Energy myths: POTUS and 'energy independence'

It seems my work is not done because I keep hearing two misconceptions in America repeated:

1) The President of the United States has something to do with gas prices; and 

2) The U.S. can and should be "energy independent."

The first is a myth because of supply and demand.  As for supply, with the exception of cartels, it's all poured into one big pool of oil, figuratively speaking.  As for demand, it's growing in China and other developing countries and there's nothing we can do about it. 

The second is a myth because there is a world market for oil, coal and natural gas, all highly fungible commodities.  America is not Venezuela and Obama is not Hugo Chavez: it's not "our" oil and gas, we don't nationalize it.  It belongs to huge MNCs like Shell and BP.

It does make sense to talk about "energy security," which Roger Altman explains: 

"Let's get to the point where the amount we import from rogue or potentially rogue nations who might be hostile to us is down to a point where, if suddenly that supply was interrupted or shut off, we go right on."

Even so, it's a global market and we must keep this caveat in mind:

Increased energy security on the supply side, however, does not mean energy independence on the economic side. A smaller share of the oil we use in the U.S. comes from foreign sources today than was the case a decade ago. But an increase in the world oil price has left U.S. consumers paying more at the gas pump and reminded them of their continued dependence on market events beyond White House control.

So if people want to blame something, blame capitalism.

Can A President Control Prices At The Pump?

By Michel Martin

October 25, 2012 | NPR

URL: http://n.pr/RiDxuF 

Energy Independence For U.S.? Try Energy Security

By Tom Gjelten

October 25, 2012 | NPR 

URL: http://n.pr/QYAvrGe

Barack the Bashful is silent (again)

Again, inexplicably, Obama has failed to take credit for a great achievement: pre-approving 250,000 acres of federal lands for solar energy projects, while Romney's beating him up in the debates for not opening up Yellowstone Park and the Arctic Wildlife Reserve to fracking and strip mining.  

Under Obama, the Interior Department didn't go project-by-project, or site-by-site, it looked at all federal public lands, did a programmatic environmental impact assessment of all of them, narrowed down the choices, got public feedback at several intervals, and then pre-approved any big solar energy projects in six states.

Because the public was involved, there won't be any litigation or protests by environmental groups.  Approval time and risk will be reduced for solar entrepreneurs.  Everybody has had their say and is on board.  That's how public management should be done, not by politicians striking secret deals in backrooms with Big Business!

New Program Spurs Solar Development on Public Land

By Flora Lichtman

October 19, 2012 | NPR

URL: http://n.pr/T35FhA

Dems, Repubs talk past each other on economy

This is what Obama was supposed to fix in three-odd years in the White House: a loss of 39 percent of Americans' net wealth during the Great Recession, according to the Fed.

In particular, the median value of Americans' stake in their homes fell 42 percent between 2007 and 2010.  That's particularly awful because: 1) most Americans' wealth is in their homes; and 2) construction, the hardest hit sector in this crisis, is usually the sector that brings us out of recession.  

Underwater houses and oversupply of housing are still the biggest obstacles to increased spending (demand) and investment, including in construction, hence hampering our economic recovery. Moreover, of the 8 million jobs lost during Dubya's recession, 2 million were in construction.

Obama should have done so much more, particularly by pushing mortgage modifications with principal reduction.  But instead he concentrated on giving $29 trillion to the Too Big To Fail banks.

But since Republicans don't believe in helping Main Street, they don't criticize Obama for that failure of leadership.  Instead, they argue what's held the economy back are Obama's "job-killing regulations," and not enough drilling, fracking and mining.  It's like they're living in a different country!  Our bipartisan dialog over the past two years has gone something like this:

Democrats:  Americans lost 39 percent of their net wealth during Dubya's Great Recession, mainly from the burst housing bubble.  Nevertheless, Americans are well on their way to reducing their private debts; and the U.S. is the only major Western economy to have decreased its ratio of total debt to GDP since the crisis.

Republicans:  The problem is the national debt!  Slash it now, even if it causes a depression! People who are unemployed and suffering now need to suffer even more so that their (unborn) grandchildren don't have to!

Democrats:  Let's not repeat the mistakes of EU countries that adopted strict austerity measures hoping to appease global bond markets and keep their interest rates low, only to cause zero-negative economic growth that scared away global bond markets and increased their interest rates and national debts.  

Republicans:  Adopt austerity measures now or we'll end up like those socialists in Europe!

