Several media outlets, along with Senate, and the FutureGen Alliance websites were praising the July 8th and July 11th votes by the The Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee and Senate Appropriations Committee respectively. In both votes, the Senate chose to protect $134 million in federal funding for the FutureGen plant at Matoon, Il.
In two separate FutureGen Alliance news releases, CEO Michael Mudd applauded the decision as helping to move the world's first near-zero emissions coal plant closer to reality.
Text from the Rand Corporation website,
Rand Impacts on U.S. Energy Expenditures & GHG Emissions of Increasing Renewable Energy Use
The penetration of renewable energy into the marketplace has been small, held back principally by their higher cost relative to fossil energy. RAND assessed the potential impacts on U.S. consumer energy expenditures and national CO2 emissions of producing 25 percent of U.S. electric power and motor-vehicle transportation fuels from renewable resources by the year 2025. The baseline for the comparisons was expenditures and CO2 emissions in 2025 as drawn from the reference-case tables of the Energy Information Administration's 2006 Annual Energy Outlook. The report shows that increasing renewables use can reduce CO2 emissions and enhance energy security by lowering the cost of imported petroleum. However, a large, inexpensive, easily converted biomass supply is necessary for significantly increased renewable-energy use to have a relatively low impact on consumer energy expenditures. Rapid progress also is needed in the technologies converting biomass feedstock into transportation fuels, and producing power at marginal wind sites. Without progress in these areas, the renewable-energy requirement could substantially increase consumer energy expenditures. Technical advances in provision of economically and environmentally sound biomass energy and wind power generation at lower-quality sites should be top priorities for increasing affordable supplies of renewable energy. The report replaces an earlier version withdrawn in 2006 to correct errors in modeling discovered by RAND post-publication.
Purchase the report or download a pdf version on the RAND website.
This just released chart, prepared by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, gives the briefest glimpse into how complex and confusing the proposed climate change legislation bill would have been. (Click on the graphic to see the full pdf version of the chart.)
Warner-Lieberman bill with Boxer amendments
Jason Hayes, Communications Director, American Coal Council
The first one to plead his cause seems right, Until his neighbor comes and examines him. (Proverbs 18:17 - NKJV)
Even the lazy and uninterested will have found it hard to miss the recent flood of interest in polar bears. The public has been treated to expensive marketing campaigns and flooded with pictures of polar bears that were allegedly “stranded” on dwindling ice flows (it turned out they were just frolicking on an ice formation). We've also heard stories about climate change and have been informed that our consumptive habits will cause populations of this majestic species to crash. All of those stories were recently capped off by the media fanfare that accompanied Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne's decision to list the polar bear as a “threatened species” under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
NJ.com has an interesting article on the $1 billion, three-year upgrade that the Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG) is carrying out at their Hudson Power Plant in New Jersey.
The energy industry and pretty much every one else who uses energy will be watching Congress this week as they take on the issue of implementing the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill.
This bill, proposed by Senators, John Warner (R-Va.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn), would set limits (or caps) on the total amount of so-called greenhouse gases (GHG) that could be released by U.S.-based utilities and industry. The bill is claimed to cover some 87 percent of U.S. GHG emissions.
