Recently Written
- Climate bill faces uncertain future in Senate
- My Smart Grid Experience
- Skepticism Rises on Plug-In Hybrids
- What nuclear renaissance?
- Polling on warming no surprise
- GE Continues to Wander in the Wilderness
- FERC’s Wellinghoff bloviates on wind
- EPA CO2 poposal is anti-life and anti-science
- Is a smart grid stupid?
- Will nano-bio-batteries save plug-in bhbrids?
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Climate bill faces uncertain future in Senate
Posted on July 3, 2009
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By Kennedy Maize
The slim passage in late June of the House Democrats’ global warming bill – 219-212 – reminds old-timers of the Clinton administration’s passage of a Btu tax in 1993 by a 219-213 vote in the House, only to see it crater in the Senate.
Is the same result likely for the Obama administration’s global warming legislation? It may happen. Indeed, it’s likely to happen, as I scope it out.
The Senate is a far more conservative legislative body than the House, meaning that it is less likely to agree to bills that have won in the House, even with large margins. That’s what the Constitution had in mind. The Senate also proportionally represents more rural areas than the House members, and more coal interests.
The narrowness of the victory of the Waxman-Markey bill (HR 2454) in the House, despite a late-in-the day spending spree of concessions to reluctant farm-state and coal-state Democrats, suggests to me that it is dead legislation walking in the Senate.
The House bill is a dog’s dinner. It is legislative hash, with something for everyone. Billions are spread around to win crucial votes. For instance, Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), a Chicago pol, gets a billion-dollar inner city green job training program, with a rationale that defies comprehension. But it won Rush’s vote.
Farmers got all kinds of last-minute concessions that make no policy sense. But the bill would not have passed without rural Democratic votes. In the end, 44 Democrats voted against the bill, and eight Republican voted for it. Without farm-state votes, the bill would have failed.
The July 4 issue of The Economist described the bill as “a masterpiece of obfuscation” and “so weighed down with giveaways, loopholes and needless complexity that many environmentalists hesitate to support it.” The magazine also predicted a rocky course in the Senate.
It’s clear that the original Waxman-Markey bill (gosh, only about 900 pages), which emerged from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, would not have survived on the House floor, even with the large Democratic majority (275-178). According to multiple press accounts, House Commerce Committee chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) was horse-trading to line up votes on the floor as the House was voting on his committee bill. As a result, the bill grew from 900 pages to over 1,400 pages. I’d bet the ranch that nobody in the House – members or their staff (including Waxman and his aides) – had read it when it narrowly passed.
The New York Times’s John Broder, a veteran observer of how legislation in Washington works, wrote, “As the most ambitious energy and climate-change legislation ever introduced in Congress made its way to a floor vote last Friday, it grew fat with compromises, carve-outs, concessions and out-and-out gifts intended to win the votes of wavering lawmakers and the support of powerful industries.”
This is how legislative sausage is made in Washington. It’s not new. The Republicans, when they controlled the House, put the vote-timer on hold for hours (it’s supposed to be 15 minutes) while they lined up votes for a Bush-administration tax plan and beat the fields for special-interest and corporate support.
But the latest legislative peregrinations in the House, where the Democrats have a large majority, suggest problems for the Obama plan in the Senate, where the Democrats now have a nominal majority 60-vote majority (thanks to the final victory of Democrat Al Franken in Minnesota). The Democratic majority – allegedly filibuster-proof — is meaningless in the Senate, where energy and environmental issues are regional, not partisan. Franken, for example, a Paul Wellstone liberal, might bolt on a climate bill if it doesn’t favor Minnesota agriculture interests. Then there are the many Democratic senators who represent coal mining and coal burning states.
My prediction is a reprise of 1993. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee may report a bill later this year – it won’t come soon – that is vastly different than the House-passed legislation. Even given the enormous compromises in the House bill to coal (utility) and agricultural interests, that won’t mollify utility and ag interests in the Senate.
I’d bet (if I were a betting person) that the Senate won’t come up with a measure for floor passage this year. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada doesn’t much care about this energy stuff, as long as the nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain is dead (and it is). So Reid’s not going to push Obama’s energy legislation onto the agenda ahead of things he, and the White House, really care about, including health care, economic recovery, and financial regulation.
If the Obama administration were able to push its global warming agenda onto the Senate floor and get passage this year (remember, I said that’s unlikely), it probably will be very different than the House bill. That sets up a potentially long and nasty House-Senate conference committee to work out differences.
So my best guess is that the topic gets kicked into 2010, and becomes a mid-year election issue. If I were a Democrat running for House and Senate in 2010 (that would never happen), I’m not sure I’d want to be bumping up against an opponent who says my party wants to raise electric rates to combat a dubious problem. The climate hasn’t warmed in a decade.
