This is the Catered Daily podcast for Friday, December 6, 2024. I'm Caleb Brown. Decarbonization of energy production may be a laudable goal, but it doesn't come without tradeoffs.

Jason Hayes of the McEnough Center says that state policymakers ought to be aware that shifts away from carbon-intensive

energy production need to confront those trade-offs as directly as possible.

We spoke in August.

Everybody is at least vaguely familiar with the case of Enron, which was a really badly designed energy market that allowed one company,

in particular, to throttle access to electricity in order to boost prices in a really nasty, nasty way, really unfortunate way.

Right.

It seemed that we had learned our lesson with regard to that, but we do see sort of a push now in a more virtuous ideal of decarbonization to transition as much of our energy production

away from fossil fuels. So how's that going? Well, it's hit and miss.

There's two big ideas behind the idea of decarbonization.

First off, that we can shut down things that we know work, like fossil fuels, and oftentimes, ironically, nuclear as well. well, ironic because nuclear is emissions-free.

But then the second part of that idea is that we can then replace them with wind and solar

in a way that will operate reliably and affordably.

Okay, so if you look at what's going on around the nation, then we're getting the first

part pretty well.

We're shutting down the things that we know work.

The second part, we're not doing quite as well.

And so we're seeing things like, good example, Amarillo, Texas hit the

unprecedented mark of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, right? Unprecedented or not so much. How many

times has it been 100 degrees in Amarillo? But their big utility, Excel Energy, sent out what they call an energy alert

that warned people in the city and the surrounding area, look, we don't have enough electricity

to power your homes. So we need you. After we've already done all the efforts to get businesses

...