A Dutch naturalist’s diary on the genuinely confusing, quietly maddening economics of energy transition happening in half-measures
My sister sent me the news article with a single message attached, just three words, “explain this to me,” and I have spent most of the week trying, without full success, to do exactly that. A major solar and battery storage project, over a billion and a half dollars, has broken ground directly at a coal mine, and the adjacent coal plant is, according to the same reporting, staying fully operational anyway.
Why This Genuinely Confused Me at First
My first instinct, reading the headline, was straightforward relief, another coal facility finally transitioning toward renewable generation, exactly the kind of story I usually forward to my own group chats with genuine enthusiasm. Reading past the headline complicated that relief considerably, since the actual arrangement appears to involve the solar and storage project operating alongside the existing coal plant rather than replacing it, at least for the foreseeable near term.
The Actual Economic Logic, As Best I Can Piece Together
From what I can tell, the underlying logic involves genuine grid demand considerations, storage and solar capacity being added specifically to manage peak load and improve overall grid reliability, while the existing coal plant continues supplying baseline power the local grid apparently still depends on, at least until enough renewable and storage capacity comes fully online to reliably replace it. This is, I think, a genuinely common pattern in energy transition that rarely gets explained clearly in the initial celebratory headlines.
Why I Think This Matters Beyond My Sister’s Specific Question
This pattern, new renewable capacity arriving alongside existing fossil fuel infrastructure rather than cleanly replacing it, represents, I suspect, the actual honest shape of most real energy transitions currently underway globally, considerably messier and slower than the clean, triumphant narrative of “coal plant replaced by solar” that headlines often imply. I think environmental communication generally does the public a disservice by underselling this messiness, since it sets up an expectation of clean transitions that then produces genuine, justified public frustration when the reality turns out considerably more gradual.
What I Actually Wrote Back to My Sister
I explained, as clearly as I could over several messages, that this represents genuine progress, additional clean generation capacity coming online, layered on top of a disappointing but structurally unsurprising continuation of existing fossil fuel infrastructure that will likely take considerably longer to fully retire than any of us would prefer. She was, understandably, not thrilled with this nuanced answer, having hoped for something closer to unambiguous good news.
The Broader Pattern I Keep Noticing in My Own Reading
I’ve started tracking, informally, how often this exact structure shows up in energy transition reporting worldwide, new renewable capacity announced with genuine fanfare, existing fossil fuel infrastructure quietly continuing operation in the same paragraph, if you read closely enough to catch it. This isn’t necessarily bad news, exactly. It’s simply considerably more complicated news than the celebratory framing usually allows room for.
Where This Leaves My Own Thinking
I’ve decided, after this week of trying to explain a genuinely confusing story to my own sister, that the most honest thing I can do as someone who writes about environmental issues is resist the pull toward simple, satisfying narratives, clean villain, clean hero, clean resolution, in favour of the messier, considerably less shareable truth: that most real transitions look exactly like this, genuine progress bolted awkwardly onto genuine continuation, moving forward slower and more unevenly than any of us would like.
What I’ll Actually Send My Sister Next
I’ve promised her a proper follow-up once I’ve read further into the specific grid capacity figures behind this project, partly because she deserves a fuller answer than three rushed messages managed, and partly because I suspect writing it out properly for her will help me finish untangling my own thinking on a story that, a week later, I’m still not entirely sure how to feel about.
What I’ve settled on, for now, is treating stories like this one as an ongoing practice in resisting the urge for a tidy verdict, since the honest answer, most of the time, sits somewhere in the genuinely uncomfortable middle ground between celebration and disappointment, and learning to sit in that middle ground without collapsing it into a simpler story either way strikes me as one of the more useful, if less satisfying, disciplines this work requires.
I’ll write my sister the fuller version this weekend, numbers and all, and I suspect she’ll still, quite reasonably, want to know why the coal plant simply doesn’t shut down already given how much new capacity has just arrived next door. I don’t have a fully satisfying answer to that either, only the honest one: grids retire baseline generation slowly and cautiously, whatever the headlines around any single new project might suggest, and that patience with the slow, unglamorous middle of a transition matters just as much as celebrating any individual milestone along the way, however tempting the milestone is to celebrate on its own. Further Dutch naturalist diary entries continue at bohiney.com, with the original reporting on the coal mine solar project available at grist.org.
SOURCE: https://prat.UK/