Recently in Energy Category

I'm not the only one questioning the wisdom of blending ethanol with gasoline. It's not just the net energy gain or lose, the decreased fuel economy compared with unblended gasoline, or the problems ethanol causes in fuel systems. There's also the economic effects, particularly the always ubiquitous unintended consequences ethanol brings to the equation.

...[M]aking ethanol (grain alcohol) from corn...is a fairly straightforward and cheap process, so even without the federal subsidy, so-called "E10" gas (90 percent gasoline, 10 percent ethanol) is cheaper than straight 100 percent stuff. But instead of simply allowing refiners to mix in up to 10 percent ethanol if the market and production environment made it favorable, the law mandated a steep ramp-up to full sales of nothing but E10 in a very short time. On the surface we would move that much closer to energy independence with this law. Well and good.

The not-so-advertised reasons for the law have to do with the strength of the agricultural lobby. The E10 mandate was a tremendous windfall for everybody who grows corn. While some ethanol from corn was being used voluntarily as a fuel additive before 2007, the mandate caused this use to skyrocket. By 2011, according to the Mosbacher Institute report by economist James Griffin, 37 percent of the entire U.S. corn crop went toward ethanol production. And corn prices soared from $2.50 per bushel up to as high as $7.50.

If the only people hurt were U.S. food consumers (not everybody drives a car, but everybody eats), it would be bad enough. But the U.S. grows and sells more corn than any other nation, and much of it is exported to poorer countries, where it is a staple in many diets. While the rise in corn prices was not solely responsible for the worldwide inflation in food costs that led to food riots in many nations in recent years, the timing is suspicious, and there is no question that the EISA law led to hardships for many poor people around the world who were now even less able to afford to eat.

It's not too often those pushing for mandates look at the consequences they may create. As long as those unintended consequences don't affect them, they don't care. Call it yet another proof that crony capitalism (better yet just call it crony economics because it really has nothing to do with capitalism) always causes more harm than good because only a few benefit and everyone else pays the price, with little if any return for what they pay.

We've all been reading about the so-called "Smart Grid", a system that allows utilities to have better information about and control over their systems. Smart grids are supposed to be more efficient and cost effective because the utilities will be able to tailor system operations to demand on a minute by minute basis. The biggest problem with implementing the communications needed in order to make smart grids possible.

Frankly, I always thought the utilities would use encrypted low power radio links (telemetry only), fiber optic networks, or even power line communications to link the control and telemetry systems back to the operations centers. I also thought they would use closed systems, meaning there would be no direct connection to public data networks (the Internet), keeping them separate for security purposes.

I was wrong.

It appears a number of utilities are looking to use the public cellular networks to provide communications for their smart grid systems.

This is an idea that leaves them open to being compromised by hackers. And while some may claim that encryption will help keep the systems secure, there is no such thing as a "secure" system if there is a publicly accessible portion to the network. Almost any encryption system can be cracked given enough time and effort, either through brute force decryption, the exploitation of overlooked system vulnerabilities, or through critical information obtained from someone inside the utility.

This is a bad idea, one that can lead to compromised electrical, water, and gas utility systems being brought down through cyber attacks by groups unfriendly to the US.

Renewable fuels have been in the news for years now, with much of the emphasis on ethanol and so-called bio-diesel. Both of these fuels come directly or indirectly from food crops. Some bio-diesel is derived from vegetable oils and some from algae based conversion systems. The one big problem with any of these sources is that all of them take up considerable land to grow and the conversion process is neither cheap or easy.

But that may be changing.

A new process developed by UCLA may take the crops out of bio-fuels and allow for large scale production an alternative fuel called isobutanol, a "higher alcohol" with an energy density approaching that of gasoline. Its feedstock? Carbon dioxide.

Using a modified bacteria for the conversion and electricity as the sole energy source, the system has the potential to be "more efficient than the biological system."

Photosynthesis is the process of converting light energy to chemical energy and storing it in the bonds of sugar. There are two parts to photosynthesis -- a light reaction and a dark reaction. The light reaction converts light energy to chemical energy and must take place in the light. The dark reaction, which converts CO2 to sugar, doesn't directly need light to occur.

