Coyote Blog

From the printed version of the Daily Telegraph (does not appear to be online, but scan here).

The days of permanently available electricity may be coming to an end, the head of the power network said yesterday.

Families would have to get used to only using power when it was available, rather than constantly, said Steve Holliday, chief executive of National Grid.  Mr Holliday was challenged over how the country would "keep the lights on" when it relied more on wind turbines as supplies of gas dwindled.  Electricity provided by wind farms will increase six-fold by 2020 but critics complain they only generate on windy days.

Mr. Holliday told Radio 4's Today programme that people would have to " change their behaviour".

The recent naming of GE's Jeffrey Immelt to head a presidential commission on, err, something or other seems to have been an occasion for bipartisan gnashing of teeth about what I call the growth of the American corporate state.  I was encouraged by the bipartisan negative reaction from the left, right, and of course the libertarians, the latter of whom have always understood the difference between being pro-capitalism and pro-business.

But all it takes is a nomenclature change of this corporate welfare to "green jobs" or "investment in the future" or "bridge to the future" or similar bullsh*t and suddenly many of the exact same people, at least on the left, are swooning again.  Why is it not obvious that, for example, green energy subsidies are just the same old corporate welfare?

Here is one aggravating example

Despite millions in government grants and subsidies, the Manitowoc company President Barack Obama called a glimpse of the future lost $4.2 million last year and cannot promise shareholders it will be profitable in the foreseeable future....

“We may continue to incur further net losses and there can be no assurance that we will be able to increase our revenue, expand our customer base or be profitable,” the report indicates.

Investors have responded to the company’s volatility, and Orion stock has plummeted in the past four years.  It closed 2007 at $18.82 a share.  By the end of 2010 it was $3.34.

Regardless, President Obama is putting his, and the U.S. taxpayers’, money on companies like Orion.

“It’s important to remember that this plant, this company has also been supported over the years not just by the Department of Agriculture and the Small Business Administration, but by tax credits and awards we created to give a leg up to renewable energy companies,” Obama said at the Orion plant on Wednesday.

The State of Wisconsin has also given its share trying to help Orion to succeed.  Since 2005, the state has given the company $350,000 in community development zone tax credits, $506,000 in economic development funds, and $420,000 from the Wisconsin Energy Independence Fund.  Plus the company got another $260,000 in stimulus funds for a State Energy project.

In addition to direct aid, public policy has also helped the struggling company.  Wisconsin law requires that 10 percent of all electricity sold in the state come from renewable sources by 2015.  Orion knows that without government intervention like that, there would be little prospect for the green economy.

“The reduction, elimination or expiration of government mandates and subsidies or economic or tax rebates, credits and/or incentives for alternative renewable energy systems would likely substantially reduce the demand for, and economic feasibility of, any solar photovoltaic and/or wind electricity generating products, applications or services and could materially reduce any prospects for our successfully introducing any new products, applications or services using such technologies,” the SEC report states.

By the way, in 2010, while the government was pouring taxpayer money into Orion, its founder and CEO was pulling his out, selling (by my count of SEC filings) 130,000 shares, despite equity prices that were at a five year low.    It is dangerous to draw conclusions form insider sales (we don't know what personal financial issues may be driving their actions) but it is interesting that the president and founder is taking the exact opposite point of view on the company's prospects than is President Obama.

From New York City Councilman James Genarro's web site:

Gennaro has received numerous accolades for his work as Chairman of the Council's Committee on Environmental Protection, and has authored many of the Council's most progressive environmental bills. Gennaro has spearheaded efforts to cut the city's global warming pollution emissions,... put more "clean air" vehicles on city streets, ...make the city's electricity more reliable, clean, and affordable,... and promote "green buildings".

Thinking about the public and private resources invested in these efforts, I wonder how many snow plows they would have paid for.

From the WSJ, about a recent "documentary" on PBS's Newshour

Mr. Suarez's report, by contrast, is like a state propaganda film. In one segment, an American woman named Gail Reed who lives in Cuba tells him that the government's claim of its people's longevity is due to a first-rate system of disease prevention. He then parrots the official line that Cuba's wealth of doctors is the key ingredient. What is more, he says, these unselfish revolutionary "foot soldiers" go on house calls. "It's aggressive preventive medicine," Mr. Suarez explains. "Homes are investigated, water quality checked, electrical plugs checked."...

As to doctors checking on water quality and electricity outlets, the PBS reporter might be surprised to learn that most Cuban homes have no running water or power on a regular basis. This is true even in the capital. In 2006, Mr. Botín says, a government minister admitted that 75.5% of the water pipes in Havana were "unusable" and "recognized that 60% of pumped water was lost before it made it to consumers." To "fix" the problem, the city began providing water in each neighborhood only on certain days. Havana water is also notoriously contaminated. Foreigners drink only the bottled stuff, which Cubans can't afford. In the rest of the country the quality and quantity of the water supply is even less reliable.

This is particularly ironic since, at the same moment this show was airing, state department reports leaked by Wikileaks revealed that the Cuban government banned the showing of Michael Moore's "Sicko" in Cuba, despite the film being wildly propagandistic in favor of the Cuban government.  Why?  Because the portrayal of the Cuban medical system, as in Mr. Suarez's PBS report, was so unrealistically favorable that ordinary Cuban citizens would immediately recognize it as BS.

From environmental blog the Thin Green Line:

Update: True MPGe is closer to 36, see below.  The 36 actually comes from the government's own research and rule-making, which they have chosen to ignore.

The EPA has done the fuel economy rating for the all-electric Nissan Leaf.  I see two major problems with it, but first, here is the window sticker, from this article

Problem #1:  Greenhouse gas estimate is a total crock.  Zero?