Gridlock in Washington isn’t entirely a case of partisanship. It’s also a case of policy differences based on regional and local interests. What’s wrong with that? It looks like democracy to me.
My Smart Grid Experience
Posted on June 11, 2009
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By Kennedy Maize
Here’s further evidence why I believe the current smart grid hoopla is bogus, and North America should be focusing on a strong grid instead.
I live on a small farm in rural Maryland, some 60 miles northwest of Washington, D.C. My electric company is Allegheny Power, a distribution subsidiary of Allegheny Energy, based outside of Pittsburgh. I have no big-picture complaints about Allegheny Power, although it does seem to kick off momentarily more often that I would like.
The parent company once had a radio advertising campaign talking about an “Allegheny Energy moment.” My wife and I, who both rely on our computers for our living, used to laugh about the off-on outages, just enough to shut down the PC and destroy the current file, as “Allegheny Energy moments.” The company no longer has those ads running in my area.
This week, on Tuesday and Wednesday, we had real outages — more than two hours each. I know the cause of the Tuesday outage — lasting from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. According the utility’s computerized voice recognition customer service software (it speaks very slowly and carefully and is really stupid), it was a tree down on a power line. No big deal.
Wednesday’s outage remains a mystery. The Allegheny Power computer voice (can we call him Hal?), which recognized my voice just fine on Tuesday, couldn’t understand me on Wednesday. It was 3 p.m. and I hadn’t been drinking, so I don’t know what was going on, but I persisted and enunciated as clearly as I could and pressed enough numbers on my old-fashioned, keep-ready-when-the-electric-power-fails, touch-tone phone (remember those), because my cell phone connection to the utility customer service center stinks. I’m always amazed that when I lose power, I don’t lose phone land-line service. Same poles.
So I eventually got through to a real, and very nice, young woman to report the outage. I told her the details, and my address. Then, to my astonishment, she asked me for driving directions to my house, in case the repair crew had to work on the transformer that connects my farm to the distribution grid.
“You don’t have MapQuest of Google Maps?” I asked. Not on her computer, which was down at the moment, but didn’t have Internet access in any case. “The computers are down more often than they are up,” she said. “Particularly when there are power outages.”
The crews don’t have GPS systems? Nope, probably too expensive for corporate.
My jaw dropped. Good GPS systems are available at $200 or less for individuals. I suspect a large electric utility could buy them for a lot less per unit. And I suspect they could be easily tied into the utility’s SCADA system. No brainer.
And that’s why, in my judgment, the smart grid won’t ever come to pass. The folks who run our electric grid today are brainless. Old, entrenched, mature industries, as many business analysts have observed in the past, are really bad at innovation. That applies directly to electric distribution utilities. It’s true for power generators, but much more for distributors.
If utility managers can’t figure out the value of satellite navigation systems for repair crews, what hope is there for smart toasters and time-of-day pricing?
The most important task, when it comes to today’s grid, is to get it beefed up, interconnected, and operationally rationalized. The EPRI lemon-meringue-pie-the-sky smart grid will never come to pass in the lifetime of anybody alive today. Nor should it, if we can’t get the basic grid right.
When it comes to transmission and distribution interconnections, I’ll take robust over smart any day. I’ve been hearing about smart houses, and smart appliances, and smart grids for a quarter of a century. They’ve never made any sense to me.
Among the daunting, maybe show-stopping, issues for the smart grid are communications protocols and standards, the cost of data-pushing dongles on power lines, and whether the smart grid is the high-voltage grid, or the local distribution grid, or both. The smart grid concept doesn’t work unless it includes the big pipes and the little pipes. That’s a mind-boggling task. It makes reforming U.S. health care look trivial.
So, as far as I can tell, all the hand waving (and money spending) on smart grid technologies is fluff. Let’s focus on getting power to people 24/7/365, not controlling their refrigerators and cycling their AC.
Skepticism Rises on Plug-In Hybrids
Posted on June 7, 2009
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By Kennedy Maize
After almost unrelenting hype, skepticism about plug-in hybrid cars is beginning to emerge in the mainstream media. It’s a good thing, as much about the much-ballyhooed vehicles, particularly the General Motors Chevy Volt, doesn’t withstand serious business or technical scrutiny.
In early June, Jim Motavalli at the “Wheels” blog at the New York Times said Toyota, the prime mover in the conventional hybrid world with its Prius car, has serious doubts about plug-ins, which feature rechargeable batteries capable of propelling a car some 40 miles, and then having a much smaller gasoline-powered engine kick in to recharge the batteries. These are also known as “extended range vehicles.” Once at the destination, or back home, they plug into a conventional outlet for a recharge.
Electric generators love the plug-in idea (indeed, the earliest champion was probably the Electric Power Research Institute) because it gives them new load at a point where they were often dumping power – overnight. The idea is that plug-in commuters would connect their cars to the grid when they got back from work in the evening, when electricity demand is low. Earlier, they loved electric-only vehicles, such as GM’s EV1, which proved way too expensive for anyone other than the Hollywood set.