--snip--

[James] Liao explained that with biological systems, the plants used require large areas of agricultural land. However, because Liao's method does not require the light and dark reactions to take place together, solar panels, for example, can be built in the desert or on rooftops.

As nice as electric cars may be, their batteries still can't store enough energy or be recharged fast enough to make them practical except for local travel. Liquid fuels have a much higher energy density and it takes little time to refill a fuel tank. If the process created by Liao and his team at UCLA can be scaled up, the need for growing food crops for use as bio-fuel feedstock will disappear. That means agricultural operations can go back to growing crops for food rather than to turn into fuel.

According to Liao this process can also be used to generate a variety of other chemicals as well.

If this pans out, I can see it as a far better and less expensive means of generating bio-fuels than the present system.

Evergreen Solar, a company formerly based in Devens, Massachusetts, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, closed it's plant, and moved its production to China. To add insult to injury, now Evergreen wants permission from the court to walk away from it's plant in Massachusetts. This is after it had received over $31 million grants, tax, lease initiatives, and other considerations from Massachusetts.

The Bay State taxpayers pony up the cash for yet another "green" company, and in the end the company takes the money and its assets and heads to China. I figure $31 million is just the beginning. As one commenter opined:

It's always fun and easy to spend other people's money. Now the state can spend $20mil on investigating what happened, $30mil on lawyers pressing charges, and then lose the entire case.

That's really adding insult to injury. But then, it's the Obama Way. (See Solyndra.)

We know the strangest things come out of California, including social fads, weird fashion, even weirder laws, and totally FUBAR'd educational theories.

But going to war against vampires?

Not all is as it appears to be.

California has declared war on vampires, but this time it's no Hollywood monster flick.

The state will be the first in the nation to target so-called vampire battery chargers that suck up and waste as much as 60 percent of the electricity they consume. The California Energy Commission voted 3-0 on Thursday to regulate such power-sapping chargers despite objections by consumer product makers.

So there won't be vampire hunting squads out there trying to eradicate the bloodsuckers, just lawmakers and bureaucrats trying to eliminate phantom power loads. Wouldn't that make them ghostbusters and not vampire hunters?

I got a bit of sticker shock today when I pulled up to the gas pump at our local BJ's Discount Club.

The Thursday before Christmas regular was $3.079 per gallon. Today, just a day shy of two weeks later, it was $3.229, an increase of 15¢. Asking around it turns out the price went up just yesterday by 7¢. Other prices around the area had jumped as high as $3.279.

It made me wonder why, considering oil prices haven't gone up nearly enough to generate that much of a price increase. Heating oil prices haven't increased as they would have had there been a crude oil price increase. Then I remembered: no more subsidies for the ethanol used in gasoline.

Gee, it didn't take long for that little gem to work its way through the supply chain, did it? Of course if it were the reverse, with subsidies starting, we wouldn't see a price drop at all, would we?

UPDATE 1/5/12: I drove by the same gas station today and the price had gone up an additional 7¢ to $3.299.

I know, I'm a few days late on this, but I'm still trying to catch up. Gimme a break. I've been sick.

Now that government subsidies for ethanol have ended, as have the tariffs on Brazilian ethanol, what will the effect be fuel prices? In the end, probably not a whole lot. After all, ethanol is only 10% of the volume in E10 gasolines. Assuming Brazilian ethanol becomes more popular with blenders, you might see an approximate 5¢ per gallon drop in gasoline using it. For blenders using US corn ethanol, you might see an equivalent rise in price. But the main thing is that you and I and everyone else will be paying for it up front rather than having the cost of it buried by taxpayer funded subsidies (to the tune of $6 billion a year).

As many of you know, I am not a fan of gasoline/ethanol blend fuels. They cause too many problems, particularly in small engines (lawnmowers, snow blowers, chainsaws, etc.) and in marine use, where nominally humid conditions can cause the ethanol to settle out and clog the fuel systems of boats, something I've had to deal with over the past couple of years. And while the end of subsidies and tariffs are a good thing, that will not make me like the blended fuels. There are still too many downsides. (One of the 'benefits' of ethanol sold to us by the EPA was that it would make gasoline burn cleaner. And it does..for carbureted engines. But it has no effect on fuel injected engines other than decreasing fuel economy by 5%. This is a benefit?) Of course the EPA wants to boost the ethanol content in fuels to 15%, but so far the Congress has said "No". Even Congress understands the downsides to such a move and the EPA has not shown the move will be beneficial to anyone but the EPA and ethanol producers.

