Energy & Power Generation

Worthwhile Reading

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A few items for your Monday reading pleasure:

In a commencement speech, the CEO of Questar Corporation takes on some popular myths about energy.

A professor of English who teaches at the U.S. Naval Academy has thoughts about the teaching and mis-teaching of his subject:

We professors just have to remember that the books are the point, not us. We need, in short, to get beyond literary studies. We’re not scientists, we’re coaches. We’re not transmitting information, at least not in the sense of teaching a discipline. But we do get to see our students react, question, develop, and grow. If you like life, that’s satisfaction enough.

Interesting description of the typical reaction of his students to Madame Bovary, and about the ways in which he tries to establish a connection between this character’s feelings and their own.

(via Newmark’s Door)

Finally, some not-so-cheerful thoughts from Arnold Kling:

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Gasping For Air and Energy

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Environmentalists claim they aren’t extremist. They claim they don’t want to make radical and dangerous changes to our technological life-support systems, they just want to make a few minor adjustments to protect not only the environment but the health and safety of humans as well.  

They’re lying. When it comes down to it in the real world, environmentalists will kill people just to gain an utterly trivial  environmental  benefit. As a political movement, environmentalism has crossed over into a kind of religious fetishism.  

Look at the example of the banning of CFC asthma inhalers. [h/t Instapundit] Here we have a clear-cut tradeoff between the deaths of thousands of asthmatics and prevention of a degree of damage to the ozone layer that is so small that we can’t even begin to consider measuring it.  

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Electricity: The Map

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It seems that General Electric has hired a group of Barbarians to help them with their Internet marketing activities. No, really.

The said Barbarians have located an interesting data visualization tool…an interactive map of the U.S. with lots of data about power sources and the grid. It shows energy source mix by state, individual power plants, the geography of solar and wind potential, and key elements of the grid as it now stands and with extensions which some have proposed.

I thought this might be an interesting reference for our many discussions here about energy policy, economics, and technology.

Oil Tanker Saves Environmentalists

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From my spouse who observes that we should, “File this under things you can’t make up,” a BBC story:

An expedition team which set sail from Plymouth on a 5,000-mile carbon emission-free trip to Greenland have been rescued by an oil tanker.

I’m presuming that the ship in the story is the one described on this website. I don’t think that they got in trouble primarily due to their unpowered “carbon-free” ship. I think they got in trouble primarily because they took a small sailing yacht into arctic waters. They might have gotten into trouble even if they used 21st Century technology to drive their ship. On the other hand, having even a small engine on board that did not depend on a tranquil environment in order to function most likely would have kept them  from capsizing.

This little  humorous  incident highlights a serious problem with wind and solar power that I have written about before. Wind and solar systems harvest low-density ambient energy. This requires that their  transducers, the mechanisms that convert the ambient energy into  electricity, must be very large, lightweight and exposed to all the forces of nature. This exposure in turn makes the systems very  susceptible  to damage from environmental extremes.  

To highlight this fact, Let’s compare two ships on the technological extremes: a pure sailing ship such as a clipper ship and a nuclear submarine.

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Natural Gas Wins… by Default

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In the April 27, 2009 issue of Barron’s magazine is an article titled “An Alternative to Alternative Fuels” by Mike Hogan. Barron’s is an offshoot of the WSJ and generally offers pithy and to-the-point articles, although sometimes even they go off the reservation.

The byline in italics does a pretty good job of summing up the REALITY (not the fiction, by both Democrats and Republicans) of our energy policy:

When you see more wind turbines and solar farms built, your first thoughts should turn to gas

Doesn’t that sound counter-intuitive? But the article does a decent job of explaining why.

Gue just returned form the US Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) annual conference, where he was puzzled by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu’s focus on renewables – with scant mention of oil, gas, coal or nuclear power: “This is striking to me because these four sources account for nearly 93% of U.S. primary energy consumption: and, according to the EIA’s own estimates, will still make up more than 90% of the total in 2030.”

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