Excellent summary of investment in renewable power generation across Africa

Thanks to Rachel Strohm

bit.ly/1V3wcxl

Forms of Energy and How The Are Used in the USA

Source: The Economist

The figure above is from a Special Report on Energy and Technology in the current issue of The Economist.

The figure suggests that the USA is heavily dependent on fossil fuels -- oil, natural gas and coal. Fortunately, U.S. energy consumption is little increased since 1990, and has actually decreased since 2000. However, it is estimated that we still waste more than half of the energy we burn!

A new technology for renewable electrical generaton

An article in The Economist describes efforts to produce electricity using generators propelled by the tides. In one version, as rising tide pushes water up a fjord the water moves the propeller generating electricity, then as the tide goes out, the system is reversed and again generates electricity. Thus four times a day, in totally predictable times, tidal energy is converted into electricity. In some large fjords, this should be a significant source of power, and one with no unsightly towers as the devices are tethered to the bottom of the fjords.

A similar application involves creating an artificial area that impounds water on the rising tides and lets that water escape at low time. The generators are located at the mouth of the impound pond.

Tribute to Jimmy Carter -- Energy and Human Rights

Two of the major initiatives of Jimmy Carter's presidency focused on Human Rights and Energy. He was right both times, but the nation was too short sighted to recognize his wisdom and follow through on his initiatives;

Energy

We should have emphasized energy conservation, a win-win proposition. We should now be world leaders in renewable energy technology. I am glad that we have developed fracking technology and are beginning to exploit oil and gas reserves that were not previously available, and I wish that the western Europeans were also exploiting their oil and gas reserves available through fracking. And I wish we had continued a vigorous program of research and development to develop safe nuclear reactors. I think the long run focus of the world might require fusion energy, and I hope that that technology is high on the list of priorities -- it will be a big step, but it may be a necessary one.

If we and western Europe were more energy self sufficient, think of how the foreign policy problems with Russia, the Gulf States, and Venezuela would be simplified. Think how much better our economies and lives would be.

Human Rights

I realize that American attitudes towards human rights are not universally shared, but we have some fundamental values in the area. At the least we can speak out for human rights, and we can work at home to guarantee human rights for all Americans.

Carter maintained that human rights should be important in U.S. foreign policy decision making. I worked in the first year of his administration to try to define American policy to promote health and fight hunger as part of our foreign policy -- and I am proud of having had that opportunity.

He maintained that undemocratic, coercive governments should be challenged on human rights grounds, even if they were otherwise important to the United States. American policy has been less likely to support dictators, oligarchs and kings since, and that is to the good.

Carter is not putting his efforts to the rights of girls and women. He points to the abortions of female fetuses, to the killing of female infants. These are scandalous per se, but are also likely to cause serious social problems in societies with few females.

He points to the sex industry and the involuntary servitude imposed on female sex workers worldwide, including in the United States.

We also know that in many countries, half of the human resources are essentially discarded. This is wrong per se, but all the people suffer from homes that function less well than they might, as does the economy and political institutions.

Jimmy Carter is acknowledged as having achieved greatness as a former president, but I think his stature as a president will improve as historians of the future put his accomplishments into the proper perspective.

Without comment

Nuclear energy is part of the toolbox we need to slow global warming

I quote from the final section of a Special Report on Nuclear Energy from The Economist:

No technology can solve the climate problem on its own. Even in combination, today’s remedies—renewables, nuclear and energy efficiency—hardly seem up to the job. To have a reasonable chance of keeping down the rise in temperature to less than 2°C, industrial economies need to reduce emissions by 80% by 2050. The true scale of this challenge is not widely understood. A thorough study of options for such cuts in California, long a leader in energy efficiency, concluded that with today’s technology and plausible extrapolations of it, 60% was the best that could be done. If California can’t do better than that, says Jane Long, of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who led the study, “neither can anyone else”. 

