Energetics Cliff Notes - Tuesday Edition

• Amid a still-ongoing nuclear accident and buoyant oil prices, The Hill reports that President Obama will "outline a plan for America's energy future" tomorrow (Wednesday). The focus is expected to be on transportation and clean vehicles.

• Gov. Tim Pawlenty thinks his rationalization for flip-flopping on cap-and-trade is better than his rivals' in the race for the 2012 Republican nomination. Sure. Okay.

• An interesting piece at TechCrunch on how high finance is stealing human capital from research, engineering, and entrepreneurialism. "Let’s save the world by keeping our engineers out of finance. We need them to, instead, develop new types of medical devices, renewable energy sources, and ways for sustaining the environment and purifying water, and to start companies that help America keep its innovative edge."

• Andrew Revkin laments the hyperbole and fear-mongering that go hand-in-hand with the media's reporting on Fukushima.

• Florida's rejection of $1.2 billion in high-speed rail funds may be good news for the Merced leg of California's planned HSR route (via California High Speed Rail Blog -- follow it!).

• The German Green Party is taking over the state of Baden-Württemberg, ending a 58-year control by the Christian Democratic Union party. Roger Pielke Jr. wonders what will replace nuclear power in the state, which currently supplies "about half of its electricity" and which the Greens are expected to get rid of. (Answer? Coal. Woohoo.)

• Americans for Energy Leadership provides an update on the state of the US solar industry. "Though the data can be analyzed and interpreted from numerous angles, overall the industry appeared to grow and expand substantially in 2009."

• Jesse Jenkins of the Breakthrough Institute was on NPR's Weekend Edition on Sunday, explaining that the incident at Fukushima will not likely alter the future for nukes in the US. Basically, we weren't exactly planning on building a lot of new reactors before, and the events in Japan aren't going to change that one way or the other.

• Christine Hertzog on the asymmetric information problem between utilities and consumers RE smart meters. "People need to know the true financial and economic costs of power outages, and how different Smart Grid technologies reduce overall outage time and increase reliability metrics. In other words, what are the risks of not implementing these solutions."