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The Plug-in Dead-end

By Kennedy Maize

Plug-in hybrid electric cars? Phooey. They don’t make economic sense. They don’t represent “green” technology. But they do help the electric utility industry, which has been pushing them hard for a decade, as a way to get some load and revenue from power that otherwise would be dumped.

Now, my curmudgeonly view gets confirmed. The National Resource Council – the working arm of the National Academies of Science – in a December 14 report mandated by Congress and funded through the Department of Energy – concluded that plug-in hybrids are likely to be a dead end at least for the next couple of decades. This despite massive federal subsidies.

The outrageously-high costs of plug-ins, said the academy, “are unlikely to drastically decrease in the near future….Cost to manufacture plug-in hybrid electric vehicles in 2010 are estimated to be as much as $18,000 more than for an equivalent conventional vehicle. Although a mile driven on electricity is cheaper than one driven on gasoline, it will likely take several decades before the upfront costs decline enough to be offset by the lifetime fuel savings. Subsidies in the tens to hundreds of billion of dollars over that period will be needed if plug-ins are to achieve rapid penetration of the U.S. automobile market. Even with these efforts, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are not expected to significantly impact oil consumption or carbon emissions before 2030.”

So, it is clear, subsidies for plug-ins, including R&D support, and tax write-offs to purchasers, are not going to produce significant national benefits. Let’s hope that Congress is paying attention (although that’s not likely).

The problem with the hybrids is well-known: battery technology. The batteries of choice for the plug-in sedans proposed by GM, Ford, and others remain lithium-ion technology. The NAS report notes that lithium-ion batteries have basically maxed out in terms of performance and cost reductions through scale economies. No improvements to the existing technology or new technologies are on the horizon. “Battery technology has been developing rapidly,” says the academy, “but steep declines in cost do not appear likely over the next couple of years because lithium-ion batteries are already produced in large quantities for cell phones and laptop computers.”

Plug-ins, relative to conventional hybrids, won’t have much impact on oil consumption by 2030, says the academy, particularly if fuel economy in conventional cars continues to improve. If 40 million plug-ins were in the U.S. fleet in 2030, says the report, they might save 0.2 million barrels of oil per day compared to conventional technologies. That’s a paltry 2% of current U.S. light-duty vehicle fuel consumption.

Nor will plug-ins make a dent in CO2 emissions (for those who care). The plug-ins will produce less carbon emissions than conventional gas and diesel vehicles, but not less than the non-plug-in hybrids, “after accounting for emission at generating stations supplying their electric power….”

The NAS report prompted a Dec. 18 Washington Post editorial, noting – which the NAS report did not address – that plug-in subsidies will flow to upper-income people, “the sort of people who can even contemplate buying, insuring and maintaining a car that is more expensive than usual.” The report says that improvements in efficiency of conventional cars – hybrid and old-fashioned internal combustion only – would reduce gasoline consumption by 40% over the next 40 years – without requiring taxpayer dollars.

“Politicians,” said the Post, “prefer plug-in electric hybrids and other flashy vehicle technologies. Pouring on subsidies makes it looks like the government is doing something effective about unemployment, energy independence and environmental pollution. The recent evidence, however, suggests otherwise.”

Energy roundup

By Kennedy Maize

Having just returned from three weeks of vacation, where I paid no attention to power issues, here are some items I’ve discovered since my return. I hope my take will spark some conversations.

First, “Climategate.” This flap of major proportions, threatening to unravel the alleged scientific consensus behind global warming, blew up while I was gone. My email queue was filled with messages about it when I returned.

What to make of the apparent scientific fakery behind the work of the climate scientists? My recommendation is to read Bob Peltier’s commentary in the current issue of Coal Power magazine. He paints the problems the revelations of the UK’s Climate Research Unit quite lucidly, and predicts, I think accurately, that the action will also move to the U.S.

Global warming evangelists are, predictably, trying to downplay the messages depicting the massaging of the scientific data. “No big deal,” they claim. “Science is messy. Beside that, the National Academy of Sciences vetted the work in 2006 and found it valid.”

No quite. I covered the 2006 NAS report, and it was not a clean bill of scientific health for the climate hysterics. As the emails discuss, one of the issues facing the scientists working with Michael Mann to built the “hockey stick” curve was how to deal with anomalies. Tree-ring data indicate that 1,000 AD was hotter than today, with no significant man-made carbon dioxide emissions. So the scientists manipulated the data to hide the inconvenient truth.

