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As the Democratic election chugs along, it provides observers the opportunity to learn as much as possible about each candidate. In fact, by the time this thing is over, we'll know more than we want about Obama & Clinton (i.e. that Obama looks good in his underwear)
The most important thing to glean from all of this information is what type of President these candidates would be if they were elected. Obviously the concern on this blog is what environmental policies the future President would support.
Barack Obama's proposed policies have been explored in great detail in this blog in the past. He & Hillary are not far apart on almost all of their plans. Both support cap & trade emissions programs, 80% renewable energy by 2050, investing in renewable energy development, etc. There are some differences, however, in the way they have voted in the past and the loyalties they have formed.
You probably know by now that Barack Obama supported the 2005 Energy Bill written by Dick Cheney and his big oil lobbyist friends. Hillary & McCain didn't. What you probably do not know is that Obama has also co-sponsored a bill that creates federal loan guarantees, tax breaks and other subsidies for expansion of coal power plants.
The bill was originally created to encourage development of "Coal-to-Liquid Fuel," which is supposed to be a cleaner way of getting energy from coal. The Argonne National Laboratory, which is run by the Department of Energy, says that turning coal into liquid fuel yields 125% more carbon dioxide than producing diesel fuel and 66% more than gasoline. In other words, this method of burning coal is still pathetically bad for our environment. The only incentive in this bill to move to "Coal-to-Liquid Fuel" was more tax breaks and no mandates, leaving the coal companies to pollute unrestricted.
Why would Obama co-sponsor a bill that gives money to increased coal plant development without demanding lower greenhouse gas emissions? Some of it has to do with the fact that Illinois is a large coal producing state. He has also supported the use of ethanol, a "wannabe" green energy source, because of Illinois' powerful agricultural lobby.
After the environmental community and MoveOn.org attacked Obama for co-sponsoring the pro-coal bill, he backed off with this statement..."Senator Obama supports ... investing in technology that could make coal a clean-burning source of energy. However, unless and until this technology is perfected, Senator Obama will not support the development of any coal-to-liquid fuels unless they emit at least 20 percent less life-cycle carbon than conventional fuels."
Barack Obama is also a big supporter of nuclear energy. He believes that nuclear energy should be a part of America's "energy portfolio" because it does not release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Of course, nuclear energy creates waste that must be stored in a safe place for many many generations. Obama has received thousands in campaign contributions from the Illinois nuclear power company Exelon. In addition, David Axelrod, Obama's Campaign Manager, has served as a consultant to Exelon in the past.
My hope is that President Obama would be the change agent he promises to be on the issue of renewable energy. Relying on dirty 18th century energy technology just because it can be made slightly cleaner is not the right direction for America. Furthermore, relying on a source of energy that creates extremely dangerous and everlasting waste should not be an option. Our next President must treat renewable energy sources like legitimate options, not side projects or novelties.
Hillary Clinton is the only candidate who is paying for carbon offsets. Sign the petition to tell McCain and Obama to do the same.
10.3.08
President Obama's Environmental Policies
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Obama does plan on a $150bn investment in green energy over the next 10 years. That's a great investment. As for what to do about energy right now, coal-to-liquid is more efficient and burns cleaner than plain coal. Would you prefer we continue to use plain coal? I question your tendency to oversimplify matters. Yes, renewable energy is great (I do research on it) but our economy runs on oil and in order to avoid catastrophic failures in our food and energy systems, the price of oil needs to be kept down.
ReplyDeleteLiquified coal can be used to make gasoline and diesel which would help bring down the price in oil.
Also, although liquifying coal produces CO2, the CO2 can be captured. The CO2 produced when burning coal cannot be captured as easily since it's mixed with other gasses in the exhaust.
If a candidate that you respect votes for a bill that seems to say the opposite of your beliefs, try looking for why they voted the way they did.
Why did Hillary vote to give Bush the power to declare war? That is supposed to be only available to congress.
Please don't oversimplify the issues.
