US Domestic Energy / Energy policy

[AMDScooter]

Looked about but the closest I could find was a poll thread started by Jimz a few years ago. With oil prices climbing back toward $100/per barrel, gas prices rising accordingly and the gubberment trying it's best to cut our nutz as far as domestic energy production, regulation and taxation. I think it's time for a US energy policy thread.

I'll start it off by stating my position: we should exploit every source of energy we have right here on US soil including every form of oil and nukes until a viable alternative to them is found.

Passed by that taxpayer funded $535 Million Solyndra plant of I-880 mentioned here just a few days ago.

Obama's Solar Nightmare

The Democrats have been busy the last two years, and not just reengineering the healthcare industry, restructuring the auto sector, assaulting Wall Street and the financial sector, harming our public finances. They have also been trying to transform America's energy industry at our expense. This is Barack Obama at his worst -- picking losers and winners by personal whim, donations for dollars deals, and ideological zeal.

Who have been the losers and who have been the winners? And have the winners just been taking the taxpayers for a ride while their guy has been driving the bus -- with taxpayers sitting in the back?

The Obama administration has tried to kill off the oil industry. Offshore moratoriums have been unilaterally imposed by executive orders and justified using scientific panel studies that were misrepresented-if not distorted- by the administration. The drilling permitting process has been afflicted with sclerosis. Federal lands are becoming less and less available for development.

Obama does not like carbon; he boasted during the campaign that he would bankrupt coal power plants and that his policies would necessarily boost the price of power. Those words were ignored by much of the media, in thrall to the man they so wanted to win. When the rapture swept journalists into ecstasy who cared about little details here and there about Obama's agenda?

He tried and failed to get a cap and trade bill through Congress. He warned that if that effort failed he would do another end run around Congress and rely on his Environmental Protection Agency to do his dirty work.

Who knows? Maybe Obama has personalized his gripes and made them the basis of public policy. We know how he feels about George Bush and •••• Cheney -- both with strong ties to the oil industry. Maybe he just doesn't care for the South where much of our carbon wealth is found -- a Republican redoubt that he may have just written off as a political wasteland for him.

Hence, gas prices approaching $4 dollars a gallon -- and this is not yet the summer driving season that typically boosts gas prices as demand increases.

This price hike may make New York Times columnist Tom Friedman gleeful. He considers high priced gas (and Chinese authoritarianism) the answer to all ills. He writes column after column on these topics from the baronial splendor of his homes (here is a photo of one of them; he earned his fortune, by the way, by marrying it). Undoubtedly, he salves his conscience regarding the carbon footprints of his homes with checks to buy carbon credits -- and writes more columns castigating us for our addiction to carbon.

But I digress.

How else have the Democrats been trying to change our power industry? By the old-fashioned way: changing the rules of the game (as noted above) and then using our tax dollars to enrich green schemers. The grand champion of spending boosts by Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress has been a 1014% boost in spending for the "Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Program." Then there is something called the Green Jobs Labor Fund-which did not even exist prior to 2009 and has received hundreds of millions of dollars.

But wait...there is more.

Much of the stimulus money also went toward funding green schemes, and one of the major beneficiaries have been solar power promoters. These are, in the words of Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson, "pipe dreams." Many of the promoters and hucksters behind these "ventures" have chummy relationships with Democrats-as will be covered below.

How are these solar dreams playing out? As nightmares, at least for taxpayers.

The latest to turn off the lights is a Massachusetts venture promoted by its Governor, Deval Patrick.

From the Boston Globe:

Evergreen Solar Inc. will eliminate 800 jobs in Massachusetts and shut its new factory at the former military base in Devens, just two years after it opened the massive facility to great fanfare and with about $58 million in taxpayer subsidies.

The company announced yesterday that it will close the plant by the end of March, calling itself a victim of weak demand and competition from cheaper suppliers in China, where the government provides solar companies with generous subsidies.