Even getting close to such goals, though, is easier with more technologies than fewer. Even if nuclear can make only a small contribution, it could be worth having. The IEA’s 2011 World Energy Outlook calculates that, between now and 2035, an emissions path that keeps the 2°C limit plausible would cost $1.5 trillion more if OECD countries were to stop building nuclear plants and other countries halved their nuclear ambition, largely because much more would have to be spent on renewables.

It seems to me that it is worth spending money designing a new (fourth) generation of nuclear reactors and on figuring better ways to store spent fuels. Indeed, I still hold hope for fusion reactors, although I remember when the experimental reactor was fired up in a neighboring building about 1960. At that time there were predicting commercial fusion in a decade or two.

I am glad that Dr. Jones is leading the Keystone XL analysis

Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney on Thursday touted the Keystone XL pipeline as a "no-brainer."

I will not vote for someone who thinks the Keystone XL pipeline is a "no brainer". Fortunately President Obama has put one of the best brains in government on the issue,  Dr. Kerri-Ann Jones, Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs.

I have known Kerri-Ann for most of four decades, from the time she was a young scientist making the transition into policy, through her service in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, to her service as head of the International Office of the National Science Foundation. She has a brilliant mind, a firm scientific foundation, and a broad understanding of policy issues. She made the decision to postpone a final decision on the pipeline until a satisfactory environmental impact statement was delivered to the government. I trust her to have made the right decision.

Gas prices have gone up and are very high at the moment. If the decision had been rushed on the pipeline last year, the gas prices would be exactly the same today. Building that pipeline would take years to complete and years to affect gas prices.

The basic point is that it is foolish to make decisions with very long term energy and environmental implications in a rush, without proper analysis, just because the price of gasoline is spiking this year. Doing so is indeed a no-brainer, at least in the sense that only someone with no brain would propose it.

Politicians don't make sense to me

Rick Santorum seems to think that energy consumption is a good per se. That is simply not true. It is better to have an energy efficient house than to pay more for heat and air conditioning to have the same comfort level in a house with poor energy efficiency. It is better to travel in a well tuned car getting good gas mileage than to travel in a gas guzzler with no advantage in safety or comfort. Energy is something that you pay for and use in order to achieve some end. If you can achieve the same end using less energy, that is all to the good. Moreover, there are external costs to using energy. Greenhouse gas emissions contribute to global warming which it a grave problem for future generations. Consumption of oil and oil products makes our balance of payments problem worse while increasing our dependence of foreign governments that control oil exporting countries.

A unnamed  White House official apparently thinks that the Congress has already passed the only important legislation for 2012. How about the federal budget for the fiscal year that starts in September 2012? That budget debate will define the way the government operates for a year. It is especially important because that budget debate will be the opening shot in determining the capabilities of the military after the ends of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and in view of Arab Spring. It will also be significant in terms of the federal deficit, and thus the rate of growth of the economy, the rate of growth of the federal debt, and such things as the balance of payments deficit.

An unnamed Republican spokesman seems to think that small businesses generate employment. They also destroy jobs. The concern is the net employment growth rate.

For the U.S. private sector, the BDS show that the average annual gross job creation rate over the 2000-2005 period is 16.4 percent of employment and that the average annual gross job destruction rate over the same period is 15.1 percent. Hence, the net employment growth rate for the U.S. private sector in any given year is accounted for by some establishments growing at a high rate while another group of establishments are contracting at a high rate.  [CES pdf]

If you look at the local strip mall, whenever you see a new business occupying one of the buildings, it is because a business that once occupied that space is now gone. 

The Price of Corn is Going Up

Source: The Economist

"The price of corn is up by almost a quarter since the start of the year, to around $7.30 a bushel and is forecast to keep rising."


My one day as a member of the Agriculture Policy Committee of the U.S. Government was marked by the discovery by another member that their previous decision on feed grains affected the price of food grains. Everything connects to everything else.


We may see the price of beef and poultry go up, and people in developing countries may see the prices of the basics of their diet go up because of the subsidies we are providing for the production of alcohol for fuel from corn.


"Next season, for the first time, more corn could be used to make ethanol than to provide animal feed."

Noted with alarm!

