Tag: alternative energy

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Not Enough Juice

By Ken Blanchard

As Orco roared through the Dakotas, dumping white powder on my sidewalk faster than I could shovel it off, it occurred to me that this might have been the first time that I was ever on a first name basis with a snow storm. It took the weather channel rather a long time to figure out that it could goose a little more drama out of wind and ice by giving storms names that sound like Japanese monsters.

I didn’t really mind the blizzard, much. In fact, it looked to me like the Good Lord’s way of declaring an impromptu holiday. Of course, I didn’t have to go out to plow roads or look for stranded cars driven by folks who ignored the no travel warnings. Perhaps the unlucky drivers didn’t have cell phones or just had stupid cell phones. My smart phone was texting me daily with warnings about blizzard conditions. It was sort of like having a portable mom.

I also don’t have an electric car. In particular, I don’t have a Tesla Model S Sedan of the sort recently tested by New York Times reporter John Broder. There are several reasons I don’t have one. The first is that the luxury vehicle would be affordable for me only if I didn’t eat or make house payments for about two years. Another reason is that I find it hard to see the sense of a car that takes an hour to refuel, or recharge as it were, even if charging stations were available in this area. They aren’t, and I very much doubt that they will be anytime soon.

Broder took the car on a drive from Washington, D.C. to Delaware and discovered that electricity evaporates much faster than gasoline. The onboard computer, apparently not as helpful as my smart phone, promised him a lot more miles than it could deliver. As the juice ran out, he was instructed to drive rather more slowly than the flow of traffic and, sorry, turn off the heater. Over a cold night, the car lost two-thirds of its charge. The next day, after a full charge, it shut down leaving Broder stranded and cold on the side of the road. When the tow truck arrived, it turned out that the brakes wouldn’t release without power. He had to wait for forty-five minutes while the car was dragged onto the flatbed.

There is a lot of mystery in a hundred-thousand-dollar car that performs like it was cursed by some ancient god. One mystery is why anyone is building electric cars. Yes, they are quiet and produce no carbon emissions while you are driving them. But the electricity that turns the engine (while you have some of it left) wasn’t produced by unicorns pushing a pinwheel. Nor are the batteries and expensive components made out of tofu. Every stage of production and operation requires inputs of energy and will produce carbon emissions and waste. Those will determine what the environmental footprint of the car really is.

Another mystery is how the car comes to exist in the first place. When a company invests millions in producing a sophisticated vehicle, it is usually because it expects to make millions selling them. Maybe Tesla really expects to sell its cars, starting out at $60,000, in numbers sufficient recover its costs. What the business model looks like, however, is a device for milking enormous amounts of federal cash. In 2010, Tesla obtained a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy. Such largess is one reason that the Sedan was built. Another, probably, is the rule passed in Sacramento requiring auto companies to produce”zero emission” cars.

There is nothing wrong with government investments in new technologies. Funding research is one thing, however; funding the creation of an industry that is not now and may never be ready to survive in the marketplace is something else. We ought to care about the environment. Caring, however, will not solve any environmental problems nor will such problems be solved by sparkling ideas unmoored in reality.

My RAV 4 has a tailpipe, God forgive me, even if it is reasonably fuel efficient as such things go. I could be reasonably certain that it would start up and that there would be as much gas in the tank as there was when Orco arrived. Now, if I could only get it out of my driveway after a big storm.

Editor’s Note: Ken Blanchard is our political columnist from the right. For a left-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Cory Heidelberger every other Wednesday on this site.

Dr. Ken Blanchard is a professor of Political Science at Northern State University and writes for the Aberdeen American News and the blog South Dakota Politics.



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As Hot as an Oven

By Laura Johnson

I’m not one to complain about the weather, but I’ll admit this year’s heat is taking its toll. The trees here on Pearl Street in Yankton look like they’re ready to give up. My garden hangs on, but doesn’t want to produce. Even my normally outgoing and gregarious father is telling people that he’s gone as dormant as his lawn this summer. The twinkle in his eyes is fading, and when you ask him what’s new, he says,”Nothing. It’s too g-d d—-d hot.” Unfamiliar words from a notorious mischief-maker and stirrer of pots.

