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FERC Audit Slams NERC Practices

Posted on May 5, 2012
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By Kennedy Maize

Washington, D.C., 5 May 2012 — A Federal Energy Regulatory Commission financial audit finds that the North American Electric Reliability Corp. is failing to focus its work on the new, mandatory electric grid reliability powers Congress gave it in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. Instead, says the FERC staff audit released May 4, NERC has continued to emphasize the voluntary approach that characterized its past as an industry-supported consensus organization.

The staff report is not the typical pro forma wrist-slap that one often finds in federal agency audits, although there is some of that in the report. It is, instead, a sharp blow directly across the chops of the organization chartered to be on the front line of the battle to keep the nation’s electric grid up and functioning smoothly.

In the audit, the first ever for Atlanta-based NERC, which exists separately from FERC but reports to the Washington agency, the FERC staff found that NERC was falling into a pattern of business as usual. “Audit staff is concerned,” the report said, “that NERC as the [electric reliability organization or ERO] has continued, and at times expanded, its historic mission of seeking voluntary reliability activities, rather than the specific mandatory objectives of the ERO as authorized [in the 2005 law].” The staff charged that “NERC, in its practices, adopted a policy of undertaking some activities based on the loosely defined relationship of the activity to a perceived reliability concern. No criteria as to whether they were mandatorily enforceable via commission-approved standards, or clearly defined and approved as a monitoring activity were developed or deemed necessary.”

The FERC audit also takes NERC to task for opaque budgeting. “NERC’s budget process did not provide sufficient transparency to allow the commission, the [board of trustees], and stakeholders to efficiently and effectively evaluate annual budget requests and subsequent requests to change approved budgets,” the staff found. “As a result, NERC funded unbudgeted activities and significantly deviated from its budgeted activities without approval from the commission or the [trustees].” NERC’s budget, the audit concluded, is largely fiction: “For a variety of reasons during the operating years, NERC has been unable to expend funds according to the proposed expenditures it presented in its budget.”

The FERC audit also found “confusion” in NERC’s dual roles in performing as the national ERO and its job running the Electric Sector Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ES-ISAC) for the Department of Energy and the Department of Homeland Security. The center’s role is “to gather information and communicate security-related threats and incidents within the sector, with United States and Canadian government agencies, and with other critical infrastructure sectors.” This includes gathering and reporting cyber-security information, although neither FERC nor NERC have a clear role in grid security. The FERC audit staff recommended that the commission and NERC work together to better define the role of the ES-ISAC.

Altogether, the FERC audit found 11 areas of “concern” with NERC’s operations and made 42 recommendations for action. NERC disagreed with 10 of the concerns (choosing not to challenge a finding related to calculating retirement benefits) and said it is contesting 25 of FERC’s recommendations. NERC’s detailed comments are included in the FERC staff report.

In a press release, NERC objected to the process of the first-of-its-kind audit, complaining that FERC’s enforcement office “has declined to negotiate as is the norm and, instead, opted to initiate litigation on portions of the audit findings and recommendations.” NERC general counsel David Cook said, “Although we understand that all FERC commissioners will ultimately review any contested issues, we regret that a litigation process was chosen rather than our invitation to work out the differences through the standard method of negotiation.” The NERC written response says its has doubts about the FERC staff’s “objectivity and balance” in the audit, and that the audit looks too much at management practices, rather than whether NERC has complied with FERC rules.

Appearing to be carrying NERC’s case, FERC Commissioner Cheryl LaFleur in a written statement said that she believes “the audit report as presented by staff should have been subject to a vote of the full commission prior to issuance.” In a cover letter to the report, Norman Bay, director of FERC’s office of enforcement, noted that the FERC staff audit was done under formally delegated commission authority (18CFR375.211) and NERC may ask the commission to review all the findings and recommendations, contested or uncontested.

Also in a written statement, Commissioner Philip Moeller appeared to be supporting the process of the staff audit. “The commission’s audit staff has extensive experience conducting financial performance audits,” he said. He added, “Should NERC determine that some of these matters would benefit from commission review, they now have 30 days to request such review.”

Wind Farms, Hot Air, and the Perils of Scientific Publishing

Posted on May 3, 2012
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By Thomas W. Overton, JD

The news blogosphere was briefly contorted earlier this week by a study published in Nature Climate Change that appeared (to some laymen, at least) to suggest that large-scale wind farms were contributing to global warming.