The academy said in “Surface Temperature Reconstruction for the Last 2,000 Years” (ISBN: 978-309-10225-4) that there is pretty good data for the temperature of the planet from the past 400 years. “Less confidence can be placed in large-scale surface temperature reconstructions for the period from AD 900 to 1600, although available proxy evidence indicates that temperatures at many, but not all, individual locations were higher during the past 25 years than during any period of comparable length since AD 900,” said the NAS report.

The scientific solons added, “Very little confidence can be assigned to statements concerning the hemispheric mean or global mean surface temperature prior to about AD 900, primarily because of the scarcity of precisely dated proxy evidence.”

Next, smart meters. Matt Wald in the New York Times Dec. 14 reported that smart meters are prompting consumer revulsion and revolution. “Consumers in California are in open revolt, and officials in Connecticut and Texas are questioning whether the rush to install meters benefits the public.”

In California, Pacific Gas & Electric has installed 4 million smart meters and plans another 6 million in the next three years. One part of the problem is that the utility bills the customers immediately in rates – at about $220 per meter – but any real customer savings from the technology are years away. The only immediate savings flow to the utility, as the meters allow remote reading, cutting costs. For consumers, the meters alert the utility when a customer has lost power.

Wald’s report notes that Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has convinced state utility regulators and Connecticut Light & Power to run a pilot program before a widespread roll-out of smart meters. In Texas, the Office of Public Utility Council, a state consumer-protection agency, persuaded the state’s utilities to mount a multi-million dollar education program on advanced meters.

Will the revolt against smart meters spread? Stay tuned. My guess is that it will.

Finally, more on the subject of shale gas. The news is that oil-and-gas giant ExxonMobil is buying natural gas company XTO Energy for $31 billion in stock and assumption of $10 billion of XTO debt.

Based in Fort Worth, Texas, XTO has become a major player in both the Barnett shale reserves in Texas, and the Marcellus shale formation in Appalachia. The company says Appalachia will be a major focus of its production in 2010 and beyond.

I’d look for more M&A action in oil and gas in coming months, as shale gas continues to be the hottest play on the planet. Big oil has the resources to gobble up independent gas companies. I’d look for a bidding war for Chesapeake Energy, a major player in Appalachia and the Marcellus shale.

Will the Smart Grid Compromise Privacy?

By Kennedy Maize

WASHINGTON, Nov. 19, 2009 — This blog has highlighted my concerns about the security of the smart grid for many months. Now, there’s a new potential problem with the smart grid: privacy.

Washington Post technology security writer Brian Krebs, in a recent posting, notes that “privacy experts are warning that the so-called ‘smart grid’ efforts could usher in a new class of concerns, as utilities begin collecting more granular data about consumers’ daily power consumption.”

Krebs points to a study this month by the Ontario, Canada, Information and Privacy Commissioner, and the Future of Privacy Forum. The study, “Smart Privacy for the Smart Grid: Embedding Privacy into the Design of Electricity Conservation,” observes, “Modernization of the grid will increase the level of personal information detail available as well as the instances of collection, use and disclosure of personal information. Instead of measuring energy use at the end of each billing period, smart meters will provide this information at much shorter intervals.”

That sort of information, says the report, can be gathered and used or sold. “Electric utilities and other providers may have access to information about what customers are using, when they are using it, and what devices are involved,” says the study. “An electricity usage profile could become a source of behavioral information on a granular level.”

In September, the Cyber Security Coordination Task Group, chartered by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a Commerce Department agency, offered a “privacy impact assessment” of the various smart grid concepts. Among the conclusions:

* The entities involved in formulating the smart grid lack privacy standards.

* Electric utilities don’t have consistent policies about personally-identifiable information.

* Few state regulators have considered the privacy implications of a smart grid, despite a National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners’ 2000 regulation calling for such oversight.

* Distributed energy and smart meters will reveal personal information, and roaming smart devices, such as plug-in hybrid cars recharging at a friend’s house, will reveal additional personal information.

The Canadian report identifies some of the types of information that the smart grid might display: “Whether individuals tend to cook microwavable meals or meals on the stove; whether they have breakfast; the time at which individuals are at home; whether a house has an alarm system and how often it is activated; when occupants usually shower; when the TV and/or the computer is on; whether appliances are in good condition; the number of gadgets in the home; if the home has a washer and dryer and how often they are used; whether lights and appliances are used at off hours, such as the middle of the night; whether and how often exercise equipment such as a treadmill is used.”

This is all obviously commercially-useful information, not just in aggregate but also specific to a household. Grappling with the privacy question is another task that must be solved before the smart grid can appear in any major rollout.

