Below the fold is the 3rd in a series of follow up posts providing analysis on the difficulties of maintaining our current energy paradigm with renewable energy (generally, 'the fake fire brigade'). The main authors are Hannes Kunz, President of Institute for Integrated Economic Research (IIER) and Stephen Balogh, a PhD student at SUNY-ESF and Senior Research Associate at IIER. IIER is a non-profit organization that integrates research from the financial/economic system, energy and natural resources, and human behavior with an objective of developing/initiating strategies that result in more benign trajectories after global growth ends. The authors have written an extensive follow-up to the questions raised in the original posting and I've broken into 5 pieces for readability - the 3nd installment, with a focus on electricity generation in an energy transition, is below the fold. This installment has been delayed a few weeks due to Hannes taking time off to get married....

The Biggest Part of Business As Usual - Electricity

In this third installment in this series, we want to put some emphasis on one of the most important enablers of human civilization of the 20th century: electricity. Its ubiquitous availability from every power plug is something we take for granted, despite the fact that stable electricity production is probably one of the most complex continuous endeavors of mankind, and one where many poorer countries fail.

In this post we would like to provide an overview of some of the properties of electricity, describe its nature (as a flow based system), and explain what challenges it faces in the future – especially those related to maintaining current delivery patterns once we have to increasingly rely on inputs no longer coming from fossil fuels that can be stored and burned mostly at our discretion, but from increasingly stochastic, largely uncorrelated flows such as solar or wind.

Electricity is a core topic of IIER’s research, because for us, maintaining anything that more or less resembles our current advanced economies is synonymous with uninterrupted, reliable electricity which mostly comes as a discretionary service to the user. Users, in this case, aren’t just private consumers, but also industrial and commercial applications, which are part of any advanced society.

Electric power is also the area of greatest debate, greatest hope and greatest investment, and the area where IIER thinks that societies face challenges with all their current attempts. Presently, OECD countries are targeting electricity generation as a means to meet carbon emission reduction goals, while simultaneously encouraging the development of non-fossil fuel based transportation (e.g. electric vehicles) and other moves away from coal and oil in industrial applications. They do this – so we think – without a robust plan as to how to maintain today’s delivery security. All plans aim at combining wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear, super- and smart grids into one new robust delivery system, and there seems to be general agreement that this will actually work. But after thorough and unbiased research of the characteristics of electricity delivery systems, the parameters of those new technologies and the discrepancies between assumptions and reality, we are now skeptical as to whether societies will be able to provide stable electricity at acceptable prices going forward. We realize that this statement is almost considered a sacrilege.

Below, we will try to explain our concerns step by step, and why we fear that investing hundreds of billions in an electricity system that is far more complex and far less reliable will lead us in the wrong direction, given the details of our current situation. Once again, a clarification: we are not arguing the fact that we slowly have to move away from fossil fuels and start using more renewable sources to provide our energy needs. However, we disagree with the common notion that societies can make this renewable energy transition and still receive the same services as today: stable and affordable electricity not just for private consumption, but for all uses that are part of an advanced industrialized society.

IIER’s Electricity Availability Index

In our first post, we introduced IIER’s Electricity Availability Index. It measures the availability of electricity in a country based on penetration (% of population with electricity) and reliability (outages and duration of outages per average customer).

Figure 1 – IIER Electricity availability index

Some commenters questioned the relationship between electricity and wealth (measured in purchasing-power adjusted GDP per capita). Such was the first hypothesis we tested when developing the EAI metric. The chicken-and-egg question can - as we think - be resolved quite easily, by testing in which directions we find the outliers. In case the assumption of “wealth is possible without stable electricity” is correct, there should be countries with low electricity availability that still are quite rich (measured in GDP per capita). However, these do not exist, the “richest” outlier is resource-rich Botswana (diamonds, copper, nickel) with close to $14’000 per capita and an EAI of only 21.9%. On the other hand, we do find rather poor countries with almost 90% electricity availability (such as The Philippines and Mongolia, with a per capita GDP of around $3’500), which leads to the conclusion that the correlation is unidirectional, or in other words: You don't have to be rich to have stable electricity, but your country needs stable electricity to become (or stay) rich.

The benefits of electricity

There are two discrete aspects of electricity’s importance to society: the benefit of its ubiquitous on-demand availability, and the severe side-effects of power interruptions. Let’s look at a simple illustration. Few companies in OECD countries install backup power for desktop computers, despite the risk of data loss during a power outage. The reason is economic – outages are so rare that the possible the cost for buying, maintaining and operating the backup equipment outweighs the risk of outage, which is why only servers and data centers are deemed worthy investments into power backup solutions. In emerging or developing countries, backup systems are commonplace, but only if businesses can afford them. But most local businesses cannot, which makes it primarily an option for international corporations, while local companies are at a disadvantage.

Other applications, particularly of industrial nature, can’t even operate with backups; they simply need a power guarantee. The pots of an aluminum smelter require uninterrupted power 24/7, 365 days a year. If the power is lost for more than a few hours, not only does the process stop, but after a short while the aluminum begins to congeal, with the consequence that the entire pot has to be scrapped, incurring costs of millions of dollars. Or think of a shopping mall that suddenly goes dark. No lights except for emergency lighting, no access to transaction services to process a credit or debit card, no elevators or escalators, and ultimately no sales. There are multiple studies on the cost of “reliability events” in power grids, each reporting very significant losses (a lot of research has been done at Berkeley Lab, documents can be found at: http://certs.lbl.gov/CERTS_P_Reliability.html). So while – as many people correctly say - power outages are just a nuisance to private households as long as they don’t exceed the time a fridge or freezer can hold its temperature, they are a threat to all more complex industrial and commercial activities that make our societies “advanced” and require the humming of electricity-driven machinery almost around the clock.

This now ties back to the Electricity Availability Index – many things are either impossible or economically not feasible in environments where grid stability becomes an issue. And even for applications where it is theoretically possible to ramp them up and down without efficiency or material losses based on energy availability, there are significant social costs associated with unpredictability. If there is no power, should we send all the workers home for a week, and call them again at 1am on the Sunday when supply comes back? We can certainly do this, but in reality we would probably rather cease many of those activities, because the opportunity cost of underutilized equipment and labor becomes so big that the final objective no longer makes economic sense.

What is electricity and how is it delivered

There are two ways that electricity is supplied. In smaller, poorer, or more remote areas, electrical production is achieved by a standalone solution that provides comfort or capabilities to those able to afford it. Often this is provided by diesel generators which can produce electricity as required, or by standalone hydro, coal or natural gas power plants which serve a local area or industrial activity. Increasingly, solar panels combined with batteries provide this service, or wind turbines in conjunction with oil based generators. The key characteristic of this type of delivery system usually is very high cost per delivered kWh.

