Energetics Cliff Notes - Friday Edition

The week that was: KGL meltdown and the oilacalypse.

• Check out this Daily Kos post on the bailout of BP.
• Steven Chu at the White House blog on ARPA-E and energy breakthroughs.
• Tom Friedman's latest contribution to his perennial push for a price on carbon.
• Businesses in Michigan are lobbying for legislation to restore competition to electricity markets.
• A decade later, Jerry Brown announces $400 million in rebates for Californians who suffered during the 2000-2001 energy crisis.
• The Economist discusses the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, and why the size of the spill isn't as important as where the oil ends up.
• Europe's emissions trading system is in an uproar amid a mounting scandal over 'recycled' carbon permits.
• Ah, remember these guys? Rep. Waxman is requesting info on Halliburton's involvement in the Gulf oil spill.

Quote of the Day

I don't always agree with David Brooks, but the man knows how to write, and when he applies his sharp rhetorical skills to the energy quest...well:

Energy innovation is the railroad legislation of today. This country is studded with venture capitalists, scientists, corporate executives and environmental activists atremble over the great opportunities they see ahead. The energy revolution is a material project that arouses moral fervor -- exactly the sort of enterprise at which Americans excel.

Some reactions to Cape Wind

Yesterday, Secretary Salazar announced the development of the nation's first offshore wind farm six miles off the coast of Cape Cod. What's that, green blogosphere? You have something to say?

• Kate Sheppard (Mother Jones): "The project was especially salient in light of the current drilling catastrophe off the coast of Louisiana, where the Coast Guard today announced that it is planning to light the oil spill on fire in order to protect the sensitive coastline."
• Paul Krugman (New York Times): "The spectacle of affluent clean-energy advocates getting all worked up at the prospect of actually putting windmills where they might see them played right into right-wing caricatures. Let's hope that's now over."
• Frances Beinecke (Natural Resource Defense Council): "I will always return to the Cape, and now, when I look out on the seascapes I love so much, I will be pleased to catch the sight of wind turbines. That is the view to the future."
• Yael Borofsky (The Breakthrough Institute): "As energy demand rises and population grows, we will only continue to have to make difficult, educated decisions about energy production."
• Todd Woody (Grist): "To be sure, there are wind farms, solar installations, and biomass plants East of the Mississippi. But Big Green Power has largely been a phenomenon of the West Coast and the Great Plains, regions rich in wind and sunshine."

Prop 16 lawsuit

The Sacramento Bee is reporting on a lawsuit, filed by a consortium of public utilities and led by Sacramento MUD, that is alleging PG&E intends to choke off electric utility competition in California. I'd say that's implicitly true, what with their $34.5 million campaign for Proposition 16, but the plaintiffs are alleging that Peter Darbee, the Chairman of Pacific Gas and Electric Corp., has acknowledged this goal as the monopoly's explicit motivation behind the June 8 ballot proposition. This is fairly dubious. Robert Cruickshank of Calitics hits the nail on the head, writing "Prop 16's practical effect would be to choke off competition and protect PG&E's existing monopoly across much of Northern California...making it very difficult for a majority of voters to create a public power district or community choice aggregation that can help deliver renewable power to localities." Even more dubious is that PG&E is financing their campaign for Prop 16 with ratepayer funds, and while others are free to disagree with me, I see this as using Californians' money against them.

I can't help but draw the analogy to private health insurance companies and their vendetta against the public option last year. Both campaigns demand that their private-sector, monopolistic (or oligopolistic, as with health insurance) practices are superior to anything the public sector could offer. So why should they be afraid of a little competition? Of course the answer is to protect shareholder profits, no evil motivation by any stretch. But power--like health insurance--is a public good, and PG&E's ratepayers are also citizens of California and thus deserve the choice of renewable, local power if they want it.

We'll find out about the outcome of the lawsuit. Hopefully it will prevent me from having to vote no on Prop 16 by removing it from the ballot completely. Until then, I will continue my own small campaign for more choice and competition in California.

