July 2009 Archives

We got the press release the other day about a solar-powered blimp, built in part by French high school students, making the trip across the English Channel. This was just about the time we were observing the 40th anniversary of people walking on the moon, some of us replaying the pinch-me awe that drew indelible tracks in our brain matter.

We weren't quite sure what to think about the blimp -- until colleague Jeff Ryser put one point of view in a nutshell: "We grew up with men walking on the moon. Now our kids are flying blimps across the English Channel." Somehow, he suggested, this wasn't what we had in mind back then.

Natural gas got another plug from an unlikely source Monday, noted environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, the Natural Resources Defense Council's senior attorney and head of water conservation group Waterkeepers.

Kennedy's pitch in the Pink Paper, the Financial Times, is simple: demand "carbon dispatch" and electricity coming from crusty, coal-fired power plants will be replaced by cleaner gas-fired plants.

Editors of the Reason Foundation's media outlets, writing in the Washington Post Sunday, see the Waxman-Markey greenhouse gas cap-and-trade bill "awaiting death in the Senate." More specifically, they see the "lousy" cap-and-trade bill awaiting that death. The editors' view of the bill is not surprising, given Reason's free-market libertarian philosphy; the question is whether their view of the bill's fate is only wishful thinking on their part. And whether the power industry would embrace or lament that outcome.

Most signals from various power sectors, and Wall Street, are that the continued uncertainty surrounding carbon, coal, nuclear's place and more is worse for business than a program that nobody likes but that at least tells everybody what the deal is.

On her way out the door of the Alaska governor's office, Sarah Palin pinned an anti-Obama blast on the refrigerator door (the Washington Post) in the home of the folks she claims to respect the least -- all that is inside-the-Beltway.

In an op-ed article today, Palin hammered President Obama and the Waxman-Markey climate change bill as a road map to economic ruin that will jack up energy costs to consumers and businesses while doing nothing to extract more energy domestically.

This fits nicely in the "all politics is local" department. Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander, not a major fan of the carbon-reduction programs envisioned by legislation now in Congress, yesterday included in an alternative-bill "blueprint" the goal of electrifying half the car and truck fleet within 20 years. It didn't occur to us immediately, but of course Alexander's state is hosting the Nissan electric vehicle venture, at the company's existing plant in Smyrna. The Department of Energy last month announced a $1.6 billion low-interest loan to the project, under the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program. Nissan plans to produce the cars and advanced lithium-ion batteries.

Surrounded by a scrum of journalists in the US Capitol's LBJ Room, 81-year-old Texas entrepreneur T . Boone Pickens defined what it means to be unflappable. While all about him are seemingly losing their cool, Pickens, dressed in a very comfortable gray suit, never once raised his voice. His soft Texas drawl quieted the mob, much like oil on water.

With a half-dozen voice recorders thrust within inches of his face, hot television lights glaring, he didn't miss a beat in responding to questions about a subject that he previously refused to talk about -- the delay in the development of his windmill farm in north Texas.

Doesn't former Senator Tim Wirth want to give his old colleagues a break?

If the natural gas industry takes Wirth's advice of yesterday, it will invest $2 million to $3 million for lobbyists to press the Senate to include in the climate change-energy bill provisions guaranteeing a role for gas in power generation and transportation.

Our colleague Bill Holland reports from the Colorado Oil & Gas Association meeting in Denver that Wirth, who represented Colorado in the Senate and now runs Ted Turner's UN Foundation, lambasted the gas industry for standing on the sidelines while every other energy sector wangled wins in the House bill. Since the Senate is just beginning work on its own climate package, the gas people had better get busy, Wirth admonished.

Although he is not going to put his 667 wind turbines in the Texas Panhandle as planned, T. Boone Pickens still aims to build a wind power facility there. Our colleague Rodney White reports that at a news conference this afternoon in Washington, Pickens said his plan for the North Texas wind farm has been delayed for two years, "but we are going to do it."

"Wind power is not dead," he said. "You are going to use the resources in America. We are on to that now. I spent a lot of money to do this. The American people want energy independence and they are willing to do whatever it takes to do it."

T. Boone Pickens has given up the 1,000-MW wind farm in Texas in favor of several much smaller ones in other states, partly because the price of natural gas is so low that it's changed the economics of wind power, partly because getting a huge wind installation -- and the transmission for it -- proved harder than it looked.

But the more local news that in his Energy Independence Day tour today, he's going to eat at Ben's Chili Bowl. For Washingtonians, Ben's is iconic, for lots of reasons, not the least of which is the now-established tradition of media coverage of your eating there if you're a star. And lo, Ben's is now 100% wind-powered, a fact that some of us did not know. (The place still looks the same.)