In richer economies or even in urban areas almost all around the world, electricity is delivered via a centrally managed grid, which balances inputs and outputs effectively to ensure that demand is always met. In poorer countries, this often does not work out, with the consequence of regular grid breakdowns. In OECD countries, however, we are so used to the grid’s reliability that even small power outages regularly make the news headlines. Below, we will mostly focus on grid based systems, as only those are capable of delivering the basic industrial and commercial services for societies we are used to receiving.

What we get from our power sockets as “electricity” is the product of an electric current that is converted into useful work by an appliance. To make sure that those appliances work, particularly more fragile ones involving electronics, voltage and frequency must be standardized across entire regions (for example 120V/60Hz in Northern America or 230V/50Hz in Europe).

An electricity delivery system can be compared to a complex set of water pipes where water (electricity) enters at multiple points and is withdrawn at hundreds of thousands of faucets. Contrary to a water delivery systems, these electrical ‘pipes and faucets’ are so fragile that they almost immediately burst or collapse when too much or too little water is in the system. Or in other words – electricity is a fully flow based system, where inputs and outputs have to be matched at any point in time with deviations of less than 0.5% between supply and demand (see ENTSO-E manuals for more detail: https://www.entsoe.eu/index.php?id=57, particularly the one on “Emergency Procedures”) .

Figure 2: Grid based system (Source)

Currently, this system is fully supply-controlled (i.e. production is following expected and actual demand), which is why it has become so beneficial to society. It delivers seemingly unlimited and unrestricted amounts of energy to each room in our homes, offices and factories, and except for heavy loads in an industry or computing (server farms), there is no user-level planning required before flipping a switch, plugging in a heater, turning on a computer. Electricity just flows according to one’s needs. Later, we will examine demand side flexibility, but first, we want to focus on the supply side, which is where electricity systems are controlled today.

Figure 3 – schematic delivery system (current status)

To meet demand, which follows the cycles of human ecosystem patterns (days, nights, work/non-work days, heat, cold) is today matched by a combination of power sources that together form a highly flexible supply system, which also includes reserves to match unexpected demand spikes or sudden supply-side failures, for example when a power plant experiences an emergency shutdown. We will dive into the different load patterns and reserve provisions a little further down, but the key characteristic of a vast majority of inputs today is that they are fully predictable and mostly controllable. This is because inputs come from steady flows (like a running river), but by a large majority from stock based resources that can be consumed whenever there is a need, such as coal, natural gas, stored water or nuclear power (the latter could, for reasons to be discussed further down, also be seen as a steady flow). So in essence, what we have built is a highly complex system that converts steady flows and stocks into a well-managed, demand driven flow of electric current.

Figure 4 – types of inputs into electricity grids

What most OECD countries plan to do is to replace some of those steady flows or stocks on the supply side by adding more and more renewables with erratic flows. Currently, those stochastic, non-controllable flows from solar and wind power account for a maximum of 5% of total power production in each interconnected grid systems we are aware of [see Table 1 for the U.S. (combining Western and Eastern interconnection for lack of data) and for the European interconnected grid system – ENTSO-E], but by 2030, most countries in the Western world plan for 20 or 30% of electricity to be delivered from those two sources alone, accompanied by other new technologies.

Table 1: wind and solar power share in 2009/10 for major grid systems (EIA 2010, ENTSOE 2010)

In Europe, the almost 5 % of solar and wind are very irregularly distributed, with some countries totaling close to 0%, and others already experiencing up to 20% (Denmark) of those renewable sources. All those countries with high shares manage their problems with the significant help of their neighbors. Very small Denmark for example uses the comparably huge water power systems in Norway and Sweden to buffer its heavily variable wind outputs.

This grand plan – to maintain something that already now is highly complex by adding multiple layers of complexity – is something we are very concerned about. The overlying challenge is to keep a flow-based demand system working while stochastic, non-controllable flows gain a significant share of supply, and to do so without jeopardizing grid stability, and at a price which is still affordable. We believe that most people underestimate this challenge and that it actually may be insurmountable. Important: “affordable” in this case doesn’t mean it can be paid by individual households for their relatively small amount of required electricity, as they may be able to bear 20 or 25 cents for a kWh, but instead for an entire industrialized society with the need to provide all the goods and services that make it what is considered “advanced”.

Figure 5 – shift to larger amounts of stochastic flows

What is an acceptable price for electricity?

What a high cost of oil does to societies has been well researched and documented in a number of papers (see: http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/ECS/IEW2005/docs/ppt/IEW2005_Maeda.ppt) . High oil prices seem to be a clear inhibitor of economic growth and early indicators of coming recessions. The reason behind this is the fact that the higher the cost for energy is, the less of our efforts can go towards discretionary spending (Hall, Powers and Schoenberg 2008). It is an inherent property of EROI: the energy and money we spend to procure and extract energy, is unavailable to spend on discretionary and non-discretionary investment and consumption.

There is no reason why the situation should be different for energy inputs other than oil, as higher energy costs always leads to this diversion away from consumption and investment. However, creating a benchmark is not easy, as electricity rates have been relatively steady during the times when oil prices fluctuated heavily, which gives us no past reference.

Using oil, where a relatively solid research base exists, we wanted to create a benchmark for “tolerable” electricity prices. Some papers suggest that oil prices that grow from 25 to 35 dollars have a negative impact of 0.3-0.5% on GDP in various countries (http://www.iea.org/papers/2004/high_oil_prices.pdf). We currently are at around $80/barrel, and are still in the middle of a bad crisis, which just looks less bad because governments have started to run up deficits at a breathtaking pace. At $150/barrel, in 2008, the current recession began with a vengeance, and many researchers suggest that high oil prices had their fair share in pricking the problem.

So based on experiences from 2008, we can probably assume that oil prices around $150 per barrel choke many economic activities, as the marginal cost becomes unbearable for many private and commercial consumers alike. Even at the current price of approximately $80/bbl, transportation and other energy-intensive sectors are under heavy pressure, and oil prices push commodity prices up. As a reminder: During the past 50 years, the median price for oil stood at about $25/bbl (inflation adjusted to current dollars). If we look at energy content in a barrel of oil (6.1 GJ or 1700 kWh), a price of $150 translates to a cost per kWh of 8.8 cents, $25 translates to 1.5 cents per kWh in oil.

The difficulty now comes in finding a meaningful comparison between oil and electricity. Oil is a high quality and high density raw energy source with excellent properties with respect to transportation, storage and processing, while electricity provides a distributed service at a comparably high quality. We assume that the same energy content in electricity is of higher value to society when compared to oil, which thus can bear a higher cost for the same amount of energy (this was also part of the Divisia index developed by Cleveland et.al.: http://www.eoearth.org/article/Net_energy_analysis).

