Category Archives: energy

Not that New

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Iran is using oil as a new weapon of war?

Iran’s move to choke off the Strait of Hormuz and turn crude oil into a weapon of war marks a new phase in the 21st-century competition for global power—one that will be defined by the control of critical raw materials and energy.

Not really. Oil as a war weapon may be new to the 21st century, but it’s an old weapon. The US and our allies, in the runup of our entry into the shooting war with Japan, used oil as a weapon of economic war with our embargo of oil sales and shipments to Japan. OPEC used oil as an economic war weapon with its embargo of oil sales to us over our support of Israel.

Oil as weapon isn’t really new to this century, either. Hungary’s Orban is using Russia’s attack on an oil pipeline that transits Ukraine from Russia to Hungary to accuse Ukraine of waging oil war on Hungary, even as he uses that oil blockage as his own weapon against Ukraine. Russia is using oil and other energy sources as weapons in its war on Ukraine by making that disruptive attack, along with other attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, in the first place. The US, and subsequently Europe, began using oil as a war weapon against Russia following that barbarian’s invasion of Ukraine with our and their refusal to buy Russian oil and subsequent sanctions against Russian oil more generally.

Iran’s blockage of the Strait isn’t new, it’s just taking advantage of a chokepoint for oil, and natural gas, shipping.

A Cynically Irrelevant Argument

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Here’s the lede:

A coalition of climate and health organizations sued the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday in an effort to combat its repeal of a landmark climate finding.

Because of course they do. The landmark climate “finding” that has been repealed is the finding that plant food in the form of atmospheric CO2 actually is a pollutant. That fiction has expanded costs of living for us American citizens for decades, and its removal is good riddance. Nevertheless, the climate funding industry is waxing hysterical over the nation’s turn toward rationality.

Their suit proceeds, cynically, from an irrelevancy. Peter Zalzal, of the Environmental Defense Fund:

Repealing the endangerment finding endangers all of us. People everywhere will face more pollution, higher costs, and thousands of avoidable deaths.

Even were that true—it isn’t—it’s irrelevant. The question is an economic, and so a political, one. Our courts have no jurisdiction for hearing this argument. Our judges and Justices are bound by our Constitution and their oaths of office to uphold and defend it, and by their oaths they’re further constrained to rule based on the text of any statute that comes before them. They cannot, legitimately, rule based on what they wished our Constitution and statutes said, nor can they, legitimately, rule based on their personal views of what’s good or bad for our society.

This sort of suit should be tossed at the outset, with prejudice, and with sanctions on the lawyers and their employing firms for bringing frivolous suits.

New Trick for Old Dogs

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The old dogs being, in this case, old(er) jet engines and more-or-less purpose-built jet engines.

There is a move afoot to convert commercial aircraft jet engines to produce electricity for AI-centered data centers. The conversion is relatively straightforward: replacing the fuel nozzles to utilize natural gas instead of jet fuel, and replacing the large fan on the front of the flight engine with a much smaller fan that is better suited for power generation.

FTAI has said it expects to be able to deliver about 100 turbines, or 2.5 gigawatts, a year. Boom Supersonic said its goal is to have 4GW of manufacturing capacity or more annually by 2030.

If jet engines can do this—and they can—they also can be used, or ganged together to be used, as electricity generators for localized needs other than AI centers in much the same way small modular reactors are planned for localized electricity needs.

One GW is enough electricity to power a city with a population of 1.8 million people. That works out to enough electricity for towns of 18,000 for each of FTAI’s turbines. They’ll gang together and scale for this, just as they will for AI centers, and just as SMRs will for either purpose.

Electricity Price Controls

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New Jersey’s newly elected Progressive-Democratic Governor, Mikie Sherrill wants them.

Ms Sherrill used her maiden speech to lay out her plans to ease electric rates. “In short, you are sick of the status quo,” she said, “Well, guess what, guys, so am I.” Guess what: Her proposals are more of the same progressive policies that have fueled higher prices: Subsidies, mandates, and price controls.