I’ve said it before — and I suspect I will be saying it again, multiple times — that I prefer a strong grid to a smart grid. I don’t care nearly as much about how my local utility – Allegheny Energy – cycles my heat pump. I care a lot more about whether the heat pump comes on when I want it in the winter and summer. Gimme muscles in my grid, not smarts.

Kick the Can on Energy Policy: Bravo

By Kennedy Maize

WASHINGTON, Nov. 16, 2009 — Call it “kick the can.” The Obama administration, according to the New York Times, has persuaded (does than mean big-footed?) the rest of the world attending the upcoming Copenhagen climate change confab to adopt a policy duck. It walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and defecates like a duck.

Acknowledging that there is not enough political support for global warming legislation in the U.S. Congress (it’s clear that the Obama administration’s energy legislation would not command even 50 votes in the Senate), the White House is looking for a way to save international face in Copenhagen in December. Their approach is a familiar “declare victory and bring the troops home” strategy.

The Times’s Helene Cooper, an excellent reporter, wrote on Nov. 14, “ President Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off the difficult task of reaching a climate change agreement at a global climate conference scheduled for next month, agreeing instead to make it the mission of the Copenhagen conference to reach a less specific ‘politically binding’ agreement that would punt the most difficult issues into the future.”

Just what does “politically binding” mean? The answer must be: Not binding in any way. It’s a classic duck. As several commentators have noted, the administration cannot commit to international rules that don’t face congressional scrutiny. They can’t bind anybody to anything.

What the administration and other world leaders have agreed to, in advance of the Copenhagen meeting, is a political veil that essentially covers nothing. It is policy dressed up as striptease. It reveals a lot, but ultimately accomplishes nothing. “Politically binding?” Give me a break. The construct is inherently oxymoronic.

Clearly many world leaders believe that there is political advantage in a worldwide attempt to attack carbon dioxide emissions – a follow-on to the failed 1997 Kyoto Treaty (to which the U.S. Senate, after Vice President Al Gore brokered the deal, correctly flipped a 95-0 political bird to the treaty). There is no doubt, as I read it, that world leaders believe that international approaches to global warming won’t work. In other words, there is worldwide cynicism directed at anything that might come out of Copenhagen. But they can’t admit that.

Don’t read me wrong here. I think any international agreement on global warming is a charade. So if Copenhagen fails, that’s good news as I read it. Global agreements to deal with an environmental issue that is undefined and unmeasurable, but incredibly costly to taxpayers without a clear benefit, aren’t a good idea. Let’s attack real problems. How about malaria control, potable water, and access to electricity?

I chuckle at the inability of the U.S. administration to implement its flawed approach to the subject. If the climate problem is real – which I doubt – the solution is clearly not a worldwide regulatory regime that, by every analysis, won’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly. Cap-and-trade on a worldwide basis enriches traders who can take advantage of securitized pollution positions, but won’t ultimately reduce carbon dioxide emissions significantly.

So it’s fine by me that the administration has adopted a strategy that essentially says, “Let’s kick the can down the road and see what happens next.” That’s a practical policy. It works. It make sense to me.

Yucca Mountain is Dead and Gone

By Kennedy Maize

I come not to praise Yucca Mountain as a final repository for spent nuclear fuel, but to bury it. The lid on the Yucca coffin has long been in place, but now the Obama administration is nailing it down, according to a report in The Energy Daily. That’s good news.

The newsletter account says that the Department of Energy in December will abandon its license application at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the Nevada waste dump. Energy Daily says it has obtained documents outlining the Obama administration’s plan to sink Yucca Mountain for good. I have no reason to challenge that reporting.

Energy Daily reports that the Yucca obituary will come in DOE’s fiscal year 2011 budget proposal, which the administration will submit to Congress in early 2010. The budget request, according to the report, will say, “All license defense activities will be terminated in December 2009.”

It’s about time. The choice of Yucca Mountain was the result of a rigged, political process that could not help but come up with a bogus site for spent nuclear fuel. I’ve been arguing this case since Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982.

The act, concocted by the late Rep. Morris Udall (D-Ariz.), chairman of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, and Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.,) chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, was built on a familiar but unsustainable premise: let’s put lots of regions at risk, and they will have to come up with a compromise. So the bill established a goal of deep geological storage of “high level” waste (initially spent nuclear fuel and later some bomb wastes), and set up a competition among various geological areas of the country for the storage.

There was salt, basalt, tuff, and granite. There would be two rounds of site characterization, carried out by the staff at DOE. Udall’s mantra was “spread the pain.” The nuclear waste program would be financed by a special tax on atomic generation.

The Udall bill also set up a system where the governor of a state with a candidate for the repository could veto the selection, with Congress able to override the veto. It was a recipe for the staggering follies of the next 27 years.

