Makes you wonder about the cost-to-benefit ratio of Obama’s green energy plan:
The Government’s plans to increase the proportion of Britain’s energy generated by “green” sources is set to cost between 11 and 17 times what the change brings in economic benefits.
The figures are buried deep in the Government’s Renewable Energy Strategy paper produced last month.
According to the document, while the expected cost will total around £4bn a year over the next 20 years, amounting to £57bn to £70bn, the eventual benefit in terms of the reduced carbon dioxide emissions will be only £4bn to £5bn over that entire period.
The figures make up part of the Government’s impact assessment of the policies, which include plans to raise the proportion of British electricity produced by renewable sources from 5.5pc today to 30pc.
And since when are reduced carbon dioxide emissions a measure – the principal one, even – of economic benefits of anything? When was the global warming religion adopted as part of economic science?
Because it will end the American middle-class lifestyle that you dumb, insensitive fly-over trash think you have the right to choose. The sophisticated, benevolent elite has a better life designed for you: you’ll be packed densely into cities with public transportation instead of cars, walking off those pounds to and from work while giving Gaia a breather, and the SUV will be eliminated as a class. All they have to do to force you into their paradise is make gas expensive enough - which, with things like cap-and-tax and no offshore drilling allowed, is just a matter of time.
The United Industrial Corporation, a Russian manufacturer, said this week that the world’s first floating nuclear power plant will go into operation on Russia’s eastern coast by the end of 2012.
The manufacturer, known also as O.P.K., told Green Inc. that the first model would be used to help power Viluchinsk, a city on the Kamchatka peninsula that serves as an atomic submarine base.
O.P.K. said similar models could power other cities in northern Russia in the future. But according to nuclear experts, mining companies are likely to use Russian-built floating reactors to power operations to extract oil and gas and valuable minerals from the Arctic and other remote regions.
O.P.K. is building the plant in the shape of a ship 144 meters (472 feet) in length and 30 meters (98 feet) wide to accommodate two 35-megawatt reactors. Construction of the plant, called KLT-40C, began in February this year.
I just hope they don’t sale them through the Gulf of Aden.
Why the Obama administration should keep its regulating fingers out of the oil-futures market – unless it wants more oil price hikes.
The problem is that the Democrats love high oil prices almost as much as they love regulation. If they can achieve one by doing the other, that will just make it doubly attractive for them.
Canada’s oil sands hold an estimated 170 billion barrels of oil that can be recovered with existing technology and as much as 1.7 trillion barrels — more than five times the size of Saudi Arabia’s reserves — that could be produced with the use of new methods that are being developed.
As the only non-OPEC source with the capability for large production growth during the next several years, oil sands have the potential to reduce the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ revenues, weakening the cartel and those members that often undertake policies hostile to U.S. interests.
By getting more of their oil from Canada, refineries in the Midwest are moving from being at the back of the crude oil supply line to the front. With these secure supplies, Midwest refineries are not as vulnerable to supply disruptions from overseas producers or hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico.
So who would object to Canadian oil sands?
Eenvironmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club are trying to shut down Canadian oil sands production and block the expansion of refineries here in the U.S.
If the environmental groups truly cared about achieving results in their battle against global warming, they would better focus their energy on the construction of scores of power plants in rapidly developing economies like China and India that account for most of the increase in the world’s carbon emissions. These developments pose the real global environmental danger, not the Canadian oil sands.
In February, I linked to a story about the British government’s discovery of free energy – they will install speed bumps generating electricity as cars drive over them by “capturing” their kinetic energy. Now a British supermarket chain is installing a similar system in its customer parking lots to power the stores. If the government can steal energy from its subjects, why can’t a supermarket steel it from its customers?
Unsurprisingly, the brazen scheme is being sold as a “green energy system”. I guess the gasoline in the cars’ tanks is a green fuel now, because where else do they think this energy comes from?