Democrats:  636,000 state and local employees (firefighters, policemen, teachers, et al) have lost their jobs since the Great Recession.

Republicans:  States need more flexibility to fire their fireman, policemen and teachers!

Democrats:  China is investing $1.5 trillion in government subsidies for solar PV innovation over the next five years, even though they already control 50 percent of the world's solar market --  a market that has grown more than 5 times since 2007, with long-term growth prospects of 20-30 percent per year -- and export 90 percent.  Meanwhile, Solyndra has been the only U.S. government energy loan guarantee that has soured, 1.3 percent of America's relatively tiny $38 billion portfolio over the past 6 years.

Republicans:  Drill, baby, drill!  

So, as you can see, Republicans claim that they have all the answers, while it is evident that they don't understand the questions.

German solar power = 20 nuclear stations!

Yep, those Germans sure are smart.  But there's just no way we in the U.S. could spend a few $ billion subsidizing an infant industry (solar power) that could wean us off foreign oil and not impose negative externalities.  Nope, only those super-efficient Germans can manage that.

Germany sets new solar power record, institute says

By Erik Kirschbaum

May 26, 2012 | Reuters

URL:  http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/26/us-climate-germany-solar-idUSBRE84P0FI20120526

Conservative Reason.com: The myth of nuclear power

Gee, I can't believe I missed this article. And I can't believe my free-market-loving rightwing friends didn't forward it to me. Oh well. Anyhoo, this article gives the lie to those who say we should put our faith -- and our investment dollars -- into nuclear power.

I don't agree completely with de Rugy's analysis. For example, taking the 60-odd years of nuclear power as a reliable data set for the entire future safety of nuclear power is just poor risk management. Harmful radioactive materials last thousands of years! (This is taking the rightwing "don't pass the debt onto your grandchildren" argument into extreme "don't pass the waste onto your great-great-great-great-great...grandchildren" territory). According to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, "At this time there are no facilities for permanent disposal of high-level radioactive waste." High-level radioactive waste has a half-life of 24,000 years.

Her article also fails to mention the scary reality that U.S. nuclear regulators are in the pocket of the heavily subsidized nuclear industry -- that worst-of-all-worlds nexus of corporatist democracy -- whose fleet of aging plants is coming up for re-licensing, so our safety cannot be guaranteed. And although she correctly points out that there is no such thing as a "private" nuclear industry, her analysis ignores the fact that all sources of energy, including oil, are heavily subsidized, whether it's necessary or not.

Also, she makes sure to draw the distinction between electricity generation and fuels, which is true as far as it goes, but let's take the U.S. interstate highway system, for instance: it is a sunk cost (not considering the need for constant repairs) in economic terms, but without it our devotion to gas-guzzling cars would make no economic sense. So it's dishonest and wrong to analyze our current energy situation but refuse to ask, "How did we get here?" She also ignores the fact that the U.S. spends hundreds of $ billions protecting market access to fossil fuels, especially petroleum. With wind and solar there's nothing to protect and nothing to restrict: it's there for everybody. Finally, her analysis ignores that plug-in electric cars are now a reality, not science fiction, so if we can switch to renewable sources of electricity production, then the dichotomy of electricity- vs. fuel-producing technologies would largely disappear.

There are other problems with de Rugy's analysis but I want you to actually read it and appreciate its merits, my pro-nuke comrades, so I won't say any more.

P.S. -- I respect Germany more all the time. After the Fukushima disaster, Germans revolted democratically at the ballot box to reject unequivocally a nuclear future for their country, and -- can you believe it? -- Germany's government actually listened, and pledged to shut down all nuclear power plants by 2022 at the latest, and increase Germany's share of renewable energy consumption to 35 percent in 2020, 50 percent in 2030, 65 percent in 2040, and more than 80 percent in 2050. Since they're Germans and not at given to silliness they will almost certainly succeed. As in the health care field, we Americans don't have to be innovators, we can simply borrow the best policy ideas from other countries and implement them to our benefit; but alas, we are oh-so "exceptional," to our detriment.


The Truth About Nuclear Power
Separating economic myth from economic fact
By Veronique de Rugy
March 25, 2011 | Reason.com

URL: http://reason.com/archives/2011/03/25/the-truth-about-nuclear-power

Bloomberg: The future now: End to energy scarcity?

Can't believe I missed this article. Read it. It's amazing. Europeans (and Texans !?!) are realizing the benefits of free wind energy today, not in some far-off utopian future. The energy companies are paying people to leave their lights on; and at times they don't know what price to charge because supply outstrips demand.