The Times blog reported that a key Toyota official told a presentation in New York that the plug-ins won’t deliver the kinds of performance that advocates predict: 100 miles per gallon of gasoline. The problem – as it is with any concept concerning electric cars – is battery technology. The lithium-ion batteries envisioned for the plug-ins, Toyota’s Irv Miller said, become a “boat anchor” once they are discharged. The blog quoted Miller: “This dog doesn’t hunt.”
In a long thumb-sucker in the Sunday, June 7, Washington Post, GM executive Bob Lutz, who has been pushing the Chevy Volt, acknowledged that the car makes little economic sense for most buyers. “If you look at most of the mainstream media, you get the impression that 95 percent of Americans today want a vehicle like the Chevrolet Volt or a [hybrid such as the] Toyota Prius,” Lutz told the Post reporter. “And that, by God, the reason General Motors is in trouble, is that we have not offered a vehicle like that. But when you look at the reality, at today’s fuel prices, most Americans still want a conventional car.” Like the Corvette that former fighter pilot Lutz drives, and the Toyota Highlander that I drive.
So why is GM putting so much money into developing and promoting the Volt plug-in, an almost sure money-loser? It’s about market perception, according to Lutz, noting that GM suffers from a bad case of Toyota envy. “We need [the Volt]. It has a chance to change our image,” Lutz said. Toyota, he noted, loses money on every Prius it sells, but the hybrid gives the Japanese company marketing cachet as seriously green, helping it sell its profitable SUVs and pickup trucks in the U.S. when folks come into the showroom to look at the distinctively-style Prius.
In the New York Times blog, Bill Reinert, Toyota manager of advanced technology, said he suspects claims for plug-in hybrid technology of 100 miles per gallon are hyperbole. Because of the weight of the battery packs, he said, the underlying frame and running gear must get more robust, which means heavier. “We can achieve 50-55 miles per gallon,” he said of plug-in technology. “But after that, there are diminishing returns. We enter the world of Star Trek,” where anything is technologically possible.
I’ve long been skeptical of any electro-automotive technologies. That includes conventional hybrids, which are unlikely pay off their premium cost with lower gasoline consumption during their lifetimes. The plug-in has always struck me as totally pie-in-the-sky, and it seems that credible folks in the auto industry, including Bob Lutz, a “car-guy” to the bone, agree. Battery technology is still the technological Achilles Heel, as they have been since Henry Ford’s wife drove an electric car.
Sorry, electric generators, but I suspect the future of high miles-per-gallon vehicles is a technology from the late 19th century: the diesel engine.
What nuclear renaissance?
Posted on May 31, 2009
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By Kennedy Maize
Remember the nuclear power renaissance coming any day soon now? Fugetaboudit.
While the stars seemed aligned for new nuclear power in the U.S. in 2005 when Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, it’s all turned brown and runny. The promise of some $15 billion in loan guarantees for new nukes in the U.S. in the subsequent four years turned into fool’s gold. While the cost for new nukes escalated dramatically, the Bush administration dragged its feet on loan guarantees. Nothing new has happened so far in the Obama regime.
As the promise of the 2005 act unfolded – very, very slowly — the world economy collapsed, The prospects that the private sector in the U.S. would finance new, untested nuclear plants with ever-rising price tags and uncertain markets essentially vanished. Nothing was working for the U.S. nukes. The financial markets disappeared. The regulators – the Nuclear Regulatory Commission – were characteristically slow in responding to new, allegedly-standardized, reactor designs. The U.S. Department of Energy was typically feckless in implementing the largely-incoherent 2005 energy act.
Meanwhile, the world nuclear energy industry – the French, for the most part – were establishing that they knew far less about nuclear engineering and economics than they had projected to the rest of the world over decades. Their hubris faltered in Finland, and followed in Flamanville, France.
The undoing of the French approach to the nuclear renaissance has come at the Olkiluuto project, adding a third reactor at an existing site. Areva, the French nuclear reactor builder, has been building a newly designed, 1,600-MW evolutionary pressurized water reactor at the site, with a sister station underway at the existing Electricity de France site at Flamanville. The new reactor is Areva’s nuclear future. It’s an uncertain prospect.
Areva has touted the new design as more robust, less likely to have accidents, and more capable of accident response relying on passive features such as gravity, convention, and natural circulation. While not yet approved in the U.S., Areva is pushing its third-generation reactor design to U.S. utilities, arguing that it is the only one of the new generation of reactors that is actually under construction. Baltimore-based Constellation Energy wants to put an Areva unit at its existing Calvert Cliff site on the Chesapeake Bay. But Areva’s pitch that it is the only “real” reactor among the contenders for the nuke revival may not be a really good sales point.
