Big differences seen compared to EIA estimate.
Documents (link to PDF) obtained from the U.S. Treasury under the Freedom of Information Act by the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute were released on Tuesday.
The U.S. Treasury Department admits that a “cap and trade” system for regulating greenhouse gas emissions could cost every household $1,761 a year. According to the CBS News story, “the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent”.
This comes in way over claims that the EIA says:
The Climate Bill Will Cost You Just 23¢ a Day, EIA Analysis Shows. This works out to $83.95 per year. Big difference.
CEI Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy Myron Ebell on the accumulating evidence on the costs of cap and trade:
“The bill’s proponents talk about protecting consumers while intermittently acknowledging that cap-and-trade can only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by dramatically raising the price of energy derived from coal, oil and natural gas.
President Obama said during the campaign last year that ‘under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.’ Dr. Peter Orszag, now head of the White House Office and Management and Budget, testified last year when he was head of the Congressional Budget Office that ‘price increases would be essential to the success of a cap-and-trade program.’”
Jeff Green,
Remember, I’m on your side. A lot of the folks on this site are a bunch of science / mathematics geeky types and they don’t understand that the future belongs to those who have vision – and that imagining a future the way we want it to be is all that is required to make it happen. Facts are just details that get in the way of Vision.
If you really want to beat them at their own game, explain how the smart grid will take care of the intermittency of both solar and wind power. Will the smart grid cause the wind to blow at all times or does it just make the sun shine at night? I’m not too clear on that, you see, our local electrical cooperative has already installed smart grid technology and it pretty much just allows them to turn off our water heater when electric rates peak (they can also read my meter realtime from the office). I’m not really sure if load shedding is quite the same as “taking care of intermittency”, but when my wife gets pissed (frequently) about running out of hot water while she’s shaving her legs, well it’s just the stupid smart grid again.
Hey Jeff Green: My post didn’t get through over at CP. And you wonder why people throw around the socialist, fascist phrase when discussing your side!
Jeff Green (16:09:53) : As much as you don’t want to hear it, government is the only answer.
What you say here is un-Constitutional and un-American.
Government getting out of the way is the answer. America was much healthier when government was small and not felt in “we the people’s” lives—i.e., when it followed the Constitution. I am better equipped to know how to use my own money, raise my own children, and give to charities of my own choosing.
The government is only for defending me and all the others in this Nation.
But now the government has become a ‘domestic’ enemy of “we the people”.
The idea that government is the answer belongs to Communism, Fascism, etc. Surely someone with a college degree knows this. I think you do know it, but you haven’t taken the time to sit back and process it.
A lot of the folks on this site are a bunch of science / mathematics geeky types and they don’t understand that the future belongs to those who have vision – and that imagining a future the way we want it to be is all that is required to make it happen.
And some of us are history types and have our own (very) grand vision. It is, however, at variance with that which you propose: Imagination is all very well, but as Edison (not known for his lack of imagination) observed, it comes down to 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. In the meantime it will not do to criminalize elbow grease.
Jeff Green (17:10:13) : The plans are there and it will work. Denmark is at 20% now. Spain and Portugal are both very aggressive in bringing more wind and solar on now.
Plans are fine. They are worth about the paper they are printed on. I’ve done a lot of planning for many projects. They are largely used to measure where you were wrong and how far off the price was.
Wind can deliver intermittent power. Same problem for solar. Now demand is not so intermittent. Exactly how will you keep English homes warm on a cold night when the wind has stopped? That happens with astounding regularity due to the nature of the weather there.
Here in California (and in places like Spain) the solar power arrives along with peak AC demand, so you can peak clip the AC demand. But that does nothing for cold and darker parts of the world (which is where a lot of the present population live) and does nothing for night time AC nor car charging ‘off peak’ which is also in the dark.
Storage will not get you out of that box. Only generation will.
Why? Efficiency. Charge / discharge on a battery wastes energy. About 10% for the very best. About 30% for the more economical ones. Then there are losses in the charger and the inverter too. That can be another 10% (5% each, assuming they are of stellar design). So before you begin you have lost about 20% to 40% of your ‘capacity’. Now since anything over about 20% wind destabilizes grids to the point of failure, you have bit of a problem here…
The more wind and solar you add, with storage to make up for their down intervals, the less efficient you become.
Do you know what the worlds most efficient engine is? The very best in the whole world? No, not the GE gas turbine (though it is close at about 52%).
It is a Diesel. 54% IIRC.
No mater what you do, you will be less efficient than that.
Now your prime mover can be gasoline, gas turbine, whatever. Unless it is that Diesel, you have already got a lower efficiency. Now you take some loses in the generator, the transformer, the transmission lines, the transformer at the other end, then the electric motor has some losses. At the end of the line, you have far less than the initial efficiency. Add a battery charger, battery, inverter and it is even lower. You are rapidly headed to 30% or even 25% efficiency. For the car, you get even lower efficiency since you get rolling losses and drive line losses and…
Please note: It does not matter if you put that battery, charger, inverter into an electric car or a storage system. It still will waste energy and reduce efficiency. You can not cheat the laws of thermodynamics.
