A free-market energy blog

The typical pulverized coal power plant in the U.S. is about 35 years old, yet the fleet will continue to operate for many years to come. New coal-fired plants, meanwhile, will continue to enter service but at a slow rate. There may not be a future price for carbon dioxide (CO2) given the dramatic scientific and political developments that we are going through, but cheap natural gas makes it difficult to justify the higher up-front costs of a new coal plant.

Still, there is significant new electricity generation capacity is possible from these older plants, perhaps as much as 30,000 MW–twice EIA’s projected growth of coal power over the next two decades. In addition, new technology upgrades have the potential of improving the operating efficiency by 3% to 5%. But the impediment for such win-wins is the risk of a New Source Review violation, years of litigation, and possibly fines.

Given the Obama Administration’s stance against coal, many attendees of the National Coal Council’s December meeting were caught flat-footed when DOE Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy James Markowsky suggested an exception be made under Clean Air Act’s New Source Review (NSR) program. Mr. Markowsky proposed easing the NSR requirements for power plants that make modifications to improve their operating efficiency–assuming those plants would be good candidates for a later retrofit of a carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) system.

Markowsky’s trial balloon also suggested that candidate plants would already have installed flue gas desulfurization (FGD) systems. The concept is intriguing but doesn’t go near far enough in solving the nation’s energy woes.

NSR Definitions Remain Murky

NSR is the process established by the Clean Air Act (CAA) that requires utilities to add a host of new and expensive emission controls should they make any “major modifications” to the plant that increase emissions. The definition of a major modification has been the subject of numerous court battles since the Clinton Administration yet stills remains murky. Even when upgrades were discussed with the EPA in advance of their installation, Justice has routinely lowered the legal boom on utilities that made common maintenance changes to their plants The usual result has been a decade of legal maneuvering followed by a consent decree agreement where the utility agrees to install new emission controls and pay a fine. [Read more →]

Posts at MasterResource have highlighted the Left’s growing Civil War on climate policy. James Hansen, in particular, has called for the rejection of (Enronesque) cap-and-trade, as well as for the failure of the Copenhagen approach to climate policy.

More recently, the Hard Left (Bill McKibben, John Passacantando, etc.) has heated-up over Joseph Romm’s dismissal of cap-and-dividend as “cap-and-divide.” Here’s the comment of longtime Greenpeace head Passacantando on Romm’s post:

Joe, as a longtime reader of your blog I find your hostility towards an innovative approach perplexing …. I don’t think a legislative alternative to what appears to be a dead approach … is in any way divisive. Cap and dividend (the CLEAR Act) is a smart policy alternative, a real Plan B, filling in the current vacuum.

Romm would have none of it (remember, he works for the ObamaTank, a.k.a Center for American Progress).

I don’t find the approach “innovative” except in a sense they have found a way of siphoning off support from an effort that might actually lead to a bill that might preserve a global deal. Cap and Divide is a political dead end which is also environmentally inadequate. What more can one say? In that regard, it is much “worse” than Waxman-Markey, which, after all, passed the House. The only reason you and [Bill] McKibben [and James Hansen?] don’t know Cap-and-Divide is a political dead end is because it never even had enough political support to have been alive in the first place….

Obviously we need something other than W-M. But cap and divide ain’t it. The main thing that its ardent supporters in the environmental movement are doing is shrinking the political space available for an actual climate bill that Graham, Lieberman, Kerry and the White House are trying to put together.

The growing Civil War on the Left–with Romm to the Right Left–is a sight to behold for many longtime participants in the great climate debate.

Now to Bob Herbert at the New York Times. [Read more →]

“Unrestricted mobility is every bit as important to American freedom and economic health than health care reform. I hope that the people who have fought socialized health care will work just as hard to fight the congestion coalition.”  – R. O’Toole

The United States is the most mobile nation on earth, with the average American traveling nearly twice as many miles per year as the average resident of any other country. That mobility, the vast majority of which is provided by automobiles, has produced enormous benefits, including higher incomes, lower cost consumer goods, better housing, and access to a wide variety of social and recreational opportunities.