As J. Samuel Walker, the official historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, noted in his 2009 book The Road to Yucca Mountain, “It was soon clear that the law did not provide the solution that optimists had predicted. DOE, in accordance with the requirements of the law, conducted environmental evaluations of possible disposal sites and selected five leading candidates: salt deposits in Mississippi, Texas, and Utah, basalt formations at Hanford [Washington], and tuff rock in Nevada.”

In May 1986, then Energy Secretary John Herrington, fearing losses in the upcoming national elections, particularly in the second-round candidate states, mostly in New England, suspended the second round of site characterizations. Herrington limited the sites to Texas, Hanford, and Yucca Mountain, in Nevada. He essentially signed a death sentence for the 1982 law.

Enter influential journalist Luther Carter of Science magazine, who suggested short-stopping the whole convoluted process and mandating storage at Yucca Mountain, where Uncle Sam already owned the land and the geology looked promising. Bennett Johnston, a nuclear advocate who had already inserted legislative language protecting Louisiana salt deposits against being candidates for nuclear waste storage, jumped on Carter’s proposal.

In 1987, Johnson sponsored the what the little-known, junior Democratic member of the U.S. Senate from Nevada, Harry Reid, dubbed the “Screw Nevada” bill. Congress passed the legislation, which stopped further site studies and pointed the government’s finger, you can guess which one, at Yucca Mountain.

But over the next 20 years, Nevada and other opponents of siting at Yucca Mountain were able to play a brilliant game of “stall ball,” dragging out the process with well-founded technical and political objections to the Nevada site. During the Clinton administration, the road to Yucca Mountain got clogged with political obstacles and technical objections. It didn’t get smoother during the George W. Bush years.

Who knew that Harry Reid would become a Democratic colossus? A two-term, back-bench member of the U.S. House, in 1986 Reid won election to the Senate against a former Democratic House member Jim Santini, turned Republican. Reid easily won reelection in 1992, and narrowly escaped a Republican landslide in 1998.

After serving as a successful Senate Democratic whip (vote counter and organizer) for several years, in 2005 Reid succeeded South Dakota Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle, who was defeated in 2004, as Democratic leader. When the Democrats recaptured the U.S. Senate in 2006, Reid became Senate majority leader. All the while, he made his opposition to Yucca Mountain a key to his home-state appeal.

When President Obama was running for the White House in 2008, he made it clear that he would support Reid on killing Yucca Mountain. Now, the administration has paid off on its promise.

What comes next? Probably a lot of dithering and feckless hand-wringing. The Bush administration understood that Yucca was dead political meat and was looking at some sort of allegedly-benign fuel reprocessing as the waste solution. That didn’t work.

Look for the Obama administration to appoint a “blue ribbon” panel of experts to come up with a proposal in a couple of years. In the meantime, spent nuclear fuel will remain at reactor sites. That’s not a bad outcome, as I’ve argued for more than a decade. The NRC says the fuel is safe. What else is required?

I’ve been writing variants of this screed for more than two decades. I hope this is the last I have to write about nuclear waste at least until I get into the retirement home.

Smart Grid Grants May be Stupid

By Kennedy Maize

President Obama in late October announced that the Department of Energy would award $3.4 billion in grants to allegedly “smart grid” technologies. As I parse the awards, my reaction is that they are fundamentally stupid.

Most of the money – to be matched by the private sector (those matches presumably are tax deductible and, for utilities, recoverable in customer rates) – goes to installation of smart meters. Why is federal stimulus needed for smart metering? Many utilities over the past couple of decades have seen it in their economic interest to install various versions of smart meters, including the obvious advantage of remote meter reading.

The smart grid sounds cool, trendy, and hip. It is, as I have expressed before, a distraction from the more important goal of a strong, fully-interconnected grid. The smart grid federal funds strike me as grandstanding, not something that Uncle Sam needs to fund to advance the national interest.

The real grid problem is the gridlock (that’s the correct term) between the states and the federal government over high-voltage interstate commerce. Congress tried – with typical half-measures – and failed to address that problem in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. Fiddling around with the undefined “smart grid” in response to that failure – a tactic promoted by the Electric Power Research Institute, which is trolling for a new mission and research dollars – strikes me as misguided.

Pardon me if I think the awards are political. The single largest grant – or loan, if you believe that loans without collateral or interest are really loans – is in, surprise, Delaware, where DOE will put up $528 million to reopen a General Motors plant in Wilmington, employing 2,000 union workers at a Fisker Automotive plant to make high-end electric cars. The plant had produced sporty two-seaters for Pontiac and Saturn, both brands that GM has now jettisoned.

