Power Across Texas Announces New Advisory Board Member And New Corporate Member.

We are very pleased to announce the addition of a new Advisory Board Member of Power Across Texas – Mr. Ralph Cavanagh. Ralph is a senior attorney and co-director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s energy program. I am excited to welcome Ralph to the Advisory Board and believe his guidance and support will help PAT further it's mission as a nonpartisan, independent organization. Please see our website for Ralph’s complete bio: www.poweracrosstexas.org.

Additionally, we are excited to announce that Calpine Corporation has joined Power Across Texas as a Gold Level corporate sponsor. Calpine, founded in 1984, is a major U.S. power company, capable of delivering nearly 25,000 megawatts of clean, cost-effective, reliable and fuel-efficient electricity to customers and communities in 16 states in the U.S. and Canada.

Calpine “generates electricity in a reliable and environmentally responsible manner for the customers and communities it serves” and “believes that a strong commitment to environmentally responsible electrical generation is a key element to achieving its goal of being the finest power company in North America.”

We appreciate Calpine’s support in achieving our mission to provide a learning center for energy issues that draws allies from all corners of the political, academic and corporate sectors, and that fosters awareness around aspects of energy issues that affect us all.

In January, Power Across Texas' Advisory Board and Corporate Members met in Austin for a Strategy Session to ensure PAT's mission was filling an appropriate vacuum in the energy market and to identify projects that PAT should focus on during 2010 and 2011.

See photos, and hear more about the event inside.

The natural variability of wind power makes it different from other generating technologies, which can give rise to questions about how wind power can be integrated into the grid successfully. This article aims to answer several important questions that can be raised with regard to wind power.

This report responds to a request to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) from Chairman Henry Waxman and Chairman Edward Markey for an analysis of H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACESA).1 ACESA, as passed by the House of Representatives on June 26, 2009, is a complex bill that regulates emissions of greenhouse gases through market-based mechanisms, efficiency programs, and economic incentives.

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the American Council for Capital Formation (ACCF) releases a comprehensive study on the impact of The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, also known as the Waxman-Markey Bill (HR 2454). The bill aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to cap the amount of carbon that is emitted by U.S. industry. The legislation does so by mandating a cap and trade program and other provisions governing fuel choices available to businesses and consumers. This bill passed the House of Representatives by a slim margin (219-212) earlier this summer. The Senate is expected to release its version of climate legislation in September.

The large decline in U.S. emissions in 2008 and 2009 due to the economic recession ensures that if the House-passed Waxman-Markey climate legislation becomes law, the bill's emissions reduction cap will require no reduction of carbon emissions over the first two to five years of the program. The resulting oversupply of emissions permits will allow regulated firms to continue business as usual emissions through as late as 2018, according to a new analysis by Breakthrough Institute based on new Energy Information Administration emissions projections that take into account the impacts of the global recession.

The Texan economy is becoming ever more diversified, but energy remains a favourite
HIGHWAY 84, as it descends from Lubbock through Snyder to the small town of Sweetwater, is a road worth taking. Spread across the vast plain are thousands of windmills, gently turning in a favourable wind; not too slow, not too fast and, above all, fairly consistent.

Only as you draw near to one do you realise that these towers are the height of 40-storey buildings; their blades are the length of a jumbo jet’s wing. They are clever too. Without human intervention, they can turn their heads and alter the pitch of their blades to make the most of the wind. They cost about $5m apiece.

Sweetwater calls itself the windpower capital of America, and with roughly 3,300MW of installed capacity within a 50-mile (80km) radius the claim is not extravagant. Already endowed with oil and gas, Texas is blessed with a fair wind as well. Even stronger and more consistent winds are to be found further north along the “wind corridor” that stretches from the west Texas plains up through the panhandle and into Oklahoma and beyond. But for now these areas are too remote to be connected to any of America’s three main grids: the eastern, the western and Texas’s very own ERCOT grid.

Two teams of scientists from the University of Texas have been asked by the U.S. Department of Energy to set out on the energy frontier — one team in search of a new way to collect solar energy, the other to contend with the byproducts of America's energy use.

Professors Paul Barbara and Gary Pope have been given $30.5 million in grants as part of a $777 million national energy research effort that its developers have likened to the creation of the atomic bomb and the mission to put a man on the moon. Their projects were two of 46 that the Energy Department's Office of Basic Energy Sciences chose from among 260 proposals.

These energy frontier research centers, as the Energy Department calls them, have been charged with providing the research foundation for a multibillion-dollar government drive to answer some of the biggest questions of national energy use and its consequences.

The nation's clean-energy economy is relatively small, but it's growing rapidly, and Texas is one of the leading players, according to a study released Wednesday by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Pew researchers counted 68,200 businesses and 770,000 jobs across the United States tied to clean energy as of 2007, according to the most recent data. Texas ranked second to California in both jobs and clean-energy businesses.

Those jobs amounted to one-half of 1 percent of the nation's total, but Pew researchers said the clean-energy sector grew twice as fast as the overall economy during the past decade and is poised for explosive growth in the coming years because of a surge in private investment in the sector and in federal government spending.

As Congress and the Obama administration reshape how Americans consume energy, the state that produces more energy than any other is mostly fighting the process.

The state's governor and one of its top congressmen maintain that global warming isn't caused by man-made emissions. While congressional Democrats want the country to get more of its energy from green sources, many Texas politicians want to protect their fossil fuel constituents.