Truck and Barter

Isn't there something in physics about that?

I dislike people misappropriating concepts as much as the next pedant, but I have to say, I think this time the logical connection I want want to make is valid. Take this article from Seed, ostensibly about clear-headed science reporting:

The United States, the only industrialized country with strong population growth, now has 300 million people whose lifestyle makes a disproportionately huge mark on the global environment, experts say.

The world's third most populous country behind China and India, the United States has five percent of the world's population.

But it consumes—alone—more than a quarter of the world's natural resources, more than any other country, according to the National Report on Population and Environment, put out by the U.S.-based Center for Environment and Population.

I know it's not quite the same, but could I really be blamed for suggesting that the law of conservation of mass and energy might provide some necessary perspective?

The US economy is also among the world's most productive nations. Meaning that the resources consumed get turned into something, be it plastic goods, financial services, taxi cab rides, software, movies, and so on. Certainly there is a massive efficiency question to address, but the overarching point of the article -- as evidenced by the headline -- is to suggest that the consumption of those resources by the US is an unalloyed negative for the world. This simply ignores the connection between resource use and economic output. All else equal, if you reduce resource use, you'll reduce output. And while some people may be fine with that, who exactly draws up the list of resources to reduce, and thus gets the pleasure of picking which industry will be turning people out of their jobs?

More on the economics of standby

Here's a quick article on the savings to be had from lower-power standby for electronic devices.

For Windows commputer users: when (if) Vista ever hits the streets, it's going to have a more robust power-saving "sleep" feature that will still allow IT managers to install updates late at night when people aren't around.

What I wonder, however, is if this idle power usage in computers (which could be larger than when the computer is actually running) is better put to other uses. Personally, I've loaded the United Devices agent from Grid.org on my PCs. After about 15 minutes of inactivity, the grid program kicks on and it starts donating cycles to things like the Human Proteome Folding Project. The direct contribution of effort is more appealing to me than trying to ramp down energy use in tiny bits over every machine (which makes me wonder whether people will just find other, more power-intensive activities to get up to, eroding the "benefit" of scaling back standby power use).

Do I Have to Re-do my Problem Sets?

Britain's wholesale price of natural gas dipped into the negative.

Well, so much for assuming prices are positive in my optimization problems.

Stupid reality.

Wherein One Blogger Deftly Constructs a Bet That I Won't Take

Kevin Drum takes a shining to all the possible wonders that the new California anti-global warming bill will bestow upon the Sunshine state. Indeed, he's so certain, he's willing to place a bet on it (one that another blogger is willing to take up).

Still, this is a good first move, and I'll bet all comers that not only does it not have a negative impact on California's economy, it will have a noticeably positive impact. It will spur R&D in new technologies, it will motivate businesses to become more efficient, and it will make California a better place to live. And as for businesses moving out, I'll bet against that too. Moving heavy industrial plants to new states is a lot less appealing than it sounds, and if it does start to happen I'll bet other states will follow California's lead. After all, what state wants to be the dumping ground for all the poor corporate citizens who are moving out of California because they want to relocate somewhere that doesn't mind them belching tons of pollutants into the air?

Here's my question: what about all of the diverted activity from companies that choose, on the margin, to avoid Cali to begin with. Stores not opened, factories not built, workforces and facilities not expanded...and so on. And, if California experiences growth, what would be the counterfactual? Would there have been more or less growth absent the new bill?

The bet seems rigged to me, focusing only on the most expensive form of altered company behavior, ignoring that this is not the only impact a change in the cost to do business will have on a state's economy. Best of luck to Jane if the bet goes forward. Me, I'd put the money into buying technology to make sure my house uses less power when I'm not home.