The Greenhouse gas rating, in the bottom right corner, is that the car produces ZERO greenhouse gasses.  While I suppose this is technically true, it is wildly misleading.  In almost every case, the production of the electricity to charge the car does create greenhouse gasses.  One might argue the answer is zero in the Pacific Northwest where most power is hydro, but even in heavy hydro/nuclear areas, the incremental marginal demand is typically picked up by natural gas turbines.  And in the Midwest, the Leaf will basically be coal powered, and studies have shown it to create potentially more CO2 than burning gasoline.  I understand that this metric is hard, because it depends on where you are and even what time of day you charge the car, but the EPA in all this complexity chose to use the one number - zero - that is least likely to be the correct answer.

Problems #2:  Apples and oranges comparison of electricity and gasoline.

To understand the problem, look at the methodology:

So, how does the EPA calculate mpg for an electric car? Nissan's presser says the EPA uses a formula where 33.7 kWhs are equivalent to one gallon of gasoline energy

To get 33.7 kWhs to one gallon, they have basically done a conversion through BTUs -- ie 1 KWh = 3412 BTU and one gallon of gasoline releases 115,000 BTU of energy in combustion.

Am I the only one that sees the problem?  They are comparing apples and oranges.  The gasoline number is a potential energy number -- which given inefficiencies (not to mention the second law of thermodynamics) we can never fully capture as useful work out of the fuel.  They are measuring the potential energy in the gasoline before we start to try to convert it to a useful form.  However, with electricity, they are measuring the energy after we have already done much of this conversion and suffered most of the losses.

They are therefore giving the electric vehicle a huge break.  When we measure mpg on a traditional car, the efficiency takes a hit due to conversion efficiencies and heat losses in combustion.  The same thing happens when we generate electricity, but the electric car in this measurement is not being saddled with these losses while the traditional car does have to bear these costs.  Measuring how efficient the Leaf is at using electricity from an electric outlet is roughly equivalent to measuring how efficient my car is at using the energy in the drive shaft.

An apples to apples comparison would compare the traditional car's MPG with the Leaf's miles per gallon of gasoline (or gasoline equivalent) that would have to be burned to generate the electricity it uses.  Even if a power plant were operating at 50% efficiency (which I think is actually high and ignores transmission losses) this reduces the Leaf's MPG down to 50, which is good but in line with several very efficient traditional cars.

Update: I have new numbers, which in part help respond to the first commenter.   The short answer to his comment is that there is a big difference between handwaving away10% you missed and handwaving away 70%.  I agree that the EPA numbers for the Leaf are valid "tank-to-wheel" numbers (meaning how efficiently does the car use the energy in its tank).  The question is, whether tank-to-wheel has any meaning at all.  My article above is basically an argument for why it is not valid.  Here is an extreme example -- what if we ran cars off of replaceable flywheels that were spun up by third parties and then put in our cars already energized.  These would be highly efficient on a tank to wheel basis, as we just need to transmit what is already mechanical energy to the wheels.  But does ignoring the energy costs and inefficiencies in spinning these things up offline really make sense?

We can go to the government itself to solve this.  In this rule-making document, the DOE defines some key numbers we need here.

They define petroleum refining and distribution efficiency as .83, meaning it takes 1 gallon of gas out of the well to get .83 in your tank.

For electricity, they define two numbers that must be multiplied together.  The fossil fuel electrical generation efficiency is .328 and the transmission efficiency is .924, for a net of .303.

Note the big freaking difference between .83 and .303, which is why to call it all handwaving is disingenuous.  Sure, we often handwave away the fossil fuel cost of getting gas in our cars, but the fossil fuel cost of getting electricity in the batteries is four times higher.   The government even does the math, multiplying the 33.7 Kwh/gal used above by .303 and dividing by .83 to get an apples to apples well to wheels mpge number for electric vehicles of 12.3 Kwh/gal.

So a total apples to apples comparison factor already exists, and the government chose not to use it for the window stickers.  This is probably because it would have given the Nissan Leaf an mpge of 36, not bad but fairly pedestrian for such an overhyped technology.  And at some level the Leaf is irrelevant.  This entire process has likely been tilted to make the Government Motors Volt look better.

I am thinking about renaming the Chevy Volt the Chevy Bastiat.  Because the entire vehicle concept is based on the hope that people will ignore the unseen.  Specifically, those pushing the vehicle are hoping that buyers will just assume the electricity for the vehicle is free (after all it is not separately metered) and that the CO2 footprint is zero (despite the fact that in states like Michigan, an electric car is essentially powered by coal combustion.  From autobloggreen

We often, though sometimes incorrectly, assume that it's cheaper to operate an electric vehicle than a comparable gasoline auto. Hey, who hasn't? While this assumption generally holds true, electrical rates vary widely across the nation and can throw off the numbers. In some instances, like when Inside Line's engineering editor, Jason Kavanagh, drove the Chevrolet Volt out in sunny California, one discovers that operating a vehicle powered by electricity can indeed cost more than running it with the liquid fuel that pours from a pump.

Earlier, I took down the absurd initial advertising that the Volt got 230 MPG.

From the Thin Green Line, a reliable source for any absurd science that supports environmental alarmism:

Sending and receiving email makes up a full percent of a relatively green person's annual carbon emissions, the equivalent of driving 200 miles.
Dealing with spam, however, accounts for more than a fifth of the average account holder's electricity use. Spam makes up a shocking 80 percent of all emails sent, but most people get rid of them as fast as you can say "delete."
So how does email stack up to snail mail? The per-message carbon cost of email is just 1/60th of the old-fashioned letter's. But think about it "” you probably send at least 60 times as many emails a year than you ever did letters.

One way to go greener then is to avoid sending a bunch of short emails and instead build a longer message before you send it.

This is simply hilarious, and reminds me of the things the engineers would fool the pointy-haired boss with in Dilbert.  Here was my response:

This is exactly the kind of garbage analysis that is making the environmental movement a laughing stock.

In computing the carbon footprint of email, the vast majority of the energy in the study was taking the amount of energy used by a PC during email use (ie checking, deleting, sending, organizing) and dividing it by the number of emails sent or processed. The number of emails is virtually irrelevant -- it is the time spent on the computer that matters. So futzing around trying to craft one longer email from many shorter emails does nothing, and probably consumers more energy if it takes longer to write than the five short emails.

