Worldwide, thousands of socialists are active in movements demanding action on climate change; many more participate in co-ops and community energy projects. But our collective efforts to map the transition away from fossil fuels, and how it relates to the transition away from capitalism, have fallen short, in my view. In particular, we need some starting-points for understanding how electricity systems are changing.
In this article[1] – both this first part on energy supply, and a second part on electricity networks – I suggest what these starting-points might be. It aims at clarification, including self-clarification, and I invite responses.
I include some polemical comments on recent would-be socialist arguments, by Matt Huber and Fred Stafford, supporting nuclear power against decentralised renewables.[2]
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| Workers inspecting a wind farm in Inner Mongolia, China |
Here are some assumptions I start with. First, in the transition away from fossil fuels, electricity’s role will expand: not only will it be used to provide heat and light, for cooking and to drive appliances and machinery, but it will have to spread in transport and industry. This expansion is to be welcomed as a method of junking fossil fuels, but unless combined with measures to curb capital’s cycles of overproduction and overconsumption – and thereby cut total throughput of energy through economies – it will fail.[3]
Second, I think renewable electricity generation is in principle better than nuclear or doubtful, borderline technologies such as hydrogen and biofuels,[4] in part because of its potential for underpinning a collectively owned and controlled energy system. However, all good (and all bad!) outcomes will most likely involve a combination of technologies; each has its pros and cons, and socially-determined potentials for good or bad uses.
Third, no technology is politically or socially neutral. Capitalism has shaped, and shapes, the technologies that have developed under its domination. Technological change rarely pushes social change in the way that some people hope, but as society changes, technological potentials that are constrained by capitalism may be unleashed.
Fourth, from a socialist standpoint, tackling dangerous climate change can not be separated from the struggle against capitalism and its hierarchies. Our actions with regard to the energy system must centre on fighting for forms of public and common ownership and control, and to turn energy into a public service, as opposed to a commodity.[5]
Fifth, my focus here is on what the labour movement and social movements internationally can do, now. Far too many socialists state their arguments in terms of state policy, despite their limited or non-existent means to influence it. I will not join them.–
1.1. To what extent have renewables become a competitor to fossil fuels?
Renewable technologies’ share of electricity generation worldwide is still dwarfed by that of fossil fuels, but is growing fast. Capital is pouring into wind farms and solar panels, attracted by costs that have plummeted in the last decade. In many countries, companies that manage electricity networks are considering how, not whether, to adapt to electricity supply dominated by renewables.
Hydro accounts for 15.7% of global electricity generation, other renewables for 10.8% – so, about a quarter of the total all together. Nuclear’s share is 10.4%, and the remaining 63.1% is fossil fuels (coal 36.7%, gas 23.6% and oil 2.8%). In 1973, when the total amount of electricity generated was less than a quarter of what it is now, hydro’s share was 20.9% and other renewables’, 0.6%.[6]
Remember that electricity generation only accounts for a small part – about a quarter, or less, depending on exactly how you count – of total primary energy supply, which measures all the inputs (or rather, the commercially-exchanged inputs) to energy systems. Almost all the rest is oil products for transport, and fossil fuels for industry and domestic use.
When considering the transition away from fossil fuels as a whole (see 1.2 and 1.3 below), the expansion of electricity supply to displace fossil fuels from these other uses is a huge issue.
Capital buying into renewables is a fairly new development. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reckons that this year, out of $2800 billion of energy investments, $1700 billion will be put into clean energy (counted broadly, including nuclear). More than $600 billion of that will be for renewable electricity; more money will go to solar than to upstream oil for the first time.[7]
These capital flows are reproducing the same rapacious relationships in supply chains as exist for fossil fuels and nuclear power. Raw materials are often mined in the global south and manufactured – mostly in China, which also continues rapidly to expand its climate-trashing coal-fired power sector – into solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and other equipment. Often harsh conditions of labour exploitation are the outcomes of financial chains that stretch from the markets of the global north.
The dynamics of those markets are working in favour of renewables. The cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) modules has fallen especially dramatically. A good indicator is the levelised cost of energy (LCOE), used by finance capital to measure the cost of electricity delivered to markets from different technologies. Lazard’s, the investment bank, puts the LCOE of solar PV at $60 per megawatt hour ($/MWh), down from $359 in 2009; the LCOE of onshore wind at $50; combined cycle gas plants $70; coal $117; and nuclear at $180.[8]
For decades, solar technology development was funded by the state. And both solar and wind relied heavily on subsidies – for example, feed-in tariffs that fixed their prices in wholesale electricity markets – to compete with fossil fuels, that had all the advantages of incumbency, corporate political power and subsidies of their own.
This is now changing, partly because, as these technologies have been diffused more widely, they have benefited from learning-by-doing and economies of scale, as have other technologies of the “third industrial revolution” (i.e. semiconductors, small-scale computers and phones based on them, the internet, and so on).[9] The IEA says the disruption of energy markets caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and resulting sanctions accelerated the momentum to renewables investment “even as it also prompted a short-term scramble for oil and gas supply”.
Matt Huber and Fred Stafford, arguing against socialists who welcome renewables, claim that these fuels are artificially cheap, because the cost estimates and prices do not reflect the investment required in networks to accommodate them. This is much less than half the truth. Finance capital is very good at estimating costs and while, naturally, companies want to avoid investing in infrastructure, and try to push that cost on to the state, this is unlikely to stop renewables expansion. (See Note: Infrastructure costs, at the end.)