One method of comparison would be to compare the ability to convert a specific source to heat (http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat5p4.html). To produce the same amount of useful heat, about three times as much oil is required when compared to electricity. So while the lower limit would ask for a direct 1:1 comparison, a “bonus” factor of three for electricity sets the upper limit. However heat – today – is no longer the key use of oil; heat may be produced with natural gas or coal at much lower cost (at less than a third of that of oil). In the predominant applications for crude oil today, transportation fuels and chemicals, electricity is at a clear disadvantage. We therefore decided to assume a bonus for electricity in the middle of the two possible values at 200%, i.e. we attribute twice as much value to a kWh in electricity when compared to crude oil, and equally, set the threshold for economic trouble at twice that of oil.

Table 2: relative prices of electricity and oil

Under such an assumption, we see in Table 2 that electricity prices become critical at around 9 cents per kWh, equivalent to about $70/barrel of oil, and then unbearable at 15-18 cents (equivalent to 130-150$ oil). This is an average value for an entire industrial society, as wealthy private consumers can tolerate rates even higher than 20 cents per kWh.

But unfortunately, a society doesn’t just consist of consumers; it also needs to produce goods and services, and there, a cost of 15-18 cents will definitely be unacceptable. Given that Chinese manufacturers often operate with final electricity cost between 4-5 cents per kWh, even the 2008 average price paid for industrial electricity of 6.83 cents puts domestic U.S. companies at a significant disadvantage. At today’s electricity levels, highly energy-intensive applications are no longer competitive, which is already visible in industrial trends – it is not only labor-intensive work that is going abroad, energy-intensive industries such as aluminum smelting and steel manufacturing are leaving areas with high electricity cost.

Another method available to create a metric for “acceptable” electricity prices is to use the ratio of electricity cost to total GDP. At the average rate of 9.74 cents per kWh of delivered electricity, all electricity consumption costs the United States about 2.6% of U.S. GDP. If we separate out the industrial portion of GDP (2,737bn US$ in 2008), a similar portion (2.5%) is spent on electricity, at the average price of 6.83 cents. Should this price – for example – triple to 20 cents, suddenly 7.4% of total industrial cost would go towards electricity. This is far more than the profit margins of most energy-intensive industries.

For the U.S., where a large portion of heavy industry has been cut back already due to the relatively high cost of labor and energy compared to other places, such an increase may seem bearable. But what if China would operate under the same regime, replacing current low-cost electricity from coal with expensive new sources? In China, electricity alone totals to approximately 3.5% of GDP at an average cost of 5 cents/kWh, quadrupling the cost per kWh to the same 20 cents would demand that the country diverts 13.8% of its GDP to electricity. This is not feasible, as it – together with oil, coal and natural gas, would divert more than 25% of total GDP towards energy alone – representing a society-level EROI of 4:1. One of the reason why China fares so badly here is because the country provides a lot of the cheap energy Western societies no longer have, and then import it embedded in goods.

Table 3 – electricity price sensitivity U.S. and China

If we want to run a complete industrial society, looked at on a global scale, energy prices above certain levels are not sustainable, as they reduce available surpluses for consumption and investment. And unfortunately, those cost levels of 15-20 cents per kWh on average are exactly where societies are headed with the planned changes. We will cover those aspects in more detail further below, when looking at individual technologies.

Meeting demand – in more detail

In order to understand what we need and what we receive from multiple technologies, it seems important to split out the various types of load grid operators have to deal with.

Base load – defined as the long-term minimum demand expected in a region – is usually provided by technologies with relatively low cost, high reliability and limited ability to modulate output. This includes nuclear power plants, lignite coal plants and hydroelectric water mills in rivers. Those plants typically have to operate continuously at relatively stable loads, as otherwise their efficiency is reduced significantly, leading to higher cost per unit of output. Also, re-starting those power plants is relatively time-consuming and inefficient. In most countries, base load capacity is capable of covering approximately 100% of low demand (during nights and weekends).

Intermediate or cyclical load – the foreseeable portion of variety in loads over a day is provided by load-following sources that can modulate to higher or lower output levels – or almost entirely be turned off and on within a relatively short time. However, these sources usually require some lead time to grow or reduce output, for example some coal power plants. Today, natural gas is used for a significant portion of cyclical load.

Peak load – usually required within very short periods of time for a few hours a day – can be provided only from sources that can be turned on and off within minutes, this typically includes gas and small oil power plants as well as stored hydropower (dams or pumped hydro). Peak capacity can be provided by spinning reserve plants (e.g. running plants that can increase capacity quickly) or by non-spinning sources, which can be turned on within minutes.

Beyond technology limitations that make it difficult or uneconomic to ramp capacity up or down quickly, the key factor in the eligibility of a technology for the use in peak, cyclical and base load mode is the cost share between capital investment and fuel cost. The higher the fuel cost share, the more suitable a technology becomes to support peak power; the higher the investment share, the more operational hours are required to arrive at an acceptable average price per kWh. We will look at this issue further below, but this for example is the main reason why nuclear power is such a bad load-following or peak source.

Demand flexibility has a (high) cost

Another point has to do with the flexibility of electricity use, i.e. the possibility of turning something on when supply is abundant, and turning it off when power is scarce. The problem lies with the nature of most uses: many applications are simply inflexible, like those that require something to run for 24 hours a day - data centers are among them, and so are some key industrial processes. Lighting is not flexible, nor is access to heavy uses of electricity in households, such as cooking, using electronics or most kitchen appliances. We also want hot water and cool air when we need it, and usually we don’t want to schedule our laundry because someone tells us to do so, even though this is probably the easiest part. Now some applications, particularly heating (air and water) and cooling (air and goods), indeed have certain flexibility potential. We can run a freezer or air conditioner that produces ice to bridge supply gaps, or we can build a water heater which produces enough hot water to get us through the day, a very common application today in Switzerland, where night energy rates are often half of daytime rates even for households. However, such a time shift comes with tradeoffs: any application that uses storage instead of directly converting electricity into the desired quality output (heat or cold here), ultimately adds cost, for several reasons.

Making equipment flexible comes at a cost, either the cost of information transfer (for price-regulated markets) or the cost of storing the required energy for later use. France has been quite active at experimenting with contracts allowing them to regulate energy according to supply, where customers pay less for power that can be cut off at any point in time. This is especially important in France because of the inflexible nature of their generation technology mix with almost 70% coming from nuclear power. Yet the flexibility French grid operators were able to evoke from that market mechanism, despite the heavy incentives, was around 2-3% of total peak demand (according to RTE, the French grid operator). Most users obviously prefer the inconvenience of higher prices versus the inconvenience of service interruptions, even for things that are not mission-critical. This fact leaves us with approaches that actively shift energy consumption without affecting the end-user. Mostly, this translates to some kind of storage, which has a number of disadvantages.

