Category Archives: energy

A Step in the Right Direction

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But it’s a small step, and much more needs to be done. A bill has moved through the Texas legislature—it’s now on Governor Greg Abbott’s (R) desk—that would create a $200 annual registration fee for battery vehicles.

State Senator Robert Nichols (R), who sponsored the bill in the Senate:

As more of these vehicles drive on Texas roads, there are concerns about how they contribute to the funding of the roads which they use. Currently, Texas uses the gasoline/diesel fuel tax to fund transportation projects; however, with the growing use of EVs, the revenue from the fuel tax is decreasing, which diminishes our ability to fund road improvements for all drivers.

That’s a necessary step in maintaining funding for Texas’ roads and bridges, but it’s insufficient because wear and tear of our roads and bridges isn’t the only cost imposed on us by battery vehicles.

Battery vehicle owners also should be the only ones to pay for the environmental damage their vehicles inflict on Texas’ land. Battery vehicle batteries, at their end of life, cannot be recycled; they can only be “disposed of.” Major components of those batteries, like lithium, cobalt, and nickel are enormously toxic, requiring the dead batteries to be carefully disposed of, lest that environmental damage get widespread.

Serious environmental damage also occurs at the beginning of the battery production cycle, even if much of that start damage doesn’t occur in Texas: mining lithium, cobalt, and nickel, along with copper, is even more environmentally damaging than battery disposal, from the destruction caused by the mining itself to the highly toxic mining waste byproducts—tailings—that are thrown off by the mining.

Much, if not most, of the lithium, cobalt, and nickel mining, along with a significant fraction of the increase in copper mining, is done for the sake of these batteries. The only ones who should be paying these environmental costs are the battery car owners. No one else.

Battery car owners are getting off light under this fee.

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.