A Response to Simon Pirani

It's OK for the Left to Disagree on Electricity Politics

Source: Jakub Zerdzicki

In Jacobin, I tried to write the most compact “case for” nuclear energy, with the hope of shaping an emerging debate on the Left (it is fair to say this debate barely even existed 10 years ago). Predictably, the piece created a lot of hostile reactions on the (mostly) anti-nuclear Left. Things got particularly feisty on the platform of the ancients (Facebook), and one comment was from Simon Pirani who expressed bewilderment that I never responded to his many critiques of my work with Fred Stafford on electricity (see here, here, and here. I’m going to mostly respond here to the peer reviewed journal article here).

I honestly don’t know why Pirani seems to think his writing demands a response. I’ve received, uh, my fair share of criticism in the last 3.5 years since my book came out. It would be impossible to respond to all of it. Nevertheless, the exchange did force me to revisit Pirani’s arguments, and the blessed end of semester does give me a bit of extra time, so here’s a response.

A Summary of the Debate

To lay out the stakes of this exchange, for the last few years, I (along with Fred Stafford) have set out to advance a critique of the shibboleths of left energy ideology:

• That it will be all or mostly a transition to wind and solar energy.

• That it will be shaped by a profound decentralization of the energy system to distributed energy.

• That the struggle over energy — particularly public power — is one between local ‘communities’ vs. big, centralized state and corporate entities.

• That we need more ‘energy democracy’ in the form of local participation in the governance of electricity systems.

• That nuclear power (and a variety of other non-solar/wind technologies such as carbon removal, hydrogen, and more) are ‘false solutions’.

These ideologies took hold on the Left in the 1970s, and I would say the vast majority of leftists, especially on the climate and energy Left, still believe this stuff. I think it’s healthy to have alternative perspectives on these things, and Stafford and I aim to offer a perspective that is quite rare on the socialist left (although I was excited to see this new book by Bill Sacks and Greg Meyerson, The Poverty of Green Philosophy: A Marxist Case for Nuclear Energy in a Cooperative World which looks very good, and there are a few socialist fellow travelers out there like David Walters, who, I should add, was himself a unionist in IBEW and worked at a power plant).

Simon Pirani clearly is one of those leftists who believes pretty much all of the above. In other words, he really doesn’t differentiate himself from the common sense among the Left. This Left is rooted in the academic humanities (Pirani is a historian), social sciences, environmental NGOs, and a smattering of ideologically aligned energy system modelers.

Stafford and I do not follow this common sense, and think it is wildly out of touch with the material and engineering requirements of the electricity grid as it exists. In contrast, we support nuclear power, respect centralized utilities for their role in building and maintaining societal-scale grid infrastructure, look the unions/labor for leadership on complicated questions of decarbonization, and advance a ‘bigger’ vision of public power less shaped by local/community/municipal ownership, and more by large-scale investment in electricity infrastructure like the Tennessee Valley Authority. We tend to draw our analyses more from engineers and experts (like public utility commissions, RTO/ISOs, government reports, etc.) and the actual workers/unions in the electricity system itself.

It is important to say at the outset that Pirani and I are coming from totally different ideological positions on these questions. Each of us can marshal all the studies and empirics to back up our position, but it’s not likely this will convince either one of us of the other’s position. Stafford and I are simply trying to win some modicum of converts on the Left for our heretofore mostly heretical positions. We’re not surprised Pirani and others aim to defend their position.

The Nuclear Question

To respond to some more specific points. First, on nuclear power. Pirani can rehearse all the common anti-nuclear talking points he wants — he can even call pro-nuclear arguments “outdated” (p. 68), even as much of the world is realizes it will be necessary (not just Trump, but the Biden Administration too, and China…and the IPCC…even Japan is restarting nuclear reactors).

My article in Jacobin basically answers all of his anti-nuclear arguments, except one I left out for space: Pirani argues, “[C]limate change deprives us of time. Nuclear power stations take many years to build, while decentralised renewable energy systems do not” (p. 64). To channel some of Pirani’s often uncomradely and dismissive language, this is a gross simplification. It ignores the fact “decentralized renewables” must also be integrated into a complex grid network, which can take many years if not decades (outside of China). In the United States, renewable projects wait “a median of 5 years” in the interconnection queue. More concerning, however, is that more renewables will undoubtedly require thousands of miles of new long distance transmission lines; projects which face innumerable legal, political and environmental barriers to completion and are often abandoned.

