Episode Details

Allen, Phil, and Rosemary continue the discussion from Tuesday’s episode, diving into renewables opposition and TPI’s financial situation.

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Allen Hall: So what we’re talking to energy, everything is difficult, so we wind and solar can be difficult to make money in. But some of the discussion about moving back to coal or, or moving back to older sources of electricity generation, their money losers too. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, probably even more efficient money losers. And on a larger scale, you know, at least wind and solar, you could lose, lose money a little bit at a time and you don’t lose money on the operation.

Um, you know, it’s, it’s all in the, the, the capital cost. Whereas coal can lose money ev every single, every single day that the plane operates. So I [00:01:00]guess that that’s, uh, yeah, that’s true. It’s not as, not as bad as that. 

Allen Hall: So is there a industry fix or is there a hope for the future? Right now, I don’t see it.

Rosemary Barnes: I was reading this book for a little while and I stopped reading ’cause I, um, it had some good ideas, but it wasn’t like totally rigorous in its, um, exploration of all the ideas. I think it’s called The Price is Wrong, or something like that. And it’s about how like, it’s not possible to have a renewables industry that isn’t subsidized by the government.

And, um, there’s some, I I, I think that there’s some truth to that, but I would replace. That there’s, it’s impossible to have a renewables industry if that’s not subsidized. Rather say it’s impossible to have an electricity system that’s not subsidized in some way by the government. Um, and yeah, I mean, just rec recognize that and maybe we don’t need to to fight that, but, um, it, it is always turns like so tribal that everyone’s arguing over who’s got the more subsidies or who’s.

More dependent on subsidies. Um, yeah, it’d be easier [00:02:00] if we could all, you know, get on the same page about climate change and just acknowledge what we needed to do. But, you know, if, if wind and solar power never came along and we didn’t care about climate change, then we’d still be subsidizing, uh, yeah, like coal and, and gas and, uh, all the transmission and, uh, I don’t know, infrastructure.

You need to transport those fossil fuels around. Like, you know, we’d, we’d still be subsidizing because people still need electricity an