Readers Comments

Becoming highly dependent on these unstable regions for gas, just like we are for oil now, will greatly harm the US geopolitical position, as well as its balance of trade. It will make resource wars (e.g., Iraq) much more likely. Gas baseload plants also make no sense from a resource management point of view, in that they consume large amounts of a precious, limited resource, for a task that can easily be performed using several fuels/sources that are domestic, and much more abundant. California, with it's defacto "all gas" policy, has one of the most irresponsible energy policies in the nation.

All that said, if the author (and his ilk) wan't to be taken seriously, they have to show a little more willingness to compromise. One of the most irresponsible things that "environmentalists" have done, and continue to do, is spread the dishonest mantra that conservation and renewables alone can meet all of our future energy needs. No serious energy expert has ever believed this. As they contunue to beat this drum, w/o any hint of compromise, most people have stopped even listening to them, as they don't offer any real solutions. The fact is, if we limit our alternative options to conservation and renewables only, the use of gas for power generation in California WILL continue to increase, making LNG necessary.

Our primary goals should be to greatly reduce the use of gas for baseload power generation (for the reasons given above), and to greatly reduce the use of conventional (non-IGCC) coal, due to its unacceptable environmental and health costs. If we are to have any chance of doing this, we are going to need a much larger tent. Due to their intermittantcy, renewables can not do the job alone. Not even close. There seems to be a growing concensus (among those capable of compromise) that a combination of clean (IGCC) coal, nuclear, and renewables, as well as conservation, is going to be required to get the job done.

Full scale experiments, while very costly, are nevertheless extremely convincing.

"In California, about half of our power plants use natural gas to generate electricity – which can be generated by other energy sources, such as wind and solar power, .... "

You can? Than why is it that you are NOT doing this? I have seen the same statement, or similar claims, for thirty years. Yet, the reality is that the folks in California can not find it in their interest to actually generate electricity in any significant amount, by these methods. None of these methods have provided enough capacity to accomodate the GROWTH of the power needs of the state, let alone REPLACE any thermal generation capacity.

I don't understand why this is. California, by their own admission, has the brightest, most beautiful, nost creative perople in the world. Yet, all they create is dreams, wishes, fantasies when it comes to generating power.

Go ahead . Protest to your hearts content. Keep offering up fanciful solutions. Such proposals serve you well.

chuck petterson persia

How much more will you need to "pay" the incumbents to achieve these goal of eliminating natural gas? From here it looks like a very lucrative flim-flam game they've got going with you. I'd suggest extreme caution in listening to any further proposals of this sort.

I note in Recommendation #5 of the ACEEE (American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy) report at http://www.aceee.org/conf/03ee/Kushler-7w.pdf the wording

"The traditional structure for the evaluation of utility energy efficiency programs should be maintained, including ......... (4) an open process, with full public access to all reports"

They then require a $13.00 fee to download any of their reports.

What I'm particularly interested in is "How to the program decision-makers avoid the liklyhood of design engineers designing new projects with an object of benefiting from this sort of program?" The ways to do so are endless, such as building a new manufacturing facility with all cheap inefficient electric motors to start, then having the efficiency program pay to replace those motors with new and costly high-efficiency motors while moving the nearly-new low-effic. motors onto phase 2 of the project. DO and repeat, while taxpayers foot the bill.

An interesting problem in economics and incentive.

I will, however, state now that I do indeed believe renewables and energy efficiency can replace all of our electricity generation in California - AND all of our natural gas needs (for non-electricity generation purposes) AND all of our transportation fuel needs. Indeed, this is our regional goal with our Fossil Free By '33 program (www.fossilfreeby33.org).

If you'd like extensive documentation, and real world examples, to back up this admittedly non-mainstream claim, I welcome further dialogue. You can email me directly at thunt@cecmail.org.

California is not already producing 33% renewable electricity b/c of many reasons, some of which are admittedly technological and economic in nature. These barriers have largely been overcome now and it's simply a matter of time before the political and industry barriers to a large increase in renewable generation takes us to the existing state goals, and hopefully much further.

A far smarter use of limited resources (capital)

I am also opposed to the misguided use of natural gas for baseload electric power as are others commenting on this column. It is a thermodynamically wasteful use of fuel. In domestic heating or in chemical processes, 90% of the natural gas energy is extracted for beneficial use. In gas turbines, it is less than half of that value. This wasteful use of natural gas for baseload electric power is the reason that domestic heating users have seen a threefold increase in gas rates over the last 3 to 4 years! It is also the reason many chemical companies depending on natural gas for their feedstock have moved their manufacturing to other countries. Thus, the misguided use of natural gas has caused the heating bills to increase while jobs disappear! Logical? No.

I make note that "renewables" as discussed by Mr. Hunt have an interesting attribute. The solar renewable source operates about 50% of the time under the best of sunny conditions. The other half of the time it is dark. Maybe renewable is a synonym for "restartable" since solar power systems must be restarted on a daily basis. Note also that the land use to generate power from solar renewables will not be from land around Santa Barbara where Tam Hunt lives, it will be from eastern California deserts where smaller populations of people with less political power live. Is this NIMBY or what?

The other renewable energy he discusses, wind, also has interesting attributes. A couple of weeks ago, I drove the I10 interstate from the Ontario, CA airport to Palm Springs. Between these points is a mountain pass where the largest installation of wind machines I have ever seen is located. The fields of machines stretch for miles along the interstate and on mountain ridges within sight of the interstate. There must be several thousand machines. During this drive, the wind was blowing particularly aggressively from the east, enough so, that it was the subject of the local news every time I bothered to listen. Nevertheless, a large number of the wind machines sat motionless! Thus, better performance reliability is clearly needed.

Now to further observe, that since no one controls the wind, this renewable energy source is also not dependable. During hot summer days when air conditioning is badly needed in inland California communities, often the wind does not blow. So where does the power come from then? Natural gas turbines with the adverse social and economic effects illustrated above.

Mr. Hunt needs to face the reality that in this country, either everyone moves to Santa Barbara and similar coastal communities where the effects of winter and summer extremes are damped, or we go to more conventional and RELIABLE sources for generating electric power that do not depend on imported energy supplies. Jim Hopf made the right suggestions for satisfying this reliability need.

There is one renewable source of energy that California can use but many of the environmental extremists groups oppose it. That is waste. The municipal solid waste (trash) generated in California could be converted into electricity or hydrogen using gasification technologies. According to a California Integrated Waste Management Board 2004 report, about 40 million tons/year of waste are generated in the state. Most of this ends up in landfills where greenhouse gas generation and groundwater pollution are known outcomes. If this waste is processed in a gasification process, the gross power available is in the range of 42,000 gigawatt hours. So, the natural gas shortfall can be largely made up using gasification technologies to process the waste resource now being wasted. And, lest I not address the subject, this process can operated with minimal air emissions -- contrary to what the ill-informed anti-everything community generally claims.

So California does have indigenous energy options, it just needs to use the intellectual power of the state to implement those solutions instead of always advancing the NIMBY responses to energy options.