Zombie Project?

A year ago, the FutureGen partnership to build a prototype low-emissions coal power plant incorporating gasification and carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology looked dead in the water. Now, according to Technology Review, it may be on the verge of revival. A cynic would point out that a project sited in the home state of the new President might be a little harder to kill than most. It also can't hurt that Illinois's senior Senator stands high in the leadership of the majority party. However, there may be objective reasons to carry on with the project, particularly if the cost assessments that led to its "restructuring" were flawed, as suggested in a report issued recently by the General Accounting Office. Moreover, although major R&D projects ought to be carried out as efficiently as possible, I'm not sure that project costs should be the primary criterion for evaluating a one-off proof of concept, especially for such a crucial technology.

At its estimated cost of $1.8 billion for a 275 MW power plant, FutureGen must be the most expensive coal-fired power plant project in the world, for its size. That equates to $6500/kW of capacity, roughly triple the cost of a conventional coal plant and six times the cost of the combined-cycle gas-turbine unit that its core power block resembles. In normal utility service it could never compete with the cost of power from other technologies. If the project is successful, it should produce reliable power for many years, but as a byproduct of its principal purpose, which is to demonstrate a fully-integrated process for reducing the greenhouse gases and criteria pollutants from fossil-fuel power plants to the maximum extent possible. While all of the elements of this system, involving the gasification of coal to produce hydrogen, combustion of hydrogen in a gas turbine, and the capture and sequestration of CO2 from flue gas have all been demonstrated separately, with some of these elements in routine industrial and oil-industry service, integrating them at scale and running them together to determine the suitability of such a system for wider deployment has not.

As I described recently, CCS is a key technology for addressing climate change and for holding down the cost of large-scale reductions of emissions, once we've harvested the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency and methane destruction. That doesn't mean FutureGen should be given a blank check, unless the new management at the Department of Energy can convince themselves that, particularly in light of all the work already done on this project, it represents the quickest and most effective next step in proving the technology. In particular, they should assess whether FutureGen includes outcomes beyond a proven prototype CCS power plant, such as opportunities to transfer technology elements to improve the efficiency or cost of other new and existing facilities. For example, could it improve existing integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) designs to increase their efficiency advantage over supercritical pulverized coal and other conventional coal technology, and thus reduce emissions even without full CCS? Could it advance our knowledge concerning the retro-fitting of CCS to existing power plants? If the answers to these questions look promising, then FutureGen deserves reviving, even if that creates the appearance of home-state favoritism.

Note: Energy Outlook will be on vacation for a few days. New postings should resume next Wednesday or Thursday.

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Perfect Energy

The recent start-up of the latest large-scale nuclear fusion experiment, the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, was greeted with the customary mix of fanfare and skepticism that has accompanied the quest for practical fusion power for as long as I have followed it, starting as a seriously nerdy child. MIT's Technology Review does a good job of describing the new facility, which will use high-powered lasers to attempt to create useful amounts of nuclear energy. But rather than focusing on the stupendous potential of fusion energy and whether this device might finally be the one to deliver on it, I'm more interested in what our dogged pursuit of this technology through decades of frustratingly slow progress says about our collective view of our current energy sources. How much of the search for fusion springs from its inherent value, and how much from our dissatisfaction with every other long-term energy option we possess?

The answer may lie in the generally-assumed characteristics of a successful commercial nuclear fusion reactor technology, providing cheap, reliable and concentrated energy from a fuel that is as ubiquitous as it is limitless, using a process that creates large amounts of power but essentially no harmful waste. Is that a realistic expectation, or merely the aggregated antonyms of the shortcomings of every existing energy source? Consider the alternatives:

• Fossil fuels are finite, and their production and use release a variety of unwanted byproducts, including greenhouse gases implicated in climate change. Their reserves are also unevenly distributed, giving rise to worrying levels of rent-seeking, resource nationalism, and geopolitical instability and insecurity.
  
• Wind power is intermittent, unpredictable and unsightly, requiring extensive adaptation of the power grid, ample fossil-fueled back-up, expensive energy storage or all of these to contribute reliably on a large scale.
  
• Solar power is more predictable than wind but still expensive, inefficient and cyclical, delivering less than a quarter of a day's peak output even in optimum locations. It takes well over 3,000 MW of solar installations to generate the same amount of energy as one 1,000 MW coal-fired power plant.
  
