Free Republic

If you watch cable TV, chances are you've seen an ad promoting T. Boone Pickens' plan for reducing the vast sums we're spending on imported oil. Hearts quickened in the Democratic Party because Mr. Pickens says in the ad: "this is one emergency we can't drill our way out of." That's what Democrats say when they block drilling off our coasts and in Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. But the budding romance cooled when Mr. Pickens made it clear he supports lifting those drilling bans. Mr. Pickens' plan has two key elements. The first is to build a massive series of...

In the wake of an economic downturn, General Motors Corp is hurrying production of its Chevy Volt. It now hopes to unveil a showroom-ready model in September, according to sources close to the project.

Centrica warns on wind farm costsCentrica, one of the UK's biggest energy generators, has warned that the prospect of making money from wind farms is looking "marginal". The company says that the rising cost of off-shore wind farms could end up ruining the government's renewable energy targets. The comments come a week after Shell withdrew from a project that was set to become the world's largest wind farm. The government wants 33 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity built by 2020. Mr Sambhi, Centrica's director of power business unit, says the firm is still planning to build three new wind farms...

In order to understand the steep rise in world food prices that set off food riots in Haiti last week and toppled the government, you need to travel to Iowa. Right now, we're trying to run our cars on corn ethanol instead of gasoline. As a result, we suddenly find ourselves taking food out of the mouths of children in developing nations. That may sound harsh, but it also happens to be true.Environmentalists and farm state senators--the great biofuels coalition--of course object. After U.N. officials called for a biofuels moratorium last week, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, called...

Every week brings new claims that clean, free, inexhaustible renewable energy will soon replace the “dirty” fuels that sustain our economy today. A healthy dose of reality is needed. Over half of our electricity comes from coal. Gas and nuclear generate 36% of our electricity. Barely 1% comes from wind and solar. Coal-generated power typically costs less per kilowatt hour than alternatives – leaving families with more money for food, housing, transportation and healthcare. By 2020, the United States will need 100,000 megawatts of new electricity, say EIA, industry and utility company analysts. Unreliable wind power simply cannot meet these...

Researchers have made a breakthrough in the development of "green gasoline," a liquid identical to standard gasoline yet created from sustainable biomass sources like switchgrass and poplar trees. Reporting in the April 7, 2008 issue of Chemistry & Sustainability, Energy & Materials (ChemSusChem), chemical engineer and National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER awardee George Huber of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (UMass) and his graduate students Torren Carlson and Tushar Vispute announced the first direct conversion of plant cellulose into gasoline components. In the same issue, James Dumesic and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Madison announce an integrated process for creating chemical...

Who knew a “free� source of energy could be so expensive? The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) recently estimated that billions of dollars in investment will be needed to transmit wind-generated electricity from the areas of Texas most suitable for wind generation — West Texas and the Panhandle — to the areas of the state that need energy the most — the I-35 corridor and the upper Gulf Coast. These costs will be borne by Texas ratepayers. How did this happen? Subsidies, incentives, and renewable energy mandates have paved the way for Texas’ wind-energy boom. Today, Texas leads the...

Fads come fast and furious in our viral age, and the reactions to them can be equally ferocious. That’s what we’re seeing right now with biofuels, which everyone loved until everyone decided they were the worst thing since the Black Death. Where fuel distilled from plant matter was once hailed as an answer to everything from global warming to the geo-strategic power shift favoring repressive one-pipeline oil states, its now a “scam” and “part of the problem,” according to Time magazine. Ethanol has turned awful. The supposed crimes of biofuels are manifold. They’re behind soaring global commodity prices, the destruction...

Sandia's synthetic-fuel recipe: Mix CO2 , water; heat with sun R. Colin Johnson (12-19-2007) In the hydrogen economy, automobiles would be powered by the simplest element on the periodic table, leveraging the element's abundance. But as the Hindenburg disaster demonstrated, hydrogen is also the most difficult element to compress into a safe, usable form. Why not instead synthesize a hydrocarbon-based fuel, such as methanol or even gasoline? Sandia National Laboratories is building such a fuel synthesizer in a bid to harness sunlight to reverse the process of combustion. The reactor would use reclaimed carbon dioxide emissions to create renewable synthetic...

Claims for Environment, Energy Use Draw Fire; Fighting on the Farm By LAUREN ETTER November 28, 2007; Page A1 Little over a year ago, ethanol was winning the hearts and wallets of both Main Street and Wall Street, with promises of greater U.S. energy independence, fewer greenhouse gases and help for the farm economy. Today, the corn-based biofuel is under siege. In the span of one growing season, ethanol has gone from panacea to pariah in the eyes of some. The critics, which include industries hurt when the price of corn rises, blame ethanol for pushing up food prices, question...

A determined pack has begun to race its engines and to try to shoulder us off the road toward energy independence. It’s time for those determined to stay on the track to drive aggressively. The energy-independence question is really about oil — the rest of U.S. energy use presents important issues, but not the danger of our being subject to the control of nations that “do not particularly like us,” as the president put it. Some of the engine racers have an economic interest in keeping our transportation system 97-percent oil-dependent. Less understandable are the authors of a recent Council...

WASHINGTON — Future nuclear power plants should include design improvements to better protect against a terrorist attack by large aircraft, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Tuesday. The chairman, Dale Klein, said the commission soon will give guidance to reactor manufacturers on "what we believe the reactors should be designed to withstand," including the possibility of a terrorist crashing a plane into the reactor. -snip-The NRC is gearing up for a rush of applications for new power reactors, the first such applications since the 1970s before the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. Klein said four or five firm...