Naturally, given the intersection of several hot-button issues (renewable energy and climate change), and the degree to which this appeared to create cognitive dissonance in the environmental movement (clean energy is causing climate change!), it’s not surprising that a number of media outlets rushed to post some sort of click-bait story on this study.

Never mind that the idea—that a few ground-based wind turbines could affect the global climate—ought to be preposterous on its face (as another flood of blog posts and news items rushed to argue). That took a back seat to getting something, anything, published.

For those of us with a background in scientific publishing, this incident hit the trifecta of Media Abuse of Science:

-The findings were misinterpreted.

-The researcher’s work was hijacked for partisan purposes.

-The actual importance of the study was lost in the ensuing kerfuffle.

This is a problem without an apparent solution, not that universities and publishers don’t do their best to keep things straight anyway. I spent nearly ten years working as the managing editor of a scientific journal, and any time we published a study that might get media attention, we worked closely with the publisher’s PR department beforehand to try to ensure the findings were clear. There were even times the legal department got involved.

When science editors get together, a frequent topic of discussion is the abysmal state of science journalism, no matter whether the topic is climate change, vaccinations, cancer research, or any one of dozens of fields average readers are interested in.

Whether it’s overstating the results, leaving out the context, misunderstanding methodologies, or presenting scientific controversies as 50-50 disputes when they’re closer to 90-10 or even 99-1, too often something goes wrong by the time the story gets in front of the public. The result is essentially negative information: The readers know less than what they did before.

There are certainly plenty of talented science reporters out there, but too often, it seems the science beat is assigned to someone who just happens to be interested in science rather than formally trained. But enthusiasm is no replacement for actual knowledge.

Worse, though many laymen do seem to understand that there’s bad science out there, they often misunderstand what that comprises. One example is the misguided pursuit of objectivity.

A lot of science is politically contentious, and for that reason, writers sometimes want to avoid appearing to take sides. Stories flowing from that impulse tend to just lay out both sides of the controversy and “let the readers decide.” That may work with general news, but it doesn’t work with science, where the average reader simply isn’t qualified to weigh competing scientific arguments.

Yet good science writers who put the controversy in context and lay out what the scientific consensus is run the risk of being accused of bias by readers who may be sympathetic to the other side (typically for non-scientific reasons). This is one of the reasons it takes a special type of talent and background (not to mention a thick skin) to be a good science writer.

As a general rule, one is best off avoiding major media outlets for science news, and concentrating on publications that focus on science journalism. The rest is largely hot air, wind turbines or not.

—Thomas W. Overton is POWER’s gas technology editor

Damn the Data, Full Steam Ahead

Posted on April 29, 2012
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By Kennedy Maize

Washington, D.C., 28 April 2012 — A vexing problem faces those who advocate massive global political and economic responses to a warming climate allegedly marred by mankind’s insatiable appetite for goods and services that produce carbon dioxide. The data to justify climatastrophism are mighty thin. As Woody Guthrie put it in a talking blues some 75 years ago, “so thin even our Senators and Congressmen can see through it.”

There are plenty of jeremiads, not the least of them coming from failed politicians such as Al Gore, and a plethora of computer models warning that civilization as we have come to know and love or loath it is coming to an end…and soon. A global political agency, the United Nations, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of other people’s money (including many really poor people) to advance the case that we are poisoning our earth with a chemical that is also a necessity of life.

But here’s a small problem. The problem appears small. The real data don’t show much global warming, despite the big-time machinations of the models. From 1906 to 2005, global mean temperatures rose by about 0.8 degrees C, according to one consensus data set. Many would regard that as trivial, occurring during the industrialization of much of the world. And those data are sketchy at best.

Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, a former NASA climate watcher and one of the most careful custodians of the real data, has compared recent warming readings. The warming from 1973-2012 in NOAA’s U.S. Historical Climatology Network (HCN) is +0.245 degrees C/decade. From the U.K. Met Office’s CRUTem3 data set, the 40-year warming is +0.198C/decade. From NOAA’s Integrated Surface Hourly dataset (Spencer’s preferred reference), the warming shows up as +0.013C/decade. The warming shown over the past 40 years in the HCN series, the most dramatic, Spencer says, is almost entirely the result of “adjustments” made to the raw data. This leads him to note, “When ‘global warming’ only shows up after the data are adjusted, one can understand why so many people are suspicious of the adjustments.”

