Understand, generally speaking, I'm a big fan of democracy.


Citizens electing their leaders to decide what is best for the country (and the world) within a framework that protects the rights of the minority it a pretty awesome system.


But the key flaw in all this is, or course, the word "elections." Because at election time, the thing that most often concerns these alleged "leaders" is their own reelection.


So as we all drown in $4-per-gallon gas and heating oil bills that may mean our kids won't go to college, energy has become an election football.


As I blogged on June 26 and July 3, the tax break for alternative energy sources is set to expire soon unless Congress gets its act together.


(Did I just say the words "Congress" and "act together" in the same sentence? Somebody slap me.)


Well, as Reuters reported in this article, an attempt to move a Senate bill extending those tax breaks forward, which needed 60 votes but received only 51, was foiled by Republicans convinced the way to move away from our addiction to oil is to drill for more oil, particularly in environmentally sensitive places where it is currently banned.


Never mind that oil companies hold hundreds of leases to drill on public lands that they are not utilizing, the Republicans believe voters will believe that a crisis is the time to decide what to let oil companies do with our future, and have said as much -- publicly!

These same companies seem to be doing OK without the Senate's help.


As CNN reported here Exxon Mobil just posted the largest quarterly profit in U.S. history Thursday, posting net income of $11.68 billion on revenue of $138 billion in the second quarter.


That profit works out to $1,485.55 a second. That barely beat the previous corporate record of $11.66 billion, also set by Exxon in the fourth quarter of 2007."The fundamentals of our business remain strong," Henry Hubble, Exxon's vice president of investor relations, said on a conference call. "We continue to capture the benefit of strong industry conditions."


That's an understatement if ever I read one. I can see why Senate Republicans feel moved to rush to their aid.


The extension of the tax breaks isn't dead yet, but I think "on life support" is not an unfair way to characterize them.


But as the Senate Republicans try to convince voters we can drill our way out of an energy crisis, those tax breaks will expire (I wonder how John McCain will vote on this matter?) and our nation's nascent entrepreneurial attempt to get ahead of the curve on energy will suffer a setback, perhaps a fatal one.


And so elections will imperil all of us to live with the consequences of the need to curry favor with oil companies in order to increase campaign donations.


But fear not oh faithful reader, all hope is not lost. Some vision remains.


This story by McClatchy newspapers that says the U.S. will soon be the world's number one wind power producer, suggesting that we may be succeeding without tax breaks.


But be careful of jumping to too many conclusions. As Mark Twain is said to have said, "figures don't lie, but liars figure."


The American Wind Energy Association is expected to release a survey next month that calculates that the US wind industry now tops Germany in terms of how much energy is being produced from wind. But that has more to do with how windy America is than any visionary investment level by us. Maybe all those senate blow-hards are a natural resource we should begin taking advantage of.

Germany still has more installed capacity - 22,000 megawatts compared with 17,000 in the US at the end of 2007. But the average wind speed is stronger in America, which means more energy is being generated, the group said.

Not surprisingly, the newspaper group also reports that many of the world's leading wind companies are not US companies, and they will need to move manufacturing jobs to the US as the wind industry grows, Swisher said. His group says 4,000 wind-related manufacturing jobs have been added in the US since 2007.


Before you get too excited, you should know that currently, wind provides about 1% of US electricity.

The cost of wind power is almost comparable to fossil fuels such as coal, at between 4.5 and 7.5 cents per kilowatt hour, but building a wind farm costs more than a fossil-fuel plant - between $1.5m and $2m per megawatt of capacity compared with $800,000 for a natural-gas plant.
Once constructed, though, wind plants have no fuel costs compared with coal and natural gas plants.


Since Germany far surpasses the U.S. in solar power generation, despite our sunnier weather patterns, I'd call this one a draw.


But also in the promise for the future category, consider this idea. What if the weather didn't matter?


As O. Glenn Smith, a former manager of science and applications experiments for the International Space Station at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, writes in this New York Times opinion piece, maybe the best idea is to harvest solar energy from space.


Smith, who seems to know what he's talking about, said it's not as James Bond as it sounds. As solar panels get lighter and thinner, this idea is more and more financially feasible.


