Last weekend, Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) co-authored an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “Yes We Can (Pass Climate Change Legislation).”

Kerry and Graham want to pass a Senate companion bill to H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), also known as Waxman-Markey, for its chief sponsors, Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA). Waxman-Markey narrowly passed in the House by a vote of 219 to 212. Only eight Republicans — under 5% of those voting — supported the bill.

Republican Opportunity

The overtly partisan character of Waxman-Markey is one of the reasons some observers conclude that Congress will not pass a cap-and-trade bill this year. Cap-and-trade “works” by raising consumer energy prices, and Democrats are loathe to increase household utility bills and pain at the pump unless they can snooker Republicans into giving them bipartisan cover.…

Editor’s note: This article is the first of two posts on shale gas production and concerns the U.S. situation. The second will look at the potential impacts of shale gas production in Europe and China. While some have interpreted shale gas in terms of coal displacement in power generation, this new competition has profound (negative) implications for the viability of politically favored renewables in power generation.

Shale gas formations have been known for many years. But only in the 1990s did an understanding of hydraulic fracturing technology make production of gas from such formations feasible technically. And it was not until the middle of this decade, with U.S. domestic gas prices consistently above $10/mmbtu, that shale moved from an interesting future resource to a major current reserve.

The U.S. Department of Energy now estimates that recoverable shale gas resources in the U.S.…

“The use of wind power is as old as history.”

– Erich Zimmermann, World Resources and Industries (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), p. 62.

“The Federal Power Commission became interested in the Grandpa’s Knob [windpower] experiment during World War II, and commissioned Percy H. Thomas, a senior engineer of the commission, to investigate the potential of wind power production for the entire country. Thomas’ survey, Electric Power from the Wind, was published in March 1945.”

– Wilson Clark, Energy for Survival: The Alternative to Extinction (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1974), p. 545.

Last week I posted on the long history of solar energy to make the point that this technology is not an infant industry. The fact that solar cannot compete against grid electricity (off grid is another matter) today is proof positive that there is an inherent disadvantage with the dilute, intermittent flow of sunlight in the thriving carbon-based energy era.…

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.…