The much greater dangers inherent in the renewables expansion under capitalism is that it will be used to supplement, rather than replace, fossil-fuel-intensive processes; that it will be used to delay, rather than hasten, decarbonisation; and that it will be undertaken in a manner every bit as exploitative and extractivist as the fossil fuel and nuclear industries.
1.2. What part could renewables really play in driving fossil fuel use down to zero?
Coal, gas and oil are consumed by and through technological systems that are embedded in the social and economic system we live under, capitalism. To drive down their use will require a transformation of all these systems. Renewable electricity generation, one way or another, will play a big part.
Before I sketch outlines of how this could happen, here are a couple of paragraphs to deconstruct “energy” and “energy demand”, terms used in public discussion of these issues.
“Energy” is often assumed to be a commodity to be bought and sold, reflecting two centuries of history during which fossil fuels – and electricity, heat, vehicles’ motive force and other forms of energy produced by them – have mostly been used under capital’s control. There is a distinction between this commodified “energy”, whose exchange value is measured in dollars or other currency, and energy as a physical phenomenon, measured in joules, kilowatt hours or other units.[10] A great deal of energy is used at the edges of the commodified system in a non-commodified form, e.g. in rural communities who rely on firewood that they collect themselves. And now, solar and other technologies carry the potential for new types of non-commodified energy use.
“Energy demand” has also been given a false meaning. Politicians and businessmen talk as though “energy demand” is fixed by populations, and companies producing oil, cars or electricity are merely serving that demand. But actually most energy (whether as fuel, electricity, motive power or heat) is consumed by industrial or transport systems, built environments, infrastructure or other facets of the economy controlled not by the population, but by capital.
Now I will look at likely upcoming trends in, first, energy use on a global scale, and, second, energy supply.
Final energy use, whether by luxury jets, blast furnaces or poor rural families’ cookstoves, is only one aspect of total energy use. It is more accurate to think of energy being used by and through big technological systems, with some of it reaching those final uses at the end.[11] In the rich countries, energy use is conditioned by endemic overproduction and overconsumption. Reducing total energy use is the single most effective way to reduce fossil fuel burning, which in turn is the single most effective way to tackle global heating.
To put some numbers on it: analysts reckon that total energy inputs to the world economy are somewhere above 600 exajoules; after losses in conversion and inefficiencies, somewhere above 400 exajoules per year are used, in the form of electricity, heat, light, motive power, and so on.[12] Most scenarios worked out for the international climate talks include estimates of total energy use in 2050: the widely-cited scenarios under which global heating is limited to 1.5° above pre-industrial levels put energy use in 2050 at, or a little above, the current level – so, 400+ exajoules. Scenarios in which global heating goes above that mostly expect higher total energy use.
The interesting scenarios from a socialist standpoint are those that highlight the potential gains from transforming energy use – (a) by sweeping changes in global north economies, e.g. shifting away from private car ownership, reducing meat consumption, reforming the built environment, dematerialising industrial processes and implementing energy conservation, and (b) by the provision of electricity to the 770 million people without it, and cleaner cooking fuels to more than 2 billion people without them.
We can compare two such scenarios, one by a research team led by Arnalf Grubler and one by Greenpeace, with other scenarios in which global heating is held to 1.5°. Grubler et al map a route to reducing total world energy use, by 2050, to 245 EJ/year; Greenpeace, to 314 EJ/year. By contrast, other scenarios included in the IPCC’s fifth assessment report that keep to 1.5% predict total global energy use to rise to 424 EJ/year (SSP1-1.9) or 438 EJ/year (SSP2-1.9).[13]
Are the economic transformations that could reduce energy throughput possible? That is primarily a social and political question. If untrammelled capitalism is not constrained by “Green New Deals” or other social democratic measures, superceded by social movements against capital – or laid low, with the resulting social catastrophes, by its own crises – then clearly not. I remain hopeful that society can combat and even suppress capital, and prevent the worst climate outcomes – although I do not pretend to know how this will happen.
Grubler’s team work in a mainstream academic context, and their paper does not consider prospects for a social and economic transition beyond capitalism. But nevertheless their thought experiment – which, whatever claims are made, is basically what all modelled scenarios are – is useful in considering how the coming decades will unfold.
Now I will suggest how energy supply might change in future. Scenarios promoted by oil companies and governments, which assume that vast quantities of greenhouse gases will be sucked from the atmosphere by unproven technologies, have long been denounced as greenwash, designed to allow fossil fuel burning to continue.[14]
The expansion of electricity networks, powered by renewables, is the main alternative. But among researchers who champion this, approaches differ. Most authors doing “100% renewables research” have a technocratic approach, accepting dominant assumptions about energy demand, and looking at technological means to meet it. By contrast, the Grubler team and others like them marry research on energy supply to interrogations of how energy is used, critiquing both overconsumption in the global north and extreme energy poverty in the global south.
Politically, the latter approach is more useful to socialists and all who believe in “climate justice”. Furthermore – there is a noticeable difference between the two sides when it comes to the actual quantity of renewables that might be used.
