New study: Efficiency investment better for Virginia economy and ratepayers than coal plant

You may or may not be aware of the huge ongoing fight in Virginia over the proposed Dominion coal-fired power plant in Wise County. Suffice to say, it's huge. And ongoing.

Into the fight drops a new report by ABT Associates, an independent research firm, which finds that -- surprise surprise -- efficiency is a far smarter investment:

The report compares the economic effects of building Dominion Power's Wise County coal plant with investing in energy efficiency measures that would meet the same electricity demand. The study finds that avoiding construction of the coal plant by investing in efficiency would save the average household in Dominion's service territory between $52 and $91 per year in 2012.

The report goes on to find that efficiency investments would also add far more revenue to the state economy and create thousands more jobs.

Got that? Better for the state economy, for ratepayers, and for jobs.

Now check out the first comment under this story about the report in a Virginia newspaper:

Bush pledges $17.4 billion for auto bailout, with no efficiency requirements

President Bush today approved $13.4 billion in emergency loans for General Motors and Chrysler, and will make another $4 billion...

Does anyone think battery swap-out is useful or even needed for electric vehicles?

The Washington Post ran a very good article on electric vehicles Saturday. I recommend it to anyone who wants an overview of the important issue of where American companies will source their batteries. The article notes:

GM plans on a battery pack big enough to last 40 miles, at which point a small gasoline engine will take over. Some rival companies are considering a smaller battery pack that might go only 20 miles, still enough to serve the needs of many local commuters without adding as much weight and cost.

That was my point in the post, "Has GM overdesigned the Volt: Is a 40-mile all electric range too much?"

Like pretty much all recent articles on EVs, this one highlighted the uber-marketers of the EV world:

Shai Agassi, the chief executive of Better Place, which is building electric car infrastructure in Israel, Hawaii, Northern California and several other places, thinks electric cars should have batteries only. He proposes setting up swap stations where motorists on long trips could exchange a depleted battery for one fully charged.

"We just don't think that the answer to how to extend the battery is to put a power plant in our trunks," he said.

You can see a computer simulation of the Project Better Place battery exchange station here.

I recently asked my EV wonk friends what they thought of the battery swap-out model, and I will reprint some of their answers below. I have never actually found anyone who thought it was a viable idea. Where, for instance, would it be done? Sunday's New York Times asserts:

Hadley Center and WMO say 2000s comprise hottest decade in recorded history

Last week, I pointed out that the climate story of the decade is that the 2000s are on track to...

Why a cap without the trade is the worst of all worlds

As cap-and-trade legislation gets debated in Oregon and Washington, a worrisome lightbulb seems be going off for a number of folks. (Congressman DeFazio from Oregon, for example.) It goes like this: Instead of "cap-and-trade" how about just "a cap without the trade?"

Under this idea, we'd meet the terms of the cap through command and control regulation. There wouldn't be permits or a trading system (and hence no auctioning). To be sure, this will reduce emissions, which is a very good thing.

But in terms of fairness and inexpensiveness, let me be completely clear: This is a horrible idea.

For consumers and businesses who are already struggling to pay their energy bills, cap without the trade is actually worse than the very worst form of cap-and-trade. Plus, it misses out on almost all of the upsides of cap-and-trade done right.

In the worst form of cap-and-trade -- a "grandfathered' system, in which the government gives out permits to polluters for free -- consumers wind up paying massive windfalls to the big energy companies that get free permits. [Click here to learn why]. That's why we favor auctioned cap-and-trade, since it makes polluters pay for their permits -- and the public keeps the money. Auctioned cap-and-trade is fair, effective, and efficient.

But if you can believe it, cap-and-no-trade would actually be worse for consumers and businesses than a grandfathered system. Families would pay even more for energy, while Exxon and other big energy companies would get even bigger windfalls!

Here's why.

NRDC responds to criticism of USCAP's Blueprint

This is a guest post from David Hawkins, director of the climate program at NRDC, in response to Joe Romm's post "CAP and degrade," which criticized the U.S. Climate Action Partnership's Blueprint for Legislative Action.

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Joe,

You are and will remain a respected friend. As an author and blogger, you call it as you see it on what needs to happen to emissions and our energy system if we are to avoid a climate catastrophe. And you do a great job at it.

We at NRDC have another job. We must do what has to be done to move this Congress to enact climate protection legislation that will change overnight the kinds of energy and other investments that are made, start the innovation engine spinning, bend our emissions down without further delay, and show the world that the U.S. has emerged from its cave of inaction.

We are buoyed by President-elect Obama's commitment to act but we will need action from Congress as well. The new Congress contains a growing number of climate protection champions but it also contains a core of obstructionists bent on using every tactic to block any action, other members who think global warming is not enough of a problem to warrant any real change, and members who are inclined to be helpful but not if it involves spending much political capital as they see it. We don't have time to change who the members of Congress are; we need to change the way current members think about this issue.

There are a number of ways to move Congress to act and NRDC is pursuing all that we believe will help. One important way is to engage deeper and broader support for action from the U.S. business community -- a community that until recently was dominated by outspoken opponents of any action to cut global warming pollution. The USCAP Blueprint you attack is an effort to get major American business leaders, joined with a number of U.S. NGOs, firmly committed to working to get this Congress to pass climate protection legislation. It is part of a process designed to make good legislation possible.

This past Thursday, the business members of USCAP testified to Congress that action by Congress is urgent, not only to protect the climate but to provide a foundation for economic recovery. Their testimony powerfully challenged those members of Congress whose mindset is still that we cannot afford to act now because they think climate protection means economic sacrifice. The business leaders' testimony was "yes we can" take action to protect the climate and it will help the economy, not hurt it. The members of USCAP will be a strong force and voice for action in the weeks and months ahead. Without those voices NRDC believes action in Congress would be slower and less effective than it has to be to protect the climate.

