CA'S ENERGY FUTURE: GREEN IDEOLOGY, NOT FRACKING

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

There is a joke that should be going around about the Lawrence Berkeley Labs Report about California’s Energy Future which goes something like this: “How many future postmodernist Californians will it take to screw in an energy efficient halogen light bulb?”  Answer: “None.  Californians won’t grow tall enough in the future to reach light bulbs on ceilings after it enacts its new Energy Future Report calling for lifestyle changes such as the elimination of red meat from one’s diet to conserve energy.

Modernization is generally understood as the expectation of being delivered from hunger, disease, debilitating conditions, and early death.  While a modernizing China scrambles to get animal proteins into their diets to cure widespread anemia and developmental defects, California wants to revert to veganism as part of its long-term energy strategy. You think the above words are merely hyperbole to sell online news?  Read on.

California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory must have had something like the above joke in mind when it seriously released a new report titled “California’s Energy Future – the View to 2050,” which provides “portraits” of what the next state energy system will look like.

About 60% of California’s future energy system would be based on shifting the entire state population into electric vehicles and eliminating natural gas heating and cooking in all homes and replacing it with electric-powered stoves, water heaters, and space heaters with power supplied from green power sources.  All buildings in the state would have to be retrofitted or replaced. 20% would be based on costly low-tech energy storage in salt domes and air compressor batteries or in speculative technological breakthroughs that do not exist today and that would impose huge costs on electricity consumers.  And another 20% would be based on behavioral changes such as changing diets to eat less red meat and controlling home thermostats and electric meters to make people wear warm clothing instead.

Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s Template for Cal Energy Future
Method	Percentage
EXISTING TECHNOLOGIES such as retrofitting every building in the State by 2050, switching from petroleum and natural gas for vehicles, space and water heating, cooking, and bus and rail fleets to electric cars, stoves, water heaters, buses, and rail.	60%
BREAKTHROUGH TECHNOLOGIES such as artificial photosynthesis, fusion energy, more efficient and sustainable biofuels, hydrogen fuel, more effective carbon capture storage and advanced batteries for both vehicles and grid storage.	20%
BEHAVIORAL CHANGES such as changing diet to eat less read meat, carpooling, setting back thermostats and wearing warm or cool clothing, telecommuting. 10% will come from lifestyle changes	20%

While most of the nation is rapidly catching on to the emerging revolution in natural gas fracking (hydraulic fracturing of rock formations) technologies and expanding hydropower, California’s energy future is to be based on a post-modern ideology that seems to want California to trash its entire modern energy system.  In its place would be a modernized version of medieval windmills, sophisticated solar-powered magnifying glasses, water wheels, and heat from subterranean geysers all transmitted to energy conserving consumers via a Rube Goldberg contraption-like energy grid that would be prone to brown outs, black outs, and rapid physical deterioration.

Reading this you probably say to yourself that this is yet another utopian scheme by a couple of academics that will get a lot of media attention but go nowhere. Nope. This report was funded by the California Energy Commission, the California Air Resources Board, the S.D. Bechtel Corporation, and endorsed by the California Council on Science and Technology.  This is apparently the template for California’s future energy system.  And as important as the report is it hasn’t received much scrutiny in the uncritical newspaper or broadcast media or even the Internet. It is apparently being taken for granted that this utopian energy scheme is a fait accompli. 

The justification for a rapid deconstruction of the modern energy system is population growth and the much-ballyhooed increase in “green house” gases.  According to the Berkeley Labs report, state population is expected to double by 2050. To combat the effects of population growth and air pollution the state must intervene to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.  Deducting 80% of today’s state population means the air pollution must drop to about that of 1935 when the population of California was about 6 million people.  Given an assumed 40-year technological lag time to implement a whole new de-modernized energy system, California must start right now with a massive program to re-engineer everything in society. And as it is presumed only the government can do this that rapidly - not private markets alone - it implies totalitarian control of everything including life styles of Californians: thus, veganism not nutrition, draconian regulation not freedom of choice, ideology not fracking.

Criticism of this new energy plan is not another conspiracy theory about Big Government.  This IS the undeniable template for California’s energy future crafted by California’s ruling cognitive elites.

What is driving this mad rush to dismantle the present-day modernized energy system is not science but a countermodern ideology.  The Lawrence Berkeley Labs and California Council on Science are only being used to put a patina of science to what is ideological.

In California there are ideologies that endorse energy modernization such as shifting to nuclear power as recently proposed by in the City of Fresno.

And there are ideologies that seek to control, contain, or mitigate air pollution from modern energy plants, such as catalytic converters on cars, natural gas fracking, and expansion of hydropower. 