The Republican majority in the House has proposed the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011 new legislation

To amend the Clean Air Act to prohibit the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from promulgating any regulation concerning, taking action relating to, or taking into consideration the emission of a greenhouse gas due to concerns regarding possible climate change, and for other purposes.

The bill has been reported out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It seems likely to pass the full House.

According to the New York Times:

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, attached an amendment with virtually identical language to a small-business bill now before the Senate.

O'Malley is right! Maryland should develop offshore wind energy resources

Governor O'Malley has proposed development of wind turbines offshore in Maryland. He has proposed limiting the increase in cost per month that the utilities can charge customers for the new source of energy. This is a very good idea and deserves our support!

Hans Rosling and the magic washing machine

Energy In the United States

Source: National Academies: U.S. energy at a crossroads

The complexity of the American energy system, as shown in the above illuminating illustration, explains why it will be so hard to change systems to reduce carbon emissions. If you look carefully it would seem that reducing the "rejected" energy, and increasing energy efficiency could be important approaches to the task.

"Laser fusion test results raise energy hopes"

Source: Jason Palmer, BBC News, 28 January 2010.

The National Ignition Facility (Nif) was completed in 2009, and is now reporting initial results of its experiments seeking to produce nuclear fusion in a way that will potentially lead to commercial fusion reactors.

• 192 laser beams are focused through holes in a target container called a hohlraum
• Inside the hohlraum is a tiny pellet containing an extremely cold, solid mixture of hydrogen isotopes
• Lasers strike the hohlraum's walls, which in turn radiate X-rays
• X-rays strip material from the outer shell of the fuel pellet, heating it up to millions of degrees
• If the compression of the fuel is high enough and uniform enough, nuclear fusion can result

Experimenters report that using 192 lasers the facility poured 669 kilojoules of energy into a tiny target in a little more than 10 billionths of a second. This bested previous records by a factor of 20. They also reported surprising ease in managing the plasma created by the laser blast.

Read more!

Comment: As far as I can guess, nuclear fusion is necessary for the long term success of civilization. Renewable energy sources don't seem adequate to support the continued growth of the population and the increasing per capita energy use required for a technological civilization. We will eventually run out of fossil fuels, and even if we did not we would not want to do the environmental damage that fueling future civilization with fossil fuels would require. The same is true of energy from nuclear fission. Of course these sources are the short term solution to civilization's energy needs, but in a couple of hundred years we will need fusion. So this result is very good news for mankind. JAD

From an Economist Special Report on the Carbon Economy

"Seven years ago the Natural Resources Defence Council and Ecos Consulting, an energy consultancy, got manufacturers, power utilities and the state and federal governments together to talk about shifting to integrated circuits. It took two years to get regulations in place in America. Once adopted in the world’s biggest market, integrated-circuit adaptors spread swiftly everywhere, because manufacturers cannot afford to make things that cannot be sold in America.

"For consumers the switch has meant lower power bills and smaller, lighter power adaptors. For the world as a whole it has meant a drop in global power consumption worth around $2 billion a year—saving 13m tonnes of CO₂ annually worldwide, the equivalent of closing down eight coal-fired power stations."

Comment: How annoying that manufacturers would not have provided the more energy and cost efficient technology simply because there was no explicit demand for it! JAD

Energy Planning Can Work

This graph is from a good article in Science which introduces a long section on energy technology. The graph shows (the green lines) that both California and the United States saw growth in per capita GDP, but California grew more rapidly than did the rest of the country and in recent years surpassed the rest of the nation in per capita GDP.

The graph also shows (the blue lines) that per capita electricity consumption has remained fairly constant in California while it has increased in the rest of the nation. So California has managed rapid economic growth without increasing electricity use during several decades.

Science attributes this success to smart policies in California!

Good to know!

World Energy Future

"In this scenario from IEA, the world's rising demand for fluid fuels will be met by growing unconventional oil and natural-gas liquids production, but only if OPEC expands its production of crude oil."
CREDIT: INTERNATIONAL ENERGY AGENCY'S WORLD ENERGY OUTLOOK 2008
via Science magazine.