Basically, you launch a bunch of solar collectors into space, which is a much more efficient way to collect solar energy, and then beam it back to earth. (Yes, I said "beam it.")


Smith writes: "Once collected, the solar energy would be safely beamed to Earth via wireless radio transmission, where it would be received by antennas near cities and other places where large amounts of power are used. The received energy would then be converted to electric power for distribution over the existing grid. Government scientists have projected that the cost of electric power generation from such a system could be as low as 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is within the range of what consumers pay now."


And if you want justification for what would surely be an expensive undertaking, Smith urges us to consider that: "Over the past 15 years, Americans have invested more than $100 billion, directly and indirectly, on the space station and supporting shuttle flights. With an energy crisis deepening, it’s time to begin to develop a huge return on that investment."


Now if only we could figure out some way turn that into a campaign contribution, then it might actually happen. (Sigh.)

Hope came from the Pacific last Friday when the state of Hawaii, according to an Associated Press report, became the first in the nation to require solar water heaters in new homes.

My bi-partisan heart (yes, I do have one) swelled even more when I read further that the governor who signed the bill, Linda Lingle, is a Republican.

Moments later, that hope evaporated and i had a bi-partisan heart attack as I continued to read The New York Times.

This article reported that the U.S. Dept. of the Interior; known for failing to collect money owed the taxpayers by oil and gas companies drilling on public lands; known for ignoring public opinion and trying to increase the number of snow mobiles allowed in Yellowstone National Park; known for ignoring previous "roadless" rules and bowing to timber companies to allow roads into pristine forests; this department had suddenly got religion.

And for what?

Why to protect the environment of course.

And to do that, the administration put a two-year freeze on all solar energy project applications on public lands.

The reason given is a concern for the impact pipelines and infrastructure would have on native fauna, like the desert tortoise.

If I were the suspicious type (and I am), I might conclude that about the only time this administration, which, no doubt by sheer coincidence, happens to be run by two former oil executives and whose Secretary of State has an oil tanker named after her, cares most about protecting the environment when it also protects the interests of the oil and gas industry.

They have good reason to be afraid for their entrenched wealthy friends.

According to the Times, many of the 119 million acres of taxpayer-owned land in sunny places like Arizona, Nevada and southern California are ideal for solar power.

Since 2005, more than 130 solar power proposals have been filed with the government, most of which call for erecting such facilities on public land to help cut costs.

Unlike the companies that pump and produce oil and natural gas, and which seem to suck all the air out of the government subsidy room, many of these solar power companies are start-ups -- you know, the kind of small, entrepreneurial businesses President Bush also cites as the kind needed to buck-up our flagging economy.

Where the existing proposals to be built, they could cover more than 1 million acres and have the potential to power more than 20 million homes, according to the Times.

Certainly, no tree-hugger worth his salt is going to suggest that one million acres of public property be developed without a thorough review, but freezing all new applications just sends panic through a young industry which might ultimately save our bacon.

Just ask our local Congressman, Jim Gerlach, R-6th Dist.

On Friday, Gerlach delivered the House Republican Conference Weekly Radio Address, according to a timely press release, the subject of which was "the need for Congress to start working together on a National Energy Initiative."

According to the release, Gerlach said: “Decades of relying on foreign oil from the Middle East and unstable regimes across the globe, while refusing to produce more of our own resources, have resulted in the average price of gas soaring past the $4 per-gallon mark.”

Putting a two-year freeze on all new solar power plant applications on public lands doesn't sound like an effort to "produce more of our own resources."

Most of the solar plants in the U.S. use "concentrating" technology by which the sun's rays are concentrated with mirrors to heat a synthetic mixture of oil and water to make steam to power turbines.

But photovoltaic plants, which directly convert sunlight into electricity are up and coming. According to the Times, Photovoltaic solar projects grew by 48 percent in 2007 compared with 2006.

So if you want to get away from $4 gas, as Mr. Gerlach suggests, why not "think outside the pump."

Instead of trying to open up off-shore drilling while refusing the make oil and gas companies drill on the public land where they already have leases (another partisan split in Congress; see if you can guess which party is on which side), why not promote something that could replace it completely?