For disclosure, I consider myself something of a fence-sitter on global warming. Yup, it's absolutely there. Yup, it's definitely a problem. Nope, no one has a non-slip grip on how big a change and what percentage of the change is due to what factor. (Confidence intervals that include both "no change" and "Hades on a bad day hot" don't make me, well, confident.) And nope, strapping businesses down and squeezing them until they bleed money is not the best way to reduce the problem (unless you happen to like the level of development in the world RIGHT NOW so much that you don't think it should change, and, perhaps, might do with some backsliding).

Peak Oil Theory of the war on Lebanon

Juan Cole tries a ‘thought experiment’ to explain the US support for the Israeli war on Lebanon;

“I've had a message from a European reader that leads me to consider a Peak Oil Theory of the US-Israeli war on Lebanon (and by proxy on Iran). I say, "consider" the "theory" because this is a thought experiment. I put it on the table to see if it can be knocked down, the way you would preliminary hypotheses in a science experiment…

The regime in Iran has not gone away despite decades of hostility toward it by Washington, and despite the latter's policy of "containment." As a result, US petroleum corporations are denied significant opportunities for investment in the Iranian petroleum sector. Worse, Iran has made a big energy deal with China and is negotiating with India. As those two countries emerge as the superpowers of the 21st century, they will attempt to lock up Gulf petroleum and gas in proprietary contracts.

(Since it is already coming up in the comments, I should note that the "fungibility" (easy exchange) of oil is less important in the new environment than it used to be. US petroleum companies would like to go back to actually owning fields in the Middle East, since there are big profits to be made if you get to decide when you take it out of the ground. As Chinese and Indian competition for the increasingly scarce resource heats up, exclusive contracts will be struck. When I floated the fungibility of petroleum as a reason for which the Iraq War could not be only about oil, at a talk at Columbia's Earth Institute last year, Jeffrey Sachs surprised me by disagreeing with me. In our new environment, oil is becoming a commodity over which it really does make sense to fight for control.)…

In a worst case scenario, Washington would like to retain the option of military action against Iran, so as to gain access to its resources and deny them to rivals. If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, however, that option will be foreclosed. Iran may not be trying for a weapon, and if it is, it could not get one before about 2016. But if it had a nuclear weapon, it would be off limits to US attack, and its anti-American regime could not only lock up Iranian gas and oil for the rest of the century by making sweetheart deals with China. It also might begin to exercise a sway over the small energy-producing countries of the Middle East. (The oil interest would explain the mystery of why Washington just does not care that Pakistan has the Bomb; Pakistan has nothing Washington wants and so there was no need to preserve the military option in its regard.)…

Even an Iranian nuke, of course, would not be an immediate threat to the US, in the absence of ICBMs. But the major US ally in the Middle East, Israel, would be vulnerable to a retaliatory Iranian strike if the US took military action against Iran in order to overthrow the regime and gain the proprietary deals for themselves.

In the short term, Iran was protected by another ace in the hole. It had a client in the Levant, Lebanon's Hizbullah, and had given it a few silkworm rockets, which could theoretically hit Israeli nuclear and chemical facilities. Hizbullah increasingly organizes the Lebanese Shiites, and the Lebanese Shiites will in the next ten to twenty years emerge as a majority in Lebanon, giving Iran a commercial hub on the Mediterranean.

China and India could get Iran, and Iran could get Lebanon, and as non-OPEC energy production decreases, the US and Israel could find themselves out in the cold on the energy front….

It may be that that hawks are thinking this way: Destroy Lebanon, and destroy Hizbullah, and you reduce Iran's strategic depth. Destroy the Iranian nuclear program and you leave it helpless and vulnerable to having done to it what the Israelis did to Lebanon. You leave it vulnerable to regime change, and a dragooning of Iran back into the US sphere of influence, denying it to China and assuring its 500 tcf of natural gas to US corporations. You also politically reorient the entire Gulf, with both Saddam and Khamenei gone, toward the United States. Voila, you avoid peak oil problems in the US until a technological fix can be found, and you avoid a situation where China and India have special access to Iran and the Gulf.

The second American Century ensues. The "New Middle East" means the "American Middle East."

