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How Do McCain / Obama Stocks Look Now?

100 days of an administration doesn't prove much. The clean energy sector has obviously been hit hard by the credit crunch. And guess who's watch the economy failed under.

14 Stem Cell, Renewable Energy Opportunities for the Obama Era

SolarMan

Yes, distributed energy from PV on rooftops etc. is a good thing. We need more of that, a less centralized grid.
If we think of it as a quality verses quantity issue, the distributed energy addresses the quality, but we also need a large quantity of renewable energy, if we are to reduce CO2 emissions enough to get the job done.

I believe we need to encourage this as well as large solar and wind farms.

Solar thermal with heat storage is the only renewabe that can replace the base load from coal plants, and it has to be large scale to work and be cost effective. And it has to be in areas of intense sunlight like the southwest. It doesn't require storage sytems in the grid, as it has it's own storage.

A smart grid will not just encourage large projects, as small distributed systems like rooftop solar will need to be smoothly integrated into the grid, so you can sell your excess electricity back to the utility, for instance.

We should remember that analysts are usually looking at the fairly short term picture. Renewable energy is obvously in the beginning of a macro trend that will span years and decades.

14 Stem Cell, Renewable Energy Opportunities for the Obama Era

Correction:

kWh is correct for electricity prices, but I should have written kW for the price of power plant construction.

14 Stem Cell, Renewable Energy Opportunities for the Obama Era

While I acknowledge that we will need some new nuclear power in the energy mix, I'm not a big fan of it, because it has a lot more problems than anything but coal, tar sand and shale oil.

What I find interesting is the statement that nuclear is cheap. Not according to estimates for new nuclear plants. Prices are expected to be 12-17 cents/kWh from new nuclear, with prices as high as 22-30 cents/kWh for at least the first year that a plant goes online. The estimates for building new plants have skyrocketed. FPL raised the estimate for two new plants proposed for Florida from
$4100/kWh to $5500-$8100/kWh. Another estimate for new plants is as high as $10,000 per kWh.

climateprogress.org/20.../

Another point is that we can build wind and solar plants much quicker. It will probably be a decade before the first new nuclear plants go online. By then, solar and wind could already be producing hundreds of gigawatts of power.

Building wind and solar also creates 3-4 times as many jobs as building nuclear or coal plants.

APWR does look good. The deal with GE is a good confirmation for them.

PUW: Progressive Energy Stocks Progress Toward Cleaner Energy

What will work is to put our efforts into solar and wind and other clean renewable energy. There will never be any fuel to explore for, mine, transport, store, smelt, modify for safe burning, burn or use for fission, or clean up the mess from.

As the following shows, we convert to clean energy with current technology.

www.setamericafree.org...
A Blueprint For U.S. Energy Security

And PV solar is within a few years of achieving grid parity. In fact, Nanosolar is probably already there.
"Nanosolar’s founder and chief executive, Martin Roscheisen, claims to be the first solar panel manufacturer to be able to profitably sell solar panels for less than $1 a watt. That is the price at which solar energy becomes less expensive than coal.
With a $1-per-watt panel,” he said, “it is possible to build $2-per-watt systems.
According to the Energy Department, building a new coal plant costs about $2.1 a watt, plus the cost of fuel and emissions, he said."
from www.grinzo.com/energy/.../

Scientific American A Solar Grand Plan
www.sciam.com/article....
How solar thermal and concentrating solar plants in the southwest could power the whole country, using less land than now used for coal mining, 1% of our deserts.

The argument against solar and wind that rests on the supposed problem of intermittency or unsteadiness of their availability hasn't seemed to stopped the Danes.

"There are areas in Denmark and Germany who use more than 40 percent of their electricity from wind. From what I have read, they are less concerned about the intermittency than we are in the United States even though we aren't at 1 pecent yet. Why? Because we are told by the fossil fuel guys, hey, can't use wind, can't use solar, what about the intermittency. If wind gets up to 40 percent of the electricity we use and solar gets up to 40 of the electricity we use, the other percents of electricity we need can be made up from the fossil fuel plants that are still there. If they are run less at full power, they can last a long time. That can be your electricity `battery.'"

gristmill.grist.org/st.../...

Denmark gets 20% of it's energy from wind.

And it isn't stopping Abu Dubai

"Abu Dhabi is not content to just sell you the oil that fuels your SUV; now its going to sell you sunshine to keep your lights on and power your electric car when the internal combustion engine goes the way of the buggy whip. Masdar, the oil-rich emirate’s $15 billion renewable energy venture, and Spanish technology company Sener on Wednesday announced a joint venture called Torresol Energy to build large-scale solar power plants in Australia, Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the United States." (specifically, the very same southwest where the SciAm article recommends that Americans build solar plants)

"The irony is too rich to leave unsaid: A leading oil producer invests billions in carbon-free energy while a leading consumer of fossil fuels - the United States - continues to subsidize Big Oil while offering only tepid support for green technology. It is inevitable that climate change will foster the rise of renewable energy - the only question is which countries and companies will profit from the new energy economics. It is entirely possible that the U.S. will trade energy dependence of one kind - on Middle East oil - for another - on Middle East and European solar technology - in the era of global warming. It’s no coincidence that most of the solar energy companies with contracts to build utility-scale power plants in California and the Southwest have overseas roots - Ausra hails from Australia, BrightSource was founded by American-Israeli pioneer Arnold Goldman, Solel is based in Israel and Abengoa is headquartered in Spain."