Transportation touches everyone’s lives every single day, and most American have to deal with traffic congestion several times a week. So when Congress takes up the subject of federal transportation funding, which it does every six years, people ought to be as concerned as they have been in the ongoing health-care debate.

This is especially true because there is a congestion coalition of powerful interests that wants to reduce our mobility. This coalition includes: 

1. Big city officials who view the suburbs as rivals;
2. Downtown property owners who similarly would like to limit the growth of edge cities;
3. Rail contractors who make far larger profits building;
4. Subsidized rail lines than from roads paid for out of highway user fees;
5. Urban planners who think Americans should be happy to live in cramped, European-like cities;
6. Natural area advocates who think no one should be allowed to live in rural areas except for an elite few who know how to appreciate nature; and
7. Environmentalists who argue getting people out of their cars is critical to stopping global warming.

The Obama administration has gladly joined this coalition, saying it wants to emphasize livability, not mobility. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood recently threw out rules designed to insure that federal transportation funds are cost-effectively spent. Instead, LaHood prefers projects that do not encourage “urban sprawl.” Since the low-densities that planners derisively call sprawl are a direct result of mobility, LaHood is saying he wants to fund wasteful transportation projects that don’t truly enhance personal mobility. [Read more →]

Joseph Romm heavily edits the comments at his top-rated energy/environmental blog, Climate Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress. (The more academic, one-post-per-day MasterResource is #14 of 2,800 “green blogs” as of 1/31/10 per Technorati, not too bad for being 13 months old.)

Dr. Romm will not publicly debate his distinguished opponents either, just as Paul Ehrlich refused to debate the late Julian Simon. Though thin-skinned and trigger happy, Romm has not attempted to rebut a four-part post at the Breakthrough Institute by Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, et al., Joe Romm and Climate McCarthyism, a widely disseminated and discussed event on the Left. (Updates on the Romm series are available at the Breakthrough Institute blog.)

Nor will Romm show the courage of his convictions by betting on his predicted global warming trend, which has led some to speculate that Romm deep down is really a global lukewarmer. In a similar vein, a reasonable oil production bet offered by Michael Lynch to put Romm’s peak-oil belief to the test has also been ignored by the uber-confident senior fellow at CAP.

Critics may ask: Is the MIT doctorate who commands a top bully pulpit for the Party in Power an intellectual scarecrow?

Yet sometimes loyal readers at Climate Progress reveal much in their (permitted) comments. And they are fighting the blues as the key issue to which they are emotionally chained continues to fray, politically and intellectually.

Retreating Romm

Romm himself has waxed and waned in the great climate tumult of the last year, often retreating to an I’ll-take-anything position in the service of the Obama agenda. Once a flaming radical, Romm as a Democratic Party operative is now an incrementalist. And his  incrementalism has shrunk with new developments. It must be sad for climate Left veterans to read such Romm statements as the outcome of Copenhagen being a glass two-thirds full. [Read more →]

The New York Times dutifully featured this week two media events primed to gin up public—and Congressional—support for industrial wind technology.

The first was a “study“ by the Department of Energy and authored primarily by David Corbus of the National Renewable Energy Lab. It claims that, for a startup cost of around $100 billion public dollars, “wind could displace coal and natural gas for 20 to 30 percent of the electricity used in the eastern two-thirds of the United States by 2024.” Corbus acknowledged that such an enterprise would require substantial grid modification but said the $100 billion was “really, really small compared to other costs,” which the Times failed to identify.

A few days later, the paper of record ballyhooed the annual report of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), which touted the growth of wind last year and projected that the country would soon get 2 percent of its electricity from wind energy. The report fretted about the American wind gap with Europe, which AWEA alleged gets 5 percent of its electricity from wind, compared to only about 1 percent in the USA, while stating “Denmark has essentially achieved that goal already, and sometimes produces more wind power than it can use.”

