Category: Green Hell

If you want to know why General Electric is lobbying for the Waxman-Markey energy tax bill — and the higher electricity prices that would result from it — the company provided yet another reason today.

GE announced that it would develop and manufacture appliances that will supposedly interact with the coming “smart Grid” to reduce energy use. GE-provided examples of this interaction include:

• A refrigerator will delay its defrost cycle – a cycle that takes more energy than normal operating mode – until the energy load is lower;
• A dryer will reduce the wattage used by the heating coils;
• A dishwasher will delay its start until a time of day when energy usage is lower.

Supposedly consumers would be able to override appliance actions, but who knows how easy that would be or whether that capability might be controlled or even phased out over time.

GE has been running a pilot “demand-response” program with Louisville Gas & Electric (LG&E) utilizing GE employees as pilot participants — folks who now seem unduly concerned with saving energy. According to the GE media release,

Dana and Mark Bryan of Louisville, KY stated the appliances also have led to changes in their energy using habits. “It’s helped me get more organized,” says Dana. “I now unload the dishwasher first thing in the morning and then fill it throughout the day. After dinner, I set it to run and the smart programming delays it until after 10 p.m.” Mark reports a 20% reduction of total electrical consumption in the months he has participated in the program. “As part of the pilot, I have an in-home energy monitor. It lets me know the rate I am paying and the instantaneous electrical consumption. Watching that meter has driven behavior changes in my house that have resulted in reduced energy consumption. That explains a portion of the 20% reduction.”

So how much of your time at home do you really want to spend monitoring your family’s electricity usage?

The average monthly electric bill in the U.S. is about $100. If obsessing over the in-home energy monitor saves the Bryans less than $20/month, then I’d suggest that meter-watching is not really a productive use of anyone’s time — unless, of course, you enjoy that sort of thing.

But, if global warming regulation is enacted and electricity prices skyrocket and/or energy is eventually rationed, then meter-watching could, for many, become more of a necessity as opposed to an optional fetish, particularly for those in lower income brackets.

GE will profit, of course, from selling the home monitors and the more-expensive “smart” appliances. But it’s not at all clear that consumers will get any benefits at all since they’ll be paying more for the appliances and more for electricity.

The common sense public policy move would be to increase our electricity supplies and reduce its cost by building needed power plants and transmissions lines and forgoing government mandates on fuels and emissions — so that we don’t have to sweat electricity use.

I’d bet that GE would make more money from making electricity cheaper than it would from making it more expensive.

CalPERS, California’s giant state retirement system, has invested $200 million with Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist who focuses on so-called “cleantech.”

Since the financial success of “cleantech” seems to be heavily dependent on the dubious cap-and-trade bill now in the U.S. Senate, it seems that CalPERS is risking a lot of retiree money on a piece of legislation that may never pass and, if it does, may very well be an economic disaster — even for the rentseekers it is designed to enrich.

Calpers lost $56.2 billion during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2009. So what’s another $200 million?

For more on state pension funds and global warming check out our report, Pensions in Peril: Are State Officials Risking Public Employee Retirement Benefits by Playing Global Warming Politics?

President Obama’s stimulus plan to weatherize America may take more than a generation to break even — if it ever does.

States will spend an average of $6,500 to weatherize homes under the plan, according to a report in Greenwire. Eligible homes house families earning up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level, about $44,000 per year for a family of four.

In Indiana, which just received the first tranche of the $132 million in caulking industry welfare coming its way, the average annual home heating cost is about $1,000.

As Obama’s caulking program hopes to reduce average home heating bills by 32 percent — or about $320 per year in Indiana — it could take more than 20 years for the program to break even.

[This space reserved for the photo-op of the Caulker-in-Chief in action!]

From Newsweek:

In the 1960s and 1970s, German companies and laboratories churned out futuristic technologies, from novel types of nuclear reactors to the world’s first magnetic-levitation train. In the early 1980s, Germany was one of the first countries to develop a national plan for genetics research, setting up labs in Munich, Cologne, and Heidelberg. Per capita, German scientists applied for more biotech patents than Americans did.

Yet only a few years later, German pharmaceutical companies like BASF and Bayer postponed production plans and moved much of their research abroad. Germany lost its spot at the cutting edge of biotech. One reason was the pull of a powerful new startup culture that had developed around American universities in the 1980s. But there was a more sinister reason as well: a powerful coalition of environmental activists, church leaders, politicians, and journalists mobilized fears against medical biotechnology as a dangerous meddling with nature, an attack on human dignity reminiscent of Nazi eugenics. With much of the public behind them, lawmakers tightened regulations, bureaucrats refused to grant permits, and even academic research facilities became targets of righteous protest. Today, most Germans once again accept medical biotech, but most of the industry’s leading companies are found in the U.S.

