CNBC releases report on how great things will be if utility companies control your appliances

The Left fantasizes about clean energy and CNBC seems particularly obsessed with the subject, frustrated that the U.S. struggles to modernize the grid.

On Monday, the news outlet posted this video on Twitter:

“The modern electric grid is an engineering marvel,” begins the female voiceover. “In the U.S. it connects to 7,300 major power plants for nearly 160,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines.”

With 3,000 electric utility companies connecting power to 154 million customers, it is “impressive” but “outdated.”

Who will make the case in this presentation? Primarily professors. Evidently, CNBC believes that university professors retain their former credibility, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

The first professor to condescend to us in the video is Jason Dedrick of Syracuse University.

“If Thomas Edison woke up today and looked at the electric grid, he would still recognize it.”

Cut to a video of giant industrial stacks with smoke billowing into the air.

The voiceover continues, “Basically, our grid was made for a world that runs on fossil fuels.”

The next “expert” to testify is Assistant Prof Destenie Nock of Carnegie Mellon University.

“Power has been designed to flow from the big power plants down to our houses, and that one-way direction has really limited our transition to more mobiles, more storage,” she said.

It is interesting how neither university representative said much of anything. It was left to the CNBC writers to provide specifics.

“A greener world demands a different kind of electric grid, a more distributed grid, where individuals or companies can generate, store, and sell electricity,” said the narrator, with pictures of rooftop solar panels and someone plugging in her electric car helping to make her points about connecting that energy to consumers.

Just envision a new, modernized grid “that can adjust to the variable weather-dependent nature of solar and wind by managing consumer demand, smoothing out the peaks in energy usage by automating appliances to run at the most efficient times.”

Some have observed with skepticism the language of “managing” consumer demand rather than meeting it.

One bit of counterpoint was permitted in the video.

“Distributed generation requires distributed intelligence,” said Michael Bates of the Intel Corporation, “and that intelligence doesn’t exist today in the way it needs to exist to move forward” with a renewable grid.

But then it was refuted (emphasis added), citing the availability of the tech needed for “smart meters and sensors that can provide detailed usage analytics and appliances that can be controlled by smartphones and utility companies.”

“Moving to 100% renewable power through a massive buildout of solar, wind, and storage facilities will be extremely expensive,” admits CNBC. “Given our current technologies, a full de-carbonization of the power grid has been estimated to cost about $4.5 trillion over a 10 to 20 year period. But if we’re going to reach 100% clean electricity by 2035, as President Biden has pledged to do, modernizing our grid so it can handle that renewable buildout is a must.”

Notice that there is no mention whatsoever of the clean energy miracle that has been right under our noses for 70 years – nuclear power. Last year a government agency, the Office of Nuclear Energy, explained how clean and sustainable nuclear power is. In June of this year, Sustainable Review showed that nuclear power is better than solar and wind.

Twitter users noted the absence of nuclear energy and the presence of ‘control’ in the report:

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