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Here's the speech everyone in the media should be talking up:
It's interesting to note that the speech on energy got the crowd more fired up than anything else last night. Granted, Schweitzer (Governor of Montana) worked the crowd pretty hard, but people are really concerned & interested in energy. As I said before, the Obama campaign should make energy a top priority in this last 60ish days. There is hay to be made here ...
I haven't done much research on geothermal energy, although I did a post about geothermal heat pumps a while back. But I stumbled upon a company named AltaRock Energy who believes they have a scalable geothermal solution. It looks very interesting.
As AltaRock points out on this page, the nice thing about geothermal energy is its 24x7 availability. I love wind power, but wind has a major achilles heel: the wind doesn't always blow & might not be blowing at the most critical, high demand periods. How can you rely on that? Without major improvements in battery technology (which is very expensive by the way), you can't. The same thing holds true for solar since they sun doesn't help much at night.
Geothermal's problem has been the fact that there aren't that many places that fit the conventional geothermal hot spot description. These are spots that have natural reservoirs of super-hot water deep in the ground. Think Iceland & Yellowstone National Park. We've long known we can tap into those hot water reservoirs, pump the liquid up & use the steam to spin turbines & create electricity. The issue is that there aren't enough of these naturally occurring hot spots to exploit (plus they often reside far away from populated areas).
AltaRock has a solution. They inject cold water at high pressure deep into the earth ("hot basement rock"). The water fractures the rock & essentially creates pathways & areas where the water can pool up. As the water flows through the hot basement rock, it heats up. Hot water is then pulled up to the surface via wells. This diagram below shows how the entire system works:
Underwriting this company's development are major VC firms like Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Google.org. AltaRock just closed a $26 million second round of financing [PDF requires Adobe Acrobat].
I couldn't find any information on costs associated with the AltaRock geothermal system, but the idea seems really interesting on the surface. Who knows? Maybe it's incredibly expensive, or maybe it's an EROEI dog ... but certainly one to watch.
Washington DC begins a bike sharing program today in a first for the US. Similar to successful programs in Europe (especially Paris), bikes will be available at kiosks placed around the city. The bikes can replace a longer walk or a cab ride for people on the move.
Read the article for all the details, but kudos to DC for making a progressive idea a reality. Not easy to do these days! Some day I'm sure bike sharing will be a standard part of urban life. It makes a ton of sense & should inspire many people to do more riding. A virtuous cycle, no doubt.
Today, Obama delivered a speech attacking McCain on energy. Not only did he lay out a very detailed & comprehensive plan (read the speech here), but he tied McCain to 30 years of political ineffectiveness that has led to our complete & utter addiction to oil.
I think Obama can really make hay on this subject. Not only does he have the superior policy plans & ideas on how to move the country forward, but he can hurt McCain badly with remarks like these:
What Senator McCain neglected to mention was that during those thirty years, he was in Washington for twenty-six of them. And in all that time, he did little to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. He voted against increased fuel efficiency standards and opposed legislation that included tax credits for more efficient cars. He voted against renewable sources of energy. Against clean biofuels. Against solar power. Against wind power. Against an energy bill that - while far from perfect - represented the largest investment in renewable sources of energy in the history of this country. So when Senator McCain talks about the failure of politicians in Washington to do anything about our energy crisis, it's important to remember that he's been a part of that failure. Now, after years of inaction, and in the face of public frustration over rising gas prices, the only energy proposal he's really promoting is more offshore drilling - a position he recently adopted that has become the centerpiece of his plan, and one that will not make a real dent in current gas prices or meet the long-term challenge of energy independence.
Senator McCain would not take the steps or achieve the goals that I outlined today. His plan invests very little in renewable sources of energy and he's opposed helping the auto industry re-tool. Like George Bush and Dick Cheney before him, he sees more drilling as the answer to all of our energy problems, and like them, he's found a receptive audience in the very same oil companies that have blocked our progress for so long. In fact, he raised more than one million dollars from big oil just last month, most of which came after he announced his plan for offshore drilling in a room full of cheering oil executives. His initial reaction to the bipartisan energy compromise was to reject it because it took away tax breaks for oil companies. And even though he doesn't want to spend much on renewable energy, he's actually proposed giving $4 billion more in tax breaks to the biggest oil companies in America - including $1.2 billion to Exxon-Mobil.This is a corporation that just recorded the largest profit in the history of the United States. . This is the company that, last quarter, made $1,500 every second. That's more than $300,000 in the time it takes you to fill up a tank with gas that's costing you more than $4-a-gallon. And Senator McCain not only wants them to keep every dime of that money, he wants to give them more.
That has to hurt if you are staffing or supporting the McCain campaign. I predict this message we heard today from Obama will resonate with American voters. The timing just feels right for a bold new vision to sweep old stuff (like McCain) away. I predict Obama will become a broken record on this for the rest of the campaign. This is winning material.
Now, if he would only start thinking & talking about passenger rail. That would be icing on the cake.
Image provided by Flickr user radiospike photography under Creative Commons license
I recently wrote with some intrigue about the Pickens Plan, which seeks to switch a big chunk of electricity generation from natural gas to wind & then use the leftover natural gas to power our cars ... freeing us of our epic addiction to oil imports.
On the surface, the plan seems like it could potentially work. Then you read a story like this one, titled "Wind won't solve energy crisis". Here are some of the issues called out:
The disadvantage of wind-generated electricity is poor reliability because the weather doesn't always cooperate. The most demanding need for energy is in the afternoons and during air-conditioned summers, but wind works best at night and during the other seasons, though intermittently. Even when the wind is blowing, it takes a 13 mph wind to power a large turbine.
I have heard of this before, of course. The primary issue seems to be around storage. There is currently no good way to store energy (in massive quantities) when the wind blows for later use. So the current fact of life is that wind energy comes when it wants to, not when the electric demand calls for it. That's definitely a non-starter.
Last year wind generators nationally produced only 30 percent as much energy in a year as they would if they ran at full tilt, every hour of the year, a measure called "capacity factor." Unlike nuclear power plants such as Wolf Creek, which achieve capacity factors of 90 percent or more, the wind operator cannot decide when the wind generator will run.
So it's 30% nationally. I wonder what that rate looks like in the wind corridor that Pickens talks about, stretching the length of the plains from Canada to Texas. It has to be higher, right?
Another problem with wind farms is their location. Where the wind is best is often hundreds of miles from cities that most need the power, so high-cost transmission lines must be built to transmit the electricity.
The author's point here is to underscore the hidden cost of wind power, which is the transmission line/grid side of the scheme. The writer obviously doesn't think wind power is the answer -- he is interested in nuclear power. Regardless of where his loyalty lies, I think he makes some good points. When he ends by saying that Gore & Pickens may be counting on wind power too much, it seems he may be right. There is a lot to this issue & it's hard to know which position is the right one. I personally have more digging to do on thsi topic.
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