Posts from — May 2010

The wonderful “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money” statement attributed to Senator Everett Dirksen  may be apocryphal, but it remains a prescient warning to our nation’s leaders. At a time when Congress is throwing billions of dollars around like pocket change based on claims of scientists and engineers, a real quote of Dirksen may be equally important (Congressional Record: June 16, 1965, p. 13884):

One time in the House of Representatives [a colleague] told me a story about a proposition that a teacher put to a boy. He said, ‘Johnny, a cat fell in a well 100 feet deep. Suppose that cat climbed up 1 foot and then fell back 2 feet. How long would it take the cat to get out of the well?

Johnny worked assiduously with his slate and slate pencil for quite a while, and then when the teacher came down and said, ‘How are you getting along?’ Johnny said, ‘Teacher, if you give me another slate and a couple of slate pencils, I am pretty sure that in the next 30 minutes I can land that cat in hell.

The nation needs Johnny. In fact, it may be time we hired a team of people like Johnny for every large science-based policy proposal Congress contemplates funding.

Carbon Capture and Storage: A Known Boondoggle

Consider, for example, the $4.4 billion Congress is putting into carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) research, nearly half of that to come from the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill. As Robert Bryce points out in the New York Times, “That’s a lot of money for a technology whose adoption faces three potentially insurmountable hurdles: it greatly reduces the output of power plants; pipeline capacity to move the newly captured carbon dioxide is woefully insufficient; and the volume of waste material is staggering.” [Read more →]

The Boston Globe recently reported that National Grid will pay 20.7 cents per kilowatt-hour for Cape Wind electricity production starting in 2013, with increases of about 3.5% a year for 15 years. This radically uneconomic cost figure  challenges the pro-wind studies of the project–and confirms the analyses of authors at MasterResoource.

A Charles River Associates (CRA) report previously indicated that the Cape Wind projects would save electricity customers billions of dollars. This expectation was immediately challenged in a MasterResource post by Glenn Schleede, who documented the study’s out-of-date data, doubtful assumptions, and missing costs. His conclusion was that the electric customers in New England – as well as the taxpayers – deserve a far more complete and objective analysis of the potential cost impacts on them of the proposed Cape Wind project than was provided by CRA and released by Cape Wind. [Read more →]

[David Kruetzer is research fellow in energy economics and climate change at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.. This is his first post at MasterResource.]

Building on the misconception that renewable energy is cheap, some legislators and activists propose mandating that minimum fractions of our electric supply come from designated renewables. Wind and solar are at the top of this list. Al Gore wants 100 percent renewables in less than a decade; others propose less ambitious targets.

The problem is that renewables are expensive, not to mention unreliable and environmentally questionable. Mandates would only force consumers to pay ever higher electric rates as this minimum in an renewable electricity standard (RES) grows year by year.

The Center for Data Analysis at the Heritage Foundation recently analyzed the economic impact of an RES, such as proposed in federal legislation. We found that starting with a 3 percent mandate in 2012, and ramping it up by 1.5 percent each year, will by 2035:

• Reduce national income (GDP) by over $5 trillion even after adjusting for inflation, which translates to an average annual loss of $2,400 for a family of four.
• Destroy a million jobs.
• Raise electric rates by 35 to 60 percent (after adjusting for inflation).

These impacts are driven by the fact that the cheapest renewable electricity source costs twice as much per megawatt-hour as the most economical conventional sources. [Read more →]

Editor’s note: This is the conclusion of the series that provides an essential basis for the understanding of energy transitions and use. The previous posts in this series can be seen at:

Part I – Definitions

Part II – Coal- and Wood-Fired Electricity Generation

Part III – Natural Gas-Fired Electricity Generation

Part IV – New Renewables Electricity Generation

America’s dominant mode of electricity generation is via combustion of bituminous and sub-bituminous coal in large thermal stations. All such plants have boilers and steam turbogenerators and electrostatic precipitators to capture fly ash, but they burn different qualities of coal that may come from surface as well as underground mines, have different arrangements for cooling (once-through using river water or various cooling towers) and many have flue gas desulfurization to reduce SO₂ emissions. Consequently, these conversions of chemical energy in coal to electricity feature widely differing power densities: for the power plants alone they are commonly in excess of 2 kW/m² and can be as high as 5 kW/m². When all other requirements (coal mining, storage, environmental controls, settling ponds) are included, the densities inevitably decline and range over an order of magnitude: from as low as 100 W/m² to as much as 1,000 W (1 kW)/m².

