Below are a few letters received at EnergyBiz Insider on topics that appeared in the past few weeks. They capture the essence of how many readers say they feel.
________________________________________

Greening the Grid - March 31, 2010

I re-read the Constitution and couldn't find a darn thing about federal control of the power industry or mandating carbon emissions (The jury is still out on the impact of carbon and if humans even can impact carbon).

Smart grid seems like a nice thing to do if it is cost effective. If the only way they are going to get it going is with billions taken from taxpayers -- thanks but no thanks. The other thing that kind of scares me about smart grid and smart meters is big brother decides that you are using "more than your fair share" and shuts you off. Isn't that a potential? Before you give me an emphatic "no", remember that income taxes were implemented as a temporary measure, Social Security was supposed to be voluntary and not to exceed 1 percent of your income and not be taxed on payout. The government hasn't kept a promise yet, or had a successful program. Or perhaps you can name one. Amtrack? No. Fannie and Freddie? No. Postal Service? No. Social Security? No. And Medicare? No.

And you are comfortable in allowing them to tell us how big a "carbon footprint" we will be allowed to have? Me, personally, I would like to plant a huge "carbon footprint" up Al Gore's backside!

Thom Peschke

Letters from Readers - April 01, 2010

I am appalled at some of the responses that you publish. I doubt very few readers really have the time to study the science of climate change, so their responses are just as much a knee-jerk reaction as much of the green crowd. That does not change the fact that overnight lows in Minneapolis in January are 9 degrees warmer than they were 40 years ago (1960-1967 versus 2000-2007, National Weather Service data). I suppose the NWS is in on this conspiracy also?

On price alone, it is almost impossible to compete with fossil fuels, but price does not dictate everything. In the late '60s early '70s the Cuyahoga River in Ohio was so polluted it burned and severely damaged two railroad bridges. I doubt anyone in Ohio or anywhere else in this country would find that acceptable today. Times change, forty years from now people may look back and wonder what all the fuss was about CO2. If the coal industry cannot figure out how to economically sequester carbon, then they may have to go out of business.

Maybe these readers should quit dragging their feet and realize that this is the second most important issue that we face, after controlling WMDs.

Bruce Stenswick

Recognizing Coal's Constraints - April 07, 2010

Coal is not going to decline in use unless we want the economy to implode. We have to do better with coal, particularly from a safety point-of-view. There is too much risk to our economy to try to eliminate it from the energy mix. The coal naysayers cannot justify causing prices to increase at the rates mentioned in your article -- an 80 to 200 percent increase is off the scale of reasonable.

Ron Corso

If we continue down the wrong road because we have driven too far -- what kind of ridiculous thought process is that? Our federal government has proven their contempt for logical thought time and again, i.e. Yucca Flats.

The media refuses to recognize the "inconvenient truth" about carbon because it alienates their readers. The facts are quite simple: coal is the only economically viable natural resource available to support the growth of the world's high growth economies. India alone will require 2 billion tons of imported coal by 2015.

Christopher L. Headrick
President & Co-CEO
Americas Energy Company

Measured Response to Greenhouse Gases - April 09, 2010

Conservative lawmakers would have opposed Galileo -- along with Luther, Calvin and the Pope. Their "fundamental disbelief that manmade greenhouse gases from power plants and automobiles are causing global warming" is more a political concern about a perceived threat to the Big AWOL (American Way of Life) than it is about science. The science is clear that the Earth has been quite different from the "Long Summer" of the last 10,000 years (the tilt of the Earth close to 24 degrees and carbon dioxide 280 parts per million + /- 40 ppm), when carbon dioxide has been where it is now -- 390ppm -- and especially different and not conducive to human civilization when carbon dioxide has been over 500 ppm -- where we'll be in 40-50 years with business as usual: the world is now using about15 terawatts of energy and approximately 87 percent is from fossil fuels.

Timothy Ferris -- Professor Emeritus UC-Berkeley and "the best science writer of his generation" -- spends eight pages in his 2010 book, The Science of Liberty, debunking the anti-scientific Global Climate Change deniers, many of whom also believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that evolution is bunk.

In the 1990s, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association was claiming that more carbon dioxide would be good for the Earth. We all learn in increments, but we have to realize that there is such a thing as "too late." Jim Hansen and others warn that we must turn around increasing CO2 by 2016 and phase out coal by 2030 to avoid climate hell.

