Senate Minority Leader Calls Energy Bill 'Troublesome'

[jpak]

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200712031710DOWJONESDJONLINE000703_FORTUNE5.htm

WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Monday threw cold water on a major energy bill that Democrats are hoping to pass before the end of the year, saying it contains "troublesome" measures that would force electric utilities to generate a greater share of their power from renewable sources.

"That would be very troublesome for all of us in the Southeast," McConnell told reporters. "That's a mandatory rate increase and would produce a lot of difficulty."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has been pushing to require utilities to generate 15% of their power from renewable sources such as wind and solar power amid concern about greenhouse gases that are produced by coal-fired electric utilities.

Southern Co. (SO), which serves customers in Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Mississippi, is among the utilities that are complaining, citing a shortage of wind power in the region that would require it to import renewable energy from other states. The result, it says, would be to drive up costs, which it would pass along to consumers.

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[GliderGuider]

1. Whaddya know, so do I.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5imPz0z6szykAL-CAKZDEZOAiDREgD8TAS08G0

It also would require a huge ramp up in the use of ethanol — both from corn and cellulosic material such as prairie grass and wood chips — over the next 15 years to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022, a sevenfold increase from today.

36 billion gallons a year? 2.3 million barrels a day? They're fucking insane.

[Nihil]

2. Not too worried about that bit ...

> It also would require a huge ramp up in the use of ethanol ...
> over the next 15 years to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022,
> a sevenfold increase from today.

I am confident that the plan will change drastically before even half
of that timescale has been covered. A couple of years of serious water
shortages (starting now) will force people to work the numbers and
realise how dumb a plan it really is.
:hi:

[GliderGuider]

4. Will that be before or after

they have arm-twisted African, Asian and South American agri-business to grow SUV go-juice for export rather than food for their own people? Before or after that same agri-business has seized the opportunity to displace yet more thousands of smallhold farmers by fair means or foul? It is indeed a transparently dumb plan, but dumb plans are a lot easier to accept if their costs are borne by others. If your average driver knows there will be fuel in the pump when he drives up, he doesn't much care where it came from or who might be suffering to get it there so long as its no-one he knows personally.

Last night I went to a seminar on how African agriculture is trying to cope in an age of climate chaos, and biofuels came up briefly. Apparently a lot of African governments are thinking about (or actually in the process of) increasing their export revenues by encouraging their large industrial farms to move into biofuels. Doing this is taking critical land out of food production, driving up the cost of fertilizer, diverting scarce water away from food production - all while Africa is facing critical continent-wide food shortages due to failing rainfall from climate change.

This bill will only increase the pressures on the food supply in that part of the world, and that pressure will not ease due to some socio-economic epiphany in the US mid-west.

[Nihil]

5. Good point.

I read "use" as "use & grow", happy in the knowledge that the current
and future droughts would bring a slap of sanity to the situation.
I had forgotten that the corporate pillagers would be in action long
before this bit home in the US. Sorry.
:-(

[Kolesar]

3. They need incentives to install PV generation at homes and small businesses

...as a "distributed generation" renewable energy portfolio.

I cannot help but think that it would be cheaper to place photovoltaics on homes to meet demand during the afternoon peak hours than to finance natural gas or other peak generation plants. Those peak generation plants are expensive and deliver electricity at a cost that is a multiple of the base electricity rates. Photovoltaic generation can probably meet those prices right now.

Just tilt the arrays a little bit to the West.

The consumers in the Southern Co. are, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Mississippi, have the highest consumption on electricity in the nation. It averages 1400 kW*hour/month. The national average is ~1000 kW*hour/month. Ohioans use ~900kW*hour/month on average.