In contrast, compact gas turbines plants (the smallest ones on trailers and larger facilities that can be rapidly assembled from prefabricated units), which can be connected to existing gas supply, can generate electricity with power density as high as 15 kW/m². Larger stations (>100 MW) using the most efficient combined-cycle arrangements (with a gas turbine’s exhaust used to generate steam for an attached steam turbine) will operate with lower power densities, and if new natural gas extraction capacities have to be developed for their operation then the overall power density of gas and electricity production would decline to a range similar to that of coal-fired thermal generation or slightly higher, that is in most cases to a range of 200-2000 W/m². [Read more →]

Photovoltaic Electricity Generation

Satellite measurements put the solar constant – radiation that reaches area perpendicular to the incoming rays at the top of the atmosphere (and that is actually not constant but varies with season and has negligible daily fluctuations) – at 1,366 W/m². If there were no atmosphere and if the Earth absorbed all incoming radiation then the average flux at the planet’s surface would be 341.5 W/m² (a quarter of the solar constant’s value, a sphere having four times the area of a circle with the same radius: 4?r²/?r²). But the atmosphere absorbs about 20% of the incoming radiation and the Earth’s albedo (fraction of radiation reflected to space by clouds and surfaces) is 30% and hence only 50% of the total flux reaches the surface prorating to about 170 W/m² received at the Earth’s surface, and ranging from less than 100 W/m² in cloudy northern latitudes to more than 230 W/m² in sunny desert locations.

For an approximate calculation of electricity that could be generated on large scale by photovoltaic conversion it would suffice to multiply that rate by the average efficiency of modular cells. While the best research cells have efficiencies surpassing 30% (for multijunction concentrators) and about 15% for crystalline silicon and thin films, actual field efficiencies of PV cells that have been recently deployed in the largest commercial parks are around 10%, with the ranges of 6-7% for amorphous silicon and less than 4% for thin films. A realistic assumption of 10% efficiency yields 17 W/m² as the first estimate of average global PV generation power density, with densities reaching barely 10 W/m² in cloudy Atlantic Europe and 20-25 W/m² in subtropical deserts. [Read more →]

“The global temperature “savings” of the Kerry-Lieberman bill is astoundingly small—0.043°C (0.077°F) by 2050 and 0.111°C (0.200°F) by 2100. In other words, by century’s end, reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83% will only result in global temperatures being one-fifth of one degree Fahrenheit less than they would otherwise be. That is a scientifically meaningless reduction.”

Senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman have just unveiled their latest/greatest attempt to reign in U. S. greenhouse gas emissions. Their one time collaborator Lindsey Graham indicated that he did not consider the bill a climate bill because “[t]here is no bipartisan support for a cap-and-trade bill based on global warming.” But make no mistake. This is a climate bill at heart, and thus the Kerry-Lieberman bill sections labeled “Title II. Global Warming Pollution Reduction.”

So apparently someone thinks the bill will have an impact on global warming. But those someones are wrong. The bill will have no meaningful impact of the future course of global warming.

That is, unless the rest of the world—primarily the developing nations—decide to play along.

In fact, the United States and the rest of the developed countries have little role to play in the future course of global warming except as developers of new energy technologies and/or as guinea pigs of making do with less fossil fuels.

Our attempts at domestic emissions savings will have only minimal direct climate impact, but instead they will serve as an example for the developing world of what, or what not, to do. So if Kerry and Lieberman were interested in directly tackling the climate change issue, they would be working with China’s National People’s Congress to draft legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not the U. S. Senate.

But, everyone already knows this, as we demonstrated the non-impact of U.S. emissions reduction efforts in Part I and Part II of our analysis of last summer’s Waxman-Markey offering. And as far as the global warming goes, Kerry-Lieberman’s The American Power Act of 2010 is similar to Waxman-Markey’s American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.