The researchers led by Grubler reckoned that, of that 245 EJ of energy use in 2050 (down from 410 EJ in 2020), 132 EJ would be in the form of electricity (up from 78 EJ in 2020) and another 22 EJ from non-electric uses of solar. Their scenario provides for inputs (primary energy supply), by 2050, of 87 EJ from solar and 52.5 EJ from wind – compared to 2.45 EJ solar and 5.1 EJ wind in 2019.
Note that even in Grubler et al’s scenario, which envisions far more radical social, economic and political change than the mainstream IPCC scenarios, electricity output would almost double over the next 30 years. This is because they, like most researchers, assume that many forms of energy use that currently involve coal, oil and gas (e.g. heating homes, various types of transport and industrial processes) would be electrified and decarbonised.[15]
The volumes of renewable electricity output targeted by 17 “100% renewables” papers reviewed recently are far higher than Grubler et al’s: for solar, 33.8-375.4 EJ (average 137.5 EJ), and for wind 23-238.3 EJ (average 96.8 EJ).[16] The pessimist in me says the higher end of those ranges could never be achieved, but the analyst in me says that, assuming social change, they are anyway unnecessary.
To sum up. The range of forecasts of the amount of energy that the world economy might use in 2050 is vast. The most important determinants are how society changes, the extent to which capitalist overproduction and overconsumption can be constrained, and how total energy throughput can be reduced. Assuming progress in that direction, it would be possible, but not easy, to meet need using systems based on renewable electricity generation.
A worthwhile research task would be to develop a socialist critique of the disputes among academic researchers about “100% renewables” scenarios. Huber and Stafford state, wrongly, that the subject is “largely based on the models of one researcher, Mark Z. Jacobson”, betraying their own lack of interest. When the nuclear advocate Ben Heard of the university of Adelaide, Australia, and his colleagues, reviewed and challenged the conclusions of significant “100% renewables” papers, they studied the work of 13 research teams.[17]
A final point about energy supply is that while hydropower, wind and solar PV are the significant technologies now, there are others that definitely work, but need scaling up. Some generate electricity, such as concentrated solar power; others provide heat, such as modern ways of burning biomass, and direct solar heat use via e.g. rooftop heat collectors or ground-mounted arrays; geothermal energy does both. Still others, such as wave power, ocean thermal devices and airborne wind power, are still at the experimental stage.[18]
1.3. What about materials?
Is it conceivable that solar and wind capacity could be multiplied dozens of times over in the coming decades? New technologies can spread fast: think mobile phones and personal computers. But solar panels and wind turbines, and the networks and storage systems needed to support them, are much bigger and heavier. The main constraint on their growth is surely the availability of materials.
Now, these materials are most often looted from countries in the global south by mining corporations. The heavy price paid by millions of people in those countries – for example the Democratic Republic of Congo, which holds an estimated 56% of cobalt reserves, or Guinea, which holds 28% of bauxite and alumina reserves (for aluminium production) – has been documented by left-leaning NGOs.[19]
Of course, measured by the human misery they cause, as much as by other criteria, these supply chains are far smaller than those for fossil fuels and nuclear power. But, together with the state power that protects them and the exploitative social relations on which they depend, they are underwritten by different ideologies. Whereas fossil fuel extractivism was often legitimised in the name of colonialism, nationalism or “energy security”, “‘green’ extractive projects are often justified in the name of universal climate salvation, including for the very populations most likely to bear their costs”, as the researcher Meredith DeBoom argued recently.[20]
Socialists in the global north can not just reassure ourselves that “green” extractivism confirms what we know about capitalism, and carry on. Politically, we need to pay far more attention to the great social struggles across the global south, not only against the fossil fuel corporations, but also those resisting the mining and metals corporations and their allies. We need to develop long-term alliances between social movements north and south.[21]
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| An artisanal miner carrying a sack of ore at the Shabara mine near Kolwezi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, October 2022 |
Another important task, in my view, is to challenge mainstream approaches to energy consumption in the global north. Without this, it is impossible to get a real understanding of whether and how renewable energy systems can be developed at scale. Some central issues are raised in a report by War on Want and the London Mining Network, which challenges the assumptions on which many studies of the energy transition are based.[22] The authors write:
None of these studies question the assumption that total economic activity and overall energy demand will continue to increase. It is particularly concerning that they do not consider the possibility of a reduction in the disproportionate consumption of the global north.
The reports shows that critical metals[23] are used in more varied ways than mining companies suggest. First, demand for them is not primarily from renewable energy producers; a “diverse, and often destructive” array of uses include construction, aviation, nuclear technology, electronics and the arms industry, which can and should be questioned.
Second, in the case of demand forecasts for e.g. cobalt and lithium, batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) play an outsize role. The potential for reducing lithium demand by economic transformations in the global north was highlighted recently by a US-based research group, which concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from the US transportation system could be reduced to zero while sharply cutting the amount of lithium used, “by reducing the car dependence of the transportation system, decreasing the size of EV batteries and maximising lithium recycling”. Merely limiting the size of EV batteries would cut 42% of the lithium demand in a baseline projection.[24]
War on Want and the London Mining Network call for projected demand to be further disaggregated, to “critically evaluate which of these end-uses most contributes to meeting the demands of energy justice and access”, rather than the imperatives of overproduction and overconsumption in the global north. Another recent report, by the university-based Institute for Sustainable Futures in Australia, points to the importance of recycling and efficiency measures, which it shows are desperately underused, and of substituting critical metals with alternative materials.[25]
All such changes will of course meet the resistance of profit-based corporations; technological potentials can not be realised without confronting and weakening their power.