And it all starts with the destruction of Lebanon.

More wars to come, in this scenario, since hitting Lebanon was like hitting a politician's bodyguard. You don't kill a bodyguard just to kill the bodyguard. It is phase I of a bigger operation….”

Related;

Colbert on One Percent Doctrine

Movie Recommendation from World Bank

“If you cannot imagine how a movie about electricity privatization can move you to tears …” - Jonathan Walters, World Bank

Pablo recommends the film ‘Power Trip’- a documentary about electricity privatization in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Watching the trailer it gave me the feeling it was very one-sided as commented by one critic;

“Paul Devlin's documentary focuses on Piers Lewis, project director of AES-Telasi. A former classmate of Devlin's, their relationship slants the film in favor of AES managers, portraying them as a fun-loving group of world travelers on an altruistic crusade to save a picturesque country from a descent into a new dark age…

While his interviews with Lewis, AES general director Michael Scholey and CEO Dennis Bakke amply express management's point of view, the people of Tbilisi are either portrayed as thieves who vandalize company equipment, rigging dangerous and illegal connections to siphon off the electricity, or are shown in various stages of distress. Devlin takes his camera into the street to film impressions of the people, but he shoots them, not as individuals, but as a chaotic mob..”

Here is John Giraudo, VP and Chief Compliance Officer, AES Corp. talking about corruption;

“My company, The AES Corporation, is in the thick of improving economic development. We provide an essential good— electricity to many third world countries—27 countries in fact. We are part of the local infrastructure in Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, China, India, Pakistan, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and many other developing countries. Through 15 distribution companies we deliver electricity to more than 10 million people---for example we keep the lights on for nearly everyone in the city of San Paolo Brazil, the entire country of Cameroon and many of the suburbs of Kiev. As a company, listed on the US stock exchange, we are one of the biggest channels of private sector money to poor countries. It is difficult to think of another private-sector company with such a large investment in third world infrastructure.

Because of our presence in all these places in the world we see lots of corruption—petty corruption and official corruption. Indeed, the biggest challenge our people face in doing business overseas is to resist the corruption around us…”

Now I think I would definitely see the film. I wonder what Georgians think of the movie.

More reviews; The Boston Globe, Village Voice

Mr. Metaphor and the First Law of Petropolitics

Thomas Friedman does it again and this time he talks about the First Law of Petropolitics;

“So, what you basically see in these countries is when oil is $20 a barrel, Iran is calling for a “dialogue of civilizations” under President Khatami. Magazines and journals are opening Iran. Iran is opening itself up to trade and interaction with the world. Reformers are getting elected. When oil is $70 a barrel, the president of Iran is calling for the destruction of Israel. When oil is $20 a barrel, the President of Venezuela is a little pussycat. When oil is $70 a barrel, he’s telling George Bush and Tony Blair – just about everybody else – to go to hell. When oil was $20-$30, George Bush looked in Vladimir Putin’s soul and saw a good man. When oil is $70 a barrel, you look in Vladimir Putin’s soul and you’ll see Gazprom, you’ll see a bunch of other newspapers and independent institutions that the Russian president has swallowed.

So it seemed just intuitively right to me that there was an inverse relationship between the price of oil and the pace of freedom. And so with Moisés help and his team, what we did was actually create a graph with the price of oil on one axis and we used the Freedom House graphs of their freedom index and just overlaid it. And what you basically see is this relationship where as the price of oil goes down the pace of freedom goes up in countries like Nigeria, Iran and Russia, and as the price of oil goes up the pace of freedom goes down, and the lines actually cross in all of these graphs.

Now, just to sum up, we have a – we know in our history the motto of the American Revolution was no taxation without representation. And the motto of petrolist states is no representation without taxation. If I don’t have to tax you – because all I have to do is drill an oil well, never drill my people – then I don’t have to represent you. And there is a real logic to this. Obviously these petrolist states, what happens is when they get this huge windfall, what happens is these regimes use it to buy off opponents, to insulate themselves from foreign pressures, to never have to construct a society where they have to maximize their openness to the world in order to extract the most energy entrepreneurship, creativity and intelligence from their people. They use this money so they can continue to rule by tapping an oil well and never tapping their people.

