For those of you who read the Wall Street Journal daily, let me ask you to pause over some stats from today's front page.
For those of you who do not read the WSJ, ponder along with us.
Dollar Dive Deepens is the main headline. Anyone who has been to Europe in recent months knows a dress shirt will set you back 100 Washington dollars. The stat behind that story, the WSJ tells us, is that the dollar yesterday reached a six-year low against the euro - failing 40 percent. Call that free fall if you ask me.
Story 2. Commodity Prices Surge. Oil reached $102.59 a barrel yesterday, up 12 percent this month and on the verge of breaking a 1980 inflation-adjusted record. 12 percent in one month!! Imagine if your take home pay would increase 12 percent in one month - and the smile that would put on your face. Now we all should be frowning as dramatically. But oil does not tell the whole story. THIS YEAR - and we are only two months into this year - natural gas prices are up 26 percent and coal is up 56 percent.
And that leads to a series of questions for you, our energyblog friends concerned with issues power related.
1. With the dollar off 40 percent against the euro over six years, how long will it be before our friends at EdF, E.On and EDP realize that they can buy Duke-Energy, Exelon or Portland General electric at a significant price discount? What about our transmission grid? And our nuclear plants? Do I see an investment binge on the horizon?
2. With natural gas and coal riding high on the tailwinds of the oil price hurricane, when will electricity prices soar through our economic roof? Fuel costs are a key ingredient in energy generation economics. When will the rampant commodity price mayhem break through and shape electricity prices? Will all this turmoil in natural gas and coal prices lend a push to development of nuclear, wind and solar?
3. My last question - for you to take into your weekend with you - is this. Do you enterain any doubt that the energy business is on the precipice of dramatic change? These stats alone would argue that big changes loom ahead.
Magnetic energy conversion systems are likely to surface as products by the end of this year. Our own efforts include solid-state generators that can be built in many of the world's electronic factories.
These will be fuel-free, inherently low maintenance, systems.
With sufficient capital to put development work on a 24/7 basis, they could move into the market more rapidly than might be imagined.
Might that fact also reverse the price rise in at least some of the fossil fuels, such as oil?
There have been no doubt at all in my mind that, as you wrote, "the energy business is on the precipice of dramatic change" for quite some time as I have be suggesting the need to do the proper type of restructuring. That work started in 1996 and took intensity in 2003. In the latest part of 2005 I started dialogues and debates on the Energy Central Network, where a lot of friction has been found. I have been blogging for 45 months in Grupo Millennium Hispaniola Blog http://grupomillenium.blogspot.com/ and 5 month on http://www.energyblogs.com
As a concerned energyblog on electric power issues, let me tell you about my last three articles which are in sychronicity with what you have been writing. First, in a timely article, Tam Hunt asks What does $100 per barrel oil mean for us? As the market hit the $100.01 figure February 20, I suggest that it means that it is about time to start to shrink utilities regulators jobs. . . as can be seen in the EWPC article "Shrinking the Regulator's Jobs" in the link http://www.energyblogs.com/ewpc/index.cfm/2008/2/20/Shrinking-the-Regulators-Jobs" target="_blank">http://www.energyblogs.com/ewpc/index.cfm/2008/2/2...
Second, it also means that since "In the article 'It may be lights out,' Warren Causey suggests agreement with your article Energy and Presidential Debates by writing that 'There are massive problems to be solved in the electric industry, costing massive amounts of money, and with very little time to do it.' Mr. Causey adds that 'NERC Chair and CEO said essentially the same thing,'" the response to the comment of Mr. Kaminski, who doesn't 'see any alternative call to arms,' is the alternative that has been available in Electricity Without Price Controls (EWPC). That response comes from the EWPC article "Global Citizens' Call to Arms" in the link http://www.energyblogs.com/ewpc/index.cfm/2008/2/24/Global-Citizens-Call-to-Arms" target="_blank">http://www.energyblogs.com/ewpc/index.cfm/2008/2/2...
Finally, to stop going backwards and to start going forward alligned with third industrial revolution, help diseminating the Call to Arms to shrink the regulators' jobs by taking a hard look at the EWPC article "The World Shouldn't be Running Out of Electricity" in the link http://www.energyblogs.com/ewpc/index.cfm/2008/2/28/The-World-Shouldnt-be-Running-Out-of-Electricity" target="_blank">http://www.energyblogs.com/ewpc/index.cfm/2008/2/2...
Thanks,
José Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio, Ph.D.
Systemic Consultant: Electricity
1."Shrinking the Regulator's Jobs" http://www.energyblogs.com/ewpc/index.cfm/2008/2/2...
2."Global Citizens' Call to Arms" http://www.energyblogs.com/ewpc/index.cfm/2008/2/2...
3. "The World Shouldn't be Running Out of Electricity" http://www.energyblogs.com/ewpc/index.cfm/2008/2/2...