UTAH ENERGY SUMMIT
Western Leaders Push Congress on Energy
By Headwaters News, 4-17-07
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Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. will wrap up the Utah Energy Summit today.
The summit, which has drawn a wide range of Western leaders and environmental groups, has drawn some fairly heft financial support from some of the region’s largest energy players, as well. The Salt Lake Tribune reported on Monday that Arch Coal, Rocky Mountain Power, Questar, Chevron and Bill Barrett Corp., all pitched in on the summit.
The summit kicked off on Sunday, with Huntsman and Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer presiding over the opening remarks, which consisted of a list of things the National Association of Governors would like Congress to get done on energy.
The governors’ driving desire to hold off devastating changes wrought by a warming climate, along with a desire to wean the nation off foreign oil, provided the motivation for the “to-do” list. The list contained a push for clean-coal technology, higher mileage requirements for vehicles, and massive injections of federal cash for developing new technology.
Unremarkedly, Gov. Brian Schweitzer pushed his coal agenda, and added his endorsement for nuclear energy as well. He chided those who didn’t share his enthusiasm for coal and nuclear energy as being a bit behind the times, and the Tribune quoted him as saying, “Coal is our future. Are you willing to sit naked in trees and eat nuts?”
Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons decided not to tout his earlier coal-to-liquids proposal, and instead promoted his state’s plethora of solar, wind and geothermal resources all available for the harnessing. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Tuesday that Gibbons, who participated via teleconference, said he’ll put together an advisory committee to study the best way to provide transmission lines to carry energy produced by remote renewable sources to areas needing the energy.
Discussions on the second day of the summit centered around renewable energy, and just why despite all the enthusiasm wind, solar and geothermal energy seems to generate, very little of the nation’s power actually comes from renewable resources. John Nielson, executive director of Western Resource Advocates, a nonprofit law and advocacy organization based in Boulder, Colo., told attendees of the conference that only about 2 percent of all the energy produced in the seven Rocky Mountain States comes from renewable energy resources.
The general consensus of attendees, according to the Salt Lake Tribune article today, is that there has been an across-the-board failure on the part of the federal government, state lawmakers and regulatory commissions to promote the development of renewable energy resources across the region.
Attendees said Congress has done little to provide federal leadership, not all states have laws mandating renewable energy and utility commissions haven’t sat down and put pencil to paper to accurately determine the cost of adding renewable energy into the power equation.
Energy summit attendees also added other factors into the dearth of renewable energy efforts: a lack of transmission line capacity, a worldwide shortage of wind turbines, see-sawing incentives for renewable energy options, and an unwavering belief that wind and solar energy aren’t consistent power sources.
But some of the state Legislatures in the Rocky Mountain states have passed legislation setting goals for renewable energy generation: Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada all have done so. Idaho, Wyoming and Utah have not.
And as far as subsidies and incentives go, Ron Lehr, the American Wind Energy Association’s Western representative, scoffed at the notion that renewable energy sources ought to stand on their own, and pointed out the recent 20-year extension of the $10 billion program meant to prop up the nuclear energy industry.
Back in D.C., Congress heard from Bush administration officials that carbon dioxide sequestration, a much-needed component in the portfolio of tools to combat global warming especially if coal is to be moved to the forefront of the energy picture, may not be economically feasible for nearly 40 years.
The Billings Gazette reports that New Mexico’s Sens. Jeff Bingaman and Pete Domenici called the administration’s timeline “troubling,” and promised to propel legislation to speed up development of sequestration of carbon dioxide to the top of the agenda.
Montana Sen. Jon Tester is the co-sponsor of one such piece of legislation which calls for the cataloguing of the nation’s underground geologic formations that could be used to sequester greenhouse gases and the creation of a database of such formations.
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Comments
If we want more wind power, we have to find a way to build it economically and make it pay. Same for solar and nuclear. The policy of government in terms of subsidies is based on the hope that the subsidies will yield fruit in terms of better technology. Now we have to include environmental standards and apply these standards to the way we do it.
We have a certain amount of Uranium. Going nuclear with uranium involves one set of problems. Placing the waste materials in huge plastic balls the size of semitruck trailers, and storing them onsite in properly designed pools(to contain radiation and recover residual energy values) and other engineering solutions to justified concerns with the hazards involved brings nuclear power back online as an acceptable tgechnology.
We have several times as much thorium, which can also fuel nuclear reactors but involves different decay products and an appropriate engineering technology to contain hazards and acdeptably deal with them.
Hot fusion reactors are still on the table as a potential viable technology, as well a cold fusion, which is still being researched and may yet develop into a viable energy source.
I like wind and solar projects, which may be located favorably in remote areas where power is now being supplied by long(hundreds of miles long) transmission lines. Transmission losses are a real element of the economics. Locating generating facilties in remote areas to supply metropolitan needs is less efficient because a large percentage of the power is lost in transmission.
Locating power plants close to cities requires more engineering for safety and emissions controls.
I am, however, a disbeliever in the general alarm of human-caused or combustion-caused global warming. Here in Utah, we have geologic carbonate deposits tens of thousands of feet thick. These deposits are formed in shallow warm seas. In Utah, these deposits represent about two hundred million years of geologic time. However, in current time, in favcored locations, these carbonate formations are known to develop several feet per year. This represents a vast carbon dioxide sink. I have not seen any projection of "global warming" calculations which includes this term in the projections of gas levels residual to the atmosphere. A second balancing term is photosynthesis. If there is a rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there will be an explosion of growth in the oceans in terms of algeae, and on lands in terms of trees and grasses, etc.
Finally, the largest term in the equation for generation of carbon dioxide is likely respiration, and second, wildfires, and third volcanos. So what should we do about all that.
Ok, so I don't like the coal or oil industries either, and do not care for global politics being based on these. But the reason we use these resources is just because, after all of the cartel profits and political costs, oil and coal still come out as the cheapest energy. Oh what to do. We have to decide with our wallets to go another direction.
The geologic record shows wide global swings in climate, and long periods of extremes due to solar, geolnuclear(producing volcanic cycles), meteoric hits, and other things way out of our reach. Rather than go nuts over carbon dioxide we just need to develop other technologies for survival if things do change.