Synopsis "Environmental Impacts of petroleum industry (in English)"
Debates on energy policy, environmental regulation, and global warming start with the largely unquestioned assumption that the present heat and power system is economically optimal. It then follows that any actions to change the energy system to achieve other goals, such as lowering pollution, will raise the cost of energy services and damage the economy. It then further follows that the only way to have affordable, clean energy is to invent and develop new technology. This view is widespread. President George W. Bush, in a major speech on climate change said, "Technology is the ticket" (2005). But the energy system is not optimal, and society does not need to play off income against cleaner energy.Industry regularly ignores energy saving projects with one to two-year paybacks. The resulting opportunities should be fertile ground for third party power entrepreneurs seeking to profit by outsourcing industrial energy supply. But regulations and regulators, bent on protecting electric distribution monopolies, largely compromise the economics of such projects. The failure to optimize U.S. power systems is principally caused by power industry governance, which consists of a vast tapestry of rules and regulations that either was based on yesterday's technology choices or was handcrafted by electricity distribution utilities to preserve their wires monopoly.Deregulation has opened some parts of the industry to competition, which has worked, but only in the ways the rules reward. The Energy Policy Act of 1992 opened wholesale electric generation competition, i.e., for power sold to the grid, and this induced electric power companies to improve labor and capital utilization efficiencies. The U.S. power industry employed 75 persons per 100MW of generating capacity in 1990. By 2004 the utility industry reduced that number by 52% to 39 persons per 100MW of generating capacity. The load factor for all nuclear units rose from 66% in 1990 to 88% in 2003, while coal fired load factors rose from 59 to 72%. During the same period, the industry only increased its coal and nuclear electric generating capacity by 5 GW, or a 1% increase (407GW in 1990). But the power output from these coal and nuclear plants increased by 26%
