The New Battlefield in the Energy Wars

The somewhat geeky looking guy in this picture is Jonathan Small a registered lobbyist for the giant oil and gas conglomerate known as Koch Companies Public Sector LLC.  In other words he is a shill for the Koch brothers.  And in this picture (provided by Andy Marso of the Capital Journal) he is attending a public hearing of the House Energy and Environment Committee for the state of Kansas. 

It clearly an understatement to say that the Koch brothers and their compadres in the oil and gas industry are busy in the political arena and one of the places they have been most active has been in the state legislatures.  Why, you might ask?  Because that is where they can have the greatest influence in countering the rapidly growing strength of the Renewable Energy industry.  Despite their Red State leanings, renewable energy is just going plain gangbusters in the plain states like Kansas, and this scares the bajeeezus out of guys like the Koch brothers.

Kansas now ranks 3rd in the overall United States when it comes to wind energy, just behind California and Texas.  Kansas has lots of wind, and thanks to to an aggressive Renewable Energy target it set in 2009, it is making huge strides in reducing the state's dependency on coal and foreign oil.  The Wind industry in Kansas is now generating over $3 billion dollars in investments, has generated 13,000 jobs,  and is making lots of friends among farmers who have discovered that wind is an easy way to hugely increase their revenue without having any negative impact on their existing farming and ranching activities.  Wind energy is a total win-win for the people of Kansas but not for the oil companies so that is why the Koch brothers intend to put a stop to it. 

One of the ways the Koch brothers are going after renewable energy is to knock down the Renewable Energy Standards (RES) that have allowed Kansas to build such success. They sponsored two bills, one in the state House (HB 2241) and one in the state Senate (HB 82) before the Kansas legislature which were designed to water down the renewable energy standards.  The current Renewable Energy Standard says that the state utilities must get 15% of their energy from renewable sources by 2016 and 20% by 2020.  The state has been making great progress towards those laudable goals but the new bill being sponsored by the Koch brothers would extend the 15% benchmark by two years and eliminate the 20% benchmark all together.  Heaven forbid that a state should get 20% of its energy from non-polluting, non global warming resources!

Now For the Good News!

So before I go much further let me bring you the good news. Both bills in the Kansas state legislature were defeated, though by fairly narrow margins!  So the good guys one this round.  However, now is not a time to be overconfident!  A few more votes the other way and the progress Kansas has made would have been defeated.

The battle for our environment won't always be fought in big battles or standoffs in Congress with CNN and the other media hanging on every word.  Most of the real work for the environment gets done quietly at the state and local level and what is happening in Kansas is a perfect example of this.

One of the things I find fascinating about all of this is that the oil company manipulations are happening right out in the open.  Rep. Dennis Hedke, the Chairman of the Kansas House Energy and Environment Committee readily admits that he met with the Koch brothers lobbyist, Jonathan Small to "talk about the merits of the bill." To those who know Rep. Hedke such meetings should hardly be a surprise. When not doing his legislative gig Hedke is a contract geophysicist with a client list that includes 30 regional oil and gas  companies.  He has long been at the beck and call of the oil lobby and recently proposed a law requiring Kansas science teachers to teach students “evidence which both supports and counters” the science of climate change.  Given this level of scientific reasoning one can't help but wonder if a bill to have students debate the arguments for and against gravity is next!

The ugly reality is that state legislators are a whole lot easier and cheaper to buy than federal legislators so it is hardly surprising that the battle for the environment is being fought hard on the state front.  If we are going to solve global warming and protect our survival as a species, it is up to citizens to be diligent, not only in following federal environmental politics, but state politics as well!

Fukushima USA

When I'm not busy being an environmental activist and an unrepentant liberal,I actually attempt to have a life, which I must admit is a whole lot easier to do since I retired out here on the central coast.  Last weekend I was out at one of my favorite wineries, Sculpterra, listening to music from my friend Steve Key, a local music promoter, performer and songwriter who performed a new song which was so completely perfect for what I wanted to write about that I requested and got his permission to include his lyrics in this post.

The song is called Fukushima USA and you can hear him perform it on his Web site by clicking on this link. In the song Steve is referring to the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California which is located not only right on top of a geological fault line, but just 20 miles from the city of San Luis Obisop, here in the wine country.  Here's a bit of the lyrics:

Local wines by the bottle or taste
Pools filled up with nuclear waste
Nowhere to send it, so it’s here to stay In Fukushima USA
The sunshine and the skies so clear
How could anything bad happen here?
That’s what the Japanese used to say Now it’s Fukushima USA

They had reactors built by GE
All the latest technology
A nineteen foot high seawall
Wasn’t much protection at all

But don’t think about that distant land
Things are safer here than in Japan
Relax and sip a little chardonnay
In Fukushima USA

At a time when the rest of the more or less sane world is running away from nuclear power like it was, well radioactive, the United States appears headed in the opposite direction. Last week the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) voted 4-1 to allow Atlanta-based Southern Company to build two new nuclear power reactors at its existing Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia. This represents the first approval of a new nuclear power plant in the U.S. in over 30 years.

