From home of the weather station that started it all, Marysville, CA their small town newspaper writes a scathing opinion on the California Air Resources Board.
They get it. The problem is that people that make up CARB are like clueless Al Gore clones. With a recent 340% error exposed, CARB is going along like nothing has happened. The problem is CARB chief Mary Nichols, who sees herself and her organization as above the democratic process.
Our View: Air board’s arrogance damaging
California seems intent on traveling a road to self-destruction paved with government mandates and regulations that drive businesses and jobs out of state while discouraging new job creation. A prime job-killing, business-punishing scheme is the insistence on achieving radical environmental goals, despite their real-world economic liabilities.
The California Air Resources Board has adopted a mandate that utility companies produce 33 percent of their electricity from so-called renewable resources by 2020. That’s a drastic increase over the previous 20-percent requirement, which the state still is nowhere near achieving. For some perspective, Congress, firmly controlled by a Democratic majority, refused to hike its renewable requirements even to the 20-percent level.
Compounding the state air board’s error is its arrogance. Even the state Legislature, controlled by left-leaning Democrats, failed this year to impose such an over-the-top requirement. But neither Congress nor the state Legislature’s reluctance dissuaded the Air Resources Board’s unaccountable bureaucrats from going where elected representatives fear to tread.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that air board boss Mary Nichols says the 33-percent standard is important because it “sends a strong, positive message to the market.” The market will get the message, alright. That’s part of the problem.
The message is that California energy prices will soar, on top of the added costs of huge taxpayer subsidies that will be needed to finance so-called renewable energy sources. Wind, solar and geothermal energy are all economically infeasible without massive subsidies.
Like the huge amounts of taxpayer dollars already wasted in government subsidies for the ethanol industry, other renewable-energy endeavors are likely to face similar fates. In Spain, where large tax-financed subsidies spurred its solar industry, 50,000 subsidized solar entrepreneurs now “face financial disaster” as the government realizes it can’t afford to continue propping up the industry with price guarantees, Bloomberg reports. Not only can’t Spain afford to continue subsidies that paid 10 times the wholesale price per kilowatt-hour, but for every new “green” job created by the subsidies, more than two normal jobs were lost.
Without generous tax breaks and subsidies, wind power costs $149 per megawatt hour compared with $100 for coal, according to estimates from the Energy Information Administration.
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Read the full editorial here
IMO, CARB is a clear and present danger to the livelihood of people of California, it is unchecked bureaucracy gone mad.
Addendum:
Since November 2nd, I’m getting a 3x increase in SPAM inviting me to move to/incorporate my business in Nevada. Given what lies ahead for business in California, the idea has merit.
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Sorry I did not think of this during my earlier post, but indirectly your question on NOX points to another ethanol urban legend.
Many web sources mention that ethanol added fuels cause engines to run “hot” due to the leaning out of the fuel air mixture. This is obsolete information and only applies to pre 1989 cars with carburetors. Those cars would lean out the fuel air mixture and would run a bit hot, but modern EFI (electronic fuel injection) engine management systems constantly monitor the fuel air mixture on the fly through their O2 sensor and continuously attempt to reach ideal fuel air mixture for low emissions. This is typically between 14.7:1 and 15.2:1 on gasoline, or the equivalent mixture for E85.
The sensor actually reports fuel air mixture as lambda which is 1/(the stoichiometric fuel air mixture of the fuel). For practical purposes lambda does not care what fuel you are burning, although technically there is a slight fuel dependency if the fuel differs substantially from the typical carbon hydrogen ratio of gasoline components. For ethanol added fuels, that difference is irrelevant.
On my WRX it cruises at 1.0 – 1.02 lambda and makes best power between 0.76 and 0.82 lambda on E85.
That said, the active adjustment of the fuel air mixture only occurs during “closed loop” operation when the O2 sensor is consulted for fuel air mixture information. In “open loop” such as at WOT most engine management systems ignore the O2 sensor and just consult a look up table to determine fuel supply. As a result running a non-FFV on E85 or a high ethanol fuel blend will cause the fuel air mixture to lean out under WOT.
The good news is that in the real world this is not a problem because no one stays at full throttle on the roads for more than a few seconds, and the very high octane of the ethanol blends and their high cooling power protect the engine. The modern 3 way cats can easily deal with this brief period of lean combustion and higher NOX output so actual tail pipe emissions hardly change.
As mentioned many people take advantage of ethanol cool combustion and clean burning to sneak past emissions tests by spiking their fuel tank with a couple gallons of E85, which will frequently get a near miss fail to change to a pass on the emissions screening.
There are several factors involve most of which are not intuitive, and that is why it is so hard to get many people past the popular misconceptions.
A typical gasoline engine only turns 33% of the stored fuel energy into useful work, the remainder 66% is dissipated as waste heat to the cooling system and out the exhaust pipe. Much of that waste is due to “negative work” the engine has to do to function. It only takes very small changes in that waste energy to usable energy spread to completely compensate for the difference in volumetric fuel energy.
