End ALL Energy Subsidies

Sarah Palin says:

"I think that all of our energy subsidies need to be relooked at today and eliminated," Palin told Real Clear Politics at a coffee shop in Dillsburg, Pa. "And we need to make sure that we're investing and allowing our businesses to invest in reliable energy products right now that aren't going to necessitate subsidies because, bottom line, we can't afford it."

The Great Mittens Romney - the next Republican Nominee For President - supports ethanol subsidies.

"I support the subsidy of ethanol," Romney told a potential voter after an event here was cut short by a fire alarm. "I believe ethanol is an important part of our energy solution in this country."

If it requires a subsidy it is not a solution. It could be a prototype. It could be an engineering test. It could be a market test. But it is not a solution. Solutions are profitable without subsidies.

I thought Romney was the smart business guy who would apply his business knowledge to government? I guess he went to the "Oligarch's School of Business Management." And what do they teach there? "Good businessmen can always make a profit with government money. It is all about buying the right lawmakers. And they go for very cheap."

There is an added advantage. All those "$Green Companies" will no longer be donating to their favorite political party.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

What The Frack?

Fracking for natural gas is supposed to be very dangerous.
But is it? [pdf].

55. All technologies have environmental risks. Press coverage that talks about `toxic‘, `carcinogenic‘ and `radioactive‘ `chemicals‘ is meaningless. Vitamin A is toxic. A single cup of coffee contains more known carcinogens than the average American ingests from pesticide residues in a whole year. Bananas are radioactive. Dihydrogen monoxide is a chemical. The question that needs to be posed is always: how toxic, how carcinogenic, how radioactive?

And it has to be balanced against the gains.

76. Gas is a common feedstock for the chemical industry; so is ethane, a glut of which is now coming out of shale gas wells as a byproduct. Thus the shale gas revolution has already begun to draw chemical companies back to the Gulf of Mexico from the Persian Gulf, and hand them a competitive advantage. As well as being a fuel, gas and natural-gas liquids such as ethane are used in the manufacture of plastic, specialty chemicals, agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals. Shale gas is therefore revitalising the chemical industry wherever it can be produced.

77. Much environmental criticism of modern high-output farming argues that it is unsustainable because it depends of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, which is manufactured from air and natural gas. Some have argued that famine will result when the gas, and therefore the fertiliser, runs out. It is now clear that the gas will not run out and will probably remain low-cost, so highoutput farming using fertiliser is indeed sustainable and affordable for the foreseeable future. This ensures not only food availability, but less pressure to convert wild lands to agriculture.

There are nearly 100 bullet points in the report and an introduction by Freeman Dyson. Read the whole thing.

Taxi Miles

Just in case you hadn't heard of it yet. The Obama administration has a plan to tax cars by the mile. Mothers of school age children often say they are running a taxi service. It will be truer than ever if this goes into effect.

The “Taxing your car by the mile” plan

Or in other words, we’ll all drive “taxis”, except for the chosen exempt few.

But that is not the last word. The idea is so spectacularly stupid that it will be delayed. For a while.

Today at 10:15AM EST, the story was updated, and now the White House says this:

“This is not an administration proposal,” White House spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki said. “This is not a bill supported by the administration. This was an early working draft proposal that was never formally circulated within the administration, does not taken into account the advice of the president’s senior advisers, economic team or Cabinet officials, and does not represent the views of the president.”

Their probable advice? "Right after the election and not a minute sooner."

Wind Power To Be Collected More Efficiently

It will be done by optimizing siting.

Evolution is providing the inspiration for University of Adelaide computer science research to find the best placement of turbines to increase wind farm productivity.

Senior Lecturer Dr Frank Neumann, from the School of Computer Science, is using a “selection of the fittest” step-by-step approach called “evolutionary algorithms” to optimise wind turbine placement. This takes into account wake effects, the minimum amount of land needed, wind factors and the complex aerodynamics of wind turbines.

What a Nice Bit Of Work. Collecting energy which is mostly useless more efficiently is a big advance. Evidently storage – which is the real missing ingredient is more difficult.

Not useless you say? This story says otherwise.

Today in Scotland, as the Great Recession rolls on, and as newly reprimitivized “wind farms” replace more tried and true — and apparently predictable – methods of electricity generation, history rhymes rather nicely. The BBC reports, “Six Scottish windfarms were paid up to £300,000 to stop producing energy, it has emerged:”

I guess wind is different. With normal power plants you pay for the energy used. With wind plants unusable energy now has value. Well not to civilization of course. But the wind farmers do quite nicely.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Bill Is Oil Slick

Bill? That would be our former President Bill Clinton talking about oil. And what is he saying about oil?