Comment: This scenario is pretty grim. The marginal cost of oil is going to have to support:

• finding new fields, assuming that they are there to be found,
• developing technologies for extraction of non conventional oil sources,
• and developing a delivery infrastructure for use of natural gas.

Lets increase taxes on gasoline now so that demand goes down and there are incentives to find alternatives, as well as incentives to improve energy conservation.

Source: The Economist

The world’s demand for primary energy will grow by 45% between 2006 and 2030, according to new forecasts from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Comment: Oil prices may have gone down recently, and one can challenge the accuracy of projections, but the basic facts are clear. The long term health of the U.S. economy requires us to cut back on oil use, and to ameliorate climate change we should reduce greatly the use of fossil fuels. JAD

Recap of Summit on America’s Energy Future

The National Academies Summit on America's Energy Future: Summary of a Meeting
Committee for The National Academies Summit on America's Energy Future, National Research Council, 2008

Description: "There is a growing sense of national urgency about the role of energy in long-term U.S. economic vitality, national security, and climate change. This urgency is the consequence of many factors, including the rising global demand for energy; the need for long-term security of energy supplies, especially oil; growing global concerns about carbon dioxide emissions; and many other factors affected to a great degree by government policies both here and abroad.

"On March 13, 2008, the National Academies brought together many of the most knowledgeable and influential people working on energy issues today to discuss how we can meet the need for energy without irreparably damaging Earth's environment or compromising U.S. economic and national security-a complex problem that will require technological and social changes that have few parallels in human history.

"The National Academies Summit on America's Energy Future: Summary of a Meeting chronicles that 2-day summit and serves as a current and far-reaching foundation for examining energy policy. The summit is part of the ongoing project "America's Energy Future: Technology Opportunities, Risks, and Tradeoffs," which will produce a series of reports providing authoritative estimates and analysis of the current and future supply of and demand for energy; new and existing technologies to meet those demands; their associated impacts; and their projected costs. The National Academies Summit on America's Energy Future: Summary of a Meeting is an essential base for anyone with an interest in strategic, tactical, and policy issues. Federal and state policy makers will find this book invaluable, as will industry leaders, investors, and others willing to convert concern into action to solve the energy problem."

Comment: The United States has to cut back on the use of fossil fuels to reduce climate change. It has to reduce use of oil for economic reasons, not to mention the fact that oil will eventually run out. One aspect of the effort will be to make the economy more energy efficient. We should try to cut the use of energy, and especially oil per dollar GDP faster than the long term average growth of GDP. Thus energy conservation and substitution of energy sources are both to be used, although there will be necessary programs for the expansion of supplies of some forms of energy, including both production and distribution.

Clearly we should focus on renewables, but it may also be important to focus on substitution of natural gas for oil. We should also be finding clean fossil fuel technologies.

I still think that a major effort to develop fusion energy is urgent, because it continues to be a difficult technological problem but looks like a necessary element of a long term solution, leading to a hydrogen economy. JAD

Fight for Fuel Efficiency Standards

Source of graph: "US Last among Major Countries in
Car Fuel Economy Standards"

From the Union of Concerned Scientists:

In response to high gas prices, the Bush administration and its allies are calling for new oil drilling that would take decades and eventually save only pennies-per-gallon.

Meanwhile, Bush’s Department of Transportation is undermining historic new fuel economy standards. They unrealistically assume gas will cost around $2.50 through 2020 and that hybrid vehicles won’t even exist until 2014. Because the agency balances the cost of new fuel economy technology against the gas savings the new technology provides, these outrageous assumptions are being used by the administration to reduce the automakers’ requirement to bring more fuel-efficient options to consumers.

According to the administration’s own analysis, if they simply used a more realistic gas price, the standards would save consumers enough fuel to equal about a dollar per gallon discount at the pump. This would dwarf the minuscule price drop from oil produced through new drilling without the environmental consequences of feeding our addiction to oil.

Click here, and the Union of Concerned Scientists will guide you to effective action.