Power Lines

The Chinese like US gas producers Chesapeake and Anadarko.

But not a lot.

In snowlocked Washington (and looking into the face of another storm), we totally sympathize with natural gas traders who traded the NYMEX futures contract 4 cents down this morning, at $5.361.

"March NYMEX gas falls early Tuesday on anticipation of spring" our headline read, with a bit of uncharacteristic poetry. Anticipation of spring.

For all the talk of innovation in the electricity sector, there's precious little of it, at least the kind that resonates with ordinary people as something concrete they could actually use without a hassle. But David Crane at NRG Energy may have something.

One of NRG's plans, Crane said at a Credit Suisse energy conference Thursday, is to sell monthly contracts, like cell phone contracts, to customers of its Reliant Energy utility, for charging electric vehicles.

The consulting firm Navigant said Thursday that by its estimates there are 196,000 people in the US currently employed in the renewable electricity industry.

The firm didn't use the term "green jobs." It specifically identified the category it was describing as generating electricity from wind, solar, biomass, hydropower and waste-to-energy. Its 196,000-jobs estimate is one of the few specific numbers trotted out as the Obama administration and Congress discuss a jobs bill and refer repeatedly to thousands of green jobs that may or may not eventually be created.

A play about Enron, in London, sold out for months. A play that reviewers say focuses on Jeff Skilling, the jailed former CEO, and his favored mark-to-market accounting. What a curiosity.

Having covered the five-month trial of Skilling and former Enron Chairman Ken Lay in Houston in 2004, and having sat through their dramatic sentencing hearing just weeks before Ken Lay suddenly died, I feel as though I have already seen at least one version of "Enron."

Fresh off a value-added-tax scam involving carbon allowances and fraudulent deals that denied sales tax revenue to EU governments, the German Emissions Trading Authority discovered that computer hackers cracked codes and gained access to company EU Allowance accounts, enabling them to steal and sell EUAs into the EU Emissions Trading Scheme market.

It's hard to know how these thing actually work, but not difficult to imagine.

JP Morgan Chase appeared on the verge of paying $4 billion to $4.5 billion for the commodity trading firm, RBS Sempra Commodities, up until about two weeks ago.

Then three things happened.

One of the most interesting jobs available right now in Washington may be director of the Eastern Interconnection States Planning Council. Who will be interested? One of cynical bent might say: people inclined toward self-punishment.

The positive way to say that would be: super self-disciplined people who love challenges.

The EISPC is to be funded by $14 million in stimulus money from the Department of Energy to the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. The point is to represent state interests in planning transmission facilities for the entire Eastern Interconnection, from the Great Plains to the Atlantic seaboard -- something never before tried, and incredibly complex.

According to Duke Energy's Jim Rogers, the greenhouse gas conversation among world business leaders at Davos last week took a turn much like the one Congress and President Obama took this month: It's all about jobs.

"A reframing of the issue" is how Rogers put it in an interview with forbes.com. "If you transform the energy sector, you stimulate the economy and you create jobs." And reduce emissions. Reframing indeed. Changing the subject, from climate change to jobs. Not a new element in the US climate-energy debate, but now in a newly important place: the driver's seat.

In its analysis of the US natural gas supplies released Wednesday, the American Gas Association asserted that its data should "quell any doubts about the ability of natural gas to supply the country well into the next century." 

"The AGA believes that the strength of gas supply in the United States is not only founded on the abundance of the methane to be found in North America but also the diversity of those supplies," the report states. 

Yet the 21-page report says nary a word about the host of challenges the industry faces as it seeks to develop that gas.