Especially those price controls.

Her worst idea is a pause on utility “rate increases or cost recoveries to the extent permitted by law.” This is a price control that will reduce grid investment, including in new supply. ….
If utilities can’t pass on their costs, they will skimp on maintenance. It’s that simple.

Of course, those rate increases or cost recoveries permissions are specified by State laws, and Sherrill and her legislature can alter those laws at will. Her “extent permitted” is disingenuous.

Maintenance skimping is well-known to renters in rent-controlled apartments.

If the provider—landlord or utility (or any other)—can’t recoup his costs as those increase, whether they’re supply costs, regulatory compliance costs, or taxes, he has less money to spend on procuring the items he needs to produce electricity or rental housing or… and especially critically, he has less to spend on simply maintaining what he has. Rental homes/apartments and power generators deteriorate, those residences become badly substandard to the point of uninhabitable, and power generation becomes unreliable. That last is bad in a hot summer, and it’s deadly in a cold winter.

With unreliable power generation, we get rolling blackouts where broad areas in succession see the lights go out; oil, natural gas, and coal generators, all of which depend at bottom on electricity, stop; and electric heating (or cooling) systems stop. On-off cycling from those rolling blackouts, even if in longer intervals than shorter, adds to the wear and tear on the generators, and on the heating and cooling systems, requiring increased maintenance for which those price controls, and rent controls, severely limit the money available to pay.

But never mind. Progressive-Democrats want those price controls because that’s their exercise of political power.

Nuclear Power and Progressive-Democrats

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Both Republican politicians support, and Progressive-Democrat politicians profess support, for nuclear power as a major source of energy for our economy. Progressive-Democrats, though, seems superficial. Here, for instance is Congressman Frank Pallone (D, NJ):

I’ve been supportive of [nuclear], and we’ve been supportive of it as Democrats mostly on a bipartisan basis, but all that is linked to safety. If anything happens that gives the impression or actually makes it so that people’s lives are at risk, or we have some kind of incident, that’s going to be the end of it. I’ll speak for myself but I won’t be able to support it anymore.

Safety matters in nuclear power, just as it does in handling electricity, natural gas, gasoline—and driving down the street and grilling on the patio. There have been three major incidents involving nuclear power. They were Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

The Three Mile Island incident involved a partial meltdown stemming from a stuck valve resulting in loss of coolant to the reactor and operators failing to recognize the fact of the loss of coolant soon enough. Despite those failures, the reactor’s overall design prevented further damage, and radiation release was minimal—generally equivalent to the amount a patient receives during a chest X-ray—and there were no fatalities.

The Chernobyl incident resulted in several immediate casualties and a number of follow-on casualties, and it was the result of serious operator error and poor design. The incident occurred during a test of power-out shutdown procedures that was carried out despite an existing serious power drop during ongoing operations. The design failure was demonstrated by the attempt to shut down the reactor during those conditions resulting in a large power surge that the system could not handle.

The Fukushima incident was driven by a well-offshore earthquake followed by a tsunami, and it had a reactor meltdown, which would seem an especially dangerous and lethal failure. However, the reactor was designed and built to handle all of that but the tsunami, which flooding caused loss of power, leading to the meltdown. By design, the meltdown was contained. Radiation release was extremely limited, and the fatalities ensuing consisted of hospitalized patients and nursing home resident elderly who died while being evacuated due to failures of the evacuation process. No fatalities from the reactor failure occurred.

Nuclear power is safe, when the designs are sound and, especially, when construction and subsequent operation are carried out carefully and in accordance with specifications. When those factors are met, nuclear power compares very favorably with the fatality rates from driving an automobile or truck, from flying commercial, and from riding the train. They compare favorably with the fatality rate inflicted on birds by windmills, and with the loss of habitat from building solar farms.

Pallone surely knows this, which makes his “support” very much a superficial position.

It’s time the naysayers—and not only some Progressive-Democrat pretenders—to get out of the way. Nuclear power is much greener than wind or solar, and it is much steadier and more reliable at generating electricity.