Kerry-Lieberman’s domestic greenhouse gas emissions reduction schedule is 17% below 2005 emissions levels by 2020, 42% below by 2030, and 83% below by 2050. Compare that to Waxman-Markey’s 20% reduction in emissions (below 2005 levels) by 2020, 42% by 2030, and 83% by 2050. Except for a bit of relaxation of near term targets, the bills’ long-term intentions are identical.

The impact of this slight emissions difference on the resulting future global temperature savings is not manifest until the third digit past the decimal point—in other words, thousandths of degrees C. Climatologically, in other words, the bills are identical. [Read more →]

[Editor note: The following post, "Cap-and-Trade: The Temple of Enron," appeared one year ago in MasterResource.  It is being reprinted in conjunction with the release of the outlines of the Senate energy/climate proposal. Robert Bradley, formerly with Enron, further documents Enron's cap-and-trade shenanigans in other MasterResource articles listed at the end of this post. Two press releases from the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Energy Research on the Senate outline are reproduced as well.]

“Since 1976, Enron [and predecessor company] employees have been at the forefront of developing air credit trading policies for governments and businesses…. Enron today is the largest and most sophisticated air emissions credit and allowance trading organization in the United States. Since 1990, Enron has participated in over 80 SOx allowance transactions and has also been active in establishing policies for trading NOx in the United States and carbon [dioxide] world-wide.”

- “Enron Corp.’s Participation in Air Trading,” Enron Capital & Trade Resources, November 4, 1996 (copy in files).

“If implemented, [the Kyoto Protocol] will do more to promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative…. The endorsement of [CO₂] emissions trading was another victory for us…. This agreement will be good for Enron stock!”

- John Palmisano (December 12, 1997) from Kyoto, Japan. Quoted in Bradley, Capitalism at Work, p. 307.

“If anyone has environmental credit needs, that’s what we do. We want to be to be the clearing house to monetize available credits or to manage risk.”

- Kevin McGowan, director of coal and emissions trading, Enron Corp., Enron Biz, November 29, 2000 (copy in files)

“We are a green company, but the green stands for money.”

- Jeff Skilling, CEO, Enron Corp., quoted in Capitalism at Work, p. 310.

Enron is Exhibit A against Waxman/Markey’s [Kerry-Graham-Lieberman's] cap-and-trade proposal. Enron was poised to make money coming and going by being the nation’s and the world’s largest market-maker in CO₂ permits, and the “smartest guys in the room” were ready to game and game for incremental dollars (remember California?).

Enron’s business model, in retrospect, had to do with regulatory complexity, as I note in the introduction to my book Capitalism at Work. Enron gamed the highly prescriptive accounting rules (GAAP), tax system (the corporate tax division was actually a profit center as told in an exposé in the Washington Post), and energy regulatory rules. [Read more →]

Editor’s note: This is Part III of a five part series that provides an essential basis for the understanding of energy transitions and use. The previous posts in this series can be seen at:

Part I – Definitions

Part II – Coal- and Wood-Fired Electricity Generation

Boilers of electricity-generating stations burning coal can be converted to burn liquid or gaseous hydrocarbons (fuel oil, even crude oil, and natural gas) and such conversions were fairly common during the 1960s and the early 1970s. Burning natural gas rather than coal has clear environmental advantages (it generates less, or no, sulfur dioxide and no fly ash) but the overall conversion efficiency of the boiler-steam turbogenerator unit changes little. In contrast, gas turbines, particularly when coupled with steam turbines, offer the most efficient way of electricity generation. This results in much higher power densities than is the case with coal-fired plants. Overall densities of the fuel extraction and electricity generation process are also kept high because of the relatively high power densities of natural gas production (depending on the field they vary by more than an order of magnitude, with minima around 50 W/m², maxima well over1 kW/m²) and even more by the fact that new gas-powered generation often does not need any major new infrastructure as it can tap the supply from existing fields and pipelines.