AWEA’s stalking horse for this PR event, energy consultant Tim Stephure, said, “By 2020 wind’s installed capacity could be five times higher than it is today, reaching about 180,000 megawatts.”

To achieve this goal, from its present base of 35,000 wind turbines and an installed capacity of about 35,000 MW, the industry must build, in each of the next ten years, an installed capacity of 14,500 MW.  This is pure speculation and, more accurately, nonsense. [Read more →]

The findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are often held up as representing “the consensus of scientists”—a pretty grandiose and presumptuous claim. And one that in recent days, weeks, and months, has been unraveling. So too, therefore, must all of the secondary assessments that are based on the IPCC findings—the most notable of which is the EPA’s Endangerment Finding—that “greenhouse gases taken in combination endanger both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations.”

Recent events have shown, rather embarrassingly, that the IPCC is not “the” consensus of scientists, but rather the opinions of a few scientists (in some cases as few as one) in various subject areas whose consensus among themselves is then kludged together by the designers of the IPCC final product who a priori know what they want the ultimate outcome to be (that greenhouse gases are leading to dangerous climate change and need to be restricted). So clearly you can see why the EPA (who has a similar objective) would decide to rely on the IPCC findings rather than have to conduct an independent assessment of the science with the same predetermined outcome. Why go through the extra effort to arrive at the same conclusion?

The EPA’s official justification for its reliance on the IPCC’s findings is that it has reviewed the IPCC’s “procedures” and found them to be exemplary.

Below is a look at some things, recently revealed, that the IPCC “procedures” have produced. These recent revelations indicate that the “procedures” are not infallible and that highly publicized IPCC results are either wrong or unjustified—which has the knock-on effect of rendering the IPCC an unreliable source of information. Unreliable doesn’t mean wrong in all cases, mind you, just that it is hard to know where and when errors are present, and as such, the justification that “the IPCC says so” is no longer sufficient (or acceptable). [Read more →]

Press reports in the Financial Times and other news outlets describe a wind project in Oregon with 338 machines of 2.5 MW each, giving a total capacity of 845 MW. The project sponsors claim that they will provide enough energy to serve 235,000 households and reduce CO2 output by 1.5 million tonnes annually.

Part I demonstrated that the served-household claims is fanciful. In reality, no more than 49,000 households could be “supplied”, and these with only a minimal degree of assurance. Indeed, the wind project is more costly than a diesel backup scheme that would actually be capable of supplying reliable power to several hundred thousand households. The wind project is also three times more costly than a replacement of just 211 MW of older coal capacity with new technology that would provide a similar reduction in emissions, while supplying firm power to the NW Power Pool’s customers.

Opportunity-cost economics, anyone?

The key to wind’s providing some degree of fuel and emissions savings is its ability to deliver reliable electricity without shadowing or backup by hydrocarbon-using plants. These shadowing/backup requirements in the Northwest (NW) Power Pool may be able to take advantage of existing surplus hydro capacity in that region during off-peak periods (spring and fall), thereby permitting the proposed plant to reduce hydrocarbon consumption and emissions somewhat during those periods. It is not reasonable to expect to achieve the claimed emissions savings, but lower figures, less than half the publicized savings, may be possible.

In particular, the addition of wind generation, with shadowing/ backup provided by reservoir hydro, may be able to reduce overall CO2 emissions in California, the ultimate customer for the electricity produced by the GE project during Oregon’s two surplus seasons. But during the winter and summer peak demand periods, less hydro output is available, peak demand is greater and the shadowing backup will be provided by some combination of gas-fired and coal plants. What it is critical to keep in mind is that maintaining stability in the NW Power Pool requires the pool to shadow/backup not only the proposed new project, but the other 6.4 GW of existing wind as well.

