Eat more cookies

Here’s a letter from Richard Allison recently printed in the Sante Fe New Mexican:

July 13, 2008 in The Santa Fe New Mexican

I stayed close to home for the Fourth of July weekend. My wife and I spent a
very enjoyable weekend camping near Mills Canyon in Harding County. We did
it to save gasoline, as many others did. My thoughts, like those of many
others, centered on how we are going to get out of this high priced
crude-oil mess we have gotten ourselves into. I still want to travel and
visit family.

Most of my friends are sold on alternative energy supply as the key to
reducing our dependence on oil. These folks are no dummies, as they include
other engineers like me, teachers and researchers at the labs. Consistently,
they all say solar and wind power are the tickets to energy independence.
This seems to be the party line, as our governor and other leading
politicians in New Mexico are against any other form of power generation,
such as nuclear or coal. But what these excellent politicians are failing to
tell us is the whole truth.

I polled at least 10 friends last week, and only one had the right answer as
to the cost of wind generation, which is the power- generation alternative
of choice in New Mexico.

None of our politicians want to talk about the cost of wind- power
generation. Wind-power generation is one of the most expensive forms of
electric-power generation.

I am in favor of varied sources of power generation, but only after everyone
realizes what it is going to cost. The fact is that wind power is between 20
percent and 30 percent more costly than conventional power production. PNM
is right in the middle at a 25 percent premium. If you don’t believe me,
just look at the much- touted PNM Sky Blue program on its Web site.

The additional cost for signing up for this program is $.0169 per kilowatt
hour, or $1.69 per hundred kilowatt hours. This is 25 percent more than
their base rate. I am really not up to paying 25 percent more on my electric
bill because my ‘97 Honda still needs to be fed gasoline to get to work. My
energy dollar only goes so far.

The politicians are not telling us that wind power can never be used to base
load a power generation system. What happens when the wind does not blow,
which frequently happens for days at a time even in our windy New Mexico?
The base load generation must pick up the slack and this happens a lot.

So, unless we are willing, which I am not, to turn off the lights when the
wind does not blow, the base load generation must keep expanding. This is
where the cost gets exorbitant. For every dollar invested in a megawatt of
wind power generation, PNM must also have in reserve or under construction a
megawatt of base load capacity. In other words, PNM must spend the money to
build two power stations rather than one: the wind farm and coal/nuclear
base load plant. Both the wind power farms and base load generation must be
maintained, which again doubles the maintenance cost. PNM is also entitled
to a return on its investment, as it is a publicly held company that must
return a profit to the investors. If it were not for the tax incentives both
the state and federal governments give to wind generation, power companies
including PNM simply could not afford to build wind farms.

In the PNM system, the cheapest electrical generation is from the Palo Verde
Nuclear Plant in Arizona at a cost of $.0129 per kilowatt hour with more
than 90 percent availability, followed by the coal- fired plants in New
Mexico.

Based on the cost of generation, common sense leads us to more nuclear
plants as a way of keeping electrical costs low and a means of providing a
benefit of no emissions for those who are members of the climate
change/carbon reduction faith. If electric car technology comes on line in
the next 10 years, this could be our best choice for fueling our cars.

So the next time some of your friends or politicians start touting the
benefits of wind-power generation, ask them why they are in favor of such an
expensive power source. I am ready for more diverse power generation,
including nuclear and next-generation, clean-coal technology.

Richard Allison is a registered professional engineer currently working for
the New Mexico Department of Transportation. He lives in Santa Fe.

I told you so.

A report from poverty aid organization Oxfam concludes that biofuel development is driving up prices for staple foods among the world’s poorest, with one official calling biofuels a “crime against humanity.” Read the story here.

It is already insane that most of the crop acreage in this country is devoted to raising feed for livestock. Now we’re raising crops to feed our cars - something we don’t eat indirectly! To think that we’re plowing up CRP land to plant corn for the “good of the planet” is asinine. But it’s happening, and meanwhile, Mexico’s poor can’t afford tortillas. Something seriously wrong here folks . . .

Check out Boone Pickens’ latest business venture, if you can handle the irony.

As if the near exponential increase in wind turbines across the landscape is not enough, hibernating bats are facing a new and mysterious threat.

Turbine-killed Brazilian freetail bat, northwestern Oklahoma.
photo by Martin Piorkowski

According to this story from the BBC, bats that should still be hibernating in New York and New England are rousing themselves, leaving their hibernacula, and attempting to forage too early for their own good. The culprit appears to a mysterious (and most likely fungal) condition biologists are calling “white nose syndrome.”

How or even if the fungus plays a role in the behavior of bats isn’t known. The result, however, can be devastating. Bats survive the freezing temperatures and lack of flying insect food through harsh Northeastern winters by migrating or hibernating. “Tree” bats like the eastern red bat migrate to winter in the Southern U.S. where they undergo torpor (lowered metabolism to conserve energy) while hanging amid clusters of leaves that persist on oaks and other trees. Red bats may also spend the winter on the ground in leaf litter. “Cave” bats in contrast do not migrate, except to find favored caves, mine shafts, or other protected areas where temperatures are moderated from dipping into brutal cold and humidity is held relatively constant (and high). In these hibernacula, bats cluster together, living off of stored fat with a very low metabolism from roughly mid-November to early April. If bats are roused to awaken within their hibernacula, they will expend much of their energy “jump-starting” their incredibly fast metabolism. That energy (in the form of stored fat) needs to be replaced quickly, or the bats will starve.

In the Northeast this season, bats have been awakening too early and, upon detecting an energy deficit from the process, have been leaving their hibernacula to forage. One problem with this is that they are foraging in advance of hatches of midges, mosquitoes, and small moths that might form their staple diet. For species that already face multiple conservation challenges, this latest news is not good.