“[LEDs are] not the same. They’re weird-looking. They’re sized different and have these unusual ripples. If you have those interspersed with your traditional lights, they’re going to look dumb.”

– Interviewed consumer, AP Piece, December 21, 2009

An AP piece yesterday by by Sean Murphy, Many Take Dim View of New-Fangled Christmas Lights, is another example of some of the problems that occur when an (inferior) product is forced on consumers in the name of “energy sustainability” (aka, the futile climate crusade).

Small, unsafe, high-insurance-premium micro cars are bad enough (do these things work on the highway?). But also troubling is the assault on quality lighting–and more lighting per se–that hinder those whose mood is elevated by brightness and the many who have trouble coping with the dark. (Of course some can go too far with holiday lighting, as with any pleasurable activity.)…

Editor Note: This commentary is reproduced, with slight revision, from the December 2009 issue of POWER magazine.

As director of public policy analysis in my last seven years at Enron, I participated in many legislative and regulatory debates involving electricity, although the public policy thrust of the company was the opposite of what I personally believed was good social policy.

While I favored free markets, the business model of Ken Lay (a PhD economist with years of Washington regulatory experience) centered on special government favor. Enron, for example, had seven profit centers geared to government pricing/rationing of carbon dioxide (CO ₂) emissions. And in the 1990s, the company was squarely behind a Btu tax. Today, Enron would be pushing cap and trade and a federal renewables mandate–and a lot of mandated energy efficiency with its profit centers in mind.…

Last week, at the first Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on S. 1733, the Kerry-Boxer “Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act,” Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu explained the economic rationale for adopting a Kyoto-style cap-and-trade program.

His argument, in a nutshell, goes like this:

1. Reducing emissions globally will require a massive investment in “clean technologies” — an estimated $2.1 trillion in wind turbines and $1.5 trillion in solar voltaic panels by 2030. These investments will create many green jobs.
2. “The only question is — which countries will invent, manufacture, and export these clean technologies and which will become dependent on foreign products.”
3. The United States is falling behind. “The world’s largest turbine manufacturing company is headquartered in Denmark. 99 percent of the batteries that power America’s hybrid cars are made in Japan.

Renewable energy generates a larger portion of the world’s electricity each year. But in relative terms, solar power generation is hardly a blip on the energy screen despite its long history of technological development.

In this Part I, we review the standard taxonomy of central solar power generating plants by focusing our attention on solar thermal technologies and demonstration projects. The technologies are reasonably well defined yet two formidable hurdles remain: large-scale energy storage technologies and first costs on the order of $5,000/kW, the same cost range as a Generation III+ nuclear plant.

 Future posts will explore a number of interesting commercial projects that have either recently or will soon break ground and the latest developments in hybrid projects that combine many of the available solar energy conversion technologies with conventional fossil-fueled technologies.…