This is exactly the kind of peril that results from a) reacting to the press release of a study without understanding its methodology (or the underlying science) and b) focusing improvement efforts on the wrong metrics.

The way to save power is to use your computer less, and to shut it down when not in use rather than leaving it on standby.

If one wants to argue that the energy is from actually firing the bits over the web, this is absurd. Even if this had a measurable energy impact, given the very few bytes in an email, reducing your web surfing by one page a day would keep more bytes from moving than completely giving up email.

By the way, the suggestion for an email charge in the linked article is one I have made for years, though the amount is too high. A charge of even 1/100 cent per email would cost each of us about a penny per day but would cost a 10 million mail spammer $1000, probably higher than his or her expected yield from the spam.

For years, my observation has been that the perfect has been the enemy of the good in energy policy.   Now, I don't support the feds making energy policy at all, but given that they do, too often the government has ignored the 80/20 solution that would get most of the desired benefits for a fraction of the cost of alternatives being considered.

For example, in California, the state could have made a ton more progress reducing vehicle emissions had they  accepted a low emissions standard decades ago that allowed for things like compressed natural gas (CNG) as a vehicle fuel.  However, environmentalists insisted on zero emissions, and thus only electric vehicles passed muster, and the technology simply has not been there  (not to mention that at the margin, new electric vehicles in the state would at best be powered by natural gas and at worst by Arizona and Nevada coal plants, making the very concept of "zero-emissions" crazy).

I am thinking of this by looking at this chart from the EIA of CO2 emissions per BTU for various fuels (pounds per million BTU):

Coal (anthracite)	227
Coal (bituminous)	205
Coal (lignite)	215
Coal (subbituminous)	213
Diesel fuel & heating oil	161
Gasoline	156
Propane	139
Natural gas	117

Looking at this, and given the huge amounts of natural gas in this country, one might reasonably expect that a logical policy suggestion would be to try to provide incentives to substitute natural gas for coal and diesel fuel.  The technology exists right now, today, to produce electricity with gas and to power large vehicles with CNG  (and focusing on truck fleets eases the distribution issues with CNG).

But of course absolutely no one in the global warming movement is suggesting this (except for T. Boone Pickens, and he is involved in climate bills as a rent-seeker, not as an advocate).  You see, we want "renewable" energy, and natural gas does not fit.  Though for some reason ethanol does, despite the fact that ethanol probably creates more CO2 than it reduces.

No point here really, since I am not advocating any sort of energy policy.  But it reinforced to me why no one should claim as a justification for energy policy that somehow the system will be more efficient if a few smart people design it top-down, when one of the most obvious 80/20 solutions to Co2 reduction is not even considered.

I got a press purportedly from a group of Latino political groups that included this:

National Latino organizations representing over 2 million people have united for the first time to urge for the approval of clean energy and climate legislation. As part of the effort, the coalition delivered a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, members of the US Senate and the White House calling on them to pass comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation this year.Citing the economic and health benefits such legislation would bring to the Latino community, the letter urged swift action.  Across the country Latino communities, organizations and businesses are raising their voices in support of clean energy and climate change legislation. The Latino coalition is also launching an ad campaign, titled "Estamos listos" or "We're Ready," to urge the federal Government and Congress to act.

Action on climate and clean energy this year is critical to the Latino community and the country as a whole.  Latinos face an unemployment rate higher than the national average at 13%, and a clean energy and climate bill could create thousands of new jobs in a green economy benefitting not only Latinos but the rest of the country, as well.

I was fairly amazed to see a group that represents a lot of low-skilled workers and poorer families support a new, quite regressive tax.  I wrote them

I'm curious if your organization honestly believes that Latinos would be helped by higher energy prices that are the inevitable result of the bill, or is support for this legislation a quid pro quo to get Democrats in Congress to support legislation that you care about more?  Even if a thousand of your members get a new job building windmills, and even assuming none of them are working in energy-intensive industries that might have layoffs due to higher electricity prices, I still count 1000 who have a better job and 1,999,000 who just have a higher electricity bill.  Given the tragic hostility of my state (Arizona) right now to the Latino community, I just can't believe you don't have something better to work on right now.

In the 1970's, during the Arab oil embargo, oil company presidents were dragged to Washington to defend themselves from charges that they were holding tankers offshore to drive up prices and all kinds of crazy BS.  Since that time, in every oil price spike, oil companies were vilified by the Left for destroying the American economy by driving up oil prices (artificially, I suppose).

Now, however, is seems that this was all wrong.  The fossil fuel price increases and artificial supply shortages needed to cut our CO2 emissions by 50% are enormous.  The Europeans have $9 gas and they are not near these targets, in fact in many countries their fossil fuel use has gone up.  We have been in a substantial economic slowdown, but even at these lower output and consumption levels we are far short of a 50% target.

But now the EPA says it has a computer model (stop me if you have heard that one before in the global warming debate) that says that proposed efforts to cut CO2 emissions by 50% in the next 20 years will have a negligible impact on the US economy over the next 20 years.

But there's another reason it was disappointing that Obama didn't mention carbon pricing: his own EPA had handed him a perfect excuse just one day before. In a detailed analysis of John Kerry's American Power Act, the EPA provided estimates of how it would affect carbon emissions and how much it would cost the average American. The results were remarkably reassuring.

On the emissions front, the APA would have a dramatic effect: US emissions would be cut nearly in half by 2030 compared to doing nothing. That's an enormous impact.

But how much would it cost? The answer is: almost nothing. According to EPA's models, if we do nothing, consumption of goods and services in the United States will increase 74.1% by 2030. If APA is passed, consumption will increase 73.4%.That's it. We can cut carbon emissions nearly in half, and the net cost will be a decrease in consumption of 0.7% in 2030. EPA figures this comes to an average annual cost of $146 per household. That's 40 cents a day per family.

