January 15, 2009

Below are a few letters we received on topics that appeared in the past few weeks. They capture the essence of how many readers say they feel.
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Obama's Oil Slide - December 19, 2008

The arguments against a windfall profits tax are one thing. But please tell me again WHY in the world any of the oil companies continue to need tax breaks?

Kevin Corcoran

I even hear those in our part of the energy industry complain about the "big bad oil companies." We should understand that many view the electric utility industry in the same way they do the oil companies.

Even those of us in the not-for-profit electric cooperative side of the business who fail to connect with the member-consumer and educate them about the realities of the marketplace will also be seen as just another greedy energy company.

John Lowrey
Manager of Information
Association of Illinois Electric Co-ops

Excellent article. Taxing excess profits of oil companies - or blaming Detroit - is not the answer.

Taxes on gasoline should have been gradually increased over the past 35 years to levels comparable to those in Japan and Europe.

Proceeds should have been used for:

" transition to high-speed rail for inter and intra-city travel, powered by electricity from pollution-free and greenhouse gas free nuclear power plants,

" development of technologies to produce synthetic gas and oil from coal, and

" increased and more efficient use of nuclear materials to generate electricity.

That's still the answer. Highest priority should be given to its implementation and creation of a national energy board that will ensure good energy policies, well managed energy programs, and accurate information to Americans about energy and nuclear technology.

Clinton Bastin
Former Chemical Engineer and Nuclear Scientist
US Department of Energy

Thank you for this article. It was very well written, balanced and informed. I especially liked the following statement:

Taxing "excessive" profits may give the appearance of justice. But such a policy is really capricious and unnecessary. It's contrary to free market principles.

I think you have hit the nail on the head in regards to this being contrary to free market principles. Unfortunately, free market principles have been under fire lately in too many markets when it is truly over involvement, over regulation and over taxation of/from the government that is having such a negative impact on our economy. Given the chance, free market can regulate itself. As a result of excessive prices, consumers have limited their consumption (and continue to limit consumption) leading to the falling prices; governmental interference was not instrumental in making this change occur.

Producers/suppliers who want to remain in business will figure that out and adjust accordingly. Having the government punish them through excessive taxes will be ultimately passed on to the consumer in any case making your final statement "all too often, it's the everyday folk who get soaked" very insightful and correct!

Again, thank you for this article. I enjoy reading your articles, particularly this one.

Heidi L. Carder
Senior Operations Training Analyst
Operations Procedures & Training
California ISO

I just finished reading your commentary regarding "Big Oil" and you are right on. I work for a smaller independent E & P company and we were exploring new fields and drilling one to two wells a month when the price of oil and gas were higher ($80/bbl and $8/mcf) at least until the companies with the drilling rigs started increasing their prices.

Our industry is very sensitive to price fluctuations as is evidenced by everyone I know digging in their heels and putting the plug on drilling anything at all. At one point, we had several prospects lined up and wells on the schedule for next year, now we have quit drilling hoping that the cost to drill will follow the decline in price. I was told a few weeks ago that I might have to cut one of my office staff to help with the budget. Therefore, you get the big picture when you start following the ripple.

If you do not drill, you will not give money to the landowners, the companies who manufacture the equipment we use in the field, the rig companies, the refineries, the trucking companies etc. Then you have all the people these companies employ who will eventually loose their jobs.

Finally, the consumption is not reduced significantly so where are we going to get our fuel. Outside of the U. S. which then stimulates foreign countries economy not our own!

In addition, there will always be people who are wealthier than most that is what America is about. Everyone has the opportunity for wealth if they are intelligent and work hard he or she can accomplish whatever their heart desires. So where does it say in our constitution that this is wrong and that the government has the right to take what they consider to be "excess." As I said at the beginning of my ranting---when we were making money we were drilling -- now we have stopped. How many jobs has that cost and we are not even one of the larger oil and gas companies!

The people in our government have forgotten what makes the economy strong.

Melody F. Moore
Controller
U. S. Enercorp, Ltd.

The moral of this story seems pretty straightforward me: The threat of a windfall profits tax led to a manipulation of wholesale cost. Under a sympathetic administration, Big Oil can soak us for whatever we will pay without fear of retribution. To avoid the results of an unsympathetic administration, BO manipulated the costs to keep the spectre of windfall taxes only a Carteresque memory.

