Commentary

Investors are continuing to bail out of alternative energy stocks—good, promising companies such as ABB, American Superconductor, Evergreen Solar, and Itron. These companies and many like them were Wall Street darlings not that long ago. Not anymore.

Al Gore, in his recent New York Times op-ed titled "The Climate for Change," calls for a "$400 billion investment over ten years to construct a national smart grid to distribute renewable energy." Echelon supports these proposed investments. We also believe the answer is not just in constructing something new but in transforming the existing […]

President Obama’s recent comments to the Business Roundtable included two blunders that showed his misunderstanding of the fundamentals of the cap-and-trade approach to reducing carbon emissions that is the centerpiece of his 2010 budget request.

Can clean energy investments carry their important share of the U.S. Recovery and Reinvestment Act load? Here’s a contrarian answer: It’s up to the utility industry and its regulators.

The Obama administration’s energy secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, has quickly become Dr. Who. As a recent New York Times article noted, Chu has repeatedly stumbled politically, demonstrating that being a Nobelist in physics is no qualification for the bumps-and-grinds of energy politics in Washington.

For decades, it’s been well-known in the country and western (C&W) music industry that "if you’re gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band." The guitars, drums, harmonicas, and piano — they’re all expected on stage. But as the legendary C&W group Alabama recognized, a fiddle is a must when performing […]

As the Obama administration takes office, energy resource allocation is both the most critical national security issue and the most critical economic issue facing us. It will be difficult to sustain and improve economic growth unless we implement policies that result in the more rational use of energy resources, especially those for which there is a finite supply.

The new U.S. president will have a new set of priorities and regulatory policies that will affect the production and generation of electricity. The specifics of the new administration’s energy policy priorities were scant when this article was written, pre-inauguration, but the industry’s challenges are fairly well defined.

By Roger Feldman
Public-private partnerships are a key to preventing a chill from settling over the green ambitions of the newly capital-strapped state and municipal public sectors.

Dr. Robert Peltier, PE
One of the key campaign promises made by our new president was that his administration would create five million new “green” jobs by spending $150 billion dollars over the next 10 years. There are serious and substantial reasons that this level of job creation won’t happen in the near future.

By Kennedy Maize
Congress will make a big mistake if it provides money for accelerated wind power development as part of the Obama administration’s new economic stimulus program, according to veteran energy analyst Glenn Schleede. Instead, he says in a recent privately-published paper, “Investment in energy efficient light bulbs would save more than five times as much electricity in five years as an equal dollar investment in wind turbine would produce in 20 years.”

Meeting growing energy demand while reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is one of the most critical challenges facing our world today.

By Kennedy Maize
The Obama administration has picked Steven Chu, currently the director of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to be secretary of energy. The selection was quite a surprise, as Chu’s name had not surfaced in any of the rumors circulating in Washington. Indeed, he’s not well know in Washington political circles.

Europe has seen tremendous activity in the development of renewable energy as a response to climate change. As a result, some of the most important renewable energy firms operating in the U.S. are based in Denmark, Germany, and Spain. Stable, high-level policy is one reason Europe dominates this sector.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, just released its report on the status of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology and its view of the technology’s future development challenges. In general, the GAO concludes that the technology faces grave technological, regulatory, economic, and legal barriers that will not be […]

Roger Feldman
Proposed U.S. legislation appears likely to use carbon offsets or credits, although the details remain unclear. I wonder if these schemes adequately support the goal of global greenhouse gas emission reductions.

Dr. Robert Peltier, PE
The Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, just released its report on the status of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology and its view of the technology’s future development challenges. In general, the GAO concludes that the technology faces grave technological, regulatory, economic, and legal barriers that will not be easily overcome.

In the 1980s, Houston wildcatter George Mitchell drilled the first well into the Barnett Shale formation that stretches through north and central Texas. He tapped into what would turn out to be one of the most prolific and valuable onshore natural gas reserves in the United States.

Kennedy Maize
Desperate to score points in a crucial state where they are in the double-digit dumps, the Republican McCain-Palin presidential ticket rolled out their heartfelt support for “clean coal technologies” at a rally in Scranton, Pa., this week.

The United States is used to transporting fuels to electric generation centers that are close to where the power supply is needed. We see trains carry coal by the carload from resource-rich areas to generation centers across the country. Natural gas is distributed through pipelines. Even uranium is transported to supply our nuclear stations. However, […]

Though former New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer may be remembered for one type of indecent exposure, the current New York attorney general is promoting a more damaging type of indecent exposure for coal-fired power plant owners.

The already razor-thin power supply margins in the UK are likely to become nearly transparent by 2012, according to a new study prepared by Fells Associates: “A Pragmatic Energy Policy for the UK” (PDF). The report notes that the UK’s electricity shortfall will blossom to between 30 GW and 35 GW by 2027, and residents should expect periods when demand exceeds supply in just three years. If you think the UK government is worried, think again.

Just when you thought coal was down for the count, here’s a report from London’s Financial Times. “British coal production looks set to grow for the first time since 2001, thanks to higher prices and power generators’ new-found appreciation of domestic coal supplies.” Coal production in the UK mostly has been falling since the 1950s.

As oil prices soar and power prices threaten to follow, our republic’s mix of diverse cultural and economic interests must cooperate to achieve our common goal of energy self-sufficiency. Those interests seem to fall into one of four main groups—policy, corporate, finance, and technical innovation—each seeking to control the direction of our nation on major […]

Opponents of massive new energy taxes and regulations breathed a small sigh of relief in June when the Lieberman-Warner climate-tax bill went down in flames on the Senate floor. Even 10 Democrats broke with the party and voted against it, writing that they would have opposed the bill on final passage. Unfortunately, power-mad bureaucrats at […]

By Dr. Robert Peltier, PE
The fallout from the Supreme Court’s April 2, 2007, decision (Massachusetts v. Duke Energy) in which the high court ruled that the EPA does have the right to regulate CO₂ emissions as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act (CAA) continues. The court also ruled that the EPA has the authority to regulate carbon emissions from automobiles and other vehicles—and, by extension, power plants (my words, not the court’s).

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced that is it well on its way to regulating at least 85% of the energy used in America in the name of global warming (never mind the fact that temperatures have inexplicably not increased since at least 2001). If the proposal is enacted, any organization or person that emits more than miniscule amounts of CO₂ will be required to obtain a permit, effectively bringing our economy to its knees in short order.

By Kennedy Maize
Stymied in its plans for new coal-fired generation, Florida’s Jacksonville Energy Authority is moving to natural gas. . . .
For several years, JEA was heavily involved in a multiple-utility plan for a $2.3 billion, 800-MW coal-fired plant to meet the region’s rapidly-growing electricity demand. But Florida Republican Gov. Charlie Crist (rumored to be on presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain’s vice presidential short list) clobbered the project and imposed a 20% renewable energy mandate on Florida utilities. “I worked on that for three years. In a flash of an eye, it got cancelled,” JEA project manager Mike Lawson told the Florida Times-Union.

Is Al Gore out of his mind? Or is he simply issuing a difficult challenge that he knows can’t be met, but will stimulate the country toward a positive effort?

It’s hard to tell, given his speech in Washington last week, calling for the U.S. to replace all – that’s 100 percent, folks – of its electric generation with renewables in a decade. We’re talking 2018 here.

By Jim Rogers, Duke Energy Corp. The climate change debate has been dramatized in movies, on Hollywood’s red carpets, and in documentaries featuring melting ice caps. The collective effect is extraordinary, and positive. America now stands ready to address one of its toughest challenges since the industrial revolution—decarbonizing our energy supply and economy. Now the […]