Energy in the Times
Sep. 15th, 2008 09:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
webfarmerTwo excellent pieces in the NY Times. Tom Friedman column and a very detailed and fascinating article on the development off-shore wind in Delaware of all places.
Making America Stupid by Thomas Friedman - NY Times - 13 Sep 08
"Imagine for a minute that attending the Republican convention in St. Paul, sitting in a skybox overlooking the convention floor, were observers from Russia, Iran and Venezuela. And imagine for a minute what these observers would have been doing when Rudy Giuliani led the delegates in a chant of 'drill, baby, drill!'
I’ll tell you what they would have been doing: the Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan observers would have been up out of their seats, exchanging high-fives and joining in the chant louder than anyone in the hall — 'Yes! Yes! Drill, America, drill!' — because an America that is focused first and foremost on drilling for oil is an America more focused on feeding its oil habit than kicking it.
Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution — on the eve of PCs and the Internet — is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. 'Typewriters, baby, typewriters.'"
Readers may recall that Dr. Willett Kempton is also the guy who came up with the "Vehicle-to-Grid" (V2G) concept for using electric vehicles as a mass distributed electricity grid storage and regulation system.
Wind-Power Politics - NY Times - 12 Sep 08
"One of the first things Kempton and his class did was go down the list of clean-energy options for Delaware — 'It was a pretty short list,' he said. Solar power was still far too expensive to be economically sustainable. And the state had no land-based wind resource to speak of. But a team of students, led by Amardeep Dhanju, became curious about measuring the winds off the coast to determine whether they might serve as a source of power.
What he found was that Delaware’s coastal winds were capable of producing a year-round average output of over 5,200 megawatts, or four times the average electrical consumption of the entire state. 'On the wholesale electricity markets,” Dhanju wrote, “this would produce just over $2 billion' in annual revenue.
It so happened that the day Dhanju’s semester-long research project was discussed, Kempton had invited several wind entrepreneurs to class. Mandelstam was the only invitee to show up in person. It was then that Mandelstam had his eureka moment. The amount of power Dhanju was describing, Mandelstam knew from Kempton, was but a small fraction of an even larger resource along what’s known as the Mid-Atlantic Bight.
This coastal region running from Massachusetts to North Carolina contained up to 330,000 megawatts of average electrical capacity. This was, in other words, an amount of guaranteed, bankable power that was larger, in terms of energy equivalence, than the entire mid-Atlantic coast’s total energy demand — not just for electricity but for heating, for gasoline, for diesel and for natural gas. Indeed the wind off the mid-Atlantic represented a full third of the Department of Energy’s estimate of the total American offshore resource of 900,000 megawatts.
The Mid-Atlantic Bight was particularly attractive to Mandelstam because offshore winds blow strong and steady throughout the day, which means offshore wind is more likely than land-based wind in the Northeastern United States to generate electricity when demand is high. More important, offshore wind farms, Mandelstam explained, can be built close enough to big, power-hungry cities — or 'load centers' — to avoid construction of expensive and politically unpopular transmission lines."
Making America Stupid by Thomas Friedman - NY Times - 13 Sep 08
"Imagine for a minute that attending the Republican convention in St. Paul, sitting in a skybox overlooking the convention floor, were observers from Russia, Iran and Venezuela. And imagine for a minute what these observers would have been doing when Rudy Giuliani led the delegates in a chant of 'drill, baby, drill!'
I’ll tell you what they would have been doing: the Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan observers would have been up out of their seats, exchanging high-fives and joining in the chant louder than anyone in the hall — 'Yes! Yes! Drill, America, drill!' — because an America that is focused first and foremost on drilling for oil is an America more focused on feeding its oil habit than kicking it.
Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution — on the eve of PCs and the Internet — is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. 'Typewriters, baby, typewriters.'"
Readers may recall that Dr. Willett Kempton is also the guy who came up with the "Vehicle-to-Grid" (V2G) concept for using electric vehicles as a mass distributed electricity grid storage and regulation system.
Wind-Power Politics - NY Times - 12 Sep 08
"One of the first things Kempton and his class did was go down the list of clean-energy options for Delaware — 'It was a pretty short list,' he said. Solar power was still far too expensive to be economically sustainable. And the state had no land-based wind resource to speak of. But a team of students, led by Amardeep Dhanju, became curious about measuring the winds off the coast to determine whether they might serve as a source of power.
What he found was that Delaware’s coastal winds were capable of producing a year-round average output of over 5,200 megawatts, or four times the average electrical consumption of the entire state. 'On the wholesale electricity markets,” Dhanju wrote, “this would produce just over $2 billion' in annual revenue.
It so happened that the day Dhanju’s semester-long research project was discussed, Kempton had invited several wind entrepreneurs to class. Mandelstam was the only invitee to show up in person. It was then that Mandelstam had his eureka moment. The amount of power Dhanju was describing, Mandelstam knew from Kempton, was but a small fraction of an even larger resource along what’s known as the Mid-Atlantic Bight.
This coastal region running from Massachusetts to North Carolina contained up to 330,000 megawatts of average electrical capacity. This was, in other words, an amount of guaranteed, bankable power that was larger, in terms of energy equivalence, than the entire mid-Atlantic coast’s total energy demand — not just for electricity but for heating, for gasoline, for diesel and for natural gas. Indeed the wind off the mid-Atlantic represented a full third of the Department of Energy’s estimate of the total American offshore resource of 900,000 megawatts.
The Mid-Atlantic Bight was particularly attractive to Mandelstam because offshore winds blow strong and steady throughout the day, which means offshore wind is more likely than land-based wind in the Northeastern United States to generate electricity when demand is high. More important, offshore wind farms, Mandelstam explained, can be built close enough to big, power-hungry cities — or 'load centers' — to avoid construction of expensive and politically unpopular transmission lines."
