2012: A "Power to the States" Year?

Since the adoption of the US Constitution, there have been ongoing tensions between the federal government and the governments of the individual states.  While the most widely-known consequence of differences of opinion over what authority the states retain has been the US Civil War, debate over the federal/state relationship continues to this day.  For the past century or more, the states have pretty consistently been on the losing side.  So far in 2012, though, there have been three developments in which the states' authority has been (or will be, if campaign promises are kept) reinforced.

First, the US Supreme Court ruling (Virginia v. Sebelius, hereafter just Virginia) regarding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act limited the power of the federal government in two ways.  For the last 100+ years, the Commerce Clause of the Constitution has been stretched to allow regulation of more and more activities.  In Virginia, the Court found that that clause couldn't be stretched far enough to allow the federal government to require individuals to purchase health insurance.  The second thing that the Virginia case did was establish that there are indeed limits to how much coercion the federal government can threaten the states with.  As I've mentioned before, this part of the decision appears to me to create a great deal of uncertainty around the federal/state relationship that will take additional court cases to clarify.  For example, the threat to states that fail to implement unemployment insurance programs that conform to federal requirements seems to me to meet exactly the standards set out as being excessive in Virginia.

Second, this week a three-judge panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the EPA's Cross State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) at least partially on the grounds that the EPA is required to give the individual states an opportunity to solve the problem on their own before imposing a federal clean-up plan.  Earlier in the month, a different federal court vacated the EPA's rejection of the Texas state rules for obtaining certain types of air pollution permits.  Both cases turned on the language of the federal Clean Air Act, which gives the states a significant role.  In one sense, the cases are more about subjecting the federal executive branch to the authority of Congress than about the federal/state relationship, but the decisions will inevitably cause the federal executive to defer more often to state desires in the future.

Third, Mitt Romney published an energy policy document for use in his 2012 Presidential campaign.  One of the major points in that proposal is to empower states to control onshore energy development, and in particular to oversee the development and production of energy on (much of the) federal lands within their borders.  The impact of such a change in land management would be almost exclusively in the West; federal land ownership outside of the West is too small to be significant.  Unstated in the white paper is whether or not states will be allowed to levy severance taxes on any new production done under their permitting.  State severance taxes are typically higher than what the state would receive through federal royalty sharing.  Either way, the existence of extensive federal land holdings in the West, and how that land should be managed, has been a perennial issue out here.

I cheerfully admit to being a supporter of decreased federal authority in some areas where both the federal and state governments have authority (but not all areas, social insurance and civil/voting rights being two where there should be a consistent national policy).  Federal land holdings in the West are a particular sore spot for me; it certainly seems that by being "late to the party" in terms of statehood, the Western states haven't been treated equitably.  2012 might well be a year in which the increase in federal power at the expense of the individual states has stopped, or at least slowed.  I look forward to seeing if the pendulum that has swung one way for most of the last century will swing the other way now.

Update (corrected) regional electricity generation

Man, I hate it when I find a bug in software I've been using for some time.  Better to acknowledge the error than to try to cover it up.  I put up an essay on September 5, 2011, comparing the sources used to produce electricity in the states that make up the Western Interconnect and the rest of the contiguous US states.  There were numerical errors in that piece.  The following is a corrected version.

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Earlier this year I posted a piece that observed that in the US, nuclear power was largely an Eastern phenomenon.  I was curious about other differences in the sources for electrical power in the East and West portions of the US.  The EIA publishes numbers for electricity generation by state and "fuel".  Several caveats go with the following discussion:

• Figures are for calendar year 2007, the last year before the recession.
• Hawaii and Alaska are excluded.
• "West" is the 11 states from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast, "East" is the other 37 contiguous states.
• Pumped-hydro power is excluded -- it's minor and in some states has a negative value, which just confuses things.

The first thing that jumps out of the aggregate numbers is that the West generates only 17.9% of the total, while the East generates 82.1%.  The West's population, based on June 2007 figures from the Census Bureau, was almost 23% of the population total for the 48 contiguous states, so the share of generation is somewhat less than I had expected.  I can think of a variety of possible reasons for the difference.  In no particular order: more moderate climate; less energy-intense economies (eg, less heavy manufacturing); and newer, more-efficient infrastructure such as housing.

