H.446 – The Vermont Energy Act of 2009

 I’d like to put in a plug for H.446 and a request to my Vermont readers to act. H.446 is a groundbreaking piece of legislation that will promote the development of renewable energy in Vermont.

The core of the bill is what is called a feed-in tariff or standard offer for renewable electricity. What this means is that utilities will be required to pay a fixed contract price for wind, solar, biomass, and hydroelectric power. The Public Service Board will set that price as follows:

“(II) The board shall include a rate of return not less than the highest rate of return received by a Vermont investor-owned retail electric service provider under its board-approved rates as of the date a standard offer goes into effect.

(III) The board shall include such adjustment as the board determines to be necessary to ensure that the price provides sufficient incentive for the rapid development and commissioning of plants and does not exceed the amount needed to provide such an incentive.”

In other words, whatever the cost of solar electricity from the panels on your roof, the price you get must ensure that you will make as good a return as the big boys with their coal and nuclear plants. The prices will start out fairly juicy and go down over time as the technology gets cheaper. This will motivate people to put in renewables sooner and lock in good prices. It puts renewable energy, especially solar and small wind, in the “stupid not to do it” category of investments.

Germany was the leader in this, enacting a feed-in tariff back in 1991, but only for wind and hydro. That was expanded to all renewable sources in 2000. The German government wanted to get 12% of the country’s electricity from renewables by 2010. They already have hit 15%. Germany has become the number one country in the world for green energy investment and has created hundreds of thousands of jobs in the industry.

And the cost to ratepayers? In Vermont it will add about 20 cents to a $100 electric bill. Not a bad price for weaning us off polluting and unsustainable energy sources and jump-starting a job creating industry. In addition to the feed-in tariff, the bill has a number of other useful measures. Quoting from Renewable Energy Vermont’s legislative page:

“Key items in the bill include:

• a standard offer for renewable energy
• clarification that thermal energy fits within the purview of the CEDF
• regulatory incentives ensuring utilities can recover permitting costs for renewable energy
• requirement that ANR reconsider its policy prohibiting wind on State lands
• improvements to residential- and commercial-building standards
• pilot downtown-community renewable-energy projects in Montpelier and Randolph
• clean energy assessment districts that would allow towns, cities, and incorporated villages to use municipal bonds to finance residential renewable-energy or energy-efficiency projects
• limitations on the power of municipalities and deeds to prohibit residential installation of renewable-energy and energy-efficiency devices, such as solar panels, residential wind turbines, and clothes lines”

Of course, Governor Doorstop, er, Douglas, is expected to veto the bill. It passed the Vermont House and Senate by reasonable, but not veto-proof majorities. It is time to make calls and send letters and emails. Send a brief, polite note to the Governor, asking him to sign H.446, although it will be a mere formality with Entergy’s man in Montpelier.

Here’s a link to Renewable Energy Vermont with links to your Rep and Senator’s vote on H.446 and how to contact them. Please do.

Update on Monday, June 1, 2009 at 10:03PM by Minor Heretic

Apparently Governor Douglas was expecting a veto override vote - he just let the veto deadline slip by. H.446 is law in Vermont. This is a big deal for the solar business in Vermont in the short term and the state's energy future in the mid to long term. Someday we are going to thank the legislators of 2009 for enabling the timely installation of the only affordable power sources we will have.

Inalienable rights, unacceptable wrongs

First, it bothers me that I feel the need to write this at all. I suppose the work of humanism is never done. You’d think that the issue of torture, what it is and why it is wrong in all cases, would have been laid to rest a few years ago, if not a century ago, but some people still seem to need reminding.

Torture, as defined by Merriam Webster: the infliction of intense pain (as from burning, crushing, or wounding) to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure. (from Latin tortus, past participle of torquēre to twist)

The United Nations Torture Convention of 1984 defines it as: "Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity." Why the definition is restricted to public officials is beyond me.

The Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish Torture, a treaty among nations of the Organization of American States, is broader in its definition: For the purposes of this Convention, torture shall be understood to be any act intentionally performed whereby physical or mental pain or suffering is inflicted on a person for purposes of criminal investigation, as a means of intimidation, as personal punishment, as a preventive measure, as a penalty, or for any other purpose. Torture shall also be understood to be the use of methods upon a person intended to obliterate the personality of the victim or to diminish his physical or mental capacities, even if they do not cause physical pain or mental anguish.

The treaty also notes that, “The fact of having acted under orders of a superior shall not provide exemption from the corresponding criminal liability.”