• Geothermal power is reliable and relatively cheap. However, the "hydrothermal" reservoirs--natural deposits of steam and very hot water--that it taps are unevenly distributed and often far from markets. Enhanced, or "dry rock" geothermal offers greater promise and flexibility, though it is still in its infancy and might also cause earthquakes.
  
• Ocean power taps waves, tides or temperature gradients, offering enormous potential while sharing many of the drawbacks of wind, solar and geothermal. It is also decades behind them in development.
  
• Biofuels' necessary shift away from unsustainable food-based feedstocks depends on unproven or expensive technology. Truly large-scale biofuel production entails harvesting and hauling vast quantities of bulky materials with low energy densities, raising serious questions about whether it can ever create a sufficient energy surplus for the rest of the economy. This limitation also applies to electricity generated from biomass.
  
• Perhaps fusion's first cousin, fission, comes closest to its ideal, providing large amounts of cheap kWhs on demand, around the clock and with very low emissions. Unfortunately, it's hobbled by the high construction cost of new reactors and concerns about safety, security, proliferation, and waste. Some of these are legitimate while others seem overblown, but the technology is no one's free lunch.

Don't get me wrong; I have always loved big science, and nothing would please me more than if the NIF performed exactly as advertised and heralded the dawn of a new era of energy abundance. However, given the long history of drawbacks and unintended consequences from all other energy sources, it seems unrealistic to suppose that any new source, including fusion, is capable of living up to all of its pre-deployment expectations. Fusion is perfect on paper, but then so is my favorite long-term energy option, space-based solar power--until the public becomes anxious about beaming megawatts of power to earth from space, or rogue nations develop anti-satellite capabilities that could hold our orbital energy supplies hostage.

I don't know what form fusion's unexpected drawbacks will take, should the NIF testing pave the way for commercial fusion power plants a decade or two from now. I do know we need a serious debate about the sorts of trade-offs we're willing to accept from any energy source we promote as part of the solution to our dual challenges of climate change and energy insecurity. At a minimum, we must move beyond the mindset in which no current technology can compete with the presumed perfection of those that are still on the drawing board or have yet to be deployed on a scale at which their flaws might become apparent. Our future energy diet will most probably be a messy mix of "all of the above", just as our current one is. Perfect energy remains an April Fool's story.

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The Wrong Enemy

While reading an article on oil company taxation in the Wall Street Journal, I ran across a quote from Treasury Secretary Geithner that crystallized my growing impression that the administration has misinterpreted its own mantra on energy and is training its "friend or foe" radar on the wrong enemy. I would paraphrase the Obama energy strategy as seeking to reduce US oil imports and greenhouse gas emissions by strongly promoting renewable energy and energy efficiency. Unfortunately, the administration's actions risk putting the domestic oil and gas industry on the wrong side of the divide that creates. Absent the steady output from our oil & gas producers, improved energy security--let alone energy independence--would become simply unattainable no matter how many wind turbines and solar panels we build in the next few years. Domestic oil & gas is not the enemy; it is a natural ally in the administration's quest to wean the US from our harmful over-reliance on foreign oil.

Policy makers must have a clear understanding of the country's energy balance and the relative contributions of our different sources. I looked at these "Big Chunks" in some detail in January. Domestic oil and gas production covers 34% of the nation's energy needs. Imported oil provides another 28%, and that's the chunk we need to focus on, along with the emissions from coal-fired power plants. When Secretary Geithner said, "We don't believe it makes sense to significantly subsidize the production and use of sources of energy that are dramatically going to add to our climate change," he was implicitly lumping oil and gas from all sources together with coal. Although he was correct to the extent that domestic oil and gas--just like the imported varieties--emit CO2 and other greenhouse gases, there is simply no way to keep the US economy running in the near-to-medium term without them, emissions or not.

