4/17/08
Below are a few letters we received on topics that appeared in the past few weeks. They capture the essence of how many readers say they feel.
Dear Readers,
Global warming and federal subsidies are two general areas in which we get a lot of mail.
As it relates to the former, the questions often go like this: Please specify which scientists or scientific organizations with an expertise in climatology have said global warming is mostly a man-made phenomenon and which ones have said it is largely a cyclical matter that human-kind does not control?
The follow up question relating to climate change is why and how I might phrase a story. That is, those who believe that global warming will result in ecological disaster say that the science is conclusive whereas those who question such thinking say that it is not. So, how do I quantify or phrase the number of scientists who argue their case?
I am asking readers to send to me their most objective analyses of the issue. We will run some of them. I understand that there are nuances and that each position will try to minimize the findings of the other side by saying their experts are unqualified or paid for by special interests. To the extent, though, we can break this down into a readable format that is easy to comprehend, we will.
Next, readers ask us to quantify which fuel sources receive federal assistance and how much they get. Such comments will follow stories that discuss the benefits given to coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind or solar. Some might grimace at the dollars granted to one sector but then argue that those given to theirs are in the public interests.
Again, the answers are not black and white. I understand implicitly that there are variables such as total money received divided by current market share. But to the extent we can get an "objective" valuation, we will run some of the answers. I would imagine that the replies will be directly tied to one's philosophical disposition and that the exercise may be too convoluted to get objective information. Regardless, readers will be better equipped to decipher the news.
Ken Silverstein
Opening Letter - April 03, 2008
Please keep the focus - an individual or society is only able to make a decision or choice that is best for them through education and information.
Jim Bain
The Loyalton Group
Jockeying for Position - March 19, 2008
The demand response industry, as other readers have pointed out, is indeed in an exciting, nascent phase and growing rapidly to meet market demand. The pressures at play - rising and less predictable electricity costs, business end-user attention on energy efficiency and demand management savings, and challenges in creating new generating capacity - all create an attractive growth environment for both demand response and permanent energy efficiency programs. As a result, it is not surprising to see new demand response and demand management markets springing up throughout North America. Examples include new emergency programs in Texas and Ontario, as well as new synchronized reserves programs on their way in New York and the mid-west. Within the next two years, we should witness demand response, in various flavors, as a viable capacity resource in most every North American metropolitan region, and accelerated development of energy efficiency market programs. In an energy-constrained world, all vehicles for energy reduction - whether permanent or temporary - ultimately will be necessary to assure reliability and economic growth, and it will be critical for us to value and monetize those energy reduction assets for those who are best able to generate them.
Gary Fromer
FERC Oversight Attacked - April 09, 2008
If the Government Accountability Office doesn't give FERC passing grades on its ability to monitor its markets, one wonders how it will grade the Fed and the Treasury on how they handled the credit market melt down. In the grand scale of things the credit melt down compared to the California energy crisis is like the difference between big and little league baseball. Personally I think FERC is doing a very good job thank you.
Peter Weigand
Chief Executive Officer
Avior Partners
Attracting the Best and Brightest - April 11, 2008
I was very pleased to read your article last week noting the important role professionals in our industry play in mentoring students and encouraging them to pursue a career in power engineering.
Engineers at ITC Holdings Corp. have been working with students in the power engineering field at Michigan Technological University since 2005 to ensure that the future pipeline of qualified workers in the power/utility industry remains full. We fully support the growth of students entering this program and have partnered our engineers with students in Michigan Tech's Senior Design Program. Michigan Tech seniors work with ITC engineers on two 14-week semester engineering projects as part of their curriculum. The students are required to meet established deadlines and report to our engineers with feedback on projects, challenges and milestones accomplished.
It's extremely important for students to get hands-on experience working in the field before they graduate. That's why ITC purchased four relay test units to help students learn the industry, supports Michigan Tech's Power Energy Research Center and pays the salaries of senior students assisting graduate students with their work.
As a result of this initiative, we've hired eight Michigan Tech students in the engineering group at ITC and one in the system planning group. Each and every student we've worked with agrees that the design project prepared them to transition from the academic environment to the real world. These students deal with the same types of issues that engineers in the power industry face on a daily basis, so it gives them a real-world perspective on what it's like to be a power engineer.