Yes, I know it's Christmas Eve. I could easily do a feel-good Christmas story since there are appear to be a plethora of them out there this year. But that smacks far too much of me-too-ism. And while I am just as guilty as many bloggers out there of doing that from time to time, I don't want to do that today. No siree. Instead, I'm going to focus on something incredibly stupid that only a government bureaucracy could pull off.

To which government bureaucracy am I referring?

The EPA.

Let's face it folks, it has become a force for interfering in the business of America, which is business. Nonsense rules with little scientific backing or study have done more to harm our economic revival than just about any other Obama mechanism. It is one of the few federal agencies that can promote two contradictory views at the same time, all in the name of "protecting the environment."

One of the latest B.S directives deals with mercury, specifically mercury emitted by coal-burning power plants. Never mind that the amount of mercury emitted at present is miniscule and that to reduce it even more has reached the point of diminishing returns. But then the EPA also has no concerns for the mercury contained in CFL bulbs which can expose the populace to levels of mercury magnitudes of order higher than what comes out of the smokestack of a power plant.

See? Two contradictory stances at the same time. But then the EPA has an agenda that us purely political, one that ignores science. It's all about feel-good rules that do nothing to protect the environment from real threats while harping on minutiae.

One of the other things the EPA ignores about atmospheric mercury: most of it reaching the ground in the US comes from China. We have no control over Chinese emissions and I doubt very much they'll listen to Obama's EPA. (Obama lost credibility with the Chinese quite some time ago.) China will do what it needs to do to expand its economy and if that means ignoring mercury emissions that affect countries on the other side of the Pacific.

This isn't the first time the EPA has tried to control effects of emissions from outside the US with ridiculous rules that have little effect of the environment but cost businesses in the US millions, if not billions of dollars to implement. This kind of useless bureaucratic incompetence (or malfeasance) must end.

It seems the work to commercialize the use of silicon in lithium-ion batteries is proceeding apace.

The folks a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have been working on a process to easily use silicon nanowires to greatly increase the capacity of Li-Ion batteries. LBNL has been testing batteries made with the silicon anodes for over a year now and found the new cells maintain their capacity after "many hundreds of charge-discharge cycles." The cells have approximately eight times the capacity of existing Li-Ion cells.

If this process holds up and is cost effective to implement, electric cars will become more of a reality as battery packs capable of giving cars extended driving range (400+ miles) will become available. It also means the physical size of battery packs used in hybrid electric cars, laptop computers, and a whole host of other devices using these batteries will shrink even as the capacity increases. Imagine a laptop, tablet, or smart phone that will give you a full 24 hours of use before its battery needs to be recharged.

I think we're going to have to rewrite a few bumper stickers. This one in particular is going to need a change:


It seems the folks over at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland have discovered that neutrinos, massless and chargeless sub-atomic particles, can exceed the speed of light, something Einstein's special theory of relativity says is impossible.

At first researchers didn't believe what they had measured, so they asked other researchers to independently verify their results. So far no one has claimed CERN's findings are in error.

Does this mean that we'll also have to edit Albert Einstein's formula to read E=mc²±1dB?

This isn't the first of Einstein's theorems dealing with relativity that have been found to be in error. Others have been found wanting or weren't as complete as Einstein thought they were.

We must also remember Einstein's words when it came to any of his theories: "It doesn't matter if ten thousand scientists agree with me. All it takes is one to prove me wrong."

These are words that 'climate' scientists should take to heart, too. (This means you, Al Gore.)

I don't know about you, but I know I'm tired of hearing the uninformed trying to mislead the rest of us about our energy reserves, energy technologies (particularly proven technologies), and so-called "green" energy, which is anything but. They push untruths in an effort to fundamentally change America even though it is in no one's best interests (except theirs) to do so. Do they really think they're saving anything other than the last vestiges of a morally bankrupt and failed ideology?

Probably.

Just listen to this and you'll probably get angry at them, and particularly The One.


