Category: Climate & Energy

Former Energy Secretary James Schlesinger and renewable energy expert Robert L. Hirsh opine in the Washington Post today,

Why are we ignoring things we know? We know that the sun doesn’t always shine and that the wind doesn’t always blow. That means that solar cells and wind energy systems don’t always provide electric power. Nevertheless, solar and wind energy seem to have captured the public’s support as potentially being the primary or total answer to our electric power needs…

Realistically, however, solar and wind will probably only provide a modest percentage of future U.S. power. Some serious realism in energy planning is needed, preferably from analysts who are not backing one horse or another.

The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that,

House Democrats are weighing a plan to give some of the nation’s biggest polluters a 10-year cushion from the impact of greenhouse-gas regulations to get a cap-and-trade system in place now.

Under the proposal, electric utilities would get free permits to emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases for as long as ten years, after which they would gradually begin paying. In exchange, utilities would be required to shield consumers and businesses from higher electricity rates during that time. They would also make investments in conservation and renewable energy to lessen the industry’s reliance on coal.

“We’re going to have some of the money allocated to ratepayers,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) “How much and what percentage, I don’t know.”

Keep in mind that the federal government’s printing presses are churning out more dollars than ever before — so there’s plenty of money to buy-off everyone. Why didn’t anyone think of Zimbabwe-ing our way to green paradise before?

Bloomberg reports,

The Dutch town of Barendrecht has a message for Royal Dutch Shell Plc: Not under my backyard.

The oil company and the Netherlands government intend to build the first of a new generation of carbon-dioxide storage facilities in two depleted natural-gas fields in Barendrecht. The plan is to capture emissions from a gasification hydrogen plant at Shell’s nearby Pernis refinery and then store the CO2 more than a mile below area homes, preventing the greenhouse gas from reaching the air and harming the environment.

“I don’t think this is the solution to the CO2 problem,” said 53-year-old resident Gerard van Gils. “Why do a project in a residential area and not offshore? The atomic bomb wasn’t tested under Manhattan. To me this means: Not under my backyard.”

Anyone who thinks we will ever be burying CO2 from coal-fired power plants — the only way to “safely” use coal according to Al Gore and Energy Secretary Steven Chu — is simply out-of-touch with the realities of NIMBY-ism stoked by the green anti-coal jihad.

From the Associated Press (via FoxNews.com):

A westward dash to power electricity-hungry cities by cashing in on the desert’s most abundant resource — sunshine — is clashing with efforts to protect the tiny pupfish and desert tortoise and stinginess over the region’s rarest resource: water.

Water is the cooling agent for what traditionally has been the most cost-efficient type of large-scale solar plants…

The solar hopefuls are encountering overtaxed aquifers and a legendary legacy of Western water wars and legal and regulatory scuffles. Some are moving to more costly air-cooled technology — which uses 90 percent less water — for solar plants that will employ miles of sun-reflecting mirrors across the Western deserts. Others see market advantages in solar dish or photovoltaic technologies that don’t require steam engines and cooling water and that are becoming more economically competitive.

The National Park Service is worried about environmental consequences of solar proposals on government lands that are administered by the Bureau of Land Management. It says it supports the solar push but is warning against water drawdowns, especially in southern Nevada. In the Amargosa Valley, the endangered, electric-blue pupfish lives in a hot water, aquifer-fed limestone cavern called Devil’s Hole…

Today’s Washington Post article, “Renewable Energy’s Environmental Paradox” tries to buff green hypocrisy into a “paradox.”

A few notable points from the article:

• The Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management is now run by Ned Farquhar, a former Natural Resources Defense Council staffer — so look for more land to be put out of reach of development.
• The Nature Conservancy is preparing a study that will enable the greens to attack renewables based on their land-use footprint:
  

  A team of scientists, several of whom work for the Nature Conservancy, has written a paper that will appear in the journal PLoS One showing that it can take 300 times as much land to produce a given amount of energy from soy biodiesel as from a nuclear power plant. Regardless of the climate policy the nation adopts, the paper predicts that by 2030, energy production will occupy an additional 79,537 square miles of land.

  The impact will be “substantial,” said Jimmie Powell, the Nature Conservancy’s national energy leader and one of the paper’s co-authors. “It’s important to know where the footprint is going to be.”

• Ditlev Engel, the CEO of the Danish wind-energy company Vestas, said that anecdotal evidence about birds being caught in turbine blades and other environmental horror stories do not usually hold up under scrutiny. Unfortunately, he then followed up this comment with,
  

  “Do people think it’s better all those birds are breathing CO2? I’m not a scientist, but I doubt it.”

  Engel then tried to rebound from this depth of ignorance with,

  “Let’s get the facts on the table and not the feelings. The fact is, these are not issues.”

Here are the take-home messages:

• Like green is the new red, “paradox” is the new “hypocrisy.”
• Key slots in the federal government are manned by greens.
• Ditlev Engel shows that ignorance, not knowledge, is wind power.

The Washington, DC consulting firm Clear View Energy Partners says the recently introdcued Waxman-Markey climate bill is a “de facto ban” on new coal-fired power plants, according to a report in today’s Carbon Control News.

Waxman-Markey would impose “a major barrier on the construction of new facilities without carbon capture and storage facilities,” CVEP told CCN.

Click here for more info on carbon capture and storage.

Click here for the Waxman-Markey bill.

In today’s Wall Street Journal article spotlighting the greens’ opposition to their own “solutions,” a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund said that the only clean-energy options likely to matter are,

“large, centralized solutions… That’s the way it is… “We all grew up with this kind of mantra that small is beautiful… [But that] is not a model for a highly modernized, global world.”

There’s also a slight focus on green double-talk:

Late last year, the influential Natural Resources Defense Council helped sponsor ads ridiculing coal-industry ads boasting about progress toward cleaning up coal. “In reality, there’s no such thing as clean coal,” said a print version of the ad.

But last month, the NRDC, along with the Environmental Defense Fund, another prominent group, hosted workshops advocating more spending on clean-coal research. The rationale: Coal will remain a crucial fuel for decades, so it makes sense to try to clean it up.

“If NRDC had written all the ads by itself, we probably would have had a more nuanced ad,” says NRDC climate expert David Hawkins. “But it probably would have been a nuanced ad that doesn’t get noticed.”

If we let these people takeover, we’ll have earned the “final solution” they have in store for us.

From today’s Guardian (UK):

BP is to axe 620 jobs from its solar power business – more than a quarter of that workforce – in a move it said was part of the long-term strategy to “reduce the cost of solar power to that of conventional electricity.”

Two cell manufacture and module assembly plants near Madrid, will be shut with the loss of 480 posts while module assembly will also be phased out at its Frederick facility in Maryland, US, with a further 140 redundancies.

BP blamed the cutbacks on the credit crunch and lower-cost competition saying its global manufacturing capacity would still increase during this year and next via a series of strategic alliances with other companies.

“We deeply regret the impact of this business decision on our employees and the local communities,” said Reyad Fezzani, chief executive of BP Solar. “We have a long history at both the Madrid and Frederick sites. Competitive hi-tech manufacturing of ingots, wafers and cells will continue at Frederick. Engineering, technology product development, sales and marketing and other business support functions will also remain at both Frederick and Madrid.”

He said solar markets had been “unsettled by the impact of the global economic environment”, adding that the market had been over-supplied as competition increased and prices had fallen.

Fezzani said the cuts would lead to lower prices for solar power: “The decision is part of the long term strategy to reduce the cost of solar power to that of conventional electricity.”

Perhaps the green job-less in Maryland can find work with President Obama’s stimulus bill program to caulk and weather-strip American homes.