Hard to see what's truth in the current scenario of near economic armaggedon. The bad news is that renewables look more efficient and more market worthy at $180/barrel. Plus a windfall profit tax could have been used to jump start more renewable efforts. The good news is that are economy probably will recover and there will be plenty of room and money for renewables and big oil for some time to come. Of course, you didn't say anything about natural gas.

Ryan Ferris
Bellingham, WA

An oil windfall tax makes no sense because it is enormously difficult to implement without creating weird disincentives. An oil use tax placed simply on each barrel or gallon bought, however, can be a very different story. Higher energy prices would gradually but eventually shift our dependence on oil and fossil fuels. Government standards and the emerging green ethic will help but they will fail to transform the economy by themselves. Obama's people should be spending some time developing plans for implementing these policies at the appropriate time, both politically and economically.

Hill Huntington
Energy Modeling Forum
Stanford University

Reflections - December 31, 2008

My wife's uncle had all his cash in Madoff's fund--and his sister's. He's a very shrewd, intelligent person who is extremely chagrined that he was duped. Fifty billion reaches out in a lot of directions. It's another $50 billion hit to the economy and all of us who share it. To me, who basically opposes capital punishment, its an attack on society not terribly distinct from shooting a police officer and verges on a capital crime. He didn't just skim off the top--he wiped people out and destroyed their lives.

Bernie Madoff, indeed -- a name right out of Dickens, if you say it with a long "A."

Crooks have been around forever. But there's an added dimension these past 30 years. The film Wall Street captured it: greed is good. Somehow, selfishness got confused with self-reliance.

We have a deep cultural problem, a sickness of avarice masquerading as a distrust of government. In my mind, the Reagan people really ramped this attitude into high gear. When I see clips of Reagan saying "Government isn't the solution to the problem, government IS the problem," I wonder why the entire population didn't rise up at such a fundamental threat to democracy. It was the statement of not a mere elitist, but a contemptuous aristocrat. It's the kind of thing a dictator would say. I suppose people were stressed by the energy and economic crisis then as we are now.

The emphasis on property rights and the pathological resistance to taxes and health care reform have driven us into a very vulnerable situation. We need to recover our sense of democracy. The American and French Revolutions were all about a reaction to concentrated, inherited wealth and privilege. Why we would ever want to reinstate that world has been beyond me for my entire adult life. Now the chickens are coming home to roost. Madoff was a liberal, and maybe he was just a plain crook. But it seems to me the culture that has been inculcated by the conservatives over the past three decades, a culture that at its heart cherishes an aversion to government -organized social cooperation, gave him and everyone else permission to be selfish.

Will an Obama administration be able to redirect this momentum? I doubt it. I hope he and his people can steer us back toward democratic principles, but the change has to come from below. There are still too many people who snarl at the thought of social cooperation. They view it as an infringement on their liberty. But a society without reasonable rules isn't free. And the more complex the problems--and the larger the population--the more cooperation is required. Otherwise, we'll continue to descend into a tyranny
of individual selfishness.

Ray Welch
Associate Director, Energy
Navigant Consulting, Inc.

Great article. You stated, "Ponzi schemes -- or pyramid schemes -- are like chain letters. In other words, the early investors are paid off by those who join in later." If this is the case, does this define the US Social Security program?

You also said, "It's unfathomable to just about everyone how these guys can harm others and then maintain a facade of normalcy." I believe that this is all a culmination of what has happened to our US society as a whole over the past 4 decades when we have continually lower the bar to the point where these practices have become routinely accepted and where personal accountability unfortunately is a virtue of the past. Like in business, a well managed company with dedicated and personally accountable executives sets the example for all of their employees.

What we need today more than ever is leadership in our country, individuals that will start raising the bar again instead of continually lowering it. Unfortunately our center of government in Washington, DC has become a haven for all of the Ponzi's in the country. This is the reason we have no energy plan, no education plan, and no financial security plan.

If the problems of today were addressed by real problem solvers in a standard approach of 1: identify the problem to be solved, 2: develop several conceptual methods to provide resolution, 3: select the best method and move forward, develop an detail process to insure its success, review the process to works, and develop a detailed execution plan to implement.

Ronald Bransfield
P6 Energy Services

The Wish List - January 02, 2009

"Sustainable" is the "in" word, as in "Sustainable Energy". I suggest a new sustainable phrase for the Democratic and Republican lexicons: "Sustainable Spending". It is a wonder that the people ready to throw trillions of borrowed Chinese dollars and our tax dollars at this and that and tossing around the "S" word cannot grasp the concept of Sustainable Spending. What is more certain than global warming is that the failure of President-Elect Obama and his minions to discover Sustainable Spending will lead to Sustainable Bankruptcy.