The reactor in Finland has long been over budget and behind schedule. The New York Times reported recently that the price of the reactor, originally pegged at $4.2 billion, is now at least 50% higher. Originally set to start up this summer, Areva is no longer willing to predict when the plant will generate commercial electricity. A clone of the “standardized” plant in France is also over budget and lagging in its schedule, the Times reported.
Noted energy economist Paul Joskow, no enemy of nuclear power, told the Times, “The rollout of new nuclear reactors will be a good deal slower than a lot of people were assuming.” The renaissance, at least in the U.S. and Europe, is largely stagnant. China and India may be a different story.
There are many aspects to why the dream of a new nuclear power revival in the West is unlikely. In the U.S., the notion of “standardized” plants is confounding. U.S. advocates and vendors of new nuclear reactors have cited the French experience, where the state-owned utility, EdF, built only one generation after another of largely cookie-cutter reactors (based on Westinghouse technology) as it rolled out its fleet of nuclear plant.
The U.S., by contrast, built one-of-a-kind plants, even with the same company’s technology. That, it turned out, was a big mistake, vastly increasing costs, complication reactor operations, and otherwise making life difficult for nuclear utilities and the federal regulators. The proliferation of nuclear technologies in the U.S. made a major contribution to the collapse of the nuclear power plant market in the late 1970s, although that was only a part of the problem.
So the U.S. vendors, as they contemplated the possibility of a new generation of reactors in the 21st century at the end of the 20th century, pledged themselves to standardization “down to the wallpaper and carpet” for new plants. Good idea. Hard to implement in practice.
What has that term “standardization” meant? The NRC has approve a handful of new generation of “standardized plant” designs over the past 20 years, suggesting that “standardized” means a bunch of different designs, varying by vendor. The agency has approved two pressurized water reactor designs, both from Westinghouse, two boiling water reactor designs, both from General Electric, and is considering a third PWR, Areva’s design. The Areva plant has not yet won approval for construction in the U.S.
Once construction begins, many nuclear engineers suggest that the notion of “standardization” will undergo another redefinition. “You can’t predict what real challenges a site will present. You can’t predict what will happen when it comes time to turn a blueprint into a real plant,” said one nuclear engineer. “’Standardization’ is a political term. It makes no engineering sense.”
The case of Areva’s Finnish plant, according to the Times, demonstrates that conundrum. The company has acknowledged serious errors in the analysis of the geology of the site and the construction of the basemat – the foundation – of the giant plant. There have also been errors in construction of the reactor vessel. According to the newspaper, Areva has acknowledged that the first-of-a-kind plant will come in at $8 billion, double the original price. Areva blames Finnish regulators for the delay and cost hikes. That’s probably bogus; the Finns have a worldwide reputation for savvy and effective nuclear regulation.
In France, according to the newspaper, regulators have found fault with the concrete basemat pourings and rebar reinforcements at the new plant. The state regulators have also charged that welders working on the reactor containment were not nuclear-qualified, the newspaper reported.
All of this is reminiscent of the bad old days of the 1970s and the first boom in nuclear power construction. A lot of bad work got done, much of it caught by nuclear regulators, but too much overlooked.
Today, far fewer new nuclear generating projects are proposed, and even fewer are underway. But the performance suggests that too few lessons from the past have sunk in.
Seeing the events of the past and the recent events, I suspect that investors will perceive what is going on in the current boomlet unfavorably. They will be unwilling to commit scarce funds in the midst of a worldwide recession to such questionable investments. Bye, bye, nuclear pie.
Polling on warming no surprise
Posted on May 15, 2009
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By Kennedy Maize
As a democrat (that’s with a small “d” and a large “D”), I have a great deal of faith in the wisdom of the American people. That’s why I’m not surprised that the hysteria over alleged man-made global warming is in rapid decline in public opinion polls. It’s no longer in the top 10, or event the top 15, of issues that Americans care about.
Folks are much more concerned about their jobs, their investments, their retirement, and the prospects for the America economy. Well they should. Concerns about global warming, despite the intellectually-dishonest hypes of former vice president Al Gore, just aren’t cutting it with the public, according to a series of recent, reputable polls. Folks don’t care.
But this view among the general public, which has as much scientific backbone as the alarums of the climate catastrophists, doesn’t seem to have made much of a dent in the coverage of the issue by the conventional print and broadcast media, or the views of the policy elite, also known as opinion leaders, particularly those in Congress.
There are exceptions. John Tierney, the excellent and experienced science reporter for the New York Times, has not swallowed the man-made cooling Kool Aide, and gives skeptics an opportunity to make a contrary case on his blog. He’s not an advocate in any scenario, as befits his role as a journalist.