Evergreen itself has a factory in Wuhan, China, built in collaboration with a Chinese company, Jiawei Solarchina Co. Ltd., and with money from a Chinese government investment fund. The company had previously said it would shift some production from Devens to the Wuhan plant but yesterday was the first time it said Devens would be closed.

The Devens closing is a major hit to Governor Deval Patrick's efforts to make Massachusetts a hub of the emerging clean-energy industry. The administration persuaded Evergreen to build at Devens with a package of grants, land, loans, and other aid originally valued at $76 million. The company ended up taking about $58 million, one of the largest aid packages Massachusetts has provided to a private company, and the governor was the featured guest at Evergreen's ribbon-cutting in July 2008.

Governor Patrick had been criticized during his re-election campaign for providing aid to the plant during a time of economic stress. He ignored the criticism and plowed ahead. He and Barack Obama shared more than plagiarized speech lines and campaign strategist David Axelrod.

There are claw-back provisions allowing the state to recover some of the lost money. But these are mostly window dressing. Officials admit the terms are so complicated and generous that any recovery will be only a token amount. Company officials agree.

This is, of course, an outrage. Money is fungible. Evergreen used its own money to expand in China, took taxpayer dollars to take a fling in Massachusetts, and when that venture failed, just closed the doors and walked away. What a deal! Taxpayers take the risk. If the venture had succeeded, the company and its promoters and investors would have pocketed the gains; when it failed, they just walked away with nary an ounce of obligations to taxpayers. Were the lights, at least, run on solar power?

The landscape of America will be littered with these green scheme boondoggles going belly-up after gorging at the pig trough filled by American taxpayer dollars. Another taxpayer subsidized solar cell maker shut down recently in New York, for example.

Solar power subsidies have helped bankrupt the Spanish economy, and the very government officials who have peddled these schemes are backpedaling furiously to keep their jobs as their taxpayers rise in revolt. The government is slashing subsidies left and right, but may already be too late to save their economy. Meanwhile, at least one Spanish solar power company has found a temporary bandage to slow its fiscal hemorrhaging -- the American taxpayer. Democratic Congressman Paul Kanjorksi, who was not reelected in November, has a nephew who "worked" for the Spanish solar company Abound. Somehow this foreign company was blessed with a 400 million dollar federal grant. Abound will probably join its rivals in Spain into ruin -- the Spanish landscape will be littered with uneconomic solar power plants that will bear more than a little resemblance, metaphorically speaking, to the windmills of Miguel Cervantes Don Quixote.

Even the Spanish media have warned America that Obama is driving America off the green energy cliff. Other European governments are slashing solar tariffs as fast as they can as they to save themselves from drowning in red ink.

Does anyone believe that Barack Obama listens or that this self-declared "student of history" would learn from the Spanish tragedy? Did he listen to Larry Summer, his own resident genius (who recently left the administration) when Summers highlighted a study from the OMB and Treasury Department that found severe problems with the "economic integrity of government support for renewables"?

Only in Washington would a term such as ‘economic integrity" be used to describe a fiscally foolish program that will lead to massive problems in the future.

This tsunami of bankruptcies is headed our way.

[AMDScooter]

^^^ Cont..

Many of the execs and investors behind these green schemes are Democratic donors and those who have toiled in Democratic party politics for years. Solyndra was another solar scheme that received 535 million dollars in federal tax dollars. The "investment" was widely touted by the Obama administration. The firm was chock-full of investors and executives who were generous Democratic donors and activists. One of its biggest investors was a big bundler for the Obama-Biden campaign.

Solyndra also closed one of its plants and laid off workers after gouging on the aid .

But wait... there is more. The hucksterism runs rampant.

Solyandra's auditor could not issue an opinion that would have allowed the company to go public and for its investors to cash out. The reason? Solyndra was so badly run that doubts were raised regarding its ability to continue as a going concern. The backers may have lacked much as investors and scientists. But as crony capitalists, they excelled.

A cloud is passing over these solar schemes.