Continuing on the topic of wordsmithing, would someone please explain to the left coasters the difference between investment and pandering? Every technology has its place, but every technology cannot successfully power a nation cost effectively and enable high standards of living. The laws of physics cannot be broken, but no technology brick wall apparently bothers left coasters more familiar with science fiction than with science.

Ed Dykes
La Grange, Texas

Coal on the Front Burner - January 05, 2009

I agree that the Obama administration will be walking a tightrope. This will be a conflict between the economy and the environment. Carbon capture and sequestration and clean coal come at a significant cost and given the state of the economy neither rate payers, generators nor public utility commissions are going to be amenable to soaring costs for electricity. The two pluses in the current situation is that (1) Russia has been economically debilitated from drastic drops in oil prices and (2) contact prices for mega projects (coal gasification, coal liquefaction and nuclear) should be dropping given order cancellations for contacts worldwide.

Attempting to remove coal from the fuel mix will have serious economic consequences from a power cost perspective and from loss of jobs in all phases of the coal industry.

Renewables have their place in the spectrum but the reality is that in general they are neither base load nor peaking capacity due to lack of reliability. They should be utilized to the maximum extent possible but there are limitations. The Obama administration has expressed both pro- and anti-nuclear positions; however, nuclear is the only base load capacity with a zero carbon footprint. The technology as been operational for over 40 years and should become an increasing part of the base load capacity while the US learns how to deal with coal issues.

Bob Percopo
Executive Vice President
AIG Global Marine & Energy

I sure wish you'd spend as much time exploring the possibilities of Concentrating Solar Power as you do trying to find some Rube Goldberg scheme in an attempt to keep us using coal plants -- the technology of the last century.

We are going to have to ship something to keep our country powered in the 21st century. We can continue look to the technology of the last century and attempt to mine and to ship coal (which is buried at increasingly deep levels and hard to access and underground gasification is highly unlikely to work at scale and at a reasonable price--and then you still have to ship either the gas or the electricity) and then ship the CO2 somewhere (e.g. from Ohio to Oregon for deep sea burial?????) and deal with all of the other environmental pollution that accompanies the use of coal in power plants that function at Neanderthal efficiency converting less than 40% of the coal to electricity but leaving us with 100% of the pollution. The stories of the coal ash spill in Tennessee are just another example of the fact that coal will never be "clean."

Instead of looking to the past, we can look to the future and use the solar resource of the Southwest and Concentrating Solar Power technologies to boil the water and turn the turbines--gathering the "fuel" when the sun is shining, storing it in molten salt or some other thermal storage device and then producing the electricity when it is needed and shipping the electrons to the rest of the country, combining them with wind, geothermal, distributed PV and concentrating PV, vehicle-to-grid and modern demand response to power our country. These are technologies worthy of the 21st century..

According to the resource assessments of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, we have enough solar and wind resources to run the country many times over and we can decarbonize our electric supply, clear our air and achieve true energy independence by getting very serious about using these carbon-free sources. We just have to begin looking up (to our solar and wind resources) for our fuel supply and begin looking to the future, rather than looking down (for more coal and fossil fuels) and to the past. Driving backwards into the future is not a wise way to "drive" an industry and it isn't likely to work any better for the American utility industry than it did for the American auto industry.

Leslie Glustrom
Clean Energy Action

Please consider these additional benefits to moving away from coal:

" coal-fired power creates 40% of all GHGs (greenhouse gas emissions), 66% of acid rain (SOx), 22% of NOx (nitrogen oxides)

" coal-fired power creates 33% of all mercury emissions

" coal mining waste AND coal combustion wastes are the 1st and 2nd largest waste streams in the U.S. -- larger than OR roughly equal to the entire volume of municipal waste in the U.S. (I've seen various numbers)

" the province of Ontario Canada, which owned both the coal plant AND the hospital (they have state-paid health care) found that it cost 3 cents/kWh to generate electricity from coal, but 9 cents/kWh for the health costs from coal;

" coal-fired power plants (plus nuclear plants) are the 2nd largest water users in the U.S. -- right behind irrigation for crops!

" the cost of global warming is enormous -- and the value of future water supplies -- which we know will be diminished by global warming, is as yet undetermined

Finally, our fossil fuels are peaking, according to many experts. Moving to natural gas in a big way is a mistake because natural gas supplies are also going to run out eventually. Many experts believe that we will not see the high natural gas production we experienced in 2007 and 2008 because shale gas - - which was 8% of gas produced in 2007 -- declines so fast -- 65% the first year! And our natural gas wells are decreasing in volume, increasing in depth, and we are drilling more and more wells for overall flat production.

