electricity
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Is coal with carbon capture and storage a core climate solution?
The goal of carbon capture and storage (CCS), also called carbon sequestration, is to take carbon dioxide that would have been emitted into the atmosphere from new or existing power plants (usually coal) and instead store it someplace, hopefully forever. It is an attractive idea across the political spectrum because it might allow us to […]
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Pickens’ natural gas plan makes no sense and will never happen
The following post is by Earl Killian, guest blogger at Climate Progress. —– Thomas Boone Pickens is a billionaire who made his money in oil and corporate takeovers. He began investing in natural gas in 1997, and in wind power in 2007. In 2008, he went public with the Pickens Plan via a website and […]
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A purely local approach would double or triple costs
This is one more attempt to kill a zombie myth: the notion that local generation of renewable electricity can substitute for long-distance transmission. I can see where this comes from — the sun shines almost everywhere, and the wind blows strong within a few hundred miles of most places where it doesn’t, right? If we […]
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Renewable energy promotion policies: non-transparent or hidden
Tax credit policies One of the ways the gap between market price and feasible price of renewable energy plants has been bridged is through tax benefits to investors. Just as the oil and gas industries have enjoyed various tax benefits to encourage investment in drilling, exploration, and production facilities, in the last couple decades investors […]
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How do we build (energy) infrastructure?
The enthusiasm for unregulated markets in the last 30 years of American public policy has obscured how large pieces of infrastructure get built. Unregulated markets, to work according to their ideal, require economic actors to be able to create competing offers which are judged by consumers or buyers according to the total value they represent. […]
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Without coal, the most catastrophic climate scenarios may not happen
NASA’s latest analysis of the intersection of peak oil and climate change argues that oil and natural gas alone probably won’t get us to 450ppm. If we can constrain our use of coal fairly quickly, we probably can avoid the worst outcomes — unless of course, the impact of reduced global dimming or methane from […]
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So how much do renewables cost anyway?
One of the attractions of renewable energy is that for most renewable generators (except biomass power plants) the cost of the fuel is free. However, even more so than with a conventional power plant, much of the expense of a renewable generator is concentrated at the beginning of the power plant’s life. The cost of […]
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Renewables and the ‘Cheap Energy Contract’
Earlier in this series, we established that electric-driven transport can fairly rapidly substitute for petroleum in most ground transport applications and that renewable electric generators will be the most quickly deployable and functional of the available energy alternatives. However, there are challenges and barriers to overcome in order to move quickly toward the clean energy […]
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Wis. utilities want customers to cover all fuel volatility
Wisconsin’s five regulated electric utilities have asked to have fuel increases in gas and coal costs automatically passed along to their customers rather than wait until they can file a formal rate case. Their regulator said no. In a bizarre bit of doublespeak, the utilities argued that passing 100 percent of fuel volatility risk along […]