We are seeing the revolution in renewable energy happen right now. It's upon us. We are talking about, for all intents and purposes, free energy that will never run out. And the power companies are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to profit from it. Well let them try! They enjoyed big government subsidies to build their wind farms and hydroelectric plants, and now... the energy at times is so abundant it costs almost nothing!

In the short term I'm sure they'll successfully lobby the government to spend more money to improve electricity transmission grids so that they can sell their excess energy to markets not served by wind or hydroelectric and make a profit. But just imagine when everybody is using wind, hydroelectric, solar, and other renewables wherever they are feasible. What happens when there are no more technologically backwards, fossil-fuel dependent regions or countries to sell their excess power to?

Dare I say it?... Utopia. An end to scarcity. Economics turned on its head.

It's an exciting time to be alive to see changes like this happening.

Windmill Boom Cuts Electricity Prices in Europe

By Jeremy van Loon

April 23, 2010 | Bloomberg

On windy nights in northern Germany, consumers are paid to keep the lights on.

Twice this year, the nation's 21,000 wind turbines pumped out so much power that utilities reduced customer bills for using the surplus electricity. Since the first rebate came with little fanfare at 5 a.m. one October day in 2008, payments have risen as high as 500.02 euros ($665) a megawatt-hour, about as much as a small factory or 1,000 homes use in 60 minutes.

The wind-energy boom in Europe and parts of Texas has begun to reduce bills for consumers. Electricity-network managers have even ordered windmills offline at times to trim supplies. That hurts profit for wind-farm operators, said Christian Kjaer, head of the European Wind Energy Association, which represents RWE AG of Germany, Spain's Iberdrola SA and Dong Energy A/S of Denmark.

"We're seeing that wind energy lowers prices, which is great for the consumers," Kjaer said at his group's conference in Warsaw this week. "We as producers have to acknowledge that this means operating the existing plant fewer hours a year, and this has an effect on investors" and profit.

After years of getting government incentives to install windmills, operators in Europe may have become their own worst enemy, reducing the total price paid for electricity in Germany, Europe's biggest power market, by as much as 5 billion euros some years, according to a study this week by Poeyry, a Helsinki-based industry consultant.

Wind Capacity

Germany has doubled capacity to generate power from wind since 2002 and has turbines producing about 7.5 percent of the nation's electricity, according to the German Wind Energy Association. That compares with 4.8 percent for the European Union and about 1 percent in the U.S. The turbines operate about a third of the time and are idle in calm weather.

"Wind is playing an important role in spot-price volatility because it's very difficult to predict when more power is coming on line," said Ruxandra Haradau-Doeser, an analyst at Bankhaus Metzler in Frankfurt.

The erratic nature of weather makes it difficult for utilities to estimate by how much wind power pushes down revenue they earn from competing energy sources such as natural gas. A spokeswoman at Bilbao, Spain-based Iberdrola, the world's largest wind-power operator, declined to estimate.

Spanish power prices fell an annual 26 percent in the first quarter because of the surge in supplies from wind and hydroelectric production, the Spanish wind-industry trade group said in a statement yesterday on its Web site.

Negative Prices

RWE, Germany's second-largest utility, minimizes the risks of having to pay consumers to use power by using a "broad" range of different generation technologies in different markets, a spokesman for the company said. Rebates, or negative prices, do not have a big negative effect on the company, he said.

"Negative electricity prices happen when supply outstrips demand and we literally don't know where to put it," Peter Smits, head of central Europe at Swiss power-equipment maker ABB Ltd., said in an interview on April 20 in Hanover. "We will see this happen more often in the future."

One solution is more investment in transmission systems to move power from northern Germany wind farms to heavy industry in the south, he said. "Power transmission is the bottleneck."

Power trading needs to be expanded further, Kjaer said. Tying European markets together, already done among France, the Netherlands and Belgium, lets temporary surpluses flow toward electricity-poor zones. Germany plans to join them on Sept. 7.

Price Volatility

Trading more electricity across markets reduces price volatility, spreading any excess capacity from wind and solar power plants across a broader area, he said.

Storing electricity may be another fix. In Scandinavia, Danish wind power is used to pump water into Norwegian and Swedish reservoirs and later released to drive hydroelectric plants when the wind is not blowing.

Nord Pool, the Nasdaq OMX Group Inc.-owned Scandinavian power bourse, last year took steps to encourage generators to limit production by implementing a minimum price. The most generators would pay users to take their power is 200 euros per megawatt hour if there is excess electricity from too much wind.