CapeWin

This morning, Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar announced the Obama Administration's approval of the United States' first offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound. First proposed by Cape Wind Associates in November, 2001, the project represents a potentially groundbreaking step in the path towards American clean energy generation. Over the last decade, the story of Cape Wind has been girded with engineering challenges, NIMBYism and environmental impact statements. And despite the opposition of conservationist efforts of groups like the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, I applaud the decision. I concede there are differences in aesthetic preferences, but I would personally prefer the sight of an offshore wind farm to an offshore oil rig, much less and exploding oil rig. At any rate, the Department of Energy predicts that offshore wind farms can account for 4% of the nation's energy generation by 2030, and I think this is an excellent first step...provided it doesn't take a decade for each subsequent offshore wind project.

Support building for RE-ENERGYSE

Teryn Norris, founder of Americans for Energy Leadership, talks about RE-ENERGYSE:

"50 years ago, after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the United States mobilized at a massive scale to regain its competitiveness in science and technology. Investment in higher education was a cornerstone of our strategy. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 invested billions of dollars to inspire and train a new generation of scientists and engineers that went on to put a man on the moon and develop many of the technologies that launched our world into the information age. And now today, in the face of a new global clean energy race, the United States must mobilize in a similar fashion to regain our leadership."

Energy Collective climate bill webinar

For enthusiasts, be sure to check out this upcoming webinar. Hosted by the Energy Collective, the topic for discussion is "Climate Legislation in the Senate: Will Obama Get a Bill?" We'll hear from Senator and Republican Conference Chair Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Fred Krupp from EDF, journalist Mark Gunther, and Jesse Jenkins from The Breakthrough Institute. The webinar will take place Thursday, May 6, at 11:30am PT. I'll be live-tweeting the event at http://twitter.com/atrembath. Get excited.

Cracked on Hybrid Cars

From Cracked, maybe one the most succinct explanations I've seen for what it'll take to save the planet:

...if you buy a hybrid, don't fool yourself into thinking that you're single-handedly saving the Earth. You're maybe helping a bit, but if the planet's ever going to be saved, it will require a concerted effort from everyone, including consumers, businesses, governments and, most importantly, Batman.

Energetics Cliff Notes - Tuesday Edition

• T. Boone Pickens and Ted Turner in a video at Fox Business, discussing renewable energy and energy security.
• Here's a Forbes piece on "Nine more myths about electric cars" -- Robert Bryce should take a look.
• Australia has shelved its cap-and-trade program. PM Kevin Rudd blames "political opposition," and the plan will be put on hold unto Kyoto expires in 2012.
• Sir Richard Branson, of Virgin fortune, predicts $200/bbl oil prices in the near future.
• Valero Oil is raking in cash and using it to finance its war against AB 32.
• Spill, baby, spill -- The Economist reports on the recent rig explosion off the coast of Louisiana.
• Solar Feeds provides 10 reasons why Israel is becoming a global clean tech powerhouse.
• Mark Muro at Brookings offers his thoughts on how the COMPETES Act should be implemented.
• Philip Radford of Greenpeace trashes the state-preemption provisions in KGL.
• The World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth a) needs a new name and b) has called for an international climate court.

Five "myths" about green energy

I don't know how much play this op-ed in the Washington Post is getting, but it came across my path so I'll share my thoughts. Robert Bryce writes "Five myths about green energy," ostensibly making the point that clean energy isn't that good a solution to a problem that's overblown anyway. Okay, fine. But he builds his case by categorizing the following as "myths," whereas I'd refer to most as challenges:

Solar and wind power are the greenest of them all.