Generally, the media, policymakers in Washington (including electric industry trade groups who are trying to arbitrage damage), and the staff of members of Congress in both parties, seem to have accepted the conventional wisdom, and abandoned any idea of serious probing. At the Electric Power conference in Chicago this May, I heard a couple of smart industry analysts sign onto the entirely unproven hypothesis that there is some sort of physical inertia built into the climate system, and we are now seeing the effects of that in terms of California droughts and wildfires.
That’s entirely bogus, regardless of who is pushing the notion (Obama science advisor John Holdren?). How does the inertia show up in measurable terms? The global climate, by all credible measures, including those of the federal government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has declined over the last decade, and has not risen significantly since the 1950s. Nor is there any evidence – only assertions — of an inertial temperature increase.
A word about John Holdren. He’s on record going back to the 1960s as an environmental catastrophist. He and Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb, circa 1969) together ardently argued that economic growth and advancement of technology would lead to greater worldwide poverty and starvation. They are both neo-Malthusians, and have been proven consistently wrong at every turn. Yet some environmentalists, including those in the Obama administration, apparently revere their work.
Now Holdren is advising the White House on issues he has never gotten right. I confess I don’t get it. I can’t imagine a worse choice for the president’s science advisor (well, maybe Paul Ehrlich would be worse).
Similarly, I heard folks who should know better at the EP meeting in Chicago cite Al Gore’s entirely discredited, hysterical projections of drastic sea level increases caused by warming. Even if the models that Gore relies upon are close to accurate, the results are sea level rises in inches, not the multiple feet that Gore claims and too many folks in the industry have apparently decided not to challenge. Scientists have thoroughly debunked Gore’s sea level claims, yet he continues to advance them, without challenge.
Gore also continues to claim that global warming today is influencing hurricane frequency and strength. That’s also bogus. None of the major hurricane researchers in the U.S. buy that analysis, including at least one major researcher who has recanted on his original support for the hypothesis that warming is boosting hurricane activity. Nonetheless, Gore continues to push that case.
There is a political correctness aspect to warming politics in Washington, where one dare not suggest that the conventional, politically-approved, view of climate science is flawed. As a result, advocates of renewable energy and opponents of fossil fuels are driving the policy debate in ways that I believe will be disastrous: enormous increases in the costs of electricity with no benefits to the environment. Based on what I saw in Chicago — the reluctance of power generators to push back — I fear that the outcome I suggested is being teed-up in Congress.
Fortunately, the naked politics of special interests will make it nearly impossible for the Obama administration to implement any kind of serious CO2 reduction policy anytime soon. That’s a good thing. Congress is unlikely to go very far to limit existing coal-fired electric generation. Half the states in the U.S. have significant coal deposits. That equals 50 senators, plus a few on ideological grounds.
On top of that, other industries that are carbon emitters, including steel, cement, and cars, will also make their views known to Congress, as American Electric Power CEO Mike Morris made clear at the Electric Power meeting in Chicago. The likely outcome, for at least the next year or so, and I’m guessing four years or so, is gridlock.
I also suspect that as congressional staffers dig deeply into the problems of the unpredictability and remote locale of wind and solar, and the need to built lots of visible, expensive, high-voltage transmission over thousands of miles, a lot of the sizzle will depart from the argument. It will begin to concentrate more on the steak and the potatoes.
GE Continues to Wander in the Wilderness
Posted on May 7, 2009
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By Kennedy Maize
General Electric, once the most successful and admired of U.S. corporations, has become “Little Bo Peep.” She’s lost her sheep and doesn’t know where to find them.
GE, in a press release in early May, announced that it was eschewing participation in industry trade shows in favor of “an increased effort on more GE-owned customer conferences and user group meetings.” In other words, the giant company is shying away from head-to-head marketing competition with its rivals in favor of schmoozing with its captive customers.
In a press release, GE said, entirely disingenuously, “With the challenges facing the industry today, from greenhouse gas concerns, to energy independence, to increased government investment, we are finding that the best solutions come from engaging customers and topical experts in open dialogue. Some of our best interactions have taken place at events we were able to organize locally, around specific issues, and with key experts at the table. Our plan is to do more of that and engage our customers in solving some of the toughest challenges facing the industry.” Kumbaya.
In other words, says GE, we don’t want to engage our rivals in “solving some of the toughest challenges facing the industry.” We want to organize the agenda and control the discussion. Bully, bully, brother!
Two things are at work here. First, GE is saving money by not appearing at industry trade shows. Fair enough. It’s tough business market and controlling costs is important.
Second, GE is ducking market competition. That’s not a good prescription for success in the long run. When you are getting clobbered in the marketplace, losing money and market share, don’t retreat from competition and try lock up your customers. That’s what GE’s current market strategy appears to be.
Former and legendary GE CEO Jack Welch must be cringing. Current CEO Jeff Immelt is a catastrophe. I unloaded all my GE shares (at a substantial profit) when Welch retired. Immelt is into political correctness, trying to read the tea leaves in Washington, promoting profitless (and loss-inducing) “green” energy, in hopes that someday, far-far-away, it might make some money.