Former President Bill Clinton said Friday that delays in offshore oil and gas drilling permits are “ridiculous” at a time when the economy is still rebuilding, according to attendees at the IHS CERAWeek conference.

Clinton spoke on a panel with former President George W. Bush that was closed to the media. Video of their moderated talk with IHS CERA Chairman Daniel Yergin was also prohibited. …

Clinton said there are “ridiculous delays in permitting when our economy doesn’t need it,” according to Noe and others.

Every thing is fine - for now though. And how do we know they are fine? Well US production is up.

The administration rightly notes that domestic oil and natural gas production have increased since 2008, while imports have decreased.

OK, but: Erik Milito of the American Petroleum Institute told Environment & Energy Publishing, "The increased production levels in 2010 are a credit to the vision of previous administrations." Milito credited the 1995 Deepwater Royalty Relief Act signed by Bill Clinton and passed by a GOP-controlled Congress.

So maybe Bill knows something Obama doesn't know. What might that be?

Clinton himself lamented "ridiculous delays in permitting when our economy doesn't need it." The administration didn't issue a permit since the blowout until last month -- and then only after a federal judge's prompting.

Not to mention the steady job-killing creep of climbing gasoline prices.

There always has been a corner of Obamaland that doesn't appreciate the job-creating properties of cheap fuel. Now-Energy Secretary Steven Chu told the Wall Street Journal, "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe." Chu said that in September 2008 -- and still Obama picked him for the slot.

Civilization runs on energy. In fact the more energy you can run through your system the more civilization you get. So why would our President be trying to strangle future oil supplies? I think you can come to one of two conclusions.

1. He doesn't understand
2. He does

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Energy Is Wealth

The graph is from Wiki Media based on data from the International Energy Organization [pdf].

I think the graph maker intended that the KW measure be averaged over 24/7/365 which would make sense (which is to say multiply by 24*7*365 to get the KWh total). Leave it to an engineer. In any case that is not the only one out there. Watts Up With That has a nice one with tons of oil equivalent.

What does this mean (generally)? Anything that lowers the supply of energy is a bad thing. Anything that lowers consumption is a bad thing. Efficiency tends to take care of itself. Engineers are always looking for cost effective ways of increasing the efficiency of use. But according to Jevons Paradox increasing efficiency INCREASES consumption. Dang.

Howard T. Odum in his book Environment, Power and Society for the Twenty-First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy discusses what energy flows mean for the bioisphere. I haven't read this edition but the previous edition Environment, Power, and Society, was excellent.

Anther book on the subject is The Second Law of Life: Energy, Technology, and the Future of Earth As We Know It. The product description makes a very good point.

Even actions we take to improve the environment may actually do more damage than good. For example, recycling is considered environmentally, socially and politically correct. Under the influence of entropy, however, it is a prolific waster of energy; we must look at entire systems, not just parts.

A point also well made at Energy, Efficiency, and Technology Magazine.

My friend Terry and I had each finished off a bottle of beer. I looked around for a recycling bin while Terry just pitched his bottle in the trash.

Was Terry indifferent to the environment? Nah. He works at one of the biggest breweries in the U.S. and knows first-hand what happens to recycled glass. “We can’t use recycled glass for making bottles. It’s just too brittle. So glass put in recycling bins generally ends up in landfills anyway,” he explains.

Terry knows what he’s talking about. Canada’s National Post reports that all the glass collected last year by recycling programs in Calgary, Edmonton, and several other Canadian cities ended up landfilled because there were no buyers for it. The situation is similar for plastic. Reports are that Germany has millions of tons of recyclable plastics piled up in fields because nobody wants the stuff. And it is literally more expensive to collect some recyclables than to just pitch them. San Francisco’s Dept. of Waste figures it pays $4,000/ton to recycle plastic bags for which it receives $32/ton.

And it is not just money/wealth that is affected by energy flows. It also affects politics as discussed in A thermodynamic explanation of politics.

There are major evolutionary implications in the ability of a species to distribute itself across space and time, not to mention the curious thermodynamics associated with this distribution. That is, species that can modulate their thermodynamic properties in response to environmental changes dramatically increase their probability of survival. In humans, there is no better example of thermodynamic modulation than conservatism and liberalism.

One of the more prominent biogeographic variations between conservatives and liberals is population density. The conservative-liberal asymmetries in population density are easily seen in the voting patterns of urban, suburban, and rural environments. As a general rule, the greater the population density, the more liberal the population.