(H/T Maggie's Farm)

Feeling the need to take a break from the ongoing debt ceiling drama, perhaps a little good news for a change?

One thing I've found to be true over the seven different decades I've trodden this earth is that it's the complicated things that tend to have the easiest answers. That's particularly true of the sciences, where some of the most sophisticated inventions use the simplest of materials and configurations. That's certainly true of this neat means of storing electrical energy, using nothing more than graphite and water.

A combination of two ordinary materials - graphite and water - could produce energy storage systems that perform on par with lithium ion batteries, but recharge in a matter of seconds and have an almost indefinite lifespan.

Dr Dan Li, of the Monash University Department of Materials Engineering, and his research team have been working with a material called graphene, which could form the basis of the next generation of ultrafast energy storage systems.

"Once we can properly manipulate this material, your iPhone, for example, could charge in a few seconds, or possibly faster." said Dr Li.

The ability to rapidly charge a battery system is key to being able to make electric vehicles a more viable alternative to liquid fuel burning vehicles. If a vehicle's batteries can be charged in the same amount of time it takes to fill a fuel tank, then EV's can become more attractive to the motoring public.

But even if Dr. Li and his team perfect their technology, there's another problem that will need to be solved: How to get all the electrical energy needed for a rapid recharge to the charging station? That's a lot of power to dump in a very short time.

You know it's getting bad when a rogue federal agency is being used as a bludgeon to punish critics of the present administration. (Of course the critics aren't so much saying anything about the Obama Administration so much as showing them to be the know-nothing socialist chumps they are.)

In this case the EPA is doing its darnedest to cripple the Texas economy by using environmental rules never meant to apply to the situation in Texas. By trying to force Texas to abide by the EPA's Cross State rules regarding coal-fired power plants and setting a very short deadline by which Texas must comply, Texas will lose a considerable amount of its electrical generation capacity.

But somehow I doubt Texas is going to cave in to the socialist yokels running the EPA and will call their bluff, in effect telling them in true Texas fashion to "Come And Take It", or as the PJ Tatler writes it, "Kiss my ass!"

Such an action by the EPA can have nothing but negative consequences, particularly for the Obama Administration and for the power of the ever expanding government bureaucracies. As Obama and his czars try to clamp down on the economy and drive even more businesses to the brink, the backlash is likely to sink any chance the President has for re-election.

Let's hope this is the case as we can no longer afford the destructive forces of this know-nothing administration.

I know I've written about these before, but the post was lost when my original blog site disappeared.

What am I talking about? Laser spark plugs.



Quite of bit of progress has been made since I last covered it about 4 years ago or so, with the size of the laser units now being slightly larger than traditional spark plugs. One of the advantages of laser plugs versus traditional spark plugs? More efficient combustion.

Engines make NOx as a byproduct of combustion. If engines ran leaner - burnt more air and less fuel - they would produce significantly smaller NOx emissions.

Spark plugs can ignite leaner fuel mixtures, but only by increasing spark energy. Unfortunately, these high voltages erode spark-plug electrodes so fast, the solution is not economical. By contrast, lasers, which ignite the air-fuel mixture with concentrated optical energy, have no electrodes and are not affected.

These lasers also improve efficiency, according to their creators. Conventional spark plugs sit on top of the cylinder and only ignite the air-fuel mixture close to them. The relatively cold metal of nearby electrodes and cylinder walls absorbs heat from the explosion, quenching the flame front just as it starts to expand.

Lasers, Taira explains, can focus their beams directly into the center of the mixture. Without quenching, the flame front expands more symmetrically and up to three times faster than those produced by spark plugs.

Another plus of laser ignition is that there can be more than a single ignition point within the cylinder, which in turn gives better control over combustion.

While I don't expect to see sets of these new laser plugs in the local auto parts store any time soon, it does show us research and development of systems that will increase the efficiency of internal combustion engines continues.

On the energy front, it appears fusion is back in the news.

The claim that fusion power was "only 20 years away" has been made for the past 50 years or so. While science is closer to achieving the goal, it's the means of getting there that has been intriguing. Much of the effort (and the money) has been spent on one of two possible technologies for achieving break-even fusion: high temperature/high pressure magnetic confinement and laser ignition.