Nancy LaPlaca

Hammering out Carbon Controls - January 07, 2009

I hope you will begin to move back from the isolated discussion of individual issues and begin focusing on the big picture. An 80% reduction in US CO2 emissions by 2050 would require the investment of ~$30 trillion over the period. That is the equivalent of one 2008 financial bailout per year over the period. (How's that for perspective? Imagine if that got the coverage in the media that the bailout has received.) You could interestingly and profitably ask yourself (and us) why we should care about the future of LNG in the US, if the 80% CO2 emissions reduction must be achieved before the LNG terminals reached the ends of their useful lives. You might ask why anyone cares about CAFE standards for gasoline and diesel vehicles, or why billions should be invested in achieving the CAFE improvements, when gasoline and diesel vehicles have no place in an 80% lower emissions US. You might posit scenarios, or even invite us to posit scenarios, of what the US would be like with an 80% CO2 emissions reduction, based on currently available technology. This might well lead to some clarity, or perhaps even some creativity, on which technologies must still be developed to at least maintain current US quality of life in 2050, with a US population of 400-500 million.

If you are willing to become a complete pariah, you might even ask whether a global emissions reduction of 80% would be sufficient to halt the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. (I believe the answer is NO. I believe those advocating such a reduction know that the answer is NO. I believe they lack the scientific integrity and the political courage to say so out loud.)

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

I keep telling and showing you there is no real-would proven link between warming and CO2 and modern-times carbon energy use, but you refuse to consider this. As I've said many times to you, if the trends you adhere to were real, then the 80% manmade CO2 increase since 1970 would have had to change the Mt. Washington trends in at least one season on page 4450, but it didn't one even in the slightest amount. Thus, there is no causal link between modern energy use and temperature trends.

Also, the global 100,000 year temperature cycle we are stuck in now is still in play, and there nothing we can do about it but adapt.

Even the science editor of The Economist in this year's World issue admitted the real-world temperature data and the models are at odds, with the models greatly overstating the trend, and that that is a problem for the models, which you refuse to write about.

If you are not willing to write about the real-world science on this issue, you should keep still about it. I say the same over and over to the science editor of The Economist. But at least at years end he had the integrity to mention this significant discrepancy.

Lloyd Weaver
President
LEW Holdings LLC

I normally do not respond to editors and articles. However, your article on RGGI hit close to home. It is my belief that the path to a greener environment, greater energy security, energy independence, and economic growth has to come from the promotion and support of both new energy technology as well as a formal Cap and Trade system. RGGI may fall short and have some loop holes, but it's a good start. The new administration certainly has its hands full, but now is the time to address this issue. Let's hope change is really on the way.

Richard Madeira
Vice President
enginuity energy LLC

Very informative article! As a consultant who speaks every day with power engineers, but is not an engineer or insider in the utility industry myself, your article helped fill a few holes in my understanding of this whole carbon emissions 'cap-and-trade' program. The RGGI program is indeed enjoying its time in the sun which seems like a good thing until those cleaner technologies come along.

Rob Spaulding
Consultant
Spaulding Associates

The Federal Shield - January 09, 2009

Very good article today! I appreciate the tri-furcation of the utility industry, the banking industry, and the auto industry. Kudos for an objective analysis and the great quotes you included.

Eric Christenson

The logic that the government would be protecting failing business models is the most compelling argument. Bailing out car companies is a poor justification for unprecedented transfers of debt. The argument that is not being made is whether the Federal Government has the ability to save failed business models. There are two reasons this bailout will fail -- strategy and financial.

The strategy is flawed because it will not affect the people who made bad decisions over the last 25 years-management and labor. We bailed out Chrysler 25 years ago only to have it back on life support. The Big 3 management has been were maximizing the size and profit content per vehicle, while Toyota was improving its model longevity. The Big 3 labor contracts contribute a $5000 disadvantage per vehicle to pay for non-workers while Toyota focused on employee relations. These two competitive differences resulted in the business model that is no longer viable. Unless the internal governance is changed for the Big 3 we can be rest assured that the bailed out companies will be just as unviable. However, the people evaluating the Big 3 business plans are not likely to do anything that would strain the UAW or change the management of the Big 3. Both are big contributors to the Federal power structure.