But what the Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s new template of the state’s energy future reflects is a full-blown countermodern ideology that proposes to dismantle many of the state’s power plants and make the electric grid into a precarious system of dubious reliability. 

A forerunner of this radical ideology is the State Water Resources Control Board’s order to forbid all coastal power plants, especially nuke plants, from using ocean water for cooling systems.  This entails shuttering all the nuke plants in the state or running costly new water pipelines to the plants or using expensive air-cooling systems.  Even if costly fresh water or air cooling systems are installed this would raise the price of nuclear power so high that costly green power could finally compete with it.  The rationale for making nuke plants uncompetitive is not to eliminate pollution, because nuclear technology is clean.  The rationale reflects a countermodern ideology.

Instead of a repeat California Gold Rush, the Great California Green Energy Race is about to be kick-started in 2012 to find the highest priced clean technologies for new forms of energy.  To do this markets must be highly regulated to control prices not just to regulate health and safety.  Markets must be short circuited because they are mechanisms for producing the lowest-priced goods and services.  This is why California is on the cusp of shifting from Market Capitalism to State Capitalism. California’s political elites want to pick winners and losers in the economy and want political exactions in return.  The apparent cover for doing this is environmentalism. 

Unfortunately, many in academia and the media believe that state capitalism is the morally superior system when there is no effective reduction in air pollution from Green Power. Green Power and Cap and Trade Emission Regulations will not result in replacing dirty imported coal power with clean green power because wind and solar farms are located in remote areas far away from California’s urban air traps.

Ironically, as postmodern cognitive elites fear the complexity of modern energy technologies as seen in the recent nuclear plant disaster in Japan, they nonetheless believe the energy grid can be fine tuned to accommodate unpredictable surges of power from wind and solar plants without sacrificing reliability, breakdown, or the rapid deterioration of electric lines that would require their frequent replacement.  Alternatively, they believe costly and unproven new battery systems can be integrated along the electric transmission grid to balance out the surges.

At the core of this radical counter modern ideology we find the quasi-religious idea that modernization is tantamount to damnation. Everything that is wrong with modern society is reflexively tracked back to monopolistic oppression by big energy corporations.   In California this ideology goes back to the influence of the Southern Pacific Railroad and the rise of Progressive politics to counter not merely economic monopolies but modernization itself.

Put into a bigger historical perspective, what the proposed new ideological template California’s future energy system reflects is something like the Japanese elimination of all Western influences in the seventeenth century. In that case, a deliberate attempt was made to wipe out every vestige of Western influence, especially religion, and anything that had become “contaminated” by modern technologies and markets.  The attempt was amazingly successful.  Japan was rigorously isolated from modernizing influences until the Meiji Restoration around the mid 1800’s. 

California’s insular turn away from the Tea Party trend of the rest of the nation is not merely political but a revulsion against Capitalism, open markets, and modernity itself.  For example, California opposes the Obama Administration’s proposal to open all the western states up to a new regional green power grid where those states with cheap natural gas or hydropower can ship electricity into the state, which is the region’s largest energy market. California’s future energy template calls for embargoing imported power.

California believes that the solution to its structural state budget deficit is to eliminate reliance on imported sources of energy.  With the enactment of air pollution regulations in the 1970’s, California’s only option for reducing air pollution in its urban air traps was to shut down old fossil fuel power plants in urban areas and rely on imported coal power from surrounding states.  

But why undertake such a radical transformation of the state’s energy systems as proposed by Berkeley Labs when you can continue to import cheap energy from states that are rapidly shifting to the natural gas fracking revolution that would entail no increase in pollution in California?  Even liberal Michael Lind writing in the left-of-center New Republic magazine says: “Everything You’ve Heard About Fossil Fuels (natural gas fracking) May Be Wrong.”  Lind asks:

“Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels, not its final decades? The very thought goes against everything that politicians and the educated public have been taught to believe in the past generation. According to the conventional wisdom, the U.S. and other industrial nations must undertake a rapid and expensive transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy for three reasons: The imminent depletion of fossil fuels, national security and the danger of global warming. What if the conventional wisdom about the energy future of America and the world has been completely wrong?”

While much of the rest of the nation is turning toward energy policies that favor of natural gas fracking and hydropower, California is determined to reject it on ideological grounds.  The problem is that the retail price of electricity is regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), but not fuels or wholesale hydropower where prices are set by markets.  As long as California is dependent on imported natural gas shipped through the Golden Gate Center in northern California and the California Energy Hub in southern California, the state energy system will be exposed to market energy prices. The same goes with cheap hydropower shipped from, say, Hoover Dam to run the gigantic pumps on the Colorado River Aqueduct for a meager two cents a kilowatt-hour.  As long as California’s energy system is open to market prices Green Power is in jeopardy.