Well isn't that interesting. Politics may have more to do with energy consumption habits than right and wrong. Dang. Right and wrong may in fact be defined by energy consumption levels.

So who is correct? No one. It depends on where you live. Now can we all get along?

Update: 6 Myths About Oil.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Biofuel Breakthrough?

I have just been notified by my friends at Talk Polywell of a break through in the biologic generation of liquid fuels. The Globe and Mail reports on the breakthrough (although my friends at Talk Polywell think the report is garbled by a not entirely science literate reporter).

In September, a privately held and highly secretive U.S. biotech company named Joule Unlimited received a patent for “a proprietary organism” – a genetically adapted E. coli bacterium – that feeds solely on carbon dioxide and excretes liquid hydrocarbons: diesel fuel, jet fuel and gasoline. This breakthrough technology, the company says, will deliver renewable supplies of liquid fossil fuel almost anywhere on Earth, in essentially unlimited quantity and at an energy-cost equivalent of $30 (U.S.) a barrel of crude oil. It will deliver, the company says, “fossil fuels on demand.”

Not only that. They can tailor the organisms to produce specific fuels using only CO2, water (fresh or salt), and sunlight.

Joule says it now has “a library” of fossil-fuel organisms at work in its Massachusetts labs, each engineered to produce a different fuel. It has “proven the process,” has produced ethanol (for example) at a rate equivalent to 10,000 U.S. gallons an acre a year. It anticipates that this yield could hit 25,000 gallons an acre a year when scaled for commercial production, equivalent to roughly 800 barrels of crude an acre a year.

By way of comparison, Cornell University’s David Pimentel, an authority on ethanol, says that one acre of corn produces less than half as much energy, equivalent to only 328 barrels. If a few hundred barrels of crude sounds modest, recall that millions of acres of prime U.S. farmland are now used to make corn ethanol.

So is this reputable or just a bunch of scammers?

Joule acknowledges its reluctance to fully explain its “solar converter.” CEO Bill Sims told Biofuels Digest, an online biofuels news service, that secrecy has been essential for competitive reasons. “Some time soon,” he said, “what we are doing will become clear.” Although astonishing in its assertions, Joule gains credibility from its co-founder: George Church, the Harvard Medical School geneticist who helped initiate the Human Genome Project in 1984.

Well how about a look at what Biofuels Digest has to say.

In Massachusetts, Joule Unlimited has won a second key patent for its genetically modified cyanobacteria that directly convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into n-alkanes, and other diesel fuel molecules. The patent is the first awarded for a bacteria that makes fuel directly from water, sunlight and CO2, as opposed to organisms that make fuels from sugar or other cellulosic biomass, such as those engineered by LS9, Amyris or Solazyme.

As reported previously in the Digest, Joule is using a genetically modified form of cyanobacteria. Two weeks ago, Joule received its first key patent for “methods and compositions for modifying photoautotrophic organisms as hosts, such that the organisms efficiently convert carbon dioxide and light into n-alkanes."

Those reporting the death of the US as a world power may have been somewhat premature. Joule is reported to be building a prototype plant in Leander, Tex. At this stage of course nothing is certain. It will probably take a couple of years to prove this out and get the "bugs" out of the system. And probably a couple of decades to scale up the idea until the production becomes a significant fraction of US liquid fuel use. Time will tell.

Here is another possible approach:

Green Algae Strategy: End Oil Imports And Engineer Sustainable Food And Fuel

Welcome Instapundit readers.

Thanks to reader clazy here is a link to the Joule patents.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The Ocean Is Big And I Am Very Very Little

We are in the very best of hands.

H/T Jccarlton at Talk Polywell

Alarmism

More than six billion humans face extinction every year. And every year millions die. If the death rate accelerates it is hard to predict the overwhelmingly catastrophic consequences.

Inspired by Ecologist who says:

More than 25% of flowers face extinction – many before they are even discovered

I wonder if he didn't spell his name wrong. Mistakes happen. I'm just wondering if it shouldn't be Ecoligist.

And where did I find this person? At the Guardian UK's enviro blog where they claim Germany will get all its energy from renewables (or France) by 2050.

I wonder what their plan is for days when the wind doesn't blow? Or days when it blows too strong? Solar I guess until the sun goes down.

Except for one minor problem, German subsidies will be shifted from solar to wind.