I hope more power and utility companies make an effort to work with the students who are the future of this industry. As professionals, we need to support academics and encourage students to pursue a career in an industry that is essential to the reliability of transmission..
Jon E. Jipping
Executive Vice President and COO
ITC Holdings Corp
University of Colorado at Boulder is taking strides to educate tomorrow's utility engineers as well as managers. The engineering program is offering a Masters of Engineering Degree with Emphasis in Engineering, Utilities, and Management. Students may enter through the departments of Civil Eng., Electrical & Computer Eng., Interdisciplinary Telecommunications, or CAETE - a distance learning program.
As our energy sector embarks upon this next decade of change, I feel confident that bright motivated students will become bright and motivated employees.
Jonah Levine
The first problem the electric utilities have in attracting the best candidates is a shortage of technically qualified engineers, chemists, physicists and biologists. Utilities and universities need to form alliances for education with energy education programs that are based on the sciences of power generation starting in high school and possibly grade school.
Secondly, electric utility generation and T&D technical careers require candidates that are not afraid to get their hands dirty and have an innate understanding of how components mechanically and chemically fit and work together. My experience is that the very best utility engineers and chemist are the ones that have participated in Coop programs while in college or worked on cars or farm equipment while growing up.
Thirdly, utility candidates should be chosen from locals as close as possible to where they grew up or went to College. People who move from somewhere for work will likely move somewhere else or move back to wherever they call home. The cost of constant training is high and escalating.
Fourth, mentoring is a natural process where the experienced teacher and the eager student meet and form a bond of trust which leads to understanding. Mentoring cannot be forced or driven by an edict from management. Force breeds counter-force and you end up with a half hearted lose, lose situation - the power of mentoring is valuable and should be promoted by encouraging mentors and students, and providing the time for dialogue.
Fifth, managements have to realize that technical competence needs to be rewarded with respect not just tolerated as a policy based expectation. If you ask technical people the reasons they want to leave or are planning to leave or why they left the utility industry, it is predominately due to a lack of respect on the part of non-technical middle and senior management. Non-technical management with very short term, bonus-based thinking fosters a pervasive lose/lose mentality throughout any organization. Why would the technically talented want to participate in an effort where their talents are marginalized and their efforts unappreciated?
Phil D'Angelo
Glen Mills, PA
As you identify in the article, "You get what you pay for" - as long as the power industry continues to pay bottom salaries, they fail to attract talent. I never considered the power industry because of low salary. My children are skilled engineers, but they too never considered the power industry because of slow change and low pay. Abigail Dowling can mentor, mother, or hug the new employees, but that is not why I enjoy engineering work. Job satisfaction originates in innovation, optimization of operations, and improvement. Soft approaches alone fail.
As demonstrated by your retirement statistics, the companies face an old line management that is not likely to allow innovation, optimization and improvement. This old line extends from the board of directors to the first level managers. Check the boards of some power companies and ask yourself, "just what can this person contribute to the company operation?". I find too many irrelevant board members. Just what does a real estate developer or a management consultant contribute to the operation of a power company? Also, why are technology people excluded from the board of directors? The old line thinking and control leads to rapid attrition even if you could recruit one of the best and brightest.
Bruce Gerhold PhD PE
Gerhold Engineering
Bartlesville, OK
Swept Up by Wind - April 14, 2008
Nobody enjoys being told about the successes of wind turbines more than I do. The "optimal" global energy economy that I imagine definitely has a place for wind energy in the picture. The point is though that no attempt should be made to overplay the wind card.
According to Jeffrey Michel - an MIT graduate working in Germany - the average capacity factor for windmills in that country before 2007 was 0.17, and in some other regions it was not only lower but much lower. I also found it interesting to hear how impressed some people are with the Danish wind 'experiment'. Perhaps they haven't heard that the price of electricity in Denmark is probably the highest in the industrial world.
Ferdinand E. Banks
Professor
Thanks for the article, it was a good piece. However, one point I thought I should highlight. Both the transmission issues and the problem with wind-on-demand can be addressed by current energy storage technologies. We have technology crucial to the development of renewable infrastructure but it is often overlooked due to current costs. These should come down over time however as more companies develop alternative products.