Also: “The existence of circumstances such as a state of war, threat of war, state of siege or of emergency, domestic disturbance or strife, suspension of constitutional guarantees, domestic political instability, or other public emergencies or disasters shall not be invoked or admitted as justification for the crime of torture. Neither the dangerous character of the detainee or prisoner, nor the lack of security of the prison establishment or penitentiary shall justify torture.” I should note that the U.S. is not a signatory to this treaty.

This definition makes sense. Torture can be gory and immediate, or subtle, long term, and mostly psychological. The definition is inherent in the act, not the victim, not the perpetrator, and not the situation. Pared down to its clinical extreme, torture could be defined as the deliberate application of aversive stimuli to degrade a person’s physical and/or mental state.

The two latter definitions I mentioned above also have clauses exempting incidental suffering resulting from lawful penalties such as imprisonment. Doing time for armed robbery is unpleasant, but it isn’t torture.

It is the understandably broad sweep of these definitions that makes former Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s evasiveness about waterboarding so vile. It also renders the present debate offensive. It is all torture, from the sleep deprivation and stress positions to waterboarding and worse. There are varying degrees of severity, but one standard of immorality.

Having laid out internationally accepted definitions of torture, I’d like to discuss why it is wrong in terms of its purpose and our constitution.

History has demonstrated the ineffectiveness of torture as a means to obtain accurate information. People under torture, or just the threat of torture, have confessed to a variety of things they never did, and have accused others similarly. The era of persecution of people for witchcraft, roughly 1480 to 1710, saw endless confessions of supernatural deeds, sexual intercourse with the devil, and the naming of innocent persons as accomplices. Military and intelligence service experts who have been studying and practicing interrogation for decades have declared repeatedly that coercive methods are not only ineffective but counterproductive in obtaining accurate information.

So if it doesn’t produce accurate information, then what is the purpose of torture? As I have written previously, it is a form of terrorism. Terrorism is the use of violence (or threat of violence) to induce fear in order to achieve a political goal. Torture is intended to become public, despite the pseudo-secrecy surrounding it. If the innocent suffer along with the guilty, it is all the more effective at suppressing opposition. And that is its primary function: making people afraid to oppose a government or political movement. It has a secondary function as well; eliciting false confessions to justify government actions. Frank Rich wrote recently in the New York Times about the Bush administration effort to connect Iraq with Al Qaeda, using torture when legitimate methods didn’t produce the desired results.

The use of torture strikes at the heart of our Bill of Rights. The fifth amendment to the constitution states, in part, “…nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…” The framers of the constitution put in the clause against self incrimination particularly because of their abhorrence of torture. They were not far removed from the widespread use of torture in Europe, especially during religious conflicts. If defendants could be required to confess, then there would be an open invitation to coercion. Torture also circumvents our right to due process. The eighth amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment would bar torture by itself, but torture is punishment before proof of guilt. Presumption of innocence and due process are principles vital to our judicial system, and torture annihilates them.

We have heard much quibbling about the status of detainees. Are they prisoners of war, or “unlawful combatants,” or just prisoners? This debate is irrelevant. The principles enumerated in the fifth and eighth amendments are not right because they are in the constitution. They are in the constitution because they are right. They were right yesterday, last year, a century ago, and before the Egyptians built pyramids. They are right in Guantanamo Bay, in Kabul, and down at your local police station. They are right for all 6.2 billion people on the planet, including those Guantanamo detainees and you.

That is why we need to prosecute torturers and all the people in the hierarchy who gave orders to the torturers. Torture is not new to this country, but in the past it had to be done off the books, with deniability for upper level personnel. The Bush administration was the first to try to justify the practice. The Yoo and Bybee memos were attempts to legitimize the unacceptable, to institutionalize the unconstitutional. It is not enough that they are out of power. Senator Leahy’s concept of a truth commission is inadequate. The Department of Justice under the Obama administration must drive the concept of legitimized torture into the ground and firmly reestablish the rule of law.

If we allow the constitution to be trampled and the torturers to go free, then who are we as a nation, really? A nation of laws, or of men? If we are a nation governed by the whims of those in power, and whose laws are enforced according to political expediency, then our conflict with despots and terrorists is one of tribalism, not principle. At this moment we are merely the Taliban with better plumbing. .

Shale Play

I just read an interesting interview from The Oil Drum with Matt Simmons, the president of Simmons & Company, Int’l, a firm that finances international oil and gas exploration. Simmons has given a number of prescient warnings about fossil fuel supply and price hikes. One thing he discusses is so-called shale gas. I’d like to discuss shale gas, its implications for our everyday lives, and the realities of the situation.

First, understand that an underground oil or natural gas deposit is not like a buried fuel tank. The resource isn’t in a big open pool. It’s more like an underground sponge, the sponge itself being rock and the pores filled with oil and/or natural gas. The bigger the pores in this sponge the more oil it contains per cubic whatever. The better connected the pores, the higher the permeability, and the more easily the oil or natural gas will flow through it to a drilled well.