GE traditionally made money from its financial unit, but that’s largely evaporated. GE is now in the government’s regulatory gun sights, along with other investment banks, and had to accept government money, although GE Capital appears to be in somewhat better shape than most. A recent Barron’s blog noted that GE Capital stock is worth “a buck or so” a share. At last count, GE’s general stock was trading at $14/share, down 60% from a year earlier.
Under Immelt — the cool, trendy, open-collared exec — the company has been chasing new businesses. First, green energy, called “ecomagination,” whatever the heck that means. Most recently is a $6 billion foray into healthcare, called “Healthymagination.” Isn’t that cute?
Jack Welch wouldn’t be chasing new business opportunities. He’d be working on how to make GE’s existing businesses more robust and profitable. When he became CEO, he had the nickname of “Neutron Jack,” because he cleared out large GE bureaucracies but left the business intact.
GE needs to understand that less — fewer business lines, more concentration on what is working, and less attention to trendy stuff such as renewable energy — is more for investors. The bottom line is much more important than the green horizon.
Noted a long-time admirer of Welch: “Jack would jettison any business that wasn’t number one or two in their market segment. Ruthless but effective. If Immelt followed Welch with the same philosophy, he would be an emperor with no clothes — he
would have to sell everything.”
FERC’s Wellinghoff bloviates on wind
Posted on April 29, 2009
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Jon Wellinghof, the latest chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, is, by his own words, a doofus. As reported in Power News this week, Wellinghoff said the U.S. may never need new baseload electric generating capacity.
Why? Because wind will be so cheap it will get sent out first in an economic dispatch regime. He told a U.S. Energy Association press event in Washington, “Baseload capacity really used to only mean in an economic dispatch, which you dispatch first, what would be the cheapest thing to do. Well, ultimately wind’s going to be the cheapest thing to do, so you’ll dispatch this first.”
Hogwash. First, wind simply isn’t dispatchable. Unlike coal, gas, nuclear, and hydro, no power system can count on when wind power will be available. Even if it were free (which is a joke), wind wouldn’t be at the top of a dispatch list. Also, there’s no evidence that I’ve seen that wind will ever be “the cheapest thing to do.” Even if it were reliable, wind would not rank on the top of the order for sending out power.
Wind, by all accounts, has a capacity factor of about 30%. That means that it isn’t available 70% of the time. On top of that, the 30% of the time that wind power is available isn’t very predictable. That’s not a recipe for baseload dispatch.
According to an account in The Energy Daily, Wellinghoff said, “I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism. If you can shape your renewables, you don’t need fossil fuel or nuclear plants to run all the time.”
That is, to put it gently, nuts. How does a power system “shape” renewables? Beats the heck out of me. As for nukes, regulators have determined (probably correctly) that they must run 24/7. So that’s mandatory baseload, something that no amount of wind can back out of the dispatch order.
Former energy secretary Jim Schlesinger and my long-time friend Bob Hirsch, a former federal energy agency renewables manager, noted in an Washington Post op-ed last week, “Why are we ignoring things we know? We know that the sun doesn’t always shine and that the wind doesn’t always blow. That means that solar cells and wind energy systems don’t always provide electric power. Nevertheless, solar and wind energy seem to have captured the public’s support as potentially being the primary or total answer to our electric power needs.”
That’s an apt observation and critique. And Wellinghoff, an acolyte of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), a former Nevada consumer advocate, and author of the state’s renewable portfolio standard, seems oblivious to the limitations of wind.
Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), representing a state with little wind resources, said, “To suggest a few sources of alternative energy alone could handle our future energy needs – in place of new nuclear or coal plants – defies reality.” He’s got it about right. There’s nothing wrong with wind. But it’s role in future electric generation is fundamentally limited. If Jon Wellinghof doesn’t understand that, he needs to go back to “Power 101” class
In the 1980s, there was a great debate about building new electric generating capacity. At the time, the advocates of peaking power – primarily the natural gas and independent energy sector – argued that the nation didn’t really need new baseload capacity. They were right. Baseload was overbuilt.
But today, it’s clear that baseload is running short. Wind won’t cut it. Jon Wellinghoff simply doesn’t know about which he is bloviating.
EPA CO2 poposal is anti-life and anti-science
Posted on April 19, 2009
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By Kennedy Maize
The Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is declaring that carbon dioxide, a life-giving and ubiquitous atmospheric chemical, is a threat to public health. That’s a completely illogical determination, but also completely expected.
The notion that carbon dioxide is a pollutant has nothing to do with chemistry or physics or biology or climatology, but everything to do with politics. The life-sustaining molecule makes photosynthesis possible. Without CO2 – as even those who want to limit its role in our atmosphere would acknowledge – life on this planet would cease.