The one silver lining in the vote was that it was the Chairman of the NRC,Gregory Jaczko , who cast the dissenting vote.  Jaczko said "I cannot support issuing this license as if Fukushima never happened. I believe it requires some type of binding commitment that the Fukushima enhancements that are currently projected and currently planned to be made would be made before the operation of the facility." Sounds like common sense to me, too bad the rest of the commission didn't show any.

The timing of this announcement also strikes me as completely out of step.  The Obama administation has just gone through a year of getting beat up about providing loan guarantees to Solyndra, a solar energy company.  And so just when they are being scrutinized about the economics of their energy policy they approve the first nuclear plant in 30 years.  Good gracious, nuclear plants are practically the poster children for cost overruns! They are guaranteed to cost the public exorbitant amounts of money even if there isn't a nuclear accident.  (And by the way nuclear accidents are not exactly cheap. Experts estimate the Fukushima accident will end up costing Japan over $257 billion dollars!).

If you want to see proof of this you need to look no further than this handy little table provided by the independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO). It shows a chart of the cost overruns at nuclear plants to date. The data is not pretty!

Cost Overruns for Nuclear Plants

Year Begun	Number of Plants	Projected Costs(thousands per MW)	Actual Costs (thousands per MW)	Cost Overrun %
1966 to 1967	11	612	1,279	109%
1968 to 1969	26	741	2,180	194%
1970 to 1971	12	829	2,889	248%
1972 to 1973	7	1,220	3,882	218%
1974 to 1975	14	1,263	4,817	281%
1976 to 1977	5	1,630	4,377	169%
Overall Average	13	938	2,959	207%

There is a reason we stopped building nuclear plants and it wasn't the one most people think. It wasn't 3 Mile Island, or nuclear waste disposal, or nuclear accidents, it was the fact that nuclear energy plants proved to be ridiculously expensive. So here we are in the middle of the worst recession since the great depression, at a time when wind and solar energy have never been cheaper, and our government wants to support the development of more nuclear plants?

We have often been very supportive at EB of the progressive energy policies of the Obama administration, but on this one they just got it wrong, very wrong! Nuclear energy is too expensive and we still have no solution on how to handle nuclear waste! Moreover, there should be a complete moratorium on nuclear plants until we fully understand the implications from Fukushima. Now is not the time to build Fukushima USA!

The Real Problem with Nuclear Energy

Yesterday's Supreme Court decision which struck down the existing laws limiting contributions from corporations is bound to have some immediate impact. Look for lots of campaign commercials from the Nuclear lobby promoting your friendly neighborhood nuclear power plant (along with continuing absurd commercials about the mythical "clean coal"). The doors are now wide open for big corporate energy interests to campaign and we doubt that they will waste any time beating down our virtual doors. However, it is my fervent hope that the public will think twice about buying the pitch for more nuclear plants. Increasing our use of nuclear energy would be very bad policy, though not necessarily for the reason most citizens think.

When most people think about nuclear energy the first thoughts that come to mind probably have something to do with Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or other glow-in-the-dark scenarios. Nuclear waste also frequently rears its head as a concern given that nuclear waste is dangerous for thousands of years. However, it may be that the biggest thing we should be worrying about (though it doesn't make for a good movie of the week) is the whooshing sound of dollars leaving our wallet, because when looked at carefully it quickly becomes clear that nuclear power plants are just too darn expensive.

An excellent explanation of this provided yesterday by Elliott Negin, the media director for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. in an article that appeared recently on the GreenTechMedia web site. Negrin points out that there have been no new nuclear plants built by utility companies since 1973. The energy companies don't want them because they know how expensive they are. A bit of history is in order. As Negin points out "In the 1960s and 1970s, the industry proposed to build some 200 plants, but as construction costs escalated, only about half were finished. Taxpayers and ratepayers were left footing the bill -- about $300 billion in today's dollars -- for abandoned plants, cost overruns for completed plants, and stranded investments that were higher than the wholesale market price for power. "

The Nuclear lobby has asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to approve the building of 26 new nuclear power plants. The cost of these plants would be extraordinary, probably in the range of $7-9 billion dollars apiece. What makes this a bigger concern is that the nuclear power companies are asking for taxpayers to finance these risky investments despite the fact that prior investments led to hundreds of billions of dollars of loss. The Nuclear Energy Institute, which is the lobbying arm for the nuclear industry has petitioned the commission to provide over $100 billion in loan guarantees so they can build the nuclear plants. Folks, this is not chump change. We are talking Iraq war kind of dollars here. Moreover, we are looking at loan guarantees that the nuclear companies could very easily default on. The GAO, the Government Accountability Office estimates that the risk of the nuclear companies defaulting on these loans is at least 50%. I can't imagine any business guaranteeing loans with a 10% risk, much less 50% risk. This is just bad business!

The argument put forward by the nuclear industry is, of course, that the demand for electricity is growing and nuclear plants do not contribute to global warming. Both arguments are true, but what they are not telling us is that there are far better alternatives for getting the renewable energy we need, lots of alternatives.