This is no good. It’s one thing to lay low for a while, but when one’s creativity goes into hibernation, it’s time to take action. There must be an upside to this miserable summer besides the comparative lack of mosquitos. How can we use the heat to our advantage?

A picture posted on Facebook provided one answer. Why not use my car as a sort of solar oven on wheels? It’s like a larger-scale version of the pizza box solar oven popular with Boy Scouts and, like the summer kitchens used back in the days before air conditioning, it keeps heat from cooking out of my house.

Here’s the general idea.

  1. Preheat your car. Leave it out in the sun until it gets nice and toasty inside. When the outside temperature is over 100, this shouldn’t take too long.
  2. Place a protective towel on the dashboard.
  3. Stir up cookie dough or use store bought slice-and-bake cookies. Use an eggless recipe if you’re worried about salmonella.
  4. Place dough on cookie sheets and stick them on the dash.
  5. Allow the concentrated heat of the sun to bake the dough.
  6. Grab your potholders and remove cookies when they have browned. This takes several hours.
  7. Remove from pans and enjoy.

Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? My results were more-or-less edible, but disappointing. The cookies dried, but never really browned. After some reflection, I think I’ve figured out where I went wrong.

  1. Timing. I didn’t get started early enough, and missed out on some great midday rays. My cookies went in the car oven at about 1 p.m. By 5 p.m. my cookies were still not done, and so I drove to my post-work knitting meet-up with two baking sheets on my dashboard, and let them cook further while I crafted. Please note: driving around with pans of hot cookies on your dash is a really bad idea. Very unsafe.
  2. Recipe choice. I stirred up a batch of oatmeal butterscotch, my favorite non-Christmas cookie. They’re soft cookies, and since this is a long and slow method, they dried out, losing that softness. A chewy/crispy cookie might be a better option.
  3. Temperature. The Mazda has a light brown interior. According to the in-car thermometer, the temperature only got up to 170 degrees. I bet a car with a black interior would make a better oven, because the dark color would really soak in the heat.
  4. Position. Tilting the pans towards the window might’ve helped them bake faster.

Will I try this again? Probably. It won’t be for a while, though. There are no 100+ degree days forecasted in the immediate future. It’s supposed to get down to 82 this weekend, and that’s just not good car-baking weather.

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The Real Cost of Renewable Energy

By Ken Blanchard

I took a few minutes last week to determine what wind and solar energy actually cost. Proceeding on the assumption that the real cost of a turtle is how much cash ends up in the hands of the turtle seller, per shell, I wondered how much consumers pay for a given unit of energy and how much other money producers get for various forms of energy generation.

The average price of residential electricity in the U.S. is about 12 cents per kilowatt hour but varies widely by state, according to the Energy Information Administration. In South Dakota it is nine cents. In Alaska it is almost twice that and in Hawaii, three times that. Doing a quick conversion, Americans pay on average about $120 per megawatt hour for electricity.

That is not quite the price of electricity, for energy producers also receive state and federal subsidies. Add the subsidy to the retail price and you get a reasonable estimate of the real cost. The Institute for Energy Research calculated the cost of federal subsidies from the EIA’s production reports. I cannot find anywhere that the EIA actually tells us what we need to know here: subsidies per unit of energy produced.

The IER finds that in 2007 natural gas and petroleum liquids received about $0.25 in Federal subsidies for every megawatt hour produced. Coal gets $0.44; hydroelectric, $0.67; and nuclear power gets $1.69. About 87% of our electricity is produced from those sources. Given that, the subsidies add up to considerable amounts of money. The total increase is still only a small fraction of the cost of the energy.

In 2007, subsidies for wind and solar power per megawatt hour were $23 and $24 respectively. That obviously dwarfs the subsidies for conventional sources and it means that electricity from these sources costs considerably more. A megawatt hour from coal would cost $120.44. A megawatt hour of wind or solar generated electricity costs $144.

