electricity
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The 25 middle-aged white guys who are frying the earth
You can find their names here.
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Memo to President-elect Barack Obama on democratizing the energy system
Dear President-elect Obama, Congratulations on your historic election. Now the truly heavy lifting begins. You have declared your intention to make "a new energy economy" your "No. 1 priority." We urge you to follow a path that leads not only to changes in the fuels underpinning our energy system but also to changes in the […]
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Clean coal salesman Joe Lucas shucks and jives for NPR
This NPR story on clean coal is astounding. Pardon the long post, but I had to transcribe several parts of it so you wouldn’t think I’m making it up. The story begins with Al Gore making (and repeating several times) a single point: clean coal — insofar as that means coal power generation that has […]
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Biogas out of … can’t say
Here’s an example from the New York Times of turning doo-doo into gold: At the electricity-from-manure project here in Sterksel [Netherlands], the refuse from thousands of pigs is combined with local waste materials (outdated carrot juice and crumbs from a cookie factory), and pumped into warmed tanks called digesters. There, resident bacteria release the natural […]
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Unplugging
Holy moly. Looks like National Buy Nothing Day came early this year, and for the first time, also included electricity: An unexpected drop in U.S. electricity consumption has utility companies worried that the trend isn’t a byproduct of the economic downturn, and could reflect a permanent shift in consumption that will require sweeping change in […]
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You know your regulatory incentives are perverse when …
… a drop in electricity demand signals an enormous crisis for the industry responsible for powering America. I do not want a publicly supported monopoly industry whose health depends on rising greenhouse-gas emissions. Pretty sure we should be aiming the other way.
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Like the interstate system, a new electrical grid would revolutionize power transmission
Cross posted at the NDN blog. —– Should the federal government build or incent others to build a new electron superhighway? In other words, a backbone for a 21st century electrical grid? At NDN’s recent event on clean infrastructure, Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) asked precisely that question, and it’s one more and more energy leaders […]
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Do we ‘have to’ keep using coal?
This AFP analysis distills crusty conventional wisdom: "coal-fired power plants, which generate about half of US electricity and 40 percent of US greenhouse gas output, will have to be the backbone of America’s power grid for decades because US coal is plentiful and relatively cheap." This is wrong on so many levels that its levels […]
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NYT gets goofy on cap-and-trade
An NYT piece on Obama’s priorities manages to get two things wrong on energy policy, both in a short section written by John Broder. First, the overall point is wrong. Broder tries to draw a contrast between "an earlier proposal," Obama’s cap-and-trade program, and what Obama is "now emphasizing," big investments in renewables, energy efficiency, […]
