energy

Florida PSC votes to establish a state renewable portfolio standard

My colleague Gwen Rose has spent a large part of the last two years working -- with a coalition of allies -- on a solar program for Florida. One would think solar in the sunshine state would be an easy sell, but it's been a rather tough slog.

Which is why we are pleased to report some good news. On Friday night, the Florida Public Service Commission voted unanimously to support a 20% by 2020 renewable portfolio standard.

We anticipate the program would establish about $300 million a year for solar. That's a big deal.

The fight now moves to the legislature, but for the moment, congrats to the many people who worked long and hard to put the sun in the sunshine state.

Another rate increase in the name of cheap coal

Duke Energy just got approval to raise rates 18 percent to cover the continued rising price tag for its 630-MW planned coal plant in southwestern Indiana.

The new price tag? $2.35 billion, or $3,730/kW.

By my highly unscientific but quixotically regular analysis, that's a new record, just topping AEP's $3,700/kW proposed facility in Virginia. Way to go, Duke!

One note: This plant will not sequester its CO2, and $2.35 billion does not represent the full cost being borne by Indiana ratepayers:

On Wednesday, the commission also approved Duke Energy's $17 million plan to study the plant's potential to capture a portion of its carbon dioxide emissions as part of the company's proposal to possibly store the gas permanently deep underground.

So not only is it expensive, but it's also environmentally dangerous. But if we throw a few million ratepayer dollars at "studying" CO2 sequestration, maybe we can put a nice report together showing that someday in the future, it will only be expensive.

This apparently was insufficient to appease the environmental community:

Environmental and government watchdog groups oppose the plant and have sued to try to halt it, calling the project a huge waste of money that would be better spent on renewable energy such as wind farms. They also warn that its price tag could go even higher if Congress acts to impose caps on carbon dioxide emissions linked to global warming.

Crazy hippies. When will they learn? We need to burn more coal and raise power prices because coal is cheap. Why is that so hard to understand?

So much for 'clean coal'

Originally posted at the Wonk Room.

Before Thursday's Senate hearing on the devastating Tennessee coal plant billion-gallon ash spill, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) demolished the "clean coal" myth. Alexander told Knoxville's WVLT-TV:

Coal is a dirty business.

Watch it:

China to increase coal production 30 percent by 2015

The Canberra Times/AFP has the alarming news:

China is aiming to increase its coal production by about 30 per cent by 2015 to meet its energy needs, the Government has announced, in a move likely to fuel concerns over global warming.

(Note to Canberra Times: Some statements are so obvious you can skip the journalistic hedging.)

Land and Resources Ministry chief planner Hu Cunzhi said the Government planned to increase annual output to more than 3.3 billion tonnes by 2015.

That is up from the 2.54 billion tonnes produced in 2007, according to the ministry.

In short, from 2007 to 2015, China will increase its coal production by an amount equal to two-thirds of the entire coal consumption of the United States -- an amount that surpasses all of the coal consumed today in Europe, Eurasia, the Middle East, Africa, and Central and South America.

Such is the legacy of eight years of the Bush administration blocking all national and international action on climate change, and indeed actively working to undermine international negotiations by creating a parallel do-nothing track for countries like China. As Chinese officials have told me, we gave them the cover to accelerate emissions growth.

Some might claim a different president would never have been able to get China on a different path. But if Al Gore had been elected picked by the Supreme Court in 2000, I assert that China would not be planning for its 2015 coal production to be triple that of current U.S. coal production.

Changing China's rapacious coal plans will arguably be Obama's single greatest challenge in terms of preserving a livable climate and thus the health and well-being of future generations and thus any chance at a positive legacy for his presidency.

The story continues:

Green(ish) news from our nation's capitol

• Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) wants to get funding for FutureGen -- the proposed "zero emissions" coal plant that the Bush administration axed due to ballooning costs -- into the stimulus package. Durbin said Thursday that he got a "positive response" when he discussed it with energy secretary nominee Steven Chu. His state-mate Barack Obama pushed to revive the plant back when he was just a senator.

• At a hearing on Thursday, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chair Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) announced the newest Democratic members of his committee (though their appointments aren't yet final): Evan Bayh (Ind.), Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), and two new senators, Mark Udall (Colorado) and Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire).

• It's looking increasingly likely that Wall Street big-wig Steve Rattner, who works for the private investment firm Quadrangle Group, will be named as Obama's "car czar."

New study: Efficiency investment better for Virginia economy and ratepayers than coal plant

You may or may not be aware of the huge ongoing fight in Virginia over the proposed Dominion coal-fired power plant in Wise County. Suffice to say, it's huge. And ongoing.

Into the fight drops a new report by ABT Associates, an independent research firm, which finds that -- surprise surprise -- efficiency is a far smarter investment:

The report compares the economic effects of building Dominion Power's Wise County coal plant with investing in energy efficiency measures that would meet the same electricity demand. The study finds that avoiding construction of the coal plant by investing in efficiency would save the average household in Dominion's service territory between $52 and $91 per year in 2012.