Meanwhile, France basically decarbonized their grid by building 40 reactors in a decade a half century ago. Nuclear power stations can be plopped right on top of retired coal stations with easy hookups to transmission. The hard reality is that building a new, zero-carbon electricity grid is going to take a lot of time regardless of which path you choose. A renewables-based grid might take a shorter amount of time, but it also probably would need replacement faster than a nuclear-powered grid (I think the former infrastructure is reasonably estimated to last 20-30 years, whereas the latter is more like 80). Regardless, it is our position that we will need both so the divergent timelines don’t matter as much.

Decentralized Renewables — Neoliberal or Emancipatory?

Second, there is the question of how much we could rely on “decentralized renewables” themselves. For all of Pirani’s optimism about some “third industrial revolution” integrating digital technology, smart meters, micro-grids, and the rest, the fact is most societies still rely on centralized power stations for the bulk of their electricity (in our Catalyst article we used EIA data to estimate around 86 percent of US generation comes from traditional, centralized generation). Pirani cites many countries that do increasingly get quite a lot of their electricity from renewables — sometimes around 40-50 percent coming from solar and wind at certain times of year (Denmark, Spain, California, Germany, the UK, are common examples), but downplays the extent to which all these countries still rely heavily on imports, natural gas backup, or plain, old coal to make up the balance (I’d prefer the nearly 100% clean grids of France and Sweden, powered by nuclear and hydro above else, over any of those cases).

He also challenges the extent to which decentralized renewables are a product of neoliberalism or fully under the control of the private sector. He is correct that the early periods of neoliberal electricity restructuring in the 1980s and 1990s were mostly to the benefit of “merchant” gas generators (and yes, even some nuclear), but the significant increase of renewables in the last fifteen years is simply a continuation of these neoliberal trends.

As I argue in a recent peer reviewed article in the journal Development and Change, the vast majority of renewable projects in the United States were undertaken by private-fort-profit independent power producers (IPPs) dislodged from the public utility system (“In 2023, 81 per cent of wind generation and 86 per cent of utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) generation was provided by IPPs (the remainder is mostly utilities)” (p. 991)). As I describe in the article, drawing from research by Sarah Knuth, tax policy means these IPP projects are also nefariously aligned with some of the wealthiest institutions in the entire economy — tax equity investors like Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway and others who take advantage of the tax credits the US government uses exclusively to incentivize renewable investment and production.

For a broader view, and regardless of the state origin in places like Denmark or Germany, it is indisputable that outside of China, the renewables industry is largely a private sector affair. My new article also cites Brett Christophers’s claim that, “the developed world, a mere 4 per cent of renewable energy projects are publicly owned. In the developing world, with the legacies of public power, the figure is slightly higher at 28 per cent” (and, as Pirani hints, most of that is likely due to China).

Pirani also refuses to see an overlap between “decentralization” and neoliberalism, preferring a view of neoliberalism as the consolidation of the power of “big, centralised corporations” (p. 71). This is a very simplistic view of the concept. It not only denies the real ways in which neoliberal deregulation of electricity literally decentralized control from centralized utilities to a more dispersed network of small-scale IPPs (among other actors), but also ignores that the entire process of neoliberal globalization could be seen as one of capitalist decentralization (offshoring, subcontracting, vertical disintegration, etc). Regardless, my point is to show the ideological affinity between neoliberal economic utopias of decentralized market forces, and energy thinkers like Amory Lovins et al (who is himself quite neoliberal despite his alignment with the environmental Left).

Pirani claims we are “mistaken” by raising any reliability concerns with variable renewable energy, even as many grid operators warn that we need more “dispatchable emissions-free resources” to ensure reliability (read: non-renewables like nuclear and geothermal), and the Biden Administration recognized the necessity of “clean firm” generation to keep grids reliable.

And, blaming “fossil fuels” for blackouts in grids that rely heavily on fossil fuels, as Pirani does (p. 66), is like blaming blood flow for a heart attack. For example, the reason you can’t blame renewables for the catastrophic, deadly blackout in Texas (“Winter Storm Uri”) in 2021 is because ERCOT was not counting on renewables to keep the lights on in the dead of winter. They counted on natural gas, and it failed. More to the point, Pirani wrote his critiques before the Iberian blackout of Spring 2025 which, regardless of whether you want to ‘blame’ renewables, happened in a grid heavily reliant upon solar generation (The Economist helpfully points to a number of grid investments needed to make the solar more reliable).