Based in California, Fisker has yet to roll out its cars for the auto market. The company plans to produce a mid-sized, luxury four-door, plug-in hybrid in 2012, at some $89,000 a copy. That’s for a car that will run 50 miles on electricity before switching to gasoline. But it qualifies for major smart grid money from Washington to make someday-to-be commercial cars in Delaware. What this has to do with smart grid technology frankly escapes me.

But I get the politics. Vice President Joe Biden, a former Democratic senator from Delaware, surely had something to do with this award. That’s particularly true because his son Beau Biden, Delaware’s attorney general, likely is running to fill his father’s former senate seat next year, against Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.), the only Republican who has been able to win statewide in recent years (Delaware has only one House seat). Castle, a moderate Republican (is that an oxymoron?) was also governor (1984-1992).

The White House denies that the Delaware award has anything to do with politics. And Claude Rains as Inspector Renault in Casablanca (1942) was “shocked, shocked” to discover gambling at Rick’s Place. At which point, a croupier handed Renault a fist-full of cash.

Is ANWR drilling key to climate legislation?

By Kennedy Maize

Washington, OCTOBER 21, 2009 — With prospects for a new international agreement on climate change (Kyoto II) in Copenhagen in December faltering, environmentalists in the U.S. may be facing a Hobson’s choice with the climate-energy legislation now before the U.S. Congress. The choice may be to agree to drilling for oil and gas in offshore Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which the environmental community has resisted for over 30 years, or the give up cap-and-trade legislation. Take it or leave it?

The New York Times reports that the costs of climate control are likely to kill the Copenhagen meeting. The Economist also predicts failure in Copenhagen. The Obama administration has acknowledged that it will not agree to a global treaty – a follow-on to the ill-fated 1997 Kyoto Protocol – unless the agreement can win approval in Congress. That’s unlikely.

Now, major climate change and energy legislation faces the U.S. Senate, after a controversial bill (Waxman-Markey), unlikely to win support in the Senate, passed the House.

Enter Senate oil-state members from both parties, particularly the two Alaskans. They haven’t made their demands specific, but the political body language is clear. If the administration were to support oil exploration and production in the tiny coastal portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where most petroleum geologists believe large onshore resources are waiting for drill bits, and offshore Alaska, similarly resource-rich, maybe the oil-state legislators could agree to climate change legislation. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

It’s not just Alaskans. Solons from oil states including Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado, have doubts and interests, spoken and unspoken, at stake in climate legislation. With 60 votes needed to pass any climate bill in the Senate, and coal-state legislators a major obstacle, the administration’s advocates for climate legislation have a decidedly uphill battle.

One key so far is Republican Lisa Murkowski, Alaska’s senior senator (the other Alaskan is Mark Begich, Alaska’s junior, a Democrat). Murkowski is the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, an important position in a chamber where it takes 60 votes to enact legislation.

In a Reuters article in mid-October, Murkowski said she would be open to Democratic-sponsored “cap-and-trade” legislation if Democrats would consider significant efforts to build more nuclear plants and greater opportunities for drilling for oil and gas on-and-off shore. She’s sending a clear political message that more domestic fossil fuel production is as valuable as reduced consumption of fossil fuels.

I see Murkowski’s position as a not-so-veiled reference to drilling in ANWR. That has long been a goal of Alaskan politicians of both parties, with the nukes thrown in for Republican political correctness. Many Republicans and some Democrats, particularly from oil-and-gas states, have supported ANWR drilling, opposed by most environmental groups. The evidence of large oil reserves is compelling. Environmentalists would just as soon not see new oil finds anywhere. That undermines their view that we need to eschew fossil fuels, which, they hope, are a diminishing resource.

Murkowski’s mention of the nukes – of which Alaska has none, and is unlikely to ever have one – was a hint of a political deal. She’s suggesting that states that have and want to expand nuclear power had better get together with the oil-and-gas interests. Together, Murkowski is hinting, there is a coalition to hold climate legislation hostage for other aims. It’s a classic political tactic.

The Obama administration may have sent a message to the Alaskans that it recognizes the nuke-oil ploy. The Interior Department in mid-October approved action on long-delayed oil and gas exploration leases in the Beaufort Sea, off Alaska’s northern coast. That move drew screams of betrayal from environmental groups. The Washington Post quoted Sierra Club lobbyist Athan Manuel, “There is no safe way to drill in the Beaufort Sea. Cleaning up on oil spill in the Arctic’s broken sea ice is next to impossible, and where there is drilling, there are oil spills.” Not accurate, but clearly reflecting the club’s position on Beaufort leases.