Obama's pick to head regulatory oversight agency draws criticism, sends Dave on tangent

Last week Obama announced that he'd be appointing Harvard Law professor (and prolific public intellectual) Cass Sunstein as head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

You could be forgiven for reacting to that news with a large yawn. But it's important!

First of all, OIRA is a big deal -- the conduit through which the entire suite of federal regulations passes. It can be used, as it was under Reagan and Bush, to stifle such regulations, or -- as will hopefully be the case under Obama -- to make them smarter and more effective. Ezra Klein has a great rundown on OIRA here, explaining its history and significance.

Some progressives are worried by the appointment because Sunstein is an outspoken proponent of cost-benefit analysis (CBA), which has been the death of many a progressive reg. Over on The New Republic, NYU Law professor Michael Livermore makes the case that Sunstein is a good choice because CBA needs to be reformed rather than scrapped. (It's a case he and his colleague Richard Revesz have made on Grist more than once.)

FutureGen was 'nothing more than a public relations ploy,' House study finds

In a stunning new report [PDF], two House Committees demonstrate that the Bush administration was never serious about FutureGen NeverGen, the "centerpiece" of its effort to develop "clean coal" technology. Turns out centerpieces are largely decorative.

Climate Progress has previously documented that the coal industry itself has never taken seriously the development of the one technology that could save the industry from extinction in the face of humanity's urgent need slash CO2 emissions sharply and avoid its own self-destruction [see here].

Now we learn the same was true of the Bush Administration. We learn that they killed FutureGen even after Department of Energy staff explained the implications: "affordable coal fueled CCS plants would be delayed at least 10 years" deferring "widespread deployment of CCS" until after 2030.

That means the whole "clean coal" or carbon capture and storage (CCS) effort of the past decade was an intentional fraud by all parties concerned -- and nobody should be allowed to use the absence of demonstrated CCS technology today as an excuse for weakening near-term CO2 targets or for giving the coal industry another decade to (fatally) delay serious climate action.

As the shocking House press release reveals:

In an effort to kill the FutureGen project, top officials at the Department of Energy knowingly used inaccurate project cost figures and promoted an alternative plan that career staff repeatedly warned them would not work, according to a majority staff report to Science and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) and Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Brad Miller (D-NC).

FutureGen was a highly-touted initiative announced by President George W. Bush in February of 2003 to demonstrate that coal could be changed from an environmentally challenging energy resource into an environmentally benign one by sequestering carbon dioxide emissions and eliminating other pollutants.... It would have been the first plant of this type in the world. But in January of 2008, former Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman pulled the plug on the project, reconfiguring it as a privately funded initiative with limited government subsidies. To date, nothing has come of this new initiative.

"To knowingly abandon a program that held out the hope of making a real impact in the effort to reduce greenhouse gases from coal in favor of another program that held out no hope at all-not commercially and not to provide technological innovation to capture and sequester carbon-is inexcusable," said Gordon. "All we have to show for 'Plan B' is lost time and an abandoned global leadership role."

"DOE officials knew that they were manipulating the numbers, and that the 'restructured' FutureGen would not accomplish what had been planned, but they went ahead anyway," said Subcommittee Chairman Miller. "In the process, they lost the participation of China and India, which are some of the largest users of coal in the world. The damage to U.S. leadership on "clean coal" technology, and climate change generally, cannot be overstated."

I had thought, like many others, that the Bush administration was simply incompetent in its management of the program (see here). But this wasn't benign neglect, it was malign neglect.

The entire report [PDF] is worth reading if you can stomach the Administration's audacity (of hopelessness), but let me pull out some of the highlights:

Power Past Coal communities host anti-coal events during first 100 days of Obama administration

Appalachia needs no defense: It needs more defenders.

Check out the footage of the bright blast that greeted Bo Webb, a decorated Vietnam veteran, and his community last night and today in Clay's Branch, Peachtree, W. Va. A shower of rock dust mixed with a toxic brew of diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate explosives swept down their hollow, as the Richmond-based Massey Energy behemoth detonated another round of explosives in their haste to bring down the mountain for a thin seam of coal. Nearby, children attended the Marsh Fork Elementary School, the blasting in the distance like a harbinger of Massey's brutal force -- the company is now infamously embroiled in a U.S. Supreme Court case for compromising judicial neutrality in their efforts to contribute their way into the good graces of West Virginia judges -- as 2.8 billion gallons of coal sludge held back by a 385-foot-high earthen dam hover a few football fields above the school like an accident waiting to happen.

Good morning, Appalachia!

Just another day of mountaintop removal; that process of wiping out America's natural landmarks, dumping the waste into waterways and valleys, and effectively removing historic communities from their homeplaces through a campaign of horrific blasting, dusting, poisoning, and harassment.

We've reached a new landmark in the central Appalachian coalfields of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and southwest Virginia: Over 500 mountains in one of the most diverse forests in the Americas -- the same kind of mountains that garner protection and preservation status in a blink of an eye in other regions -- -have now been eliminated from our American maps.

Five hundred mountains are gone. For what? Less than 5 percent of our nation's supply of coal, while 50 million tons of West Virginia coal are annually exported to CO2-spewing plants in countries like China.

As a new report [PDF] by Quentin Gee, Nicholas Allen and their colleagues at the Associated Students Environmental Affairs Board of UC Santa Barbara recently found, the overlooked external costs of coal further debunk the black diamond's image as a "clean" and "cheap" source of energy.

Gee and Allen write: