Regulating Deregulation

The deregulation of an industry only happens once, but in the case of energy (electric and natural gas services) it is a slow-release process migrating from state to state.

Energy deregulation revolves around the concept of allowing competition into the market place, giving consumers a choice of electricity and/or natural gas suppliers.

The $220 billion energy industry has been referred to as "the last great government-sanctioned monopoly." To break it down simply, up until a few years ago, when you moved into a new house or apartment, you had only one option in energy provider whether you liked it or not.

Since the 1990s, however, in several states consumers have had a choice in energy providers, thus opening the market up to competition and driving down overall rates; but has it worked?

In Pennsylvania, electricity consumers were given choice starting in 1998, and by the end of 1999, nearly 500,000 residents had chosen a competitor over the local incumbent provider. On average, consumers who chose a competitive electric company were still getting the same service and reliability over the same physical lines, but at an average of $10 less per month.

On the flip side, California's rush into energy deregulation in 1996 took a much different turn. Not long after the plan was voted into law, price gouging began to sour the pallets of many would-be money saving consumers, and within 2 years, lawmakers there sought to repeal deregulation legislation. Those measures failed, and by 2000, the price of electricity in California nearly doubled for residents of some communities. By early 2001, the electric utilities faced financial hardships to the point where electricity shortages occurred.

Good or bad, positive or negative, many states are still pushing the issue of energy deregulation. A couple have deregulated electricity in recent years to rousing success, including Texas and New York. Georgia and Illinois are moving forward in the deregulation of natural gas.

The key seems to be in a careful and slow approach, ensuring that competitive electric and natural gas companies seeking to do business within a particular state are able to meet standards of quality and customer service, as well as financial responsibility.

Illinois, for example, has allowed natural gas customers choice since 1993, though approval processes have been methodical and standards strict in order to protect consumers. This has created a very slow trickle effect that protects residents from companies doing under-handed business.

Consumers in Illinois still bare some responsibility and are encouraged to research any natural gas provider they plan to switch to. In addition, consumers are not encouraged to sign long-term contracts with new providers as this will lock them in and keep them from taking advantage of future savings.

Whether you are for or against the deregulation of electricity and natural gas, you should research the concept fully in light of your state's provisions and make a decision based on the needs of your budget and family.

In short, deregulation of energy can benefit the consumer, as long as the deregulation process itself is well-regulated.

Al Haneson blogs about Illinois issues and life at Ambit Illinois Natural Gas and Midwest Lawn Tips

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DIY Fuel

I knew people who made moonshine year back. The process involves a morning of Value Village rummaging, an afternoon of soldering, and a week of the beer making. E-Fuel are taking all of this one step further and producing fuel for $1/gallon.

This from Wired News

People were making ethanol at home long before there were cars. They called it moonshine. With gas prices going through the roof and everyone worried about global warming, a California company is betting people will jump at the chance to use the same technology to turn sugar into fuel for less than a buck a gallon.

E-Fuel Corporation has unveiled its EFuel 100 MicroFueler, a device about the size of a stacking washer-dryer that uses sugar, yeast and water to make 100 percent ethanol at the push of a button.

"You just open it like a washing machine and dump in your sugar, close the door and push one button," company founder Tom Quinn told us. "A few days later, you've got ethanol."

Is it really that easy?

According to Quinn, it is. The MicroFueler weighs about 200 pounds and hooks up to a water and 110 or 220 volt power supply and wastewater drain just like a washing machine. It uses raw sugar (not the refined white stuff) and a proprietary time-release yeast mixture as feedstock. You can also use left-over booze if you've got any lying around. Toss it all into the fermenting tank, turn on the machine and in seven days you've got 35 gallons of ethanol. The MicroFueler has its own pump and hose - just like the pump at your corner gas station - so you can easily fill up your car.

"It's so simple, anyone can make their own fuel," Quinn says. Depending upon the cost of electricity and water, he says, the MicroFueler can produce ethanol for less than $1 a gallon. Quinn likens the MicroFueler to the personal computer and says it will cause the same sort of "paradigm shift."

"Just as the PC brought desktop computing to the home, E-Fuel will bring the filling station to the home," he says.

Maybe. Maybe not. Making ethanol at home is not as easy as Quinn might have you believe, says Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at UC-Berkeley. Making a lot of ethanol has generally required a lot of equipment, he told the New York Times, and quality control can be uneven.

“There’s a lot of hurdles you have to overcome. It’s entirely possible that they’ve done it, but skepticism is a virtue,” Kammen says.

Quinn is not some moonshiner trying to make a quick buck on the alt-fuel craze. He's a longtime entrepreneur who patented the motion-control technology Nintendo uses in the Wii. His partner in the E-Fuel venture is Floyd Butterfield, who has been distilling ethanol for more than 25 years and in 1982 won a California Department of Food and Agriculture contest for best design of an ethanol still.

They say they've overcome many of the hurdles to making ethanol at home cheaply, easily and efficiently. Quinn says the biggest breakthrough is the MicroFueler's membrane distiller, which uses an extremely fine filter to separate water from alcohol at lower temperatures and in fewer steps than conventional methods. Using sugar as a feedstock makes the process virtually odorless, he says, and leaves the wastewater so clean you can drink it. It also avoids the food-for-fuel debate that plagues corn-based ethanol because we're in the midst of a worldwide sugar glut.