John McCain used to say that in case the climate science might be wrong, we should do some risk assessment and insurance re how we use produce and use energy, which would also be beneficial for energy security, balance of payments, and for local and regional ecosystems.

Roland James

Jackson is not right about jobs. If we put legislation in place to reduce carbon emissions and China and India don't not only will we lose jobs, but those are the two countries that most of those jobs will go to. The EPA's actions could double or triple the cost of electricity in the U.S. and make most electricity dependent industries (mining, steel, pulp and paper, cement, etc.) scale back operations and dramatically reduce the number of employees because the U.S. would be even less competitive with foreign suppliers in these industries than it is today.

Bob Percopo
Executive Vice President
Project Finance Advisory Services
Global Marine & Energy

The surest way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions per megawatt of power delivered to the consumers while burning fossil fuels is to push the efficiency envelope ever higher rather than pursue technologies like Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS). CCS significantly decreases power plant efficiency requiring a massive increase in fuel burned and heat rejected to the environment.

CCS also removes oxygen from the atmosphere permanently because there is no photosynthesis occurring thousands of feet under the Earth's surface. CCS also forever removes carbon from the carbon (life) chain. CCS is destructive, wasteful, and expensive.

Spending hundreds of millions of dollars adding CCS technology to a new or existing power plant is just plain stupid, especially when the reason for doing so is questionable. When the "world's leading scientists" ignore such things as the Medieval warming period, their conclusions are no longer undeniable. Such actions are dishonest, manipulative, unethical, and unscientific.

I do not deny that the earth is warming and that man is contributing to it. How much is natural and how much is manmade is the real question. But whether manmade CO2 is the primary cause, I certainly have my doubts especially compared to the billions upon billions of BTUs that get pumped into the environment as waste heat.

There are a number of parallel paths that must all be employed to decrease man's impact on global warming:

• Push the efficiency envelope of electrical generation ever higher in all methods of doing so-fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro etc. By pushing the efficiency of all of these we put more net MWs to the consumer with less fuel burned and less heat rejected to the environment.
• Expand the capture of methane from sewage processing-there should not be a sewage treatment plant built that flares or vents methane.
• Build more trash-to-steam power plants. It is incredibly stupid to take oil and gas from the ground and pour energy into it to make it into plastics that get buried in a landfill. The same thing with paper-we cut down trees, put energy into processing it into paper, then bury it in a place where it takes decades to decompose.
• Increase the efficiency of electricity usage. Think about it. Many uses of electricity eventually ends up with that use putting heat into the environment-refrigerators, air conditioners, stoves, microwave ovens, light bulbs, computers, televisions etc.

Byron Wooldridge, P.E.

I think you oversimplified the opposition to strong, immediate steps to address green house gases. My concerns are:

• Most bills in congress are expensive; leading to higher energy prices and less competitive U.S. exports.
• I am concerned about hubris in the science. Twenty-five years after this discussion began, I have seen no reports of increased sea levels. This ought to be a very simply measured and documented validation of a long held prediction.
• I wonder about the advocates' true agenda. Against the claimed risks of green house gases, the relative risk of nuclear power ought to pail.
• Specific to cap-and-trade, I am very concerned that the bureaucracy needed to validate savings and discharges will begin as unwieldy and eventually become unworkable. For this and other reasons I strongly prefer a carbon "fee". (Another reason I prefer a carbon fee is the ease of adjusting it. This would give the U.S. flexibility as other nations join a regime, and allow government, not an invisible hand, to consider the issues of expense, competition and where the receipts will be best spent).

I don't consider myself a flat-earth denier. I am concerned that congress may be rushing to a premature and potentially unwise policy.

David Dixon
Energy Commentator

The regulation would shape power plants and other factories that emit 25,000 tons or more of carbon dioxide a year. If such facilities are modernized, or if new ones are built, they would then be required to install "best available technologies." Even then, the administrator says that the agency is now looking at "substantially" raising that threshold and giving many of the smaller polluting businesses until 2016 to comply.

The use of the term "modernized" suggests that EPA will use the courts regarding CO2 as it has regarding SOX and NOX, arguing that major maintenance, even if it results in increased efficiency or reduced emissions, triggers NSR for the affected power plant and requires BACT technology for CO2.

