Rolling blackouts

Friday, 8:48 am

By Kate

Dec

02

2005

From the Boston Globe:

Electricity officials are bracing for unprecedented rolling blackouts if New England faces a severe cold snap that overtaxes supplies of natural gas used for both heating homes and generating power.

If the winter is mild, officials foresee few problems maintaining adequate electric supplies, according to a forecast to be issued today. But officials at Independent System Operator New England, the Holyoke organization that manages the six-state electric grid, fear a repeat of brutally cold weather like that of January 2004 that could force them to shut off power to hundreds of thousands of people and businesses for one or two hours at a time to conserve available electricity.

New England set records for wintertime electric and gas demand—and came close to rolling blackouts—in January 2004 when temperatures stayed below 10 degrees on three separate days in a single week and hit a 24-year low of 7 below zero at Logan International Airport in Boston.

Winter has been mild so far, but that’s fairly typical of our weather through at least the middle of December. But the weather forecasts leave little doubt that we’re going to have a colder than usual winter in January and February. Sometime tonight, another arctic cold front is supposed to move in with much colder than usual temperatures for December and we have less gas than we had last year. Furnaces will be grinding away all over the region for the next several days. Add the extra load from Christmas lighting and I think all bets are off.

One third of our electricity is generated with natural gas and it’s in short supply. The article claims we won’t have to worry about natural gas delivery for cooking and heating, but they fail to mention that those households that heat with gas require electricity to start their furnaces. Same holds true for houses that heat with oil. A couple of hours of no electricity in frigid temperatures means already chillier than usual houses will get really cold, really fast.

But, if it happens, thousands of people will suddenly be focused on our current and growing energy problems like never before. We obviously need to figure out some alternatives and different ways to manage what we have. Conserve isn’t a word public officials have uttered yet. That may quickly change. Should the next hurricane season be anything like this one, we’ll really be up the creek. Gas and oil production in the Gulf of Mexico haven’t yet recovered from this season and the new hurricane season starts in 6 short months.

Discount heating oil for MA

Wednesday, 6:30 pm

By Kate

Nov

23

2005

Massachusetts state legislators inked a deal with Venezuelan officials yesterday to provide low income residents with more than 12 million gallons of low cost heating oil this season. The oil will be provided by CITGO and administrated by Citizen’s Energy and Massachusetts Energy Consumer Alliance. Other big oil companies were asked to participate in the program, but none would agree. Must be their profits were a little tight this past quarter....

The discounted oil will be available beginning Dec. 12 to any of the more than 40,000 Massachusetts households receiving federal fuel oil assistance. Families who have used up their $550 annual federal subsidy will get a letter from Citizens Energy informing them of the new program.

Yay, Hugo!

(And let it be said that Mitt Romney thinks this is fantastic, too.)

Filth

Wednesday, 5:46 pm

By Kate

Nov

16

2005

There is such a miasma of filth hovering over the news the past couple of days that it makes me sick. Really. Nauseated. Most of the news originates in Washington DC. That’s where the stink starts and it’s spreading so thickly that I can hardly breathe. When do people finally say “Enough” and scream to boot their skanky asses out of Washington?

1. According to Anderson Cooper’s TV program (about halfway down the page) yesterday, dozens of families have returned to their homes in the 9th ward (New Orleans) and found the decomposing bodies of relatives in their homes. That’s the area where searches for the dead were called off. Why? Who the hell knows. One hundred and four bodies have been found this way. Can you imagine walking back in to your house and finding a rotting body of someone you loved? After the authorities claimed that there were no more dead bodies to be found? Was it that poor people or poor black people weren’t worth the trouble? It’s a sick turn of events.

2. After vigorously denying that the US military used white phosphorous weapons in Fallujah, the Pentagon has now admitted that they indeed did use white phosphorous munitions against insurgents, but adamantly claim they did not target civilians. White phosphorous is a gas that has a chemical reaction with human flesh and continues to burn until the phosphorous is spent. It will burn all the way to the bone. It melts flesh. This is a hideous weapon. And since the military would not allow males over the age of 15 to leave Fallujah (because they might be insurgents), it’s a sure bet that there were a lot of innocent civilians trapped in Fallujah who were hideously burned alive. Civilians were targeted the moment authorities refused to allow people to leave the city. Some families refused to be separated and stayed together. There were women and children who were burned alive. They weren’t ‘officially’ targeted, but they were targeted nonetheless. The Pentagon claims the use of these weapons was legal. But moral? Decent? Humane? Well, those are words that have little weight or importance. Saddam gassed the Kurds. The US used chemical weapons in Fallujah. The things the Pentagon likes to call weapons of mass destruction. There’s a clue. Weapons of mass destruction don’t discriminate. They just kill anything in their path. If that includes melting the victims to death....eh. It’s legal.

3. Officials at the second largest oilfield in the world, the Burgan oil field in Kuwait, have announced that Burgan is exhausted and past peak. (Heads up from The Oil Drum)There is no way that more oil will be extracted from the wells than is currently being extracted. What it means is that progressively less and less oil will be extracted from the wells. That’s the second largest oil field in the world, next to the Saudi Ghawar oil field. Those in the oil industry state pretty plainly that there will never be another oil field discovered the size of Ghawar or Burgan. Those days are over. Worse, Burgan’s peaking gives a lot more credibility to Matthew Simmons’ claims that the Saudi Ghawar field is close to peaking or already peaking. When the oil isn’t there, what do we do then? Is there a Plan B? Plan C?

