In response to my recent post about whether passenger trains save energy, a reader asked about the “life-cycle costs of both forms [rails vs. highways] of transportation.”
Such a life-cycle analysis was the focus of a study by researchers at UC (Berkeley), which I mentioned in the previous post (but incorrectly identified as UC Davis).
Their answer is that neither form of transportation is clearly superior to the other; it depends on such things as load factors. Japan’s bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka, which serves more than 60 million people in a 300-mile corridor, is probably more efficient than driving. But the same train from (say) Eugene, Oregon, to Seattle would probably be a huge waste of resources because it would not likely fill enough seats to justify the energy costs of construction.…
Continue ReadingKen Maize’s recent post arguing for a strong grid instead of a smart one made an important point: the Smart Grid is largely an assortment of tweaks and minor fixes that lets America’s utilities get by with the transmission status quo to cope with the growing demand and integration of intermittent renewables.
Policy should instead aim at a strong grid. Redundancies and “excess” capacity could better maintain reliability and lower delivered power costs in a world of monopoly utilities. It would also facilitate market transactions if competitive retail and wholesale power markets prevail.
Maize has well-founded concerns about how utilities in a smart-grid world will
… Continue Reading1) administer their new gizmo-heavy systems;
2) justify the benefits that small consumers will get in return for higher bills, and
3) make up for the prospect for increased vulnerability to innocent or serious hacking.
“If there is one thing I have been impressed with over the last decades, it is that when the environmental community defines a number one priority, something happens. Not always something good—but something.”1
Dr. Kenneth L. Lay, Chairman, Enron Corporation, June 1997 (1)
Who was the late Ken Lay, the architect and chairman of Enron throughout its 16-year history? All parties to the current legislative debate on a CO2 cap-and-trade bill should know. After all, Lay’s tireless efforts to promote CO2 regulation and enact renewable energy quotas make him a father figure for HR 2354, the Waxman-Markey climate bill, what I have called the Enron Revitalization Act of 2009.
In his lifetime, Lay did not win CO2 regulation, but he got a very damaging renewable energy mandate passed in his home state of Texas.…
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