The greens are giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “pissed off.”

The Albany Times Union reports that,

The [New York Department of Environmental Conservation] has been getting complaints by state workers that waterless urinals at their building have created a fetid mess complete with “splash back,” “puddles (of urine) on the floor,” and “unpleasant odor.”

Those using the restrooms at DEC’s 625 Broadway headquarters grew so disgusted that in April they filed a union grievance alleging a health hazard and a violation of work rules protecting employees from “elements, such as filth or pathogens,” according to records obtained by the Times Union.

The grievance was dismissed by DEC, then taken to the Governor’s Office of Employee Relations earlier this month where it also was dismissed.

Nonetheless, GOER’s Assistant Director for Safety and Health, Charles Vejvoda, conceded that “if indeed back splash or public urination is occurring, there is a violation of human dignity and decorum.”

He also recommended that the union and DEC try to work out the issues. Displaying some bureaucratic humor, he listed possible remedies including the use of such protective equipment as rain gear, aprons, rubber boots, gloves, or even reducing fluid intake, but concluded that wasn’t feasible.

Since its grievance was dismissed, the Public Employees Federation union has begun urging DEC employees to e-mail and otherwise inform management when there is a problem.

New York blames its employees. Although Assistant Director for Safety and Health, Charles Vejvoda, conceded that…

“… if indeed back splash or public urination is occurring, there is a violation of human dignity and decorum…”

… he also wondered…

… if workers were exaggerating the extent of problems, writing “this reviewer does find the assertion that someone is ‘urinating above the urinals’ quite troubling inasmuch as such a healthy stream would be uncommon in a workforce whose average age is 48.”

He also suggested that “certain individuals may come up short,” as an explanation for the complaint about puddles.

Now that the greens have screwed up urinals, who wouldn’t want to hand over national energy policy to them?

H/t to WGY’s Al Roney for bringing this item to our attention.

A new study from Harvard University estimates that capturing carbon dioxide from power plants will double the cost of electricity.

This price tag does not include the cost of transporting and storing the carbon underground, which Michael Economides of the University of Houston estimates will cost additional trillions of dollars.

That’s a lot of money to spend to accomplish nothing of value.

Commenting on Washington, D.C.-based utility Pepco’s application to the Obama administration for $254 million in federal stimulus grants to upgrade its grid, Pepco region president Thomas Graham said in a statement,

“Every dollar we obtain from the federal government offsets the cost customers would otherwise pay to make these important improvements to the system.”

While this is technically true, it overlooks the fact that Pepco customers will be paying for the improvements through taxes.

Moreover, since virtually all utilities plan on tapping into the taxpayer honeypot, all ratepayers and taxpayers will be paying for all the money utilities obtain from the Obama stimulus ATM.

To paraphrase Milton Friedman, there is no such thing as a “free grid improvement.”

If Graham doesn’t know that, then Pepco needs to hire smarter executives. If Graham did know that, then Pepco needs to hire more honest executives.

Need to disabuse someone of the notion that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is a viable strategy?

University of Houston energy expert Michael Economides says in this recent study that CCS for just Kyoto Protocol-type CO2 cuts in the U.S. would require the drilling of 161,429 injection wells by 2030 at a cost of 1.61 trillion dollars — and there’s no guarantee that the CO2 would stay sequestered, much less accomplish anything for the climate.

That price tag doesn’t include the cost of capturing the CO2 at the point of generation, purchasing rights of way for pipelines, pipeline installation costs, liability insurance etc. Economides says the total cost may be as high as $1 trillion annually.

Waxman-Markey-type CO2 limits, which are much more Draconian than the Kyoto Protocol, would obviously be even more expensive.

It’s quite a price to pay for something that may not work and, even if it did, would accomplish nothing.

North Carolina state representative Pricey Harrison has apparently visited Al Gore’s web site one too many times.

Rep. Harrison pushed a bill through the North Carolina House that would have prohibited local governments from banning clotheslines. Harrison claims,

“It’s been a real problem for folks who feel pretty adamantly they want to use clotheslines. It’s their small step that they can take toward global warming issue.”

Drying your clothes outdoors as way to slow the much-dreaded global warming is, of course, the brainchild of Al Gore and is recommended on the web site for An Inconvenient Truth.

Sadly for Pricey, the State Senate clotheslined her bill, the News-Record (Greensboro, NC) reported.