DOE Archives - Michaels Energy

Sep 27

Nuclear Power over White Rabbits for a Reliable, Affordable, Zero-Carbon Future

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant No Comments

I update my electrification slides for the Wisconsin Public Utilities Institute’s Utility Basics course every year with the latest technologies, sales data, and energy, commodity, and equipment/vehicle prices. Year over year, electricity prices at my home have increased 15%, for now, based on fuel alone. That is minuscule compared to what is proposed in the Northeast. EnergyCentral.com linked to a Patch article that said Eversource Massachusetts is filing for a 38% hike on top of a 22% jump last winter. National Grid is filing for an unprecedented (in my world) “increase from last winter's 14.82 cents per kilowatt-hour rate to...

Oct 05

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GEBs The Final Chapter – Baby Steps!

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant No Comments

This is my sixth and final post on Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings (GEBs), including the great interview with Doug Scott (#5) of the Great Plains Institute. This week, I will wrap up with a mishmash of items in the DOE’s GEB Roadmap. As I start this wrap-up, what I wrote three years ago comes to mind - How About Some D in DSM? Here is the gist as it applies to GEBs today: I have always found it interesting that “demand-side management,” the term that is generally used synonymously with energy efficiency programs, includes virtually no demand management whatsoever. The term...

Oct 09

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Nuclear Power – What’s it worth to you?

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant No Comments

Author’s Note: Mike Frischmann here. I’m doing my best Jeff Ihnen impression and filling in for the Rant this week. Your regular dose of Jeff will return next week. Nuclear power plants have fallen on hard times. There has been a dearth of new builds in this country for decades. The DOE, at the request of the nuclear and coal industries, is pushing to throw nuclear generators a lifeline for pricing preferences. Most of the recent plant construction cancellations discussed in the news are nuke plants. And there’s, of course, the global scale mess of the Vogtle plant in Georgia...

Nov 14

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Regulating Deregulation and Wind’s Other Big Subsidy

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant 3 Comments

Last week we examined the startup of deregulation, why a competitive market for electricity is difficult and early failures. This week, we look at the price impacts and some long-term implications of deregulation. It seemed to me that deregulation of the electricity market had been a disaster: bankruptcies, soaring prices, and most recently, stranded baseload assets. There was a lot of evidence in that, but lately, prices have improved, but other challenges are emerging. Deregulation’s Impact on Pricing I realized that searching for comprehensive data showing the impact on electricity costs for regulated versus deregulated is impossible. Lucky for you,...

Mar 07

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DOE Pumping Standards – Can-a-Corn

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant 2 Comments

Apparently, the nauseating term “low-hanging fruit” is not even a relevant idiom. According to Priceonomics.com, low-hanging fruit is all there is these days. Priceonomics says growers have for centuries been developing the modern Frankenfood-producing apple trees of today, but this miserable term lives on anyway. Priceonomics produced the following chart showing the use of four idioms for “easy” in recent decades. First, I must ask, why is pie easy? Making a good crust is as easy as dunking two basketballs at once. And why are fish in a barrel? My choice for replacing the miserable “low-hanging fruit” is “can of...

Nov 19

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Mad States of Saudi America

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant No Comments

Remember peak oil? That was the glorious theory, which at some point will occur and no one will know, or maybe it won’t matter, that the stewards of the planet have maxed out oil production, and we would be headed for terminal depletion – and we adopt Mad Max-like diplomacy to survive. By the way, the Mad Max dog is an Australian Cattle Dog, or Blue Heeler, and his name is Dogmeat and he has his own Facebook page. We had a Red Heeler when I was a kid, and her nickname was Tough Dog for a reason. Not mean. ...

Aug 06

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Nationalize EE – Boooo!

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant, Government, Utility Stuff 2 Comments

The widget world of energy efficiency is governed by the Technical Resource Manual, or TRM. A technical resource manual includes energy calculations requiring baselines and efficient equipment specifications, hours of use, and duty cycles. It also includes cost differences for baseline and efficient equipment. Costs and savings from TRMs are used across the board for mass market, and even in some cases large, far too large in my opinion, equipment. Technical resource manuals may be held at the state level, which may apply to all programs/utilities in the state, or at the utility level. Some in our industry are advocating...

Jul 02

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Independence, Finally

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant, Government, Investments, Uncategorized No Comments

Here is some good news in my view. Despite nearly 40 years of political claptrap to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, technology from the private sector, not cockamamie pie in the sky, physics-defying dumb ideas will deliver it. That is, unless of course Washington snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, which it is 100% capable of doing. I went looking for data on our dependence on foreign oil since the first oil shocks of the 1970s. There is one significant dip in the import percentage Figure 1 and that is due to (1) a deep recession in the early...

Mar 12

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The Smoking Gleick

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Rant, Government, Sustainability One Comment

Last week I described a hypothetical, unethical scam to achieve a desired outcome, which leads up to this week’s rant, which I didn’t have space for last week. I first came across this in The Wall Street Journal editorial page. The Heartland institute, which I had never heard of, or at best I forgot about, is a global-warming-crisis skeptic. From the horse’s mouth, they believe global warming is real, that man contributes, but they are skeptics of the alarmism and the magnitude of man’s impacts. They are a privately funded non-profit and yes, they get money from big oil just...

Nov 07

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Occupying Ignorance

By Jeff Ihnen Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant, Government, Sustainability No Comments

Have you had your fill of Occupy Wall Street, (OWS) which has spilled over into dinky, surrounding, wannabe towns including one nearby with a population of a whopping 4,000? Apparently, these in-duh-viduals are protesting rich people and the fact that the rich keep getting richer and the poor, well, are the poor. My response: that’s life. Life isn’t fair. I don’t like the word “fair”. Rather, I like “not cheating”. “Fair” is too often used by whiners. Some of these OWSers are self described anarchists and communists. Oh yeah, there you go. That’s what we need is communism. There’s a...

Nuclear Power over White Rabbits for a Reliable, Affordable, Zero-Carbon Future

GEBs The Final Chapter – Baby Steps!

Nuclear Power – What’s it worth to you?

Regulating Deregulation and Wind’s Other Big Subsidy

DOE Pumping Standards – Can-a-Corn

Mad States of Saudi America

Nationalize EE – Boooo!

Independence, Finally

The Smoking Gleick

Occupying Ignorance

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