Energy & Power Generation

Let’s Not Forget This

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Steven Chu, Obama’s astonishingly arrogant (Nobel-prize-winning!) energy secretary, defends the Edison-bulb ban:

We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.

Read the PowerLine post at the link, and continue to the Mark Steyn post….Steyn is, as usual, in fine form. But I’m mainly posting this because we need to remember Chu’s comment at election time, to be added to the very long list of statements and actions that show just how disconnected this administration is from traditional American ideas of liberty. I don’t think most Americans yet understand just how extreme this disconnect is, and we need to help ensure that it is made visible.

This is an administration, as I’ve noted before, that is comprised of two kinds of people: theorists and agitators. They do not value individual freedom, and they are not interested in problem-solving.

What If…

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What if there was a “shovel-ready” project that:

**would create a significant number of American jobs

**would require no government money and no government guarantees of private debt

**would provide America with a secure new source of energy supplies and would reduce dependence on certain unfriendly regimes, such as the one in Venezuela

**would benefit an important and trusted American ally

And what would we think of an American administration that continually threw obstacles in front of this project?

It turns out that there is indeed such a project…

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Quote of the Day

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Commenter hdgreene at Belmont Club:

The uniting concept in the Leftist economic program is the politically controlled Cartel — whether in health care or energy or finance. Cartels force the consumer to pay higher prices for a lower quality product. They force workers and suppliers to do more for less. They exist, in short, for the benefit of those who control the Cartel. In this case that is bureaucrats, technocrats, politicians and their cronies.
 
Of course they do not promote these Cartels by announcing the real purpose. Instead they tell you it will save lives or money or the entire planet. Salesmanship is important — especially when selling lemons.

Rowe (Inadvertently) Explains Why We Are Doomed On Energy

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In my many posts on energy commenters make the point over and over again that I am too gloomy and don’t offer solutions. My lack of optimism comes from actually KNOWING how the BUSINESS of utilities works, which is independent of the technology, operations, or dreams of a “nuclear renaissance” or “alternative energy” or anything else.

There are only a few utilities that actually matter in the USA. There is Southern Company (NYSE: SO), which benefits from some old-school regulation in the South that actually encourages investment in base-load generation, and is currently building 2 nuclear units at the site of an existing nuclear plant at Vogtle. Another one that does matter, because of its scale (enough market cap to borrow to fund a nuclear plant) and the fact that it already is a big nuclear operator, is Exelon. And an interview with Rowe, the Chairman, explains in his own words, better than I ever could, how doomed we are if any sort of “new thinking” is needed to get us out of the impending base-load crisis.

Here is the dynamic leadership style of Rowe, in his own words:

There are probably only four or five real decisions I make in a year. There are an awful lot of things I just quietly ratify. I find it very hard to get officers to let you in before the food is cooked. Their natural tendency is to want to bring it to you all packaged. By then all you can do is say yes or no. And you usually say yes.

Awesome. And here is a Q&A about hiring, where he admits he isn’t very good at it:

Q. Let’s shift to hiring. How do you do it? What qualities are you looking for? A. Well, it’s not one of my greatest strengths

Most importantly, look at the cutting edge thinking he brings to the question of what he’d ask in an interview:

Q. If you could interview somebody for only five minutes and ask just two or three questions to check for this sense of responsibility that you touched on, what would you ask?

A. I’d probably ask them if they’d seen the old Gregory Peck movie of “Moby-Dick” where the Quaker sea captain says to Ishmael, “Are you man enough to pitch a harpoon down a live whale’s throat and jump after it?” That’s probably what I’d ask. And Ishmael of course gives the perfect answer. He says, “Well, I am, sir, if it be absolutely indispensible that I do so.”

Really? This is the type of question you’d ask – about Moby Dick? I can’t make this stuff up.

Cross posted at LITGM

The Scots & Energy

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Arthur Herman’s How the Scots Invented the Modern World, in his description of Watt (“Practical Matters: Scots & Industry”) reminds us of that great industrial moment. In the “modern consciousness” was firmly “the idea of power not in a political sense, the ability to command people but the ability to command nature: the power to alter and use it to create something new, and produce it in greater and larger quantities than ever before” (278). To create something new.

We might oppose that to the stimulus; Fitzgerald summed up the end of that old bubble in “Babylon Revisited”: “the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word dissipate – to dissipate into thin air; to make something of nothing.” But wasn’t the desire, always, of this politics to control others, not to create nor to make. And how many Middle Eastern palaces are likely to fall into ruin by the end of the next century. The self-indulgent life is often described as dissipated – but how much worse a dissipated culture.

Roy Lofquist’s point that space meant clans didn’t bump against each other may well be first cause of respect for others here; the building of the west by both north and south surely was helpful in healing those raw mid-nineteenth century wounds. But in the end, we were founded in the mercantile era and capitalism – which turns us to look at what we can do to please and entice another. Frances Hutcheson would argue as my more religious friends do – we serve ourselves by serving others. That felicity is enlarging. Our natural desire to extend our self – to create, to leave a mark can come from good works and procreation and art. But it can also come from creating a business, creating a product. Ford’s desire to make a product all could buy was capitalist, creative, and productive. Building a bigger oven and planting more wheat is better than fighting over the pieces of one pie.

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