Category Archives: energy

An Edge of the Envelope

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Here’s one estimate of the cost of converting internal combustion vehicles to an all electric fleet.  Certainly, it’s a single datum, but it’s a useful one as an outer bound, plausibility estimate.  Nicola Sturgeon is Scotland’s First Minister, and she wants to replace all of Scotland’s internal combustion vehicles with electrically powered vehicles by 2032, which lends irony to the outer bound datum.  Great Britain’s green energy aficionados want to replace all of Great Britain’s internal combustion vehicles with electric ones by 2040.

Professor Jack Ponton of Edinburgh University has rudely run the numbers [emphasis in the original].

If you want to do this with wind turbines, you are talking about 16,000 more wind turbines, four times as many as we have at the moment, and I’ve estimated that would occupy some 90,000 square kilometres, which is approximately the size of Scotland.

Hmm….

What Hath Fracking Wrought

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From AEIdeas comes one indication:

AEIdeas summarized the circled section:

In 18 of the last 19 months starting in December 2015, the energy share of consumer spending has been below 4% marking a historic period of the most affordable energy in US history (annual data on energy spending back to 1929 confirms this).

That’s evil oil and gas for you—making our lives easier and making that ease cheaper.

Another Example

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…of the failure of government intervention in “green” energy.  And of the lack of understanding of the problem by the participants.  This four minute video via Deutsche Welle tells the tale.

A group of Spanish farmers, in order to “improve their pensions and to do something for the environment,” banded together to build a solar farm, Spain’s biggest cooperative solar park, an operation of solar cell collectors at roughly €90,000 per module.

The central takeaway:

[T]he modern facility is currently losing money because the conservative government has drastically cut the subsidies for solar power.

The solar farm is not economic viable, it cannot compete in the market place, without those subsidies, without OPM.  The thing simply is not market ready.

The lack of understanding is in the plaints that this is someone else’s fault; it can’t possibly be a poor business decision to rely on a technology that can’t compete and that isn’t ready for prime time.

I feel swindled by my own government, by the politicians we Spaniards voted into office.

And

The big energy companies regard us small investors as enemies because we threaten their monopoly on the market.

Except that these “small investors” don’t have anything with which to challenge them without all that OPM to prop you up.  Their enemy—and the small investors’—is that government subsidy.

One bit of slanting by DW: there is a vague reference to a tax on solar cell installations on private homes in that region of Spain.  However, DW chose to provide no context for that reference: what the tax is for, how much it is, what is actually being taxed, and so on.

It’s About Time, Ollie

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In a move met by applause from at least one congressman, the Energy Department announced a pilot program for research into domestic mining of rare earth elements.

Rare earths are minerals critical to computing technologies and to various military and civilian sensor technologies.  China currently dominates the production and market for these elements, with about 85% of the world’s production from its domestic mines.

Another major source for rare earths, not yet exploited, is the South China Sea floor.  Part of the purpose of the PRC’s seizure of the South China Sea and of its island-building and militarization of those constructs is to control access to those rare earths and to reserve them for itself.

The US has about 13% of the world’s total reserves, but very little of this is in production: mining efforts aren’t extensive because it hasn’t been economically feasible (or yet politically necessary) to mine seriously.  Instead, we’ve been buying our rare earths almost exclusively from the PRC.

We’re very late to this production party, but with Secretary Rick Perry’s announcement, we need to jump in with both feet.  This is another area where we have to cease our dependence on our enemies for our own prosperity.

A Terrible Nightmare for Bureaucrats

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Here’s Joe Pizarchik, ex- Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement Director in the Interior Department, for all of the Obama years:

My biggest disappointment is a majority in Congress ignored the will of the people.  They ignored the interests of the people in coal country, they ignored the law and they put corporate money ahead of all that.

Wow.  Just wow.  Because the people, exercising their will in electing the majority of Congress—all the members of Congress, come to that, every single one of them—had their will ignored when the majority that they elected executed on their will by rejecting a bad regulation.

Again, wow.  Just wow.  Because that Congress, in executing on the will of the people by acting within a previously enacted law and rescinding a regulation, ignored the law.

A third time, wow.  Just wow.  Because Congress, in acting on that Congress-passed law and rescinding a coal job-killing regulation, acted against the interests of the people in coal country, people whose livelihoods were threatened by that regulation.

Of course Pizarchik worked for seven years—seven years!—on his regulation, only to have Congress get rid of it.  That’s not fair!

Now he’s working on a replacement rule for submittal under a future President:

I believe there’s a good chance that, in a legal challenge, that a court will overturn Congress’ actions here as an unconstitutional usurpation of the executive branch’s powers[.]

Never mind that the Executive Branch’s rule-making authority is solely a delegation from Congress and that the Executive Branch is required to remain wholly within the scope of the law which its regulation is intended to implement.

Plainly, eighth-grade civics was not a safe space for Pizarchik.

And there’s this pit of worry: Ross Eisenbrey, Policy Director in OSHA from 1999 to 2001 asks

Why would an administration risk putting all the years of effort into a rulemaking, all the political capital to do it, knowing somebody could take the rule to district court and have it blocked in an instant because the judge says it’s similar enough?

Why, indeed?  It is to hope.

 

h/t Don Surber