Solipsism anyone?

Echoes and reverberations of the "drill, baby, drill" chorus won't go away. It hit NC, too, in 2008, and now we have a July 28, 2009 byline.

The Southeast Energy Alliance, a consortium of oil and gas interests, recently revealed what's waiting just off the coast - jobs and money, allegedly.

If only I could give the estimate a closer look... You see, as of 10:14 a.m. Google won't let me visit the site of the Southeast Energy Alliance. The Warning: "This site may harm your computer." Bing: ditto. That rules out me actually reading the report, but I can probably intuit its contents: drilling is an economic panacea and if only those dastardly environmental hippies weren't preventing people from having jobs.

Well, no. Let's recap. The main reason many environmental groups oppose offshore drilling is that it doesn't really solve any of the problems it's purported to.

1. It takes years and millions in subsidies to get the oil.
2. The oil conglomerates aren't required to sell the oil here in the US.
3. Fossil fuels aren't efficient, the price fluctuates at the whim of vaguely understood interest groups like OPEC and speculators, and the emissions aren't all that great (purposefully understated).

How about some NC based reasons:

• Do we really want massive tankers in "the Graveyard of the Atlantic?"
• Hurricanes
• No oil refineries in our state
• See reason 2 above and replace "US" with "NC"

To my mind, the worst frame on offshore drilling is the constant appeal that this is about state's rights. Well, actually, the waters of the state of North Carolina extend to about three miles offshore, and the sounds, and maybe a few other small outliers. Further than that and you've got federal waters and federal leases.

So, let's look at the Gulf states, who are apparently just rolling in the oil dough. From the same article linked above:

Gulf states currently share royalties from federal leases, but the figures are modest: about $25 million shared among four states last year.

By those numbers, each state got a whopping $6.25 million dollars. Last I checked, the North Carolina budget deficit stood over a billion dollars. Plain and simple, the typical (remember, I can't get access to the report so I have to generalize) pro-drilling argument is comprised of oversimplifications, wishful thinking and endless speculation.

What we know: the NC coast has thriving fisheries and an economically important coastal tourism industry, both of which would be impacted by drilling. It's a cost/benefit situation, not a win/win.

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Our own Atlantic garbage patch?

The Great Pacific garbage patch gets all the press, but we have our own swirling sea of refuse and plastic debris - sort of. Take a boat just past the Gulf Stream off our coast and you'll enter the North Atlantic Gyre, which is quickly gaining notoriety for trashiness.

A UNCW staffer is headed out to investigate, map, and chronicle the Sargasso Sea's increasing likeness to a landfill, and you can follow her exploits here: the Plastic Ocean.

From their website:

UNCW’s Bonnie Monteleone and Jennifer O’Keefe, Director of Keep America Beautiful- New Hanover County, will represent North Carolina’s passion for the ocean by going out into the Atlantic Gyre, followed by Monteleone joining Algalita Marine Research Foundation into the North Pacific Gyre. They will be taking samples to quantify pelagic plastics found on the oceans surface, collecting surface feeding fish to necropsy for ingested plastics and bringing national awareness to the issues of man made debris entering our oceans.

Do we have smart grids in NC?

Yes.

To start things off, let's first mention that promoting smart grid technologies is a Sierra Club priority, and let's then define (as best we can) what's being talked about: think of the smart grid as two-way communication between the utility and energy users (homes, in the general sense, but appliances to be more specific). Smart grids build off something called Advanced Metering Infrastructures, which allow wireless communication between utilities and energy meters, so that utilities can offer demand response services, i.e. asking consumers to use less at certain times to prevent blackouts. Utilities have been emphasizing and constructing AMI for years, so that system is largely in place and ready for expansion in much of the country.

The aforementioned is more or less agreed on, but when "we need a smart grid" hits the airwaves and RSS feeds, politicians and utility representatives and environmental advocates can be talking about very different things at the levels involved, i.e., the utility or distribution system, the customer, and the transmission infrastructure. There's a great write-up of this by some professors at Carnegie Mellon.

On to North Carolina.

Working example. There are several initiatives in both the eastern and western part of the state that have smart meters and AMI inititiatives. But there's a lot of info out there on Duke Energy's program in Charlotte. From a CNET article on Duke's Charlotte pilot program:

Consider Duke Energy's smart-grid trial in Charlotte, N.C. A substation--the point that distributes electricity from long-haul transmission lines to a neighborhood--is equipped with 213 solar panels and a large battery. About 100 households have smart meters and in-home energy management tools.

When the sun is shining, the 50-kilowatt solar array makes electricity for the homes in the neighborhood. It also feeds the battery, giving the area a few hours of backup power in the case of an outage and a buffer to draw from during peak times. Consumers can take part in demand-response programs, too, to get a reduction on their electricity bill.

One of the more aggressive utilities in this area, Duke plans to have millions of smart meters installed in homes over the next two years. In addition, it envisions putting sensors along power lines, and networking gear, such as routers, in substations and transformers. In people's homes, individual appliances like water heaters could eventually be networked as well.

The project reflects how the utility industry seems to be following the path of the computing industry, which went from centralized processing with mainframes to a much more distributed and varied architecture.

You can read more about the project in the Triangle Business Journal.

Research. Last fall, NC State announced plans to house a national research center for smart grid technologies, aiming to develop the "Internet of Energy" (the center site).

On Behalf of the Cape Fear Group

SEPA is the State Environmental Policy Act and it is rarely triggered, but it needs to be for Titan Cement. It ensures that permits are not granted piecemeal, but that all relevant agencies will have their concerns heard before any permits are granted.

SEPA is triggered when the following conditions are met: (1) state permitting is needed for the project (2) the project will have significant environmental impact, and (3) public money has been accepted by the company. All of these conditions apply to Titan.

Titan doesn't want SEPA and is saying that even though they accepted $4,000,000 in public money, it doesn't apply because technically it is a reduction in taxes after the project is completed. DENR originally determined that SEPA applied, but has since decided that it does not. Titan has at least eight lobbyists in Raleigh working to get their air permit , and we need people from across the state to call Governor Perdue and insist that this project must still be subject to SEPA review. No air permit should be granted until all state agencies have had an opportunity to state their concerns.

Her number in Raleigh is 919-733-5811.

But she needs to hear from citizens across the state. Regional Governor's office numbers are:

New Bern: 252-514-4825

Asheville: 828-251-6160

Charlotte: 704-330-5290

Thank you for your help -- if you have any questions, please email me or call me 910-313-0498.

Janice Wilson

Chair, Cape Fear Group

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