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.

Solyndra bankrupt - and not all bad

I saw news today that Solyndra was forced to declare bankruptcy today. There's lots of handwringing and schadenfreude happening over this because $535 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy. It was part of the vaunted 'green jobs' part of the stimulus.

I think its actually good (overall) that prices are coming down, and we're seeing some consolodation in the industry. The only way solar ever gets to grid-competitive (which is very possible) is by reducing prices. And - there's a lot of solar companies in the US right now. There were a lot of car companies in the US in 1910. Recessions thinned them our so that only the best three remained to compete around the world. Don't think that early car companies didn't get any federal help. Probably an even better example is the railroads. There were many - they all received support from the federal government

And - even with the Chinese driving down prices, the US had a $1.9 billion surplus in solar exports last year, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association. So - even if there's not a lot of jobs - that's still a lot of money being made.

Asian Companies want technology - not Canadian Exports

I'm almost done with the tar sands, but there is one other argument I've heard a lot about: Asian national oil companies are buying up shares in Canadian oil companies to secure access to their oil.

However, I understand that the investments from Asian oil companies in Canada is not really for supply, contrary to many assumptions. Instead, Asian (particularly Chinese, but also Malaysian and Indian) companies are looking for access to technology. If they can master the technology for fracking, horizontal drilling, and in-situ drilling, they will open up many new areas of domestic production. That's really what they're after - not Canadian oil.

Even More on the Tar Sands

Prompted by a very interesting post on Grist, "Everything you’ve heard about the tar sands and energy security is wrong", which said that we should keep Canadian oil in reserve to ensure longer-term energy security - a point I also made in my recent (and long-winded) post on the Tar Sands and the Keystone pipeline.

That has prompted an interesting discussion on the nature of energy security, and our relationship to Canada.

It clearly would be in Canadian producer companies interests to open up their Pacific coast to oil exports. There has, indeed, been a push to build a pipeline to the coast, at the port of Kitamat. However, there is significant opposition, from both environmentalists and Native Americans, to building it. They will probably be enough to block it, at least for a time. So - we can't simply assume that the export routes will open. Here's a source on that.