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factor is carbon emissions, and there seems to be a consensus that the
US will pass some sort of Cap and Trade law soon that will force a
reduction of carbon emissions into American air. For centuries, humans
have been pumping increasing amounts of carbon into our global
atmosphere, which can only hold a finite amount of such carbon. The use
of the atmosphere as a place to dump our combustion waste has always
been considered free and that, in turn, has kept the cost of energy from
combusting fossil fuels much cheaper than it should be. The atmosphere,
of course, is about to have its say, either by creating so much hell on
earth that we are going to change our ways or, in the extreme case,
simply shutting down many of us and much of our civilization.

Someday soon, we are going to start paying for using the atmosphere as a
giant waste dump, and it is going to be expensive. Now we have the
debate about what to do next. Obviously, any change on this scale will
produce winners and losers, and they are already at each other's
throats. The forum was treated to a running debate between a speaker who
plans to build nuclear power plants up and down the East Coast, if the
federal government will guarantee the loans, and an environmentalist
legislator who thinks this a bad idea.

An underlying theme of the presentations is that increased efficiency
and conservation is by far the cheapest way to keep having adequate
electricity without harming the environment or coming to blows over
nuclear generators versus carbon sequestration.

The presentations were full of interesting factoids. It was impressive
that it now takes 90,000 BTUs a square foot to run the average building
for a year, but this can be reduced to 40,000 or even 35,000 if the
latest building technologies are applied. Improvements like this, of
course, could take serious pressure off our demand for energy and might
just let us get by with some semblance of life as we know it. The
problem is our millions of buildings are owned by millions of people who
don't see the declining capacity of the atmosphere to continue taking
our waste carbon or the cost of energy as a problem - as yet.

It was interesting that if we put our wind generators on 300 foot rather
than 140 foot towers, they just might make a lot more electricity in
places we don't think have much wind. The government is building an
extra-high generator in Colorado to test this out. There is still a ways
to go, but all sorts of carbon-free power generation technologies -
wind, waves, solar, geothermal, flowing water - are coming along nicely.
Most think that as soon as we start charging consumers for dumping
carbon into the atmosphere these will become economically competitive in
a big hurry.

Another important aspect of our power situation is that we had better
get busy rebuilding the national electric grid and making it smart. The
current grid is decades old and is prone to expensive failures. In fact,
there are already many small, unpublicized failures each year that are
costing us billions in lost productivity. The bottom line of all this
seems to be that capping the carbon, increasing the efficiency of power
consumption and building a smart, robust, failure-resistant electric
grid is the way to go. Someday soon, Congress will get this message.

The presentations were well-intentioned; however, lurking just outside
the room was the 800-pound gorilla of peak oil. Although there was much
discussion of increased fuel costs, particularly about natural gas for
power generation and rapidly rising costs of building new
infrastructures, there still seems to be little appreciation out there
of what much higher liquid fuel costs and eventual shortages will do to
our economy and to the feasibility of rebuilding our power generation,
networks and buildings for a low emissions future.

http://www.fcnp.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3329:the-peak-oil-crisis-americas-electricity&catid=13:news-stories&Itemid=76


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