Every piece of equipment that includes a storage mechanism is significantly more complex than one that operates without, and because of that complexity becomes more expensive, more energy-intensive in its manufacturing, and more exposed to failure. Additionally, each storage process incurs losses. If we produce hot water at night that should last through the entire day, some of the heat dissipates, dependent on how well insulated the storage tank is (again this is dependent on cost and effort, as well as space). The same is true for air-conditioners or freezers that use ice produced at night as buffer – they are less energy efficient overall. Both applications can still be economical for the end user and society as a whole if they use cheap base-load power at night and avoid using peak electricity during the day. Ice-based air-conditioning systems are quite common in office buildings in some parts of the U.S., where utilities charge different rates between night and day. But there is a caveat: all those approaches are geared at balancing two almost steady systems with fully predictable 24 hour cycles, nightly base load production and daily usage patterns with a peak or two. Thus, the maximum storage time required is 10-15 hours, which reduces system complexity as well as conversion and storage losses to acceptable levels. Now with renewable energy supplies, we are suddenly confronted with irregular patterns that can include days to weeks of over- and undersupply. In those cases, storage and conversion losses beyond a few days become almost insurmountable hurdles, as cumulative losses grow quickly over time.

So in a nutshell – there are technical solutions for many of these problems, but often the outcome no longer makes economic sense – neither for the individual user nor for a society.

Moore’s law and receding horizons

A key assumption of many forward projections for renewable energy production is that the technology will become cheaper and cheaper over time. Unfortunately, this isn’t true for many technologies, especially as fossil fuel inputs become more expensive.

One of the often cited rules in energy discussions is Moore’s law, which describes the fast advancement of capacity improvements (and price decreases) in computing power. It says that the density of calculation power can double every two years, and has been relatively consistently achieved since 1970. This has led to the fact that a smartphone today has more capacity than large mainframe computers in the early Seventies.

However, outside electronics, Moore’s law does not apply and has never applied for anything. A physical structure remains a physical structure, and does not have the multiplication potential that comes from miniaturization. We may be able to raise the efficiency for a photovoltaic panel from 18 to 20%, but not double it every two years no matter what we do, given the physical limits. The same is true for the materials used for its manufacturing; we might reduce them, but often by 10-20% and sometimes at the cost of more complex tools and purer materials (which also require energy). And erecting a modern wind turbine always requires steel, concrete and many advanced materials, which won’t change, no matter how much we optimize it.

For normal industrial goods, price curves often show an asymptotic form. When a technology is new, neither its production nor its outputs are focused on efficiency; production facilities are small and processes involve a lot of manual labor. Also, new technologies often get produced in advanced economies with higher labor and energy cost. With maturing manufacturing technologies, more efficient and scaled up factories, and the inclusion of lower cost labor and energy from – for example – China, production becomes cheaper and prices fall. Eventually, when labor and production costs become optimized, the decline in price of the product slows, until it reaches a stable retail price more dependent on the raw materials and energy required to produce and transport the good.

In many cases, the picture for raw materials and raw-material-driven products begins to look like the dotted line, despite rapidly growing output:

Figure 6 - Marginal cost curve for supply-constrained resources

During the past few years, we have seen this important reversal in this key underlying trend, which briefly visited our economies in 2008 when - with rising resource prices – everything from food to fuels became suddenly more expensive. Thanks to the economic crisis and reduced demand, this phenomenon has partially disappeared, but for some key commodities (such as copper, iron ore, coking coal and some others), we are already back to pre-crisis levels or higher. This is the “glass-half-full” trend, which applies to almost all natural resources, but first and foremost energy. Even if we – as many people correctly state – have enough of something in the ground, getting it out becomes more difficult, has to happen further away and in geopolitically riskier places etc..

This is confirmed by the cost for new power plants, where cost estimates have recently gone up based on higher input cost (for almost everything ranging from nuclear to coal to wind towers), and even for solar panels, the permanent reductions experienced in the past haven’t continued between 2003 and 2008, despite rapidly growing production. The last important cost reduction happened since around 2006, when Chinese manufacturers entered the market, bringing low-cost production energy (mostly coal-based) into the game. Not truly a sustainable model. And, in 2009, due to overcapacity and massively reduced raw material prices, costs came down again, and there might even be more room for some reductions, but this story has an end once input prices go up.

Figure 7 - Cost of solar panels ((Pdf warning)

If that core trend of higher energy cost, particularly at the historically lowest-priced end, cannot be reversed, which we doubt it can, this has implications for everything that uses those inputs, as it raises the price with the cost of the raw materials and the energy that go into them. This effect might, in turn, effectively end the trend of lower and lower prices for everything, including energy generation technology, no matter what it is.

Figure 8 - The “old” trend ............. Figure 9 - The “new” trend

Base load power – a real problem

Except for solar and wind, most of the technologies currently seen as potential future output providers deliver base load power. This is true for biomass, for geothermal, for nuclear, and to a certain extent for coal. All those generation approaches have only limited load following capabilities, for very different reasons.

Now, stochastic renewable sources (mostly wind) coming into play, often with a “right of passage”, i.e. no limits in selling into the grid at a preferred price. Whoever comes next only gets to sell when there is still demand, and – in a free electricity market like we have it in most OECD countries – that means that prices for coal, nuclear and other base load outputs without a preferred status (biomass mostly has that status), drop sharply. Some analysts have even considered this a positive phenomenon, but actually it is not. What it really does: due to the preference of wind, it pushes marginal price (but not cost) of those steady sources down and thus makes base load generation economically unattractive, because less steady demand at lower prices simply translates to an unacceptable risk for investors. Spot markets are among the key reasons why no more nuclear and hardly any coal power plants were built in Western economies during the past decade.

In a future electricity system, we will see an increasing disparity between a growing pool of inflexible (for cost or technology reasons) base load power, a mission-critical pool of peak and cyclical load capacity, and that new, unpredictable pool of sources that deliver whenever they deliver, irrespective of demand.

A new electricity mix

If we use some currently available numbers for various electricity generation techniques, we might come up with the following for generation capacity in the United States, without any subsidies:

Table 4 – cost and suitability of various generation technologies

We are aware of the fact that the above numbers are being disputed, which is why we have included broad ranges. This is not the point we are trying to make – the point is incremental replacement of fossil fuel-based plants, especially cheap coal with more expensive technologies has the potential to lead to large increases in the price of electricity.

