Obama's (and America's) energy blues

There is a lot of soul searching among Republicans over the defeats of last week and 2006. Of course the GOP should not become a single issue party, but creating a coherent and practical energy policy is a way out of the wilderness. The American Spectator paints an unattractive picture of Obama's energy problems:

Take last Thursday's edition of (Energy Central). Right at the top of the page was the story, "Xcel Energy, eXco Join in Major Wind Farm Developments in Minnesota, North Dakota." It's like this every day. Wind farms of sprouting up all over the country like 65-story mushrooms. The North American Reliability Council estimates we will have 175,000 megawatts of new capacity by 2017 (that's the equivalent of 175 major coal or nuclear plants). Unfortunately, it admits, "only approximately 23,000 MW…is projected to be available on peak." That means these windmills will be idle most of the time. Coal plants operate at 65 percent capacity, nuclear rims at 90 percent. But at best windmills produce only 30 percent of their "nameplate capacity" and they are almost useless on torpid summer days. California has found its windmills running at only 3 percent capacity on hot summer days.

Never mind, we are forging ahead anyway. Right under the Minnesota story is a report that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has laid down a "wind farm code of ethics" governing dealings between wind companies and municipal officials. It seems that several windmill manufacturers are following the tried-and-true pattern of bribing municipal officials by hiring them as "consultants" in seeking zoning and other approvals. Although you'd never know it, there are actually folks out there in the hinterland that don't like the idea of littering the landscape with these nearly useless monstrosities. However, those folks are being steamrolled in the march toward alternate energy utopia. As Attorney General Cuomo remarks, "Wind power is an exciting industry that will be a cornerstone of our energy future."

Next comes a story, "More Study is Ordered Before Savannah River Dredging Starts: An NRC Board Says the Environmental Impact Has Not Been Addressed." The Alvin W. Vogtle Nuclear Generating Station in Burke County, Georgia, has two 1,200-MW reactors sitting on the Savannah River, directly across from the federal nuclear processing facilities in South Carolina. Now Southern Nuclear, which owns Vogtle, wants to build two new 1,000-MW reactors as part of the nuclear renaissance.

Environmental groups of course are opposed to the dredging. And those reactors.
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IT'S EASY TO SEE where this is leading. President-elect Obama says he supports nuclear "in principle," but then so does the Union of Concerned Scientists, which has opposed reactors for 35 years. Obama also opposes Yucca Mountain, which is a shibboleth among opposition groups. Ironically, Yucca Mountain only became necessary when Jimmy Carter canceled nuclear fuel reprocessing in 1977, creating the so-called problem of "nuclear waste." France has pursued reprocessing and stores all its high-level waste from 40 years of producing 75 percent of its electricity in one room at Le Havre.

Rather than heeding this example, however, the Obama Administration is much more likely to do exactly what California did during the 1980s and 1990s -- stall both coal and nuclear construction while adopting huge subsidies and mandates for "renewable energy." Within a decade we could find ourselves where California was in 2000 -- saddled with huge quantities of expensive "alternate" energy while not having enough electricity to run its traffic lights.

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