Articles by Joseph Romm

Biggest California utility contracts for world’s biggest solar power deal

Wind power has come of age (see here). Concentrated solar thermal power is next. Southern California Edison has contracted with BrightSource Energy Inc. for seven projects totaling 1,300 megawatts of concentrated solar-thermal power. CSP is a core climate solution, probably the zero-carbon form of electricity with the most potential, since it can be easily integrated […]

Biggest California utility contracts for world’s biggest solar power deal

Wind power has come of age (see here). Concentrated solar thermal power is next. Southern California Edison has contracted with BrightSource Energy Inc. for seven projects totaling 1,300 megawatts of concentrated solar-thermal power. CSP is a core climate solution, probably the zero-carbon form of electricity with the most potential, since it can be easily integrated […]

The entire 'clean coal' effort could be fruitless

Part 1 noted that the U.S. Geological Survey's stunning December report found

The coal reserves estimate for the Gillette coalfield is 10.1 billion short tons of coal (6 percent of the original resource total).

Although the report didn't get much media attention, it was a shocker because the Gillette field, within Wyoming's Powder River Basin "is the most prolific coalfield in the United States" and in 2006 provided "over 37 percent of the Nation's total yearly production."

Now Clean Energy Action has issued a new report, Coal: Cheap and Abundant ... Or is it? that goes beyond the analysis in the USGS study and concludes:

It appears that rather than having a "200 year supply of coal," the United States has a much shorter planning horizon for moving beyond coalfired power plants. Depending on the resolution of geologic, economic, legal and transportation constraints facing future coal mine expansion, the planning horizon for moving beyond coal could be as short as 20-30 years.

A top priority of Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the Obama administration must be a detailed mine-by-mine analysis to resolve the issue of the U.S. coal resource. The imminent reality of peak oil production should be clear to all by now (see here). If we are running short of coal, the urgency of jumpstarting the transition to a clean energy economy is all the greater -- and the possibility that coal with carbon capture and storage will be a major contributor to greenhouse gas reductions would be greatly diminished.

Clean Energy Action notes:

How did $50B high-risk, job-killing nuclear loans get in the stimulus?

[I urge readers to stick their head in a vise before reading this.]

I have previously discussed the non-job-creating $50 billion in nuclear loan guarantees the Senate put into the stimulus (see here). For the record it was Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah), which I point out merely because "R-Utah" perfectly describes thinking behind this farce.

Not only won't these loans generate any jobs in Obama's first term, but as Peter Bradford, former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, explained to me, it could actually kill jobs. How?

The capital markets are not swimming in credit. If you have billions in taxpayer backed loans for your project, even for a project that will take years to finalize and see actual jobs, you may well suck up money that might be otherwise be available for, say, wind projects that are shovel ready now. Bradford called the nuke loans "straw ready."

Worse, utilities that actually use these loans to build a nuclear plant would face an all but certain drop in their credit rating -- see here. That means we are setting ourselves up to take over more trouble assets, since the Congressional Budget Office estimates the likely default rate of these loans at over 50 percent. If you liked nationalizing banks and insurance companies, you'll love nationalizing nuclear utilities!

But here is where it gets particularly farcical: The loans only got snuck into the bill by budget gimmickry that replicates the high-leverage, fraudulent risk analysis that got us into the subprime mortgage and credit default swap mess. Some leading nuclear energy experts explained this to me Tuesday, and I will do my best to explain it to you.