Hans,
You have opened up a rich area for discussion. Tom Walker's attempt at
the same opening fell flat. ( see [Pen-l] The Lovins Paradox: "this old canard"
March 22, 2012 3:26:06 PM PDT)
If we took off from Walker's opening we might be discussing whether or not
technology will save us. (save us from what? climate change? save us from a
revolution breaking out?)
Lovins is an advocate of a technological solution to our problems. In my view
he has led two generations of young environmentalists down the path of saving
the world through technology rather than social change. He's served a useful
function for the capitalists. (Murray Bookchin called Lovins a "techno-twit"
in a debate long ago, and my faulty memory thinks Lovins agreed.)
I think your history of the US national electric transmission and gas pipeline
systems is superficial. The electric transmission grid can be as easily
explained by population dispersal as by conspiracy or political power per se.
The east and midwest are quite well integrated into a single grid because that
is where the people and the load was when the grid was gradually accreted over
the 20th century. Texas was a separate island, not integrated, because the
rulers of Texas didn't want their electricty under the Commerce Clause. If no
electrons flowed across state lines, voila ... no regulation except home grown.
The grid didn't tie east and west because the Rocky Mountains were an
impediment and there weren't that many people west of the Rockies. Wind from
the Dakotas can't get to Chicago because there wasn't baseload generation in
the Dakotas to deliver to Chicago, so no lines were there ... . Now that wind
there is viable, that alone doesn't make a good financial reason for the
utilities to build lines because of the intermitancy issue. On the west coast,
the Pacifica Northwest was integrated with California long before the DC line
was built -- the financial benefits of the seasonal swap were large enough to
justify AC transmission long ago. And Utah was tied both North and South, and
later West, but not so much East, those Rocky Mountains again and not much load
to the East except for Denver.
As an aside, there was a big push about 5 -10 years ago to build transmission
west from Wyoming ostensibly to bring wind energy into California. The push
behind it was from the coal producers, ready to build baseload coal in Wyoming.
Wind was a way to sell the idea to the enviros but what was going to move on
the transmission lines was coal.
But all that is a distraction from what I think is the main thing we should be
talking about re climate change: INCOME REDISTRIBUTION. As long as the rich
keep consuming the way they do, and have done, any technological fix is going
to be swamped by more consumption of energy. I don't think "Owen's Conumdrum"
gets us to that discussion although I haven't read his book. It isn't a
question of rebound or the Jevon's Paradox so much as income going to the rich
so they can buy more of what they want and thus teach the rest of us about nice
things to buy.
In other words, do we want technology or conservation? (Not energy efficiency,
conservation.)
I've changed the subject you proposed and so I'll stop. A final point: we
need to control the institutional arrangements for distributed renewable
energy. It is one thing for an individual to install roof top solar and then
depend on the grid as the battery back up. But who pays for building and
maintaining the grid? That grid has to move into public ownership to make all
this work.
Gene
On Mar 25, 2012, at 10:07 AM, [email protected] wrote:
>
> Hi Gene,
>
> Sorry, I didn't have time yesterday to respond to you. I
> didn't mean to ignore you, and thank you for the info. I
> have talked to people at the public service commission and
> at the consumer office (the director of the consumer office
> used to be a power plant manager). But I'd be very happy to
> talk to your contact. People at Rocky Mountain Power know
> me as the crazy Marxist from the U of U, but some of them
> still seem to enjoy discussing with me. In the last DSM
> meeting I attended I got into a good discussion about
> feed-in tariffs with some vice president from RMP, but the
> discussion had to be broken off because it was off-topic.
>
> Utah is a net exporter of electricity. The cheap coal-fired
> electricity is exported to LA, and we Utahns must breathe
> the pollution from it. And some of our own wind and
> geothermal is not used here in Utah but shipped to
> California over expensive transmission lines, because here
> in Utah the coal-generated electricity is so "cheap" that
> our wind and geothermal cannot compete. I put "cheap" in
> quotation marks because it would not be cheap if the
> externalities, ie the healthcare costs of the children with
> asthma and autism, would be factored in. The capitalists
> get a double benefit: first they profit from overproducing
> dirty electricity, and then they profit from the health care
> bills. This is their idea of a booming economy.
>
> I don't doubt that the big utilities share and swap baseload
> with each other, but they are doing everything to discourage
> and impede distributed renewable energy. Distributed
> renewable energy is the outsider. All the incumbent big
> businesses close ranks against these outsiders, because they
> know that distributed renewable energy is a big threat to
> their profitability. And one way they can shut out
> renewable energy this is through their control of the
> transmission system.
>
>
>
> Do you know why the US has a nice interstate gas pipeline
> system but no interstate electric transmission system to
> speak of (with the exception of the HVDC line from Milford
> to LA you have mentioned)? In the 1930s the owners of the
> natural gas pipelines were caught price fixing, therefore
> federal regulators, the precursors of FERC, took over. FERC
> has oversight over electric power lines, it must approve
> them, but it cannot tell the states where to put them, this
> is why we don't have a viable interstate electric
> transmission system. I heard a national expert about these
> issues say that it will take another multi-day national
> power outage to make it possible for FERC to get this
> authority. Right now everybody is opposed, even the
> progressive governors don't want to cede their authority to
> site the transmission lines to the Federal government.
> And having no viable transmission grid is a big obstacle
> for renewable energy. They don't even have the wires to
> transport the wind energy from the wind belt in the midwest
> to neighboring Chicago!
>
>
> Hans
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