Texas Power Crisis Was Biggest Energy Story Of 2021

Morning Consult and Politico polls were conducted throughout 2021, surveying roughly 2,000 registered voters each, with 2-point margins of error.

Are Electric Cars The Answer To Pollution ?

The picture above is of the Nissan Leaf -- an all-electric automobile. It is advertised as a zero emission vehicle because it has no exhaust pollution like a gas-powered car does. Electric cars are being touted as an answer to the environmental concerns being raised by the continuing use of fossil fuels that foul our air and contribute to global climate change. But is that really the case?

A new study, done by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, says that may not be true. They cite two reasons for this. First, the construction of an electric car produces more factory pollution than the production of a gas-powered car. This is because of the chemicals that go into making the battery (which actually results in a more toxic brew of pollution). But even though this is true, electric cars would still reduce pollution if it was not for the second factor -- where the cars get their electricity.

While these cars don't need gasoline, they still must get their power from somewhere. And right now, that would be existing power plants, which would have to produce more power to take care of this added need for electricity -- and most of that power is produced from the burning of fossil fuels. When you combine the extra pollution from building the electric cars and the extra pollution from getting the electricity from dirty power plants, the result (according to the study) is that electric cars don't have any advantage over gas-powered automobiles (especially the high-mileage sub-compacts) as far as the environment is concerned.

But that does not mean the electric car is not a good idea -- only that it cannot solve the problem of pollution without also addressing the source of their electric power also. The problem is not quite as acute in Europe, where they get a larger percentage of their electricity from non-fossil fuel sources (like solar, wind, and nuclear power). But it is a major problem in the United States, where over 85% of the electricity produced is from fossil fuels -- especially the burning of coal.

There has been a lot of talk lately, even from our president, about the promise of "claen" coal. Don't be mislead. There is no such thing as clean coal. That is just propaganda fed to the public by the coal companies. Even after washing and treating coal, it is still the dirtiest of all the fossil fuels -- and pollution capturing techniques are still just a dream (and may never be a reality).

I still think electric cars are a good idea, but until we cut the use of fossil fuels to produce electricity and replace that with clean (and hopefully renewable) sources of electricity production, it will just be a good idea that failed. The use of electric cars cannot replace the need to clean up our power plants. In fact, it increases the need to do that.

Nissan Says Emergency Power For Your Home Could Come From Your Car

I read this post over at the excellent blog called Zero Energy Construction, and I thought it was a very interesting idea. It seems that the Nissan corporation is investigating ways to reverse the flow of electricity on its electric car (the Nissan Leaf) and allow the auto to power your home during a temporary blackout. Here's the post:


Everyone's looking for an edge in the electric vehicle wars, and Nissan might have one. It's working on a system that would allow Leaf owners to use the car to supply electricity to their houses during power outages.
Lots of people buy generators for that purpose, but Hideaki Watanabe, head of Nissan's Global Zero Emissions Business unit, says his EV could handle the job.
The Leaf's battery can store 24 kilowatt hours of electricity, equal to about a day's worth of energy use in a normal U.S. household.
"In case of blackouts we can utilize that," Watanabe said. "In Japan, some people say instead of installing a generator they'll just buy a Leaf. As of today we don't have a function to discharge, but we are looking into that."
Watanabe is pushing his engineers to look for ways to reverse the flow of energy.
"I want it ASAP--at least I would like to see some concrete proposal by the end of the year," he said. "I want a prototype."
Watanabe said Nissan could use the CHAdeMO DC fast-charging system backed by most Japan automakers because the technology can detect electricity leaks.

Only A Partial Solution

(Cartoon above is done by Michael Ramirez in the Investor's Business Daily.)

Don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed to electric cars. I think they're probably a good idea whose time has come. If we put enough of them on the road, we probably can reduce our dependence somewhat on crude oil. But we need to stop thinking that electric cars are the way to end pollution in the United States.

I'm not saying that the use of electric cars will make no difference in pollution levels -- only that the difference they would make is much smaller than most people think. The truth is that the electric cars have a carbon footprint also, and currently that carbon footprint is not a whole lot smaller than that of a gasoline-powered auto.

How can that be? Two reasons. First, gasoline-powered autos are much cleaner than they used to be (and at least the newer ones don't pollute nearly as much as autos used to do). Second, the electric cars must get their electric power from somewhere, and that is usually from a dirty coal-powered energy plant.

If a proliferation of electric cars simply results in the building of more dirty coal-powered energy plants (and there is no such thing as a "clean" coal-powered plant), then little or nothing would have been accomplished toward cleaning up air pollution. The EPA has already told us that nearly 70% of the pollution produced in this country now comes from energy plants -- and the worst violators are the coal-fired plants.

Electric cars are a start, but they are only a small part of the solution we need to combat pollution. Far more important is cleaning up energy-producing plants -- and that must be done by finding new clean and renewable sources for energy production. Coal producers like to brag that they have hundreds of years of supply and their product is cheap. That might be true. But isn't planetary survival more important than a cheap dirty fuel? Can we really afford to continue building coal-powered plants? I think not.

Electric Companies Should be Consumer Owned

For years now, we have heard conservatives tell us how much better the private sector can do at providing services than the government can do. They have tried turning over many government functions to private concerns, and most of the time these are disasters which wind up costing ordinary citizens even more.

They tried it with the Department of Human Services here in Texas, and we wound up with a mess that we're still trying to solve. We were also told a few years ago that electric deregulation would show how efficient the private sector was and would result in lower prices for consumers. This was nothing but a huge lie told by Republicans so they could funnel windfall profits to their corporate buddies!

Anyone who really thought deregulation through could have seen it for the lie it really was, but the Republicans were smooth talkers and were able to convince most people that black is really white. Now there is proof of the lie.

The private companies who were deregulated here in Texas are now charging some of the highest electric rates in the nation. Meanwhile, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram tells us that government and consumer owned electric companies are charging significantly less for the electricity they deliver. These companies were not deregulated because they are not "for-profit" companies.

Let's look at some prices being charged consumers. TXU is charging its customers 13.8 cents a kilowatt-hour (kwh). But the consumers in Denton, which has a municipally-owned power company, are paying only 8.6 to 9.7 cents per kwh (depending on the times of year). The average of 6 North Texas co-operatives and municipally owned plants was 10.2 cents per kwh, and none of them came close to the rates charged by the private companies.

Why are the 150 municipal and co-operative power providers charging their 6 million customers less than the private companies? It's pretty simple. They don't have to turn a profit - they just have to cover their costs (and those costs don't include multi-million dollar salaries, thousand dollar-a-night hotel rooms, or private jets).

It's pretty clear that deregulation of private electric providers has not worked. In fact, consumers get the best deal when they are the owners - whether through their government or through a co-operative.

This is one of those functions that could probably be done better by government. You need only look at the deregulation in Texas to see that the private corporations will squeeze every nickel they can out of their consumers. At the very least, we must re-impose regulation on the private electric companies. They have proven they cannot be trusted with deregulation.

The private sector doesn't do it better, thay only charge more to do it.