Cooking with Dexter

environment, environmentalism, animal rights, human rights, vegetarianism

The Changes and Chances of This Mortal Life

I see President Obama, having surrounded himself with advisors well-schooled in the very principles and practices that have landed us in unending war and unraveling economy, doing what members of that class have always done-rewarding wealth, incompetence and malfeasance, shifting blame to the victims and passing the bill to the future. ...

New century, new president, new Congress. Same old, tired, failed ideas. Give public money to private interests. Reduce oversight and remove accountability. Feed the military-Industrial complex as much wealth as it demands; console the widows and orphans with condolence letters, casket flags and lies. Flog the myths of "Clean Coal" and "Energy Independence."

--Christopher Cooper, Common Dreams, April 2, 2009

Build more: Use more

How do we persuade people to drive less—an environmental necessity—while also encouraging them to revive our staggering economy by buying new cars? The popular answer—switch to hybrids—leaves the fundamental problem unaddressed. Increasing the fuel efficiency of a car is mathematically indistinguishable from lowering the price of its fuel; it’s just fiddling with the other side of the equation. If doubling the cost of gas gives drivers an environmentally valuable incentive to drive less—the recent oil-price spike pushed down consumption and vehicle miles travelled, stimulated investment in renewable energy, increased public transit ridership, and killed the Hummer—then doubling the efficiency of cars makes that incentive disappear. Getting more miles to the gallon is of no benefit to the environment if it leads to an increase in driving—and the response of drivers to decreases in the cost of driving is to drive more. Increases in fuel efficiency could be bad for the environment unless they’re accompanied by powerful disincentives that force drivers to find alternatives to hundred-mile commutes. And a national carbon policy, if it’s to have a real impact, will almost certainly need to bring American fuel prices back to at least where they were at their peak in the summer of 2008. Electric cars are not the panacea they are sometimes claimed to be, not only because the electricity they run on has to be generated somewhere but also because making driving less expensive does nothing to discourage people from sprawling across the face of the planet, promoting forms of development that are inherently and catastrophically wasteful.

--David Owen, "Economy vs. environment", The New Yorker, Mar 30, 2009

So the more electricity that is produced without burning those fossil fuels, the less fossil fuel will be burned, putting less greenhouse-creating goop in the air and therefore easing (or at least not exacerbating) global warming. Right?

No. Wrong.

Or at least doubtful.

Unless the expansion of wind, solar, and other renewable power sources is accompanied by some mechanism to reduce the demand for - and therefore the production of - electricity from coal and oil.

The reason, according to many experts (and not refuted by any) is that the human demand - or at least the American human demand - for electricity is effectively infinite. The more that is produced, the more that will be consumed, as our technological and innovative (and somewhat hedonistic) society creates more electronic gadgets. ...

There is, of course, another way to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases produced by power generation: use less power. That does not require slower economic growth, as demonstrated in one state - this one.

--Jon Margolis, "The wind and the warmth", Vermont New Guy, Apr 2, 2009

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, Vermont

More confessions: Wind is not an energy source

In a report prepared for NC WARN and released today, economist John Blackburn and attorney John Runkle state ("North Carolina’s Energy Future", footnotes to Tables 1-6):

Renewables are treated as a demand reduction rather than as capacity addition.

The authors' intention is to show that with modest efficiency improvements and expansion of renewables (primarily wind), Duke Energy and Progress Energy do not need to build any new coal or nuclear plants and can even retire existing ones.

Their calculations appear to ignore, however, that average wind generation values hide its highly variable and intermittent character. Utilities have to plan for the worst-case scenario, and with wind, that's about one-third of the time, when generation from wind is virtually nil.

It would actually be better for these authors' goals to leave the wind out. Because if wind is added, the utility has to add capacity to provide for the times when the wind is not producing (i.e., not reducing demand).