With as much public money as we spent over 35 years to build the high speed information highway, we could solve the energy problem in a simillar time frame.

PUW: Progressive Energy Stocks Progress Toward Cleaner Energy

" Most solar energy firms remain heavily reliant on government subsidies, and politicians may be less likely to dole out funding to such programs as budgets tighten and constituents cope with unemployment and high gas prices."

You must be kidding. Nuclear, and especially oil receive far more in subsidies than solar does. And coal is at least as much. The entire alternative energy proposal now in congress is for $6 billion for one yeard. That's for solar, wind, geothermal etc. Oil gets more than ten time that much all by itself.

www.setamericafree.org...
www.monitor.net/monito...
www.progress.org/2003/...
www.eoearth.org/articl...

And one estimate of all the hidden costs of oil is over $800 billion annually. That includes costs like $100 billion for military protection of oil shipments, health costs, environmental costs. It also adds $300 billion to our trade deficit.

Nuclear has big issues with water, the billions of gallons needed to cool the plants. Droughts in the southeast are threatening shutdowns of reactors, with one in Alabama already having been shut down briefly.

The Argonne National Lab says an airliner crashing into a reactor could cause a complete meltdown, even if the containment building isn't compromised

"The total of all oil-related external or “hidden” costs of $825 billion per year. This
total is nearly twice the figure authorized for the Department of Defense in 2006.
To put the figure in further perspective, it is equivalent to adding $8.35 to the price
of a gallon of gasoline refined from Persian Gulf oil. This would raise that figure to
$10.73, making the cost of filling the gasoline tank of a sedan $214.60, and of an
SUV $321.90."

"Federal subsidies to new nuclear power plants are likely between 4 and 8 cents per kWh (levelized), and could well be the determining factor driving the construction of new nuclear power plants. $9 billion per year in the U.S."

Nuclear doesn't make us energy independent.
""The United States and Russia signed a deal that will boost Russian uranium imports to supply the U.S. nuclear industry, the Commerce Department said Friday….
The new agreement permits Russia to supply 20 percent of US reactor fuel until 2020 and to supply the fuel for new reactors quota-free."

"So if, under a President McCain, we build a bunch of new nuclear reactors -- they could be fueled 100 percent by Russia.
I can almost hear Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin saying, "Excellent." "
from: gristmill.grist.org/st...

We import a bigger percentage of our Uranium than our oil.

Nuclear is costlier and more time consuming than solar or wind to get up and running.

"Estimates of the cost to construct nuclear power plants are as high as $4,000 per kilowatt, as compared to about $1,400 per kilowatt for wind projects."

The nuclear industry isn't accountable for safety.

"The nuclear industry has long enjoyed limited liability for nuclear accidents under the Price-Anderson Act, which ensures that taxpayers, not industry, will pay for damages in the event of a serious accident."

Transporting nuclear waste from all over the country to Yucca Mt. Nevada is potentially dangerous, and expensive.

"Part of our electric rates go to payments to the federal Nuclear Waste Fund, which is intended to fund the construction of the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada and pay for transportation of waste to the proposed disposal site. To date, Wisconsin customers have paid about $600 million into this fund." That's just one state.

Dismantling old nuclear reactors is expensive.

"Nuclear plant owners are responsible for costs to dismantle retired units, dispose of waste, and decontaminate the site. Each unit has its own decommissioning trust fund, paid for by customers. Wisconsin ratepayers have spent $1.5 billion for the eventual decommissioning of the Point Beach, Kewaunee, and Genoa plants."
That's $500 million each.

www.cleanwisconsin.org...

"David Fleming, creator of the concept of Tradeable Energy Quotas and author of the forthcoming and rather wonderful “Lean Logic”, has just published The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy, which is a thorough demolition of the case for nuclear power being a solution to peak oil. and climate change. You can down load the pdf. for free here or you can order printed copies here. Like much of David’s writing, it patiently yet assertively builds its arguments, backed up by exhaustive research, to build a case against nuclear power that looks pretty much bulletproof to me." from
www.grinzo.com/energy/.../

transitionculture.org/.../
Link to The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy"

Global Warming Up to a Hydrogen Economy

panseyed Your idea that global warming is just a natural phenomenon is a skeptic argument that has been debunked repeatedly. Your opinion is at odds with the tens of thousands of climate scientists from all over the world, and at odds with the third assessment by the IPCC, which has been called the most thoroughly peer reviewed scientific document in the history of science. If you don't think that is evidence enough, what do you think would be