The nation's first hydrogen pump station just opened in Los Angeles and electric cars are looming on the market place.
Having already had a functional electric car that it pulled from the market in a brilliant display of entrepreneurial foresight, (See "Who Killed the Electric Car?") Detroit is now rushing to catch up to the Japanese in creating what it had already created, a viable electric car.

My personal fantasy is to pull my all-electric car into my driveway and plug it into my personal solar-power generator and laugh all the way past the Exxon station.

While we're fiddling around on our knees to the oil companies, other countries like German and Britain are reading the writing on the atmosphere and getting ahead of us. (See my posts on 6/26 and 6/19)

If you think none of this is the government's business, consider that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Thursday that he will lead his country to increase its renewable energy use 10-fold by 2020.

For an investment of $200 billion (the equivalent of what we pay for a long afternoon in Iraq) he envisions the U.K. cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by nearly 20 percent and oil dependency by 7 percent, and creating some 260,000 green-collar jobs.

Notably lacking in sunny days, Britain will instead make the most of its particular resources, its windy coastline, and use wind power to meet those goals according to this story by Bloomberg News Service.

So just as I tried to come to terms with the idea that the Bush administration had once again crushed hope into dust, I read this article in Scientific American.

It appears that some of the big businesses the administration thinks it has to protect have a longer view than the next quarter's returns.

Three companies that got rich envisioning the future, IBM, Intel and Hewlett Packard, have all made major investments in solar energy, the magazine reported.

First out of the box was IBM, which has "plans to make solar panels covered with a thin film of chemical compounds. The idea is that the film, when applied to different surfaces such as glass or brick, can produce solar energy more efficiently than conventional silicon wafer–based solar cells—which are made of materials similar to those used to fabricate computer chips. (That's right—a company built on chips based on silicon is trying to get the world to move away from using it in solar cells)" the magazine reported.

(And here you thought I was the only purveyor of journalistic sarcasm).

"Also last week, Intel spun off a new solar tech company called SpectraWatt, which was born with $50 million in investment capital from Intel, Cogentrix Energy LLC, PCG Clean Energy and Technology Fund and Solon AG," according to Scientific American.
And the trifecta: "Meanwhile, HP earlier this month began licensing technology to Xtreme Energetics, Inc., in Livermore, Calif., designed to help that start-up company deliver rooftop solar energy systems that produce twice as much energy as conventional solar panels at half the cost."

Hmmm, twice as much energy at half the cost.

That's almost reason to hope....

On June 19, I wrote (in extreme frustration I might add) about the likelihood that Congress, in its extreme ineptitude, will allow to expire a tax incentive to encourage the development of alternative energy.

The potential of a solar energy plant in places like Arizona was cited as an example of the kind of thing that might collapse if the tax break were not extended.

Then Tuesday, I received in my in-box my daily copy of Grist, an on-line magazine of sorts that includes links to the environmental stories of the day.

It included a link to this story about a new solar power plant on a former air base in the former East Germany.

In my blog I had noted that Germany is fast becoming the solar power king of the world and we (again) are being sadly left behind by a myopic energy policy.

A reader wrote, and I quote "that is BS."

The writer, identified only as anonymous, said his (or her) tax dollars were not needed to get a fledgling industry off its feet.

Fair enough. But in the meantime, here is what's happening in Germany.

"A solar power plant described by its operators as the biggest in the world began generating electricity at the site of a former East German air base on Sunday, June 22.

"The Waldpolenz Solar Park is built on a surface area equivalent to 200 soccer fields, the solar park will be capable of feeding 40 megawatts into the power grid when fully operational in 2009.

"In the start-up phase, the 130-million-euro ($201 million) plant it will have a capacity of 24 megawatts, according to the Juwi group, which operates the installation.

"After just a year the solar power station will have produced the energy needed to build it, according to the Juwi group.

"The eastern part of Germany is one of the forerunners of solar energy in the country. Three of the world's 50 biggest solar parks are located near Leipzig.

Folks, it's not even sunny there!

Two years ago, President Bush told the nation in his State of the Union address that "we are addicted to oil."

And now, rather than investing in the development of the clean technologies of the future, he wants to drill our way out of a corner into which we've put ourselves by refusing to make the investment sooner.

Oy!