There was a hearing on Capitol Hill this week, with all the major execs of the major oil companies. The inevitable question came out: Were you involved with, present at VP Cheney’s Energy Task Force? Absolutely not, they all said. Then, the pesky Washington Post came out with an article that says otherwise, based on a White House document they got their hands on. It says that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc were all present and accounted for. So what was Cheney’s energy task force about? You know, the task force for which Congressional requests for documents have been stonewalled?

Well, according to Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, peak oil and securing Middle East oil was at the top of the list. Yes, I can see why the Veep wouldn’t want that to get out.

“We had a discussion in (the State Department’s Office of) Policy Planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields of the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N. trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly,” Wilkerson said. “That’s how serious we thought about it.”

The article goes on to say:

On Feb. 3, 2001 – only two weeks after Bush took office – an NSC document instructed NSC officials to cooperate with Cheney’s Energy Task Force because it was “melding” two previously unrelated areas of policy: “the review of operational policies towards rogue states” and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”

Before this disclosure, which appeared in The New Yorker three years later, it was believed that Cheney’s secretive task force was focusing on ways to reduce environmental regulations and fend off the Kyoto protocol on global warming.

But the NSC document suggested that the Bush administration from its first days recognized the linkage between ousting unreliable leaders like Saddam Hussein and securing oil reserves for future U.S. consumption. In other words, the Cheney task force appears to have had a military component to “capture” oil fields in “rogue states.” [For more on the NSC document, see The New Yorker, Feb. 16, 2004.]

Wilkerson sums up:

“We consume 60 percent of the world’s resources,” he said. “We have an economy and we have a society that is built on the consumption of those resources. We better get fast at work changing the foundation – and I don’t see us fast at work on that, by the way, another failure of this administration, in my mind – or we better be ready to take those assets (in the Middle East).

A bunch of oil men running this administration who can only think in terms of oil. There is no Plan B other than waging war to secure the dwindling oil supplies for US consumption? Iraq, of course, was part of that plan. (WMD were merely digestible propaganda.) Is there a longer term plan? Haven’t heard of one, have you? I’ll bet the documents from Cheney’s Energy Task Force would shock the American people right out of their skins. Washington is a stinking cesspool.

Lost the ANWR vote, finally

Friday, 12:43 am

By Kate

Nov

04

2005

The Senate voted to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge today. For a “proven” reserve—which actually means best guess estimate—of 10 billion barrels of oil. Which means roughly half of that will be easily accessible, another quarter will be much harder and more expensive to extract, and the remaining quarter may never be extracted unless there is a new cost efficient technology that can do it. That technology doesn’t exist yet, though. And since we consume roughly 20 million barrels of oil a day with our hunger growing at about 2% annually, that means the ANWR should give us a little less than a year’s worth of our current annual demand.

The Senators claim that THIS is going to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Well, not for very long or probably that significantly. If there are 5-6 billion barrels of easily recoverable oil in the ground, it will trickle out in increments enough to help a little for a few years. It could possibly buy us some time while oil production around the world continues to decline or in the aftermath of another Katrina. It would be advisable for those in power to use the time ANWR oil buys us to spend capital on intensive alternative energy R&D in a big way. But, I won’t hold my breath for that kind of far-sighted policy.

It’s not a good thing for the pristine wildlife reserve to have oil exploration and extraction going on. It’s very sad to think we are so desperate for oil that we have to destroy such beautiful and valuable wild spaces and the lives that depend on it.

Some stunning photographs of what we’re about to despoil, if anyone is interested.... Subhankar Banerjee is the photographer and his ANWR photographs are so beautiful. (photographs link via The Oil Drum)

Add another layer!

Friday, 10:36 am

By Kate

Oct

21

2005

Holy mackerel. I got my October gas bill today. It was enough to shock my socks off. I have *not* turned on the furnace yet this season so all the use is from the hot water heater and cooking, which are more or less fixed usage amounts every month. (If I had it to do over again, I’d go back to last year and purchase one of these on-demand hot water heaters instead of the tank variety with the pilot light.)

In any case, my current bill is $51 for a measly 24 therms. Last year at this time, I also used 24 therms for a total bill of $32. Last year I was charged 68 cents per therm. On this bill it was $1.45.

I came real close to turning on the furnace for a few minutes last night. It was around 36 degrees outside and the inside temp fell to around 62 degrees. It was unpleasantly chilly, but we just layered up instead. I even thought about starting a fire in the stove, but I want to save the wood for as late in the season as possible. I dunno. I might cave in and burn some of the small stuff during the next couple of evenings if the nights don’t warm up a little.

Yes, I’m obsessive about heat and energy use. Can’t help it.

But the fact is, gas costs are very high this month, and they’ll probably be higher next month. Those people who use gas for heating are going to be in a state of shock!