Imagine Enron With Nukes

Public Citizen [1] just field an amicus brief [2] with the Federal Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. "The brief states that FERC illegally deregulated the electric rates under its jurisdiction, allowing the market to set rates, when only Congress can deregulate rates." The result was an overcharging of consumers billions of dollars. If you recall who actually designed and executed that market manipulation [3], it was Enron. Who was the primary advocate for deregulation? [4] Enron.

Now combine that disastrous reality with the Bush administration's calls for new nuclear power generation capacity. I've written why it's a bad idea [5] before. This morning, we posted an NYT storythat said [6] while there is certainly more interest on the part of nuclear power advocates and from the White House, utiities are, in some cases, five years from making a decision—and then construction would take another six years. In the meantime, we'll have another energy war, a collapsed domestic economy or both.

The answer is not to build more centralized power generators. That's a 100-year-old design. The answer is to build energy-independent buildings. New microgenerators are capable of being driven by natural gas, wind or solar—up to and beyond 100 percent of that building's energy needs.

The idea is is called distributed generation. You place the energy generator closer to the load: the service you're operating. The closer the generation, the lower the transmission losses—one of the main sources of inefficiency. By forcing building designers to incorporate the cost of energy generation into their designs, rather than externalizing it as an "operating cost," buildings become more efficient. And by having the private sector build their own power generation as it needs it, the rest of us don't get stuck with a dirty, expensive and long-term set of subsidies.

Continuing to build centralized power generators is just asking for more monopoly pricing and market manipulation. Of course, looking at the Enron experience, that's exactly what these folks want.

Here's a good brief on distributed generation [7] from the previous Department of Energy.