Pirani seems to think Stafford and I are “anti-renewables” (even going so far to say we’re parroting fossil fuel talking points). That’s not at all true. We just oppose the simplistic and biased focus among leftists on renewables and nothing else. We follow unions in supporting a “broad based” approach to decarbonization that includes renewables, but also a variety of other technologies.

Quibbles for Days

Pirani’s critique is infused with countless quibbles that don’t actually contest the main point were were trying to make. It would be hard for me to respond to each and every one. Let me try a few.

For one, it may be true that we don’t accurately represent Idel’s research into the systems costs of renewables integration, but this does not change the fact that these systems costs are indeed real and belied by constant claims that renewables are now the “cheapest” electricity sources out there. Since Pirani’s critique appeared, again, Brett Christophers’s work has thoroughly dismantled these claims showing that the entire methodology of Levelized Cost of Energy (a) ignores prohibitive constraints to renewable investors such as land costs, interconnection fees (i.e. systems costs), and more and (b) because of this, actual investors in the sector do not take the LCOE claims seriously.

To quote Christophers, “JP Morgan’s Michael Cembalest described the metric as a ‘practical irrelevance’. He was expressing a position widely held among his peers in the financial sector.” In his own elaboration on his blog, Pirani cites research that claims renewables might sometimes be costlier than nuclear or “somewhat less competitive” when these systems costs are taken into account, and quotes one article claiming, “it is important to avoid simplistic claims that system integration costs are large.” But, we never said systems costs were “too large”. We said they exist, and are often occluded by claims of supercheap renewables.

On another point, Pirani is right that Mark Z. Jacobson is not the only only modeler who claims the possibility of a 100% renewable grid (although we maintain his influence is massive and, as we point out in a newer article, circulates much more broadly than academia). Yes, there is a robust literature on the real, potential of 100% renewable electricity systems. But, our larger point is that outside these purely academic models, no such 100% renewable systems exist in the real world (outside of marginal cases with huge proportions of hydro and geothermal), and, as we mention above, grid planners actually working in these systems explicitly worry we need lots more non-renewable clean power for decarbonization.

Third, we describe Mark Nelson as an energy analyst which Pirani thinks is incorrect because he is a “consultant” and “nuclear advocate.” Nevertheless, we would still call him an analyst.

And, one can quibble back. Just because Engels said nice things about Robert Owen’s co-ops, does not invalidate his searing critique of the utopian socialist tradition (of which Owen’s cooperatives were a prime target). I was just reading Bruno Leipold’s brilliant study of Marx and Engels’s republicanism, and he claims Engels did flirt with small-scale cooperative utopianism, but that Marx had “never had any time” for such experiments and that Marx influence him to, “abandon these earlier enthusiasms.”

Pirani refutes Marx saw socialization and centralization of production as connected. I agree Marx’s main focus is on the socialization of labor laying the material conditions for socialism, but in the climactic passage of Capital he does indeed couple this concept with centralization (“The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.”). Regardless, you would be hard pressed to find a better example of the socialization of labor than an electricity grid made up of centralized power stations, long distance transmission, and dispersed distribution networks. Such systems require vast planning and socialized coordination — including a dense division of technical engineering knowledge and manual skill — to constantly balance supply with demand. Unlike most markets, this socialized planning is a physical and infrastructural necessity.

Finally, yes, union leaders do not always speak for their members, but that does not mean union members are clamoring for what are inherently temporary construction jobs in the renewables sector (with the caveat that only offshore wind really provides a long term, durable industrial infrastructure that unions are excited about). The actually existing solar industry today is any workers nightmare, featuring low pay, transient work sites away from family for weeks and workplace hazards like extreme heat, alligators and snakes.

It is fashionable among socialists of a Trotskyist orientation (or other tendency) to wholly dismiss trade union leaders as “business unionists”, but when it comes to decarbonization and technology I would take their much more practical perspectives and proposals over most environmental NGOs.

Agree to Disagree

Let me close by just saying the main issue here is we simply disagree on a lot. And that’s OK. A healthy Left would be defined by divergent positions and open debate. I hope readers can decide for themselves which vision of socialism and electricity they find most compelling.