They are inefficient boondoggles. They generate electric power at a cost vastly more expensive than electricity generated by natural gas (a relatively clean-burning fuel), hydro, coal -- and of, course, nuclear. But the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress are on a crusade to foreclose the use of these fuels to power our nation. The Democrats are "enemies" (to use a word Obama has used to describe opponents) of natural gas development (see my column Cheap Natural Gas and its Democratic Enemies ); want to blow up dams; kill coal -- the EPA is on a rampage against Big Coal; and choke off nuclear power plants by stopping the development of a repository for nuclear waste. We are being force-fed green schemes like so much spinach Michelle Obama might forcing down our gullets.

Solar power plants are inefficient and cannot survive on their own. Instead, they survive by virtue of an IV flowing from taxpayers to tax-takers. Eventually, reality catches up to fantasy and they close. Solar stocks are losers in the stock market, that harsh judge of economics.

Death panels would be better used to evaluate the values of these ventures, not the value of our lives.

Much of the stimulus money, as well as the Department of Energy budget, went toward these renewable green energy schemes. A quarter of a billion dollars (chump change in Washington; but real money to us who are paying for it) went to fund a weatherization program in Obama's hometown of Chicago that was marked by fraud and shoddy work. That is but just one example.

The solar power schemes will become one bright, shining example of liberal politics run amok. We will be paying the price for these schemes and boondoggles for years to come. Meanwhile, the Chinese are happy that we are in hock to them as we borrow billions to pay for these fantasies and schemes. They also benefit since many of the green jobs that Obama touts happen to be in China -- a nation that may be violating World Trade Organization rules when it exports solar panels (don't believe the hype regarding China and solar power; they will sell us uneconomic solar panels but meanwhile, back at home, burn massive amounts of coal to fuel their growing economy).

The government is a notoriously bad investor when it comes to clean energy. Barack Obama and his band of zealots have very little real world business experience -- and seem to disdain free enterprise. But this green energy crusade may have more than just ideological zealotry fueling its drive. Recall, Obama likes to pick winners and losers, and not just in basketball tournaments.

He hails from Chicago, after all.

Darrell Issa, now chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will investigate these green energy projects and get to the bottom of how we have been ripped off by green schemers and their friends in high places. He has already announced that one item on his agenda will be how the Obama administration has spent our money. He may have misspoken a bit when he called the Obama administration the most corrupt in history, but corruption there has been and he is ideally positioned to ferret it out and to prevent it from happening in the future.

Issa made his fortune creating and selling Viper car alarms.

He does not care for wrongdoers, and neither should we because we, the taxpayers, are the ones being ripped off.

[Phopojijo]

Nuclear is, simply put, one of the best viable options we have at the moment.

Just don't screw with all of its redundant safety mechanisms (Chernobyl) or be negligent (~Three Mile Island)...

[AMDScooter]

Nuclear is, simply put, one of the best viable options we have at the moment.

Just don't screw with all of its redundant safety mechanisms (Chernobyl) or be negligent (~Three Mile Island)...

Yup.. should look into putting Yucca Mountain back into operation also. Pulling the plug on it and the reasons given was as naive and premature as declaring GITMO would be closed in a year.

Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management
Advancing the national, economic, and energy security of the United States

The logic employed there is simply mind numbing. We're going to "restart America's nuclear industry" by eliminating the best place to dispose of the waste. Somehow we're to believe these types of actions along with others like the drilling ban or EPA gone wild will "create thousands of new jobs"..

Appeals court to hear arguments in Yucca Mountain lawsuit

&

Nuclear Waste: Yucca Mountain’s Scrapped, So What Now?

I'll toss this into the mix in regard to the "green economy". It's from 2008.. but gives a good picture why "alternative energy" usually = you are paying through the nose for it whether you know it or not.

Subsidizing American Energy: A Breakdown By Source

American taxpayers footed a $16.6 billion bill for energy subsidies, tax breaks, loan guarantees, and the like in 2007 alone, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). That’s more than double the Federal subsidy level from eight years earlier.