Yet, says the EPA in a proposed determination that completely defies science, CO2 is a killer pollutant, a threat to public health. Why? Because CO2, and other trace gases in the atmosphere, allegedly cause the global climate to warm. The increase in these gases, say the advocates of CO2 reductions, are the result of man-made actions, in the form of coal-fired and natural gas power plants, cars, and other uses of fuels derived from dead dinosaurs. There is, of course, no evidence for this assertion.
And is a warmer climate bad? Absolutely yes, say the would-be regulators, again without empirical evidence. Mankind is altering the climate in ways that we can’t predict, based on physical evidence. But they must be bad, the regulators assert. Numerous studies by credentialed academics predict gloom and doom as a result of a warming Earth. Is there any reality beyond computer projections based on unwarranted assumptions? No.
On the contrary, a warmer climate may be a better climate. It’s not by any means a settled argument. People are moving to Florida, South Texas, and other warmer climes for reasons that make sense to them. Global warming, according to many of the dubious computers models, will mean warmer winters, not hotter summers. Who can object to that?
The policymakers – including the Obama administration — assume that climate warming is universally bad, based in part on bogus assessments from academics who want to prove that their apocalyptic visions are valid.
That’s too bad. One can conjure up many scenarios of the results of climate warming (if it is likely). I suspect that Carl Hiassen and Tim Dorsey would view Florida sinking into the sea as a pretty good idea. It would take a long time, providing the two Florida-based eco-and-wacko novelists plenty of material. Nor would they necessarily object to the final outcome.
Skepticism would be a welcome addition to the Obama administration’s science team. That isn’t in the cards. The global warming religion is triumphant in Washington today; heretics should be burned at the stake, as long as that doesn’t result in carbon dioxide emissions. Former Clinton administration energy official Joe Romm has declared that climate change skeptic Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists of the age, is a fool. Romm, I suggest, is the clown in this act.
I’d like to organize a science curriculum on CO2 for grade schooolers. If I could present it before the kids themselves, I would ask, “Is CO2 bad?” I suspect the answer would be a resounding “Yes.” Should it be eliminated entirely from our atmosphere? I’m sure the answer would be “Yes.”
Then I’d ask, “Do you like trees, flowers, fruits and vegetables?” The kids would probably answer, “Yes.” “Do you like dogs, cats, rabbits, and ponies?” “Yes.”
Do you know that if you eliminate all carbon dioxide from the air around us, you will kill all the trees, flowers, fruits, and vegetables; all the dogs, cats, rabbits, and horses? That’s a true statement. Is that what you want?
The answer would be “No.”
The point I’m trying to make is that carbon dioxide is not a “pollutant” in any sentient definition, but an essential part of life. The convoluted reasoning of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases (primarily, but not entirely, CO2) as pollutants defies logic and science.
One can argue that some CO2 is good but too much is bad. That makes logical sense. Ultimately it’s specious in this case. The attempt to define what is “too much” crashes against empirical reality. There is simply no way to determine how much CO2 is too much, in terms of the concentrations we’re talking about today. Is 300 parts per million too much? How about 350 ppm? How does one determine the impact of the difference?
Today, policy on climate change is based on computer models that have very little empirical support. Even the physical mechanisms that the models claim to understand are flakey. They don’t understand the interrelationships among the terrestrial earth, the aquatic planet (70% of the surface of the globe is water), and the clouds that determine so much of weather. In short, they are crap shoots, not precise predictors.
Climate models are worthwhile scientific enterprises. They can help us understand what we know and don’t know about the climate and direct our inquiries. They are not useful guides to public policy. Indeed, they are largely false indicators. Policy makers should view the global circulation models as interesting, but far from determinative, inputs to policy.
The Obama administration’s attempt to regulate CO2 through the existing Clean Air Act is empty-headed, but may be intended to push Congress to act. I suspect the courts will reject the EPA’s attempt to define a life-giving molecule at one concentration as a chemical life-killer at another, at levels of parts per million.
That would put the issue where it belongs: in Congress. Because CO2 emissions are so controversial, and touch so many industries and congressional districts, many of the solons would have been happy to see the issue defined by the courts, absolving them of the need to grapple with the nettlesome issue.
I don’t think that’s going to happen. Congress is going to have to make the decision here, and I suspect it will be that CO2 isn’t a conventional pollutant, despite the views of the environmental community and many in the Obama administration. Back to regulatory and political square one.
Is a smart grid stupid?
Posted on April 10, 2009
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By Kennedy Maize
A report in the Wall Street Journal that Russian and Chinese spy hackers have penetrated the U.S. electric power grid, and left malware and root kits, cyber time bombs, to explode in the future strikes me as bogus. The story had no named sources, and the details were sketchy at best. Where were the penetrations? How could a sabotaged substation bring down the grid? Which grid were they talking about?