There’s a further problem related to U.S. data, which show a long-term cooling trend. While the world may have seen a 0.8C centennial temperature increase, the U.S. from 1930-1990 has shown what climate scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have called a “warming hole” — a “cold patch where the effects of global warming were temporarily obscured.” During this head-scratching period, U.S. temperatures declined by a degree, or more than worldwide temperatures rose during the concurrent century. This anomaly is not something that the global circulation models can explain or “retrodict.”

Notice that the Harvard boffins (or at least the press release they approved) make the conclusory statement of that the data temporarily obscured the model predictions. The late mathematician Roz Marimont, my mentor in all things statistical when we worked together at the National Institutes of Health in the 1970s, warned me of two errors that bedevil science. The first, one that often infects mathematicians, is what she called “confusing the map for the territory.” When model and reality conflict, she said, too often the modelers blame the data and spend vast energies trying to make the data fit the model, which seldom advances knowledge. The second, which is particularly pernicious among health scientists, is conflating correlation and causation.

In the case of the “warming hole,” I suspect we have a case of confusing the map for the territory. The Harvard researchers observed an anomalous condition that doesn’t fit their idea of what they think the world should look like. So they went on a snipe hunt for new data. The hole in the data, they concluded, is a result of particulate pollution, which provide a negative warming feedback. (There is controversy over whether particulates have a positive or negative coefficient of warming, but that’s another topic). Said lead author Eric Leibensperger, “What we’ve shown is that particulate pollution over the eastern United States has delayed the warming that we would expect to see from increasing greenhouse gases.”

Maybe. But maybe we have a problem with what the researchers expected to see, which is what the models predict they would see. As Roger Pielke Sr. has commented, “Before modeling results are even used, they must first show skill at predicting changes in climate statistics on the spatial and temporal scale needed by the impacts communities.”

And that leads to another climate topic, this one involving correlation and causation. It’s about that unusually warm March experienced over much (but not all) of the U.S. this year. Proof positive of global warming, no? That’s the position a lot of uninformed commentators — and a lot of self-interested activists (i.e. Bill McKibben) — have been peddling to the public this spring.

But it’s balderdash. As Roy Spencer put it quite clearly: “Connecting such an event to ‘global warming’ would require either lazy thinking, jumping to conclusions, or evidence that the warmth was not caused by persistent southerly flow over an unusually large area for that time of year.

“The U.S. is a pretty small place (about 2% of the Earth), and so a single high or low pressure area can cover most of the country. For example, if unusually persistent southerly flow sets up all month over most of the country, there will be unusual warmth. In that case we are talking about ‘weather’, not ‘climate change.’”

Say Goodbye, Commissioner Svinicki

Posted on April 19, 2012
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By Kennedy Maize

Washington, D.C., 19 April 2012 — Advice to NRC commissioner Kristine Svinicki: it’s time to start polishing that resume. Your days on the regulatory commission are over.

The term of Republican Svinicki, who led an unsuccessful attempted regicide of NRC chairman Greg Jaczko last year, expires June 30. Under the law, the commission is designed to be made up of five members, with three from the political party of the sitting president, and two from the minority. They are presidential appointments, subject to Senate confirmation.

NRC Commissioner Kristine Svinicki

The odds that Svinicki will be renominated to a second five-year term are slim and none, and Slim just left the room, headed toward Nevada. Today’s Wall Street Journal notes that the White House has not yet renominated Svinicki, a favorite of the nuclear industry. The article quotes Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wondering why the Obama administration hasn’t put her nomination on the table, saying any further delay is “unacceptable,” a term of little meaning given the way nominations have moved in the grid-locked Senate. McConnell wondered, disingenuously, if Sivnicki’s name was being held up because she was a “whistleblower” in the Jaczko fracus. The article correctly noted that Jaczko, a PhD in physics, was the science advisor to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) before named to the NRC.

But today’s Huffington Post has the details of the reason why Svinicki’s days in White Flint are done. HuffPo, which coincidentally won a Pulitzer Prize this week for national reporting, explains how deeply nuclear engineer Svinicki has fallen into Washington doo-doo. The online news service quoted Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson: “Senator Reid opposes Commissioner Svinicki’s renomination because she lied to Congress about her past work on Yucca Mountain. Furthermore, Commissioner Svinicki has an abysmal record on nuclear safety, demonstrating that she puts the interests of the nuclear industry ahead of the safety of American citizens. Senator Reid has consistently supported qualified Republicans for the commission and is open to supporting others, but Commissioner Svinicki has disqualified herself and does not deserve to be renominated.”

She’s history. Even if the White House renominates her, which could happen, the nomination would not survive Reid’s opposition.