The first uses a tokamak reactor, basically a torus surrounded by electromagnets used to generate a magnetic field to contain a high-temperature plasma. The second uses 'pellets' containing tritium or deuterium that are dropped sequentially into the focus point of a large number of laser beams (the National Ignition Facility uses 192 very high power laser beams). The beams are supposed to collapse the pellets to create a high temperatures and pressures in their core which should force the tritium and deuterium to fuse.

The problems with both of these technologies is the expense (billions, so far) and the complexity of the systems. Even if they were able to achieve above break-even yields, meaning they were generating more energy than they were using, commercialization of the technology could take a decade or more and cost additional billions.

But as MSNBC has been reporting, the more promising fusion technologies are those on the fringes. One in particular, called polywell fusion, something I've covered before, is showing great promise.

EMC2 Fusion doesn't have tens of millions of venture capital to play with -- but it does have a $7.9 million Navy contract to test a plasma technology known as inertial electrostatic confinement fusion, also known as Polywell fusion. The idea is to accelerate positively charged ions in an electrical cage to such an extent that they occasionally spark a fusion reaction, releasing energy and neutrons. The concept was pioneered by the late physicist Robert Bussard, and carried forward by the EMC2 Fusion team in Santa Fe, N.M.

So far every generation of the Bussard-designed WB ("whiffle ball") reactors has performed just as Bussard's calculations have said they would. Each generation of WB reactors has been larger than its predecessor and each generation's results have scaled likewise.

Should polywell fusion turn out to be something that actually works it will turn the energy industry on its ear, creating a source of cheap and clean power that doesn't have the downsides of present day uranium cycle fission power plants.

Another thing to mention - should polywell succeed, the cost of building fusion power plants will be in the double-digit millions, not billions.

OK, so I misspoke about what Part 2 would be about. Originally I was going to cover energy, but thoughts and righteous indignation about the EPA overrode that plan.

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One of the government agencies that has most recently caused FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) among business, and indirectly the people, is the EPA.

While it is the EPA's purview to help safeguard the environment, lately it has been going outside its mandate and trying to regulate economic activities it sees as affecting the environment. This is particularly vexing considering both Congress and the courts have told the EPA they do not have power to do so.

One of the EPA's latest 'crusades' involves energy. In this case making sure it is less available and far more costly. In particular they're trying to impose stricter regulations on the electric utilities and oil companies, bypassing the usual means of doing so and imposing them without the consent of Congress.

Jeff Holmstead, who directed the EPA's air and radiation office from 2001 to 2005 during the Republican President George W. Bush's administration, told the commission the new rules will quickly change policies that have been stable for 40 years. He called the new regulations an "unprecedented" amount of change for power companies.

Part of the problem is that some of the EPA's new rules overlap and contradict many existing rules, both its own and those of other governmental agencies and departments overseeing the energy industry. This leaves the power companies and oil exploration and drilling firms in a bind, making it impossible for them to be in compliance with all the rules and regulations imposed upon them. The EPA also ignores state rules and regulators rather than working with them, which only adds to the confusion.

This is a government agency that has gone rogue and believes it doesn't have to answer to anybody. It ignores the law, ignores the courts, ignores Congress, and ignores the Constitution. It believes it is above the law. It hands down edicts and expects everyone to follow them without question or dissent regardless of the effects on the economy or the environment.

Don't believe me? Then how about the EPA's efforts to 'clean up' the upper Hudson River in an attempt to remove polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) embedded in the silt at the bottom of the river? Their clean up has done far more harm than if they'd left things alone.

By ordering a dredging operation along 40 miles of the Hudson, the EPA has created a disaster of governmental proportions in this quiet upstate community. For six months in 2009, floating clamshell diggers shoveled day and night, pulling sludge from the river bottom around Fort Edward and depositing it onto barges. Six days a week, 24 hours a day, these barges, containing a total of 286,000 cubic yards of sediment mixed with old PCBs, were offloaded into that massive dewatering facility. There the soggy material was treated and squeezed in giant presses. The cakes of compacted sludge were then moved by truck onto 81-car trains, parked on a new spur of the Canadian Pacific Railway extending into the site. Five of these trains were in constant rotation, circulating the 4,400-mile round trip between the facility and the final dump site in Texas.

