Category Archives: energy

Some Questions Arise

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The just-achieved ability to get more energy out of a controlled fusion process than was put into the process is a tremendously positive step in generating power for our economy.

Some questions arise, though, that want answers before this achievement can be brought to actual, economic, widespread fruition.

  • What is the efficiency of released energy capture? If the energy actually captured is less than the energy input, the process (so far) wouldn’t seem economically feasible.
  • How long did the test last—not so much in terms of time, but over how many hydrogen fuel “pellets” in the stream fed into the process?
  • Did the energy budget measured include the energy required to generate, preserve, and deliver to the reaction process those hydrogen “pellets?” Strictly speaking, that’s not ordinarily included in measuring the success of the process itself, but it is important in assessing the end-game economics of the matter (think of the energy budget of a gasoline or battery car when measuring efficiency—those don’t ordinarily include the energy costs of getting the fuel/electricity inputs out of the ground and delivered to a gasoline/recharging station, but they’re important to the overall economics)

Problems to be solved a bit later include emergency shutdown procedures

  • Shutting the lasers as gracefully as possible so as to “merely” extinguish the fusion reaction
  • Handling the energy release from a failure of the fusion containment process

Still, to repeat, this is a terrific step forward for man-controlled fusion and for energy generation generally.

American Energy Production

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In a piece centered on Texas’ role in our nation’s electricity production and especially on Texas’ role in our nation’s oil and natural gas production, there sat this nugget of information:

Fossil fuels—petroleum, natural gas, and coal—accounted for roughly 79% of total US energy production in 2021, according to the EIA.

This is the magnitude of destruction the Progressive-Democratic Party wants to wreak on our ability to heat our homes in winters, cool our homes in summers, travel to/from work or stores, or produce much of anything at all from food to manufactured products to communications facilities—all of which take energy as the first input. They don’t care about the destruction they intend to inflict on our economy in general.

No more drilling.
There is no more drilling. I haven’t formed any new drilling.

That’s President Joe Biden’s (D) solemn promise to do right now. All in the name of converting us to “renewable” energy sources…sometime. All without regard to those sources being entirely unreliable.

Ubiquitous Battery-Powered Vehicles

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These need things; here’s a partial list of Critical Items and some problems associated with their acquisition.

With respect to batteries, the raw materials—lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt, among others—are expensive to mine and destructive of the environment to mine. Both the metals themselves and the mining tailings are highly toxic and expensive to handle and to dispose of.

Refining those materials comes with its own problems:

[The People’s Republic of China] processes some 70% of the world’s lithium and cobalt, and 99% of the manganese, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. [The PRC] also dominates the market for the parts that go into batteries, such as cathodes and anodes, as well as the production of batteries themselves.

And this:

[The] majority of motors used in today’s EVs rely on permanent magnets, which produce a constant magnetic field that helps spin a motor’s rotor and, in turn, power the wheels.
But these magnets require costly rare-earth metals such as neodymium and dysprosium. As with battery ingredients, the dominant supplier is [the PRC], and producing the metals can cause pollution

That makes us dependent on an enemy nation for our economic welfare.

On the other hand, there are such things as AC induction motors. These are a 19th century invention and are ubiquitous in today’s household appliances. However.

[They are] less efficient. That can reduce a vehicle’s driving range unless battery storage is boosted.

That increased battery dependence would make us even more dependent on that enemy nation for the materials. Aside from that, induction motors also take a double potful of copper, and copper mining is destructive of the environment.

And this: the electricity distribution infrastructure needed to for recharging the batteries doesn’t yet exist, and the current grid already is nearly fully occupied just handling today’s household and business loads.

And this: the production of electricity depends on inconstant solar and wind facilities, on fossil fuel (reliable and cheap, but currently under attack by the Left), and on nuclear power (currently hugely expensive to produce, with the building of additional nuclear power facilities even more expensive due to enormously expensive over-regulation).

The root problem (to use a phrase), then, is to get government out of the way of fossil fuel use and out of the way of adding nuclear power reactors to the electricity distribution grid. And expanding the grid to handle the increased load.

Power to the People

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Or not.

In a Friday op-ed centered on California’s hog-raising requirements for pork sold in the State, Robert Alt, President and CEO of the Buckeye Institute had this throw-away line:

California—which boasts of recent policies that require residents to reduce electricity use to prevent rolling blackouts….

The only State—and possibly the first nation in the world—to institutionalize steady state brownouts.

What a legacy for the Progressive-Democratic Party running California.

A Good Move

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Finally.

The Biden administration has granted a waiver to the Jones Act so American shippers can ship diesel fuel directly from American refiners to Puerto Rico, which desperately needs the fuel—still—after Fiona ran over it.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement that the administration granted the “temporary and targeted” waiver to “ensure that the people of Puerto Rico have sufficient diesel to run generators needed for electricity and the functioning critical facilities as they recover from Hurricane Fiona.”

Finally, because the Biden administration should have granted this waiver preemptively a month ago, if not sooner: they knew the hurricane was going to do serious damage to the territory—which still hasn’t fully recovered from the prior hurricane—whether or not this hurricane ran over the island. Worse, this administration had been sitting on a request for the waiver since 20 September, when BP asked for it for just this reason.

It would be even better if President Joe Biden (D) granted a broader and longer-lasting waiver so New England States could get the natural gas, oil, diesel fuel, gasoline, and so on that they so desperately need and for which they must pay especially exorbitant prices to foreign entities to get.

New England also could get these energies overland, but for the Progressive-Democratic regimes running New York. Those regimes have blocked development of a natural gas pipeline from Pennsylvania into New England that must transit New York, and they have block development of that part of the Marcellus Formation that lies under New York—which obstruction inflates energy costs not only for New England’s citizens, but for all the rest of us citizens, as well.