And hence, I argue the first law of petropolitics: As the pace of freedom declines, the price of oil goes up; as the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom increases…

We have moved basically from a bipolar world in the Cold War to a unipolar world in the post-Cold War into a multipolar world into the post-post-Cold War, which is the world of petrolist states. And these new poles – these new poles are not getting powerful, they are not getting rich by making microchips; they’re still making potato chips actually, but they’re getting rich because they have struck it rich on oil and therefore a new multipolar world is emerging with a whole new group of poles fueled, funded and financed by $70 a barrel oil. And for those reasons, I would argue, this is not your parents’ energy crisis.”

Related Links:

Running on Empty? How Economic Freedom Affects Oil Supplies; A large part of the world's oil reserves are outside the easy reach of free markets, with their incentives and disciplines. Oil prices are rising—not because the world is running out of oil but because the bulk of reserves are in countries where market incentives cannot work fully or in the hands of monopolists who may be exercising their power by restraining investment

Iraq Oil Output Lowest Since Invasion; In 2005, Iraq's exports averaged just 1.4 million barrels a day, which earned the country about $26 billion. This winter proved disastrous, with January exports failing to reach even 1 million barrels a day, said George Orwel, an analyst with Petroleum Intelligence Weekly (who’s writing a book about Iraq oil sector)

Geopolitical Oil Map of the World

The Crude Oils and Their Key Characteristics

Glossary of Energy Terms

Fareed Zakaria reflects on the Power of Oil

Look! On the ground! Under the water! It's....SUPERGRID!!!

IFTF's Future Now blog directs us to an interesting article at Technology Review: "A Supergrid For Europe".

Excerpt:

Last month a Dublin-based wind-farm developer, Airtricity, and Swiss engineering giant ABB began promoting a bold solution to the continent's power grid bottlenecks: a European subsea supergrid running from Spain to the Baltic Sea, in which high-voltage DC power lines link national grids and deliver power from offshore wind farms. When the wind is blowing over a wind farm on the supergrid, the neighboring cables would carry its power where most needed. When the farms are still, the cables will serve a second role: opening up Europe's power markets to efficient energy trading.

As Homer Simpson might say, "Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter."

The result would be a more integrated and thus more competitive European market, delivering power at lower prices. And it would enable Europe's grid to safely accommodate even more clean, but highly variable wind power. That accommodation will be needed because the European Union has set a target of 21 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2010, and much of this will come from wind farms. "The primary benefit of the supergrid is that it aggregates wind power across geographically dispersed areas, and, by doing so, it smoothes the output of those wind farms," says Chris Veal, the Airtricity director promoting the supergrid. "If the wind isn't blowing in the Irish seas, it's likely to be blowing in the North Sea or the Baltic. The wind is always blowing somewhere."

I'm always suspect of sentences like the first in this paragraph. Integration in a loose sense, like the building of a firm, might help defray various costs, but in the case of countries means more "integration" often results in larger opportunity for rent-seeking and political mismanagement. This is especially true in the case of the EU where the penchant is to make political leaders (elected and not) in charge of anything that happens to cross boundaries, resulting in bad policies that major players can ignore with impunity. To wit, the Stability Pact.

The project does sound fascinating. One of the issues I'd always heard raised against wind power is the variability which would get coupled with the stresses placed on the infrastructure from periods of peak demand (highly variable supply with spikes in demand doesn't seem like the best mix for an overall base of energy). And the general tone of the piece implies that it is heavily driven by commercial interest. Right up to the end, that is:

The challenge is to get the supergrid onto the policy agenda. Because it's a big-energy concept, Czisch says, it runs counter to the thinking of many renewable energy advocates, who he believes prefer to see renewable energy as local energy sources, such as solar panels on rooftops. "You would have to build huge high-voltage DC lines, huge wind-power plants in Morocco, and so on. This is something that could easily be done by the big utilities -- but the utilities are the enemy of the renewables people," he says.