The measures are meant to "increase the effectiveness of the market forcing power generators to consider reducing their electricity generation or having to pay for delivering electricity," the company said on its Web site.

Wind's impact on prices results from its "low marginal costs," which pushes more expensive technologies including natural gas and coal out of the market, the Poeyry study said. Fossil-fuel burning relies on fuel, which can boost the price of electricity from those sources.

Negative Power Prices

Texas had so-called negative power prices in the first half of 2008 because wind turbines in the western part of the state weren't adequately linked with more populated regions in the east, according to the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas.

Until there's more integration and better transmission grids, prices probably will fluctuate, leading to negative prices, in which payment to consumers is reflected as a discount on their monthly bills.

That hasn't yet stopped the expansion of wind power. Britain now has wind turbines with the capacity to generate 1 gigawatt of power offshore, enough for 653,000 homes, the industry group RenewableUK said today.

China WindPower Group Ltd., Iberdrola and Duke Energy Corp. will lead development of an estimated $65 billion of wind farms, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Around the world, the potential output of electricity from wind is already 157.9 gigawatts, according to the Global Wind Energy Council, a Brussels-based industry group.

Projects in Danger?

"I haven't yet seen that negative pricing is a danger to new projects," said Andrew Garrad, chief executive officer of GL Garrad Hassan, a wind consulting company. "We do need to get the right market mechanisms in place" to better integrate wind power into energy grids.

Wind power is as cheap as electricity made from burning coal on windy days, and those lower costs drive down power prices. In parts of Texas, some utilities are using wind power because it's the cheapest form of energy, said Garrad.

China is the most attractive nation for developing wind energy, followed by the U.S. and Germany, Ernst & Young said yesterday in a study. The consultant surveyed factors such as unexploited energy resources, power rates, taxes and financing.

James Woolsey: 'Destroy oil as a strategic commodity'

It seems as if neocon, Iraq War proponent, and ex-spook James Woolsey has found Jesus, so to speak, on the energy issue. He actually makes some salient points about what "energy independence" really means.

It was news to me that oil releases carcinogenic particulates into the air which cause tens of thousands of deaths each year in the U.S.

If Oil Were Like Salt, Could U.S. Kick The Habit?

With Scott Simon

June 26, 2010 | Weekend Edition Saturday on NPR

SCOTT SIMON, host: Every president - Democratic and Republican - since Richard Nixon has vowed to strive to make the United States energy independent. Forty years later, human beings have landed on the moon, human hearts are routinely transplanted, communism has collapsed, and silicon chips have made it possible to pack a library-worth of information into a device smaller than your thumb.

So why hasn't the United States or any nation become energy independent?

Jim Woolsey is the chairman of Woolsey Partners and a former director of Central Intelligence. He specializes in a range of alternative energy and security issues. He joins us in our studios. Thanks very much for being with us.

Mr. JIM WOOLSEY (Former CIA Director): Good to be with you, Scott.

SIMON: So what are some of the obstructions, technological, economic and political?

Mr. WOOLSEY: Well, in part we haven't been working frequently on the right problem. There are two energy systems essentially in the U.S. One is transportation - that's at 70 percent oil - and the other is the electricity grid - and that's over half fueled by coal and then natural gas, nuclear, hydro and others. They don't have very much to do with one another now.

Back in the '70s it was different. Oil fired power plants, provided about 20 percent of the country's electricity. So, if you were building a nuclear power plant or a wind farm in the '70s, you could well be replacing oil directly. Today, you're not.

SIMON: So when people talk about generating alternative sources of energy - and it often is things like wind or solar - that's not necessarily addressing the problem of foreign oil dependence.

Mr. WOOLSEY: It's not really addressing the problem of foreign oil dependence. No, that that doesn't have much to do with it and won't for many years.

SIMON: So where does that leave us?

Mr. WOOLSEY: In a way, there's been too much emphasis on the foreign side of this. Yes, we import well over half our oil now and that's a bad thing and we borrow a billion dollars a day essentially to import oil. But producing the oil domestically helps solve the balance of payments problem, but that's about all it does. It will not interfere with OPEC's domination of oil.

Something close to 80 percent of the world's proven reserves of oil are in OPEC states. And they are the low-cost producers and they have the big reserves. So they're going to be effectively running the international oil trade and running the cartel that runs it even if we drill more domestically. And so they're going to run the system.