And everyone on the Left is credulously lining up to say that this sounds about right to them.    Well, now you tell us.   And if this is true, why have you been hammering on the oil companies for 40 years if oil price increases are virtually irrelevant to the economy.

Look, the is is utter BS.  I have a wild optimism about the power of free minds to innovate and handle about anything if they are allowed, but even so there is no way that an energy price increase (or artificial shortage, take you pick of mechanisms) large enough to cut output by 50% in 20 years will have a negligible impact on the economy.  No way.

Update: I am skimming the EPA power point presentation.  I am looking at one chart that shows a shows coal with CO2 capture around 5% of US energy production about 12% of electricity production by 2030.  Absolutely no freaking way.  They are on drugs.  CO2 capture is never going to happen except when exorbitantly subsidized by the government.

And they show natural gas going way down.  Why?  Replacing coal-produced electricity with natural gas produced electricity is probably the most effective single CO2 reduction step that exists after certain conservation approaches.  But despite huge availability in the US, they show gas consumption going down by half.  If so, those are some pretty screwed up incentives in the bill.

Update #2: I found the price chart.  Apparently they project they will get all this fossil fuel reduction with an increase of electricity prices from 11 cents per Kwh in 2030 without the law to 14 cents with the law.  Gasoline prices with the law will be increased by about 25 cents a gallon in 2030 by the law.  So we are going to get a government imposed 50% reduction in CO2 output in 20 years with a price increase that is within the natural variation over a couple of months in the gasoline market?  Yeah, right.  We all will be riding unicorns to work instead.

Question:  How many years does it take for a typical government / green investment to pay off?

Example 1:

Mesa got $1 million in federal stimulus money to replace 2500 traffic lights with LED's. That's $400 a light which probably includes the cost of installation. Once they are operational, Mesa expects to save $0.028 million per year in electricity costs. At that rate, it will only take 35.7 years of savings to get the $1 million back.

Example 2:

Nine turbines from seven manufacturers, including Reno's Windspire, are being installed to test their performances in different environments. The first turbine was installed at the sewer plant in Stead and the second at Mira Loma Park.The nine turbines and several solar projects together are a $3.5 million investment, before $1.7 million in energy rebates are applied to reduce that cost. The projects are expected to save 788,932 kilowatt hours a year for an annual savings of $91,000 a year [a 38-year payback].

The latter example actually over-estimates the payback, because it ignores the substantial maintenance costs of wind turbines (what percentage have you actually seen running?) as well as the systematic over-estimation of their power output.  Incredibly, the SF Chronicle's green writer/blogger actually brags up the Reno boondoggle.

Postscript: In the comments of the wind turbine article I added, in response to the projects green credentials:

But, you say, its not about return on investment but CO2 reduction. OK, lets look at that, forgetting for a minute whether Reno taxpayers should be paying extra for electricity to reduce global temperatures by 0.00000000001C.

Let's consider an alternate investment in gas turbine electric generation, and assume it and the wind turbines are displacing coal-fired power. Per Kw-H, gas turbines are going to, even including the fuel, produce power for a fourth or less the cost of wind with these relatively small turbines. And gas is plentiful and most of it comes from the gold old USofA (or at least North America).

But it's not zero emission you say. OK, but if it is 1/4 the cost that means that it can displace four times as much coal power for the same investment. And it is as low of CO2 emissions per btu as you can get in a fossil fuel. In fact, 4X of gas generation would reduce CO2 emissions more than 1X of wind. So even in terms of CO2 emissions, wind here is a bad investment.

More here on the failure of European green energy subsidies.

At a speech a while ago, I told this to an investing group a while back:  Do the math.  You can't build a growth company on public subsidies.  It may be possible to grow at first when the subsidized activity (e.g. solar) is a tiny percentage of the market.  But once it starts to grow, the projected subsidies are astronomical.  The German solar subsidy is something like 50 cents per KwH -- to give one a sense of scale, the typical electricity price from fossil fuels there or here is something like 8-10 cents per KwH.  Subsidizing just 20% of US electricity production at this kind of rate would cost $50 billion a year.  Subsidizing all production would cost a quarter of a trillion dollars a year.

Take a company dependent on subsidies, figure out what their implied size is in 10 years based on current stock multiples, and then calculate what the public subsidy at current rates would have to be to support that size and a reasonable market share (because competitors are following the same model).  Investors who do this will quickly figure out that the subsidies needed to support their favored company are unsustainable.  Phoenix-based FirstSolar, a sometimes-darling of Wall Street, has had  a rocky year.  Its stock price has had several steep falls, each one just after rumors that Germany would cut its solar subsidy rate (actually its feed-in tariff, but the same idea).

My advice to the group was that if you were investing in green energy, either your company had a three year plan to reduce costs to be able to compete profitably in a subsidy-free environment, or else you are investing in pets.com.

Update: If you have Nancy Pelosi's husband on your board, you can probably extend your window to five years.

Of course this was going to happen.

An audit of solar-power generation from November 2009 to January 2010 found that some panel operators were paid for doing the "impossible" -- producing electricity from sunlight during the night, El Mundo reported today, citing a letter from Secretary of State for Energy Pedro Marin....

Preliminary evidence shows some solar stations may have run diesel-burning generators and sold the output as solar power, which earns several times more than electricity from fossil fuels, El Mundo said, citing unidentified people from the energy industry. The power grid received 4,500 megawatt-hours of power from midnight to 7 a.m. in the months audited, El Mundo said.

Electric current is electric current.  However, in a country like Germany, the price that utilities are required to pay for electric current varies based on its source.  While electricity from, say, a diesel generator gets 4-5 Euro cents per KwH, ground-based solar gets about 48 Euro cents per KwH.  This is a 10x greater price paid solely for absolutely identical power manufactured in a different way.  So of course there is going to be fraud as to the current's source.

