A brief study in one of the ways that Greens lie

Mostly, they seem to be lying to themselves.  However, that they repeat falsehoods as fact cannot be disputed and suggests that the entire Green philosophy is one enormous delusion.

A little while ago, I was flabbergasted by one Bob Wallace, moderator, censor and ban-hammer wielder of Cleantechnica.com [1], who flatly stated that nuclear is not dispatchable.  Not just once to me, but many times going back years.

LOLWHUT?!

Digging a little deeper I found that this meme-virus had some fairly old (as the web goes) roots.  The Wikipedia article on dispatchability still says as of 2014-10-08 that nuclear power is not dispatchable.  This claim goes back to the very first version of the page in 2006.

In my research I found a grid operator definition of dispatchable meaning the generator having filed an energy supply curve with the ISO, but I'm unable to find it again.  But the EIA rides to the rescue.  Under "Dispatchable Technologies", it lists:

• Conventional Coal
• Advanced Coal
• Advanced Coal with CCS
AND (last but not least)
• Advanced Nuclear

(there being no un-advanced nuclear entering the market in 2018)

Bob Wallace will probably back-pedal and claim that today's nuclear isn't advanced and isn't dispatchable.  But for the last 30 years, France has been load-following with its fleet of 1980's-vintage PWRs.  How can you follow load, if you can't dispatch generation on demand to follow it?  Ridiculous.

I expect to see more such howlers from Bob Wallace and his ilk.  AAMOF, I would wager that he'd even repeat his "nuclear is not dispatchable" claim after being referred to the EIA page.  In other words, what Bob Wallace says can only be taken as a recitation of Green dogma.  One cannot expect any evidence of independent thought or any acceptance of facts from outside his echo chamber.

A lot of what Bob Wallace says (along with the rest of orthodox Greens) is out-and-out lies.  This is not to say that they are consciously lying.  They may very well have accepted a delusional belief system structured to support the romantic Green vision, and can't pry themselves away from it.  But that means that they have, for all intents and purposes, surrendered their ability to think.  Without the ability to actually reason from facts, even uncomfortable facts, they are intellectual zombies:  shambling along, eating the brains of those too slow to evade them and turning them into more like themselves.

And that, folks, is why so much discussion of our energy future is Sofa King Stew Pit.

Footnotes:
1 He doesn't like it when you use the phrase "put you in my crosshairs".  There's a list of other things he doesn't like, none of which are noted prominently enough for the casual Cleantechnica commenter to have any idea what they are before being censored, banned or both for transgressing them.

  ¶ 10/10/2014 02:16:00 AM 2 comments