Airtricity's Veal is hoping to get some help from the European Commission, which just released a proposal for an integrated European energy policy. "We're not going to solve all of the EC's problems," Veal says, "but we can be a major contributor."

Allow me to rephrase: "Sure, it's a great idea that companies may like, but since the profit motive is the world's greatest sin, what we really need are government mandates and the public's money."

Sigh.

If I Made A Mulder and Scully Reference Here, Would Anyone Get It?

Global warming has nothing to do with human use of fossil fuels. Turns out, we can blame rocks from outer space. At least, according to Vladimir Shaidurov we can.

The Tunguska Event, sometimes known as the Tungus Meteorite is thought to have resulted from an asteroid or comet entering the earth's atmosphere and exploding. The event released as much energy as fifteen one-megaton atomic bombs. As well as blasting an enormous amount of dust into the atmosphere, felling 60 million trees over an area of more than 2000 square kilometres. Shaidurov suggests that this explosion would have caused "considerable stirring of the high layers of atmosphere and change its structure." Such meteoric disruption was the trigger for the subsequent rise in global temperatures.

Note that this comes during a time when the canonical "hockey stick" graph is coming under some serious scrutiny from The National Academies. (For completeness: Mann et. al.'s original article, the McIntyre/McKitrick page rebutting the analysis, and another paper that sort of straddles the line saying that Mann and company underestimated variation in historical temperatures, but current warming is beyond past records.)

(Note: X-Files fans should remember this.)

Oil

With Katrina bearing down on the gulf coast, some commentators have noted that this could possibly have economic consequences. A large percentage of the domestic oil production comes from this area, 25% is the number I saw today. The overnight oil futures are a few cents short of $70 after trading as high as $70.75. Where as most of the rise in oil prices were the result of increasing demand, this storm could possibly cause a supply shock. This could finally cause some negative economic consequences that people have been predicting but have yet to come to fruition. Our prayers are with those still in New Orleans and other communities in Katrina's path.

In other news, the headline from this MarketWatch seams downright pressimistic. Although, the article itself isn't as glum. It seems that attendees of the Fed's confab iin Jackson Hole aren't in agreement as what the future holds for the economy. The greatest threat it seems to me is rising interest rates. Oil, as mentioned above, doesn't seem to be causing problems yet.

Notes on Oil Supply

While there is some chatter going on around other blogs about oil supply issues, I wanted to make mention of something I think is important to the debate.

The definition of oil supplies often carries (and too often does so implicitly) the descriptor "economically recoverable". That is, the amount of oil that can be drawn from the ground using today's technology and todays cost-structure for doing so and reap a price that companies are willing to sell it for. By its nature, this means the amount of oil is in constant flux. An alternative description is the amount of "oil-in-place", i.e. the amount of the stuff that is extant, no matter how hard it might be to extract. (Including the stuff just found in this guy's back yard.) Of course, this number itself moves since the geological assessment benefits from ever-improving measurement methods.

To get an idea how much this number has increased, here's a chart from an EIA presentation that shows some early measurements (1942) at 600 Billion barrels of oil as ultimately recoverable, all the way up to just under 4 Trillion barrels in a 2000 USGS survey.

In the same presentation, the amount of oil-in-place is estimated at around 6 Trillion barrels. Estimates of the amount of oil to be recovered, then, depend heavily on the technological ability to make extra barrels recoverable. And, of course, as the price of a barrel of oil rises, the more economically reasonable it is to go after those additional barrels.

Currently, the EIA is using an estimate of about 1.3 Trillion barrels of "proved" oil reserves. The remarkable thing about this is that, in just 1980 that number was approximately 644 Billion (NOTE: XLS file). Clearly it would be wrong to consider any single number the exact amount of oil that is truly left in the world.