The German photovoltaic industry knew bad news was on the way, and it could have been worse. Last week, Germany’s Environment Ministry recommended a shift in subsidies from solar energy installations to offshore wind farms. The solar sector breathed a collective sigh of relief because the subsidy could have easily been significantly cut or completely eliminated. Nevertheless outraged, the German Solar Industry Association issued a statement complaining that its members were in “a sensitive phase of development and [face] harsh competition with Asia.”

With Germany's impressive track record of renewable energy legislation, we have to wonder if the future will cause fickle investors to flock to wind now that solar subsidies have been cut in Germany. On the surface, this might look like a victory for wind power, but if you do a bit of digging, a different picture emerges.

Germans get 13% of their energy from renewable sources, but little of this energy comes from offshore wind farms, and the technology has been struggling to get out of the starting blocks. "The development of the offshore wind industry has gone forward more slowly than expected," said Michael Schroeren, a spokesman for Germany’s environment ministry. "And the cost of these new technologies is also higher than was expected." By shifting subsidies from solar to wind, the German government is essentially signaling to the market that wind isn't doing that great, and that the technology needs all the help it can get.

And why is a subsidy even necessary? Simple. Solar and wind are not competitive without lower cost collectors and really low cost storage. Otherwise you have to keep coal and natural gas plants on hot standby to make up for instantaneous declines in output. And of course on a really good day when solar and wind are producing more electricity than needed the excess is just wasted. And you still need the fossil fuel plants on hot standby - just in case. So where is the subsidy for storage? Not in evidence.

It looks to me like a classic case of ignorant politicians leading a stupid people. Well, in the long run the Germans (and every one else for that matter) always get what they deserve. Let us hope they get it good and hard and soon. Pour encourager les autres. Nothing like a Greek tragedy to wake people up.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Clearing Up Misconceptions

Rick Nebel who is in charge of the Polywell Experiments at EMC2 comments on Alan Boyle's article on progress in Fusion Power on MSNBC's Cosmic Log.

As usual, I seem to have created some misconceptions by my comments. First of all, what we said on our website is that the work on the WB-7 has been completed. We did not discuss the results. If you would like to conjecture what those results are, let me suggest that you notice the fact that we are working on the WB-8 device. The WB-8 was not a part of Dr. Bussard’s original development plan. This device came about as a result of the peer review process which suggested that there were issues that needed to be resolved at a smaller scale before proceeding to a demo. This was a conclusion that EMC2 heartily concurred with. I don’t want to leave people with the impression that everything on the WB-7 is identical to the WB-6.

Secondly, in our contract with the DOD, EMC2 owns the commercialization rights for the Polywell. However, commercialization is not something that we can do with our DOD funding. That is what we would like to look at with any contributions from the website. This will enable us to:

1. Design an attractive commercial reactor package.
2. Identify the high leverage physics items that most impact the design (i.e. how good is good enough).
3. Give us a base design when we are ready to proceed to the next step.

rnebel (Sent Wednesday, March 24, 2010 9:12 PM)

I think it is evident that the Polywell people are making progress. Will it actually lead to a viable fusion power machine? There is no way to know for sure until the experiments are done. I am hopeful. It seems like Rick is hopeful as well and with better reason. He has the data.

Some of my more recent articles on the subject:

Rick Nebel has a few things to say:
Polywell - No BS - No Excuses

Pictures of past and future Polywell efforts:
WB-D

Where the money for commercialization will come from:
Venture Capital Likes Fusion

H/T DeltaV at Talk Polywell

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Sustainable

Any method for doing anything that cannot be sustained for 100 billion years minimum is unsustainable. Nothing is sustainable in the long term. So why not just focus on getting by with an eye towards future requirements?

And let me add that the things people were doing 200 years ago were unsustainable. And 200 years hence?

My definition of sustainable? Can we keep it up for about 100 years? Which is time enough to figure out what to do next.

Which was brought up by a discussion of the Bloom Box fuel cell and water heater.

Now if you want to get more into the technology of the Bloom Box here are a couple of very pricey books that may help:

Biofuels for Fuel Cells (Integrated Environmental Technology)

That came out in 2006. I wonder if The Bloom Boys got some ideas there? Here is one of the latest books in the field:

Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Technology: Principles, Performance and Operations

I haven't read either of them so I can't give any recommendations.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Natural Gas Fuel Cell

I just came across an Australian Company, Ceramic Fuel Cells Ltd., that makes a solid oxide natural gas fuel cell, BlueGen™, that can produce electricity and heat.

