The Oil Drum

In recent days a series of media articles surfaced pointing to a concerning situation in China. The New Scientist reported:

At the end of a cold and stormy winter, the country has just 12 days of coal reserves at most power stations. Some provinces, including Hebei, bordering Beijing, have less than a week's coal left. This is a record low, the state electricity regulatory commission revealed on Tuesday.

This is a guest article by Simon Ratcliffe and Jeremy Wakeford. Simon is an energy and sustainability consultant and is the Chairperson of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil South Africa (ASPO South Africa). Jeremy is an economist specializing in energy and sustainable development and is Research Director of ASPO South Africa.

South Africa has been experiencing blackouts over the last three weeks or so, and is forecast to have electricty shortages until at least 2013, see S Africa eyes rationing to end power cuts (Financial Times, 24 Jan.) for a brief overview. Here Simon and Jeremy discuss the issues in more detail.

With oil prices receding from the nineties, the energy crisis almost seems like in recess. Almost, because elsewhere there are millions of people affected by power shortages amidst an old fashioned Winter. It reminds that the energy crisis is affecting the energy sector horizontally and showing problems in an industry that not long ago seemed like our last resort safety net.

Source: Al-Jazeera.

On Thursday 10th January 2008 Business Secretary John Hutton announced to MPs that he was giving the green light for new nuclear build in the UK. He is inviting energy companies to bring forward plans to build and operate new nuclear power plants. However considering the nuclear cliff, has the decision come too late to maintain the nuclear contribution?

The nameplate capacity of the UK nuclear fleet, stacked, from the peak capacity in the late nineties and following the published decommission schedule. Three life extensions are shown in red. Source: British Energy & Nuclear Decommissioning Agency

I spent most of this week at the big conference organised every two years by EWEA (European Wind Energy Association) on offshore wind, which took place in Berlin over this week.

all photos by author

(And yes, in case there is any doubt, I work in the industry, finance it and spoke at the conference)

Cross posted from Peak Energy.

I seem to have spent half of this week criticising various energy articles in the local media, however there seems to be an endless supply of them coming down the pipeline.

NZ Petroleum Exploration and Production Association executive officer John Pfahlert had an opinion piece in the NZ Herald this week ("Minister out of whack on importance of gas") arguing that New Zealand should be building new gas fired power stations instead of trying to become carbon neutral.

We on The Oil Drum spend so much time worrying about oil supply that we tend to think that electrical supply is relatively safe in comparison. If we stop to think about the issues, I think that we will find that the electrical situation is not much better than the oil situation. The likelihood of widespread electrical outages in next five to ten years is uncomfortably high.

We may already be starting to see some beginning examples of electrical shortages, such as this recent story regarding Maine. Residents were being asked to conserve electricity because of a natural gas shortage related to supply disruption and cold weather. Maine has a relatively tight electrical supply and heavy dependence on natural gas, so it is at high risk for this type of disruption. I expect to see more outages like this in the coming months and years, especially in high-risk areas.

In this post, we will look at some areas of vulnerability for the US electrical supply. While this analysis is restricted to the United States, some of the issues discussed may also be relevant to other countries.

(More beneath the fold)

Another guest post from Hans Noeldner of Oregon, Wisconsin, who does not believe in the Dream Home ideal as portrayed in "Zero House From the Future is Totally Green, Off-Grid" especially considering the crisis is more in liquid fuels than electricity.

The ideal of getting “off the grid” – that is, living independently of the electrical power grid – has been popular for a long time, dating to the ‘60’s if not sooner. Remember the Whole Earth Catalog, communes, Woodstock, and rejection of corporate excesses?

Many people tried living “off the grid” over the years, but almost no one has stuck with the program. Small windmills, solar panels, biogas-driven generators, and battery storage arrays often proved unreliable, and maintenance was a lot of work! Although millions of us moved “back to the land” in search of greater self-sufficiency, we dropped the self-sufficiency part long ago, and actually became far more dependent on nonrenewable resources – oil in particular - than ever before.

With fossil fuel prices surging once more, the ideal of “getting off the grid” is back. The popular focus again is on personal independence and self-reliance – building our own house out in the country on a good-sized chunk of land, with our own disconnected energy systems.

Hold on!

Now that New York has had six months since Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC sustainability plan, kicked off and they have released their interim report on their progress, I thought I might take a step back to think about how we evaluate sustainability at the local level.

Here at The Oil Drum, we love good data. We love hard objective data that can not only tell a story, but highlight the importance of a particular issue in a crisp fashion. However at the local level, data is not as easy to locate or not consistent enough to make an objective positive statement. The result, as many have probably realized, is that local discussions become inherently normative, political and frankly, messy.

So, help me find some data at the local level...

In an Op-Ed that was published in the Wall Street Journal last month (and is available in full to non-subscribers on CATO's website) two CATO economists specialised in deregulation and energy markets provide a breath of fresh air in the debates on energy.

Their point is to criticize the poorly thought out deregulation in various US States over the past 15 years, and they explain clearly how energy markets work (something which is rare enough in the mainstream media), and what the consequences of various bits of deregulation are on market behavior and thus on electricity prices.

Also discussed on European Tribune