As I said on Friday, there is so much going on. Here are some more salient items for you.
Jim Rogers , I quoted the Duke Energy CEO here a while back. In the Sunday "NY Times Magazine," there's a profile of the head of the nation's third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide. Why has he been promoting a cap-and-trade law when it will impact his company so enormously? The short answer: ""If you're not at the table, you're going to be on the menu,'" he says in the article. The article is a good survey of where we are on climate change legislation and where the power industry is. (Hint: not yet quite in the same place.)
The big, unanswered question, for me anyway, is why the subject of demand-side management is not front and center. The article touches on this. By DSM, we mean all the ways in which a utility, power regulators, other authorities, and consumers get consumption down. There are ways to reduce consumption by having large users cut down in peak periods. There are the obvious approaches to energy conservation such as mandating higher efficiency and providing audits. Cogeneration and distributed generation , or decentralized energy as the Europeans call it , will both enormously add to the efficiency of power systems and therefore radically reduce consumption.
Rogers says in the article, for instance: "So we have 500,000 solar units on the roofs of our customers. We install them, we maintain them and we dispatch them, just like it was a power plant!" That's enough to replace a large coal-fired power plant, and it's one innovative approach.
Beyond that, why shouldn't power providers get paid for helping to reduce consumption? It's called decoupling and it's worked before. We had it in New York State and it lapsed. Duke Energy, and others, are bringing it back. As Rogers says, ""I would rather spend $8 billion implementing efficiency than spend $8 billion on building a nuclear plant." Hear, hear!
The Economist , In the current issue of the venerable "Economist," there is a special section on the "Future of Energy." In the leader (Britspeak for editorial), they say "in the imaginations of a coterie of physicists, biologists and engineers, an alternative world is taking shape." They also report that "plans for the end of the fossil-fuel economy are now being laid." This is the message of "Earth: The Sequel" which I wrote about in April. There's a host of good material into which you can sink your teeth at "The Economist" report.
Algae Moves Up , Algae has a lot of possibilities. Aside from its ability to grow very quickly and in a relatively small footprint, thus providing a much-more easily accessible and cost-effective feedstock for ethanol than corn, or even cane sugar, it also consumes enormous amounts of carbon dioxide. Algae production can, in fact, be configured to act as a carbon sink. This is precisely what is being piloted by a utility in Arizona. (I wrote about this, also in "Earth: The Sequel".)
In this article from Reuters, we learn that an American company, Algenol, is in a deal with a Mexican company, BioFields, to build a large plant in the in the Sonoran Desert. Algenol is aiming to produce one billion gallons, 10% of current US capacity, by 2012.
More Electric Cars! , Further to my recent notes on cars, here's an item from GreenBiz: GM, GE and Ford Join DOE to Advance PHEVs. It's only a modest $30 million, but it could signal a real acceleration by American industry in this critical field. See also McCain Proposes $300M for Next-Gen Car Battery from them. (Not incidentally, GreenBiz has a world of great information into which you can delve.)