1.4. What about energy return on energy invested?
Might the transition to a new, all-renewables energy system itself so drastically push up demand for energy that the economy would strain, or even collapse, under the burden? Such possibilities are discussed in a good article by Michael J. Albert – who also (I think, quite rightly) criticises “ecosocialists” collectively for saying far too little about the transition from where we are now to the utopian ends they envision.[26]
Albert raises the issue of energy demand in his critique of various versions of the Green New Deal (GND):
GNDs (particularly moderate GNDs, which are more likely to emerge in the near-term) would likely result in a prolonged trajectory of stagnation and crisis for global capitalism.
Rather than stabilising global capitalism in a new regime of accumulation, Albert writes, GNDs may “give way to an era of political-economic turbulence”, that would produce opportunities, but also dangers – and one of the reasons for this is the possibility of “net energy decline”.
People can read Albert’s broader argument themselves. Here I focus on the issue of “net energy decline”. Here are some definitions. It takes energy to produce energy; the energy inputs, minus the energy used in the energy system, is “net energy” or useful energy. Researchers have over decades developed another measure, “energy return on energy invested” (usually abbreviated EROI), which is the ratio of energy inputs to useful energy.[27]
There are a mountain of ways to work this out, and an even bigger mountain of uncertainties, but most researchers agree that since the mid 20th century, when the world economy gorged on high-EROI coal and oil, EROI has been going down. There is general agreement that corn-based ethanol, for example, has such a low EROI that there’s no point in producing it (aside from ecological reasons). But debates continue to rage about the EROI of wind and solar power, partly because the implications of intermittency and how electricity networks will adapt to them are not fully understood. Albert writes:
As we increasingly shift to renewable energy sources with a lower EROI, more energy will be required to collect and store these diffuse energy sources, which means less energy may be available for the global economy overall.
Albert gives four reasons why EROI may fall during a transition to renewables: (1) the need for large-scale storage, which itself imposes energy costs; (2) the burden placed on land use by large-scale wind and solar, and the possibility that wind and solar farms might have to be placed further away from electricity users, incurring transportation costs; (3) the fact that renewables infrastructure currently being manufactured with fossil-fuel-produced energy will eventually be produced with renewably-produced energy; and (4) the amount of metals needed for renewables infrastructure.
To cut a long and fiendishly complex story short, my take on this is: yes, the storage, land, infrastructure and metals requirements for renewables systems are substantial, and will impose economic burdens, some of which I touched on above with respect to metals; but, no, researchers’ attempts to capture these complexities meaningfully in EROI models can not yield definite conclusions. There are just too many variables, including, above all, the effect of social conflict and social change.
A paper by Iñigo Capellán-Pérez and his colleagues, that Albert cites, questions the “green growth” paradigm promoted by the international financial institutions and western governments: they say its “consistence and soundness” is put into question by their results, and that the difficulties with renewables reflected in their computer models have not been accounted for in mainstream economic thinking.[28] In particular they say that their approach, of working out “dynamic EROI”, more realistically captures the up-front costs, and delayed returns (in energy terms) of a fossil-to-renewables transition. All that I can believe – but I note that Capellán-Pérez et al list the uncertainties in their calculations and call for further research.
In my view, the important political conclusion from this is that it dovetails with socialist critiques of “green growth” discourse. Assumptions about renewable technologies being a means to continue capitalist economic expansion, combined with greenwash-laden technofixes (carbon capture etc), not only need to be challenged for their perpetuation of hierarchy and social injustice, but they also fly in the face of what researchers understand about the physical constraints on energy systems.
1.5. Is it not more realistic to include nuclear in our perspectives?
Nuclear power is a low-carbon way of generating electricity, and it uses a much smaller land area than wind or solar. Most of France’s electricity (69%) is generated by nuclear, but in other big nuclear nations it supplements gas (e.g. Russia, where 19% of electricity is nuclear), coal (e.g. China, 4.7%) or hydro and renewables (e.g. Sweden, 30%).[29] The true costs of decommissioning a reactor, which can easily take a decade or more, are still poorly understood, but the much bigger unsolved problem is of burying nuclear waste.
Huber and Stafford, who strongly advocate investment in nuclear, say the waste problem has been “overstated”, and that “we have proven methods for storing it safely on-site, or the long-term solution of underground”. Again these are less-than-half-truths. Dave Cullen, a socialist writer on nuclear issues, points out that the “long-term solution” does not yet exist: there is “no working deep repository for high level waste anywhere in the world”, despite limited progress in Finland and Sweden. Claire Corkhill, who advises the UK government on nuclear, has said that plans for new nuclear should be put on hold “until we have a geological disposal facility”: officially, that is timetabled for the 2040s, but is far likelier to take longer.[30]
Huber and Stafford also write that, in electricity market terms, “nuclear power struggles to compete with natural gas and subsidised renewables”. That’s understatement on stilts. Nuclear electricity costs have risen constantly over time – notwithstanding state support for construction, decommissioning and other aspects of the industry – while costs of electricity generated from renewables costs continue to fall (see 1.1 above).