So at the end of the day, you have a simple choice: Burn one gallon of Diesel fuel in a Diesel engine vehicle, or burn 2 to 3 gallons of Diesel equivalent in an electric generator of some sort and take the electric system losses. You may be happy with that, I’m not.
Smart grid will bring on an efficiency of about 16%
Which will not quite make up for the charge / discharge losses of your power storage system. It’s a negative sum game you are playing.
Iwth investment in energy efficiency in regular society another 20% can be saved.
Flat out dreaming.
With plug in hybrids reach into the millions the smart grid can tap into their battery banks for utility storage.
And you have allowed 20% minimum losses for the charger, battery charge discharge cycle, inverter? And 1% / day for whatever capacity is in the charged state? (typical good battery standby losses). And you have allowed for the capital costs to replace those batter packs after 3 years or 1000 cycles of charge discharge (common specs)? Oh, and you have allowed for the fact that a 90% efficient charge cycle battery drops considerably as it ages so that 10% charge / discharge loss will only be on the first day you plug in. It will drop consistently from that day forward…
Please, go find a power engineer and a battery engineer and after they are done with you, spend some time working out the logistics of building out even a single building of infrastructure. Your rampant speculations are full of great imaginings and no practical experience nor technical understandings.
Try this, call your local utility. Ask them the lead time to get a 750 kVA transformer installed. Then ask them how long for 2. Then 10. They will likely hang up when you ask for 10, so be sure to start with 1.
When we did this for our project, it was 2 years to get one. If we wanted a second one, they could start to build it after that construction work station was done building the first one … If you are going to charge a bunch of 45 kVA cars, you will need one of these for about every 10 to 20 such cars. (You don’t know when they will all be plugged in at the same time, but I would bet it will be just after “commute home” at peak power demand mid afternoon…)
These power equpment things are not just kept sitting around. The first one they installed for us was a dud. They gave us the ONE SPARE they had for the western region… and everybody prayed it would work. If it didn’t, we would have been looking at the East Coast and folks would have been asking who was going to be down for 2 years if another one died…
David Ball (19:40:13) :
[I did it the way it would have been done in the past . I know first hand why life spans were very short. Do you have this delusion that living off grid was easy? You can not bait me. Our discussion will go in the direction I want it to. Reason being; that I am not allowed to post on the sites you frequent (Open Mind) my (snip). I will admit that I may be wrong, but before we can discuss it, you will have to acknowledge that you may also be wrong. Or go away]
WHy not let down your defenses a little bit. THis really isn’t a war. You will definitely be allowed on the site, but with a discussion of science as the basis. If all you have is just a political rant, then its just a waste of our time. Most of my conversation is based in science.
The reason I asked you about your living off grid is that I have solar electric energy on my home. I actually enjoy the idea of off grid living and respect it a great deal. I understand it to be a harder working life. And you are right I probably couldn’t handle the lifestyle you have chosen.
I have been teaching renewable energy for 10 years now. THe interest is real.
Jeff Green (19:19:00) : “Voluntary standards failed under the Bush administration.”
I can see you are a political animal. Clanging the ‘Bush administration’ bell is a dead give-away. I can only expect talk of Dick Cheney now somewhere down the line.
I think I was assuming you had a broader viewpoint than that. That was why I replied to you. So it is a let down to see you revolving around the usual, hackneyed party line.
This is my last reply to you.
where are the batteries?
Well, if they ever do come up with the superbattery (and they may) and are therefore able to save/store all that unused power from the grid, all bets are off.
evanmjones (20:06:10) : …as Edison (not known for his lack of imagination) observed, it comes down to 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration…
Edison’s imagination, inspiration, and perspiration or his warehouse full of worker’s imagination, inspiration, and perspiration? 😉
HEY!!!
Stop making this a Jeff Green blog post! You’re all looking like fools. Enough already. Just ignore the troll. Sheesh.
DGallagher (19:49:10) :
Jeff Green,
[Remember, I’m on your side. A lot of the folks on this site are a bunch of science / mathematics geeky types and they don’t understand that the future belongs to those who have vision – and that imagining a future the way we want it to be is all that is required to make it happen. Facts are just details that get in the way of Vision.
If you really want to beat them at their own game, explain how the smart grid will take care of the intermittency of both solar and wind power. Will the smart grid cause the wind to blow at all times or does it just make the sun shine at night? I’m not too clear on that, you see, our local electrical cooperative has already installed smart grid technology and it pretty much just allows them to turn off our water heater when electric rates peak (they can also read my meter realtime from the office). I’m not really sure if load shedding is quite the same as “taking care of intermittency”, but when my wife gets pissed (frequently) about running out of hot water while she’s shaving her legs, well it’s just the stupid smart grid again]
For smart grid to work it needs to connect most or all of the grids across the United States. This will allow the renewable energies that are producing to be routed to where they are needed. This would also be a form of peak shaving avoiding co2 emissions and using less energy to get the same job done.
For your wife’s sake, possibly go to gas instead of electricity.
Edison’s imagination, inspiration, and perspiration or his warehouse full of worker’s imagination, inspiration, and perspiration? 😉
Yes.
