“[The plan] is a sign to the industry that the Obama administration is serious about exploration.”
– Daniel Yergin, chairman, IHS-CERA, quoted in Jennifer Dlouhy, “Offshore Plan Wins Few Raves,” Houston Chronicle, April 1, 2010.
The subtitle to Ms. Dlouhy’s piece was “Environmental groups and GOP are critical, while oil patch is wary.” Pouring over the 300 comments on this article, Chronicle readers know a bait-and-switch and Trojan Horse when they see it (energy-savvy Houston, after all). Maybe some of these same readers fear what I do: a wishy-washy editorial from the Chronicle on how Obama’s drilling plan is a ‘good beginning’ and ‘reasonable compromise’.
Now to Dr. Yergin, the industry expert and author who seemed to have come a long way from Energy Future (1979) to The Commanding Heights (1998).…
Continue Reading“Instead of the fear-baiting warnings that the U.S. is being outspent on renewables [by China], a better question might be: what are we getting for our money?”
– Loren Steffy, “Scrubbing the Data on Clean Energy Investment,” Houston Chronicle, March 27, 2010.
Loren Steffy is the most read and respected voice at the Houston Chronicle on business and related policy issues, the paper’s editorial board notwithstanding. And on energy, he smells a rat with the ‘clean energy’ mantra that comes on high.
Steffy has documented the role of Enron in the government-created Texas wind power boom. He deconstructed the all pain-no gain nature of the House-passed Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill before the rest of the country caught on. And most recently, he has called out the non sequitur of a new study, “Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race,” recently released by the Pew Charitable Trusts via the Pew Environmental Group.…
Continue ReadingMost analyses and reviews of utility-scale, highly intermittent new renewables, especially wind power which will be the focus here, are lacking in perspective. This makes marginal aspects appear to have significance out of proportion to the very little value they represent.
A few examples are:
… Continue Reading· A focus on the energy contribution (MWh) from wind power leads to error in assessing the contribution to electricity costs, reliability, impact on fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, transmission needs and the operation of an electricity system.
· The possibility of some improvements in wind forecasting. Given the current state of weather forecasting in general, it seems difficult to believe that wind can be forecast for short time intervals, say 24 hours in advance. In any event, even if such forecasting was possible, it does not change the need for balancing generation plants to be ramped frequently to mirror wind conditions.