A typical gasoline engine will make maximum power and torque if peak cylinder pressure occurs at about 12 degrees past top dead center as the piston just begins it motion down cylinder. Too early and you get huge bearing loads and detonation due to very high cylinder pressures. Too late and the piston is moving down the cylinder so fast that the burning process cannot maintain high cylinder pressures when the piston/connecting rod have ideal angles with the crank shaft.
To get that timing right, the ignition fires at anywhere from 15 – 40 degrees before the piston reaches the top of the cylinder in gasoline engines, so burning of the fuel air mixture actually begins when the piston is still trying to compress the fuel air mixture. This puts a lot of “negative work” into the system as the burning fuel air mixture tries to push the rising piston back down the cylinder.
E85 burns much faster than gasoline at high power fuel air mixtures so you can get away with less ignition advance, and since ethanol boils at 173 deg F, the evaporative cooling that occurs as the fuel air charge is compressed, is spent evaporating fuel (producing a very effecient burning fuel air mixture) not increasing pressure in the cylinder. Gasoline on the other hand has much lower heat capacity and latent heat of evaporation and some of its components will not boil until they reach temperatures over 380 deg F.
As a result you have lower cylinder pressures during the compression stroke (less negative work and less heat loss to the cooling system) and then once the faster burning ethanol fuel ignites, it quickly builds pressure at the correct time to get maximum leverage on the crank shaft without needing excessive ignition advance.
Also due to the higher heat capacity of the combustion gases, pressure drops more slowly as the piston descends the cylinder. The net result is more area under the pressure time curve even though the peak pressure is lower.
That is a highly simplified explanation but it is that sort of subtle changes in how the engine produces and loses energy in the combustion process that make E85 such an excellent fuel.
Most modern engine management systems have approximately +/- 25% fuel trim authority built into the engine management system and will automatically compensate for any change in the fuel that needs less change in fuel air mixture. FFV’s simply widen that tuning range to +/-40% or so, and include a means for the engine management system to guess what fuel you have in the tank.
E85 is typically rated at 105 octane by the conventional octane rating methods, but the motor octane test is not appropriate for ethanol fuels and gives lower numbers than it should, because it requires intake air temperatures that are unreasonable for alcohol fuels and their high cooling power due to evaporation.
The real world “road octane” of common pump E85 is widely believed to be in the 112- 120 octane range because to get the same performance level from the engine you need to burn gasoline of that high octane and tune accordingly.
When I was actively drag racing my WRX, I was getting detonation on 110 octane racing gasoline that cost $5.00 a gallon, at 16 psi peak boost, but can run straight pump E85 (costing $1.79/gallon at the time) at 27 psi peak boost without any detonation. Some folks run 30-35 psi boost on E85 with no detonation.
It is a very forgiving performance fuel if the fuel air mixtures are anywhere near correct.
Larry
Smokey, no fair.
You linked to the Sugar chart, and asked why sugar went up. I merely pointed out that the low point on your chart coincided with the low point for Oil, and that the high point occurred within a couple of months of the High in oil.
Most analysts point to the rapid economic growth in Non-OECD Countries as the primary causative factor in the Growth of Commodity Prices. I don’t think what I did was “cherry-picking.”
Minor correction :
The sensor actually reports fuel air mixture as lambda which is 1/(the stoichiometric fuel air mixture of the fuel).
Should read:
The sensor actually reports fuel air mixture as lambda which is
(measured fuel air mixture)/(the stoichiometric fuel air mixture of the fuel).
Good summary here — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-fuel_ratio
Kum Dollison says:
November 13, 2010 at 8:10pm
“I was looking at Appalachian Anthracite. I believe it’s what is traded on the exchanges. I believe it’s up somewhere over $60.00/ton, right now.
In any case, it will go up more than wind does, I betcha.”
There is a reason Appalachian Anthracite is trading at over $60/ton. There simply is not that much of it left. Look at the map shown in the link below. See the two little green blobs in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Those are the only two places that produce Anthracite coal in the US and it’s SO2 content is 1.5 times the sulfur content of Powder River Basin coal. Anthracite coal production is approximately 1.5% of the total US production.
http://www.teachcoal.org/aboutcoal/articles/coalreserves.html
“”””” Norman says:
November 16, 2010 at 6:44 pm
I’ve had asthma for thirty-odd years. I find the sulfurous smoke from fireworks and from my black powder rifle to be soothing to my lungs and sinuses.. These people really need to get out more. And run with a better crowd. “””””
However, isn’t it also true that Apalachian Anthracite is also a “low sulphur” coal when you rate the sulphur per BTU rather than per ton. The Western so-called low sulphur coals are actually higher sulphur per BTU, is my recollection.
“”””” hotrod (Larry L) says:
November 16, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Sorry I did not think of this during my earlier post, but indirectly your question on NOX points to another ethanol urban legend. “”””
Thanks; yes I recall that negative work part because of ignition before TDC. And of course the whole idea of dual ignition; specially in large capacity engines (like an RR-Merlin for example) was to speed up the flame propagation; by launching it from two locations instead of one.