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

Pickens: "I don't want to replace natural gas with wind"

From "Confessions of energy legends: wind power technically, economically inefficient -- can't really replace natural gas in electricity sector" by Tom Stacy, reporting on a "town meeting" in Ohio:

When asked what electricity generation fuel they envisioned for load balancing once the NG has been diverted to the transportation sector (a pillar of the Pickens Plan), Boone responded: "I don't want to replace natural gas with wind ... I would say that you use natural gas for power generation and a transportation fuel ... natural gas will last for 20 to 65 years. Then you're going to have to get on the battery." Not a positive word for wind.

The follow-up comment from AEP's [American Electric Power] Michael Morris was even more damning for the fading fame of the towering turbine: "Today wind is electrically inefficient and economically inefficient but it won't always be. We'll crack that equation -- Thank you."

Important confessions by two of the biggest promoters of wind energy: The Pickens Plan will not free up any natural gas for transportation; and wind is not ready to play a part in our energy supply.

Wind is a stalking horse -- for what? For Pickens, it's obvious: expanded consumption of natural gas. For AEP, it's probably to expand and upgrade transmission. (And with all that new very expensive transmission in place, most of the time being embarrassingly underutilized by wind, they'll just have to build a new nuclear or coal plant on it to make it pay.)

A final note -- even with efficient and economically and environmentally feasible storage, wind remains a diffuse resource. The fact remains that it requires huge machines over huge areas to collect a significant amount of it. Even if it were to work some day far in the future, it would remain an economic and environmental fiasco.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

Vermont wind companies inflate emissions displacement by hundreds

First Wind/UPC:
"The Sheffield wind farm [40 MW] is projected to produce 115,000,000 kilowatt hours of electric energy annually [33% c.f.]. ... Based on data recently published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (U.S. EPA) Emissions and Generation Resource Integrated Database (E-GRID), traditional Upstate New York generation sources producing an equivalent annual amount of electric energy would emit Greenhouse Gases (GHG) consisting of nearly 52,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) and 50 tons of nitrogen oxide (NOx)."

Kingdom Community Wind Farm (Ira):
"A wind farm the size being evaluated [42 MW] holds the potential to meet the annual electrical needs of approximately 15,000 average Vermont households ... On average, the American Wind Energy Association has estimated that each megawatt of wind capacity displaces 1,800 tons of CO2 per year given the current mix of generation fuels, indicating that on average a 42 megawatt KCW facility would displace over 75,000 tons of CO2 per year."

It is notable that neither of these companies uses emissions figures from Vermont in describing the effect on emissions of their proposed Vermont wind energy facilities. Leaving aside for now the optimistic projection of production (the existing Searsburg facility has an output of only 21% of its capacity, not 33%), how much emissions are released by the generation of 115,000 MWh of electricity in Vermont?

According to the Energy Information Administration, U.S. Dept. of Energy, in its State Electricity Profiles 2006, Vermont releases 3 pounds of CO2 per MWh generated, 0.2 pound NOx, and no SO2.

So 115,000 MWh of electricity generated in Vermont releases 172.5 tons of CO2, 11.5 tons of NOx, and no SO2.

That's a lot less potential displacement than 52,000 or 75,000 tons of CO2. These companies are exaggerating the theoretic effect by 300 to 400 times!

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, Vermont

Greenpeace needs nuclear

As quoted in a March 17 Guardian (U.K.) story, Nathan Argent, head of Greenpeace's energy solutions unit: "We've always said that nuclear power will undermine renewable energy and will damage the UK's efforts to tackle climate change."

This shows how Greenpeace themselves have undermined their anti-nuclear stand by also taking up climate change as issue number 1.

Do they want green energy or carbon-free energy? Right now, you can't have both, because we use far too much energy to rely on diffuse, intermittent, highly variable, and nondispatchable renewables such as wind (whose green credentials, furthermore, are highly questionable).

While we work to develop good new sources and to clean up the way we use existing sources, the best we can do is simply cut down on our use.

But perhaps Greenpeace knows exactly what it is doing in calling for more energy construction. They live by membership donations, driven by facing down a few select environmental crimes. A push for new nuclear power plants is exactly what they need to keep the member dollars pouring in.

And that's what they'll get by forcing the government to choose between renewables and nuclear.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, Vermont, anarchism, ecoanarchism