But it hardly matters. The NRC can function just fine with four, or even three, members. The partisan balance is irrelevant, as Jaczko is the lone nuclear skeptic on the commission, despite the presence of two other Democrats, commissioners William Magwood and George Apostolakis.

How About ‘None of the Above?’

Posted on April 15, 2012
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By Kennedy Maize

Washington, D.C., 16 April 2012 — So clever of the White House. President Obama says his administration’s latest energy strategy — mimicking his GOP adversaries — is “all of the above.” This is the “welcome ever more trotters into the trough” approach. And most everybody who makes energy loves the free lunch. Who wouldn’t. The policy is, put more honestly, bribes for all.

Watching one of the sessions of the eternally and terminally boring New York Times energy policy online gabfest last week, I was struck by the Maoist unanimity of opinion from those who benefit from government subsidies: let a hundred subsidies bloom. If I’ve got mine, you can have yours.

Of course, the politics are clever. The White House cuts the pins out from under the Republicans who claim that the Democrats are showering their hippie friends on the green fringe with taxpayer greenbacks. Sure, respond the Democrats, we’ve given money to Solyndra. It didn’t work, but life’s a crap shoot. But we’re also going to give money to the Vogtle nuclear units, to on-and-offshore drillers, coal miners, and anyone else who gets in line (before Nov. 6, 2012).

Each visit to the public trough naturally includes pious pronouncements about the public utility of such spending. Without taxpayer dollars for [fill in the energy technology blank] civilization as we know it will end tomorrow.

Most recently, the alleged man-made warming of the climate — which must be a calamity, must it not? — has been the hook upon which to hang the energy policy bacon. But before that, it was, variously, scary Arabs, lung cancer, childhood asthma, and godless Communists. (Rep. Allen West, Florida Republican, to the contrary notwithstanding, these last have not been seen in the U.S. since the 1980s.) Today, for those not scared out of their wits by global warming, there are those ambitious, inscrutable Chinese and Indians about to eat our economic lunch. It seems there is always a boogyperson out there to justify draining of the public purse.

At the Times timewaster, much was said about the great success of Sematech as a model for the modern policy pantry raid. I was writing about the computer industry for Newsbytes News Network back in 1986 when Sematech was born. Sematech is an acronym for SEmiconductor MAnufacturing TEchnology, a consortium of 14 U.S. semiconductor makers and the government, specifically the Defense Department. It was designed to circumvent U.S. antitrust laws and allow industrial collusion. The mythology about Sematech that emerged during the NYT event was misleading.

The idea (if one can elevate it to that status) behind Sematech was fear of Japan, which was going to eat our lunch in every phase of economic life. That had to be the truth, because MIT’s Lester Thurow was telling us it was the case, over-and-over again. In the case of semiconductors, Japan was going to drive American companies out of business, gaining control of a vital military technology. The answer, hatched and nurtured in that Valhalla of conservatism the Reagan administration, was “industrial policy.” The U.S. government would emulate Japan and collaborate — and fund to the eventual tune of $1.4B — with industry to beat back the challenge from Tokyo.

Sematech was founded on faulty analysis and soon fell apart (at least the government part of it) because it was based on a bad understanding of the market. The problem wasn’t that Japan’s government was subsidizing its semiconductor industry, but that US manufacturers were crappy at their job and losing out in a world market. As a 1993 New York Times retrospective observed, “Saving the semiconductor industry actually meant saving the equipment suppliers, the small companies that make the machines that make semiconductors. They too had once dominated the world market, but by the 1980′s they were producing equipment that was far less reliable than Japanese counterparts.”

In their misplaced enthusiasm for a government solution to private-sector problems, the NYT panelists advocated applying the Sematech model to the seemingly intractable problem of batteries for electric cars. Guess what? The U.S. tried that, too. In January 1991, the Big Three U.S. auto manufacturers — GM, Ford and Chrysler — and the Electric Power Research Institute got together under the aegis of the Department of Energy for a program to overcome the limits of batteries. They would jump-start the EV market. This official conspiracy in restraint of trade was called the Advanced Battery Consortium, or ABC. Clearly it didn’t work. Otherwise we would all be driving EVs today.

In 1998, a National Academies of Sciences panel reviewed the ABC and concluded, in typical academic-bureaucratic bafflegab, “Although no technology has yet been brought to the point of fully meeting even the midterm goals, work in progress has a significant chance of meeting both the midterm and commercialization goals early in the next decade, possibly even before the year 2000.” The government-industry program collapsed not long after that assessment.