In the 1970s, nuclear was seen by much of the ruling class, certainly in the US and UK, as the most promising future energy source. But despite strong support from capital, governments and above all the military, nuclear went into long-term decline. In 2021 its share of global electricity generation was the lowest for four decades, at 9.8%; over the two decades 2002-2021, there were 98 nuclear start-ups and 105 closures. Fifty of the start-ups were in China, meaning that the rest of the world saw a net decline of 57 reactors.[31]
Nuclear is so expensive that it is not only shunned by capital seeking rapid returns, but is also increasingly untenable even with state funding and policy support from the military. Specialist researchers Andy Stirling and Phil Johnstone argued recently that the question is not why nuclear is in overall decline, but rather: why is it proving, in a limited group of countries, “so surprisingly resistant” to changing market conditions? Their answer is its interdependence with the military, evidence of which is strong in military studies but “typically neglected” in energy policy analysis.[32]
Huber and Stafford are among those who neglect the connection between civil and military nuclear. They do not write a word about it. With the largest nuclear plant in Europe, Zaporizhzhia, occupied by the Russian army – which has ignored UN calls to cease military action near the plant, and which bears responsibility for the collapse of the nearby Kakhovka hydro plant[33] – it is a bizarre silence.
This is typical of Huber and Stafford’s approach: they pick and choose parts of technologies’ social and economic contexts to suit their argument. They one-sidedly portray renewables as playthings of US tech giants and merchant electricity generators, ignoring the broader picture of state support for renewables research during the 1970s energy crisis; renewables development as community energy in Denmark, and by a Social Democratic-Green alliance in Germany from the 1980s; the Chinese government’s role; and the widespread social support for them in the global north and south. When it comes to nuclear, the role of governments and the military does not rate a mention, to say nothing of decades of social opposition, not only in post-Hiroshima Japan but in Europe and the US. This is not Marxist analysis.
What about nuclear’s future? Again, broader social and economic dynamics matter. If our sole aim is to produce as much electricity as possible, as far into the future as possible, nuclear might be a good choice. But if our aims are to avert dangerous climate change, to move society away from social injustice and the rule of capital, to challenge capital’s endless expansion, and to heal humanity’s rift with its natural environment opened up by capital, the calculations are different. Then, the logical policy is to reduce total throughput of energy through technological systems (see 1.2 above). Renewables are suited to this; nuclear is not. Assuming the speed of technological transition matters – an issue that Huber and Stafford do not directly address – renewables have another great advantage: they can expand rapidly. A nuclear power station typically takes a decade to build.
Furthermore, there is the issue of where social, economic and political power lie in society. If our vision of the future assumes a strong state and a reinforced military, nuclear power might work. Such assumptions are antithetical to anything I understand by the word socialism. If socialism assumes people taking more direct control over their own lives and developing forms of collective power and democracy, then renewable power – and especially decentralised renewables – has potential. Nuclear does not.
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| Solar panels in the Gobi desert, China |
What about the workplaces in which electricity is produced? Huber and Stafford write that renewables companies are fiercely anti-union (true, no doubt), but do not explain US nuclear companies’ attitude to, or relationship with, the unions. In the UK, union officials representing nuclear sector workers often ignore the labour movement’s wider concerns, to focus on maintaining bargaining rights for those relatively well-off members.
So, while I agree with Huber and Stafford that we should “listen to what these workers and unions say” about electricity, their point that energy sector unions favour a “broad-based approach to decarbonisation”, including nuclear, carries less weight than they give it. They do not probe the extent to which these union officials really speak for these workers. Nor do they confront the harsh reality that here, as so often, there are tensions between some workers’ sectional interests and the aims of the wider workers’ movement. I doubt there are simple answers to that – but the longer we avoid discussing it, the further we will be from resolving it.
Finally, what about actual policy proposals? Huber’s and Stafford’s are for state investment in a capitalist context. In an earlier article, Stafford suggested a “return to the New Deal politics of public power” and argued for funds released under the US Inflation Reduction Act to be funnelled to the nuclear industry via the publicly-owned Tennessee Valley Authority.[34] This is effectively a call to divert funds from renewables to nuclear.
In their Catalyst article, Huber and Stafford claim that, because nuclear has proven so expensive:
But in reality, most nuclear power plants have not needed socialism; they have been constructed by an alliance of capitalist governments and private capital. The exceptions are those built in the Soviet bloc which, whatever it was, was not “socialist”.
A more compelling question is: does socialism need nuclear power? I can not suggest a better answer to this than Dave Cullen’s. On the back of a working life spent studying nuclear power, he writes:
Note. Infrastructure costs
Matt Huber and Fred Stafford suggest that renewables are not “the cheap option” because:
This is much less than half the truth. Firstly, because, by every conceivable measure, state support for renewables has for decades been dwarfed by that for fossil fuels and nuclear. So the implication, that renewable technologies are free-riding on good ol’ coal and gas – which can be heard whenever a bunch of oil company managers sit together in a bar – is out of place in any serious analysis.