The petroleum industry has long supported oil and gas exploration in the Beaufort and the Chukchi Sea to the west, but has been unable to muster sufficient political support in Congress and the Interior Department. It now appears that Interior will allow Beaufort exploration, and the Chukchi may not be far behind. Whither ANWR, long an oily grail for Alaskans and many Republicans in the Congress?

ANWR drilling has been the mark of Satan for some of the Obama-supporting greens. This may set up a confrontation between the forces aimed at reducing fossil fuel development at any level, particularly in Alaska, and those in the internationalist environmental movement who want to put into place a carbon reduction scheme that might allow further development of oil and gas resources. It’s a tension that’s been under the surface of environmentalism for many years.

Historically, the environmental movement has finessed its internal contradictions by agreeing that no Arctic development was necessary as long as “renewable” alternatives such as wind, solar, and geothermal were on the agenda. Now industry advocates of oil and gas exploration have called out the greens: Agree to oil and gas exploration or forget any kind of greenhouse gas control regime. Renewable energy is off the table. It is worthwhile, but impracticable as a replacement for fossil fuels. Smart politicians, despite what they say publicly, understand that there is no significant fossil-renewables tradeoff that works. So a deal could be cooking.

Lisa Murkowski said in a press release that she saw the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service decision to approve Beaufort Sea exploration as “an encouraging sign that Alaska’s oil and natural gas resources will continue to play a major role in America’s energy security.”

The opposition of environmental groups appears irrelevant, as they are unable to produce evidence that off-shore and on-shore drilling has resulted in severe environmental damage. Ironically, an administration that has won wide-spread environmental support can now blow off its green wing when it comes to oil and gas exploration.

Murkowski, the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has introduced a bill that would exploration on the “1002 lands” of the Arctic refuge (established in the 1980 law creating the refuge). Those acres are a small and furiously contested part of the enormous ANWR territory in northern Alaska. Few doubt that the coastal acres harbor large amounts of oil and natural gas. Oil is already seeping to the ground in the area, a classic indication of large and accessible reserves..

Under the 1980 Alaska lands law, 1.5 million ANWR coastal acres are allowed for exploration out of a total of 19 million acres in the reserve, most of it in the Brooks mountain range to the south. Under the terms of the law, oil and gas exploration is off limits in most of the ANWR territory, but can be allowed in the land defined in section 1002 of the law, a portion of the coastal plain bordering the Beaufort Sea and the Canadian border. Oil and gas exploration in this region requires positive Congressional approval, which has never happened. Numerous oil seeps, and a secretive exploration well by native Alaskans, allowed under the 1980 act, suggest major oil reserves in the disputed 1002 territory.

Responding to the Interior decision on Beaufort drilling, Begich said, carefully phrasing his response to avoid the ANWR issue, “This decision shows Secretary Salazar and the Obama administration recognize the importance of Alaska’s abundant offshore oil and gas resources, and it brings us one step closer to environmentally-responsible development offshore of Alaska. They are getting the balance right: including safeguards for important subsistence resources and allowing drilling to go forward.”

Ironically, onshore oil production, such as might occur at ANWR, is far less potentially polluting than offshore rigs, which might show up at the Beaufort and Chuchki Sea sites. Existing onshore production at the Prudhoe Bay complex and its gathering and pipeline system have an exemplary environmental record. Environmentalists in the 1970s opposed the Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) to move North Slope crude to tankers in Valdez as a potential environmental hazard. They were wrong.

Tanker shipments from the end of the pipeline in southern Alaska proved to be the environmental hazard, as the Exxon Valdez crash and spill in 1989 demonstrated. TAPS has proven to be a safe, reliable way to move crude oil. It is a system that local wildlife have embraced, as many photographs of grizzly bears walking on top of the warm pipeline, and caribou grazing under it, have shown.

Dynastic political history is interesting when it comes to the Alaska energy issue. Lisa Murkowski’s father, Frank Murkowski, was a Republican senator from Alaska from 1981 to 2002, and governor of Alaska from 2002 to 2006. He was chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee from 1995 to 2002, where he tirelessly and unsuccessfully pushed for ANWR drilling. When he became Alaska’s governor, he named his daughter, Lisa, a member of the Alaska legislature, to succeed him in the Senate. She was elected in her own right to the U.S. Senate in 2004.

Frank Murkowski, tainted by scandals not directly associated with him, lost big in a three-way Republican primary battle for the GOP nomination for governor in 2006. The winner of the contest was the largely-unknown maverick Wasilla mayor Sarah Palin (with 51% to 31% for businessman Joe Binkley, and 19% for incumbent Murkowski). Palin went on to win the general election, and in 2008, became Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain’s running mate.

