Category Archives: energy

Wrong Answer

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Electricity producers in several states are asking for hundreds of millions of dollars in financial support to keep costly nuclear power plants in business[.]

For instance,

New York and federal regulators are weighing whether to make customers subsidize the Ginna nuclear station in Ontario, NY, 20 miles northeast of Rochester.

And

Illinois is considering financial assistance for three Exelon nuclear plants that the company says are suffering from low power prices. State officials are considering several forms of aid, including legislation that would require utilities to support carbon-free generators like nuclear and renewable energy.

And

FirstEnergy’s proposal would obligate three regulated Ohio utilities it owns—Ohio Edison, Toledo Edison and Cleveland Electric Illuminating—to buy kilowatts from Davis-Besse and other company-owned plants even when cheaper electricity is available on the open market.
Consumers would pay an extra $400 million in the first three years of a 15-year contract….

These are the wrong answers.

There’s no question that users of electricity from nuclear power plants should be the ones to bear the costs of electricity generated by them. However, those costs are artificially high, hugely high. Permitting, licensing, and government regulation add billions (yes, that’s with a ‘b’) to the cost of building a new plant (which would be more efficient and generate at lower cost than existing nuclear plants) and of operating plants, whether old or new. Those impediments don’t need to be anywhere near so extensive to achieve their legitimate purpose: to ensure the plant builders know what they’re doing and to ensure the plant operators know what they’re doing.

Another artificial cost of nuclear plant existence (much less operation) is storage of spent fuel. Nuclear plant operators have been charged a fee to support building, transportation to, and storage at a nuclear spent fuel repository in Yucca Mountain. Even after that facility was prevented from opening and the nuclear plants forced to store their fuel on their own sites, that fee has continued to be charged, and it’s added up to additional billions of dollars of cost, held essentially in escrow in Uncle Sugar’s hot, grimy, little hands. It’s time to open the Harry Reid Nuclear Fuel Repository in Yucca with no further delay. Or to build a facility somewhere else (Nevada and New Mexico have several other useable sites) and in the meantime return those billions in collected and unspent fees to the plant operators for their use in on-site storage.

Obama and “Energy”

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President Obama announced Sunday that he’ll use his executive authority to designate 12 million acres in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as wilderness, walling it off from resource development. This abrogates a 1980 deal in which Congress specifically set aside some of this acreage for future oil and gas exploration.

He also did this without so much as a faretheewell to any of Alaska’s leadership, including, explicitly its Republican delegation in Congress. Not a what do you think. Not a heads up. Nada.

Here’s his cynical divide-and-conquer bribery attempt:

The Obama administration is poised to unveil a draft plan for selling offshore oil and gas leases that is expected to rule out auctioning drilling rights in parts of the Atlantic Ocean as well as in some Arctic waters and along the West Coast between 2017 and 2022.
…
The draft plan is expected to keep the door open for selling oil and gas leases off the coasts of Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, though with a larger buffer zone than previously outlined. Possible oil and gas leases in the Chukchi Sea [off the northwest coast of Alaska] also would be set back further from the coast than during a previous 2008 auction of drilling rights in those Arctic waters.

This draft also would set off limits areas in the Beaufort Sea, off the north coast of Alaska, that had been available before this. It’s a naked attempt to get Republicans to abandon Alaska in return for the promise of future drilling elsewhere.

None of this has anything at all to do with energy or energy independence for the US. It’s entirely, and tightly, centered on an insecure man trying to show how powerful he is to those lesser men and women impudent enough to disagree with him.

The Congress and the President

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President Barack Obama is ready, willing—even eager—to work with the 114th Congress, instead of routinely bypassing it, The Wall Street Journal quoted “senior administration officials” as saying at the start of this new year.

Both Houses of this new Congress have introduced bipartisanly supported bills that would authorize construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. And Obama has said he’ll veto that legislation, never minding that 70% of Americans—Obama’s employers, as well as the employers of the new Congress—want the pipeline built.

I’m driven to the conclusion that Obama’s claimed willingness to work with Republicans is just more Obamatalk, and that “cooperate with” still means “be reasonable: do it my way.”

Carbon Footprint

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[I]n 2011, the University of Technology Sydney made a significant breakthrough by synthesizing something called graphene paper (GP), an ultra thin layer of graphite that has five to six times lower density than steel, but is two times harder with 10 times the tensile strength and 13 times higher bending rigidity.

GP also works well in lithium-ion batteries and even better in lithium-sulfur batteries. The latter kind has far greater storage capacity and is a whole lot cheaper; GP solves the sulfur degradation problem.

There’s a lot more at the link.

Of course there are practical problems yet to be solved at this early stage. A carbon fire burns hot. Get the car, or pickup, too light, and the shock absorbers will need serious redesign—a particular problem for working pickups that do off-road work. But still….

An all-carbon vehicle? Gah. The horror.

“Green” Energy, Competition, and Consumers

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Technologies that can’t compete in the market place aren’t ready for market, nor are they ready for our consumption. Subsidizing these not-ready techs is one way of plusing them up. Another way is to penalize their competition for being too successful.

The New York Times tells this tale, albeit carefully buried in the nether regions of Katharine Seelye’s article. Overarching all of this is this:

New England [Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont] already pays the highest electricity rates of any region in the 48 contiguous states because it has no fossil fuels of its own and has to import all of its oil, gas, and coal.

That’s not strictly true; the Marcellus Shale holds more natural gas than you can shake a…drill…at, and a significant fraction of that lies under western New York. New York, though, is throwing every road block they can think of in the way of extracting the natural gas, which would give the Northeast a nearby, if not local, source of natural gas.

There are two items of interest that backdrop this. One is the spiking energy prices in the Northeast. For instance,

[f]or October, [a small business owner] had paid $376. For November, with virtually no change in his volume of work and without having turned up the thermostat in his two-room shop, his bill came to $788, a staggering increase of 110%.

The other is the lack of infrastructure: there are all of five pipeline systems in the region, with seven new systems proposed.

The six states’ governors had agreed to a regional solution to this, involving building those additional pipelines.

However.

Just last August,

the Massachusetts Legislature rejected the plan, saying in part that cheap energy would flood the market and thwart attempts to advance wind and solar projects. That halted the whole effort.

That halted the whole effort.

But, it’s OK. Progressives and “environmentalists” have your back. And they have sharpened their knives.

 

h/t Power Line