The share provided by the five largest sources of generation for the West and East are shown in the table to the left.  As expected, there are fairly dramatic differences between the two regions.  The East depends much more on coal and nuclear (almost 75% of their total) than the West does (about 40%).  If conventional hydro power is counted as renewable, then the West gets about one-quarter of its electricity from renewable sources.  Western wind, with a value of 0.0181, was close behind geothermal as a renewable source in 2007, and passed geothermal into the fifth spot in 2008 [another update: by 2010, renewables totaled a bit over 28% in the West].

The next table shows the top ten sources of electricity by region and source when measured against the US total.  Depending on your biases, the table is making any of several different points.  I'll stick to the one that says the table shows the need for two distinct energy policies (at least with respect to electricity) in the US, one for the West and one for the East.  The problems of replacing the power from an aging fleet of nuclear reactors is an Eastern problem.  The problems of replacing large amounts of coal generation in order to address climate change issues is an Eastern problem.  When the time comes -- and I believe it will -- when the East requires a heavy dose of austerity, in terms of sizable per-capita reductions in electricity use, it will be difficult to justify imposing exactly the same degree of pain on the West.

Political TV Spending, So Far

ProPublica has a story up this morning with an interesting chart showing spending on TV political ads so far this year.  They aggregated spending by three categories of entity: political parties, super PACs, and 501(c)(4) non-profits.  Super PACs may not make contributions to candidates or political parties, but can engage in unlimited independent spending.  501(c)(4) non-profits are organizations whose primary purpose must promote social welfare for the community as a whole.  Such a purpose may be educational in nature.  Broadly speaking, 501(c)(4) corporations can lobby for specific legislation, but can't promote either candidates or parties.  OTOH, they can certainly attack candidates by disclosing information about them.  This past week, Crossroads GPS announced a new television ad buy in Nevada that accuses Representative Shelley Berkley of a pattern of unethical behavior.  Unlike political parties and super PACs, 501(c)(4) corporations are not required to identify their donors.

Broad observations...  It's going to be a long, negative election season.  Very large amounts of money are flowing into organizations whose message will, because of the constraints under which they operate, be negative.  The 501(c)(4) spending thus far is dominated by conservative messages; Crossroads GPS was created by Karl Rove and Americans for Prosperity is generally associated with the Tea Party movement.  It appears there are people with lots of money even during difficult economic times who wish to support a conservative message but remain anonymous while doing so.  I can think of good reasons for that, such as avoiding the flood of people looking for contributions once word got out that I could afford to make a large donation.  I fear that the reasons are not that good, as in voters will be disinclined to support my cause if they know that I'm the one behind the message.  To pick an issue like that, I may firmly believe that when people die, their assets should pass to their heirs without any tax.  But it looks bad if I'm spending millions to push that idea if I myself will benefit to the tune of hundreds of millions when Mom dies. (That's just a hypothetical -- Mom is not leaving me hundreds of millions of dollars when she dies.)

I have the dubious pleasure of living in a Denver suburb where: (1) it's in a swing state for the presidential election; (2) it's in a competitive district for the US Representative race; (3) it's a competitive district for the state representative race; and (4) it's a competitive district for the state Senate seat, and that seat is up for election this year.  I am not looking forward to the next three months.  I have set up a box where I can throw the (mostly unread) campaign and "educational" material that I receive this year.  I have a bet with myself that it will total more than 10 pounds of glossy brochures by election day -- at least it can be recycled.   I've lost track of the number of recorded phone messages pushing one position or another, or asking me to answer some questions, I've received.  I'm considering giving up TV and radio for the duration.

Close Encounters of the Mechanical Kind

I have mentioned before, at least in passing, the historical sea change in how machines are controlled that has occurred, particularly in the last 10-15 years.  More than 30 years ago as a systems analyst at Bell Labs, I recall telling management that "it's a software world now", and their future projects would be late because of software problems, not hardware.  Today, almost everything beyond a certain level of complexity is controlled by one or more microprocessors, some sensors, some actuators, and a big pile of software.  For example, even a low-end contemporary automobile has more than a dozen processors running the various parts of the car.  General Motors says that two-thirds of the budget for the transmission they designed for a hybrid gasoline/electric SUV was for software development for the dedicated processor that operates the transmission.