Gene Nemetz (20:10:52) :
[Jeff Green (19:19:00) : “Voluntary standards failed under the Bush administration.”
I can see you are a political animal. Clanging the ‘Bush administration’ bell is a dead give-away. I can only expect talk of Dick Cheney now somewhere down the line.
I think I was assuming you had a broader viewpoint than that. That was why I replied to you. So it is a let down to see you revolving around the usual, hackneyed party line.
This is my last reply to you]
You guys are tough cranky bunch. LOL
Lets go a little deeper than that. Businesses are a race to the cheapest price. which is fine. What businesses also want is an even playing field. And that is fair too. With cap and trade we can make even rules across the United States. And the next field to even out is across the world. We will see what comes about.
One worker in particular by the name of Tesla
Jeff Green (14:55:13) : Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. The reason the CBO doesn’t estimate Waxman Markey to cost so much is largely because it doesn’t do anything but transfer money in circles. Many of the really INSANE elements of the bill had to be stripped out, and backdoor deals cut all around to get that pile of crap passed. This is one reason why Hansen doesn’t like it. It doesn’t do much of anything but waste money. But what Waxman Markey provides in spades is a Trojan Horse for truly destructive legislation that would follow. Any estimate of cost today is meaningless because we don’t know what we will get until the Senate responds with their bill, and all those that would follow. There is no way to destroy this country’s energy infrastucture (particularly with no feasible shovel ready plan to replace it) and accomplish anything but failure.
Jeff Green,Did you even read my post? My post was political and non-scientific and yours wasn’t ? As with most greenies, they don’t go outside. You haven’t admitted you might be wrong. Endy story
DGallagher, stop and re-read your own post. Do you not even see the slippery slope you are on? Nice cheerleading by the way. Are you guys meeting for Lattes later on?
E.M.Smith (20:06:38)
I am definitely an optimist when it comes to Renewable energy. With proper listening to the skeptics, it helps to cover all the bases where things might go wrong. I agree with quite a few of your presentations of inefficiencies.
Advanced coal burning is at best about 40% efficient and then you have the inefficiencies of the transmission system after that. I’ve always been annoyed with all the waste heat that just goes into the air. If we are giong to keep on using coal for awhile it is actually possible to capture 60 to 80% of coal energy.
One of my favorite energy storage schemes for utility is CAES. Compressed air energy storage. In Iowa they are building one with an attached wind field. There the wind comes more at night when electric buying rates are low and the demand isn’t for crap. By storing it at night, they can sell the energy during the day when the rates are higher. It also provides energy when the demand is highest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage
This is bogus. The CEI spin on the Treasury analysis (which isn’t really an analysis) has been totally debunked.
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/dhawkins/climate_bill_slanders.html
Jeff Green, you stated, “Business as usual will give us an increase of about 5 to 6 degrees average temp by 2100.”
This would imply global temperature increases of about 0.6 to 0.7 degrees C per decade for the next nine decades. Given that temperatures for the past 30 years have increased at an average of about 0.13 degrees C per decade, at what point in time do you expect global temperatures to start increasing five times faster than they have been for the past three decades?
The cost of cap and trade will indeed place an economic stranglehold on what is left of the industrial world. Once in a while the beleaguered skeptics of AGW need to take the offense, and point out the benefit of CO2, both to life on earch as well as the economic benefit to society. I copy below a short previous post on a less used blog
It is cogent to point out the the increased bio-mass of the earth appears to be the result of a lineal symbiotic relationship with increasing CO2, while the negative effect of any warming from increasing CO2, decreases exponentially. The benefit is, for a time at least, nearly lineal, the negative decreases exponentially. About 75% of the warming expected to happen from a doubling of CO2 should have already occurred. Therefore the benefits of the finale doubling should far outweigh the negative of a litttle additional warming.
Due to the benefit of increased CO2 we (the earth) currently produce a crop yeild that formerly would have required at least 10% more water. What is the economic value of this benefit. I would love to have, say a Ross Mckitrick do a study on this. Do anyone have access to Mr Mckitrick?
I’m afraid $1,761 is just the tip of the iceberg, as they are not taking full account of job losses and GDP shrinkage, among other related things. However, we must look on the bright side: If you thought cap-and-trade was dead in the Senate, now it’s really dead. There are just too many Democratic senators who are already in electoral trouble, or would put themselves in trouble by voting for it, and not enough Republicans (if any) who are receptive.
Off of Topic, but important.
Who needs frogs? Hundreds of frogs singing at once in the fields near BioCab’s offices.
Extinct or endangered species? Hah! You have to hear them spreading their croaks, looking for couples under the thunderstorm. It is Frog’s Valentine’s Day.
They only had said “tomorrow”… Today is “tomorrow”.
Actually one trillion would be 1000 billion. But really this is splitting hairs. If someone cannot comprehend 1 trillion then they’re not going to comprehend 1000 billion. To me that kind of notation is more confusing.
Um, sorry. “Fools” might have been excessive.
E.M.Smith (20:06:38) :
Excellent post, Mr. Smith, as per usual.