It's Not Easy Being Green
Two recent New York Times articles are worthy of note on the energy front.
Those of us involved in the energy biz have known for years that the need for water is one of the many stumbling blocks to large-scale solar power development. Those solar arrays in the desert need water to wash the panels, and that’s nothing compared to the water demand presented by solar trough technology. Now everybody else is finding out about it too. It’s not easy being green, as the song goes, and we are only beginning to discover just how hard it is.
On the other end of the energy spectrum is the discovery that there remains plenty of oil to be found out there. BP’s giant Tiber field might not be another Cantarell (the field that put Mexico on the oil map in the 1970s), but then again, it might be. In the last decade, technology has taken off, allowing fields that were supposed to be played out long ago (Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, for example) to keep on giving. So when are we going to lift that bizarre ban on exploration off Florida and California and really start producing oil and gas in the US again?