 I have recently been presented with the opportunity to explore one of the historical alternatives to software control.  I came into possession of the floor-standing Regina music box that sat in my Grandmother Cain's parlor for many years.  It's a handsome piece of antique furniture, shown here in the garage after unpacking from the shipping crate.  This device plays music encoded using projections stamped into thin metal 15.5-inch diameter disks.  As the disk rotates, the projections pluck special gears that in turn pluck the tuned teeth on a steel comb to produce sound.  Somewhat surprisingly, there are a couple of places where you can still have new disks made.  The playing time for a disk of this size is about a minute.  This particular music box includes a disk-changing mechanism that can cycle through a dozen disks, lifting each in turn into position to be played.  Grandma's music box doesn't work enough to play disks -- yet -- but here's a YouTube video of a similar model that shows the basic operation.

The mechanism itself is fascinating (or a nightmare, depending on perspective).  A strong spring motor turns slowly; the turning barrel for the motor has a number of cams cut into it; each cam moves one end of a lever that, through various linkages, is translated into the proper motions at the proper time.  In one sense, I am incredibly lucky.  The box is stopped at the point in the cycle where all of the interesting things involved in changing a disk are happening.  This makes it possible to manually move the followers into the depressions in the cam and watch the corresponding levers move.  If the mechanism had stopped in the middle of playing a disk, working things out would have been much more difficult.

Perhaps the most interesting item is the governor that controls the speed of the spring motor.  The critical piece of it is that gold-colored widget near the top of this photograph.  The video linked above includes a brief shot of the governor in operation.  It spins at high enough speed that air resistance becomes a factor.  That air resistance is transferred back to the spring motor through a set of gears that provides a few-hundred-to-one mechanical advantage.  An ounce of pressure at the governor translates into tens of pounds of resistance that the spring must overcome, slowing it down.  The governor has two spring-loaded wings that unfold when it spins too rapidly, increasing the resistance and slowing the motor.  I'm not sure that I ever knew enough physics to actually write down a set of equations describing the system.  Or to prove that there's a single stable equilibrium for it.

So, what worries me most about the problems involved in restoring this disk player mechanism?  The people who have provided me information thus far all seem to be significantly older than I am, and I'm no longer young.

Should we allow professors to advocate innumeracy?

When I think about energy and energy policy, I almost immediately find myself immersed in numbers.  At a macro level, it seems to me that it's almost impossible to avoid that.  If nothing else, the numbers are so big that you have to do simple scale calculations just to be sure that you're not making some really stupid blunder.  For example, does the US grow enough corn to replace all of its gasoline usage with ethanol?  Tom Murphy's Do the Math is filled with that type of scale calculation, and Tom punches holes in a lot of the proposals for how we can meet future energy needs cleanly and affordably.

Last Saturday the New York Times ran an opinion piece titled "Is Algebra Necessary?" by Andrew Hacker, an emeritus professor of political science.  Dr. Hacker's basic position is that we keep too many people from succeeding in high school and college because of our silly infatuation (my adjective and noun, not his) with making people learn high school algebra.  To quote one of his statements, "But there’s no evidence that being able to prove (x² + y²)² = (x² - y²)² + (2xy)² leads to more credible political opinions or social analysis."  I claim that's not true, that there are a lot of non-credible political opinions held by  people who didn't do the math.  And even worse, if they can't do the math, they have no way to determine that their position is unsupportable.

A commonly heard statement about the US Social Security system is that over the next few decades, we will move from the current situation with about three workers per retiree to having only two workers per retiree, so it must follow that the system is insolvent.  If that's so, I tend to ask, then how did we move from having 16 workers per retiree in the early days of SS, to the current three workers per retiree, but the system continues to roll along?  And accumulated a $2.7 trillion dollar surplus in the Social Security trust fund?  Yes, we raised the tax rates to reflect more generous per-retiree benefits.  But if you can't explain how worker productivity increases allowed a 5:1 decrease in the ratio of workers to retirees over the past 80 years, then you're not competent to have an opinion on the subject [1].  And you can't make that explanation without understanding how exponential functions work.  And now you're back to algebra.

I admit to a bias on this topic.  I was an applied mathematician before I was any of the other things I did in my career(s), and it's how I think about a lot of things in the world.  Mathematical models aren't the only way to think about the world [2], but there are a lot of topics, including political opinions and social analysis, where there are questions that you can't answer without math.  However, I'm willing to meet Dr. Hacker half-way.  At one point he writes, "Yes, young people should learn to read and write and do long division, whether they want to or not. But there is no reason to force them to grasp vectorial angles and discontinuous functions."  I'll offer the alternative, "Yes, young people should learn to read and write [3] and do long division, whether they want to or not.  But there is no reason to force them to grasp Shakespeare and Chaucer or why England and France fought the Hundred Years War."


