5 Comments
User's avatar
Al Christie's avatar

Mixed reaction. I like the favoring of private and microgrids, and the lowering of regulatory barriers, but am disappointed that a carbon tax would even be considered. The "social cost" of carbon is nonsense and totally vulnerable to whatever politicians want to say it is, as an excuse to try to get a carbon tax. The Eu is destroying itself with carbon taxes. CO2 is good for plants and to think that 0.04% CO2 in our atmosphere is harmful is crazy. Also it sounds like Travis actually buys into the idea that it's ok to weaken our grids' reliability with wind and solar, although I'm glad he at least said he's not in favor of subsidies. He doesn't seem to realize that without subsidies, there would be no wind or solar farms, because they make no sense economically.

Expand full comment
Travis Fisher's avatar

The only way to know what resources would show up on an unsubsidized grid is to remove the subsidies and see what happens. I don’t want to prejudge any outcomes because I simply don’t have all the relevant information. Students of Hayek know that no one person ever has all the relevant information

Expand full comment
Al Christie's avatar

OK, I appreciate that we don’t know what we don’t know. But I’m pretty sure I’ve learned enough now to say that removing subsidies would eliminate the construction of any new wind and solar farms and their grid-size battery backups.

Expand full comment
Urs Broderick Furrer's avatar

Exactly. And what we don’t need is subsidies for politically driven energy sources. If they live on their own without subsidies, that’s fine. The fact that we would prefer full time on demand energy sources over part time sources is self evident. At least to some.

Expand full comment
EvanP's avatar

AI is on the brink of a massive paradigm shift. A small startup company has realized that because of the way servers have developed under the influence of the windows desktop OS there is massive hardware redundancy and wasted processor cycles in server farms. By writing their own OS optimized for AI they can replace a massive server farm with a few NUCs. They have been using prototypes of their systems to analyze voter databases and uncover massive opportunities for fraud that have been exploited multiple times in recent years to distort election results. Verifiable data, only made available in the last twelve months by using cheap, energy lean AI.

Expand full comment