In the Pipeline: 9/4/12

So the new automobile mandates kill people, increase the cost of cars, punish poorer people, and erode the solvency of the Highway Trust Fund.  Is there anything this crew can’t wreck? American Road & Transportation Builders Ass. (8/29/12) reports: “As new cars and light trucks are purchased in the future and old ones retired, average fuel economy will improve, reducing the 2009 forecast of gasoline sales and HTF revenues by the amounts shown in the table.  The baseline for computing percentage losses is total HTF revenues.”

Is Reuters trying to imply that Senator Reid is a corrupt politician trying to compel a utility to purchase expensive, unreliable energy?  Because if they are, they need to write this story on just about every Member of Congress who favors utility mandates.  Or, looked at through a different prism, everyone who favors the ethanol mandate. Reuters (8/31/12) reports: “In 2003, the Nevada Democrat publicly banned relatives from lobbying him or his staff after newspaper reports showed that Nevada industries and institutions routinely turned to Reid’s sons or son-in-law for representation. Now, questions surrounding family ties are flaring again in Nevada around the Senate majority leader. He and his oldest son, Rory, are both involved in an effort by a Chinese energy giant, ENN Energy Group, to build a $5 billion solar farm and panel manufacturing plant in the southern Nevada desert.”

Hey, I’m pretty sure Solyndra and the rest of the crew went under babbling about how the Chinese were killing them.  Let’s make it easy.  No one on the planet wants a product that doesn’t work as well as its competition.  When was the last time you bought a VHS tape? The Telegraph (8/29/12) reports: “At the same time, the quality of the solar equipment being made by Chinese companies, even by the biggest companies, is often not export-grade… While the Chinese government has promised to hugely increase its purchases of solar panels, there is a significant excess capacity in the domestic market that has kept prices low.”

What?  You mean FERC does not rule the entire planet?  Does Joe Kelliher know about this? Platts (8/28/12) reports: “While the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission can retroactively determine what the electricity rates in California should have been during the Western energy crisis of 2000-01, it cannot use that information to make non-jurisdictional entities, such as municipal utilities and the Bonneville Power Administration, pay refunds, a federal appeals court has determined.”

On Friday we noted that some in New York did not want the Champlain Hudson line bringing in electricity from Canada.  Now, we note that some in New England would rather not have the Northern Pass line bringing electricity in from Canada.  Sense a theme?  On a separate note, kudos to ISO-NE for acknowledging that switching to natural gas may be a lot more complicated than people think. Union Leader (8/29/12) reports: “On Friday we noted that some in New York did not want the Champlain Hudson line bringing in electricity from Canada.  Now, we note that some in New England would rather not have the Northern Pass line bringing electricity in from Canada.  Sense a theme?  On a separate note, kudos to ISO-NE to acknowledging that switching to natural gas may be a lot more complicated than people think.”