Consider the latest figures from the Energy Information Agency of the Department of Energy. In 2008 "other renewables", excluding hydropower, generated 3% of the US electricity supply. Wind, solar and geothermal power--the non-hydro renewables that the President has targeted for doubling in the next three years--contributed just over half of that, or 1.6% of the total. That's up from 1.2% last year, for an impressive growth rate of 36%. If the renewable energy sector can maintain that growth for three years, helped by the stimulus package, it should easily double to 3.2% of our electricity supply. That might push the broader "other renewables" category close to 5%, and total renewables including hydropower to 10 or 11%--but all without displacing more than a tiny amount of oil, because oil (including petroleum coke) accounted for just 1.1% of net electricity generation last year, and plug-in vehicles aren't yet a measurable fraction of our vehicle fleet. Oil-burning power plants consumed 165,000 bbl/day, a paltry 0.8% of US petroleum demand. Even if the output of every new wind turbine and solar panel were devoted to backing out oil-fired power--a practical impossibility, given the geographical and time-of-use patterns involved--it wouldn't make a dent in our oil imports.

Increasing the tax burden on the oil and gas industry, by contrast, would most assuredly make a dent in our oil imports--by expanding them. Despite a recent uptick in oil prices, oil companies have seen their cash flows decline significantly in the last nine months. Under pressure to support dividends, those that can still borrow to maintain their capital investment programs are doing so; others have had to defer projects or sell off assets. Increasing their tax burden by revoking long-standing oil & gas tax breaks and singling the industry out for exclusion from a tax benefit offered to all US manufacturers, even with the logic of leveling the playing field for energy sources that emit greenhouse gases relative to those that don't, would be ill-timed, at best.

When the industry argued against higher taxes last year, some suggested that we were entitled to raise taxes on oil companies because political risk was lower in the US than elsewhere, while companies were denied access to key resources overseas. Those comparisons have shifted noticeably, as producing countries have become more receptive to foreign investment in their oil industries, thanks to the rigors of lower oil revenues. At the same time, political risk here has increased, as described in a provocative op-ed by Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group. The energy industry has already seen signs of this, in a proposal for an excise tax targeting companies that refuse to renegotiate the royalty relief provisions of certain Gulf of Mexico deepwater lease contracts, which were recently upheld in court. No business leader can watch the current spectacle of "outrage" and fail to wonder when he or she will sit in the hot seat.

This isn't a question of seeking sympathy for companies that have just come off a streak of record-setting profits, most of which were plowed back into the business or returned to shareholders. That would be as fruitless as soliciting aid for AIG's financial products employees. Rather, we need to look to our self-interest, here. When an oil company drills in the US, its production backs out imports directly, barrel for barrel. It pays US salaries--attractive ones--and it pays hefty taxes: income taxes at a 40% effective rate, along with billions of dollars in royalties, rents and bonus bids collected by the government. When a US oil company drills elsewhere, much of the benefit is captured by foreign governments, and when the oil we import comes from a non-US supplier, our trade deficit swells and the federal government only gets to tax the profits on refining & marketing, which are often pretty thin.

In the future, when we've cracked the code for producing liquid fuels cheaply from abundant non-food biomass, covered our hills and shorelines with wind farms and our deserts and roofs with solar arrays, and have sufficient domestic energy supplies--used efficiently--to back out the last of our oil imports, then the time will be ripe to talk about winding down the domestic oil industry, along with the emissions from the remaining petroleum products. Until then, rather than penalizing them on the basis of fractured logic suggesting this will somehow reduce our oil consumption, it is very much in the public interest for the government to treat the domestic oil industry as a partner, not a foe, and refrain from making it less attractive to drill in the US.

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It's the Economy

Yesterday afternoon I attended a panel discussion in the Capitol building, featuring one Senator, two Members of the House of Representatives, the new CEO of API and two senior journalists from Newsweek, which hosted the event. The discussion covered a wide array of energy topics, including offshore drilling, taxation, renewables, and climate change. Although there weren't many surprises, I was not expecting to hear such uniform skepticism on the prospects for passage this year of a cap & trade bill regulating emissions in the manner proposed by President Obama. With the exception of the Honorable Doc Hastings (R, WA), who questioned the contribution of anthropogenic CO2 to climate change, the common theme appeared to be that the dire state of the economy and the need for sensible energy policy take precedence over stronger action targeting greenhouse gas emissions. In this regard, these elected representatives are attuned to the views reflected in a new national Gallup poll. For the first time since at least the mid-1980s, a majority of Americans place a higher priority on the economy than on protecting the environment. As much as that shift might disappoint environmentalists, a sound economy is the logical precondition for building a sustainable national policy to address climate change.