In fact, on an energy fuel basis, Congress has increased subsidies for renewable fuels considerably, from 17 percent of total subsidies and support in 1999 to 29 percent in 2007. Conversely, natural gas and petroleum-related subsidies declined from 25 percent to 13 percent during the same period, and coal and nuclear subsidy shares remained roughly constant.



A large portion of the increase in subsidies for renewable fuels is due to ethanol and biofuels production, which represented two-thirds of the renewable subsidies in FY 2007.

For subsidies related to electricity production, EIA data shows that solar energy was subsidized at $24.34 per megawatt hour and wind at $23.37 per megawatt hour for electricity generated in 2007. By contrast, coal received 44 cents, natural gas and petroleum received 25 cents, hydroelectric power 67 cents, and nuclear power $1.59 per megawatt hour.



Renewable lobbies complain that they don’t get their fair share of the subsidy pie, despite the data that suggests otherwise. The industry justifies its requests for larger levels of taxpayer support by arguing that subsidies per unit of energy produced are always higher at the early stage of development, before large scale production can occur. But here’s the problem: wind power has been subsidized for more than a decade. The production tax credit (PTC) for wind, for example, was first introduced as part of the Energy Policy Act of 1992.



The PTC for wind is currently slated to expire on December 31, 2008, if Congress does not extend it before then. However, even with these subsidies, wind represented less than 1 percent of total net electricity generation in the United States in 2007. By contrast, nuclear and natural gas, both representing about 20 percent of net electricity generation in 2007, and coal, representing almost 50 percent, are subsidized less than wind by factors ranging from 15 for nuclear to 93 for natural gas.

The bottom line: traditional fuels continue to be more efficient and cost-effective than renewable fuels, which is why EIA forecasts show them representing 91 percent of energy consumption in 2030.

See also: Record Profits for Oil Companies, Record Revenue for Taxpayers

[AeroSim]

^^^ A Traveling Wave Reactor actually uses spent material, though it must be initiated by enriched material.

http://gigaom.com/cleantech/terrapow...reactor-works/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor

[AMDScooter]

^^^ Interesting.. first I've heard of it. Do ya by chance know how large one of these would have to be to produce for say 60+ years and how much fuel would be necessary to git it started? I did not get any "feeling" for the scale involved. I'm guessing similar footprint to current reactors?

The benefits are that the reactor doesn’t have to be refueled or have its waste removed until the end of life of the reactor (theoretically a couple hundred years).

Follow up.. can the reactor practicably be refueled at the end of it's cycle and reused? Interesting that it states we can have one operational in 10 years... you'd think the greens would be all over this technology as a viable solution/alternative to contemporary nuke power. Then again.. most greens seem opposed to nuke power altogether when it comes down to brass tacks.

[AeroSim]

^^^ Interesting.. first I've heard of it. Do ya by chance know how large one of these would have to be to produce for say 60+ years and how much fuel would be necessary to git it started? I did not get any "feeling" for the scale involved. I'm guessing similar footprint to current reactors?



Follow up.. can the reactor practicably be refueled at the end of it's cycle and reused? Interesting that it states we can have one operational in 10 years... you'd think the greens would be all over this technology as a viable solution/alternative to contemporary nuke power. Then again.. most greens seem opposed to nuke power altogether when it comes down to brass tacks.

Much of this is theoretical modeling right now AFAIK- it's probably based on a computed optimum. Sort of like knowing how much wick you need on a 60 year candle. The size, like a candle, can be variable.

Understand that a lot of this is from the theory, but it has lots of upsides- it "burns" hotter but you don't have to worry about runaway. This makes it easier to contain and more efficient to use. It can be larger or more modular. We don't have a lot of fissionable Uranium- so it extends the resource life of the minable material. Also, despite what some I've heard say, the waste by-product is in Plutonium 239- which by itself really is not that difficult to deal with or worry about and has actually been found to occur (rarely) in nature.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutoni...he_environment

Still, these reactors don't look like they have an OFF switch, Pu is a key fissile material and you don't want your kids playing with it so storage under guard looks like the bottom sides.

