Articles by David Roberts

Distributed-energy advocacy in the wild

Great op-ed in the Houston Chronicle. It starts off with how coal sucks and renewables are better (yeah, yeah), but then gets into distributed energy, which I wish a lot more people would talk about outside the environmental tribe (which I assume is rather small in Houston).

So what is distributed energy? Essentially, it means local generation of power -- small power plants typically constructed to serve individual hospitals, campuses, apartment houses, factories or entire neighborhoods. The plants have an efficiency level double or better that of regional power plants, because they practice cogeneration -- producing electricity and steam simultaneously.

That's a slightly narrow definition -- distributed energy is more than cogen -- but whatevs. We need to get this stuff out there.

Pataki’s big energy speech

Yesterday, New York governor and presidential hopeful George Pataki gave a major energy speech. Here's the nut:

Let's replace the equivalent of every drop of OPEC oil -- 25% of our current consumption -- with greater efficiency, greater domestic production, and greater use of petroleum alternatives, and let's commit to doing it within the next ten years.

He wants to do this without over-prescribing:

I'm not talking about government picking winners and losers, making investments that favor one technology over another. ... I am proposing a positive policy of tax and other incentives that lets the market answer "how, what, and where."

First, five initiatives to increase alternative fuels:

Energy Policy Act birthday, not so much happy

Good/funny/depressing post on ThinkProgress about the first birthday of the Energy Policy Act, the execrable piece of swill that passes for Bush administration energy policy.

Wal-Mart’s green makeover

I have an op-ed on TomPaine.com today about Wal-Mart's recent green initiatives. Give it a read. I'm sure the accusations of corporate whoredom will come rolling in at any moment.

I worry that, even given the copious pixels expended, my overall point was not entirely clear. So below the fold, I shall try to express it in more compact form.