The most commonly exploited oil and gas containing rock is sandstone. Here’s your insider term of art for the day: The unit of permeability of oil bearing rock is the Darcy. (Jane Austen would approve) An easy flowing sandstone formation in the Middle East might have a permeability between 1 and 5 Darcies. By comparison, a shale formation in the U.S. might have a permeability of 0.5 milliDarcies, or thousandths of a Darcy. Tough to pump gas through that. This used to be a huge barrier to exploiting shale gas.

The other barrier was the thinness of the shale layers. The Bakken Shale formation that underlies the north-central U.S. and southern Canada is about 200,000 square miles in size, but only 10 to 150 feet thick. Imagine a sponge about 1/16” thick and the size of two football fields and you’ll get an idea of the proportion. Drilling standard vertical wells into this was essentially useless. A few feet of the well would be exposed to nearly impermeable shale, yielding no commercial quantities of natural gas.

The two interlocking solutions to this problem are horizontal drilling and hydrofracturing. The drillers have figured out how to steer the drill bit so that they can drill down to the shale and then sideways through the thin shale layer, exposing more of the well to the gas bearing rock. Then they open up cracks in the shale by pumping a mixture of water and sand into the well under extremely high pressure, forcing apart the rock and propping the cracks open with the sand. The increased permeability means that the natural gas comes flowing out of the well at a commercially viable rate.

Here's an animation of horizontal drilling, minus the hydrofracturing:

There are problems with this. It is expensive. The price for a thousand cubic feet of gas has to be up around $6 or $7 for the drillers to break even. Right now, due mostly to the economic downturn, it is floating around half that. Also, the wells are short lived. Where a traditional gas well might produce at a viable flow rate for years, a horizontally drilled and “fracked” shale well might only last months. Then the well has to be capped, the area remediated, the equipment transported to a new site, perhaps only a mile or two away, and the whole process started again. Each well is a big faucet on a small bucket.

Here I’ll quote a section of the interview by Steve Andrews of ASPO-USA (Association for the Study of Peak Oil) with Matt Simmons, from the April 20 Peak Oil Review:

Q: My last question: have you been surprised by the gas industry’s growth in shale gas?

Simmons: I’ve been surprised by the hype that assumes there’s been major growth in shale gas. I don’t think there has been any data of any reliability that proves we’ve actually had the growth in shale gas that we think we have.

Q: Some people here in the industry in Colorado are promoting it big time. They see it as a game changer. Couldn’t they be right?

Simmons: I’ve never seen the industry hype something crazier. Here are some numbers that I find enlightening. Of all the shale plays, the only one that we have significant production history on is the Barnett Shale. In the Haynesville, I think there are around 20 or 30 well-tests so far, and I don’t know that there are that many in the Marcellus. Consider these figures in the March 22 Barnett Shale Newsletter. It shows Barnett Shale total natural gas production by year, 1982 to 2008, all counties and fields in the Fort Worth Basin. In 2004—3890, then 4973, then 6542, then 9180, then finally 12104; and I thought, gee, we increased production X%, but then I realized that’s the number of wells! In 2008, we went to 4.8 Bcf a day, from 3.56 the year before—or up 1.24 Bcf/day. We’re looking for an increase of 8 Bcf, according to the EIA numbers, so the Barnett Shale did 1/6th of that.

Here’s another interesting set of numbers. All the big natural players have all now reported their results. The top 10 players increased their production in 2008 over 2007 to the tune of 685 mmcf/day. Unfortunately that was mostly offset by the top 10 gas decliners, led by ExxonMobil, BP, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, RoyalDutch/Shell, Marathon, Newfield, Hess, and they dropped 601 mmcf/day. So we netted out a plus 84 mmcf/day. Then you have about another 800 coming from about 40 individual reporting companies, but none of them are big enough—even if they tripled their production—to really make a difference. So that means that to match the growth that the EIA believes happened, then the residue—these hundreds and hundreds of mom-and-pop operators—would have to have grown their cumulative production twice as fast as the top 10, which obviously didn’t happen.

The EIA started reading the hype. And even though they probably have been puzzled that the number of gas wells completed went from 8,000 to 10,000 a year up to last year’s 33,000, and all we did was tread water for nine years. So right at the end of the year last year they started showing month-to-month growth year-over-year of 5%. Then in January they knocked their model up to 9%, so every month it was up 9%, year-over-year. They just knew, because they read the hype. We won’t have any real numbers until the states report what they collect, in the 3rd quarter of 2009. But I think we have the numbers in [from the companies] to say that we barely grew supply. Too bad we destroyed the industry.

