We know, it’s a heavy burden, but it’s your job to make clean coal for the foreseeable future.

Here are the facts.  There is no such thing as clean coal, and there won’t be such a thing for a long time.

The coal industry is running ads showing President Obama, as candidate Obama, saying that “if America can put a man on the moon, don’t tell me we can’t burn coal without releasing carbon dioxide.”  Maybe that’s true, but we aren’t doing it yet, and the moon mission took a decade.

Fifty percent or so of the electricity we use in the United States comes from coal.  In the middle of the country, almost all of the electricity comes from coal.  The coal state senators are going to be hard to budge on cap and trade legislation, and whatever passes congress this year will be a baby step toward curbing carbon dioxide  (a teeny tiny step in the right direction).

But you can start making coal cleaner right now.

How, you ask?  By not wasting electricity.  All the electricity you don’t waste is electricity that doesn’t have to be generated by coal.

Here is the logic.  There is no storage system on the electricity grid (some argue that hydroelectric dams and their reservoirs are grid storage, but very little of our electricity comes from hydro).

When we turn on a switch to use electricity, for all intents and purposes, the power providers have to make that electricity right then.  They can’t make some today and save it for you to use tomorrow or next week.  A majority of the time, power companies are burning coal to make that electricity.

So when you don’t waste electricity, you keep the power providers from burning coal that had no real use.  Where can you find wasted electricity: in your unattended power, phantom power, vampire power, call it what you will.  Also in the rooms with lights on when nobody is there, or the TVs or game systems or computers running when nobody is watching or playing.

Look around your house to see where the only form of current clean coal is hiding.

Here are some videos about unattended power:

Simple things you can do to save energy around the home

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-6-v-15.html

End phantom power drain-cartoon

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-6-v-44.html

An Introduction to GreenSwitch with Ed Begley, Jr.

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-6-v-24.html

Yesterday, I attended The Fourteenth Annual POWER Conference on Energy Policy and Research hosted by the Center for Study of Energy Markets (CSEM).

Suffice it to say that it was very high level.  Economists presented their findings including sophisticated regression analysis and lots of numbers, charts and graphs.  Wow, was it detailed and math heavy?

What was the takeaway?  There is much more to energy policy issues than is reported in the news, shown in oil and natural gas commercials or chanted in drill, baby, drill rallies.

Here is a video that shows every president from Nixon to Bush 43 talking about Energy Independence:

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-12-v-65.html

Now, President Obama is making energy policy a major focus of his budget, intending to turn talk about energy independence into action.

When energy policy is being shaped by governments (local, state or federal) and public utility regulators, they need information about what works and what doesn’t work (or what might work and what might not work).  This is where the economists come in with their complex formulas and statistical analysis.

What question needs to be answered, what data is available, what data needs to be included in the study, what needs to be excluded, what time period is relevant, what was going on at the time that would skew the results, etc., etc., etc.  After they have that figured out, then they have to reduce it to a formula and use computers to run the data through the formula.  Here is a sample of the topics:

“Regulation, Allocation, and Leakage in Cap-and-Trade Markets for CO2“

“How Do Firms Exercise Market Power in Hydro Dominated Markets?“

“What Do Emissions Markets Deliver and to Whom? Evidence from Southern California’s NOx Trading Program“

Presentations were made by the economists and consultants and then “discussants” (other experts in the field) made suggestions for improvement or further study.  You should have been there.

Actually, we should be thankful that there are people working so hard on these and other energy issues.  Their work should lead to better decisions by policy makers, if they base their policies on science instead of knee jerk reactions and political expediency.  That is a big IF.