There is speculation that Palin might challenge Lisa Murkowski, who is up for reelection in 2004, in the Republican primary. Alaska’s poisonous and dynastic politics would resume. Stay tuned.

Nuke Notes: New names for the NRC and another, lame poll on public support for nuclear power

By Kennedy Maize

Washington, OCTOBER 23, 2009 — The Obama administration is moving to get the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission fully staffed, naming two Democrats, MIT nuclear scientist George Apostolakis and former Clinton administration Department of Energy nuclear chief Bill Magwood, to the commission That fills two vacancies on the five-member commission.

At the same time, NRC Commissioner Dale Klein, chairman during the Bush administration, announced he will resign his term, ending June 30, 2011, when a successor to his Republican seat is sworn in.

Klein’s resignation creates the possibility of a nomination trifecta. Under the law that governs the NRC, three members of the five-member commission should represent the party of the president. The Obama administration elevated Greg Jaczko, a Democrat (who is tied to Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada) to chairman , The other sitting commissioner is Republican Kristine Svinicki, an appointment pushed by former Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig.

So far in his tenure Jaczko has been outvoted by the Republican holdovers, limiting what he has wanted to do. With the two vacant seats to be filled by Democrats and Klein’s vacancy (a Republican seat), Jaczko should be able to assert greater control at the NRC.

In his Oct. 16 letter to President Obama, Klein, protege of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, wrote, “I offer my resignation effective upon my nominated successor taking office as a member of the commission.”

In other atomic energy political news, the Nuclear Energy Institute has issued the latest in its yawn-inducing, predictable, periodic public opinion polls, finding that Americans prefer nuclear power plants over hot dogs, baseball, apple pie and Chevrolets.

The pollster, no surprise to followers of nuke politics over the past 30 or so years, is Ann Bisconti. She’s been finding overwhelming public support for nukes from the days of the Atomic Industrial Forum through the U.S. Committee for Energy Awareness to the NEI. The name changes, but the institution remains the same – the Washington lobbying group for the nukes.

NEI’s latest poll finds that 80% of Americans favor “low-carbon energy sources, including nuclear, hydro, and renewable” technologies. Golly, what a surprise. According to the survey, 60% of Americans said they favor nukes. The straight-faced news release from the NEI said, “This the ninth straight year that favorability levels have averaged more than 60% in surveys conducted by Bisconti Research Inc.”

Well, duh? How many new nuclear plants have begun construction in that nine-year string? None. How many new nuclear plants have begun construction since Bisconti began polling for the nuclear lobby? None.

Could it be that survey research on the support of Americans for nuclear power is meaningless? That’s the conclusion I draw from this long record that suggests that public opinion polling has no impact on nuclear power development. Maybe the respondents are lying? Or maybe they don’t much care?

I’ve long argued that this sort of public opinion polling is wasteful and useless. The latest poll doesn’t change my mind in the least. Nothing about it is persuasive, as it simply repeats what NEI, and predecessor organizations, have found for decades, and validates what they have wanted to find, which, I suspect, is why they commissioned the polls.

How to Cherry-Pick Recent Climate Data

By Kennedy Maize

For those of us who follow the ever-contentious global warming debate, one of the key areas of conflict is the recent climate record. Is the globe warming, cooling, or just puttering along. It’s a game that depends on where you start and how you aggregate the data. Each side accuses the other of “cherry-picking” the data.

So I refer readers for whom this matters to a posting on Rob Bradley’s fine MasterResources.org blog by Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger, an environmental scientist with, in my judgment, a level head and no zealotry. His recent posting, A Cherry-Picker’s Guide to Temperature Trends (down, flat–even up), is required reading for a constructive conversation about climate change.

Check it out. You will be rewarded with clear-headed advice about how to make your arguments. While Bradley’s blog is in the camp of climate skeptics, it’s among the fairest and most intellectually honest I have come across (other than this one, of course).

By way of entertainment, Bradley has waged a running intellectual gun battle with former Clinton administration DOE renewable energy official Joe Romm, who now works for John Podesta’s liberal think tank Center for American Progress, where he lobbies on climate issues. Podesta was a former Clinton advisor and the chief of the Obama transition team.

Romm, who has a Ph.D. in physics from MIT (and he will tell you that repeatedly when challenged on science, as if no one else has brains), is a clever guy. He was a consistent winner for years in the Washington Post’s “Style Invitational” irrepressible snarkathon.