The record of government subsidies for energy technologies, and the wider approach of “industrial policy,” is dismal. But that course of action is precisely what the Obama administration, the Republican opposition, and the supplicant energy industries are advocating. A common rationalization is that widespread subsidies and government’s thumb on the industrial scale are appropriate as long as there is “a level playing field.”

The only sensible comment I heard at the New York Times session came from my old friend Branko Terzic, who is also a friend of government energy subsidies. Despite his tolerance for market meddling, Terzic has been around long enough to see what has gone on in the past. He noted that when people say they want a level playing field, what they are saying is that they want the playing field tilted dramatically in their direction so that everyone else slides off.

What’s particularly amusing about this current round of claims for the need for the “all of the above” energy policy is that occurs just as it is clear that the current and long-running energy policy — or lack thereof — is working. As the Times noted in a long article that served as a curtain-raiser for its day-long conference, the energy situation in the U.S. looks quite rosy today, better than it has since a spooked Richard Nixon, facing the first Arab oil embargo, rolled out his stupendously stupid “Project Independence.”

All of the above? None of the above seems to be working quite well, thank you.

EPA Greenhouse Rule: Going for the Capillaries

Posted on March 28, 2012
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By Kennedy Maize

Washington, D.C., 28 March 2012 — Just how significant is the Obama administration’s new regulation on carbon dioxide emissions from new coal-fired power plants, announced yesterday? From here, it looks like a fair amount of ado about not very much.

In today’s cynical political environment, it’s hard not to see the Environmental Protection Agency rule as a willful case of making a big political impression without having much economic impact. Don’t misread me. I approve of the deception inherent in the Obama policy, although I would prefer a candid admission that this isn’t a fight worth waging on substantive grounds. The ultimate outcome of the EPA policy is likely to be at most a nudge for natural gas in electric generation, already in the midst of a major boom.

One of those who quickly saw through the Obama regulatory sleight-of-hand, although he put his own spin on it, was Michael Brune of the Sierra Club. He told the New York Times, “It’s a rule that follows the marketplace. Right now, next to no coal plants are being built. This basically means that new coal plants are going extinct.”

Ed Crooks, the fine U.S. energy reporter for Britain’s Financial Times had a pertinent tweet (@Ed-Crooks) following the announcement of the rule: “The EIA expects coal-fired generation capacity to be 286GW in 2035. If the US does not build a single new coal plant, it will be 275GW.” In short, the rule won’t even change the velocity, let alone the direction, of today’s gas-centric generating market.

The EPA rules produced the predictable posing and policy huffing-and-puffing on all sides. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity warned that the rule “could cause the premature closure of many more coal-fueled power plants operating today.” Note the use of the conditional “could.” The claim is hollow. The Natural Resources Defense Council said the “logical next step is to improve the aging fleet of existing coal-fired power plants….” That’s not likely, however one defines “improve.”

The politicians also chimed in with high dudgeon and empty rhetoric. Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) said he will try to block the rules in Congress. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) bellowed, “Determining how to regulate carbon dioxide is the job of Congress, not the EPA.” Don’t hold that CO2 in your lungs until Congress acts; it’s a sure way to asphyxiate.

Purely coincidentally, yesterday morning, before the EPA announcement, I downloaded a new “discussion paper” from Resources for the Future, the perceptive Washington environmental, energy, and economics think tank. The paper by Dallas Burtraw, Karen Palmer, Anthony Paul, and Matt Woerman models the U.S. electricity market to look at how regulations versus market (secular) trends influence the generation mix and electricity prices. “This analysis,” they report, “shows that the change between 2009 and 2011 in projections of natural gas supply and electricity demand has a much bigger effect on electricity prices, total generation, and generation by fuel” than the high-profile regulations.

The RFF paper looks specifically at the EPA’s recent interstate ozone pollution rule (CSARP) and the new mercury rule (MATS), not at the greenhouse rule promulgated just days after the discussion paper surfaced. But I’d be surprised if the story were any different for the greenhouse gas rule, which appears to be designed to have little real effect.

This is not to say that the RFF analysis concludes that pollution controls have had no impact, only that the economic impact has been overstated. The power industry has always disingenuously claimed that EPA rules will raise prices and impoverish masses of middle-class Americans, but that’s not what RFF has found.