FYI-, my favorite "alternative" right now is using more natural gas. It is abundant, we have plenty of supply, requires far less processing and it burns about 3 times less carbon. Many systems can easily be converted and we are finding newer and better methods of obtaining it. Best of all- the US sits on a huge reserve.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/natural-gas-facts.html
http://lnglicensing.conocophillips.c...ges/index.aspx

However, I also think that the delivery systems to residential areas and the people running them need to be a bit smarter-

http://www.necn.com/09/10/10/Norther...42&feedID=4207

[Phopojijo]

The CANDUs can use the same materials -- and are very much already built and used.

[AMDScooter]

The CANDUs can use the same materials -- and are very much already built and used.

I'm reading that they use uranium dioxide with natural uranium. The ideal of a reactor that would consume most of it's own waste is a more appealing idea IMHO. I see a familiar company AECL.. back in the day I worked on quite a few of their medical radiation therapy simulators. Never knew they were into heavy duty applications as well.

[Phopojijo]

They can "burn" just about anything though... natural uranium is just common because there's a crap load of it in Canada but little-to-no enrichment facilities.

I mean I'm not saying one's better than the other... I didn't look *that* hard into CANDU reactors -- but from what I remember they do burn through multiple stages of nuclear byproducts... and I know China has used a few CANDUs to burn waste from LWRs.

[Dutchcedar]

Yeah, everyone will be scared of nuclear power once again. We'll lose sight of the fact that these nuke plants may well be toast, but remained safe through what is clearly some of the most devastating forces nature can throw at 'em.

What I'm finding funny is the clap-trap offered up by the chatter heads on the news over seismic rates that American nukes are designed for in comparison to the Japanese nukes. Hey Cletus, they survived the freakin' earthquakes. Its the tsunami that caused the problems.

Unless I missed something, the generators went out due to the water waves, not seismic waves.

Hey, I don't know.

We can expect the usual solutions... windmills and solar panels.

[BlackDragon24]

Yeah, everyone will be scared of nuclear power once again. We'll lose sight of the fact that these nuke plants may well be toast, but remained safe through what is clearly some of the most devastating forces nature can throw at 'em.

What I'm finding funny is the clap-trap offered up by the chatter heads on the news over seismic rates that American nukes are designed for in comparison to the Japanese nukes. Hey Cletus, they survived the freakin' earthquakes. Its the tsunami that caused the problems.

Unless I missed something, the generators went out due to the water waves, not seismic waves.

Hey, I don't know.

We can expect the usual solutions... windmills and solar panels.

It's like God laughed at us.

"Build a nuclear reactor to withstand a 9.0 quake? Ok...I'll follow the 9.0 jab with a tsunami uppercut to the jaw."

"Silly humans playing with things they think they undertand."

Message received.

[Enmore]

Yeah, everyone will be scared of nuclear power once again. We'll lose sight of the fact that these nuke plants may well be toast, but remained safe through what is clearly some of the most devastating forces nature can throw at 'em.

Yep, that was my first thought too. "My" gutless, stupid government will also chicken out of the already long overdue nuclear power program and we'll get even more useless ••••••• windmills.

We'll all have plenty of time to consider that folly when we're freezing our arses off, trying to read by candlelight.

[Dutchcedar]

^^^ And of course, we don't know yet how serious this whole thing is.

[Keven]

^^^ And of course, we don't know yet how serious this whole thing is.

Yeah, this whole thing is a big to do about nothing. Yeah, radiation has been released and they're (rightfully so) evacuating people and issuing medication. But we haven't seen the "OMG fatal" levels of radiation released like you'd think by watching cable news.

And you're spot on about the generators. It was a "perfect storm" where the earthquake caused the reactors to scram and then the tsunami damaged/shut off the emergency generator.