Let's start with solar energy, for example. As of January 2010 solar has rapidly emerged as an increasingly competitive way of generating commercial electricity. The current cost of a kilowatt-hour of solar energy is hovering around 19 cents per kilowatt hour which is still a bit above nuclear energy costs. However, the cost of photovoltaic panels has dropped by half in 2009 while at the same time the efficiency of the panels went up. Once commercial electric plants begin incorporating these cheaper panels most experts believe PV electricity costs will drop to around 9-11 cents per kilowatt hour which would make them very competitive if not cheaper than electricity from nuclear power plants.

Solar energy can also be generated using solar heat, particularly if the plant is built somewhere in the southwest US where temperatures are high. Solar thermal plants have become far more efficient as the technology becomes refined. There are many solar thermal plants in development that rival nuclear plants in scale. Many of these plants will also address one limitation of solar energy which is its intermittent nature. Recent breakthroughs in the storage of solar thermal energy using molten salt now allow the solar thermal energy to be stored overnight so that the plants can generate energy 24 hours per. This will make them even more viable alternatives to nuclear power plants.

Wind energy is yet another alternative to nuclear power. Large utility scale wind turbines are being manufactured in increasing numbers and as a result are becoming bigger and more cost effective. Over the last 20 years, the cost of electricity from utility-scale wind systems has dropped by more than 80%. In the early 1980s, when the first utility-scale turbines were installed, wind-generated electricity cost as much as 30 cents per kilowatt-hour. Modern wind farms are now producing energy at closer to 4-6cents per kilowatt-hour when you account for the Production Tax Credit. In turn most nuclear power plants are producing energy at somewhere between 11-14 cents per kilowatt-hour when you account for the cost of storing depleted nuclear fuel. Wind farms produce electricity at far less cost and do this without generating any carbon emissions, no radiation risks and without the long-term problem of disposing of nuclear waste. When you look at the whole picture wind energy becomes a no brainer!

Despite these economic hard times are choices for generating cleaner and less expensive energy have never been better. That makes it all the more important that we choose wisely. Give it some thought!

The Truly Scary Thing About Palin

Ever since the surprise nomination of Sarah Palin as John McCaine's running mate the press has been filled with stories relating to her lack of experience, her position on abortion and even absurdly irrelevant discussions of her pregnant teenage daughter. All of this has served to distract the public from what may be the strongest problem with Palin as a Vice Presidential candidate, her badly misguided positions on energy policy. Recently CNBC did an extensive interview with Sarah Palin including a frank discussion of her positions on energy policy. We reviewed this interview as well as numerous presentations by Palin on the topic of energy and renewable energy and frankly found it shocking, though not necessarily surprising. After all she is the Governor of Alaska and Alaska gets 80% of its oil revenues from oil and natural gas companies. Nonetheless, in this CNBC interview, had we not known we were listening to the governor of Alaska, we would have guessed that we were listening to a highly paid lobbyist for the big oil companies. She is that pro big oil!

Palin has long been a strong advocate for drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). When asked about her position on this she said "We need to drill, drill, drill." She has even suggested that she thinks she can persuade John McCaine to approve drilling in the Refuge even though this was one of the rare areas where McCaine disagreed with Bush. She is a big promoter of off-shore drilling and seems to discount any impact the drilling would have on the environment. When the interviewer asked her what the environmental consequences of all this drilling would be she discounted the problem by bascially dissing the environmentalists. She said that the environmentalists were wrong when they said the Alaskan oil pipeline might hurt the caribou herds. She said the herds were fine and therefore drilling in the Arctic Refuge would not have any negative impact. This was a scarily simplistic answer to an important but complex problem, something we have seen all too often from the Republican candidates. Many scientists believe that the oil pipeline did, in fact, impact the caribou herds significantly and that drilling in the arctic would cause even more damage to wildlife because of the nature of the terrain. For an excellent discussion of this see this article from the San Francisco Chronicle appropriately titled "The Last Refuge".

The interviews with Palin are worrisome not only for their content, but for the overall attitude they convey. Palin is not only pro oil, she appears anti-renewable energy. In the interview she acknowledge that her state had vast resources of renewable energy such as wind and tidal energy, and then in the same breath says ""These renewables are not proven to be economic or reliable". Not reliable! Tell that to the millions of people around the world that get their energy from solar, water and wind energy. Not economic! Tell that to the smart people in the energy industry like T. Boone Pickens who are making a nice little fortune creating and selling renewable energy.

Its not only what Palin says that is disturbing it is what she doesn't say. It appears that the term "Global Warming" is not even in her vocabulary. She says "Drill, drill, drill" but she might as well say "Warm, warm, warm" because the inevitable consequence of drilling for more oil is putting more carbon into the atmosphere. Palin was once asked about global warming, she told the conservative Newsmax.com that, while it would affect Alaska more than any other state, "I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made." How out of touch can you be!

We strongly urge our readers to take a look at this recent interview with Palin and hear first hand her comments on energy policy. You can find the interview on YouTube at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GE11URmmnc.