A permit from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms will allow you to make ethanol legally, but running 100 percent ethanol in your car is against the law. No problem, Quinn says. Mix it with gasoline to create E-85. Just put a few gallons of gas in your car, then drive home and top it off with ethanol. Quinn says running sugar-based ethanol will produce about 85 percent fewer carbon emissions than using gasoline. You're all set if you've got a flex-fuel vehicle.

It's an open question whether switching to home-brewed ethanol will save you much money. The MicroFueler costs $9,995, although federal tax credits can cut the price to $6,998. Another $16 buys you enough yeast to make about 560 gallons of ethanol, and you'll have to pay for the sugar and water. You'll need as many as 4 gallons of water to make 1 gallon of ethanol.

The sugar is where the math could break down - it currently sells for about 20 cents a pound in the United States, and you need 10 to 14 pounds of it to make a gallon of ethanol. Factor in the cost of electricty and water and you may not be coming out ahead. But Quinn says changes in the North American Free Trade Agreement allows the importation of inedible or "ethanol-grade" sugar from Mexico for as little as 2.5 cents a pound and E-Fuel is creating a distribution network to sell it to consumers.

That same distribution network will deliver and install MicroFuelers when E-Fuel begins delivering them at the end of the year, he says.

File and Fly Plane Testing May Take Pilots and Collisions Out of th Formula

This from The Register:

US aerospace titan Northrop Grumman has commenced flight tests of new "sense and avoid" technology which could be fitted to existing and future unmanned aircraft - or indeed to the long-awaited flying cars - allowing them to fly routinely in civilian airspace. At present, planes which don't carry qualified pilots are subject to special time-consuming bureaucracy before they can make such flights.

Flight International reports that Northrop's Detect, Sense and Avoid (DSA) suite began flying this week aboard a modified Learjet over New York State. The DSA gear includes radar, a transponder-based collision alert system, and an electro-optical camera for use by drone operators on the ground. It also has ADS-B, the new sat nav based networked airtraffic system.

"It’s not inconceivable that DSA technology will be ready for use within a matter of years," said Northrop roboplane exec Alfredo Ramirez, as quoted in Flight. Ramirez was speaking at an air safety forum in Washington this week.

Aviation authorities including the American FAA and Eurocontrol have said that unmanned aircraft will only be allowed to fly under normal procedures - so-called "file and fly", where a flight plan is filed and the aircraft takes off without further ado - if there is "the same level of safety as for manned aircraft". This is usually linked to proposed sense-and-avoid tech like Northrop's DSA, but technical requirements are sketchy at the moment.

"The real hard part is the quantification of ‘equivalent level of safety’. How does that translate into a specification?" said Ramirez.

Northrop is cooperating with the FAA on that very question in the ongoing tests, with the safety feds supplying an ADS-B equipped aeroplane for use in the flight trials of DSA.

It would appear that the FAA may want to use the unmanned-aircraft safety issue as a way to push ADS-B, a technology they are very keen on. The regulators are under massive pressure to get more flights in and out of America's overtaxed airport approaches, and a major constraint is the limited accuracy and slow update rates of current radar-based plots used for air traffic control.

US traffic controllers, however, tend to dislike ADS-B and its planned successor NextGen. These technologies offer significant potential for many more planes to be handled by fewer human controllers in future. The network might one day carry automatically-generated control instructions, as well as simple location data - leaving less information to be passed via voice traffic between controllers and aircraft pilots (or operators on the ground).

It would seem, then, that the new technology of unmanned aircraft - some examples of which are already largely autonomous in flight - may not just threaten pilots' jobs. The robot aircraft might in future menace the ground controllers' livelihoods as well.

It's not all doom and gloom, though. We and our children may lose the chance of a nice well-paid job as an air traffic controller or a military/cargo pilot (passenger airliners will probably always have human pilots, we're guessing). But on the other hand, automated and accurate high-volume traffic control - and automated piloting systems that can work within it - are one of the big things one would need for proper flying cars. Or jetpacks that were any use, come to that. Now, if only jetpacks and vertical-lift aircraft worked a bit better...

Meanwhile, it seems that if this week's calibration runs go well, Northrop's DSA rig will be tested over the summer against multiple "intruder" aircraft, to see if it can respond safely. Thus far, it has had to handle only one at a time.

How Beat China, Chavez and Bin Laden While Driving Your SUV to the Bank

China is using capitalism to take over the world. Hugo Chavez has threatened to choke off Oil to the U.S.. Bin Laden funded 9-11 with Saudi wealth earned from the American appetite for oil. Oil is the problem. It's also the solution.
A drastic jump away from an oil economy to solar, wind, nuclear and hydrogen could propel a company into a position of safety: immune to the OPEC pricing strategies. Replacing gasoline cars with electric cars could leave gasoline car companies in the same position as VHS manufacturers. India has rolled out the gasoline powered Tata. When China tries to export its Lifan model, it would find its car unwelcome in eclectic car countries. China's bureaucracy could be used as a weapon again China-- slow to change, it would be unable to shift gears and produce electric vehicles for the same price as the Tata.
The most patriotic thing an American could do is turn away from oil. The conversion process of moving away from oil, would mean new opportunities. Think about how many times people buy a new computer to keep up with the software requirements. An on-rush of new vehicles sales could buoy the economy. New fueling stations, new opportunties for manufacturers. All of these could be available to the country that opts to go away from oil: stop giving strength to Chavez and money to Bin Laden funders.