Government bureaucracies do not exercise power by allowing activities to occur - they only have power, and thus have reason to justify their continued funding and jobs, when they say no.   Every incentive that they have is to say no.  When a government agency allows progress to proceed smoothly, it is doing so because some person or small group is fighting against the very nature of the organization.  Anyone who believes otherwise about government agencies is challenged to go build and open a new restaurant in Ventura County, California.  Here is the latest example:

The [weatherizing] program was a hallmark of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a way to shore up the economy while encouraging people to conserve energy at home. But government rules about how to run what was deemed to be a ''shovel-ready'' project, including how much to pay contractors and how to protect historic homes during renovations, have thwarted chances at early success, according to an Associated Press review of the program.

''It seems like every day there is a new wrench in the works that keeps us from moving ahead,'' said program manager Joanne Chappell-Theunissen. She has spent the past several months mailing in photographs of old houses in rural Michigan to meet federal historic preservation rules. ''We keep playing catch-up.''

And of course, even in a skeptical article about a "stimulus" project, no one ever mentioned what productive activities the $5 billion was being used for by private individuals before the government yanked it away for this little catastrophe.

By the way, the overblown rhetoric award has to go to this:

''This is the beginning of the next industrial revolution with the explosion of clean energy investments,'' said assistant U.S. Energy Secretary Cathy Zoi. ''These are good jobs that are here to stay.''

Given that the first one was about steel mills and railroads and oil and electricity, if this new industrial revolution is all about caulking, I think I am getting nostalgic for the first one.

For years I have said that daylight savings time likely made no sense as an energy saving program.  It was first used back in World War I, when electricity demand was primarily driven by illumination.  At that time, shifting the clock around to better match working hours with sunny hours (ie times with natural light) probably did save electricity.  But today, electricity demands are driven much more heating and cooling.  The same logic no longer holds.  In Arizona, the earlier the sun goes down, the less electricity we have to use when we are home in the evenings to keep the house cool.

It seems that research has confirmed my gut feel:

The result of the study showed that electricity use went up in the counties adopting daylight saving time in 2006, costing $8.6 million more in household electricity bills. The conclusion reached by Kotchen and Grant was that while the lighting costs were reduced in the afternoons by daylight saving, the greater heating costs in the mornings, and more use of air-conditioners on hot afternoons more than offset these savings. Kotchen said the results were more "clear and unambiguous" than results in any other paper he had presented.

Of course, daylight savings time will never go away, because modern environmentalism has become more a matter of making empty feel-good gestures than performing rational acts that actually improve something.

Why can't our newspaper here in Arizona apply any skepticism to alternate energy technologies?  Sure, I think this technology is cool, where large solar dishes concentrate heat on what appears to be Stirling cycle engines  (the article, true to form, does not explain the technology, but a few hints plus the name of the company "Stirling Energy Systems" seems to point to that answer).  Other concentrator technologies focus on boiling water, so this a new approach to me.

However, why can't the article actually address real issues, like "how does this technology stack up, based on cost and efficiency, vs. other solar technologies."  It says it uses less water than other concentrator technologies, but is it more or less efficient?  No answer.

We can figure a few things out.  First, as with many "renewable" energy technologies, the company selling it engages in nameplate capacity abuse.  A 1MW coal plant produces 1MW all day long.  A 1MW wind plant produces 1MW when the wind is blowing hard, and less at other times.  And a solar plant produces 1MW when the sun is at its peak.   We can address this latter because folks have calculated sun equivalent hours, the number equivalent max sun-hours per day a site gets through the year.  For the best desert sites in the US, this number is around 6.  This means that the actual capacity of this plant is not 1.5MW, as stated in the article, but about a fourth of that, or  0.375MW.

This matters for a couple of reasons.  They state their build cost as $2.8 million per MW, which seems competitive to coal plants which cost $1.0-2.0 per MW, but in fact the reference number for this solar based on an apples to apples capacity comparison is actually  $11.2 million per MW.   The solar plant gets some credit for having no fuel costs, so it might be possible still for its power to be competitive, but it appears form the limited information in the article that it is not:

Singleton would not disclose what SRP will pay for the electricity, but said the utility will pay a premium for the environmental benefits of the power, and that the price is competitive with other sustainable-energy sources such as wind and geothermal power.

In other words, it is not competitive, so much so that they will not even reveal the price, and only subsidies and government mandates make it possible for a power company to buy the power.

Let's do a reality check.  At best, they get 8 dishes per acre, and 25Kw per dish at max sun.  So this is 8 x 25 x 6/24 = 50Kw per acre.   Lets say we want to get rid of coal.  The US generating capacity of coal plants is about 336,000 MW, or 336,000,000 KW.  To replace it with this solar technology would require 6,720,000 acres (10,500 sq miles or 10% of the state of Arizona) and cost $3.76 trillion dollars if located in the best possible solar areas.   This is not cheap but is not awful.

If I am doing the math right, I get something like $70,000 per dish   (1 dish = 25Kw, $2.8 million per MW).  I would think there are a lot of rich folks with some acreage that would pay $70,000 for one of these bad boys.  It would look much cooler than solar panels on the roof.

I thought this was really funny -- from an email I got today:

With water supplies drying up in the next 10 years, the Salton Sea poses an economic and ecological threat to the Coachella Valley and large portions of Riverside and Imperial counties. And while plans to restore the Salton Sea exist, government funding and determination to tackle this potential multi-billion disaster have not materialized.

Why is this funny?  Because the Salton Sea is the result of a man-made environmental disaster about a century ago.  The lake formed when floodwaters from the Colorado River roared down a man-made canal, breached a dike, and formed the lake.  Since then, this record "spill" which dwarfs the sum total volume of every oil spill of all time has been slowly drying up like a puddle on the garage floor.  I suppose I am OK retaining it if people have gotten used to it, but I find it funny that the natural reversal of a man-made ecological disaster is itself an ecological threat.