Secondly, electrical engineers and researchers have been thinking for years about how to adapt to large-scale renewable generation (see 2.1 and 2.2 below). For sure, investment in interconnection, storage and flexibility lags far behind. As with all infrastructure investment under capitalism, companies are desperate to avoid paying for it and anxious to secure state funding. But there is a mountain of research showing that (i) there will be substantial network costs, whichever technological directions systems go in, and (ii) these costs are expected to be higher, but not dramatically higher, in systems dominated by renewables. The energy researcher David Elliott reflects the consensus opinion that the extra cost of grid balancing to adapt to renewable supply may be 10-15%.[36]
Thirdly, to support their argument, Huber and Stafford misrepresent work by Robert Idel, a researcher who constructs market models, to claim that “if systems costs were added” to LCOE estimates, the costs for solar and wind in Texas, USA, would be more than 11 and 7 times higher respectively. But Idel only modelled a theoretical situation, which could not and will not happen in real life, in which the given technology supplies 100% of the electricity.[37]
Had Huber and Stafford been seriously interested in network costs, they could have looked at the research. A paper by economists at Imperial College, London, summarising current views, concluded, among other things, that variable renewables can take high shares of total generation with “relatively” low costs, provided there is attention to flexibility. They say they can not be sure that renewables will always be cheaper than nuclear, but “it is important to avoid simplistic claims that system integration costs are large”.[38] Sound advice.
Worth looking at too is a report published by the IEA and the Nuclear Energy Authority, who developed a “value-adjust levelised cost of electricity” designed to take account of system costs.[39] It concludes that in 2025 gas plants would be far more competitive if system costs were taken into account; nuclear and coal plants would mostly have “zero or minimal value adjustments”; and wind and solar would be “somewhat less competitive” than the LCOE methodology shows.
In my view, socialists should embrace a technology that can help to avert dangerous climate change, even if it is “somewhat less competitive” in the market. If someone has a legitimate reason to dispute that, fine. Point-scoring, supported by cherry-picking bits of research, is insufficient.
Endnotes
So, while I agree with Huber and Stafford that we should “listen to what these workers and unions say” about electricity, their point that energy sector unions favour a “broad-based approach to decarbonisation”, including nuclear, carries less weight than they give it. They do not probe the extent to which these union officials really speak for these workers. Nor do they confront the harsh reality that here, as so often, there are tensions between some workers’ sectional interests and the aims of the wider workers’ movement. I doubt there are simple answers to that – but the longer we avoid discussing it, the further we will be from resolving it.
Finally, what about actual policy proposals? Huber’s and Stafford’s are for state investment in a capitalist context. In an earlier article, Stafford suggested a “return to the New Deal politics of public power” and argued for funds released under the US Inflation Reduction Act to be funnelled to the nuclear industry via the publicly-owned Tennessee Valley Authority.[34] This is effectively a call to divert funds from renewables to nuclear.
In their Catalyst article, Huber and Stafford claim that, because nuclear has proven so expensive:
[N]uclear power needs socialism to grow – or at least a form of public investment that socialises the costs of construction and does not privatise the gains.
But in reality, most nuclear power plants have not needed socialism; they have been constructed by an alliance of capitalist governments and private capital. The exceptions are those built in the Soviet bloc which, whatever it was, was not “socialist”.
A more compelling question is: does socialism need nuclear power? I can not suggest a better answer to this than Dave Cullen’s. On the back of a working life spent studying nuclear power, he writes:
Nuclear power is antithetical to the world we want to see. From its origin as a figleaf to distract us from the grim truth of mutually assured destruction, to its recent resurrection as a bogus solution to climate change, it is inherently bound up with violent state forms and paranoid and secretive hierarchies. […]🔴Part 2 on electricity networks is here. □□□ Both parts can be downloaded now, as a PDF, here
Climate change mitigation measures need to be prefigurative of other changes we want to see in the world. Technology will never be the solution to climate change, but any viable solution will need to deploy it alongside social change. Nuclear can not deliver on even the limited grounds where it claims to make a difference, and is a distracting dead end. In political circumstances where social change is not immediately realisable, we need to be advocating for technologies which are in harmony with the changes we want to see, not providing free PR for an industry which should have been left to die decades ago.
Note. Infrastructure costs
Matt Huber and Fred Stafford suggest that renewables are not “the cheap option” because:
The cheap prices of renewable energy don’t include the transmission lines to their remote locales or the costly back-up required when the weather isn’t favourable. In other words, it is the limited use value of solar and wind that leads to broader system costs of integrating backup power plants (usually natural gas) and storage technologies.[35]
This is much less than half the truth. Firstly, because, by every conceivable measure, state support for renewables has for decades been dwarfed by that for fossil fuels and nuclear. So the implication, that renewable technologies are free-riding on good ol’ coal and gas – which can be heard whenever a bunch of oil company managers sit together in a bar – is out of place in any serious analysis.