BlueGen™ is a the latest breakthrough in small scale electricity generation - a modular style fuel cell generator that can be configured to suit a range of different markets and installations. For markets that require an alternative product approach to fully-integrated 'European style' systems, such as Japan, Northern America and Australia - BlueGen™ bridges that gap.

Utilising the Gennex™ fuel cell module; BlueGen™ is a grid-parallel SOFC system that operates on natural gas producing highly efficiency electricity.

* Output: up to 2 kW power export
* Efficiency: up to 60% electrical efficiency (net AC export)
* Modular installation; can be configured as:
mono-generation (power only)

or

co-generation (power+heat)

BlueGen™ is fitted with an integrated heat exchanger to recover the heat from the fuel cell module. A separate water tank (not supplied) can be connected to the unit to increase the total system efficiency.

I do see a few problems. It takes 20 hours to get the system up to operational temperature. So far it is only available in 50 Hz models. The USA uses 60 Hz. You have to burn gas to keep the system hot even if you are not using the heat or electricity.

One very good thing: It will self power if you lose mains power - if it is hot enough.

With all the new natural gas being discovered a system like this might make a lot of sense. If the price is right.

For those interested: there is no North American Distributor. It looks like an opportunity to me.

H/T Seeking Alpha article and comments on the coming glut in natural gas supplies.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Looking At Light

Anthony Watts has a great article up on how he changed out a fixture that used a CFL Flood Lamp to one using an LED lamp. Anthony bought 5 LED fixtures and got a deal. He paid $80.00 each for them. So let us run some numbers.

LAMP	PRICE	OPERATING HOURS	WATTS
Cree LED Lighting LR6-GU24 White 6	$80.00	50,000	12
GE 47478 15 Watt (65 Watt equivalent) Energy Smart Floodlight 6 Year Life R30 Light Bulb	$6.25	10,000	15
5 CFLs	$31.25	50,000	15

For 50,000 hours You pay $31.25 capital

In 50,000 hours you save 150,000 Wh or 150KWh with the LED fixture. The LED fixture costs $48.75 more than 5 CFLs . If your electricity costs less than 32.5¢ a KWh The CFLs are a better deal.

On new construction or when replacing a fixture the cost of the fixture enters the picture. Don't forget to figure out what it is worth in time and hassle changing bulbs more often vs installing a fixture. Another point is that you can dim the LEDs and the CFLs do not dim. Dimming the LEDs should add to their life since ordinary LED lifetime is roughly proportional to current. Not only that: light output per watt goes up at lower currents.

My advice to cheapskates? At 10¢ a KWh wait until you can buy one for $45 or less. A couple of CFLs should see you through.

Those are the economic issues - roughly. As Anthony points out there are other considerations. And thank you Antony for being an early adopter. It will help bring the price down to one I can afford.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

A Solar Powered Government

A wind and solar powered government? I kid you not.

WASHINGTON — The federal government, the nation's largest energy consumer, will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 28% over the next decade, the White House will announce today.

"It's a real opportunity to lead by example," says Nancy Sutley, chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). "And not just for the environment but to spur innovation and create jobs and savings."

The council says the reduction in energy use in the government's 500,000 buildings and 600,000 vehicles will be equal to taking 17 million cars off the road for a year or not consuming 205 million barrels of oil.

Some states, cities and companies have set similar goals, but environmentalists say the federal government's plan is ambitious. "It's a bold target," says Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "It's a great deal for the American taxpayers … and a great example for the rest of the country."

I'd like to see them get that up to 100%. Then the government could shut down in the winter when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. Not to mention freezing in the winter without natural gas for building heat. Or burning in summer when there are electrical shortages from a lack of electricity for air conditioning. I could see a real exodus from government service with conditions like that. Why didn't the Republicans think of that?

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The Anti Nuclear Conspiracy

I found this interesting quote at IntelliBriefs which claims it came from the January 22, 2010 issue of Executive Intelligence Review which is a Lyndon LaRouche property. So take it with a grain of salt. Or half a ton. But the pattern seems to fit.

What was promised by the Atoms for Peace process of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy—access to the virtually unlimited power potential of nuclear energy, to escape from the colonial legacy of backwardness and poverty—was abruptly sabotaged in the 1970s. This was done under the cover of the anti-nuclear hysteria fostered by Prince Philip's environmentalist movement, and the fraudulent argument that non-proliferation of nuclear weapons required a halt to peaceful uses of nuclear power. Now, the nations of Asia have definitively rejected British imperial dictates, asserting their long-term development to be centered, necessarily, upon expanded nuclear power capacities.