David Hopkins
Director of PR
Carbon International
The potential for electricity generation from windmills is truly staggering. The commercial success (without taxpayer subsidies) is not nearly so compelling. One of the inescapable problems is delivery certainty (or rather -lack of predictability) for any given area. Ironically, the highest demand often happens when there is not enough wind to turn the windmills.
But when those blazing hot, windless, clear sky days happen, photovoltaic power generation really "shines" with generation potential nicely matching demand. Traditional silicon solar cell based systems must drop in cost by a factor of 5 or more before the power generated is economically competitive with a "clean burn" coal power plant. The technology advancements needed to enable this large decline in cost have already been made and commercialized. A factory near Oakland Ca. is making low cost solar cells that come in a long roll, like roll roofing--and much lower cost than silicon crystal solar cells. That plant is "sold-out" for the next 2 years to Germany.
We need both wind and cost-effective photovoltaic now. We need to strongly encourage investment in additional low-cost photovoltaic manufacturing facilities, and a strong incentive to home-owners, commercial building owners, land owners, power companies, etc. to install these new generation technologies.
After all, we know what the cost of oil is now, and what it will be: higher. Clean coal power plants are another viable alternative, but investor owned companies will not install that expensive CO2 capture technology unless mandated by consumers.
Keith E. Bowers
Last year Congress considered legislation that would have allowed federal agencies to enter into renewable energy power purchase agreements for terms longer than the current ten years. Unfortunately, this provision was not included in the final language of the legislation passed at the end of December. The reason this longer contract term is important is that it would allow Federal agencies to enter into long term power purchase contracts with wind farms, or other renewable energy providers. This would allow the government to use renewable energy as a 'hedge" against volatile and seemingly constantly increasing fossil fuel prices. This would benefit the taxpayer, the environment, and the local economy. More work needs to be done to develop transaction structures in deregulated markets for allowing large end users (like the government) to purchase renewable energy directly. When wind power is purchased through a utility (middleman) the price is marked up as a "premium charge" when, in fact, the production cost of wind energy is much less expensive than some other fuel sources. More work also needs to be done on storage technologies in order to address the intermittent nature of the wind resource. Things like CAES, Redox flow batteries, pumped hydro storage, and other technologies need to be perfected and brought to the commercial markets. While industry has a legitimate point that wind energy needs to be backed up or supplemented to make it into firm delivery power, it is also true that utilities substantially mark up and resell the wind power that they do purchase.
Just like the production tax credit, having the ability to enter into long term contracts with a creditworthy party like the federal government would be a boon to renewable energy development. Having this contracting ability would allow a renewable energy developer to take such a "long term government contact" to a bank, or financier, and obtain financing for his project. As most wind farms are capital intensive up front, but have little "fuel costs" over their life span once constructed, such arrangements could spur renewable development. The more renewable energy that is used, the more it relieves demand on fossil fuel energy resources which can them be applied to useful work for which no viable substitute yet exists. In return for the use of its credit to support wind farm construction, the government could obtain a large portion of its projected future power needs from renewable energy at prices that would not escalate as does fossil fuel power.
Kevin Myles
U.S. General Services Administration
You should endeavor to cite wind generation in terms of (kilo/mega) watt-hours, rather than straight watts. The former term denotes actual generation while the latter describes maximum capacity. This is especially germane to wind, where the plant rarely approaches maximum output. Indeed, most wind power farms generate electricity at only 60% of nameplate capacity.
Isn't it time that Congress let the production tax credit for wind power expire? Your article alluded to the fact that wind power is not dispatchable and cannot stand on its own, needing conventional power to back it up when the wind isn't blowing hard enough. Your article also notes another hurdle for wind, namely the long distances required to transport it to population centers. The producers bear none of these costs, which are passed along to the tax payers. The tax credits have served to spur the penetration of wind technology into the market (a good thing in my opinion), but having accomplished that goal, it's time to cut off the gravy chain.