Now on top of the generation cost shown in Table 4, we have to bear the cost for maintaining and operating the electricity grid, which delivers the power to homes, offices and factories. For a standard grid today, which does not have to do much more than transmit electricity generated according to demand, this might add about 2-3 cents per kWh. When looking at the cost ranges above, it becomes quite obvious that even the lowest cost sources already bring the total price of electricity dangerously close to what industrial users can afford.

Now on top of the generation cost shown in Table 4, we have to bear the cost for maintaining and operating the electricity grid, of metering, and some profit margins for the utility companies which delivers the power to homes, offices and factories. For the U.S. today, where the grid does not have to do much more than transmit electricity generated according to demand, this adds between 2 and 7 cents per kWh.

Table 5 – approximate share of final electricity cost (multiple sources, IIER calculations)

When looking at the cost ranges, it becomes quite obvious that even the new lowest cost sources already bring the total price of electricity dangerously close to what industrial users can afford.

What really matters is “useful energy”

And now comes the challenge: Only power that meets someone’s demand has a positive price. If I am asleep and someone offers me free power to light my entire house like a Christmas tree, I don’t care. On the other hand, when the food in my freezer starts to thaw, I would probably be ready to pay a very high price for the few kWh it needs to keep that device going. The same is true in aggregate. Spot electricity prices go as low as 0-3 cents during the night (or even negative, http://www.scribd.com/doc/27816762/Negative-Prices-in-Electricity-Market), and up to 12, 15, sometimes even 50 cents at peak times during the day.

Now what we need to measure in order to understand the entire delivery system is not so much about the prices paid for one kWh of electricity produced, but instead the cost of electricity delivered according to demand. We want to determine how much it costs to provide a kWh from a particular source to supply our human energy demand patterns, and if that doesn’t work in a straightforward manner, we have to estimate the extra cost required to either shift it to the right time, or to shift demand to the time of production. Only once that has been factored in, do we know how expensive a kWh of electricity from a particular source really is.

Sources with little flexibility, such as coal and nuclear or run-of-river hydro plants, mostly produce around the clock. Given their low average cost, the average prices received are profitable, despite the fact that during the night they sell below full cost, but usually above marginal (fuel) cost. The rest (power plant investments, non-flexible operations cost) are incurred irrespective of plant outputs. Thus, adjusting output to more closely meet demand would incur even higher cost (or efficiency losses, or both), put stress on the equipment and require higher operations and maintenance efforts.

If we had to run our grids with just those base load sources, electricity would be more expensive, either from those efficiency losses, from lost overproduction during the night (to still meet peak demand), or from additional measures to shift demand, such as incentives and storage (either in the network or in end-user appliances, as described above). This would add to the basic generation cost. After including these extra efforts, electricity generated in coal or nuclear plants (see section below) would have to sell at a higher price than just the generation plus distribution cost.

Other sources, mostly dammed hydro, oil, and natural gas, are generally able to deliver exactly on time. (hydro only to a limited extent, as certain minimum flows need to be maintained in order to keep ecosystems in rivers below the dam intact). In general, we can turn them up when demand rises, and cut production back as soon as less power is needed. Those sources do not require extra cost on top of their generation cost and the basic effort to operate a grid. A kWh of electricity produced from natural gas thus usually costs approximately 6-10 cents (obviously as long as natural gas prices don’t change).

For sources that don’t have the characteristics described above, things become trickier. We wouldn’t be talking about smart grids, high voltage DC lines, storage in ELVs, and more, if it wasn’t for the fact that most of the sources we want to add to our grid are unpredictable beyond the reach of our weather forecasts. For sources that are capable of producing everything between 0% and 100% of total nameplate capacity at any given time, irrespective of demand, we need to have very different approaches to make them work, and none come cheaply.

So overall, as with all energy sources, we have limits in electricity cost to make it bearable for people. And not for us rich people who plan future energy systems, but also for everybody, and for those industries that manufacture the stuff we all use.

To be continued...

Next week, we will go through a list of all the currently available technologies for generation, transmission and storage, and review total feasibility and cost for each including transmission and grid management, and show certain trends for the future, and, ultimately, provide our assessment as to whether these technologies will be able to deliver what we need to keep grids going.

***************************
Previously in this series:
The Fake Fire Brigade - How We Cheat Ourselves about our Energy Future

Revisiting the Fake Fire Brigade - Part 1

Revisiting the Fake Fire Brigade - Part 2 - Biomass - A Panacea?

With thoughts of the miners in Chile, and suggestions that a rescue tunnel will also be started to try and drive down through the broken rock, I thought I would write a little today about holding rock together. For those of a slightly cynical nature, I recently used the example of the Forth Road Bridge, in comparison with one of the bridges that the Romans built in France. The latter is over 2,000 years old and still standing, the former was built in 1964 and is now being scheduled for replacement, since the cables in the old one are corroding and snapping. The point of the comparison being that if you know what you are doing with rock, you can build a structure that can carry load for a long time. (And if you think about it, the rock that the Romans built with is bits of broken rock, rather than the solid structure that a tunnel starts out drilling through).

The Roman Bridge at Chaves (James Martin)

When man first started digging into rock, whether to get flints, create shelter or extract some coal that would burn, it was a relatively slow process. The miner relatively slowly dug out the rock, giving the loads around the hole some time to redistribute, and small holes could be made that would be stable for a long time. That is only a generalized statement and not always true, there are several factors that limit its validity. The first is water. Of the underground hazards water is one of the worst. In its most visible form it can fill the hole, and drown all those in it. There have been many disasters where water has invaded a mine, either from the surface, or from nearby underground workings. (For example Quecreek).

But water has a more insidious role underground, travelling into the mine with the air that the miners must breathe. Underground the ground temperature stays quite constant, and for many mines nearer the surface, the temperature can be quite cool (one I was in recently was at 58 F). So in the days of high humidity of the summer, the moist air moves into the mine, meets the cooler rock, and the moisture condenses onto the rock. It soaks into the rock, and usually weakens it – some shales (the more common rock in coal mine roof) will lose 60% of their strength when they get wet. And it is often why there are more accidents from roof falls in the summer – while in the winter it is more the time for gas explosions – another story).

The second problem that affects the rock relates to the number of cracks in it. If you drive along a road and pass through a road cut where you can see the cracks that develop around individual lumps of rock. Some, the bedding planes, are formed when the rock was first laid down as a sediment, some were formed as the rock was twisted and distorted over geologic time, or during the time that it changed from the sediment into the rock structure encountered today. And some cracks are made as the opening in the tunnel is made. We want to break the rock in the tunnel face into small pieces that we can pick up and carry away, and so we place explosive in known patterns of drilled holes in the face that will break the rock into bits, when the explosive is set off. Generally the charged holes are set off in a sequence, so that after breaking out the middle of the face, successive rounds (they are set off with timed detonators) will blast successive layers of rock into the opening until the desired shape has been removed. In the process some cracks from the outer ring of blast holes will extend out beyond the intended wall of the tunnel and into the final wall. (Seems to happen more on Mondays and Fridays for different reasons).