Unfortunately, the West is still mired in the British Empire's muck. While Asian nations are currently engaged in the construction of 43 nuclear plants, the entire rest of the world is constructing only 12. The United States, once the unquestioned leader in nuclear power development, is now constructing but one facility—and that is simply the completion of a mothballed TVA plant, suspended in the 1980s. All of Western Europe is constructing only two plants, while Germany and Sweden have determined to phase out all their nuclear power plants—although the global economic collapse is forcing a reconsideration of that lunacy.

In the United States, 224 nuclear scientists, engineers, and others issued a public letter this week to President Obama's Science Advisor John Holdren, himself an anti-nuclear, anti-science zero-growther, warning that "the world is leaving us behind." The letter reads in part: "Our nation needs to proceed quickly—not twenty or fifty years from now—while the people who pioneered this science and engineering can still provide guidance to a new generation of scientists and engineers. There is no political, economic, or technical justification for delaying the benefits that nuclear power will bring to the United States, while the rest of the world forges ahead."

It does seem to me that nuclear can help bridge the gap over the next 50 or 100 years until we get workable fusion or renewables plus storage become economically viable. Of course there is always coal. The USA has lots of it.

The Oil Underground

I was reading ChiefIO about peak oil and saw the most interesting explanation of how hydrocarbons might be produced underground.

We don’t know for sure what process makes oil and there are sound reasons to think that it is still being created in large quantities. For example, the Middle East oil fields have an astounding rate of pumping, yet they have more oil in them now as “reserves” than before the pumping began.

One very good explanation for “why” is the possibility that iron acts as a catalyst to turn CO2 rich rocks, in the presence of H2 propbably from water, into hydrocarbons in geologic subduction zones (which would explain the oil locations in places like Indonesia and coastal California with active subduction zones).

Much as we do it synthetically (heat, pressure, CO2, H2 or water, and metal catalysts – Fischer Tropsch in a nutshell); nature may be doing the same thing. Take a look at how: Oil may come from subduction of rocks.

He has a lot more to say about why we have a lot of resources even if the conventional theories of oil creation are correct. So you know go read the whole thing.

And something else to read is a book that says our oil is a product of planet formation with a little different explanation from the above of how long chain hydrocarbons like oil came to be:

The Deep Hot Biosphere : The Myth of Fossil Fuels

Global Warming Shutting Down China and Britain

You think I'm joking? I'm not. First let's look at the shutdown.

The heaviest snowfall to hit northern China in nearly six decades continued to snarl traffic yesterday, stranding thousands of passengers on railways and at airports.

The unusually harsh winter weather also caused coal shortages, forcing some provinces to cut power supplies.

And what are the people of China doing? The obvious. Trying to keep warm. With disastrous results.

With people turning up the heat indoors to fight the extreme cold across the country, many provinces are reducing electricity supply due to the shortage of coal.

Since December, power has been cut or reduced to more than 2,000 factories in Wuhan, Hubei province, to ensure supply for household use, while most parts of the south face electricity shortages, Han Xiaoping, an energy analyst, said yesterday.

With power demand surging this winter, coal stocks in 349 power plants across the nation have decreased to around 27 million tons, or barely enough for 12 days of generation, while stocks in the north have declined to less than a week, the Shanghai Securities News reported last month.

Generally, coal stocks should be enough for at least 20 days, Han said.

But in Hubei province, things are much worse. The local electricity supplier faces a shortage of 760,000 tons of coal before March this year, Yang Yong, assistant chief engineer at Hubei Electric Power Company, told China Business News yesterday.

Nearly 2.4 gigawatts, or some 17 percent of the coal-fueled power generation capacity in Hubei, has been shut down due to coal shortage and there is a risk of even more output cuts, the newspaper reported yesterday.

Britain is getting similar treatment.

For the second time ever, the National Grid yesterday issued a warning to energy providers that demand for gas is threatening to outstrip supply.

The ultimatum comes after a 30 per cent rise on normal seasonal demand as snow and freezing conditions continued their stranglehold on Britain.

The concerns caused natural gas prices to jump to their highest level in 10 months yesterday, touching 45p a therm.

While it is unlikely that households will find their supplies restricted, a shortage could lead to higher bills.

Ah. Higher bills. What are the Brits doing about it? Burning books.

Volunteers have reported that ‘a large number’ of elderly customers are snapping up hardbacks as cheap fuel for their fires and stoves.

Temperatures this week are forecast to plummet as low as -13°C in the Scottish Highlands, with the mercury falling to -6°C in London, -5°C in Birmingham and -7°C in Manchester as one of the coldest winters in years continues to bite.