We have to effectively destroy oil as a strategic commodity. Not destroy oil, but destroy its strategic role, its dominance of transportation.

SIMON: Well, that's why we've asked you here. It sound attractive. How do you do it?

Mr. WOOLSEY: Well, I think you want to focus on existing infrastructure and existing vehicles, and there are several things that could be done relatively quickly. One - and the administration is doing this, I think, and various people on the Hill, encouraging moving toward electrification. Particularly, I think, plug-in hybrids.

Another is improving the efficiency of internal combustion engines. There are a number of start-up companies that are inventing computer chips and valves and all kinds of things that you can use to modify existing engines and existing vehicles to get something like a 20, 30 percent improvement in fuel efficiency.

You can also encourage the use of biofuels generally. Require the automobile manufacturers much more rapidly than we're now requiring them to move to what's called an open-standard, flexible fuel vehicles. It just requires them to change the kind of plastic in the fuel line of the car and a bit of software -40, 50 dollars a vehicle - in the manufacturing process.

And that, I think, would an extremely positive step. One reason it would be positive is that we've got a serious health risk problem from using petroleum products. The fine particulates that are carried into the atmosphere by what's called aromatics - benzene, toluene, xylene - which is what the oil companies now use to increase octane, are highly carcinogenic.

It really looks as if tens of thousands of deaths from malignancy a year and hundreds of millions of dollars in added health care costs are caused by these fine particulates, which the oil companies have a special waiver on, essentially. If you run a chemical plant, you can't put benzene, toluene, xylene into the atmosphere, but they're permitted to do it because it's from a mobile source like gasoline in a car.

SIMON: People often point out you can burn oil, it's affordable - that's why it's good for cars. There's a reason why people use oil.

Mr. WOOLSEY: Well, it does carry a lot of energy in a relatively small space. But at least, as far as I'm concerned, that's about where its advantages stop, and there are just a number of things that are in the works that are going to give oil a real run for its money. Some of them are going to need some initial help, but I think the government role could largely be one of a Teddy Roosevelt-style trust buster - going after oil's cartel and oil's dominance of transportation, to break it.

Same thing happened to salt in the very early 20th century. Salt was a strategic commodity for thousands of years. It was the only way to preserve meat, countries went to war over salt mines. At the beginning of the 20th century, the coming of the electric grids, meant that all of a sudden refrigeration and freezing was available affordably and salt's dominance just fell apart within a relatively few years. That's what we need to do to oil. We need to make it as boring as salt is today.

SIMON: Thank you, Mr. Woolsey.

Mr. WOOLSEY: Thank you.

SIMON: Jim Woolsey, chairman of Woolsey Partners and former director of the CIA.

Book: Chernobyl killed almost 1 million people

I guess we're all Ukrainian, whether we like it or not. (That goes for Belarusians too).


Book's Astounding Allegation: Chernobyl Radiation Killed Nearly One Million People

Emissions from this one reactor exceeded a hundred-fold the radioactive contamination of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki according to a new book.

April 26, 2010 | Environmental News Service

Nearly one million people around the world died from exposure to radiation released by the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl reactor, finds a new book from the New York Academy of Sciences published today on the 24th anniversary of the meltdown at the Soviet facility.

The book, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment," was compiled by authors Alexey Yablokov of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy in Moscow, and Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko of the Institute of Radiation Safety, in Minsk, Belarus.

The authors examined more than 5,000 published articles and studies, most written in Slavic languages and never before available in English.

The authors said, "For the past 23 years, it has been clear that there is a danger greater than nuclear weapons concealed within nuclear power. Emissions from this one reactor exceeded a hundred-fold the radioactive contamination of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

"No citizen of any country can be assured that he or she can be protected from radioactive contamination. One nuclear reactor can pollute half the globe," they said. "Chernobyl fallout covers the entire Northern Hemisphere."

NYT: How wind can break

All you wind hatas will love this article. I thought this particular paragraph was interesting:

"The cost and hassle of transporting the huge, heavy turbines has led to interest in manufacturing turbines in the United States, rather than in Europe. Last year 24 states opened, expanded or announced turbine manufacturing plants, according to the American Wind Energy Association. By value, about half of turbine parts are now manufactured in the United States, said Mr. Dunlop of the wind association."

See, the free market wants to break into wind!

Slow, Costly and Often Dangerous Road to Wind Power

By Kate Galbraith

July 22, 2009 | New York Times