Scientists at Pennsylvania State University have created an electric “fart” machine of sorts, which takes advantage of a microbe’s ability to convert electrical energy into methane to create a more efficient way to store energy.
A good article about the much-overblown incident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant and how America’s nuclear power industry has changed since. Some highlights:
Three Mile Island was an industrial accident. It ruined the reactor, caused a billion dollars worth of damage and nearly bankrupted the utility. What made it unusual for an industrial accident is that no one was hurt. The radioactive release — caused when the seals on a steam overflow tank failed — was minuscule. Exhaustive studies of the area have never found any health effects on the surrounding population. What Three Mile Island proved is that the worst-case scenario for a nuclear accident was far less than anyone realize.
America’s fleet of 104 nuclear reactors now runs at a level of safety and efficiency unprecedented in any industry. Reactors now run for nearly two years without interruption. The record — 688 straight days — is held by Unit 1, Three Mile Island, the one that didn’t melt down.
Despite being the object of scorn for three decades, nuclear energy delivers enormous benefits to the American public. With only 9 percent of the nation’s generating capacity, it produces 20 percent of our electricity. Natural gas, on the other hand — the favorite of environmentalists — makes up 39 percent of our capacity but delivers only 20 percent of our electricity because the fuel is so expensive.
The nation’s disdain for the nuclear industry and lack of will in constructing new reactors has put us in a precarious position. Our entire energy future may be riding on the fate of a few 40-year-old [not-as-safe] reactors. Somebody had better pay attention to this before we have another nuclear accident and the enormous promise of nuclear energy in this country ends for good.
Twenty years to the day that two electrochemists ignited controversy by announcing signs of cold fusion at an infamous press conference in Utah (watch a video of the 1989 event), a separate team has made a similar claim in the same US state. But this time, the evidence is being taken more seriously.
Back in 1989, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons at the University of Utah announced the tantalising prospect of abundant, almost-free energy, but their claims of fusion reactions in a tabletop experiment were dismissed by nuclear physicists, not least because such reactions normally occur inside stars. The few watts of extra energy they found were widely considered a fluke.
Now Pamela Mosier-Boss and colleagues at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California, are claiming to have made a “significant” discovery – clear evidence of the products of cold fusion.
Nuclear power is safe, affordable, and the waste problems are much more manageable than the public realizes. That was the take-home message from this year’s American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago, where a group of experts from the US and EU participated in a session called “Keeping the Lights On: The Revival of Nuclear Energy for Our Future.”
Currently, the US lags behind Europe when it comes to new nuclear plants. There are several plants under construction across the Atlantic but, despite plans for 34 new light water reactors in the US, ground has yet to be broken on any of them. I’m not a betting man, but I’d be surprised if that remained the case a decade from now.
Since everything European is cool now, can one hope that, as Europe’s social-market economy and nanny-statism are imported to the U.S. in the next four years, some good ideas like building more nuclear plants can also sneak in on the quiet?
A number of institutions with licenses to hold nuclear material reported to the Energy Department in 2004 that the amount of material they held was less than agency records indicated. But rather than investigating the discrepancies, Energy officials wrote off significant quantities of nuclear material from the department’s inventory records.
That’s just one of the findings of a report released on Monday by Energy Department Inspector General Gregory Friedman that concluded “the department cannot properly account for and effectively manage its nuclear materials maintained by domestic licensees and may be unable to detect lost or stolen material.”
Auditors found that Energy could not accurately account for the quantities and locations of nuclear material at 15 out of 40, or 37 percent, of facilities reviewed. The materials written off included 20,580 grams of enriched uranium, 45 grams of plutonium, 5,001 kilograms of normal uranium and 189,139 kilograms of depleted uranium.
Auditors also found that waste processing facilities could not locate or explain the whereabouts of significant quantities of uranium and other nuclear material that Energy Department records showed they held. In another case, Energy officials had no record of the fact that one academic institution had loaned a 32-gram plutonium-beryllium source to another institution.