The following, by the way, has to be the dumbest idea of all time from an economic and energy balance perspective:

The Imperial County Board of Supervisors and Imperial Irrigation District have voted to explore the Sea to Sea Plan, which not only brings water to the sea, but generates hydroelectric energy that will be used for desalinization of water that can then be sold to water users throughout the Southwestern United States and Mexico. This new, reliable water supply will generate funds for further Salton Sea restoration.

So we pay money to pump water out of the Sea of Cortez, but then somehow have this generate electricity that pays for desalinization to then pump the water back out of the Salton Sea for irrigation.  Sorry folks, but I think the second law of thermodynamics says this won't work.

Update: OK, from here, one source says the water generates energy via hydroelectric plants, which seems odd (pumping water up and then harvesting the energy going down never balances, though this is used in certain California lakes as a method of energy storage) while one source says the power is geothermal.  Hmm, does "half-baked" come to mind reading this?

Update #2:  Shouldn't desalinization occur as close as possible to the source?  Otherwise you are paying to pump tons of salt you are going to eventually remove.

We see all kinds of alarmist spin being attempted on the CRU emails.  For those who are interested, this is best layman's article I have found to discuss the now-famous Michael Mann "trick," what it is, and the obfuscation in the CRU's response.

I have at least one experience with the core alarmist community responding where I pointed out an error.  The responses I got in that case are very similar to the ones today for the CRU - basically the responses either are tangential to the basic point or try to retroactively change the alarmists original assertions.  They are responses that stand up only if the questioner is unwilling or unable to do the smallest amount of verification work (in other words, they work with most of the media).

The series of posts began with this image from the recent US government climate assessment.  Its point was to provide electric grid outages as a proxy measurement variable for severe weather, the point being that severe weather must have increased.

I thought this chart smelled funny

This chart screams one thing at me:  Basis change.  Somehow, the basis for the data is changing in the period.  Either reporting has been increased, or definitions have changed, or there is something about the grid that makes it more sensitive to weather, or whatever  (this is a problem in tornado charts, as improving detection technologies seem to create an upward incidence trend in smaller tornadoes where one probably does not exist).   But there is NO WAY the weather is changing this fast, and readers should treat this whole report as a pile of garbage if it is written by people who uncritically accept this chart.

So I called the owner of the data set at the EIA

He said that there may be an underlying upward trend out there (particularly in thunderstorms) but that most of the increase in this chart is from improvements in data gathering.  In 1997, the EIA (and Makins himself) took over the compilation of this data, which had previously been haphazard, and made a big push to get all utilities to report as required.  They made a second change and push for reporting in 2001, and again in 2007/2008.  He told me that most of this slope is due to better reporting, and not necessarily any underlying trend.   In fact, he said there still is some under-reporting by smaller utilities he wants to improve so that the graph will likely go higher in the future....

At the end of the day, this disturbance data is not a good proxy for severe weather.

The author of that section of the report, Evan Mills, responded and then I dealt with his response here.  Here is just one example of the BS we have to slog through every time we criticize even a tangential analysis like this.  See the links for his whole response, but he says in part:

As noted in the caption to the figure on page 58 of our report (shown above)"”which was masked in the blogger's critique [ed.  actually it was not masked- the source I got the chart from had left off the caption]"”we expressly state a quite different finding than that imputed by the blogger, noting with care that we do not attribute these events to anthropogenic climate change, but do consider the grid vulnerable to extreme weather today and increasingly so as climate change progresses, i.e.:

"Although the figure does not demonstrate a cause-effect relationship between climate change and grid disruption, it does suggest that weather and climate extremes often have important effects on grid disruptions."

The associated text in the report states the following, citing a major peer-reviewed federal study on the energy sector's vulnerability to climate change:

"The electricity grid is also vulnerable to climate change effects, from temperature changes to severe weather events."

This was pretty amazing - citing his chart's caption but hoping that somehow I or other readers would miss the very first line of the caption which he fails to quote:

To Dr. Mills' point that I misinterpreted him "” if all he wanted to say was that the electrical grid could be disturbed by weather or was vulnerable to climate change, fine.  I mean, duh.  If there are more tornadoes knocking about, more electrical lines will come down.  But if that was Dr. Mills ONLY point, then why did he write (emphasis added):

The number of incidents caused by extreme weather has increased tenfold since 1992.  The portion of all events that are caused by weather-related phenomena has more than tripled from about 20 percent in the early 1990s to about 65 percent in recent years.  The weather-related events are more severe"¦

He is saying flat out that the grid IS being disturbed 10x more often and more severely by weather.  It doesn't even say "reported" incidents or "may have" "” it is quite definitive.  So which one of us is trying to create a straw man?   It is these statements that I previously claimed the data did not support, and I stand by my analysis on that.

I deconstructed a lot of the rest of his longer post, and you can follow it all, but the bottom line is that if a you are drawing a trend line between two points, and you have much more data missing from the begginning end point than the end, your trend is going to be SNAFU'd.  Period.  No point in arguing about it.  See the chart below.  It represents the situation at hand.  The red is the reported data.  The blue is the unreported data, which declines as a percentage of the total due to a push for better data reporting by the database owners.  My point was simply that the red trend line was meaningless.  Its amazing to me that even accepting the basics of this picture, Dr. Mills wants to fight that conclusion.

I am reminded by one of the now-famous quotes from the CRU emails

I really wish I could be more positive about the Kyrgyzstan material, but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that. I don't think it'd be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have - they just are what they are...

Yep, sometimes the measured results from nature are what they are.  Well, I actually that most of the time they are what they are, but not in climate apparently.  Never give up a flawed analysis that yields the "right" answer without a fight.  I concluded:

Look Dr. Mills, I don't have an axe to grind here.  This is one chart out of bazillions making a minor point.  But the data set you are using is garbage, so why do you stand by it with such tenacity?  Can't anyone just admit "you know, on thinking about it, there are way to many problems with this data set to declare a trend exists.

