Daily Archives: May 31, 2011

Power outages hot and cold

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Michael Giberson

A FuelFix post by Tom Fowler relays ERCOT’s report that the Texas grid operator expects to have enough power to serve customers reliably this summer. At the end of Fowler’s post he casually mentioned, in connection with the rolling blackout in ERCOT last winter, “a report by federal reliability officials concluded power plant operators could have done more to prepare for the cold.”

Somehow I’d missed the release of the fed’s report. Since FERC and NERC were cooperating on the report, I headed to the FERC website to see if it had been posted. At http://www.ferc.gov, however, I find a notice saying that FERC would be closed on Wednesday “due to a power outage in the vicinity where FERC Headquarters is located.”

A Washington DC-area news report indicated that the power had been out in the area since around 4 PM, likely due to high summer temperatures. (98 F was nearly 20 degrees warmer than average for May 31 and just 1 degree short of the record.)

NERC – the nation’s FERC-certified electric reliability organization – also just issued its summer reliability assessment for the nation. NERC’s CEO said, “We expect the bulk power system will be able to meet the electricity demands this summer, though we are closely monitoring the effects of storms in the Midwest and Southeast, as well as potential drought conditions.” No mention of possible trouble in DC.

The coincidence of the DC power outage and the confident NERC summer report is mildly amusing (to those of us not sweating through DC’s unseasonably warm, humid night without power), but it appears the outage was a local distribution problem and not a resource adequacy or regional transmission system issue.

Still, maybe federal reliability officials and the local power distributor should have done more to prepare for the heat in the nation’s capital?

Texas legislature passes fracking disclosure bill

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Michael Giberson

The Texas legislature has passed the nation’s first hydraulic fracturing fluids disclosure bill. The governor is expected to sign the bill into law. The text of the bill is available from the Texas Legislature Online website.

In summary, a oil or gas well operator performing hydraulic fracturing will have to disclose the volume of water and the chemical ingredients of the fracturing fluids used. An operator will be able to withhold from disclosure information for which it claims trade secret protections, but affected property owners and neighbors to the property owners will be able to challenge the trade secret designation. In addition, a means will be provided to supply the information to health professionals and emergency responders in case of an injury or other accident.

Aspects of the bill remain controversial, for example the NRDC has criticized limiting public disclosures to ingredients found on the Material Safety Data Sheet (as the law requires) and broad trade secret protection limits.

The requirements will only apply to wells for which the initial drilling permit is issued on or after regulations implementing the law have been adopted by the Texas Railroad Commission. Any well with an initial drilling permit issued before the regulations are adopted will be governed by preexisting laws.

The website of State Rep. Jim Keffer, who introduced the bill in the State House, provided these additional details:

Upon the adoption of rules by the Texas Railroad Commission, an operator with a well that has undergone a hydraulic fracturing treatment will use the website http://www.fracfocus.org to disclose chemical ingredients of hydraulic fracturing fluids on a well-by-well basis. The registry is a joint project of the Ground Water Protection Council and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, and was designed for operators to report chemical ingredients listed by the federal Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS). Under HB 3328, all chemicals intentionally used in the fracturing process (whether listed by MSDS or not) must be reported and publicly disclosed.

Some companies have already posted disclosures voluntarily at www.fracfocus.org. For example, Chesapeake Energy disclosed that on April 7, 2001 at a well in Hidalgo County, Texas, it injected fluids that were composed of about 94 percent fresh water, 4.5 percent CO2, 1.5 percent sand, and a handful of other materials in concentrations ranging from 0.032 percent to 0.0006 percent of the hydraulic fluids.* (As the form says, “Information is based on the maximum potential for concentration and thus the total may be over 100%”)

A Caspar Star-Tribune story reports that Wyoming already has fracking disclosure laws and several other states are considering such laws. Regulators in Montana have proposed fracking disclosure rules, also challenged due to trade secret protection rules.

*In order of decreasing concentration: Petroleum Distillate Blend, Polysaccharide, Mineral Oil (Paraffin Oil, White Mineral Oil), Magnesium Hydroxide, Magnesium Peroxide (Magnesium Dioxide), Magnesium Oxide, Methanol (Methyl Alcohol), Ethoxylated Nonyl Phenol (Nonyl Phenol Ethoxylate), Zirconium sodium hydroxy lactate complex, Triisopropanolamine, Ammonium Hydroxide, Acetic Anhydride, and Acetic acid.

Civil liberties and economics: more than just free markets

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Lynne Kiesling

I wasn’t around KP a lot last week because I was spending a lot of time following the Patriot Act extension debacle and contacting my Congressional representatives to urge them to vote against it (of my so-called representatives, only Senator Durbin did so; I think this is the first time he and I have aligned on an issue).

The past couple of weeks have been brutal for our civil liberties in the US. Consider this incomplete list:

In the past two weeks the legal enforcement of our inalienable right to be free from unreasonable search seems to have almost disappeared.

You may ask why I’m paying so much attention to Patriot Act-related issues (including my frequently-articulated objections to the TSA, an outcome of the Patriot Act), and what is its relevance to our economic decisions and choices. The first and most obvious reason is the morality of the issue. Free people, in a country whose legal institutions are premised on protecting that freedom, have inalienable rights, and we have stipulated legal institutions for the protection of those rights (NOT for the granting and definition of those already-existing rights). In this case the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution is the legal institution being destroyed (and the First and Fifth (due process) are taking a beating too), with the evisceration of our civil liberties as the consequence.

The second reason is the more consequentialist, utilitarian one relating to economics. How can we thrive, be happy, be productive, invest, take on risks, when we are not secure in our life, liberty, and property? Our civil liberties are an essential foundation of those secure property rights on which our economic activity and economic growth are built. Without being secure in our life, liberty, and property, our economic selves wither.

Matt Zwolinski’s recent post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians articulates well why the erosion of civil liberties matters, both at a daily personal level and at an intellectual level, and implicitly at both a moral and economic level, and why we should emphasize both economic liberty and civil liberty in our policy arguments.

Economic freedom is not the only freedom over which governments currently run roughshod.  And, as I have suggested here before, it is probably not even the most important one. …

But libertarians, and especially bleeding heart libertarians, ought to give these issues much more attention than they currently do.  First, these issues matter for people’s lives, especially the lives of the poor and vulnerable who are much more likely to find themselves victimized by the growing police state, either directly or indirectly.  Second, precisely because they aren’t under dispute we can make compelling arguments on these issues without first trying to resolve all of the difficult and intractable problems that divide various schools of political and philosophical thought.

Economic liberties and civil liberties are complements, and the erosion of one erodes the other. These are some of the reasons why I am paying such close attention to the Patriot Act and the TSA, why I am acting to encourage change.