This raises the questions of what constitutes BACT for CO2 in 2011, IGCC or CCS; and, if CCS, at what percentage capture.

The electric industry has reason to be extremely wary of EPA and its CAA implementation, based on its experiences since the mid-'90s. Now the manufacturing industry will have reason to be wary as well.

It is hardly worth mentioning that, in the global scheme of things, this effort would result only in a very minor reduction in the rate of growth of carbon emissions, given the intent of China and India, among others, to continue massive increases in coal-fired power generation. I guess we just need to be hope that the globe would be heated very slightly less rapidly as the result of our changes.

Edward A. Reid, Jr.
President
Fire to Ice, Inc.

Nuclear's New Confidence - April 12, 2010

In your article regarding nuclear power I would take exception to your comment in paragraph 2, specifically "Besides coal, nuclear energy is the only other source of base-load power that can run continuously..." Technology, not fuel source, is configured to operate to serve load continuously. Any fossil-fueled technology can handle base-load duty and operate continuously if called upon to do so, without much technical consideration. Natural gas-fired combined cycle technology also fulfills such duty. Dispatch profiles tend to be shaped by economics of the fuel source.

Frank Giacalone
CEO
Navasota Energy

I'm responding to Ken Silverstein's EnergyBiz Insider article "Nuclear's New Confidence". In it he stated, "Besides coal, nuclear energy is the only other source of base-load power that can run continuously and serve large populations." So, my question is, "What about geothermal as a base-load replacement?" Based on the reading I've done, geothermal is most attractive as a utility around geologically active regions of the U.S. (Yellowstone, Pacific Rim fault line, Continental Divide). However, it is still reachable (less than 4 miles down) just about anywhere in the U.S. and at low end temperatures that can drive power turbines if we are willing to invest in the drilling. (Cheaper than a nuclear plant?) Certainly, if we know how to drill for oil, we can hit a hot spot 4 miles down in the Earth's crust and do it enough times to meet the ever-increasing loads of our population.

Ken also made a statement that nuclear is a carbon-free source of energy, but I argue that we can't just look at the carbon. We need to consider the waste of any power generation technology and the costs of dealing with it. Our short-sighted, profit-oriented society seems to overlook these overall costs, which amounts to saying lets just stop collecting garbage because we've already made a profit selling the original goods. That's why it irritates me when I hear those in the energy business say "coal and oil are so cheap, why should we develop any renewable energy source?" These sources wouldn't be considered so cheap if they were also forced to collect all the carbon they've generated or fix the harm they've caused to the planet. They argue that global warming isn't real. Whether it is or isn't real, we can't afford to be wrong and we should be striving to live in better harmony with our planet's ecosystems -- systems that we need to survive. They know in the back of the! ir minds this is the ethical approach, but greed always seems to win out. In terms of nuclear energy, you are just exchanging carbon for radioactive waste which they still don't know how to dispose. I've heard that the Yucca Mountain radioactive repository in Nevada is no longer viable and has been defunded so we are still stuck with storage onsite. Some recycling can be done, but it still seems like a very costly radioactive mess that is a potential target for terrorists.

Also, why can't we use the money we would have spent on a nuclear plant, to invest in some type of storage for solar or wind to make them viable base-load technologies. Solar already has shown promise with molten salts and this technology could be scaled up. Why couldn't wind be used to store pumped hydro, hydrogen gas or compressed air instead of being curtailed when supplemental loads are not present? Imagine offshore wind farms with hydro storage tanks large enough to contain the volume of water behind Hoover Dam or Three Gorges Dam with built in hydroelectric stations. Even tidal forces might be used to help pump the stored water. If we could build the Panama Canal, why couldn't we build something on this scale? It is time for this generation to think bigger and to challenge itself again.

So, I guess I'm disheartened by Mr. Silverstein's comments that seem to promote nuclear as our "only" "clean" option. Is nuclear our only base-load option? I don't think it is. Will developing geothermal or energy storage be easy? No, but more oil, coal or nuclear are not the keys, either. We've tackled harder issues in our country's history and it pains me to hear someone parrot what the oil/coal/nuclear lobbyists are brainwashing us into thinking: Their profit should come before our need for a cleaner future.

John Wadley

Respond to the editor.