Price of gasoline: from a reader, "If you put .29 cents in the amount and the year is 1965, the adjusted price for gasoline is $ 2.16/gallon." See "inflation calculator."
Strange bedfellows: Saudi Prince MSB considering game-changing handshake with Israeli PM.
How America broke OPEC, from The Wall Street Journal. This is an op-ed piece by the editorial board. It almost qualifies The WSJ editorial staff for a nomination for the Geico Award. Anyone paying attention saw this coming several years ago -- if nothing else, the trillion-dollar mistake should have been enough evidence. At the linked article, 184 comments so far, but none from Art Berman. Best paragraph:
Barack Obama, hilariously, is now claiming credit for the shale boom. “You know that whole suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer . . . that was me, people,” he said last month at Rice University. But drilling leases on federal land declined 28% during his two terms amid new restrictions on land use. Drilling skyrocketed on private land, despite attempts by his regulators to block pipelines, slow down approvals, and impose higher costs on production.Magic pony:
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Whoa! Not So Fast
Updates
December 16, 2018: link here.
Original Post
Wind, solar have banner day in New England. From Boston's Chesto in Boston in The Boston Globe:
Winds of change: The blockbuster auction for offshore wind leases that wrapped up today should leave few doubts: The industry has finally arrived in New England.
Three developers backed by major European energy companies won access to 390,000 acres of federal waters nearly 20 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, after numerous rounds of spirited bidding that stretched over two days. These firms will each pay a record $135 million for the rights to build massive windmills in their respective slices of the ocean.
Walter Cruickshank, head of the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, told reporters: “We are completely blown away by this.” He was speaking for the agency that oversaw the auction, of course.
But he also summed up the industry’s reaction. Although these areas will take many years to fully develop, BOEM says the three lease sites combined could eventually support 4,100 megawatts of wind generation, enough juice for 1.5 million homes.There's a reason that Apple, Inc., did not announce a tech campus in Boston -- they would have liked to have done that -- based on the tea leaves -- but they knew that electricity was going to cost them an arm, a leg, and an iPhone X. In addition, the taxes. Ouch! Apple, instead, announced a $1 billion tech center in Austin, Texas. Wow. Still no state income tax.
How rich are these prices? Consider how far the industry has come in four years. In early 2015, two larger lease areas closer to shore -- read: easier and cheaper to develop -- each sold for less than $300,000. An acre of land in Edgartown sells for more than that. The offshore areas auctioned off this week? BOEM tried to sell them once before, also in 2015. Everyone took a pass.
Not this time. Eleven bidders gave it a shot this week. The eventual victors were: Equinor, the Norwegian company known as Statoil until earlier this year; Mayflower Wind, a joint venture owned by Shell and EDP Renewables; and Vineyard Wind, a JV controlled by Spain’s Iberdrola and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners.
So what changed? State policy, for one thing. In 2016, lawmakers in Massachusetts required the state’s big utilities to seek contracts for up to 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind. Vineyard Wind won the first round of bidding in May, for 800 megawatts, for an area it already controlled. The rest will likely be put out to bid in mid-2019. In July, legislators on Beacon Hill passed another law that allows the Baker administration to seek an additional 1,600 megawatts of offshore energy.
Also from Chesto:
- how GE became a shadow of its former self -- WSJ
- Newbury College to shut down
- Hasbro -- signals it will exit Rhode Island, unless ...
- Massachusetts state income tax drops from 5.1% to 5.05% on most income
- let's see, $400,000 income x 0.05 = $20,000 -- the down payment for a Tesla
The ONLY reason the Bakken exploded when it did was a perfect marriage of technology, private business and private landowners, working together create something the govt could not stop or control.
ReplyDeleteYou are so correct.
DeleteThere is one other piece. The success of fracking took everyone by surprise. Had fracking developed much more slowly, let's say five to ten years, the faux environmentalists would have had time to stop fracking on federal land and they might have had some success in stopping fracking at the state level. They had success in New York state for example.
But by the time the faux environmentalists were able to react to fracking, the horse was already out of the barn, and everyone saw how "important" fracking was and it was not going to be stopped -- at least in a couple of states.
Bruce,I know how much you like math, but your $ 20,000 down payment on a tesla is only $200 down payment on an electric scooter!
ReplyDeleteAnd only $20 for a down payment on a new Haro 21-speed bike -- although I tend to pay for new bikes in three monthly installments. Thank you for taking time to write. LOL. And for newbies: I like math, but I often make simple errors in arithmetic.
Delete