On any number of occasions from October through February, I predicted that this recession would top out at perhaps 9% unemployment at the most, and would probably not be as bad as the recession of the early 1980's.  My logic was that we had a mortgage-driven banking crisis, but that the crisis was perhaps not as bad as that of the late 1980's and that many fundamentals (e.g. interest rates) were looking way better in this recession than in the early 1980's.  I honestly thought that Bush and Obama Treasury and Fed officials were declaring the sky was falling more from the danger to their beloved former employers on Wall Street than due to any economic fundamentals.

Well, obviously I was wrong.  Unemployment has topped 10% and could be headed higher.

So the question is, do I accept that others saw something I did not, or do I crack open the self-serving excuses.  Well, at the danger that this will fall into the latter category (I will leave that to readers to decide) I do think some things have changed since late last year that have contributed to worsening the economy.

Businesses are reluctant to invest when the returns on their investment are wildly unpredictable, particularly when future income changes are more driven by changing acts of Congress rather than fluctuations in the market.   Over the last year the Congress and Administration have:

• Printed trillions of dollars of new money, raising the risk of future inflation
• Borrowed trillions of dollars, sucking capital out of private lending markets
• Run up deficits that pretty much guarantee future tax increases
• Toyed with health care bills that will substantially increase the cost of labor
• Toyed with climate bills that will substantially increase the cost of fuel and electricity
• Demagogued industries with average to below-average profitability for making obscene profits that must be reduced (e.g. health insurance companies who make 3-4% of sales)
• Taken over whole industries (autos, banks) and run them to the benefit of favored political constituencies, even when it violates the law (e.g. trashing for secured creditors of auto companies in favor of the UAW).
• Demonstrated a disdain for money-making by imposing populist compensation limits on executives of out-of-favor companies and industries.
• Spent money in the stimulus mainly to add government jobs, every one of which is generally focused on making my life running a business harder.  If you do not understand or believe this, you have not run a business that employs people.
• Shown a general philosophic hostility towards markets and capitalism

I am sure this is just a subset (Louis Woodhill has more in this vein here), but these all have negative effects on investment.  My company for one has backed out of several planned expansions this winter for four reasons:

1. Half of my costs are labor, and I don't know how much Congress is going to increase my labor costs.  Current health care bills will increase it at least 8% -- given that my typical margin in 5-8% of sales, a government action that increases half my costs by 8% is worrisome.  Worse, my smaller competitors will not bear this expense under certain versions of the legislation.
2. My second highest expense is fuel and electricity.  I have no idea right now how much Congress may raise these expenses.
3. Capital for small businesses is gone.  I can get secured equipment financing, but that is it.
4. Assuming I make any money from these investments, I have no idea how much I will be able to keep.  I would not be surprised at all if Obama pushes my marginal rates over 50% -- and investments in my business are just too much work and risk to keep less than half if I make any money.

I used to work as for several years in St. Louis as VP of Planning for Emerson Electric.  I worked for a guy named Chuck Knight, who could be a real pain in the *ss to work for, but was a) brilliant and b) always willing to speak his mind without the typical filters a lot of other executives apply.  It appears that his successor Dave Farr, who I also knew at Emerson, is following in this tradition:

Emerson Electric Co. Chief Executive Officer David Farr said the U.S. government is hurting manufacturers with regulation and taxes and his company will continue to focus on growth overseas."Washington is doing everything in their manpower, capability, to destroy U.S. manufacturing," Farr said today in Chicago at a Baird Industrial Outlook conference. "Cap and trade, medical reform, labor rules."...

Companies will create jobs in India and China, "places where people want the products and where the governments welcome you to actually do something," Farr said.

The unemployment rate in the U.S. jumped to 10.2 percent in October, the highest level since 1983. Emerson, which Farr said employs about 125,000 people worldwide, has eliminated more than 20,000 jobs since the end of 2008 to lower expenses.

"What do you think I am going to do?" Farr asked. "I'm not going to hire anybody in the United States. I'm moving. They are doing everything possible to destroy jobs."

Politicians in both parties are generally clueless about this kind of thing, because very few of them have ever run a business or even even been in a real business position other than as lawyer or lobbyist.  Just look at how George McGovern feels now that he has run a business.

But the Obama administration is almost scary clueless.  In defending their promotion of a good business environment, they cite the most hostile item on their agenda:

"This administration has made a significant commitment to U.S. manufacturing, including reforming the country's health insurance system to bring down costs and make American companies more competitive globally," Griffis said.

Not. One. Single. Clue.

Actually, I think the Obama administration may believe this, which just accentuates their preference for a corporate state wherein "business friendly" means support for the top 20-30 corporations in the country.   In the context of a few old-line corporations with politically powerful unions, health care reform is helpful in that it dumps a bunch of the corporation's commitments to present and past workers onto the taxpayers.  But these are not the companies that grow the economy -- they are just the ones with out-sized power in political elections.

The Thin Green Line writes:

But other problems have such a straightforward solution the only question is, why haven't we implemented it already?So it is with the phone charger (H/T Mother Jones). How many old ones do you have kicking around in a drawer? If you're loyal to a particular phone, you may even have several identical chargers. Because they're electronic, you're also burdened with disposing of them properly lest they leach their toxins into some poor, unsuspecting landfill.

Not only that but chargers use a good bit more electricity than they need to and are vampires"”meaning they continue to draw power even when they're not, you know, charging.

Now imagine a world where not only did phone chargers use less energy, but they were universal, meaning any charger fit any phone. That would mean about 600 million fewer chargers each year stashed in drawers around the world and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 15 to 24 million tons a year"”not even to mention e-waste.

The UN's International Telecommunication Union has approved this universal dreamboat of a charger. It will use half as much energy on standby. Samsung, Nokia and Motorola have already agreed to use it. Of course, they're hemorrhaging business to BlackBerry and Apple...no word yet from those guys.

