Markell, PSC sued over Bloom Energy deal

Resident, competitor say state aid for Bloom is discriminatory

A Middletown resident and a Connecticut fuel cell manufacturer have filed suit against Gov. Jack Markell and the Public Service Commission, seeking to invalidate the law passed last year that enables a Bloom Energy factory and electrical projects in Delaware.

John Nichols and FuelCell Energy Inc., of Danbury, Conn., filed suit in U.S. District Court in Delaware on Wednesday, also seeking to invalidate a surcharge for Delmarva Power ratepayers that will subsidize two energy-generating clusters operated by a Bloom subsidiary.


Last year, lawmakers changed state code to allow Delmarva Power to count purchases from Bloom Energy’s solid-oxide fuel cell servers toward its state renewable energy purchase requirements.

After receiving PSC approval, Delmarva agreed to pay for Bloom to put 30 megawatts of its electricity onto the regional grid from two electrical projects in New Castle County.

READ MORE:  http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20120622/BUSINESS06/306220016/Markell-PSC-sued-over-Bloom-Energy-deal?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|Home|p&nclick_check=1

N.C. Senate approves sea level calculation bill

RALEIGH, N.C.

The North Carolina Senate has approved a bill that ignores scientists' warnings of rising sea levels.
Senators approved the bill on a 34-to-11 vote Tuesday. The measure received little fanfare and no senators spoke in opposition to the measure.

The bill now goes back to the House for a vote.

HB 819 says that only the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission can calculate how fast the sea is rising for state governmental purposes and those calculations must be based on historic trends, which are much lower than the science panel's projections.

A state-appointed science panel warned sea levels could rise by more than three feet by 2100 and threaten more than 2,000 square miles of coastal land.

READ MORE:  http://hamptonroads.com/2012/06/nc-senate-approves-sea-level-calculation-bill

How sea level rules would hinder N.C.’s coast

The recent committee approval of House Bill 819 in the state Senate was, as expected, widely criticized by sea level rise “believers.” Members of NC 20, who are labeled “deniers,” are routinely accused of not understanding science and for requesting legislative intervention based purely on economics. Let’s take a look at those accusations.

First, note that fears of global warming and accelerated sea level rise are reminiscent of previous climate change concerns, only in reverse. Newsweek magazine, in the April 28, 1975, edition, in an article entitled “The Cooling World,” warned of “drastic decline in food production” and opined that “resulting famines would be catastrophic” due to global cooling. Foremost among the scientists predicting this doomsday scenario were those from NOAA, the very agency now part of the current doomsday scenario of global warming, massive ice melt and a “hockey stick” sea level rise. If the climate change community was totally wrong 37 years ago, shouldn’t we be a little bit leery of their prediction today of a massive sea level rise 88 years hence?

Second, despite warnings of an accelerating sea level rise, Dr. Robert Dean, professor emeritus at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and his co-author, Dr. James Houston, director emeritus of the Engineer Research and Development Center, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, concluded in a recent paper (which Dean summarized in a recent presentation to NC 20): “The results of all of our analyses are consistent – there is no indication of an overall world-wide sea level acceleration in the 20th Century data. Rather, it appears that a weak deceleration was present.”

READ MORE:  http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/06/20/2147302/how-sea-level-rules-would-hinder.html

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/06/20/2147302/how-sea-level-rules-would-hinder.html#storylink=cpy

EPA blasted for requiring oil refiners to add type of fuel that's merely hypothetical

Federal regulations can be maddening, but none more so than a current one that demands oil refiners use millions of gallons of a substance, cellulosic ethanol, that does not exist.

"As ludicrous as that sounds, it's fact," says Charles Drevna, who represents refiners. "If it weren't so frustrating and infuriating, it would be comical."

And Tom Pyle of the Institute of Energy Research says, "the cellulosic biofuel program is the embodiment of government gone wild."

Refiners are at their wit's end because the government set out requirements to blend cellulosic ethanol back in 2005, assuming that someone would make it. Seven years later, no one has.

"None, not one drop of cellulosic ethanol has been produced commercially. It's a phantom fuel," says Pyle. "It doesn't exist in the market place."

Read more:  http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/06/21/regulation-requires-oil-refiners-use-millions-gallons-fuel-that-is-nonexistent/

Natural Gas a Raging Bull in Its Battle With Coal

For U.S. power plant operators, the economics of natural gas may have already dethroned coal as the nation's key source of electrical power.

Source: AEP AEP’s Philip Sporn coal-fired power plant in West Virginia. It was partially retired in 2011 and is slated to be entirely mothballed by 2016.

"Natural gas is, and is likely to remain, the low-cost option for new generation capacity," says Mark Fulton, managing director of Deutsche Bank's DB Climate Change Advisors.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration, EIA, estimates that nearly 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas are recoverable in shale formations, like the Marcellus one that spans New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, significantly boosting national gas reserves to what some estimate is a 100-plus-year supply.

READ MORE:    http://www.cnbc.com/id/47279731

$9 Billion in ‘Stimulus’ for Solar, Wind Projects Made 910 Final Jobs -- $9.8 Million Per Job

(CNSNews.com) –

The Obama administration distributed $9 billion in economic “stimulus” funds to solar and wind projects in 2009-11 that created, as the end result, 910 “direct” jobs -- annual operation and maintenance positions -- meaning that it cost about $9.8 million to establish each of those long-term jobs.

At the same time, those green energy projects also created, in the end, about 4,600 “indirect” jobs – positions indirectly supported by the annual operation and maintenance jobs -- which means they cost about $1.9 million each ($9 billion divided by 4,600).

Combined (910 + 4,600 = 5,510), the direct and indirect jobs cost, on average, about $1.63 million each to produce.

READ MORE:  http://cnsnews.com/news/article/9-billion-stimulus-solar-wind-projects-made-910-final-jobs-98-million-job

Global warming: second thoughts of an environmentalist

Fritz Vahrenholt, one of Germany's earliest green energy investors, is not convinced that humanity is causing catastrophic global warming. 

 

Scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are quite certain: by using fossil fuels man is currently destroying the climate and our future. We have one last chance, we are told: quickly renounce modern industrial society – painfully but for a good cause.

For many years, I was an active supporter of the IPCC and its CO2 theory. Recent experience with the UN's climate panel, however, forced me to reassess my position. In February 2010, I was invited as a reviewer for the IPCC report on renewable energy. I realised that the drafting of the report was done in anything but a scientific manner. The report was littered with errors and a member of Greenpeace edited the final version. These developments shocked me. I thought, if such things can happen in this report, then they might happen in other IPCC reports too.

Good practice requires double-checking the facts. After all, geoscientists have checked the pre-industrial climate, over the past 10,000 years: this isolates natural climate drivers. According to the IPCC, natural factors hardly play any role in today's climate so we would expect a rather flat and boring climate history.

READ MORE:   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9338939/Global-warming-second-thoughts-of-an-environmentalist.html