So there are several concerns that face an engineer that is going to try and drill a tunnel through rock, whether it is solid or already broken into boulders and smaller pieces. The first is to get some idea of the general strength of the rock – designs that work in something like a granite won’t work in a very weak shale, for example. Once the rock strength is known, then the amount of cracking, either natural or man induced needs to be found. There is a very simple way of doing this that a group at Urbana/Champaign developed called the Rock Quality Designation (RQD), under Don Deere to simplify how it is measured, you drill a core through the rock layers that you want to drive the tunnel under. You recover the core and measure the core lengths that are more than 4-inches long. That total value, divided as a percentage over the length of core recovered gives you the RQD. Over time (it is now 40-years old) it has been shown to give a very good first estimate as to how badly broken the rock is, and it is used in many design programs to decide how best to hold the roof up.

When working out how to hold the roof of the tunnel up, the engineer knows that he is not trying to hold the weight of all the rock between the tunnel and the surface. The work that most of us used to refer to as the basis for the support of the tunnel was written by Karl Terzaghi. Again, to simplify a relatively complex subject, he came up with a simple method of classifying rocks so that, the designer of the support would know how much rock load from above the tunnel, the supports would have to carry. And very often it was only a small additional amount above the height equaling the width of the tunnel. (The presence and actions of water being the main factor that would make it a lot worse).

Karl was starting the knowledge base that now allows engineers to classify rock and thus design the tunnel supports before the tunnel gets started. It was only a start, however, because back in those days (beginning in 1925) most of the tunnels were supported with large steel arch girders. Because those had to be ordered and delivered before the tunnel was started, getting that size wrong could be very expensive, and there have been many lawsuits as to whose fault that was. (Very awkward, for example, if the tunnel is half-way under a harbor when you discover the steel beams aren’t big enough).

Possible heights of overbreak that have to be supported over the tunnel

Since then a new method of support, which works more on helping the rock to support itself, along the lines of the Roman arch bridges, has been shown to often be more effective. Although it has been generally more effective, and more flexible, it has become more popular, but I will write about it, and the change from steel arches to sprayed on concrete (shotcrete) and rock bolts, next time.

This is a guest post by Kurt Cobb. It originally ran on his blog, Resource Insights.

A frequent critique of those who claim we still have enormous stocks of resources left to exploit is that the flow or rate of extraction is far more important to the health of the world economy than the size of the stocks. If we can't get it out of the ground at the rate we'd like to, then that is the key restraint. Hence the concern about peak production of resources such as oil, natural gas, coal, phosphorus, and even gold.

It occurred to me that this argument might be due in part to differences in personality, but also to flaws in one's understanding of how the world actually works. Let's think for a moment about how the world actually works. All life on Earth (except that of certain deep-sea creatures living off the heat of the Earth's core) ultimately depends on the daily flow of sunlight. The sunlight enables plants to create food for themselves and for animals. There are storage mechanisms for when the light is gone at night or when it's seasonally weak and short-lived in winter. But, generally nothing could survive long without the Sun.

So too, our entire civilization lives on flows of energy, food, water and other resources. While it has the capacity to store resources, the end of the needed flows would mean the end of our civilization in short order.

Given all this, why is it that some people believe they can really store up much of anything? Yes, it is wise to have emergency supplies in case of a power outage or other disruption that might make it difficult to get food, heat and even water. But can one really stock up for a lifetime?

The illusion that we can stock up for a lifetime is given to us by money. We are told that if we save enough, we can have a comfortable old age. But what is money other than a claim on the current flow of goods and services? It's not really a stockpile of anything. So, its value depends entirely on the smooth flow of energy and resources through the economy.

And yet, there are people who believe that money will somehow make them immune to the breakdown of this flow. Yes, enough money might make it easier for someone to get scarce goods during such a breakdown. But, ultimately a community that fails to function won't be able to provide you with anything no matter how much money you have.

This is the fear behind the thinking of the lone survivalist. And yet, even stockpiles of food and other goods will eventually run out. Without a functioning community capable of defending itself and with continuing access to a flow of energy and goods, no one can survive in the long run.

Today, however, it is far too easy to just "go with the flow," rather than prepare for possible disruptions. This is the philosophy behind the just-in-time inventory approach which is still so dominant. Prudent stockpiles of essential materials including food have been the hallmark of civilization. Without such surpluses and the ability to store them, what we call civilization could never have arisen. Civilization depends on the ability to store surpluses.

Today's cornucopians provide a useful cheering section for the just-in-time religion since they are the ultimate "go with the flow" crowd. They like to cite the principle of substitution as their defense against running low on critical resources. No need to worry about using up nonrenewable resources, they say. But, what they always seem to leave out is that substitution takes time. What if we don't have enough time for a smooth transition from one resource to another? Won't happen, the cornucopians say. You see, the marketplace is just like magic. Things show up the instant they are needed! (This is true until it isn't.)

What I'm getting at is that the balanced personality would recognize that all of us live on flows of energy and resources and that our cooperation to keep those flows moving is critical. But that same balanced personality would also recognize the potential for serious problems should those flows be curtailed. Therefore, the balanced personality would want three things:

1. That we have a reasonably large stockpile of critical goods in case of a temporary disruption of flows,
2. That what we rely on for our survival be, by and large, renewable, and
3. That our demand for renewable resources would come into balance with the supply we can reasonably expect--considerably less than fossil fuels have provided us.

It's hard to find such balanced thinking in the world we now live in. But that balance is precisely what we will need most in the years to come.

First it was hoisted to the surface.

Note the actual size of the Deepwater Horizon Blowout Preventer as it is held just above the support frame, after having been raised through the moon pool of the Q4000. Compare the size of the folk standing around. (The BOP is the large frame with the yellow legs on the corners, being held just above the red platform with the four vertical bracing columns).

And then it was lowered and latched into place on the red platform, that can help to move it and support it.

Meanwhile the LMRP that should sit above the new BOP is still on its way to the surface.

A press briefing was held earlier on Saturday. The BOP transferred from the second relief well has now been put in place. It can withstand 15,000 psi of pressure. With the new BOP in place, all threat of discharge has been eliminated. According to Admiral Allen,

. . . we basically have secured this well as we would any well that was under production and then being closed out with a kill. . . we have essentially eliminated the threat of discharge from the well at this point.