There are a number of hydropower projects for California probably being pushed by California Congressman Tom McClintock who is on the powerful House Committee on Natural Resources.  The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has recently released a report “Hydropower Resource Assessment at Existing Reclamation Facilities” (March 2011) of the increased hydropower potential of existing dams and rivers the U.S. that would involve only modest impacts on the environment.  Seventy potential hydropower project sites were identified with 5 of them in California that could produce 15,256 megawatt-hours of electricity.  See table below - the threshold for considering a project as practical is 0.75).

Potential California Hydropower Projects

Facility Name	Installed Capacity (kW)	Annual Production (mWh)	Benefit-Cost Ratio
John Franchi Dam – Fresno River	469.1	863	0.9 +/-
Boca Dam – Little Truckee River	1,184	4,370	1.68
Prosser Creek Dam – near Truckee	872	3,819	1.98
Putah Diversion Dam – Green River in Lake County	363	1,924	1.16
Casitas Dam – Coyote Creek, Ventura Co.	1,042	3,280	1.57
Total:	3,930	15,256	1.5 average

Development of added hydropower at the John Franchi Dam on the Fresno River for example would take only $3.6 million with $108,000 in yearly operations and management costs.  While this may be drop in the bucket of California’s total energy needs many of the other hydropower project sites in the Western region identified by the Bureau of Reclamation could end up shipping additional electrons to California through the regional power grid. It is the impact that cheap hydropower would have on all wholesale energy prices that is critical.

But California’s Green Power Law – AB 32 – forbids hydropower from qualifying as “green” even though it emits no air pollution.  The reasons for this are more ideological and political than economic or environmental.

Those who would not for a moment believe whatever the U.S. Secretary of Defense or the head of Occidental Petroleum said would take whatever the Lawrence Berkeley Lab says as gospel truth.  The Energy Future report by the Berkeley Lab is not a rational response to a body of vetted evidence.  It is supported by a belief system and an economic ideology.  Government in California does not always follow what is in its rational interest.  It does what is consistent with other things it believes in. 

There are powerful vested interests for continued modernization of the energy policy via nuclear power.  There are similar vested interests, albeit diminishing, for centrist energy policies that would entail continued modernization of the energy system and grid but with mitigating measures such as fracking and hydropower.  And there are nearly insurmountable vested interests for scrapping modernized energy policy and the energy system in favor of highly risky and costly countermodern energy policies. 

There are powerful interests, money, political power and status at stake on all sides.  But right now it is not vested interests but the vested ideology of countermodernization that is driving future energy policy in California with some possible influence being made by the Federal government for fracking and hydropower. 

But fracking is being demonized by the Environmental Left to render it illegitimate. The media has already spread the urban myth of fire coming out of water faucets in the vicinity of fracking operations. And California’s Green Power Law has already made hydropower legally illegitimate.  Energy in California is not a policy for rational problem solving but ideological warfare.

It is the power of ideology not necessarily economic interests that will likely determine California’s future energy policies.  Here, a vigorous case needs to be made for markets and moderated modernization of the energy system including relatively less-polluting natural gas fracking and clean and cheap hydropower. 

There is need in California for a middle ground energy policy that is somewhere between the radical utopian vision of the Berkeley Lab and the impacts of a nonexistent bogeyman of unregulated energy markets. 

Without competition from cheaper natural gas and hydropower to contain prices the price of Green Power will likely go through the roof.  This was demonstrated during the California Energy Crisis of 2001 when cheap imported hydropower from the Northwest was unavailable due to a drought and the price of natural gas spiked when Cal-Trans ordered a shut down an interstate natural gas line purportedly to do freeway repairs right in the middle of the crisis. Together with price controls on retail electricity imposed by California’s legislature at the time these unforeseen events created a “perfect storm” for an energy price “bubble” in wholesale energy markets that was erroneously blamed on Enron to avoid the political consequences. The experience of the California Energy Crisis of 2001 teaches that the Law of Unintended Consequences is much more likely to raise its ugly head without open markets than with them. 

Postmodern policies are a way to cope and mitigate the impacts of modern energy technologies. But they are not any way to “run a railroad” or an economy.  California’s cognitive elites don’t seem to understand the difference to the detriment of it structural state budget deficit and high unemployment rate.

California needs an ideologically centrist and open market energy policy not a radical countermodern energy plan for the future based on an ideology that can only succeed by closing off markets and the regional grid to California. As long as Gov. “Moonbeam” Brown is in office California is not likely to get that.  Like Japan before it walled itself off from modernization in the seventeenth century, California may be poised to enter into a “Dark Age” in more than one sense of the term.

 

 

Comments

[Energy management system]

"I HATE this whole carbon tax idea. It's artificially inflating the price of current viable energies .."