Reclaim Conservatism

Here is part of an interview the local newspaper did with my representative, Adam Putnam (R-FL12). It’s a long answer, but a good one, about the GOP House plan on energy.

There is no one magic formula or silver bullet out there that anyone is aware of that’s going to eliminate our dependence on foreign sources of energy. To move forward as a nation, in order to stop transferring $750 billion a year to the people who don’t like us, in order to be more energy secure than we are today, we have to invest in all of the aspects of a comprehensive policy.

Conservation, obviously, is a piece of that. You cannot conserve your way into energy security, but it has to be a part of the solution. Incentives for manufacturers to invest in maybe things that are more capital intensive up front, but are going to save energy and save money in the long haul, giving homeowners tax credits for putting solar panels on their roof, people changing out light bulbs; that whole conservation message is important and a lot of it people are doing on their own. People voluntarily bought SUVs because they felt like they were safer and more spacious and met their needs as a lifestyle. People are voluntarily trading in SUVs because they’ve decided the benefits of a larger, safer vehicle don’t outweigh the extra cost of fuel. That’s the marketplace working. That’s not the government banning SUVs. So conservation and efficiency are a big part of it.

Renewables are a part of it. The most promising renewables are solar, wind and biofuels. The reason why it’s important we focus on energy sources that impact the electrical grid is because all of our vision, our collective national vision, for mobile fuels, is that they will move away from petroleum-based products and fossil fuels to basically things that require more electricity. You’re not just giving up cars, not giving up gas or diesel in exchange for a Fred Flintstone method of getting around. You’ve got to power that motor somehow. Most of that technology right now is leaning toward hybrids, which are battery combined with a traditional combustion engine, and plug-in hybrids, which is really kind of the next big thing. And what are you plugging it into? You’re plugging it into the wall.

So, solar and wind, getting back to that, nobody in Congress is talking about building more dams, so hydroelectric is kind of out. Wind is a great part of the plan, but the trouble with wind is that wind blows the most in the United States where the fewest people are. And unlike oil, gas or coal, you cannot store electrons. So, the wind corridor that (oil and gas executive) T. Boone Pickens and others talk about in many cases are side by side with oil wells. It’s in the Texas panhandle, it’s in Oklahoma, it’s in the Dakotas, it’s in the Great Plains, and because when that wind blows that blade and that blade spins, it produces electrons, it needs to go to wherever the end user is. It cannot be stored yet on site. In order to get the electricity from where the wind blows to where the people are, we need to invest about $40 billion, I’m told, in electric transmission infrastructures so you get that electron from the middle of nowhere to St. Louis or Kansas City or Chicago or Dallas or wherever that’s basically in that heartland area. It’s still an important part of a national electrical portfolio.

Solar also has great potential in the United States today with the current solar technology. The desert is still the best place to produce solar energy at a power-plant scale. Based on what I’ve learned about the topic, solar still works the best outside of the Mojave Desert, outside of Arizona, New Mexico, California, where they have major solar power plants. Outside of those areas, solar still works best in a place like Florida on the roofs of shopping centers or municipal buildings or schools or churches, on your house to use for your swimming pool or hot-water heater. The difference between Florida only getting five or six hours of sunlight on average per day and the Mojave getting eight or eight and a half is significant when you’re talking about that kind of infrastructure. And the water vapor and other things that diffuse that power a little bit in Florida make us less desirable, but not undesirable. In fact, there are three solar power plants being permitted in Florida as we speak – one just south of Arcadia, one at Cape Canaveral and one near Jupiter. So, solar, wind, those are your renewables.

Your alternatives, in my opinion, and this is certainly controversial, but nuclear has to be a part of the topic, has to be part of the solution. Nuclear power plants are expensive and they take a long time to build, but those things can be streamlined some and nuclear power is very clean. It has zero carbon emissions, so that can be part of the solution. There are two nuclear power plants being permitted in Florida. …

The other piece, biofuels, are important. Taking what we’ve learned from corn-based biofuels, which are not that efficient, and apply that to cellulosic ethanol. You look at the BTUs of energy that came down around here in 2004 (during hurricane season) with all the oak trees and everything. The University of Florida, they’ve developed an enzyme that can convert that to ethanol – at the bench scale and at the test scale. Nobody’s ready to go build that plant yet. That’s what we’ve got to get to.

Eventually, you’re looking at a day where hopefully your yard waste landfills can be biofuel plants. And a state like Florida that has a year-round growing season, would be able to produce some nonfood crop that can be grown for fuel. I think the shrinking phosphate lands have some potential for doing that.

Sands and shale are also technologies that at $10 barrel oil makes no sense. At $120 a barrel, it suddenly makes sense to get those. Coal is very abundant in this country, very cheap, very dirty. And so we have to invest in the technologies to make it cleaner-burning technology. One of the examples of that is south of Bartow at the TECO plant, where people come from all over the world to see how they do it. They’re gasifying coal. You can also liquefy coal; the Germans did that for aviation fuel in as far back as World War II. That aspect of it is not a new technology. The gasification is a little bit newer and the combined cycle makes that possible. You’re still releasing carbon; you’re not releasing sulfur dioxide the way they used to. You’re not releasing nitrous oxide the way the used to, but you are releasing carbon. So, if you’re really going to tap into coal and if you’re going to have a carbon law, which both presidential candidates have said they want, then the key to making that technology work is to figure out how to capture the carbon, number one, and like the dog that caught the car, figure out what to do with it once you’ve captured it because there’s a lot of it. Those are the two pretty big milestones in the technology to unlock carbon.

So, you’ve got your renewables, alternatives and traditional fuels.

What I keep coming back to is that for the near term, all this other stuff’s great, but for the foreseeable future, for the next 20 years, we’re still an oil, coal and natural gas economy and we have to do more domestic production – in the Arctic, deep water, offshore production – to reduce our dependence on the Middle East for that transition. It’s not going to drill your way out of the problem, T. Boone Pickens is right, but it makes no sense for it not be a part of the solution at all. It has to be a part of it, in there with all the other pieces.

Rep. Putnam is scheduled to speak Tuesday at the Republican convention. I hope to be able to catch his talk.

Cross posted from bRight & Early