Wall St. firm behind slow solar pace on federal lands? - Goldman Sachs subsidiary bought lots of leases — but hasn't used them

ROACH DRY LAKE, Nev. — Not a light bulb's worth of solar electricity has been produced on the millions of acres of public desert set aside for it. Not one project to build glimmering solar farms has even broken ground.

Instead, five years after federal land managers opened up stretches of the Southwest to developers, vast tracts still sit idle.

An Associated Press examination of U.S. Bureau of Land Management records and interviews with agency officials shows that the BLM operated a first-come, first-served leasing system that quickly overwhelmed its small staff and enabled companies, regardless of solar industry experience, to squat on land without any real plans to develop it.

Kurt Cobb: Fossil Fuels vs. The Public Interest

The fossil fuel industry often pretends to have the public's best interests in mind. The operative word is "pretends."

Fossil fuel executives get out of bed in the morning thinking about two things: 1) Making sure they can sell all their current in-ground inventory of fossil fuels at a profitable price and 2) finding more fossil fuels to replace those they've already taken out of the ground.

BP Installs New Blowout Valves on Well, Removing Threat to Gulf, U.S. Says

A new valve-stack system installed last night to replace the one that failed BP Plc’s Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico has removed the threat of oil flowing into the water, the U.S. government said.

BP used the Development Driller II to install the blowout preventer, National Incident Commander Thad Allen said in a conference call. The failed blowout preventer is near the surface of the Gulf and will be taken to a facility in New Orleans for testing, a U.S. federal judge ruled yesterday.

“The well doesn’t constitute a threat to the Gulf of Mexico at this point,” Allen said, in declaring a near end to the effort to kill the well.

A Voice From the Next Offshore Oil Frontier

On Thursday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar had a meeting with the only people outside the gulf region whose waters had been opened to offshore oil exploration. He was in Barrow, Alaska, the capital of the North Slope Borough, where people have the same conflicted feelings about the oil industry as residents of the gulf states do. The energy industry centered in Prudhoe Bay is the economic engine of the North Slope, helping preserve the Inupiat culture, but it also presents a potential threat to that culture.

Petrol pump dealers threaten strike over sale commission

NEW DELHI: Petrol pump dealers have threatened to go on an indefinite strike from September 20, if the commission they earn on sale of petrol and diesel is not increased.

The Federation of All India Petroleum Traders (FAIPT), which claims to represent all of the 38,700 petrol pumps in the country, said it has been, for the past two years, seeking a rise in dealers commission as the cost of maintaining retail stations has increased.

Shell in Exclusive Talks to Sell Finnish, Swedish Refining Units to St1

Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe’s largest oil producer, is in exclusive talks to sell its refining units in Sweden and Finland to St1, a Finnish energy company, as part of a plan to streamline operations.

Yemen to Offer 15 Hydrocarbon Blocks for Exploration Contracts in October

Yemen plans to offer next month the rights to develop 15 offshore hydrocarbon blocks as the smallest producer on the Arabian Peninsula seeks to boost production, Oil Minister Amir al-Aidarous said.

“Expanding explorations is one of the priorities of the government,” al-Aidarous said in an interview in Sana’a on Sept. 1. Yemen will offer the blocks to international companies during a two-day conference in Sana’a in October, he said.

A world in collapse?

Take a look at any measure of the fundamental health of the planetary ecosystem on which we are dependent: topsoil loss, chemical contamination of soil and water, species extinction and reduction in biodiversity, the state of the world’s oceans, unmanageable toxic waste problems, and climate change. Take a look at the data, and the news is bad on every front.

And all of this is in the context of the dramatic decline coming in the highly concentrated energy available from oil and natural gas, and the increased climate disruption that will come if we keep burning the still-abundant coal reserves. There are no replacement fuels on the horizon that will allow a smooth transition. These ecological realities will play out in a world structured by a system of nation-states rooted in the grotesque inequality resulting from imperialism and capitalism, all of which is eroding what is left of our collective humanity. “Collapsing” seems like a reasonable description of the world.

That doesn’t mean there’s a cataclysmic end point coming soon, but this is an apocalyptic moment. The word “apocalypse” does not mean “end.” It comes from a Greek word that means “uncovering” or “lifting the veil.” This is an apocalyptic moment because we need to lift the veil and have the courage to look at the world honestly.

What makes the Kochs and the neocons nervous enough to spend so much money

I don't ever write about Peak Oil, because, among my many odd jobs, (some odder than others), for over ten years I have been doing news aggregation for a major Spanish energy futures portal and have had to read hundreds and hundreds of articles about oil during those years. I also have friends who are real industry experts on the subject (I just know what I read in the papers) and up till now "received" opinion is that Peak Oil is tinfoil-hatsville, and so I stay away from it. But, these two articles in publications that I respect have made me realize that the subject is now being discussed at (gasp) the highest levels.

Peak Oil: Comic Book Minds

But this first wave prognosticated like they had comic book minds - or for a more up-to-date insult, like they had TV hourlong drama minds. Reading Peak Oil columns, and Kunstler's novel, World Made By Hand, one had the impression that the industrialized world was going to fall apart rather quickly - and homogenously - in a massive shock of oil depletion and unaffordable energy. But it hasn't. Not a one of them predicted that a global recession would reduce the demand for oil and keep the prices under $100/barrel.

Review: "Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World"

Ok, I'm a serious guy trying to evaluate serious topics. I find the documentary medium to be just about useless.

They are all the same:

(a) A guy making broad-brushed, scary, unsubstantiated claims with no real, checkable evidence to back it up.

(b) Backed up by tingly, scary music.

(c) Whenever any evidence (numerical or graphical) is presented, the camera pans in and out without giving the viewer a chance to determine what the units are on the axes of the graph much less have enough time to consider its sources or what the graph is saying.

Economy: “Ten Shetland pounds please…”

Was there ever a more appropriate time to discuss the opportunities for a local currency and for supporting the local economy? The discussion surrounding the arrival and expansion of Tesco in Shetland has been well documented recently; then there’s the national economy, still reeling after the “work” of greedy bankers; central government funding cuts; the threat of climate change; increasing fuel prices as we move towards peak oil. All are high on the agenda.

US firm’s landmark solar deal with China loses steam

BEIJING — With great fanfare, an Arizona-based energy company signed a preliminary agreement with China last fall to build the world’s largest solar power plant in the Mongolian desert.

The deal was hailed as the first major example of the United States and China cooperating on a big-ticket energy project, and the largest move made by an American company into Asia’s fast-growing alternative energy market.

The agreement became a centerpiece achievement of President Obama’s visit to China last November.

But nearly a year later, the deal has not been completed and there is growing skepticism as to whether it will happen.