Secondly, electrical engineers and researchers have been thinking for years about how to adapt to large-scale renewable generation (see 2.1 and 2.2 below). For sure, investment in interconnection, storage and flexibility lags far behind. As with all infrastructure investment under capitalism, companies are desperate to avoid paying for it and anxious to secure state funding. But there is a mountain of research showing that (i) there will be substantial network costs, whichever technological directions systems go in, and (ii) these costs are expected to be higher, but not dramatically higher, in systems dominated by renewables. The energy researcher David Elliott reflects the consensus opinion that the extra cost of grid balancing to adapt to renewable supply may be 10-15%.[36]
Thirdly, to support their argument, Huber and Stafford misrepresent work by Robert Idel, a researcher who constructs market models, to claim that “if systems costs were added” to LCOE estimates, the costs for solar and wind in Texas, USA, would be more than 11 and 7 times higher respectively. But Idel only modelled a theoretical situation, which could not and will not happen in real life, in which the given technology supplies 100% of the electricity.[37]
Had Huber and Stafford been seriously interested in network costs, they could have looked at the research. A paper by economists at Imperial College, London, summarising current views, concluded, among other things, that variable renewables can take high shares of total generation with “relatively” low costs, provided there is attention to flexibility. They say they can not be sure that renewables will always be cheaper than nuclear, but “it is important to avoid simplistic claims that system integration costs are large”.[38] Sound advice.
Worth looking at too is a report published by the IEA and the Nuclear Energy Authority, who developed a “value-adjust levelised cost of electricity” designed to take account of system costs.[39] It concludes that in 2025 gas plants would be far more competitive if system costs were taken into account; nuclear and coal plants would mostly have “zero or minimal value adjustments”; and wind and solar would be “somewhat less competitive” than the LCOE methodology shows.
In my view, socialists should embrace a technology that can help to avert dangerous climate change, even if it is “somewhat less competitive” in the market. If someone has a legitimate reason to dispute that, fine. Point-scoring, supported by cherry-picking bits of research, is insufficient.
Endnotes
[1] Thanks to Kolya Abramsky and David Camfield for commenting on a draft, and to friends I have discussed the issues with
[2] Matt Huber and Fred Stafford, “In Defense of the Tennessee Valley Authority”, Jacobin, 4 April 2022, and “Socialist Politics and the Electricity Grid”, Catalyst 6:4, 2023
[3] I have written about reducing throughput e.g. in “How to do away with fossil fuel consumption”, People & Nature, August 2023 and Burning Up: a global history of fossil fuel consumption (Pluto Press, 2018), chapter 12
[4] I outlined the problems with hydrogen in “The hydrogen hoax”, The Ecologist, December 2020. A good source on biofuels is the Biofuelwatch web site
[5] See: S. Pirani, “How energy was commodified, and how it could be decommodified”, People & Nature, 2021
[6] IEA, Key World Energy Statistics 2021. The “non-hydro renewables” item covers “geothermal, solar, wind, tide/wave/ocean, biofuels, waste, heat and other”
[7] IEA, World Energy Investments 2023, page 9 and page 12
[8] Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis 2023, page 9. LCOEs for all technologies are higher this year than in 2018-21, due to global inflation
[9] See: Max Roser, “Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?”, Our World in Data, December 2020; Gregory Nemet, How Solar Energy Became Cheap (Routledge, 2019)
[10] At global level, energy may be measured in exajoules (a billion billion joules, or 1015 joules), as I do in this section. An exajoule is equal to 277.8 Terawatt hours, or 23.8 million tonnes of oil equivalent
[11] On analysis of energy flows (primary energy supply, secondary energy, final energy, etc) see: “How to do away with fossil fuel consumption”, People & Nature, August 2023
[12] In 2019, the IEA counted annual total primary energy supply (i.e. all the inputs) as 606 exajoules (EJ) and final energy consumption (i.e. all use) as 418 EJ. (IEA, Key World Energy Statistics, 2019.) About units of measurement, see note 10 above
[13] A. Grubler et al, “A low energy demand scenario for meeting the 1.5° target and sustainable development goals without negative emissions technologies”, Nature Energy 3 (2018), pages 515-527; Greenpeace, Global Wind Energy Council and Solar Power Europe, Energy [R]evolution: a sustainable world energy outlook 2015
[14] See e.g. “Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap”, The Conversation, April 2021; Kevin Anderson et al, “A Factor of Two: how the mitigation plans of ‘climate progressive’ nations fall far short”, Climate Policy 20 (2020), pages 1290-1304
[15] Research such as Grubler et al’s is a useful antidote to inflated claims of “electricity demand” in projections by energy corporations and their consultants. For example Hitachi Energy is cited by The Economist, asserting that “by 2050 the world will need four times as much electricity generation as it has today”, begging questions about what “the world” is, what “need” means, etc. See “The ultimate supply chains”, The Economist, 8 April 2023
[16] Grubler et al, op. cit.; C. Breyer et al, “On the history and future of 100% renewable energy systems research”, IEEE Access, vol. 10 (2022), 78176-78218
[17] B.P. Heard et al, “Burden of proof: a comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems”, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 76 (2017), pp. 1122-1133; and the response, T.W. Brown et al, “Response to ‘Burden of proof’”, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 92 (2018), pp. 834-847. If you are finding your way into the debate, I would suggest starting with: David Roberts, “A beginner’s guide to the debate over 100% renewable energy”, Vox (2017), and S. Pirani, “We need social change, not miracles”, The Ecologist, July 2023