That was back in 2007. As a result of the stimulus bill, subsidies to all sources of energy increased, but the subsidies for renewables ballooned. Here are the numbers for 2010:

For solar power, they were $775.64 per megawatt hour, for wind $56.29, for nuclear $3.14, for hydroelectric power $0.82, for coal $0.64 and for natural gas and petroleum liquids $0.64.

That means that wind energy is now costing over $170 per unit. Solar power is off the charts at almost $900. I admit some astonishment that the solar industry in the U.S. is not booming rather than wobbling. At that level of reimbursement, you’d think they’d be giving away whole house solar instillations for joining Netflix.

Proponents of renewable energy will argue that there are large costs involved in fossil fuel production and consumption (environmental degradation, health, etc.). That may be true, but it gets the cart before the horse. One turtle may be cooler than another and one form of energy generation may be more desirable than another. That doesn’t change how much the turtle or the megawatt hour costs.

It misses something else, equally important. Subsidies shift wealth from one place to another. Wealth shifted to renewables is wealth generated by non-renewables. As long as the subsidies last, they don’t reduce the secondary costs of traditional energy.

What they do accomplish, with mathematical certainty, is to make energy more expensive in the short run. This is not ruinous only because the renewables produce less that 3% of our electricity. Of course, it may be that the subsidies will eventually kick in and wind and solar power will dramatically increase production while prices fall precipitously. Is there any sign that that is happening? How efficient would these machines have to become (10 times as efficient?) and how much turf would we have to cover with pinwheels and panels before these sources constituted 20% of electricity generation?

Wind power and solar power are pretty ideas. They have been the sources of the future for as long as the monorail has been the transportation of the future. Maybe one day they will really pan out. Right now, these industries are neither producing jobs nor economic growth. They are absorbing both.

Dr. Ken Blanchard is a professor of Political Science at Northern State University and writes for the Aberdeen American News and the blog South Dakota Politics.

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Wind Won’t Be Stopped

By Bernie Hunhoff

State legislators and energy lobbyists gathered on the fourth floor of the State Capitol on Monday night to hear a review of various issues from the Public Utilities Commission.

If there is any issue that unites Democrats and Republicans in South Dakota, it is the omnipresence of our prairie breezes. They say a real Texas oilman can almost smell where to drill. It is in his bones and nostrils, maybe the way a Northerner can feel the wind even when indoors or in a truck. We live with wind, and we believe in its power.

So the news from PUC commissioners Gary Hanson and Chris Nelson was heartening on that cold night in Pierre, who reported that in a scant decade our state has grown its wind energy industry from nothing to nearly 800 megawatts.

We lead all states in wind development when you rank it as a percentage of total in-state generation. Wind represents 23% in South Dakota. Iowa is second at 17%, followed by North Dakota and Minnesota at about 13%.

But our potential has hardly been tapped by the existing turbines. We could produce up to 4,000 MWs — twice the total annual peak demand for electricity in South Dakota. Consequently, if we are going to expand in the future we’ll need to export our energy to urban areas.

News came this week that a $730 million transmission line will be finished that will carry wind power from the Buffalo Ridge country in Brookings County to the Twin Cities. It is one segment of a string of proposed lines from North Dakota eastward.

Transmission towers are more important than turbine towers at this stage of the game. Also critical is a federal tax subsidy that pays developers up to 30% in construction costs. The federal credit has been an on/off program and it is currently scheduled to be switched off again in 2013, so next year is an important construction season for projects currently being planned.

The only downside to wind energy has been the realization that, beyond construction jobs, it doesn’t seem to create as many rural jobs policymakers had hoped. The PUC staff reports that only about 3 to 7 maintenance and operation positions are created in a 100 MW project.

But the other benefits — lease payments to landowners, tax receipts for state and local governments, cleaner air and less dependence on foreign energy — have all become realities in South Dakota.