Its founder gone, Ocean Energy searches for direction

Nearly a month after the death of Matthew Simmons, board members and advocates of the Ocean Energy Institute are trying to figure out how to carry forward its founder's bold ambitions.

Simmons' death was a personal tragedy for those who knew him. In a wider sense, it was a loss for Maine and those who share Simmons' goal of making the state a global center of ocean energy research and development.

His Corporate Strategy: The Scientific Method

THE scientific rebel J. Craig Venter created headlines — and drew comparisons to Dr. Frankenstein — when he announced in May that his team had created what, with a bit of stretching, could be called the first synthetic living creature.

Two months later, only a smattering of reporters and local dignitaries bothered to show up at a news conference to hear Dr. Venter talk about a new greenhouse that his company, Synthetic Genomics, had built outside its headquarters here to conduct research.

The contrast in the fanfare reflects the enormous gap between Dr. Venter’s stunning scientific achievements and his business aspirations.

Copper thieves hit Hydro-Québec plant

Police in Repentigny, Que., a suburb northeast of Montreal, are investigating a robbery at a Hydro-Québec transmission plant.

The thieves cut through a fence surrounding the plant and stole 150 meters of copper-coated electric wires.

Habitat for Humanity builds $90,000 green Miss. gem

"It is more expensive, but it does help in long-term affordability," says Wendy McDonald, executive director of Habitat's Bay-Waveland Area, named a "2009 Affiliate of the Year" by Habitat for Humanity International.

"You don't want people to choose between the utility bill and the mortgage," she says, noting the affiliate sells homes to people who cannot qualify for regular mortgages. She says the average mortgage and insurance for one of her Habitat homes is $550 a month.

Jersey Shore: Dead Fish Wash Ashore In Thousands For Second Time This Week On East Coast

N.J. Department of Environmental Protection officials say initial tests show no signs of toxic phytoplankton, like red tide, in the water, and they are still examining oxygen levels. Fisheries in Massachusetts alleged low oxygen from warm waters was the cause of the mass kill in Fairhaven, according to CNN.

China Sustains Blunt ‘You First’ Message on CO2

Yu Qingtai, China’s lead negotiator in climate talks from 2007 through the tumultuous conference in Copenhagen last December, recently gave a blunt speech at the Bejing University School of International Studies on climate, diplomacy and the balance of national and global interests in limiting global warming.

Yu, who is now China’s ambassador to the Czech Republic, presented a tough — and appropriate — challenge to the world’s industrialized nations, which have largely built their wealth on a couple of centuries of burning fossil fuels.

In sum, he said that China’s national interests will always come first and, in any move toward binding steps for reducing global emissions of greenhouse gases, rich countries must go first.

Recession is the proven cure to cutting carbon output. Who's in?

As we head into the next round of interminable UN global negotiations to draft a successor to Kyoto in Cancun this November, let’s understand what’s really being debated.

Specifically, how much more are we willing to lower our standard of living — how much poorer are we prepared to make ourselves — to cut emissions?

California's Prop. 23, backed by oil giants with a lot to lose, needs to go down in flames

I don't mean to disturb your holiday weekend just when you're trying to scrub that grease off the barbecue grill. But I thought now was a good time to remind you that in two months, you'll have an important choice to make about the air you breathe.

In November, you'll be asked whether California should continue on the path to becoming one of the world's environmental leaders. Or give up the good fight and pray that the global warming deniers are right.

Coal a 'driving factor' in U.S. Senate race

The landscapes of Eastern and Western Kentucky have little in common, but the areas share at least two things: an abundance of coal and a pivotal role in the U.S. Senate race.

That means coal policies, such as the controversial "cap and trade" approach to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, are a key issue in the contest between Republican Rand Paul and Democrat Jack Conway.

George F. Will: The environmental movement in retreat

The collapsing crusade for legislation to combat climate change raises a question: Has ever a political movement made so little of so many advantages? Its implosion has continued since "the Cluster of Copenhagen, when world leaders assembled for the single most unproductive and chaotic global gathering ever held." So says Walter Russell Mead, who has an explanation: Bambi became Godzilla.

That is, a small band of skeptics became the dogmatic establishment. In his Via Meadia blog, Mead, a professor of politics at Bard College and Yale, notes that "the greenest president in American history had the largest congressional majority of any president since Lyndon Johnson," but the environmentalists' legislation foundered because they got "on the wrong side of doubt."

Scientist Watches Glacier Melt Beneath His Feet

Earlier this summer, a group of scientists spent two weeks in Indonesia atop a glacier called Puncak Jaya, one of the few remaining tropical glaciers in the world. They were taking samples of ice cores to study the impacts of climate change on the glacier.

Lonnie Thompson, a professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University, led the team and what he witnessed shocked him: The glacier was literally melting under their feet.

Indian Ocean rising faster than others

Newly detected rising sea levels in parts of the Indian Ocean have led Indian scientists to conclude that the Indian Ocean is rising faster than other oceans.

Dr Satheesh C. Shenoi, director, Indian National Centre for Ocean Infor-mation Services, speaking at a workshop on “Coasts, Coastal Populations and their Concerns” organised by the Centre for Science and Environment, warned that sea surface measurements and satellite observations confirm that an anthropogenic climate warming is amplifying regional sea rise changes in the Indian Ocean.

This would have far-reaching impacts on the climate of vulnerable nations, including the coastlines on the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, Sri Lanka and parts of Indonesia as a result of human-induced increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Arctic Battle Between Scotland and Russia

IT COULD be viewed as the opening exchanges of a new Cold War – this one taking place off the coast of Scotland – as Russia battles the West for control of the Arctic and the vast, untapped natural resources that lie underneath the melting ice caps.

The revelation last week that a Russian attack submarine had attempted to track one of the Trident nuclear fleet out of Faslane naval base on the Clyde signalled a worrying return to an era that many thought had been confined to history.

AP - Investigators looking into what went wrong in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill are a step closer to answers now that a key piece of evidence is secure aboard a ship.

AFP - The Macondo well, which spilled an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, has been secured and no longer constitutes "a threat," a senior US official said.

Reuters - BP Plc successfully replaced a failed blowout preventer from atop its ruptured Gulf of Mexico oil well late on Friday, the top U.S. official overseeing the spill response said.

AP - What now for the Gulf? News of another oil rig fire in the Gulf of Mexico, so soon after the BP oil spill, has set off a wave of anxiety along the Gulf Coast and prompted calls for the government to extend its six-month ban on deepwater drilling.

Reuters - Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said on Friday he cannot predict whether Royal Dutch Shell, which has invested $3.5 billion in an offshore Arctic oil-development program, will be allowed to drill the five wells it plans next year in Alaska's Chukchi and Beaufort Seas.