I wrote:

There are at least two problems with this.  The first is that consumers are all different.   A lot of cell phones (and other devices like my kindle) are standardizing on a mini-USB connection.  Should I use the UN's solution, which is likely inferior?  Why?  Most of the time I don't even travel with a charger, I plug the mini-USB into my computer to charge.  That way I only have 1 charger on the road, for my computer.  You want me to carry 2, in the name of having fewer chargers?   You might say, "well, I hadn't thought of this situation," and I would say, "that's the point - you can't, there are 6 billion of us individuals out there."

The second problem is innovation.  Who says that innovation won't demand a different type of connection in 2 years?  Do you really want your technology gated to some working group at the UN?  Go back in time and imagine the government locking in a standard on something.  We still would have 801.11a wireless only, or cars would still all have crank starts (but they would all turn the same direction!) or cars would all have the same size wheels.  If the UN had invented something 3 years ago, it would have been power only and not data.  Today, most cell phones have power connections and connectors that double as data ports.

There is always a technocratic urge in messy changing technology markets to swoop in and mandate a standard from above, even while the technology is still evolving.  The problem is that neither you nor anyone else knows everything.  Hayek described this information problem well but you make it abundantly clear on this site you have no familiarity with Hayek.  You extrapolate what seems to be a good solution from your narrow knowledge, but cause many of us to sub-optimize because you did not anticipate how I use my charger or what technology some cell phone manufacturer today may be developing that requires a different kind of charger standard.

I had wanted to dig into the costs of a Florida solar facility that Obama recently visited.  Fortunately Ronald Bailey does it for us:

Now let's do a rough calculation of the costs of DeSoto Solar versus conventional power sources. According to the Electric Power Research Insitute, a modern 1,000 megawatt coal plant without carbon capture technology would cost about $2.8 billion to build. Adding carbon capture would boost the cost to as much as $4.7 billion.

The 25 megawatt DeSoto facility cost $150 million. Scaling it up to 1,000 megawatts would cost $6 billion. But coal power plants operate 90 percent of the time snd solar only 30 percent, so in order to get the equivalent amount of electricity out of solar plant would mean tripling the capital cost for a total of about $18 billion. In other words, building a solar power plant costs between 4- and 6-times more than conventional, or even carbon capture, power. Even worse, a scaled up DeSoto-style plant costs 18-times more than a natural gas plant.

We Phoenicians, who live in one of the best solar sites in the world, have been anxiously awaiting a solar electric technology that makes economic sense.    I have a couple thousand square feet of nice, flat room that is just begging to get be off the grid.  Already, solar is economic for individuals in Phoenix, but only if you are willing to soak American taxpayers and your neighbors for 85% of the costs.  It would be nice if it were, you know, actually economic and not just subsidy bait for tens of thousands of dollars.  I have dug into many analyses that claim that solar has a 5-7 year payback, but never seen one that achieved these returns without substantial subsidies and rebates (beware the term "energy payback" which is not the same thing as investment payback (pdf))

For a while I have said that I thought traditional silicon/germanium IC-like wafer processes for making solar cells was just never going to get there, and that some other technology was necessary.   This might be one such example:

JA Solar, one of the big players in the solar industry, is working with Innovalight to commercialize the latter's method for making silicon-ink-based, high-efficiency solar cells, the companies said this week.

... The solar cells are created by pouring an ink solution incorporated with silicon nanoparticles and then decanting the excess liquid to leave behind a crystalline silicon structure.

At the time of the 2007 announcement, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Innovalight claimed its method not only resulted in solar cells that were cheaper to produce by as much as half, but that the crystalline structure resulting from the process made its cells more efficient at converting electricity.

Those claims now appear to be validated.

On Tuesday, Innovalight announced that an independent study of its method by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Germany confirmed that its silicon ink-based cells "demonstrated a record 18 percent conversion of efficiency."

The 18% conversion efficiency is close to a record for thin films, but must be the "record" for production models, since higher conversions have been achieved in the lab.  18% is very good for a production device, particularly if it is cheaper to manufacture than current cells.

I probably have posted on the electricity generating speed bump more times than it deserves, but Glen Reynolds linked this story and I am seeing it linked uncritically all over.  Here was the email I dashed off to Instapundit:

The speed bump / power device at the Burger King in New Jersey is the silliest technology I have ever seen and I am amazed that so many people praise it or write uncritically that it provides free power.  Energy is never free, it comes from somewhere.  In this case, the energy is actually stolen from the car.  The electricity power produced is equal to or less than the extra power the car has to expend going over the bump.

This electricity might be "free" if it is used where cars are braking anyway, say on a long down ramp in a parking garage, or on a suburban street or school zone where speed bumps already exist.  But the Burger King example, and in fact most of the examples I have seen of this installation, are just vampiric theft, very similar to what the US Government does in many of its programs, creating a large benefit for a single user and hoping that distributing the costs in small chunks across a wide number of people makes these costs invisible.

I wrote more about the technology here.

Today's issue in Arizona:  Should our public utility be required to provide line extensions to new homes "for free" (meaning paid for by existing rate payers) or should homebuilders, developers, and home buyers have to pay the real marginal cost of their utility infrastructure.

It is another of those subsidy issues where "visible" jobs (ie jobs in new home construction) are held out as justification, while "invisible job losses (ie from higher electricity rates to existing customers) are not even mentioned.

One of the biggest sticking points in the case is whether it is fairer to charge new developments the cost of new lines or simply charge the existing 1.1 million APS customers higher monthly rates to fund free lines.

Proponents of free lines said it would only cost customers 80 cents a month for APS to reinstate free lines, but APS officials said that if growth picks up as the economy recovers, customers could be charged an average of $45 a year to fund free lines.

Why is this even a point of discussion?  A small group of people are attempting to make the majority buy them some goodies. The argument, as always, is that when the price of these goodies is spread across lots of people, its not really very much per person.  It is almost as if the rest of us are being made to feel churlish for not agreeing to fund their next housing development.

I am far, far, far from being an anti-growth guy.  But I agree with the anti-growth guys in one respect - it is perfectly reasonable for new developments to pay for the full incremental infrastructure cost of their development.