My suspicion is that someone in the U.S. government with a bureaucratic axe to grind –maybe the Department of Energy, maybe the Department of Homeland Security – planted the story in order to raise the profile of cybersecurity on the grid at a time when the Obama administration is due to issue a report on the issue. Major funding could be at stake. As someone who has covered energy and environmental politics in Washington for 40 years, this would come as no surprise.
Cybersecurity and the grid is clearly is an issue worth discussing.
That’s why I suggest that the vaunted “smart grid” ultimately could be stupid and, so far, is incoherent. To date, the smart grid resembles what former supreme court justice Potter Stewart in 1964 said about pornography: “I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it.”
For starters, what is the grid? Is it high-voltage, long-distance transmission? Is it local distribution to the house and factory? Is it both? Does anybody know?
Is the role of the smart grid to interconnect remote generation of renewables – wind, solar, and geothermal – to load, or is it to promote efficient use of existing technologies and ideas such as time-of-day pricing and peak shaving? Two different roles, and two different technical requirements.
If future investments in the grid are designed to bring renewables to market, what’s required is a strong, long-distance grid. Muscles, not smarts. If the goal is to interconnect your toaster to your local utility so they can talk to each other, that’s something else entirely. Both roles are expensive; to pretend that they are mutually achievable is fantasy.
There are additional fundamental questions that will delay any major deployment. Where is the demarcation between the federal authority over interstate transmission and the state authority over retail distribution? How do the FERC, the NERC and state and local authorities fit in? This was a fundamental issue when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the 1990s was considering electric competition (known as the “bright line debate”). It was also a key reason why Congress was unable to deal with electricity policy from 1992 to 2005. At both the FERC and Congress, in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the policymakers ducked the issue.
More questions. Should the “smart grid” use existing, available internet interconnection protocols, or separate, cybersecure, networks? Which course renders the grid less susceptible to outside attack, and what course requires less smarts and more muscle? Is reliability and defensibility more or less important than intelligent behavior?
These are basic questions about the notion of a “smart grid” that precede second-order, but also difficult, questions about what steps might be necessary to protect the grid, whether smart or strong, from attack. If a smart, two-way, grid requires a series of modem-like dongles clinging to distribution lines, what’s to prevent anyone with a .22 rifle from wrecking havoc and rendering the smart grid brainless?
How can a long-distance, high-voltage transmission system connecting renewable generation in the remote areas of the U.S. to concentrated loads in the East be protected from a couple of wing nuts with C5 shape charges from blowing up the transmission towers and bringing down the entire system?
Is a neural network transmission and distribution system – modeled on the Internet – more or less susceptible to cyber attacks? Is software available to isolate attacks and reroute data? That was the basic idea behind the Internet when Vint Cerf worked at DOD and invented the internet protocol, but it seems that defense information systems have become vulnerable to attack as a result.
In summary, I doubt that hackers from anywhere have mounted credible threats against the U.S. transmission and distribution grid. That’s because the current grid is stupid. That may be a good thing. A stupid but muscular grid may be better for the nation than a smart, but vulnerable, grid. I’d spend the money on muscle and worry about smarts later.
Will nano-bio-batteries save plug-in bhbrids?
Posted on April 9, 2009
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By Kennedy Maize
Is biology the key to improved battery performance? Researchers in a recent issue of Science magazine describe how genetically-engineered viruses could boost the power of lithium ion batteries, expected to be the batteries of choice for plug-in hybrid vehicles.
A research team led by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used genetic modification and nanotechnology to improve the ability of Li+ ion batteries to deliver more energy at higher rates of charging and discharging.
Say the researchers, “This benign low temperature biological scaffold could facilitate fabrication of electrodes from materials that have been excluded because of their extremely low electronic conductivity.” The research paper notes, “Development of materials that deliver more energy at high charge/discharge rates is important for high power applications including portable electronic devices and hybrid electric vehicles.”
The paper notes, “Lithium bio battery electrodes store and release electrical energy by insertion of Li+ ions and electrons through the electrode materials. Therefore, increasing transport of Li+ ions and electrons can enhance energy storage at high charge and discharge rates.”
The MIT team was able to manipulated two genes from a common virus used in nanotechnology research (M13) to attach iron phosphate, an excellent conductor, to carbon nanotube networks to create a structure for more efficient electrodes.
Iron phosphates, the report says, are “promising Li+ ion battery positive electrode materials due to their lower toxicity, lower cost, and improved safety through improved chemical, thermal, and structural stability for high power applications.” But practical use of iron phosphate chemistry has been limited by poor charge and discharge rates and fading of capacity after too-few cycles of use.
The research paper claims, “By developing this two-gene system with a universal handle to pick up electrically conducting carbon nanotubes, we facilitated a method to realize nanoscale electrical wiring for high power lithium ion batteries using basic biological principles.”
The Army’s Institute of Collaborative Biotechnologies and the National Science Foundation, along with support from the Korean government, funded the research.