The financial justification is also flawed because it assumes an unlimited bonding capability of the US Government. When the sale of $2 trillion in treasury bonds starts hitting the market, we will have interest rate pressure that will increase inflation and further force the Big 3 to increase their cost of capital to fund any changes that they need to make. The last automotive crisis was during 18% interest rates. If car loans start costing 10% (add-on interest) instead of 3%, the buying public will be just as reluctant to buy. Our current liquidity problem (home loans) was the result of over-capitalizing the mortgage market (i.e. bad loans) and this automotive bailout process is overcapitalizing the auto industry.

We can be re st assured that this bailout is not over and the result is going to be that every tax paying American is going to be hurt, and hurt severely. The assumption that the Federal government has the wherewithal to control the economy is ludicrous on its face to anyone who understands supply and demand. The way to increase supply and demand is to increase both sides of the equation, not just supply.

Alan Gartner
Executive Consultant

TVA's Long Road Ahead - January 12, 2009

Good Engineering practice could have avoided the TVA incident.

Coal Combustion Wastes [including Fly Ash, Bottom Ash and Flue Gas Desulfurization (FGD) sludge] is regulated as a Solid Waste (i.e. non-hazardous). About 30% of these wastes are utilized in road construction, bricks etc (fly ash) and Cement Wall-Board production (FGD By-Product Gypsum). Rather than pond and landfill these materials, TVA could have opted to investigate their beneficial re-use. Several electric utilities dedicate staff to develop markets and end-users for their Coal Combustion By-Products [e.g. TECO, AEP]. The failure of the pond dike walls could have been avoided if TVA had appreciated the well-documented behavior of ash with FGD waste forming a pozzolanic material suitable as a dike wall instead using earthen material.

Rather than create unnecessary legislation or investigate undemonstrated technology, the application of Good Engineering Practice [based on over 20 years of field operating experience] should be part of an coal-fired power plant's management philosophy.

Dr. Richard W. Goodwin, P.E.
Environmental Engineering Consultant

Thanks for the timely article on the TVA mess. One thing you should make note of; ash from the usual gasification process is not the same as ash from PC's like TVA's or other types of boilers. Most gasifiers operate at very high temp so the ash in the coal, or pet coke is in a vitrified form. In simple terms, the high temp ( 2900F) of an oxygen blown gasifier transforms the mineral content in the coal into a glassy ceramic like form that encapsulates the heavy metals making the complete residual truly inert and not subject to leaching. More importantly, it allows gasifier ('bottom") ash to be recovered and sold as road paving or structural fill material. The fines or "fly" ash are salable as abrasives or the "frit" used on roofing shingles.

The Polk plant now sells 100% of its vitrified ash for a profit instead of land filling it.

Your concern is right about this TVA mess (not an environmental catastrophe) becoming a lightening rod for all those against coal. To counter, I think a good article distinguishing gasification from the target buzz words "clean coal" is called for. Unfortunately, making fun of the words "clean coal" has been become a rallying cry against coal in any form, and has now been turned into a monster campaign against the most realistic way (gasification) to use coal to solve our energy problems and break away from imported oil. We all know windmills and solar while good will never allow that goal to be reached.

David B. Grogan
Principal
D.B. Grogan Associates, LLC

The coal ash problem is not just a TVA problem, every coal power plant has ash disposal issues. Coal ash is not hazardous in small quantities, it only becomes a hazard when large quantities are involved. The obvious solution is for the ash products to be used in beneficial products such as concrete. But currently only a small fraction of the 125 million tons generated annually are beneficially used and almost none of the billions of tons of ash in storage ponds and landfills are being reclaimed for use. There are several technologies in existence that could potentially consume all coal ash production and, over time, deplete the ash in storage. My company has one such technology that is described in the attachment.

The barrier to beneficial use of coal ash is cost. With our concrete product, and other uses of coal ash, the resulting products must be lower cost than other alternatives to sell in the volumes necessary to absorb ash production. The economics of building production plants and purchasing and transporting ash feedstock just don't work. The only way that the economics will work out is for the utilities to recognize that beneficial use of the ash is a part of the cost of generating power from coal and that long term storage of the ash is not a solution. Given that utilities have a much lower cost of money than does private industry, it makes sense that beneficial ash product manufacturing facilities be financed as a part of the power plant with marketing, and perhaps operation, contracted out to parties in the construction industry. Yes, this will be an increased cost to the power company, but likely a much lower cost than eventual cleanups.

Roger Babb
President
OSA, Inc.