This has large impacts on anyone trying to truly predict where "the peak" might come in oil production. Yet another picture from the EIA; this time it's projected "peaks" in the production curve. As can be seen, the date of the peak is highly sensitive the changes in the projected level of production growth. There is a 46-year difference between 1% and 3% growth. It is also important to mention a couple of other items on this graph. 1) Note the sharp decline in the demand following the oil shocks of the 1970s. 2) Recent projections of growth extrapolate a trend that includes a period of time when oil was US$10 a barrel, meaning that industries like auto makers were responding by caring less about conservation. In both cases, the extremes of prices resulted in marked shifts in market actions (people wanted, and got, more efficient cars in the early 80s, then wanted, and got, gas-guzzlers in the 90s). I don't think there is any reason to suspect this time will be any different.

In a note to this slide, the EIA puts things quite nicely:

The peak year would be delayed by discovery of a larger recoverable conventional resource base than is currently estimated, or it could occur earlier with accelerated production rates. It may also vary as global oil demand varies. For example, if demand for oil weakens for economic reasons or because substitutes for conventional oil gain market share, the conventional oil production growth rate may decline and result in a later peak.

I think it would be quite reasonable to see a sustained growth in the price of oil, and thus gasoline and other fuel products, as the best way to curb demand. As the price climbs, oil companies will become more active in searching for new reserves as well as researching new technologies to make more of known reserves, meanwhile the demand for the oil will fall, and alternatives become more appealing. The reaction, I would suggest, is a pushing off of the coming peak in production. If that's so, then any attempt to restrain the rising price through some sort of governmental intervention (stepping in to respond to the people who cry "there oughta be a law" and those who simultaneosly complain both about high gas prices and the polluting nature of fossil fuels) could result in, all else equal, bringing the impending peak closer and closer to fruition.

broadband.google.com?

Google is putting money into the potential of broadband-over-powerlines. Along with Goldman-Sachs, they are sinking about US$100M into the BPL efforts of the Current Communications Group.

Power Outage in Moscow

An explosion of some sort has caused a major blackout throughout Moscow and neighboring areas:

Prosecutors in Russia have opened a criminal case against the country's power monopoly after a major blackout in the capital, Moscow, on Wednesday.

Public transport ground to a halt, Moscow's main stock exchange stopped trading and water supplies were hit.

The electricity outage was caused by a fire and explosion at a substation, the energy minister told parliament.

The first thing the government of Russia has called for is the ouster of the current Chairman. I have no idea what Chairman Chubais' various merits or problems are; but perhaps the government should be reminded that it currently holds the controlling share of UES (the "power monopoly" mentioned in the first sentence of the article). At the time of the writing of this brief from the EIA, that stake stood at 52%, with Gazprom controlling 10%. Of course, Gazprom itself is soon to be effectively a state asset after the recent cash buyback plan put into place by the Kremlin.

No matter what the cause of the explosion (and I am sorry it happened on such a hot day; there are bound to be health issues arising from the power loss for air conditioning), the massive size of the blackout is in some large measure due to poor infrastructure. That is to say, an outdated, problematic grid almost certainly contributed to the scale of the problem. Who, then, was responsible for the grid?

UES, which is 52% owned by the Russian government (Gazprom now has a 10% stake) , controls most of the transmission and distribution in Russia. UES owns 96% of the transmission and distribution system, the central dispatch unit, and the federal wholesale electricity market (FOREM). The grid comprises almost 2 million miles of power lines, 93,000 miles of which are high-voltage cables over 220 kilovolts (Kv). [From the EIA brief linked to above.]

For reference, here is the EIA diagram of the Russian Electricity Sector Structure:

Click for a larger version

This places the transmission process under a heavy amount of regulation from a centralized source, and put it in position unable to respond to growth in demand and use. When a problem arose, massive parts of the grid failed. Does any of this sound familiar at all? (Better bet: Click here and just start reading.)

till going when that annoying pink bunny finally shuts the hell up...

