Should the U.S. join OPEC? After all, the U.S., home of the never-ending calls for “energy independence,” is an oil exporter. A big one.
Through the first six months of 2009, America’s daily exports were averaging 1.9 million barrels per day.[i] At that level, U.S. oil exports are on a par with countries like Angola and Venezuela.[ii] Of course, the vast majority of those exports are refined products, not crude. And those exports are also largely a function of America’s position as the world’s largest oil importer, which means that OPEC membership is rather unlikely.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that the U.S. is an integral player in the oil market. And there has never been a bigger, more global, more integrated, more transparent market than the modern crude oil and oil products market.…
Continue ReadingRenewable energy generates a larger portion of the world’s electricity each year. But in relative terms, solar power generation is hardly a blip on the energy screen despite its long history of technological development.
In this Part I, we review the standard taxonomy of central solar power generating plants by focusing our attention on solar thermal technologies and demonstration projects. The technologies are reasonably well defined yet two formidable hurdles remain: large-scale energy storage technologies and first costs on the order of $5,000/kW, the same cost range as a Generation III+ nuclear plant.
Future posts will explore a number of interesting commercial projects that have either recently or will soon break ground and the latest developments in hybrid projects that combine many of the available solar energy conversion technologies with conventional fossil-fueled technologies.…
Continue Reading“In an 1878 letter, [John] Ericsson concluded that ‘the fact is . . . that although the heat is obtained for nothing, so extensive, costly, and complex is the concentration apparatus that solar steam is many times more costly than steam produced by burning coal.’”
– Wilson Clark, Energy for Survival: The Alternative to Extinction (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1974), p. 364.
Renewable energy, particularly wind and solar, are packaged as “new” and “the energy future.” But on close inspection, as the quotations below will show, these technologies are very old and have had many decades of application.
And as sure as the sun shines, solar and wind fail the economics and product-quality tests as dilute, non-stored, intermittent energy sources. And why amid a boom in fossil fuel supplies–a stock of energy from the sun’s work over the ages–would one chose a far more costly and unreliable energy source from the sun’s weak flow?…
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