No all of it can be blamed on Bush, though:
The audit was a follow-up to a 2001 probe that found similar record-keeping problems. “Key commitments made by the department were not completed nearly eight years after our earlier audit,” Friedman reported.
Jovion Corporation of Menlo Park, California in partnership with the University of Colorado in Boulder aims to develop and commercialize a device for producing energy from the electromagnetic quantum vacuum. If successful, this could lead to a practical zero point energy device that would work just as well anywhere in the universe due to the constancy of this background electromagnetic radiation as it is presently understood.
Because if they steal it from people driving their cars, it means it’s free:
“Green” speed bumps that will generate electricity as cars drive over them are to be introduced on Britain’s roads. The hi-tech “sleeping policemen” will power street lights, traffic lights and road signs in a pilot scheme in London that could be rolled out nationwide.
Peter Hughes, the designer behind the idea, said: “They are speed bumps, but they are not like conventional speed bumps. They don’t damage your car or waste petrol when you drive over them – and they have the added advantage that they produce energy free of charge.” An engineer who formerly advised the United Nations on renewable energy sources, Hughes added: “If it [the energy] wasn’t harnessed by the speed bumps, it would go to waste.”
The ramps – which cost between £20,000 and £55,000, depending on size – consist of a series of panels set in a pad virtually flush to the road. As the traffic passes over it, the panels go up and down, setting a cog in motion under the road. This then turns a motor, which produces mechanical energy. A steady stream of traffic passing over the bump can generate 10-36kW of power.
“With a steady flow of traffic, four of the ramps used as speed bumps would be enough to power all the street lights, traffic lights and road signs for a mile-long stretch of street. The ramp is silent, comfortable and safe for vehicles. It is not only green energy; it is free energy, once you have paid for the capital cost of the equipment,” said Hughes. “The full potential of this is absolutely enormous.”
From now on, when Brits buy fuel for their cars, they’ll be paying for the government’s free energy. Because it’s fuel that produces the car’s kinetic energy that the system will steal – “capture”, as the article puts it. Warren Meyer takes the idea to its logical conclusion:
Next up: Britain proposes to put windmills on the roofs of electric cars as a power source. After all, when you are driving at 60 miles per hour, all that wind energy coming past your car is just lost, right? Once you got the car up to speed, it would just generate its own electricity. LOL. I shouldn’t laugh, there is probably a billion or so for this in Obama’s stimulus bill.
Nah, it won’t be for generating the car’s own electricity. A government standard will require the electricity to be stored in the car’s battery and later fed into the national grid. The government needs free energy!
In its first action to overturn Bush administration policies on energy, the Obama administration on Wednesday said it will cancel oil drilling leases on more than 130,000 acres near two national parks and other protected areas in Utah.
This, naturally, is done while talking about the need to “responsibly develop our oil and gas supplies to help us reduce our dependence on foreign oil”. Which, of course, is followed with a “but”.
Gas is too cheap for the Democrats’ liking, I guess. It’s hard to justify spending huge sums on “green” projects when oil is cheap.
A study funded by the British Wind Energy Association and U.K. government found that
contrary to claims that micro turbines can suffice for a household’s 30 percent electricity needs, on an average they only generate 214 watts hours per day,
or less than 5% of electricity a household requires. Some can’t even generate enough power to run their own electronics.
If President Obama was to demand the funding for and enabling legislation to kick start the construction of the dozens of new nuclear power plants this country needs, as well as the wind turbines envisioned by T. Boone Pickens and the grid expansion everyone knows is necessary, not only would he be creating thousands and thousands of great jobs, he’d be powering the U.S. up for a second American century.
Continental Airlines used a 50/50 mix of regular jet fuel and biofuel in one engine and jet fuel only in the other, and everything went without a hitch.
They will test a laser-triggered thermonuclear reaction in the spring. If it works, they will have to improve their laser ignition technology by quite a lot to be able to produce usable power, but the concept will be proven. This is quite exciting.