Film Review of Juice: The Anti-Human League

Film Review of Juice: Power Politics and the Grid
The Reliability Error | The Commodity Error
The Anti-Human League |  Victory?

The Anti-Human League

The fatal myth driving these errors was that electricity customers wanted to be in a market where the objective was to purchase kilowatts. We didn’t. What we really have always desired was to purchase reliable electricity. Full stop.

A pricing mechanism works properly only when the price tag is placed on the product desired. This is an important point for conservative and libertarian viewers who may interpret Juice as a criticism of the market economy. It’s not.

Bryce’s criticism is of a warped pricing system that was wrapped deceptively in free-market rhetoric. All doubts on this point should fade when Juice turns the cameras to the great winners from the bad policy: the advocates and producers of unreliable energy systems.

Journalist Michael Shellenberger revealed in Juice that no energy system spoils more landscapes than wind and solar. Compared to the tiny footprint of nuclear or natural gas, he claimed wind and solar chew up 300 to 400 times as much land to generate a comparable amount of electricity.

Similarly, Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil calculated that providing all of America’s electricity with wind alone would mean covering a land mass twice the size of California with wind turbines.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the average capacity factor of industrial wind power in America in 2021 was a paltry 34.6 percent. Capacity factor is a measure of how much of an energy system’s full capacity is used, and wind has the second worst reliability rating, ahead of solar panels at 24.6 percent.

The capacity factor of American nuclear power stations is 92.7 percent. Nothing is more reliable. It’s not even close. Nuclear is also, by far, the largest carbon-free source of electricity in the United States.

Juice profiled several advocates of building much more nuclear power. They support nuclear power for both energy reliability and climate policy reasons. Many of them are left-inclined in their politics, such as Dr. Chris Keefer, a Toronto ER physician who is also president of Canadians for Nuclear Energy.

What’s not to love about nukes?

In Episode 4 of Juice, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council were specifically criticized by Shellenberger for their “absolutely massive” annual budgets of $100 million or more and for “making money on renewables” while they oppose nuclear.

Bryce could have dedicated his whole series to this point. As previously covered by the Capital Research Center, left-leaning groups that oppose nuclear energy collectively raise at least $2.3 billion annually. Most if not all of them are also strong supporters of the unreliable, weather-dependent wind and solar power systems.

Add to them the massive political and economic muscle deployed by the weather-dependent power firms. In some of the most inspirational moments in the new Juice, Bryce profiled the legal battle waged by the Osage Nation in Oklahoma against an unlawful invasion of their tribal property by the wind turbines of Enel, a giant Italian energy firm.

“This is our home,” said one member of the Osage. “This is our landscape.”

Madi Hilly summed up the magnitude of the war they’re all waging, stating that the anti-nuclear movement is “anti-society and anti-human, and they use the full weight of their resources to act on that.”

“If you’re pro-nuclear, you’re bringing a slingshot to the Cold War,” concluded the editor of the Grid Brief, summarizing what Shellenberger, Hilly, Keefer and their allies are up against.

In the next installment, pro-nuclear advocates have recently scored some small wins.