Workers at one charity shop in Swansea, in south Wales, described how the most vulnerable shoppers were seeking out thick books such as encyclopaedias for a few pence because they were cheaper than coal.

One assistant said: ‘Book burning seems terribly wrong but we have to get rid of unsold stock for pennies and some of the pensioners say the books make ideal slow-burning fuel for fires and stoves.

A lot of them buy up large hardback volumes so they can stick them in the fire to last all night.’

If they are burning copies of the Communist Manifesto it may actually be a service. No way to tell.

Now we come to the very best part. To what do some Chinese attribute the cooling to?

BEIJING: Freak snowstorms and record low temperatures sweeping northern China are linked to global warming, say Chinese officials.

But, unlike the unseasonal snow falls that hit Beijing at the start of winter, the dump this week appears to have no link to the Government's relentless efforts to change the micro climate.

There are about 2000 weather modification offices in China, according to the media, which are responsible for bombing the skies with silver iodide to induce precipitation.

More than 2 million Beijing and Tianjin students were given the day off school yesterday because traffic was in chaos. On Sunday the capital received its biggest snow dump since 1951, immediately followed by the harshest Siberian winds in decades.

Tomorrow morning the mercury is forecast to plunge to minus 16, a 40-year low, after a day-time maximum of minus 8.

The head of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, Guo Hu, linked the blizzard-like conditions this week to unusual atmospheric patterns caused by global warming.

So if it gets warmer - it is global warming. If it gets colder - global warming. How convenient. Evidently there is nothing Global Warming Can't do.

H/T Icecap

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Giving Thanks

We have so much to be thankful for. Not the least of which is abundant energy which makes our lives so comfortable. At ECN Magazine I have reposted an idea I had from November of 2006. The idea is to develop a neighborhood energy source and storage unit along with communications facilities that could be dropped into a neighborhood to start improving life. Also included would be water pumping and storage modules.

I only mentioned wind power in the article, however any energy source that makes sense in a particular location could be added or interchanged.

The changes from 2006 are adding an off the shelf battery with included motor generator set and substituting WiFi and laptops for a TV station and television receivers. Read the article. There are links.

So what about giving thanks? One way would be to do what you can to make something like this happen.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

California Says NO To Solar Power

California is not going to build a thermal solar plant in the desert. It seems the "environmentalists" are against it. You know. The usual. It is unnatural.

A proposed solar energy project in the California desert that caused intense friction between environmentalists and the developers of renewable energy has been shelved.

BrightSource Energy Inc. had planned a 5,130-acre solar power farm in a remote part of the Mojave Desert, on land previously intended for conservation. The company, based in Oakland, Calif., said Thursday that it was instead seeking an alternative site for the project.

The Wildlands Conservancy, a California environmental group, had tried to block the solar development, as had Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who proposed that the area become a national monument.

The land was donated by Wildlands to the Interior Department during the Clinton administration, with assurances from President Bill Clinton himself, the group says, that it would be protected in perpetuity. But the Energy Policy Act of 2005, a Bush administration initiative, opened the land to the development of solar projects.

I think this is just another example of the Cloward-Piven strategy at work. Create a crisis and then put the government in charge of "fixing" the problem. You have to wonder why Californians are such suckers for this strategy, given that the State is bankrupt.

H/T Watts Up With That

Warm Sodium Battery

There is some amazing news in the world of high energy batteries. Coors Ceramics thinks they have a way to make Sodium-Sulfur batteries that can operate at 90° C ( 194° F which is below the boiling point of water)and charge-discharge once a day for ten years.

The battery breakthrough comes from a Salt Lake company called Ceramatec, the R&D arm of CoorsTek, a world leader in advanced materials and electrochemical devices. It promises to reduce dependence on the dinosaur by hooking up with the latest generation of personalized power plants that draw from the sun.

Solar energy has been around, of course, but it's been prohibitively expensive. Now the cost is tumbling, driven by new thin-film chemistry and manufacturing techniques. Leaders in the field include companies like Arizona-based First Solar, which can paint solar cells onto glass; and Konarka, an upstart that purchased a defunct Polaroid film factory in New Bedford, Mass., and now plans to print cells onto rolls of flexible plastic.

The convergence of these two key technologies -- solar power and deep-storage batteries -- has profound implications for oil-strapped America.