New tritium powered batteries for much longer life.

A battery with a lifespan measured in decades is in development at the University of Rochester, as scientists demonstrate a new fabrication method that in its roughest form is already 10 times more efficient than current nuclear batteries—and has the potential to be nearly 200 times more efficient. The details of the technology, already licensed to BetaBatt Inc., appears in today’s issue of Advanced Materials.

Of course, I have to imagine recycling these things would be a bit more difficult than your average Duracell.

And How Much Did it Cost Us To Get This Amendment Written?

Via Slashdot: Congress is considering making daylight saving time two months longer.

What is behind such a move? Why, energy savings, of course:

"The more daylight we have, the less electricity we use," said Markey, who cited Transportation Department estimates that showed the two-month extension would save the equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil a day.

Naively using Congress' numbers on this, considering that the projected growth in oil use (at constant dollars, mind you) according to the EIA is from a little over 20 million barrels a day to just about 40 million barrels a day by 2025, that means we're looking at a simple growth of 2380+ more barrels of oil every day in the US. Even if the 10000 bpd figure is net for the new daylight saving period, this gain would be soon swamped*.

Instead of becoming infatuation with being able to "change" time itself, is there any chance we could get Congress to focus on those things that fall a little closer to their purview: government waste.

[* Note that I'm assuming a very simplistic calculation of that savings. That is, I believe they might have said "we use N kilowatt hours of electricity during the average waking dark hour, which requires Q barrels of oil to produce, and there would be R fewer waking dark hours..." Of course, with the price of crude going up, energy will get more expensive, but not as visibly as the price of gas. Might people switch from driving to/from nights out to staying at home and burning more energy during the dark hours? The effect might not seem huge, but Congressmen took time and our money to figure out how to save us around 0.0005% of daily oil use. At that level, minor changes could overwhelm the policy quickly.]

Of course, if two months is good, 12 months should be better, right? How about doing away with the whole thing entirely and get government out of the businesses of setting my watch.

Solar Hampered By Silicon Shortage?

An article on Wired News makes the claim that a shortage of silicon might be getting in the way of a boom in the use of solar energy.

As demand for clean energy continues to grow, the solar industry forecasts millions of photovoltaic systems will dot the landscape by the end of the decade. However, a severe shortage of the silicon used in the systems threatens to dampen solar's growth.

According to a recent solar-energy report from the nonprofit Energy Foundation, the U.S. solar industry could grow by more than $6 billion per year if the technology becomes cost-competitive with electricity from fossil-fuel sources.

(Link in original text.)

That's a mighty big "if" in that last sentence. A lot of things might grow if the underlying technology suddently became easy and cheap to produce.

Despite the repeated calls for government action (new programs, tax breaks, rebates, etc.) by some of the interviewees, industry seems to be doing exactly what one should expect:

Homan said that from 2000 to 2004, silicon manufacturers could not justify capital investments because the price for their products in the solar industry had dropped to less than $30 per kilogram, or below many companies' costs. Demand for silicon from semiconductor manufacturers and the solar industry has increased sharply since then, and the price has nearly doubled, Homan said.

In the short run (before new plants could come online), I would think a sudden spike in demand for silicon as would be occasioned by a new government policy would only exacerbate the problem. Since silicon makes up less of the production costs of a microchip, chip makers' demand are likely to be more inelastic than that of the solar power technology companies.

Known Unknowns

Well, this post is a bit of a stretch, I know, but all I can say is that there is a direct and negative relationship between the amount of work I have and the quality of my posting. Still and all, I think this article at New Scientist is interesting enough to point to: "13 Things That Do Not Make Sense."

