Distribution

By | February 26, 2006
2 Comments

“The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

- quote commonly attributed, probably incorrectly, to William Gibson.

“Our nation is on the threshold of some new energy technologies that I think will startle the American people. It’s not going to startle you here at Johnson Controls because you know what I’m talking about. (Laughter.) You take it for granted. But the American people will be amazed at how far our technology has advanced in order to meet an important goal, which is to reduce our imports from the Middle East by 75 percent by 2025, and eventually getting rid of our dependence totally.”

- President Bush, February 20, 2006

It’s gratifying to see the President finally addressing this important front in the War on Terror. If we are less dependent on trouble spots for energy, then the amount of misery we will feel compelled to put up with will be less, and the money that malevolent oil dictatorships will have to do us harm will be less too. A win, win. A triple win if you consider the environment. Most alternative forms of energy reduce pollutants, including green house gases.

The President said,

The most promising ways to reduce gasoline consumption quickly is through hybrid vehicles. Hybrid vehicles have… an electric battery based on technologies that were developed by the Department of Energy… [T]his technology came to be because the federal government made a research commitment…

Research paid off in the past, so let’s try it again. The President suggests “a 22 percent increase in funding for clean energy research at the Department of Energy.”

Future Pundit Randall Parker has an excellent analysis of Bush’s speech, why it’s important, and why it doesn’t go far enough:

Bush is getting over the original obsession of his Administration on hydrogen and seems to be realizing that development of better batteries is a highly desirable and achievable goal. Well, better that political leaders learn late than never.

Bush even seems to be aware that switch grass would be better than corn as a biomass source of energy. We need better technology for converting the cellulose in the switch grass into more usable sugars. But that’s a solvable problem.

…

I do not think Bush’s recent speeches on energy are a huge step forward. A huge step forward would put a couple billion dollars a year into solar research, a couple billion into batteries, maybe a billion into accelerating pebble bed nuclear reactors or other advanced reactor concepts, and still other initiatives. These initiatives should be on a scale similar to the corn ethanol boondoggle [$3 billion per year] but in productive directions rather than aimed at satisfying farmers and Archer Daniels Midland.

Agreed. And how about setting aside about 10% of that budget for energy push prize programs?

  • D. Vision

    Funding research isn’t particularly bold. What we need is investments in actually deploying technology that we know already works. We should be building nuclear reactors en masse–RIGHT NOW–and upgrading the 103 plants operating nationwide. China gets this. They are building 50 new reactors by 2020.

    The biggest obstacles to deploying more energy technology are, ironically, environmentalists. They’ve erected a nightmarish regulatory wall that makes building new nuclear plants no longer cost effective. The weight of regulation and liability insurance drives up the cost of nuclear power to the point where it cannot compete with coal or natural gas plants. While environmentalists are busy erecting barriers to building the best alternative technology that can be had, fossil fuel fired plants take up the slack. The real irony is that environmentalists are their own worst enemy.

    In California, they’ve managed to defeat nearly every project for building new power plants and overregulated the system to the point of penalyzing producers. Energy producers are smart geese; they won’t get trapped in California.

  • http://pfdietz.blogspot.com/ Paul F. Dietz

    What we need is investments in actually deploying technology that we know already works.

    I understand that utilities are stymied by regulations that require them to invest in the cheapest technology, narrowly defined. This means they aren’t investing in state of the art coal-fired powerplants, like IGCC (never mind things like high temperature fuel cells), but instead still building old fashioned steam turbine plants.

    If Bush wanted to address this, he’d get some changes enacted that would enable the utilities to compute future costs based on assumptions about increased carbon taxes. But I can see why Bush doesn’t want to do this — he doesn’t want ‘carbon will be taxed in the future’ to become a default policy assumption.