Understanding Government

Federal wildlife conservation officials have launched an inquest into the deaths of protected birds at a California wind farm, Louis Sahagun of the Los Angeles Times reports, highlighting a potentially crippling drawback of one of the world’s cleanest power sources.

A total of seven golden eagles are believed to have been killed over the course of two years after colliding with one of 90 windmills at the Pine Tree windmill site. The windmills, operated by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in the Tehachapi Mountains went on-line in 2009 and are spread out among 8,000 acres, generating 120 megawatts of electricity. (more…)

Last month, I blogged that the Tevatron, the world’s largest atom smasher — located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois — will shut down this year because the U.S. Energy Dept. will no longer fund it. Using my wikipedic knowledge of particle physics, I wrote that this wasn’t a big deal because a more powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, was being built along the border of France and Switzerland. (more…)

Writing at the Washington Monthly, Heather Rogers has an authoritative takedown of biofuel energy, i.e. ethanol and biodiesel, and the federal government’s continued subsidies to the Iowa-based biofuel industry. Rogers even finds Iowa farmers who share the view that biofuels are environmentally and economically unsustainable. “Growing crops for biofuels damages their soil,” she writes of these farmers, “and keeps them at the mercy of predatory multinational corporations.”

One quibble with the piece, though, is that Rogers glosses over possible changes being made by the Obama administration. (more…)

Government can and should be at the center of innovation along with private industry.  The market is more nimble, the market is more responsive, and the market is more reactive.  But government can be the convener, the coordinator, and  the patriotic core driving projects America needs.   Tom Friedman’s New York Times column about an exciting group of alternative energy innovation centers (called Energy Innovation Hubs) proposed by the Department of Energy shows how “faceless” government agencies can work at the forefront of infrastructure change in this country.   Mini-Manhattan Projects devoted to peaceful production of energy, bringing together private industry, university researchers, and the best engineers the country has available?  A program like this would show us all that we can still solve problems.  And it might even work.

As Ned Hodgman has tirelessly chronicled, the Dept. of Energy has problems distributing its share of the stimulus bill in a timely fashion. This is partly because many of the projects eligible for funding are unprecedented — like a plan in Illinois for three suburban school districts to construct and operate a wind farm. The Chicago Tribune’s Robert Channick reports that these school districts, which serve about 25,000 students, have formed The School Wind Consortium and are expected to receive $15 million in DOE grants. (more…)