All three Congressional participants on yesterday's panel were from states or districts with a vested interest in energy. If anything, I would have been more surprised if this group had indicated unwavering support for the immediate imposition of cap & trade. Senator Landrieu (D, LA) represents a state that ranks fourth in US oil production, without counting the contribution from federal waters offshore Louisiana. Representative Rahall (D, WV) chairs the House Natural Resources Committee and hails from a major coal state. And while Washington might not be top of mind as an energy state, Congressman Hastings's 4th District encompasses Columbia River hydroelectric dams, a nuclear power plant, and the DOE's Hanford nuclear site. Still, the concerns expressed by both Democrats suggest that the President cannot count on a party line vote to deliver cap & trade, if it is seen as threatening vital industries and the health of the economy as a whole.

A few weeks ago, I examined the President's proposed budget and the levels of cap & trade permit revenue it included. Since then, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has analyzed the budget and concluded that its estimates of the ten-year federal deficit relied on overly-optimistic assumptions of future economic growth and would likely be $2.3 trillion worse than forecast. At the same time, it appears that the original estimate of $646 billion in revenue from cap & trade was highly conservative, with likely proceeds in the range of $1.3-1.9 trillion. Those figures are certainly more in line with the level of carbon prices necessary to stimulate large emissions reduction. $12/ton of CO2 wouldn't cover even the lowest-cost estimate for carbon capture and sequestration, let alone make solar power competitive with natural gas. The roughly $35/ton consistent with $1.9 trillion in permit revenue from 2012-2019 comes much closer to the mark. However, unless the Congress goes along with the President's plan to refund most of the proceeds to taxpayers, that more realistic outcome would result in a much bigger net tax on a weaker economy than the President's staff assumed.

This creates a terrible dilemma. From the perspective of those most concerned about the risks of climate change, we are very late in putting a price on emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, in order to accelerate the transition to greener energy sources and bolster the existing incentives for renewable energy and efficiency investments. Yet it is also apparent from both the Gallup poll and long experience in observing developing countries that unless the economy returns to healthy growth, the wherewithal to pay such a price--and perhaps more importantly the political will to impose it--won't be sufficient. Poor countries, or those that feel poor, are understandably reluctant to pay for environmental protection, particularly when the consequences of not paying are deferred for years or decades. Anyone questioning that logic should spend a moment revisiting Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Any cap & trade bill introduced this year must take into account the dramatic changes since last year's Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill was debated. It must be structured to minimize the impact on the struggling economy. In practical terms, that means deferring the onset of emissions caps until a recovery is confirmed to be well underway and diverting no more than the President's target of $15 billion per year for energy R&D from the refund of all proceeds to taxpayers, including the businesses that will be burdened with buying trillions of dollars worth of emissions permits. Failure to do so would jeopardize the recovery and doom cap & trade. That's crucial, because mitigating climate change won't be accomplished within the term of one President; it requires commitments that must be sustained for decades. If those commitments are pitted against the public's aspirations for prosperity, they are unlikely to be sustained long enough to do any good.

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Assessing Trade-Offs

Today's posting serves in lieu of a letter to the editors of the New York Times, in response to the misleading comparisons drawn in today's editorial concerning the "Lessons of the Exxon Valdez." The editorial characterizes oil development as "an inherently risky, dirty business — especially so in the forbidding waters of the Arctic." It goes on to draw a comparison between the $2 billion per year Alaskan fishing business in Bristol Bay and the presumed value of future oil and gas production from this area, concluding that the trade-off is not worth the risk. It suggests that the new Secretary of the Interior focus on promoting wind and tidal energy, instead. Unfortunately, their assessment of the trade-offs involved is undermined by the use of a resource estimate that appears to have been misinterpreted from its original source.

Whether the Times drew its estimate of $8 billion of potential hydrocarbon revenue for Bristol Bay from a 2008 World Wildlife Fund report citing a US Minerals Management Service (MMS) estimate of 230 million barrels of oil and 6.79 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of natural gas, or merely draws on the same ultimate source, I found a rather different estimate in the official report of the MMS to the Congress, as mandated under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 . It reflected a range for the North Aleutian Basin, encompassing Bristol Bay, of 20 million to 2.5 billion barrels of oil and 0.04-23.3 TCF of gas, with a mean estimate of 750 million barrels and 8.62 TCF. At $70/bbl for oil and $6/MCF for natural gas, reflecting current long-dated futures prices, the mean expected value of the "undiscovered, technically recoverable resources" around Bristol Bay would be on the order of $100 billion, rather than $8 billion.

