Energy & Power Generation

We Are So Boned

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Bad news, Obama’s Chairman of the  Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,  Jon Wellinghoff,  is bad at math.  

No new nuclear or coal plants may ever be needed in  the United States, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission  said today.
 
“We may not need any, ever,” Jon Wellinghoff  told reporters at a U.S. Energy Association forum.
 
Wellinghoff said renewables like wind, solar and biomass will provide enough energy to meet baseload capacity and future energy demands. Nuclear and coal plants are too expensive, he added.

Okay, let’s look at the numbers, shall we?

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Texas Just Builds

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From a  Max Schulz article on California’s failing environmental and energy polices:

And Texas, of all places, has outpaced California as America’s leader in wind-power generation. High costs, excessive regulation, and litigation from environmental groups on how to limit bird deaths have all hampered California’s effort; Texas has just built lots of wind turbines.

We just build things in Texas. Wind turbines, solar power plants, off-shore turbines, coal-powered plants, transmission lines, pipelines of all sorts, you name it and we just build it with apparently only a tenth as much gnashing of teeth as places like California.  

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Quote of the Day

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Cut to the chase. We rich people can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can’t even make any durable dent in global emissions—because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we’re foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still.
 
We don’t control the global supply of carbon.
 
Ten countries ruled by nasty people control 80 percent of the planet’s oil reserves—about 1 trillion barrels, currently worth about $40 trillion. If $40 trillion worth of gold were located where most of the oil is, one could only scoff at any suggestion that we might somehow persuade the nasty people to leave the wealth buried. They can lift most of their oil at a cost well under $10 a barrel. They will drill. They will pump. And they will find buyers. Oil is all they’ve got.
 
Poor countries all around the planet are sitting on a second, even bigger source of carbon—almost a trillion tons of cheap, easily accessible coal. They also control most of the planet’s third great carbon reservoir—the rain forests and soil. They will keep squeezing the carbon out of cheap coal, and cheap forest, and cheap soil, because that’s all they’ve got. Unless they can find something even cheaper. But they won’t—not any time in the foreseeable future.

-Peter Huber, “Bound to Burn”

Suppressing Solar Power, on Environmental Grounds

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We’ve frequently discussed energy issues at this blog, so I thought people might be interested in this item.

Sen Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has demanded that the Department of the Interior suppress plans to lease government land for solar plants in the Mohave Desert.

Also, a regional director of the Bureau of Land Management has objected to any plans for “water-cooled” solar energy projects in “the arid basins of Southern Nevada.” (He is clearly referring to solar-thermal plants: these use water to cool and condense the steam and also for cleaning the mirrors.)

There are also environmental objections to the transmission lines that need to be built in order to connect solar plants to population centers.

I expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing. As I’ve remarked before, “progressives” love alternative energy technologies as long as they remain purely theoretical. Once they become practical and ready for deployment, it becomes obvious that these technologies–like all human activities–have certain downsides. And the love is gone.

So the search for a perfect and non-existent form of energy production will continue, while our economy is seriously crippled due to electricity shortages and skyrocketing costs.

(link via Glenn)

An Intersection of Technologies and Infrastructures

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Obama has released his plan for the expanded development of passenger rail in America.

Best practice in high-speed passenger rail is, of course, to power it electrically, from overhead wires. And these things use significant amounts of electricity. A quick search reveals that a French TGV train draws somewhere in the range of 6-12 megawatts. (For comparison, 6 MW is the amount of power consumed by 60,000 regular incandescent 100-watt bulbs.)

Most of the electricity that runs the TGV, of course, comes from France’s extensive nuclear power system. It’s unfortunate that Obama, with his admiration for things European, is not paying more attention to France’s very successful experience with nuclear power.

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