Michael Roberts

1/ New working paper: "Optimal transmission expansion minimally reduces decarbonization costs of U.S. Electricity." #energytwitter #EconTwitter #decarbonization 🧵

@JigarShahDC Outside of the US, and to some extent within it, I this may well accelerate solar and wind. It’s probably a lot cheaper/easier to do on short notice if permitting can be streamlined. Powerful incentive—Europe can resell some contracted LNG at a huge premium.

@lasee_frank @JigarShahDC Not full time. Batteries and forecasts can buy a lot of startup/ramp time. Older and/or cheap capital is good enough. And since it’s rarely used, fuel use and cost is minimal. Depending on transmission and location, you don’t need complete redundancy.

Wind and solar are part-time. In order to have full-time electricity, we also have to pay for full-time on-demand natural gas, coal, and nuclear. Paying for both is expensive. Just like if you buy a part-time car, it cannot meet your full-time transportation needs. Paying for two cars or two grids is really expensive. Unless we just turn off the power when there is no wind or solar (most of the time).

@xiaowang1984 @QuincyEdmundLee It”s curious why data centers are not using more solar+battery. I expect it is cheaper, especially bc they have more demand flexibility than many claim. My hunch: permitting solar (which pairs well with battery) is more difficult & they want power ASAP, no matter the cost.

@QuincyEdmundLee For sure the value of batteries in power roles is absolutely clear. For energy a little less clear cut imo

For 20 years, gas peaker plants were the only option for meeting peak electricity demand. Now batteries are 24% cheaper New gas plants are $102/MWh — an all-time high. Why is gas getting more expensive? AI is buying all the turbines for data centers.

I've been critical of the reliability of EPA's climate benefit estimates, but this statement from WaPo is pure vibes and ideology.

@mattlavietes @NBCNews I’m a MN grandmother in my 60s. I have voted Republican all my life. But I’m so appalled and angry. I’m ready to drive to Minneapolis. They can’t kill all of us.

@JEBistline Driving more isn't the problem. People or robots will drive EVs charged with cheap clean energy (except where EVs and clean energy are blocked by incumbent energy interests). The problem is that the richer people get the more they fly, and that's a more difficult challenge.

If your climate plan assumes "we'll get richer and people will drive less," this figure has bad news. Without intervention, higher income is strongly associated with higher car dependence across ~800 cities; doubling income is associated with ~37% more car journeys.

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.

Solar and batteries are so cheap and so easy to site at most any scale. Resistance is futile. But still they resist.

@JEBistline It depends in the technology. But this does appear to be the case for solar and batteries. Do you want to bet?

We love to say "costs fall X% every time capacity doubles." This paper looks at 87 technologies and says: actually, no. Past learning rates are not reliable predictors of future learning.

This is a great piece with some mind-boggling statistics. - At Brown and Harvard, more than 20% of undergraduates are registered as disabled - At Amherst: more than 30 percent - At Stanford: nearly 40 percent Soon, many of these schools "may have more students receiving [disability] accommodations than not, a scenario that would have seemed absurd just a decade ago." As students and their parents have recognized the benefits of claiming disability—extended time on tests, housing accommodations, etc—the rates of disability at colleges, and especially at elite colleges, has exploded. America used to stigmatize disability too severely. Now elite institutions reward it too liberally. It simply does not make any sense to have a policy that declares half of the students at Stanford cognitively disabled and in need of accommodations.

I get pegged as being "anti-China", but this is unironically going to save the world from climate change.

Sure sounds like a war crime.

This NYT article on the "golden age" of air travel is an amazing example of an unthinking journalist failing to make contact with reality. The narrative: air travel used to be much better, but less affordable. 1/

@JamesSurowiecki Language evolves. It's unstoppable, especially in English.

"Begs the question" is a very useful, concise name for a common argumentative fallacy (or, more often, deliberate tactic). People should stop misusing it to mean "raises the question."

@uhshanti Within countries: Yes. Between countries: No. But hey, it’s X, so choose your truth.

“global inequality may be falling across the population but it is increasing both between and within nations” was the first sentence uttered by my globalization professor in our first class, and he was a McKinsey consultant, not a socialist. economists think we are all stupid

@noahqk It seems there may be market power issues that make the NE even worse than it should be given the pipeline they have. researchgate.net/publication/35…

@noahqk NE is not overbuilt. But most other places appear to be. Overbuilt means: congestion charges are much too small to cover the full cost of pipeline built. We just built a huge model, optimized pipeline & storage given historical S&D, compared with actual.

These pipelines are climate nothingburgers. Instead of trying to block them, how about productive negotiations about what policies and contingencies can be added to ensure a package that’s beneficial to both affordability and decarbonization goals?

Good news from 🇮🇳 India!

Solar and wind are covering ALL new power demand worldwide in the first three quarters of 2025 electrek.co/2025/11/13/sol…