Countering those dystopian claims, says the RFF paper, “The one area where the regulations matter more than secular trends is emissions.” The rules do lower SO2 and Hg emissions more than just letting markets work. Presumably, more stringent CO2 regs might also reduce greenhouse gas emissions more than the shift to methane will accomplish by itself. But it’s unlikely the EPA rules announced yesterday will do that and, in my opinion, that’s just fine. The carbon dioxide reductions from the switch to gas are free.

Will Natural Gas Inventories Hit Their Caps This Fall?

Posted on March 20, 2012
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By Thomas W. Overton

San Diego, 20 March 2012 — A fair amount of ink has been spilled in the commodities market over record natural gas storage inventories in the U.S. As of March 9, they stood at 2,369 Bcf, a whopping 735 Bcf more than this point last year, and well above the previous end-of-season record of 2,148 Bcf set in 1983.

The winter heating season, when gas inventories decline as stocks are withdrawn, traditionally ends at the end of March. However, there are reports that injections have already begun, and that this week’s EIA report may actually show a rise in gas storage rather than a decline.

Gas stocks hit an all-time peak of 3,852 Bcf last November, and that was with end-of-March inventories at 1,581 Bcf, far lower than they are now. This raises the possibility that storage operators could begin running out of space some time this year.

U.S. Gas Inventories (EIA)

How much space is there? First, one needs to draw a distinction between gas used to maintain adequate pressure and withdrawal rates (known as base gas), and gas available for withdrawal (known as working gas). Inventory levels reported by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) are normally given in terms of working gas.

According to the EIA the maximum total gas storage capacity for 2010 (the latest point for which data is available) was 8,763 Bcf. However, more than half of that is taken up by base gas. Total working gas design capacity as of April 2011 was around 4,353 Bcf. While that’s 501 Bcf above the all-time high set last year, we’re likely to end this March with inventories at least 700 Bcf above where we were last March.

Net injections into storage during the spring and summer months (Apr-Oct) totaled 2,223 Bcf last year, and 2,217 Bcf in 2010. We would need to add only about 2,000 Bcf to fill the storage reservoirs to their brims. Unfortunately, the EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook is projecting total gas production (extraction plus imports) to grow by 0.46% over 2011, while consumption grows by only 0.21%. That would mean net injections of about 2,228 Bcf for 2012—assuming there was that much capacity.

But it gets worse. Our storage network comprises over 400 fields spread across 30 states, and moving excess inventory from one field to another is not always easy or even possible. A few of those fields, or portions of them, are also inactive, but are included in the EIA’s figures for total capacity.

Of course, all of this is without getting into the complicated economics and market behavior that governs why and how gas goes into storage. Suffice to say it is not simply a matter of excess gas going into the nearest reservoir—far from it. What is likely, no matter what reservoirs hit their capacities—and some clearly will—the industry is facing the prospect of large quantities of gas being dumped onto the market later this year, driving prices down even further, perhaps into negative territory in some regions. Hold on to your hat.

—Thomas W. Overton is GAS POWER’s editor

Energy Efficiency and the End of the Free Lunch

Posted on March 20, 2012
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By Kennedy Maize

Washington, D.C., March 20 2012 — The most important economist you probably have never heard of is William Stanley Jevons. Contemplating the convergence of coal, industry, and technology in the middle of the 19th Century, Jevons explained why increasing efficient use of coal meant more, not less, use of the dusky diamonds throughout the British economy.

The insights of Jevons, published in his 1865 book “The Coal Question”, came from his examination of how improvements in the use of coal (in steam engines) led to ever greater use of coal. His findings were counterintuitive. Energy efficiency didn’t reduce the use of coal; the amount of coal Britain used increased dramatically.

William Stanley Jevons

A century later, the insight of Jevons, informed, perhaps unconsciously, environmentalist Denis Hayes, who helped create the first Earth Day in April 1970, the formative event in the modern environmental movement. As part of the Earth Day enthusiasm, Hayes offered a series of rules for environmentalists. The first was right out of the Jevons playbook: There is no free lunch.

This sensible dictum dominated the thinking of environmentalists for the next several years. Hayes has described the period of 1969 to 1974 as the “golden age” of environmentalism.

The free lunch warning applied broadly, but particularly to energy, which wasn’t much of an issue in 1970 except in the context of cleaning up the smoke from coal-fired power plants. And I can testify from personal experience, having grown up in Pittsburgh, that coal plants in the 1960s and 1970s produced copious amounts of dark, ugly smoke, not just white plumes of steam.

It was clear that cleaning up coal would require everyone to pay a price, in the form of higher electricity rates. There was no free lunch.

