Yergin's "The Quest"

My copy of "The Quest" - Dan Yergin's follow-up to his excellent history of oil "The Prize - arrived yesterday from Amazon. I've read several reviews of the book, so I'm not going into it cold. Steve LeVine thinks that it doesn't have nearly as much original research as The Prize. Fareed Zakaria thinks that he doesn't complete many of his thoughts, perhaps because doing so would lead to some of the disturbing conclusions - either about climate change or energy security. David Roberts chalks up Yergin's book and Zakaria's review to elite disdain for renewable energy.

In August, I put out my large White Paper on Energy and Environmental policy, "America's Energy Choices". Although it only topped-out at 30 pages, I felt like I could very easily have expanded it into a book. I probably would not have sold as many copies as Yergin has, but I see the importance of a big book like this. That's why I'm going to try to live blog my reading of The Quest. I'll put up a brief notes here on the blog with the 'Yergin' label after many chapters. I'll also put Yergin's little bits of insight up on twitter with the hastag #YerginNuggets. Maybe we can have a little fun with it.

The Solyndra Affair

The bankruptcy of Solyndra continues to dominate talk in the renewable energy community. On Wednesday, I put my thoughts together into an article for The Atlantic. I frankly don't know much about whether this should be called a scandal or just a bankruptcy. I'll leave it to the investigators to determine whether there was anything unethical done here.

My take is that this is a company that had a bad business model, and probably deserved to go bankrupt. But - it is very important that the government continues to support clean energy in general, and solar in particular.

Our Grid Still can't Keep up in the Summer

The AP has the story today of the the Outage that affected millions in the Southwest and Mexico last night.

8 years after a windy day knocked out power across the northeast, it appears that a similar chain reaction knocked power out across the Southwest.

This points out to two big problems. First, when the electricity grid is operating a peak capacity in the summer, there in no leeway in the system. Any problems will be magnified when there's so little 'give' in the system.

The second problem that this points out is that the power grid is not smart enough to react to problems. Although this has been pointed out as 'human error', the truth is that humans are going to make errors. If the grid was smart, a problem on a transmission line in Yuma wouldn't cause cascading problems across the system (including the shut-down of San Onofre nuclear power plant). Humans will never be able to react fast enough, but a smart grid would be able to quickly move power to where it was needed.

North Anna's Reactor and the Earthquake

Just a quick hit today on an article that appeared in the NY Times: "After East Coast Quake, Virginia Nuclear Plant Takes Stock."

Credit: Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

I've been waiting for an assessment of the damage to the North Anna reactor after the quake. This reactor was rated prior to the quake as the "7th most At-Risk for Earthquake Damage" according the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). I found that story the day of the earthquake here in DC; it also said that North Anna was designed to withstand a magnitude 5.9 – 6.1 earthquake. Because our earthquake was rated as a 5.8-5.9, it quickly became clear that North Anna should be an area of concern. Although no one expected a Fukushima-style meltdown - it was the tsunami, not the earthquake, that did in their reactors - it is important that we learn how American reactors can stand up to trauma.

The New York Times article make clear that the jury is still out. The reactor has not yet come back on line after the quake, and the NRC is requiring them to prove that the damage to reactor was only cosmetic. The picture above shows how one of the 117 ton casks containing radioactive spent fuel shifted, it isn't clear that there was any real damage.