But even that assessment provides a poor basis for comparison, because of the economic criteria that would be applied to any oil or gas discoveries in Bristol Bay. No one can know how much oil and gas is actually under the waters of the North Aleutian Basin, without at least performing a seismic survey and interpreting the results, which would then have to be confirmed with the drill bit. Nor would a positive result from such tests guarantee development, even at the prices cited above. As the Times notes, Alaska is a hostile environment. That raises the costs of exploration and extraction. The minimum resource size required to justify building a production platform would generally be higher than in the Gulf Coast. Oil finds much below that 750 million barrel mean estimate would be unlikely to be pursued, and the outlook is even tougher for gas, for which there is insufficient local demand.

In light of these facts, the balance of risks from allowing lease sales in Bristol Bay looks quite different from the one indicated by the Times, in which we might jeopardize a world-class fishery resource for an inconsequential amount of oil and gas. In reality, whatever risks hydrocarbon development entails would only arise in the eventuality that a world-class oil or gas resource were found there. Otherwise, the government would pocket the bid premiums and rental fees, the local economy would get some welcome revenue during the assessment process, and that would probably be the end of it. It's also high time for the editors of a paper that likes to be thought of as the nation's newspaper of record to recognize that renewable electricity does not function as an oil substitute and won't be in a position to do so until there are millions of electric vehicles on the road. We're going to need billions of barrels of new oil discoveries as we make the long transition to greener energy sources.

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Rebound or Dead Cat?

US light sweet crude oil closed above $50 per barrel yesterday for the first time since late November. The financial press appears to attribute this mainly to the weakening of the dollar and inflationary expectations triggered by the Federal Reserve's decision to purchase over a trillion dollars of securities, in a bid to reduce longer-term interest rates. Although I don't discount these concerns, a review of oil's fundamentals suggests there are other factors at work, as well. The recovery in oil prices from the mid-$30s has involved more than a one-day rally, nearly a dollar of which had abated as of this morning. It is hardly the kind of rebound we might expect once the recession eases, but if it is sustained it should remind consumers that the current price relief on petroleum products is temporary, while sending producers a positive signal on the need for continued resource development.

Yesterday's weekly statistics from the Energy Information Agency showed that US inventories of crude oil and its two main fuel products, gasoline and distillate (diesel/heating oil), continue to build. But while distillate demand remains very weak, reflecting the decline in goods movement that accompanies a slowdown in economic activity, calculated gasoline demand has returned to within a percent or so of its year-ago level. Gasoline imports are running at a million barrels per day. All of this provides refiners some welcome headroom for their traditional spring-time switch into maximum-gasoline mode, after having optimized on distillate production during the winter. If demand were still as weak as it was a few months ago with gasoline inventories this high, any rally in oil prices would quickly extinguish itself.

Weakness in the dollar relative to other key currencies can also drive crude prices higher. This effect contributed to the extraordinary spike in oil prices from mid-2007 to mid-2008. But many of the factors that fed the resulting "oil-dollar price loop" look too anemic now to create a sustaining pattern of this type, amid the global recession and credit crunch. A slight decline in the Euro or Yen price of oil seems unlikely to stimulate much demand. Unless the dollar continued to weaken progressively, turning its recent 8% slide against the Euro into something more serious, it's hard to see this sustaining higher oil prices against the fundamentals.

The notion of oil as an inflation hedge is another matter. Traders aren't the only ones who get the jitters at the thought of the US government printing money to buy its way out of our current problems. However, inflation worries seem premature when deflation remains a serious risk. The latest report on seasonally-adjusted US consumer prices showed "core inflation"--excluding food and energy--rising at a sub-2% clip, while the three-month and twelve-month averages for the prices of all items are still in negative territory. The whole point of the stimulus bill was to soak up the enormous slack capacity in the economy, and until that begins to bite, the idea of too much money chasing too few goods seems a remote prospect. Nor did oil work out very well as an inflation hedge last summer, when the CPI was growing at more than 5% per year.