David Knowles
Wind energy's formidable transmission and annual-scale firming storage problems cannot be solved with electricity transmission alone. We need to:
1. Fully harvest the Great Plains wind resource, for example, and
2. Accelerate displacement of fossil fuels rapidly enough to prevent dangerous global climate change.
Gaseous hydrogen and anhydrous ammonia look promising as energy carriers and "firming" storage media, where "firm" means "able to deliver the contracted quantity of energy every hour of every year." No affordable storage systems are available or anticipated for such annual-scale firming of electricity, as your article laments.
This severe limitation on renewables is unacceptable, requiring us to consider delivering renewable-source energy as "firm" hydrogen or anhydrous ammonia (NH3) fuels via underground transmission and distribution pipelines, as we now do with natural gas. Annual-scale firming storage is affordable in solution-mined salt caverns, for hydrogen, and in refrigerated surface tanks, for ammonia. Customers buy these renewable-powered, carbon-free fuels for vehicles and for on-site heat and power. The internal combustion engine runs well on both; we needn't wait for hydrogen and direct-ammonia fuel cells to hasten climate protection, and energy security and cost relief, via diverse, abundant renewables.
Underground pipelines are more acceptable to the public (permitting is less "rigorous"), are somewhat more secure, and have generally higher capacity (per GW-km, for example) than large-capacity, overhead, electricity transmission lines. Now we need to build pipeline-based pilot plants, to discover and demonstrate the technical and economic merits of hydrogen and ammonia transmission and firming storage systems -- or lack thereof.
Bill Leighty, Director
The Leighty Foundation
Juneau, Alaska
High Court Pressure - April 16, 2008
In the scientific world observations are made, data are measured and recorded, and a theory is developed. This theory is then tested experimentally and if many experiments support the theory, it is generally accepted. In the legal world a conclusion is reached and then data to support the conclusion are presented. There is no attempt to find out what is actually happening, only the desire to "win" the legal argument.
Unfortunately, when the matter of "global warming" is submitted to the courts by so called "environmentalists", there is no longer any search for the truth. There is only the search for evidence that supports the plaintiff. It is almost insulting to intelligence and to intelligent discourse for the courts to be deciding technical matters that have nothing to do with manmade law.
I believe a famous litigator once said, "If the facts support your case, argue the facts. If the facts do not support your case, argue the law." Unfortunately, we seem to be arguing the law and paying no attention to determining the actual facts.
Michael Z. Lowenstein, Ph.D.
Chief Technology Officer
Harmonics Limited
If the vessel to which you are adding something already contains more of that something than is desirable, continuing to add that something more slowly will not resolve the issue. If the vessel is a common vessel and others are also adding that something to the vessel, even if you and/or one or more of the others stops adding that something to the vessel while others do not stop, your actions will not resolve the issue. However, once everyone stops adding that something to the common vessel, it becomes possible and perhaps practical to begin removing a portion of that something from the common vessel to achieve the "ideal" vessel content.
The statement above is the reality of the CO2 issue, if you believe: that anthropogenic global warming is occurring; and, that the "ideal" global average temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration have been exceeded; and, that it is essential to return to the ideal. If you accept the logic, the ultimate global CO2 "cap" must approach zero asymptotically, or the carbon tax must be large enough to force carbon emissions to approach zero asymptotically.
If you accept the logic, then no US county or state, no single national government or sub-set of national governments can resolve the issue. Only universal, global action would be sufficient. If you accept the "tipping point" and "global catastrophe" arguments, we'd better hurry!
If you accept the logic, the combustion of coal, oil and natural gas must cease, or the resulting CO2 must be permanently sequestered. That leaves us with hydro, geothermal, solar, wind, OTEC, wavepower and nuclear. Hydro has reasonably predictable "reliable" and "source of opportunity" components. Geothermal, OTEC and wavepower can be reliable sources, when and where available. Nuclear can be reliable essentially anywhere. Solar is intermittent, but mostly predictable. Wind is intermittent and less predictable. Solar and wind must be coupled with storage if they are to make the transition from "commodity replacement" to "capacity replacement". The issues regarding replacement of oil in transportation are less well defined and thus more challenging.
Edward A. Reid, Jr.
President
Fire to Ice, Inc.
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