll be including some examples in upcoming posts. I've also promised to offer some critiques on other energy tech besides nuclear. They are upcoming as well, although you could start with my featured post, listing some amazing inconsistencies with MidAmerican energys reporting of wind property taxes. As I have mentioned before, Mid American,county officials, state regulators, etc are welcome to comment on that information and I'll include their comments here. In short, if anyone sees problems with my calulations or wants to assist in getting to the bottom of this issue. Please submit some info. In the meantime, the explanation for this photo is in my featured post as well.

I haven't sent this property tax information to the state ombusman office... and Iowa has a new elected attorney general. Maybe it's time to ask reach out there again. Thanks for stopping by.