Obama does plan on a $150bn investment in green energy over the next 10 years. That's a great investment. As for what to do about energy right now, coal-to-liquid is more efficient and burns cleaner than plain coal. Would you prefer we continue to use plain coal? I question your tendency to oversimplify matters. Yes, renewable energy is great (I do research on it) but our economy runs on oil and in order to avoid catastrophic failures in our food and energy systems, the price of oil needs to be kept down.
ReplyDeleteLiquified coal can be used to make gasoline and diesel which would help bring down the price in oil.
Also, although liquifying coal produces CO2, the CO2 can be captured. The CO2 produced when burning coal cannot be captured as easily since it's mixed with other gasses in the exhaust.
If a candidate that you respect votes for a bill that seems to say the opposite of your beliefs, try looking for why they voted the way they did.
Why did Hillary vote to give Bush the power to declare war? That is supposed to be only available to congress.
Please don't oversimplify the issues.
Coal to liquid would allow for carbon sequestration while just coal does not. 50% of our energy comes from coal right now. There are companies planning new coal plants.
ReplyDeleteWhat I'm saying is you are faulting someone for voting to improve what we've got while researching better options.
Your ideas are cool and they match those of many people who feel the energy is all there and all we need to do is focus on it. But just so you know where I'm coming from. I have a BS in Computer Engineering and am finishing my MS in Environmental Systems with a an emphasis in Mathematical Modeling, I have installed my own off-grid solar array, and I am a member of the IEEE Power Engineering Society and I'm telling you, there is a lot more to it. You are oversimplifying it.
Solar panels are not mature enough for commercial power (not to mention they cost a fortune, only last 25-30 yrs, and only generate power during part of the day). Solar panels are great if you think of every home having some on its roof. But as far as a solar power plant goes, you don't actually use panels but mirrors that either (1) point to a central tower or (2) are curved troughs that heat a fluid. Also the process of making solar panels is incredibly toxic. I recommend reading this.
Wind power (now that is a cool one) is mature and it's being built all over the place. You should check out the huge wind farms that Texas is putting in. Very cool. PG&E is testing a natural gas generating plant that uses cow manure in California. They are also testing some wave power stuff. We need R&D. I'm sorry but the coal is still needed. Yes, carbon sequestration is still on paper. That's what the R&D is for.
Have you compared the numbers?
Solar panels do not produce power at the same cost as coal. I'd like to see where you got that information. Let's take a 200W solar panel (pretty big for a solar panel), and a summer day here where we get 7 noon-hours of sun. The panel outputs 200W. The sun shines 7 hours so that's 1.4kW hrs of power in one day. Now take into account that there is no way to store the power needed to run a city, we have to assume it's used right out of the gate. So that 1.4kW has to be supplied by a different source at night. The average US home uses something like 5-8kWhrs per day and the number of homes is increasing fast.
Let's go with Natural Gas since it burns cleaner. We have a natural gas power plant in my county. It's a 103MW plant that typically runs around 80% or around 80MW but it runs 24x7. The solar panel I mentioned would run 7x7.
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I could go on with the numbers but do you get the idea. You're oversimplifying it again. Solar is not ready to power the country. Even if you could generate enough to power, say, 90% of the country, it would only power it during the day. lol. So, we need lots of money poured into R&D for green power. We also need coal and other forms of fossil fuels to keep us powered. I would personally prefer gathering coal from mines in Illinoise to beating the tar out of other countries with our military might.
Out of curiosity, what was Hillary's reason for voting against it?
Hi Bradon,
ReplyDeleteThat's a nice article. But the cost they speak of does not take into account a major obstacle to it all: Transmission and Distribution (T&D). Right now, most power systems are built in a central power generating facility style. It's pretty self-explanatory: you have a power plant and all the T&D goes from the plant outwards. Since the plant generates a great deal of energy all in one spot, this works. With solar, the energy would be generated in what's called a Distributed system, that is, in many different spots. Centralized plants can hook into the power network with no addional cost beyond the power station hookup. Distributed systems mean the system has to be capable of sending power in both directions. The T&D costs are enormous, especially in a country the size of the US. Spain is small. Most European countries do not have the infrastructure costs that we do. The numbers don't hold up either.