Of particular fascination to me was the last one, on the question of cold fusion:

AFTER 16 years, it's back. In fact, cold fusion never really went away. Over a 10-year period from 1989, US navy labs ran more than 200 experiments to investigate whether nuclear reactions generating more energy than they consume - supposedly only possible inside stars - can occur at room temperature. Numerous researchers have since pronounced themselves believers.

With controllable cold fusion, many of the world's energy problems would melt away: no wonder the US Department of Energy is interested. In December, after a lengthy review of the evidence, it said it was open to receiving proposals for new cold fusion experiments.

Also fascinating, though, are the questions that remain not just "out there", but about the basic functions of the human body:

In her most recent paper, [MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast] describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

My point? Well, mostly that I find this stuff amazing. But also to point out that, amid all the talk about the effects of economics becoming a field that looks more and more like applied math, that even those truly "hard" sciences are still facing plenty of issues for which they simply do not have a good answer, despite libraries full of incredibly hard formulas and institutes full of million dollar experiments. The lack of a perfect answer, I tend to think, isn't indictment of a method. But surely there is room for more than one. At least, that's my hope as I spend my evenings trying to catch up to, well, what feels like most 8th graders in the hopes of soon moving into more rigorous economic study...

Just One Word: Nanotechnology

Not being a long-time watcher of the energy industry, I'm not sure whether this sort of pronouncement comes along routinely, only to fizzle out, or if it might have some serious implications:

Breakthrough in solar photovoltaics

THE HOLY Grail of researchers in the field of solar photovoltaic (SPV) electricity is to generate it at a lower cost than that of grid electricity. The goal now seems to be within reach.

A Palo Alto (California ) start-up, named Nanosolar Inc., founded in 2002, claims that it has developed a commercial scale technology that can deliver solar electricity at 5 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Also, I may be guilty of finding those things that support my pet theories. Namely, that the next real shift in energy isn't going to be finding a single, marvelous source of energy to replace coal or oil, but rather we'll see a hodgepodge of other sources made far more economical by breakthroughs in manufacturing as a result of nanotechnology.

No Such Thing as a Free Reactor

A kilometer-high Solar Tower lurched a little closer to reality:

The quest for a new form of green energy has taken a significant step with the purchase of a 25,000-acre sheep farm in the Australian outback. The huge alternative energy project isn't driven by manure, but by a 1-kilometer-high thermal power station called the Solar Tower.

I've only read a bit about these things, but it sounds pretty interesting, massive engineering and construction challenge aside. (What might not be possible with Frank Lloyd Wright's Mile High Skyscraper might be possible for, basically, a turbine-factory that produces energy on a level with some reactors.)

Seems to me this suffers from some of the same issues as wind farms. Namely, the amount of space they take up isn't conducive to having a bunch of them in every town. That said, the video by EnviroMission seems to envision new, 25000-acre spreads cropping up over Australia in a fashion not unlike the rabbit population.

Just one howler in the article, though:

Although expensive to build, solar towers "essentially produce energy for free," said Sherif [a University of Florida professor of mechanial and aerospace engineering].

Free, you say? That's setting aside, I'm assuming, the opportunity costs of using 25000 square acres for each one of these things that get built. Maybe that's not much in the Oz outback, but you try finding that much space around NYC or Chicago that developers won't scream bloody murder over losing access to...

Nuclear Power Coming Back Online?

Not for a while, if it does. But the recent report from a DOE Advisory Board is encouraging it. The recommendations include supports for starting new plants; despite falling price-per-kilowatt hour for nuclear energy, the startup costs remain the biggest stumbling block.

Here's the executive summary.

The bad news is that the report suggest cost-sharing and/or loan guarantees for companies looking to build the newest plant designs. From my reading of this brief summary, it appears that the costs of conforming to construction and safety regulation is between $400-$500 million dollars. And that's just the plans. Of course nuclear power requires stringent security measures, especially given their attractiveness as terrorism targets, but perhaps the committee could have suggested some sort of review of the regulatory process to see if that might not be a driving factor in the prohibatory cost of startup?