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FERC’s Wellinghoff bloviates on wind

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

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?

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?

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.

Sparkling future for carbon capture?

One of my favorite folk songs from the Great Depression is “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” which I remember hearing sung by Burl Ives, the bearded and burley tenor who, among other gigs, performed with Pete Seeger and the Weavers in the 1950s (boy, does that date me). One of the lines in the song refers to “soda water fountains” that would be found in the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Now, it turns out, soda water may the answer to the troubling question of what to do with all that carbon dioxide it seems that the federal government wants us to collect from coal-fired power plants. New research led by the University of Manchester, published April 1 (and, no, this was not an April Fools’ joke) in the British journal Nature suggests the best way to store all that CO2 may be in water. Most research on carbon capture and storage has focused on pumping the gas into underground oil and gas reservoirs, a practice in use for decades to enhance the production of fossil fuels from these fields.

A press release from the U.K.’s National Environment Research Council notes that “the risks around the long-term storage of millions of cubic metres of carbon dioxide in depleted gas and oil fields has met with some concern, not least because of the possibility of some of the gas escaping and being released back into the atmosphere. Until now, researchers couldn’t be sure how the gas would be securely trapped underground.”

But the researchers from the U.K. and Canada found that carbon dioxide has been stored naturally for millions of years in underground water in gas fields. Stuart Gilfillan of the University of Edinburgh, the lead researcher, said, “We already know that oil and gas have been stored safely in oil and gas fields over millions of years. Our research shows that the carbon dioxide has been stored naturally and safely in underground water in these fields.”

Earlier research, according to the news release, used computer models to simulate injection of CO2 into the depleted fields. Some models said the carbon dioxide would combine chemically with minerals in the rock to form new kinds of carbonates. Others suggested the gas would dissolve in the water.
The research team decided to examine what’s going on empirically, rather than modeling the question. “We’ve turned the old technique of using computer models on its head and looked at natural carbon dioxide fields which have trapped carbon dioxide for a very long time.”

The research team measured ratios of CO2 and noble, inert gases such as helium and neon in nine gas fields in North America, China and Europe. They found that underground water is the major CO2 sink in these fields, and been for “millions of years.”

Chris Ballentine of the University of Manchester, the project director, said the research establishes a new way to look at carbon dioxide fields and storage. “This new approach,” he added, “will also be essential for monitoring and tracing where carbon dioxide capture from coal-fired power stations goes when we inject it underground – this is critical for future safety verification.”

And it may be a boon the hoboes who longed for the Big Rock Candy Mountain. When I was a kid living in Steamboat Springs, Colo., we had a public, natural soda water fountain. It was the spring that named the town (it chugged like a steamboat), and it was naturally carbonated (although with a slightly sulfurous taste and smell, if I remember correctly). Now, with just a little cola extract, we could have had something the world would have craved.

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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?

Sparkling future for carbon capture?

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