[18] There is a useful survey in: Elliott, Renewable Energy: can it deliver?, pages 17-64
[19] Clare Church and Alec Crawford, Green Conflict Minerals: the fuels of conflict in the transition to a low-carbon economy (IISD, 2018) provides a summary. In addition to Congo and Guinea, they highlight China (rare earths), Guatemala (nickel) and Zimbabwe (lithium)
[20] Extractivism has been defined as “a mechanism of colonial and neocolonial plunder and appropriation”, that was “forged in the exploitation of the raw materials essential for the industrial development and prosperity of the global North” (Alberto Acosta, “Extractivism and neoextractivism: two sides of the same curse”, in Beyond Development: alternative visions from Latin America (Transnational Institute, 2013). Meredith DeBoom, “Climate Necropolitics: ecological civilization and the distributive geographies of extractive violence in the Anthropocene”, Annals of the American Association of Geographers (2021) 111:3, pages 900-912. The general comments on extractivism are made along with a study of Chinese uranium mining in Namibia. On energy-related aspects of extractivism, see: Joshua Kirshner et al, “Energy landscapes in Mozambique: the role of extractive industries in a post-conflict environment”, Economy and Space (2020) 52:6, pages 1051-1071
[21] A good place to start, politically, would be with the Manifesto for an Ecosocial Energy Transition from the Peoples of the Global South (February 2023)
[22] War on Want and London Mining Network, A Just(ice) Transition is a Post-Extractive Transition (2019)
[23] The International Resource Panel defines critical metals as those of “high economic importance that faces supply risks” and that have no commercially viable substitute. The term is used in the Just(ice) Transition report, with the caveat that the author does not favour the geopolitical values it reflects
[24] Thea Riofrancos et al, Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining (Climate and Community Project, January 2023)
[25] Institute for Sustainable Futures, Responsible minerals sourcing for renewable energy (2019). A much more technical briefing paper on potential substitutions is: Aidan Rhodes et al, Materials for Energy (Energy Futures Lab, Imperial College London, 2022)
[26] Michael J. Albert, “Ecosocialism for realists: transitions, trade-offs and authoritarian dangers”, Capitalism Nature Socialism 34:1 (2023), pages 11-30. (Albert is not to be confused with the US-based economist Michael Albert, who writes on participatory economics (parecon).)
[27] The concept of “net energy” owes much to the pioneering work of Howard Odum; see e.g. H. Odum, Environment, Power and Society (Wiley, 1971). On EROI, see numerous articles by Charles Hall, the first to use the concept. An explanation for beginners is in: Richard Heinberg and David Fridley, Our Renewable Future: laying the path for one hundred percent clean energy (Island Press, 2016), pages 18-21 and 117-121
[28] Iñigo Capellán-Pérez et al, “Dynamic Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) and material requirements in scenarios of global transition to renewable energies”, Energy Strategy Reviews 26 (2019), 100399. In another paper (C. de Castro and I. Capellán-Pérez, Standard, Point of Use and Extended EROI from comprehensive material requirements of present global wind, solar and hydro power technologies”, Energies 2020 (13), 3036), the same research team, expanding the boundaries of what they include in the energy system, find levels of EROI for wind and solar power, all below 3:1, and substantially lower than other researchers’ results. I learned a bit about the methodological issues from: D. Murphy et al, “Comparing Apples to Apples: “Why the Net Energy Analysis Community Needs to Adopt the Life-Cycle Analysis Framework”, Energies 2016 (9), 917.
[29] Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy
[30] Dave Cullen, “Stop Trying to Make Nuclear Power Happen”, New Socialist, 16 October 2021; “Push for new UK nuclear plants lacks facility for toxic waste”, Guardian, 28 March 2022
[31] Mycle Schneider et al, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2022
[32] Andy Stirling and Phil Johnstone, A Global Picture of Industrial Interdependencies between civil and mlitary nuclear infrastructures, SPRU Working Paper 2018-13
[33] The most recent IAEA report on Nuclear safety, Security and Safeguards in Ukraine notes Russia’s failure to heed the agency’s calls “to immediately cease all actions against and at nuclear facilities in Ukraine”. The agency continues to report military activity near the plant. See also e.g. “Inside the Ukrainian city threatened with nuclear sabotage”, OpenDemocracy, 6 July 2023. On Kakhovka, see “Why the evidence suggests Russia blew up the Kakhovka dam”, New York Times, 16 June 2023
[34] Fred Stafford, “We Need a Nuclear New Deal”, Breakthrough Institute web site, 6 December 2022
[35] Huber and Stafford, “Socialist Politics and the Electricity Grid”, Catalyst 6:4, pages 71-72
[36] David Elliott, Renewable energy: can it deliver? (Polity Press, 2020), pages 7-9
[37] Robert Idel, “Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity”, Energy journal 259 (2022), 124905. Yuhji Matsuo in a recent survey of methods of calculating system costs (“Re-Defining System LCOE: Costs and Values of Power Sources”, Energies 2022(15), 6845), comments on Idel’s methodology: “LFSCOE by Idel is different from other metrics in that it calculates the cost of VRE [variable renewable energies] when the market is occupied only by one power generating technology. For this reason, this metric is not discussed much in this article, which aims to capture the economics of real power systems.” In other words, Idel’s work does not address what actually happens in real power systems
[38] Philip Heptonstall and Robert Gross, “A systematic review of the costs and impacts of integrating variable renewables into power grids”, Nature Energy 6 (2021), pages 72-83
[39] IEA/NEA, Projected Costs of Generating Electricity 2020, page 80.
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