Bryce uses a couple conceptual tricks here, one of which is ignoring both the existence and benefits of decentralized power production. Solar and wind generation aren't that green, he contends, because of how much square mileage they require and their intermittency, which must be supplemented by carbon fuels like coal and natural gas. Yes, wind and solar farms take up a lot of space, are located far from populations and therefore require significant transmission -- much like coal, oil and natural gas. He excludes the benefits of phasing out carbon transmission (with its continuous import and mining infrastructure), but includes the costs of new transmission and land-use requirements in this cost-benefit analysis. Nor does he mention small-scale solar and wind generation, which have the capacity to power average homes and businesses. This capacity will only increase with future investment and deployment, and has the added benefit of making power generation much less vulnerable to attack/disaster. Lastly, he ignores the potential that battery storage has to eventually contribute. Some combination of significant deployment and advanced battery technology can create a critical mass of solar and wind generation to render his argument on intermittency completely moot.

Going green will reduce our dependence on imports from unsavory regimes.

To prove this as a "myth," Bryce notes that shifting to clean technology simply substitutes energy imports like natural gas and oil for "'rare earth' elements that are essential ingredients in most alternative energy technology." He focuses on one type of these rare earth elements, lanthanides, the increased reliance on which would make the United States too dependent on China, which "controls between 95 and 100 percent of the global market in these elements." Okay, well, it's useful to ignore other vital ingredients to clean energy like silicon, bauxite, uranium, and copper--of which there are vast reserves in Africa--and predict that our trade deficit in lanthanides will make the US economically subservient to China. And personally, I'd rather import the clean technology components from China than the clean technology itself, which is where we're headed--China is investing $9 billion monthly in clean tech, and Pew Research found China surging ahead as a global player in clean tech.

A green American economy will create green American jobs.

I imagine it's tempting to compare the manufacturing of wind mills and solar panels to shoes to make this point, but I think it's misleading--we may not like American cars, but we don't buy Japanese and German ones because of cheaper labor going into them, and cars are a much better comparison for clean technology than shoes. Bryce does ask the pertinent question of how to define a green job, but then uses the ethanol subsidy to argue that green jobs are too expensive. That'd be a more effective argument if there were a single environmental policy wonk who thought that America's ethanol program was effective at doing anything. Bryce also ignores green jobs in clean tech research, development, innovation, installation/weatherization, finance, and construction. If America plans to add millions of jobs by subsidizing each one, then sure, building a green economy will be too expensive. But if the United States sets up a basic policy structure of R&D investment, infrastructure/grid planning, weatherization/construction projects, feed-in tariffs and maybe carbon pricing, then a green economy can grow more organically from a private sector that appreciates clear market signals.

Electric cars will substantially reduce demand for oil.

This is Bryce's most accurate, if unoriginal, complaint about clean energy. Yes, electric cars still rely on fossil fuel-generated electricity; yes, current battery technology isn't energy-dense enough to perfectly replace the internal combustion engine; yes, we are severely lacking in infrastructure to support an electric vehicle fleet. Bryce is correct on all counts, but again, I'd characterize these as difficult technological challenges, and certainly not insurmountable ones.

The United States lags behind other rich countries in going green.

Here, Bryce notes that the United States has been among the most effective of rich countries in reducing our per-capita emissions over the last few decades. Okay, well first of all that depends on how you measure emissions. But more importantly, our emissions are rising anyway. Even if "the United States has improved its energy efficiency as much as or more than other developed countries," we still started out in a worse position and are still emitting more carbon than anyone but China. California has been especially successful when it comes to energy efficiency, with per-capita energy use staying virtually flat since the last 1970s, but we still rely heavily on carbon fuels. Denmark generates 20% of its power from wind (compared to the US's <1%); France gets 70% of its power from nuclear (compared to the US's 20%); add in China, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Germany and others and the US starts to look pretty infantile on the global clean energy playing field.>

Energy is important, and clean energy is coming whether Robert Bryce likes it or not. To build a green economy from scratch, and to compete with rising juggernauts like China, will require significant public investment and policy. There are a myriad of political and economic obstacles to success, but that's a perennial truth in the American story. We can approach these challenges with pessimism and doubt, which Bryce does proudly in his piece, or we can throw our hats over the wall and rise to the occasion.