But Joe doesn’t have a sense of humor when it comes to climate, as Bradley and others (and that includes me) have discovered face-to-face (or, in my case, voice-to-voice when he was at DOE). I hope he comments on Knappenberger’s blog post.

Ohio Repeats Maryland’s ‘Take this Bulb and Shove It’ Fiasco

By Kennedy Maize

In the words of shade-tree philosopher and New York Yankee Hall-of-Fame catcher Yogi Berra, “It’s deja vu all over again.”

The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio has put on hold a plan by Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. to send out compact fluorescent light bulbs to its customers, unbidden, and bill them for the bulbs in their rates.

Here’s the Energy Daily story, which clearly misuses uses the term “free”:

“At the request of the state’s governor, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio … ordered FirstEnergy Corp. to halt a program to give free compact fluorescent light bulbs to its customers, citing concerns about the cost of the energy efficiency initiative.

In a statement, Alan Schriber, chairman of the commission, said the agency had received many phone calls and e-mails about the cost of the program, under which FirstEnergy is sending two bulbs to each of its customers.

“Schriber said the commission had approved the program, but not the charge that the utility is putting on customer bills to pay for it. He cited media reports as putting the cost at 60 cents per month for three years, amounting to $21.60 [per customer] for the life of the program.

‘The PUCO has not approved these additional dollars nor have we received a request by the company to do so,’ he said.

“‘Today, I received a letter from [Ohio] Gov. Ted Strickland (D) asking that the PUCO postpone the program until such time as we can address several questions raised by the governor, members of the Ohio General Assembly and FirstEnergy customers related to program details and costs. Until the PUCO has specific details regarding the program costs, FirstEnergy should not deploy its compact fluorescent light bulb program.’

“FirstEnergy, which says the bulbs will save customers $60 in electricity costs over their operating lifetime, agreed to the commission’s request and pledged to work with the agency to ‘respond to its questions and determine how best to proceed.’”

What’s going on with these utilities? Don’t they read and remember their own industry’s recent history? Whomever came up with this FirstEnergy light bulb program should be fired immediately, as should the managers who approved it. The utility is going to end up apologizing to its customers, giving them the bulbs, and eating the entire cost. The public relations damage will be lasting.

Ohio isn’t that far from Maryland and Pennsylvania, where Allegheny Energy got entangled in an almost exact precursor of what is going to happen to FirstEnergy. Nearly two years ago – close to Christmas 2007 – Pennsylvania-based Allegheny Energy shipped a CFL bulb to each of its 220,000 Maryland customer accounts, with no coherent explanation, disclosing in fine print that the utility would recover the cost in rates (with a return on investment). The utility said it was responding to an initiative approved by the Maryland Public Service Commission.

It was a public relations and regulatory disaster, with the MPSC denying any culpability in approving the program. Allegheny ended up eating the costs and suffering a PR plastering in the Maryland media. It was part of an ill-advised industry strategy advocated by some utility executives, such as Duke Energy’s Jim Rogers, that utility energy efficiency programs should not require customer advanced approval. Rogers and others have advocated an “opt-out” rather than “opt-in” approach to efficiency programs. The Allegheny and First-Energy approaches amount to “sock it to ‘em and let ‘em scream.”

Marylanders screamed, and opted out en mass. The program crashed. The utility had energy-efficient egg on its face.

It looks like Ohioans are going to do the same screaming, with the same results.

The cost of the light bulbs to customers in the First Energy plan, spread out over three years, amounts to over $20. That’s for the equivalent of two 60-W incandescent bulbs that are available in bulk for about $2 each, according to LightBulbsDirect, a web-based provider. The utility says the bulbs will save $60 over their projected nine-year life. Maybe. Maybe not. CFL’s have a history of not meeting rated lifetime projections.

But the numbers are mostly irrelevant. What’s shocking is the arrogance of the utility to take a regulatory requirement to promote energy efficiency and turn it into a program where customers have no choice but to accept the bulbs and pay the utility-determined price, which, no doubt, results in the maximum regulated return on investment. There is no way that these bulbs are “free.”

But they will be free after the Ohio regulators are through with reviewing the program. FirstEnergy, like Allegheny Energy, will eat the cost of the unwanted light bulbs.

FirstEnergy has a deserved long-term reputation as a fumbling, bumbling utility. This latest fiasco adds to that rep. Those who do not understand history – even recent history—appear, as big-time philosopher George Santayana observed, doomed to repeat it.

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How to Cherry-Pick Recent Climate Data

Ohio Repeats Maryland’s ‘Take this Bulb and Shove It’ Fiasco

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