Energy use itself wasn’t much of an issue until the 1973 Arab oil embargo. And the price of that lunch was obviously high, so high that it scared the daylights out of our political and policy elites. The Ford administration wasn’t willing to face the political tariff of removing oil price controls; neither were the Democrats who ran Congress.

But in 1976, in an article in Foreign Affairs, an obscure and wonkish low-level academic named Amory Lovins turned that paradigm on its head. A brilliant phrase-maker and publicist, Lovins said the way to accommodate the need to reduce use of energy while not impinging on current or future lifestyles of the people of the world was through energy efficiency. Saving energy (and he later coined the perfect moniker for this: “Negawatts”) said Lovins, is “not a free lunch, but a lunch you’re paid to eat.” Roll over, Jevons.

Since then, the Lovins doctrine has replaced the free lunch dictum. Among others in high places, energy secretary Steven Chu is a devotee in the Lovins school of the reverse free lunch. The U.S., and the world, has gone bonkers for efficiency.

That’s well and good. But the result has not been to reduce energy consumption in the U.S. and the world, but, as Jevons predicted, to increase it. The followers of Jevons have been lurking in the background of the energy policy debate for years, but lately have emerged to set off a worthwhile debate over just how energy efficiency works…and how it doesn’t. Among those who have resurrected Jevons have been the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, Calif., and energy analyst Rob Bradley at the MasterResource blog. Just this week, the New York Times took up a debate on the limits of energy efficiency.

This year, New Yorker writer David Owen, one of the participants in the debate in the Times, has highlighted the growing controversy over energy efficiency, clearly accepting the lessons of Jevons that saving energy in the short run means using more energy in the long run. His new book is “The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse.”

Among many illustrations of Owen’s main point is a favorite of environmentalists: Fuel efficiency requirements for cars. He notes that “first fuel-economy regulations for U.S. cars–which were implemented in 1975 in response to the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and 1974 — were followed not by a steady decline in total u.S. motor-fuel consumption but by a long-term rise, as well as by increases in horsepower, curb weight, vehicle miles traveled (up 100 percent since 1980) and car ownership.”

And so it goes as virtually every success in using energy more efficiently has resulted in opportunities to use more energy in more, and more ingenious, ways. The technical term is “rebound.” The practical meaning of the technical term is that Denis Hayes was right and Amory Lovins is wrong. There is no free lunch, and certainly no set of activities that will pay for your lunch…and dessert too. The price of more efficient use of energy is greater use of energy.

The results of this rebound effect are not pernicious. Climbing standards of living around the world — reflected not only in greater material benefits such as cell phones and more cars, but in increased lifespans — are a result of the spread of cheaper energy through the world. The areas of the world that have been left behind — mostly rural and in places such as India, China, southeast Asia, and Africa — can only advance their standards of living through greater access to energy.

So saving energy by using it more efficiently is a good thing, not because it is going to result in less energy but in more. More is better.

Bad News for San Onofre

Posted on March 16, 2012
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By Thomas W. Overton, JD

San Diego, 16 March 2012 — Yesterday, the NRC announced that it is sending a special team to San Onofre after several steam generator tubes in one of the reactors failed an inspection. This isn’t good, but probably sounds worse than it is.

First, full disclosure and some background: I am a former Navy nuclear reactor mechanic, and I helped perform an underway steam generator inspection while I served on the USS Enterprise.

There are two operating reactors at San Onofre. Both are pressurized water reactors, which means there are two loops operating when the plant is up: one high-pressure loop that transfers heat from the reactor to a pair of steam generators, and a second that runs the steam from the generators through turbines to generate electricity. The steam generators operate like huge submerged radiators. Hot water passes through a series of tubes, and the heat boils water on the other side of the tubes. All four steam generators at San Onofre were replaced a couple of years ago, so they’re essentially brand new.

Unit 2 has been shut down since January for scheduled maintenance. During a routine inspection of the steam generators, some unusual wear was detected in about 800 of the nearly 20,000 tubes, meaning that the tube walls were showing some thin spots.

Then, last month, one of the tubes in Unit 3, the other reactor, sprang a leak (Unit 1, the plant’s first reactor, was retired in 1992). The leak resulted in a very small release of radioactivity (barely detectable, according to the NRC), and the reactor shut down automatically as it should have. Subsequent inspection of the steam generator tubes showed 129 had unusual wear. Those tubes are being subjected to additional pressure testing for structural integrity, and three of them have failed. That’s what brought in the NRC yesterday.