Gas turbines were first commercialized for electricity generation by Brown Boveri in Switzerland during the late 1930s but in the US their installations became common only during the late 1960s, spurred by the November 1965 US Northeast blackout that left 30 million people without electricity for up to13 hours. Nationwide capacity of gas turbines rose from just 240 MW in 1960 to nearly 45 GW by 1975, a nearly 200-fold rise in 15 years. This ascent was interrupted by high hydrocarbon prices (as well as by stagnating electricity demand) but it resumed during the late 1980s. By 1990 nearly half of the 15 GW of all new capacity ordered by the US utilities was in gas turbines and by 2008 almost exactly 40% of the US summer generating capacity (397.4 GW) was installed in gas-fired units, either single- or combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT). Unlike a single gas turbine that discharges its hot gas, CCGT uses the turbine’s hot exhaust gases to generate steam for a steam turbine, boosting overall efficiency. While the best single gas turbines can convert about 42% of their fuel to electricity, CCGT convert as much as 60% and are now the most efficient electricity generators. [Read more →]

Editor’s note: This is Part II of a five part series that provides an essential basis for the understanding of energy transitions and use. The opening post on definitions was yesterday.

Baseline calculations for modern electricity generation reflect the most important mode of the U.S. electricity generation, coal combustion in modern large coal-fired stations, which produced nearly 45% of the total in 2009. As there is no such thing as a standard coal-fired station I will calculate two very realistic but substantially different densities resulting from disparities in coal quality, fuel delivery and power plant operation. The highest power density would be associated with a large (in this example I will assume installed generating capacity of 1 GW_e) mine-mouth power plant (supplied by high-capacity conveyors or short-haul trucking directly from the mine and not requiring any coal-storage yard), burning sub-bituminous coal (energy density of 20 GJ/t, ash content less than 5%, sulfur content below 0.5%), sited in a proximity of a major river (able to use once-through cooling and hence without any large cooling towers) that would operate with a high capacity factor (80%) and with a high conversion efficiency (38%).

This station would generate annually about 7 TWh (or about 25 PJ) of electricity. With 38% conversion efficiency this generation will require about 66 PJ of coal.

Assuming that the plant’s sub-bituminous coal (energy density of 20 GJ/t, specific density of 1.4 t /m³) is produced by a large surface mine from a seam whose average thickness is 15 m and whose recovery rate is 95%, then under every square meter of the mine’s surface there are 20 t of recoverable coal containing 400 GJ of energy. In order to supply all the energy needed by a plant with 1 GW_e of installed capacity, annual coal extraction would have to remove the fuel from an area of just over 16.6 ha (166,165 m²), and this would mean that coal extraction required for the plant’s electricity generation proceeds with power density of about 4.8 kW/m²:

800 MW/766,000 m² = 1,044.4 W/m²

An even larger area would be needed by a plant located far away from a mine (supplied by a unit train or by barge), [Read more →]

[Editor’s note: This is Part I of a five-part series by Vaclav Smil that provides an essential basis for the understanding of energy transitions and use. Dr. Smil is widely considered to be one of the world's leading energy experts. His views deserve careful study and understanding as a basis for today's contentious energy policy debates. Good intentions or simply desired ends must square with energy reality, the basis of Smil's worldview.]

Energy transitions – be they the shifts from dominant resources to new modes of supply (from wood coal, from coal to hydrocarbons, from direct use of fuels to electricity), diffusion of new prime movers (from steam engines to steam turbines or to diesel engines), or new final energy converters (from incandescent to fluorescent lights) – are inherently protracted affairs that unfold across decades or generations.

Many factors combine to determine their technical difficulty, their cost and their environmental impacts. A great deal of attention has been recently paid to the pace of technical innovation needed for the shift from the world dominated by fossil fuel combustion to the one relying increasingly on renewable energy conversions, to the likely costs and investment needs of this transitions, and to its environmental benefits, particularly in terms of reduced CO₂ emissions.

Inexplicably, much less attention has been given to a key component of this grand transition, to the spatial dimension of replacing the burning of fossil fuels by the combustion of biofuels and by direct generation of electricity using water, wind, and solar power. Perhaps the best way to understand the spatial consequences of the unfolding energy transition is to present a series of realistic power density calculations for different modes of electricity generation in order to make revealing comparisons of resources and conversion techniques. Detailed calculations will make it easy to replicate them or to change the assumptions and examine (within realistic constraints) many alternative outcomes. [Read more →]