It was a Herculean attempt at remediation but one that actually increased PCB levels in the Hudson for a time; it also wreaked havoc on locals' lives and imposed huge costs on General Electric. And all this work was only "Phase I" of the EPA's plans. The government is now compelling GE to spend billions of dollars on Phase II, an even larger and longer operation. Dredging will recommence this spring.

And once they start dredging again the PCB levels will rise dramatically and stay that way as long as they continue removing all that silt on the river bottom. That doesn't even take into account the huge amounts of energy expended or pollution generated to clean up the river. They would have been better off to leave it where it was. It wasn't going to go anywhere. Instead, they've made things worse all in the name of "Saving The Environment." It's yet another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences coming into play. Government agencies are pretty good at invoking it.

Maybe it's time to rein in the EPA, to remind them that they work for us and not the other way around. Better yet, to ensure they get the message it might be worthwhile to slash their funding to zero for year. Then refund it the following year after an exhaustive review of the EPA's overreach and implementation of proper controls upon the agency.

A few weeks ago my post quoting one of the unfortunate truisms we live under - how regulated portions of the economy tend to have the biggest problems - struck a chord with one of my commenters.

Apparently she believes we don't have enough regulation, citing the problems caused by shady banking practices that helped bring down the economy as the only justification for even more regulation. I came back at her with the problems within the telecommunications industry because of heavy-handed regulation, much of it at the behest of "rent-seekers". Such 'regulation' is crony capitalism at its worst and in the end benefits no one except the rent-seekers. And even they feel the negative effects eventually, making far less money than they might have otherwise and costing the consumers plenty.

There are plenty of other examples of regulation having exactly the opposite effect from the one most would expect. The question is, where to start?

How about one of my favorite targets, gasoline? Or should I say ethanol in gasoline?

Ethanol

The EPA, in it's push to clean up the tailpipe emissions of anything that burns gasoline, decided that pump gas needed something that would help gas burn cleaner, thereby reducing pollution. At first that something was MTBE. MTBE certainly helped engines with carburetors burn cleaner, but it had little effect on fuel injected engines. Unfortunately MTBE had a serious side effect.

While it helped gas burn cleaner, it also polluted water supplies as it was a hydrophilic substance, meaning it was chemically attracted to water. Unfortunately the water it was attracted to far too often was that in out municipal water supplies and private wells. MTBE started showing up in places it didn't belong. It didn't help things that it's also considered a carcinogen.

So in its wisdom, the EPA banned the use of MTBE and decided ethanol would make a great substitute. Like MTBE ethanol also helped gasoline burn cleaner with the added benefit of boosting the octane rating of gasoline. While the water pollution problem was solved, other problems raised their ugly heads, some of them quite costly to deal with.

Like MTBE, ethanol is hydrophilic. It absorbs water. The problem with it is that if it absorbs enough water it separates from the gasoline, turns into a yellowish sludge, and settles to the bottom of the tank. This has two effects. First, it lowers the octane rating of the gasoline. Second, the sludge will clog the fuel systems of the vehicles it's used in.

On more than one occasion I've written about the problems with ethanol in marine gas and how it costs boat owners millions in repairs. The same holds true in other areas, such as small gas-powered equipment. Lawnmowers, chain saws, weed-trimmers, snowblowers, generators, lawn tractors, and a whole host of other equipment don't get along with 90/10 gasoline/ethanol mix presently being sold in the US. Corrosion, detonation, and deterioration of plastic/rubber parts in the fuel systems plague otherwise trouble-free gas powered equipment.

But that's not the whole story of ethanol. There are other unintended consequences created by the use of ethanol as a fuel component.

One of the biggest is the effects on food prices, followed only by the greater pollution generated by its production.

When land previous used to grow food is now used to grow the feedstock for ethanol (corn), the supply of food goes down and prices go up. More pollution is created when those feedstock crops are grown because the farmers will use even more fossil fuels and petroleum-based fertilizers to grow them. The amount of energy derived from the ethanol created from those crops barely equals the amount of energy used to grow and process those crops in the first place.