Not good, but not Fukushima either. The thing to understand is that tube wear is a fact of life in running a steam generator. You inspect them regularly, and plug the ones that show too much wear. The generators are designed so that they can still function with a substantial number of tubes taken out of service; in the case of San Onofre, there is about an 8% reserve that can be plugged and still reach 100% power.

Tube ruptures are unusual, but also not unheard of. Typically, though, they happen as a steam generator gets close to the end of its design life. The ones at San Onofre are new, and that’s what’s got the NRC concerned. The reactors are going to remain shut down until the cause of the unusual wear can be determined.

And that is the real problem here. San Onofre supplies about 20% of the region’s electricity at full power. Right now, after a fairly mild winter, that’s not an issue. It will be an issue as the weather starts to heat up. Rolling blackouts are not out of the question, though planning has already begun to find ways to take up the slack this summer.

What’s wrong with the steam generators? My guess is that either there are some manufacturing defects in the new units (and the manufacturer, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, is involved in the inspection right now), or swapping out the generators changed the flow characteristics through the primary loop in such a way as to generate unanticipated water erosion. Let’s hope the NRC can figure things out quickly.

Thomas W. Overton, JD is GAS POWER’s editor.

Climate Science: A Super-Wicked Mess

Posted on March 14, 2012
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By Kennedy Maize

Washington, D.C., 14 March 2012 — Climate science is a wicked mess. That’s not a political statement or a casual description of the difficulties of the man-made global warming knife fight. It’s a technical term some social scientists use to shed light on complex, convoluted, interconnected problems. It also provides a useful way to look at the controversy swirling around the issues of global warming and what, if anything, to do about them.

I owe my awareness of this emerging way of looking at complex social and political issues to Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry, who blogged about wicked messes and climate recently. Her blog is consistently among the most interesting and provocative of many I follow on the subject of global warming.

The guru of messy science is political scientist Robert Horn, a visiting scholar at Stanford University. He coined the term “social messes” to describe “those problems about which different people have very different perceptions and values concerning their nature, their causes, their boundaries, and their solutions. They are the problems that bring out two or more points of view from the first mention of them.” Sound familiar?

According to Horn, attributes of social messes include, among others: no unique “correct” view of the problem; contradictory solutions; missing or uncertain data; ideological, economic and political constraints; consequences difficult to imagine; great resistance to change; and problem solvers who are not in contact with the problems or potential solutions.” Social messes are characterized by such complexity that they are difficult to analyze and even more difficult to resolve.

Horn's Climate Social Mess

For a graphic depiction of social messes, take a look at Horn’s map of what he calls the climate “labyrinth.” The visual can be downloaded as a PDF and makes an interesting, and somewhat terrifying, piece of office wall art.

Next come “wicked problems.” In 1973, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, professors of design and urban planning at the University of California at Berkeley, came up with this moniker in an article in Policy Sciences. Among the characteristics of wicked problems: no definitive formulation (defining a wicked problem is itself a wicked problem); the are unique; every wicked problem is a symptom of another problem; there is no intermediate or ultimate test of a solution.

Finally, let’s look at “super-wicked problems,” introduced by a group of social scientists in 2007 at a technical meeting, and later in 2009 to a climate gathering in Denmark. Added to mere wickedness, the super-wicked problems are characterized by running against time constraints, with no central authority capable of solving them; those charged with solving the problem are also causing it; and the problem is surrounded by “hyperbolic discounting,” a term from economics meaning that decision makers make choices that are inconsistent over time.

What do we learn from these amusing terms about mind-boggling conundrums? First, they provide an understanding that simplistic solutions (regulation or faux market mechanisms) might not work to tease out these policy Gordian knots. Nor will Alexander’s terrible, swift sword. But there are promising problem-solving approaches. Horn has been applying concepts of visual analytics (see the link I provided above to his climate mess map) and Robert Weber has been analyzing a tool based on scenario planning. Both approaches also use a form a cloud sourcing and both are very visual.

Together, Horn and Weber published an influential paper in 2007 titled New Tools for Resolving Wicked Problems. They write: “These tools can be successful where others have failed (or have feared to tread) because both incorporate or address uncertainty and risk; complexity; systems interacting with other systems; competing points of view and values; different people knowing different parts of the problem (and possible solutions); and intra- and interorganizational politics.”

Judith Curry comments, “I find this pretty interesting. Climate change to me seems to be the mother of all messy super-wicked problems. I like the mess mapping approach, with scenarios, etc. This makes much more sense to me than developing a scientific consensus that all but demands a specific policy.”

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