I'm not sure that you are looking at the correct statistics on coal combustion byproduct use. In 2006 approximately 54 million tons of fly, bottom and other coal combustion products were sold and reused. Of that total, more than 40 million tons of fly and bottom ash were sold for use in a variety applications. Beneficial reuse of coal combustion byproducts is approaching almost 45% of production, hardly a small fraction as you describe. Many, if not all of the "toxic substances" are actually found in soils, including those wherein we plant our gardens. Of course, even the most benign substances can be deleterious if encountered in high enough concentration.

The incident in Tennessee is most regrettable and hopefully TVA will come through with a complete remediation. Their performance does not reflect the sense of environmental stewardship of those that I encounter in the electric utility business.

I always enjoy your writing, but it is a little disturbing that you do not seem to be using factual information. You might want to check out the American Coal Ash Association web site at: http://www.acaa-usa.org/index.cfm

Stephen R. Powell
Senior Fuels Engineer
Tri-State G&T

Wind's Clip - January 14, 2009

I was glad to see this part in the article

The company's exuberance, however, is tempered by its stated recognition that wind will always be a supplemental energy form. Simply, wind is an intermittent natural resource and that back-up fossil fuel sources must still be made available.

This can't be overstated. We need 100% backup with reliable sources (fossil and nuclear) unless people want to sit in the dark until the wind picks up or the sun comes out. Without over capacity and storage of power produced by wind and solar -- they are not viable.

Here's the problem. They expect that consumers will prefer "free" energy and pay the same for it as they do now to fossil fuel companies. But when the reliable industries are put on standby, how long will they last before the economic impact of a reduction in their sales reduces their ability to maintain their plants?

When you consider the impact, it's staggering.

What should be done is that regulation should mandate solar and wind companies to provide their own backup capacity factors or purchase backup capacity from fossil fuel or nuclear plants. We should not let the solar and wind energy producers blow in and destabilize and existing industry without addressing (by paying for) their own detrimental impact to the national capacity factor.

Mike Brisendine
B&McD Electrical Controls

Your opening paragraph states that the growth of wind, as a source of electrical power, will occur only if the new administration "will allow such expansion to occur."

This is not even remotely correct, of course. There is nothing stopping the expansion of wind. Any private generator can go ahead and build all the turbines they want, assuming local approvals etc. What is holding expansion of wind power back is the lack of certainty around the extremely lucrative cash incentives that have been available in the past. The truth is that generators will only put wind turbines up if they can get incentives, tax credits or guaranteed purchase agreements (typically guarantees purchase at above market rates and in preference to lower cost providers).

Certainly I don't fault generators from wanting to make as much money as possible. But let's not fall into the trap that the renewable spin doctors have set up of implying that they are not being allowed to put as much renewable power into play as they could.

Consumers are, by and large, not willing to pay the actual cost of wind power, aside from the few to whom source is more important than cost. Otherwise the US would already have reached the presumed possible 20% capacity.

Paul Stevens

From: http://www.windaction.org/news/17746 - Wind energy unreliable, says E.On - September 1, 2008

Wind energy is so unreliable that even if 13,000 turbines are built to meet EU renewable energy targets, they could be relied on to provide only seven percent of the country's peak winter electricity demand, according to a leading power company E.On.

E.On has argued that so little wind blows during the coldest days of winter that 92 percent of installed wind capacity would have to be backed up by traditional power stations.

I recently I saw a report from E.on regarding their European wind experience. If my memory serves me, for 2006, E.on's wind generation in Europe had a capacity factor of 18%, generation never exceeded 84% of installed capacity, and at times generated almost nothing. In 2007, I believe the US Wind Generation capacity factor was 32%, a big improvement over the Europeans, but still far from reliable. I haven't seen anything on storage technologies that gives me comfort that they are realistic and cost effective solutions for large scale application any time soon. Pumped storage is effective and the the most mature, but good pumped storage sites are hard to find and it is expensive. I've seen tidbits on compressed air, batteries, and hydrogen production, but there are no widespread proven applications of these technologies, and they are also expensive. In effect, the storage $/kw costs must be added to the wind $/kw cost to put wind on an even economic footing with baseload technologies. And even with transmission system upgrades, I just don't see long distance transmission of wind energy from the boondock in Kansas to New york City becoming a reality (Don't forget to add those costs to the $/kw cost of wind).

I believe 20% wind will become a reality in the 2030 timeframe, but it is no panacea. Give me a good Nuke any day.

Thomas E. Spink
Licensing Project Manager
Nuclear Generation Development

Respond to the editor.