The report goes on to find that efficiency investments would also add far more revenue to the state economy and create thousands more jobs.

Got that? Better for the state economy, for ratepayers, and for jobs.

Now check out the first comment under this story about the report in a Virginia newspaper:

TVA says leak has stopped but 'some materials flowed into Widows Creek'

You can't out-irony real life. The Tennessean has the story:

TVA is investigating a leak from a gypsum pond at its Widows Creek coal-burning power plant in northeastern Alabama ...

Seriously, Widows Creek coal plant? What PR guy thought that up? The same genius behind Frosty the Coalman, Clean Coal Night, and Deck the Halls with Clean Coal?

TVA says the leak has stopped, but not before "some materials flowed into Widows Creek." At least they won't have to change the creek's name. The story continues:

Gypsum is a byproduct of coal-burning power plants when "scrubbers" are added that use limestone spray to clean air emissions. This pulls sulfur dioxide from the emissions ...

Tighter air emissions controls result in additional waste byproducts. Gypsum can be used in building materials.

As always, the enviros are really to blame. If it weren't for their pesky laws, the pollutants would be in the air where they belong:

Cheap oil: Be careful what you wish for

This guest essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission.

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Only yesterday, it seems, we were bemoaning the high price of oil. Under the headline "Oil's Rapid Rise Stirs Talk of $200 a Barrel This Year," the July 7 issue of the Wall Street Journal warned that prices that high would put "extreme strains on large sectors of the U.S. economy." Today, oil, at over $40 a barrel, costs less than one-third what it did in July, and some economists have predicted that it could fall as low as $25 a barrel in 2009.

Prices that low -- and their equivalents at the gas pump -- will no doubt be viewed as a godsend by many hard-hit American consumers, even if they ensure severe economic hardship in oil-producing countries like Nigeria, Russia, Iran, Kuwait, and Venezuela that depend on energy exports for a large share of their national income. Here, however, is a simple but crucial reality to keep in mind: No matter how much it costs, whether it's rising or falling, oil has a profound impact on the world we inhabit -- and this will be no less true in 2009 than in 2008.

The main reason? In good times and bad, oil will continue to supply the largest share of the world's energy supply. For all the talk of alternatives, petroleum will remain the number one source of energy for at least the next several decades. According to December 2008 projections from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), petroleum products will still make up 38 percent of America's total energy supply in 2015; natural gas and coal only 23 percent each. Oil's overall share is expected to decline slightly as biofuels (and other alternatives) take on a larger percentage of the total, but even in 2030 -- the furthest the DoE is currently willing to project -- it will still remain the dominant fuel.

A similar pattern holds for the planet as a whole: Although biofuels and other renewable sources of energy are expected to play a growing role in the global energy equation, don't expect oil to be anything but the world's leading source of fuel for decades to come.

Keep your eye on the politics of oil and you'll always know a lot about what's actually happening on this planet. Low prices, as at present, are bad for producers, and so will hurt a number of countries that the U.S. government considers hostile, including Venezuela, Iran, and even that natural-gas-and-oil giant Russia. All of them have, in recent years, used their soaring oil income to finance political endeavors considered inimical to U.S. interests. However, dwindling prices could also shake the very foundations of oil allies like Mexico, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia, which could experience internal unrest as oil revenues, and so state expenditures, decline.

No less important, diminished oil prices discourage investment in complex oil ventures like deep-offshore drilling, as well as investment in the development of alternatives to oil like advanced (non-food) biofuels. Perhaps most disastrously, in a cheap oil moment, investment in non-polluting, non-climate-altering alternatives like solar, wind, and tidal energy is also likely to dwindle. In the longer term, what this means is that, once a global economic recovery begins, we can expect a fresh oil price shock as future energy options prove painfully limited.

Clearly, there is no escaping oil's influence. Yet it's hard to know just what forms this influence will take in the year. Nevertheless, here are three provisional observations on oil's fate -- and so ours -- in the year ahead.

Responding to Heritage's staggeringly confused 'rebuttal'

Part 1 presented a new study by power plant cost expert Craig Severance that puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour -- triple current U.S. electricity rates!

Those ideologically promiscuous folks at the Heritage Foundation have replied with "New Study on Staggering Cost of Nuclear Energy, Staggeringly Pessimistic." Craig's point by point response follows a few of my comments.

Heritage is a leader of the conservative movement stagnation. They have written "the only thing a green 'New Deal' will do is lead us down a Green Road to Serfdom," comparing such a policy to "collectivism in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany," and their Senior Policy Analyst in Energy Economics and Climate Change is quite confused about both of the subjects he analyzes.

The key paragraph in Heritage's new critique is: