Energy

Enron Tapes

This entry was posted in bush California cheney Domestic Terrorism Economics Energy on by

Ever wondered what was going on inside Enron during the California blackouts? Here is part of the answer:

“He just f—s California,” says one Enron employee. “He steals money from California to the tune of about a million.”
“Will you rephrase that?” asks a second employee.
“OK, he, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day,” replies the first.

There is a lot more so go read the rest.
Now that you have read the rest do you really think that the Justice Department and Enron lawyers didn’t want the tapes released because of the foul language?
Via Making Light.

Infrastructure Mapping

This entry was posted in Economics Energy Internet Science on by

The gallery at Geoge Mason University’s Infrastructure Mapping Project has some great visualizations of various parts of North American critical infrastructures, e.g., long haul fiber, the electic power grid, and gaspipelines:

The Infrastructure Mapping Project’s goal is to provide meaningful analysis of critical infrastructure and its interdependencies with vital sectors of the US and global economy. In this pursuit we map a wide variety of networks and phenomena ranging from the Internet the power grid and spam.

Their related research papers are listed here.

Pricing Gas

This entry was posted in Capitalism Economics Energy Marketing on by

Via Scott here is a map of gasoline prices populated with blogger provided info. I note that the price recently posted for Houston is only $1.60/gallon.
I often use gasbuddy to find a low price. Their Houston page shows someone paying 1.55/Gal as recently as last night.
Last week in Canada I paid $0.855(Can)/Liter which works out to about $2.36(US)/gal at the then current exchange rate. I made sure I arrived back in the states with a near empty tank so I could pay $1.989(US)/gal and was quite happy.

May I Borrow a Cup of Sugar,

This entry was posted in Energy Environment on by

my fuel cell is almost out of fuel. Well, these folks are using glucose not table sugar but this looks pretty interesting anyway:

First, the microbial fuel-cell oxidizes glucose to completion, liberating all 24 electrons stored in each molecule of glucose, compared with fuels that are being used or targeted for use in conventional fuel cells � hydrogen (2 electrons) or methanol (6 electrons).

Via The Knowledge Problem.