But do you know what the biggest irony of this story is? Gasoline/ethanol fuels don't help fuel-injected engines burn any cleaner than straight gasoline does. These days, how many engines in cars and trucks sold over the past decade and a half or so aren't fuel injected? None of them.

Oh, and one other thing we must remember about ethanol: it contains less energy per gallon than gasoline, meaning you need to burn more of it to get an equivalent amount of power out of the engine using it. What that means is you get fewer miles per gallon with ethanol-blended gasoline than you do with straight gasoline. And this is good how?

Air Pollution Other Than Tailpipe Emissions

Here's another area where the EPA has gotten it wrong, and it's all going to cost us plenty with little return seen for what we spend.

First, I have to ask you out there how many times you've heard this refrain: "It's just awful! Air pollution is getting worse all the time!"

I've heard it far too often over the past 10 years or so. There's only one problem...it's a lie.

I can't speak for you, but I can honestly say I remember the days when the smog was so bad in some cities that it cast a dark brown pall over them. Automobiles, trucks, power plants, and factories spewed all kinds of noxious fumes from their tailpipes and smoke stacks. The air stank of all kinds of chemicals and partially burned hydrocarbons, even in many of the smaller cities.

Can we honestly say that is the case today? Not by a long shot.

But what effluvia still spews into the atmosphere isn't necessarily the fault of those generating it so much as it's the rather rigid rules created by the EPA that makes it far more expensive to clean up the emissions from the smokestacks than it needs to be. What do I mean by this? Call it the All-Or-Nothing rule.

Let's use coal-fired power plants in the mid-West as an example of the shortsightedness of this rule.

At one point during the Bush Administration, the president wanted to relax rules that would make it easier for the aforementioned coal plants to upgrade their systems to make them more efficient. The upgrades would also have the side effect of making the plants run cleaner than they would without the upgrades. But those upgrades also meant they had to go well beyond those changes and install scrubbers and other air pollution controls as if the plants were brand new. New plants had to meet far stricter emissions requirements than the older plants. The cost to make the older plants meet the new requirements exceeded that of building a new plant. Under EPA rules the utilities had two choices - spend far too much money to upgrade the old plants to meet new plant requirements, or don't do the upgrades at all. There was no in-between solution as far as the EPA was concerned.

So what happened?

President Bush was lambasted by Congressional Democrats and enviro-socialists for "allowing his buddies in the energy industry" to pollute the air all in the name of obscene profits. Congress killed any chance the utilities would get a waiver to reduce their emissions less than the EPA wanted them to. The end effect: the coal plants were not upgraded, their efficiencies were not increased, and their emissions did not decrease. Yet somehow the EPA and the left saw this as a victory for the environment. They wanted the whole thing but they ended up with nothing at all and everyone downstream of those plants are still paying the price.

This is yet another case where government regulation had the opposite effect from that intended.

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This is the first in a series of posts dealing with the problems of government regulation overstepping its bounds and causing far more harm than good.

Part 2 will cover energy and how the government regulations are making sure we'll have less of it at a much higher costs.

We've watched as gas prices have climbed rapidly over the past three months. While we here in New Hampshire aren't seeing the highest prices in the nation (or New England) they are approaching the highs seen in 2008. Yesterday I filled up the trusty F150 for $3.69 per gallon. The highest price I saw today here in central New Hampshire for 87-octane gas was $3.75. Highs elsewhere in the nation top $4. Some are expecting gas to hit as much as $6 this summer.

As painful as the rising gas prices are, some side effects are being felt elsewhere in the economy.

Deb and I went grocery shopping at our local chain supermarket today. One of the first things Deb noticed was many food prices were higher than only two weeks ago. Much higher. Most of that can be directly attributable to higher transportation costs because of rising fuel prices.

The higher gas prices are also expected to have a negative effect on the summer tourist season. The last time prices were this high a lot of families changed vacation plans, staying closer to home. In 2008 we saw a lot more 'local' folks vacationing here rather than the usual people from elsewhere in the US and Canada. Boat traffic on the lake was down considerably because marine gas prices approached $5 per gallon. I have no doubt we'll see the same thing this summer, only worse.