Yes, the jury is still out on carbon sequestration but I would rather we do it. We get more energy, the exhaust from the plant is cleaner, and we store up the CO2. The alternative, we keep releasing the CO2 and get less energy from the coal.
The idea of that being "unacceptable" is not a valid argument. It will happen whether we want it to or not. The power needs are too great.
As for toxicity of building coal power plants, the toxicity is the coal, not the power plant. They are just big boilers. Not nearly as toxic as the stuff required to make silicon for solar panels which is the same toxins required to make computer motherboards, etc.
You said:
"I also feel that there is an urgency in making a move to renewables that isn't felt by most people."
I used to think that too but it changed when I delved far into power engineering research. I am writing some optimization routines to optimize renewable energy power plant installations in my county.
You said:
"To me, developing cleaner uses for coal is an example of the mentality that we can get by on fossil fuels for a little while longer while we treat renewables as an experiment or a side project."
Perhaps over simplifying is the wrong term. What I mean is there are parts of the picture that you just aren't aware of. For instance, the reliability of the power system in the US is awesome. It's in the high 90% range. When you introduce renewable sources like wind and solar, termed intermittent power, your reliability becomes a problem. All the power we use right now is generated right now. If you have a large wind farm generating, say 100MW of power and the wind dies down for 10 minutes, you have to have a backup system. Say you have a small city that uses around 100MW of power and you install a 50MW solar power plant (that's an insane solar power plant by the way. I think the biggest solar power plants are like 10MW). Then it will provide the 50MW during daylight and as soon as the daylight goes away or a cloud floats by, then the backup system needs to be able to vamp up really fast to avoid brown-outs and black-outs. The point is that we have to perfect the system as we install it. Yes, we could spend hundreds of billions of dollars and install enough renewable energy (not necessarily green) to run the country but we would have to install trillions of dollars in T&D and backup systems to compensate for reliability.
At least, that's the current idea. Who knows? With more R&D, we may find some way of storing massive amounts of power and then we won't need to generate it as we need it.
Bottom line - even if you have tons of renewable power like wind and solar, you have to have backups for it. Everything is dynamic and comes at a cost. I think we should go for the "clean coal" (oxymoron... lol) at the same time as everything else.
On HIllary:
I will vote for her if she wins the nomination but I am very tired of the her "say anything to win" campaign. Have you read about one of her campaign guys, Mark Penn? He constantly takes polls for tons of special interests so he can tell how to spin the message to manipulate the vote. What about Hill's taxes? Why not release them? And I am offended that she claims she grew up in the middle class?! She had one hell of a privileged middle-class experience. Do you happen to have a blog on the invasion of Iraq? :)
Hey Brandon,
ReplyDeleteActually, the individual home-owner solar arrays would be awesome. Having a solar array on your house dramatically increases home owner knowledge and awareness of power use. I think if everyone in my county had a solar array on their roof, then power would be taken care of (in the private sector at least) during the day. Now, if every one of those homes also had a battery backup system to store power and then use at night just for their individual homes, I think we'd find that large power plants just aren't needed as much.
The main obsticle to distributed systems is having to build T&D both ways. To send power from point A to point B, there are specific power transformers at each source. If you wanted to be able to send from A to B or from B to A, you would need to have both types of transformers at each source.
The only thing really stopping us from solar panels everywhere is cost. They cost a lot. You can get panels for around $5/watt right now (so like $1000 for a 200Watt panel).
Actually, if you want to see the calculations involved in installing an off-grid solar array, check out this website: http://www.eukota.com/pvbarn/. It details the system I put in at my Dad's Partner's place. The system has only 500W in panels and cost $4000. It's not enough for a home but it runs the barn great.
There really is no "main" problem. Just a lot of data required. People have to be educated about it. It's not a carefree type of technology and getting people to change is, well you know... nigh impossible!
:)