Barnett Shale also has a production profile where peak initial production happens virtually when you come on stream, because of the way you frac the wells. By the end of the first year you’re down 70%.

Q: So you thing that the shale gas story is the most hyped story…

Simmons: It’s the most hyped play since Kashagan, which was later derisively called “Cash is gone.”

So what does this mean for you? For a while a lot of people were thinking that our natural gas troubles had been pushed out a few decades into the future by a glut of shale gas. 52% of American homes are heated by the stuff. Most of the peak period electricity that we use comes from natural gas fueled power plants. The retail price of electricity faithfully tracks the price of natural gas. It seems that happy days are not here again on the retail electricity front. The price will stay depressed for a while, but once the economy starts to pick up the supply will tighten. There will be a lag while exploration and drilling try to catch up. As I noted in a previous post, there is roughly a two-decade lag between the discovery of conventional natural gas and its peak production.

The other important thing to consider is that companies are going after this stuff at all.

A few years ago there was a big hoo-ha over a well in the Gulf of Mexico called Jack #2, drilled in 7000 feet of water and through 28,000 feet of rock, which produced 6,000 barrels a day. A huge expense and brilliant technical feat to get 0.03% of our daily needs.

The shale plays are similar. Gas companies are spending big dollars on complex processes to extract expensive gas from marginal sources. It means that all the easy, cheap stuff is gone. It may be futile. In the end, geology trumps technology. Or, as Wendell Berry wrote, “Nature bats last.” So don’t bank on cheap natural gas or cheap electricity five years down the road, whatever the hype.

The debut of The Maven

Your Minor Heretic is a compulsive investigator. I tend to do research before I buy anything. I do more research than is really necessary or practical. I thought I should share some of the results of my efforts, if only to bring the overall utility in line with the labor expended. Check out the Maven link above for an ongoing look at the world of material goods.

Secrets and Rights

The Vermont House of representatives passed a bill granting marriage rights to same sex couples last Thursday. The vote was 94-52; not the two thirds needed to override Governor Douglas’s promised veto. No doubt the Governor’s mailbox is full these days.

The controversy has me thinking of two stories about people in my life.

Let’s call them Holmes and Watson. They were friends of my parents, and then friends of mine. They were part of my parents’ circle of friends, two of the usual suspects at a dinner or cocktail party. Their names went together in a guest list. “We’re having the Smiths, the Taylors, Holmes and Watson, and the Petersons.” They were in middle age when I first met them, a pair of solid citizens who ran a successful local business. They were involved in local politics and charity, volunteering and giving. They were both World War II veterans, which was how they met. They were not ostentatious about their sexual orientation, but they presented themselves to the community as a pair. They were together for over fifty years. When Holmes was in his mid-eighties he became ill and died. He and Watson had exercised enough forethought to put in place powers of attorney and living wills. Nevertheless, without that preparation, Watson would have had no inherent right to make those final medical decisions nor to bury his partner of five decades. They held up their end of the bargain, with each other and with the community. The community accepted them and respected them, but ultimately failed to do right by them.

Then there is my own maternal grandfather, who died a couple of decades ago. I was doing some genealogical research a few years ago and came up with the surprising fact that he was born into a Hasidic Jewish family. My mother was as surprised as I was. All we knew was that he had left his family at the age of 14 and made his way in the world. He had distanced himself from his family to the degree that my mother had never met them. He had gone to Yale, gotten a medical degree, and become a professor at the University of Virginia, marrying my grandmother in the late 1920’s.

I have never found out why he left his family and hid his origins. I have a theory, though. A smart young Jew never would have been allowed into Yale in that era, and probably never would have obtained a position at the University of Virginia. More importantly for my personal existence, he definitely would not have been allowed to marry a well-bred young woman from an old Virginia family. He had to remain closeted to the grave.

Throughout history couples have been barred from marrying because of religion, ethnicity, politics, and class. As I just pointed out, a religious difference that would be irrelevant today was, within living memory, an absolute bar to marriage. It is only in the past few decades that we have started to fully acknowledge our equality and change the law to match our new understanding. This latest law is part of that movement. The governor will almost certainly veto it, but he is pushing back against history. Someday people will look back at this with a kind of incomprehension, the way we might look at my grandfather’s secret life. It’s just sad that for some time yet we will fail in our responsibilities to our fellow citizens.

Governor Douglas’s contact page, by the way, is http://governor.vermont.gov/contact.html .

Update on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 at 3:14PM by Minor Heretic

Today the Vermont House overrode the Governor's veto by one vote, 100-49. The law takes effect September 1st. Equality under the law begins for all Vermonters this fall. The leaves will turn colors again - it will be a great season for weddings.