Going further, our analysis shows there are less costly and more effective alternatives readily available that rival or exceed the claimed benefits of this wind project. [Read more →]

In the midst of a bitter winter in North America and Europe, General Electric has announced a large wind project to be built in Oregon. Press reports in the Financial Times and USA Today describe a project of 338 machines of 2.5 MW each, giving a total capacity of 845 MW.

With power grids strained due to heating demand, increments to generating capacity are to be welcomed. But along with the usual hoopla about homes served and CO2 emissions savings, it is time for some “devil’s advocacy” by asking: – how much energy and capacity will this project really create? How much CO2 will be saved? And when the chips are down will consumers and grid operators be pleased that their funds have gone into wind rather than into some other generating source?

We strongly suspect that neither consumers nor grid operators will benefit greatly from this plant. Our brief analysis of this announcement shows that the claims for houses served and carbon saved are not supported, though some incremental, useful energy supply may be possible under some circumstances. All such claims depend on the system operator’s ability to use the wind farms’ output to offset hydro generation, the key generation resource in the Northwest United States (NW). [Read more →]

“Politically oriented capitalism, whatever particular form it takes, involves the granting by the state of privileged opportunities for profit. Such openings are available only to those with connections or to those who can pay for influence.” 

-          Scott, James. Comparative Political Corruption. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972, p. 52.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress (Center for American Progress) is holding out hope against hope that a climate bill–just about any climate bill–will be passable in 2010. He regurgitates a Boston Globe piece under the headline, Graham, Kerry, Lieberman meet with Rahm Emanuel — and then Chamber of Commerce, whose VP of Gov’t Affairs said, “generally we were in synch”!

This brings up the question: why is the Chamber of Commerce negotiating with the enemies of true (consumer-driven) economic recovery?

This incident reminded me of a section from my book Capitalism at Work (chapter 6, pp. 172–74) that deals with the Chamber of Commerce in a historical sense. (There is a Ken Lay surprise–read on.)

A collection of speeches given in 1966/67 by the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was published by McGraw-Hill as The Business of Business: Private Enterprise and Public Affairs. M. A. “Mike” Wright, chairman of Humble Oil & Refining Company (now ExxonMobil), urged his fellow executives to be more proactive in public and government affairs to improve the business environment and better society. “Virtually every business decision today is affected by public laws, regulations, and policies,” he stated, yet industry leaders were often “indifferent” or “negative” rather than “creative” and “positive” toward lawmaking. [Read more →]

On Wednesday evening January 27th a discussion of the latest developments in climate change science will be held on the campus of Rice University (directions below for those nearby). This discussion/debate is cosponsored by the Shell Center for Sustainability and the Center for the Study of Environment and Society at Rice. Here is the flyer:

Defending the IPCC consensus regarding natural-versus-anthropogenic climate change is Gerald R. North, Distinguished Professor of the Physical Section, Department of Atmospheric Sciences and the Department of Oceanography at Texas A&M University.

Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts of Technology, will challenge the IPCC consensus, arguing that real-world climate sensitivity lies below the iconic range of 2c–4.5C. Questions about ‘Climategate’ and the newly emerged  ‘Himalayangate’ (the latter exposed by Dr. North’s Texas A&M colleague, John Nielsen-Gammon) are expected to be covered in the question/answer period after the scientists’ formal 30-minute presentations.

[DIRECTIONS McMurtry Auditorium is located in Duncan Hall. Visitor parking is available to anyone with a credit card.  Visitor Parking “L” and Founder’s Court Visitor are the closest to Duncan Hall, in particular using the Rice main entrance on South Main Street at Sunset Blvd. Another parking lot is the North Lot, 5-8 min walk to Duncan Hall, on Rice blvd using entrance # 21 or 20.

Rice campus map: http://www.rice.edu/maps/maps.html]

Having this climate debate is very good news. The last climate science debate at Rice University was in the summer of 2000 at the James A. Baker Institute. Therein lies a story…. [Read more →]