Gitt'r Done
Brian Gitt is a highly successful entrepreneur. After a short career as a guide in mountain expeditions and national parks in Alaska and the Rockies, Gitt developed a yearning to save the wilderness and the environment but felt he needed a more hands-on approach to truly make a viable difference.
After an executive director position at an organization that campaigned for green building policies, followed by being CEO at a consulting firm that ran energy-efficiency programs, he founded a software startup that assisted homes with green upgrades. During the Obama Administration, his company was awarded USD $60 million in federal contracts. The government programs were all about gaining energy efficiency.
It was during this period that he began to understand the weaknesses and flaws of the government’s environmental schemes, not to mention their insolence and aversion to admitting failure. Times have not changed.
As Gitt has written:
I used to think solar and wind power were the best ways to reduce CO2 emissions. But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissions during the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas *.
I used to think that the world was transitioning to solar, wind, and batteries. This, too, was false. Trillions of dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.
I used to believe nuclear energy was dangerous and nuclear waste was a big problem. In fact, nuclear is the safest and most reliable way to generate low-emission electricity, and it provides the best chance of reducing CO2 emissions.
* Gitte failed to mention that the emissions reduction occurred in the United States only. Further despite the Trump administration aborting participation in the Paris Climate Accord, during this period, the USA was the only nation to reduce CO2 emissions and it was all done by the conversion from coal to natural
Gitt admits that he remains an environmentalist and that carbon dioxide can be an issue, but at minimum, he is an energy realist with respect to:
Reliability - with the intermittency and sporadic availability of soklar and wind there will be energy rationing. If you have read the report linked with my article Energy Storage - Mission Impossible you will understand that battery storage is impossibly unaffordable;
Affordability – unless energy is affordable the ordinary person or family cannot manage heating or cooling within their homes;
National Security – without sufficient energy, countries are vulnerable to hostility and aggression by other nations.
Scalability – energy sources need to be close to the places that use them – transmission from faraway locations becomes unaffordable.
Land Use – A 1000 Megawatt nuclear plant requires about 1 square mile of land - solar consumes 75% more while wind farms 360 times more.
The one energy characteristic missed is the ‘return on investment’ (ROI), also called ‘return on costs’ (ROC) or ‘payback period’ relative to the lifespan of an asset. Solar panels and wind turbines last between 20 and 30 years, shorter in the case of obsolescence, while nuclear plants can last a century or more. As I have always believed, thorium needs to be used as the feedstock because of its higher grade it is easier to mine, with less waste, and most importantly it cannot be melted down to plutonium for manufacturing nuclear weapons.
Brian Gitt has a talk on Prager U. It can be listened to here.