"These batteries switch the whole dialogue to renewables," said Daniel Nocera, a noted chemist and professor of energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who sits on Ceramatec's science advisory board. "They will turn us away from dumb technology, circa 1900 -- a 110-year-old approach -- and turn us forward."

One small quibble. Unless this technology can be used to make liquid fuels at a lower cost than oil, its uses in transportation will be limited. One drawback is that it needs to be kept around 90C for the battery to deliver juice. It will be hard to maintain that temperature with low losses in a Chicago winter.

Enough of the caveats. How about some more techno porn.

Inside Ceramatec's wonder battery is a chunk of solid sodium metal mated to a sulphur compound by an extraordinary, paper-thin ceramic membrane. The membrane conducts ions -- electrically charged particles -- back and forth to generate a current. The company calculates that the battery will cram 20 to 40 kilowatt hours of energy into a package about the size of a refrigerator, and operate below 90 degrees C.

This may not startle you, but it should. It's amazing. The most energy-dense batteries available today are huge bottles of super-hot molten sodium, swirling around at 600 degrees or so. At that temperature the material is highly conductive of electricity but it's both toxic and corrosive. You wouldn't want your kids around one of these.

The essence of Ceramatec's breakthrough is that high energy density (a lot of juice) can be achieved safely at normal temperatures and with solid components, not hot liquid.

Ceramatec says its new generation of battery would deliver a continuous flow of 5 kilowatts of electricity over four hours, with 3,650 daily discharge/recharge cycles over 10 years. With the batteries expected to sell in the neighborhood of $2,000, that translates to less than 3 cents per kilowatt hour over the battery's life. Conventional power from the grid typically costs in the neighborhood of 8 cents per kilowatt hour.

Re-read that last paragraph and let the information really sink in. Five kilowatts over four hours -- how much is that? Imagine your trash compactor, food processor, vacuum cleaner, stereo, sewing machine, one surface unit of an electric range and thirty-three 60-watt light bulbs all running nonstop for four hours each day before the house battery runs out. That's a pretty exciting place to live.

And then you recharge. With a projected 3,650 discharge/recharge cycles -- one per day for a decade -- you leave the next-best battery in the dust. Deep-cycling lead/acid batteries like the ones used in RVs are only good for a few hundred cycles, so they're kaput in a year or so.

My favorite caveat in projects like these is logistics. Or in layman's terms "how soon can they ramp up production once they have a working battery.

Grover's brother, John K. Coors, is CEO of CoorsTek, the manufacturing company that applies what the scientists at Ceramatec dream up. Their nephew, Doug Coors, oversees R&D.

With some 21 plants producing advanced ceramic products worldwide, the expectation is that full-scale production of ceramic sheets for the new batteries could be tooled up in short order. In fact, only a handful of CoorsTek facilities would likely be employed.

The order of magnitude pencils out along these lines: a target of 20 gigawatt hours of storage in 20 kilowatt-hour battery increments equals 1 million batteries. Or using a different metric, 1 million square meters of thin ceramic electrolyte would yield 20 gigawatt hours of batteries, equal to California's entire spinning reserve.

Nobody at CoorsTek even blinks at such figures. The company already produces 3 million pounds of ceramic material per month. "Once we have a working prototype battery with all the standards and cost requirements met, it will come up quickly," said Grover Coors. "It would scare people to know how quickly we can bring this up."

They're about about six months away from initial scale-up toward a commercial product, he said.

Lots of sodium will be needed to make the new batteries, and Ceramatec proposes a symbiotic relationship with the federal government to get it. Enormous quantities of sodium metals, the byproducts of nuclear weapons manufacturing, just happen be available for cleanup at Hanford nuclear reservation near Richland, Wash. It's a ready-made source of material that CoorsTek can recycle.

Of course once that source is gone they will have to pay full price for their sodium. Fortunately neither Sodium nor Sulfur are too hard to come by.

And what does all that talk about time to scale up mean? Here are my guesses. About a year and a half to pilot plant production. A year for battery testing and scale up. Another year to get a full production plant operating. So optimistically about 3 and 1/2 years. Realistically 5 years. Pessimistically 7 years. And very pessimistically never.

What would this technology mean? For one thing, besides its uses for wind and solar, it would be very handy for shaving peak loads. It costs the utilities a lot less to deliver steady power than to deliver power that varies a lot over the course of a day. Think of it as having a peaking plant and some backup power (for the refrigerator and furnace) in every home.

Of course superflywheels [pdf] might be a competitive technology capable of even more charge discharge cycles at roughly equivalent energy density.

H/T R. Dave Talk Polywell

Cross Posted at Classical Values