[1]  It's perfectly reasonable to develop a model and derive numbers and show that the productivity gains needed to allow the continued decrease in the worker-to-retiree ratio are unlikely to occur.  I wrote an argument that suggested that energy supplies are a key to that discussion here.

[2]  And I cheerfully acknowledge the wisdom in George Box's statement that all models are wrong but some are useful.  I'll also point out that a non-mathematical chain of reasoning can be just as wrong, and for many of the same reasons

[3]  I'd go at least a step farther than the minimum writing typically required in high school.  I want everyone to have to pass a real composition class; one where you write something almost every day and someone critiques it.  Such a class is, of course, a hell of a lot more work to teach than literature appreciation.  But probably more broadly useful than literature, too.  The composition class I took in high school as an option (well done, Ms. Morgan) was enormously more valuable, over the course of my life, than the literature classes I had to take in college that masqueraded under the name "English Composition."

More on east vs west and fire

A few days ago I wrote a bit about my experience at a family wedding in SE Kansas and how one part of that illustrated the different attitudes people living east and west of the Great Plains have towards fire.  Today I came across an interesting map assembled by John Nelson of IDV solutions.  The map shows the occurrence of "large" fires in the US since 2001; bigger hotter fires are in yellow, smaller less energetic fires in purple, intermediate fires in red.

Much of the purple appears to be crop residues being burned in the field.  For example, this paper on the use MODIS satellite data identifies the area of SE Missouri and Arkansas bordering the Mississippi River as being largely cropland, planted in wheat and rice, and subject to annual stubble burning over wide areas.  Kansas, North Dakota, and eastern Washington all burn large areas of wheat stubble.

The bright dots, though, are almost certainly big wildfires.  And the overwhelming majority of them occur to the west of the Great Plains.

Great Plains wind energy

Over the past month, I've driven two round trips across the Great Plains on family matters.  There were lots of wind turbine parts being moved from west to east on both I-80 in Nebraska and I-70 in Kansas.  Pulling out to pass the truck carrying a nearly 40-meter turbine blade gives one an appreciation for just how big those things are.

I was also within sight of five different wind farms.  The most impressive (visually) was the three parts of the Smoky Hills complex near Ellsworth, Kansas.  The wind farm is strung out along 24 miles of I-70, with some of the turbines within 300 yards or so of the highway.  Phase I consists of 56 1.8 MW Vestas turbines; phase II has 99 1.5 MW GE turbines; and the Post Rock project, still under construction, will have 134 1.5 MW GE turbines.  Phases I and II have a maximum output of 250 MW; the Post Rock portion will add another 200 MW.

While the sight of all those turbines near Ellsworth spinning in the 25-knot breeze that was blowing was impressive, I wondered how they stacked up in the "big picture".  As of the time I started writing this, April 2012 was the latest month for which the EIA had statistics available.  In that month, wind generation accounted for 4.3% of the total US generation.  That's a nice number compared to the situation even a few years ago, but it still leaves a long way to go.  It may also be at least slightly misleading -- spring and fall months are good for wind because of the weather, and the full summer air conditioning load hasn't kicked in.  Believe me when I say that SE Kansas was running its A/C pretty much flat out while I was there.

I'm always curious about state-level statistics.  The table to the left shows the percentage of power generated in each of several states in April.  I've selected states that contain large stretches of the Great Plains, or had large tall-grass prairie areas before the prairies were plowed under.  There's some overlap, of course -- eastern Nebraska, for example, was tall-grass prairie, while western Nebraska is Great Plains.  On this scale, a couple of smaller states approached one-third of their generated power coming from wind sources.  On a somewhat larger scale, these 13 states accounted for 27.6% of all US generation in April, but for 70.0% of all US wind generation.

At least to me, this suggests a region in the center of the US that has a good chance of deriving a big percentage of its electricity from wind.  How big a percentage depends on lots of things: dispatch rules that favor wind power when it is available, north-south transmission links to provide geographic diversity, etc.  Whether it can produce a significant share for the country as a whole is a much harder question to answer.