As the higher gas prices have hit everyone in the wallet, people have been cutting back in other areas to make up for it. One of the biggest areas where people are cutting back is eating out. It's one of the 'luxuries' most of us can do without and one of the first thing people cut out when money is tight. Other than some of the ice cream stands, most restaurants will be taking a double hit of higher prices for the food they prepare and fewer customers to fill their tables.

It's not going to be a good summer for most of us.

UPDATE 4/23/11: Apparently I'm not the only one seeing this.

CNBC believes the "killer combo" of high gas and food prices are at the key tipping point that will drop us back into a recession.

Sarah Gilbert gives us a list of 11 things that will be adversely affected by higher fuel prices. The biggest three on her list that have me pissed off: chocolate, beef, and bacon.

You start messing with my bacon and it means WAR!!

Since I regaled you with the tale of the sort of semi-spectacular failure of the WP Parent's HDTV earlier this week, a timely opinion piece by Sam Kazman has appeared, lamenting the poor quality of today's washing machines. And not so much the quality of the machines, per se, but their inability to actually clean clothes.

Call it another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences coming back to bite us all in the a**...er...wallet.

What's caused this decline in their ability to get clothes clean? Three words:

Energy efficiency mandates.

Front-loaders meet federal standards more easily than top-loaders. Because they don't fully immerse their laundry loads, they use less hot water and therefore less energy. But, as Americans are increasingly learning, front-loaders are expensive, often have mold problems, and don't let you toss in a wayward sock after they've started.

In 2007, after the more stringent rules had kicked in, Consumer Reports noted that some top-loaders were leaving its test swatches "nearly as dirty as they were before washing." "For the first time in years," CR said, "we can't call any washer a Best Buy." Contrast that with the magazine's 1996 report that, "given warm enough water and a good detergent, any washing machine will get clothes clean." Those were the good old days.

In 2007, only one conventional top-loader was rated "very good." Front-loaders did better, as did a new type of high-efficiency top-loader that lacks a central agitator. But even though these newer types of washers cost about twice as much as conventional top-loaders, overall they didn't clean as well as the 1996 models.

So how much energy is being saved if we have to wash our clothes more than once to get them clean? How much is being saved if we have to wash smaller loads for the same reason? If I had to guess, I'd say not much, if at all. (We're fortunate here at The Manse as we have an 11-year old front-loader that does a great job cleaning clothes. We've thought about replacing it and our not-very-good clothes drier with new models that would allow us to stack them in the laundry nook, but now I'm not so sure.)

Remember, this is the same government that has mandated the elimination of incandescent light bulbs, use of low-water volume flush toilets, and a host of other energy 'saving' appliances. The problem is that most of these energy saving measures don't work very well and the savings are minuscule or non-existent, all while costing us more to buy.

One of my biggest pet peeves is the low-volume flush toilets. Sometimes it takes more than one flush for it to properly dispose of the effluvia deposited in them, and the low water volume sometimes prevents the aforementioned effluvia from making it all the way to the septic tank or sewer system, clogging the drain pipes. If the government really wants us to save water, then maybe they should spend time and money on more effective means like fixing the leaky public water systems that waste far more water than 'normal' toilets would during their entire lifetime.

(H/T Instapundit)

UPDATE 3/19/11: It turns out Jay Tea wrote a diatribe about this same subject a few days ago. We're on the same page on this one.

Bogie has added her two cents worth as well.

It didn't take long for the anti-nuclear power hysteria to start up here in the US after the problems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility came to light.

It seems shortly after the first report of trouble, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) called for a moratorium on the permitting or building of any new nuclear plants in the US. Never mind that the nuclear plants in Japan are 40 years old. Never mind that they're of a Generation II design no one builds any more. Never mind that any new plants planned in the US are Generation III or IV plants, neither of which require the active cooling measures of Generation I or II plants. (The new reactors are convection cooled, meaning the heat of the reactors causes the cooling liquid to flow. No pumps are required.)

Other anti-nuclear organizations jumped on the bandwagon in an effort to stifle any further construction of nuclear plants. Many of these same groups also have a tendency to call for "green" power, but when such green alternative energy systems are proposed, they protest against them, too. And even if they are built, they'll then protest the power lines needed to carry that green power to the people who need it. It's a no-win situation with them.

They need to get a life.