And that brings me back to oil's fundamentals. The fact that the market didn't swoon when OPEC met and decided to defer further cuts suggests that they have reduced output sufficiently--and are living up to their lower quotas well enough--to create an environment in which events such as the Fed's move can be seen as bullish. It wasn't long ago that it seemed nothing could drive up oil prices for more than a day or two. At the same time, oil's recent moves haven't flattened out the remarkable degree of "contango" that I observed in December. Oil futures for delivery twelve months from now are $10/bbl higher than the front-month price. That suggests the market is still weighed down by high inventories and tight credit, impeding the obvious arbitrage opportunity such wide spreads create. A more dramatic rebound in oil prices must still wait for the global economy to begin to turn around and draw down that overhang. In the meantime, though, the 50% appreciation of oil from its low on February 12th looks like rather more than the proverbial bounce of a dead cat.

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Zero Emissions?

The other day I ran across reports of a curious event, in which the Attorney General of the state of Vermont convinced Entergy, which owns or operates 11 of the nation's 104 active nuclear power plants, to back away from characterizing nuclear power as having zero emissions. Technically, of course, the AG was correct. However, as a reader reminded me, it is equally true that such unambiguously "green" energy sources as wind and solar power also entail emissions greater than zero--a fact that appeared not to trouble Mr. Sorrell. This situation highlights another important gap in the public debate over energy and the environment. The solution lies in better public education and clearer reporting of absolute and relative emissions, based on numerous studies detailing the lifecycle emissions of our various energy sources. We might also apply some common sense to this complex technical issue. Unfortunately, the resolution of the Vermont dispute leaves the public with the mistaken impression that, at least in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, nuclear power is not in the same league as our favored renewables.

The misunderstanding in the Green Mountain State reflects a common inconsistency in the way that we look at the emissions of energy sources. In the last few years it has become pretty routine, at least in the better-informed media, to report the emissions from fuels and the vehicles and stationary facilities that consume them on the basis not just of what comes out of a tailpipe or smoke stack, but by tallying all emissions from extraction and production through to end-use: a technique referred to as "well-to-wheels" analysis, or more generically as "lifecycle" analysis when no actual wheels are involved. Energy sources that don't burn fuels have often escaped this level of rigor and tended to be clumped together as zero-emission sources. That includes nuclear power, wind, solar, geothermal, and hydropower. All of these entail a modest level of "embodied" emissions associated with their construction or manufacture, including the direct and indirect emissions from the conversion of raw materials, machining and assembly of components, and transportation to their operating sites. Nuclear power is different in one respect, in that it also consumes a fuel, the production of which--though not its use--results in some emissions. That hardly justifies lumping nuclear power in with coal, oil and natural gas burners, and drawing a misleading distinction from the embodied emissions of other low-GHG energy.

A web search turned up numerous references that quantify the lifecycle emissions from all these electricity sources. A recent report to the International Energy Agency on electricity in Japan, for example, cited cradle-to-grave GHG emissions from nuclear power at 29 grams of CO2 per generated kWh, equal to those from wind power and roughly double those from geothermal and hydropower, but half the emissions from solar photovoltaic power (PV). By comparison, the lowest fossil fuel emissions in Japan come from combined-cycle gas turbine plants running on imported LNG. Those averaged 519 g/kWh. Then there's the study from the University of Wisconsin, which shows nuclear at 17 g/kWh, beaten only by wind and geothermal, but exceeded by every other renewable source. Finally, I was amused to find the website of the Windham Regional Commission in Vermont hosting a report from the Nuclear Energy Institute bracketing nuclear power between hydro and geothermal and lower than PV and biomass power.

Rather than seeking to highlight the inconsistency of a government official--cue Captain Renault, here--I'd like to propose the common-sense application of a two-tier standard to this problem. All energy and environmental decisions involving comparisons of different energy sources and devices, particularly when they result in money changing hands, should certainly be made on the basis of full and careful lifecycle analysis. For general discussion purposes, however--most likely including the ads that offended the group that appealed to the Attorney General of Vermont--the emissions from wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric and nuclear power are all so much lower than those from coal, oil and natural gas that it seems entirely reasonable to treat them as effectively zero. Perhaps Entergy should reconsider its retraction on this basis.

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