Call it a most intriguing circuit.
Many of them were there last week at our landmark EnergyBiz Leadership Forum. There was Jon from Microsoft. Julia from the solar association. David from Southern Company. Ben from Quanta Services. What they heard at EBLF - did you miss it? Stay tuned to our site and we will be posting video snippets and other highlights shortly.
Today, Jon, David, Ben and I and others are at CERA Week here in Houston, Dan Yergin's long-running salon on oil, gas and, lately, power. Some of my CERA notes - for your eyes only:
Nobuo Tanaka, head of the International Energy Agency, says that we are enjoying perhaps the first "oil-less" recoveries, which means that our economy will slowly bloom even though oil demand will not be robust.
David Gergen, political pundit, journalist and one-time presidential adviser, at a banquet told the audience of energy executives that they should not expect Sarah Palin to run for president in 2012. That is because she now - on the speaker circuit - makes more than "everyone in this room," Gergen told the well-heeled crowd.
Mike Morris, the head of AEP, said that Congress has to ratify carbon legislation in the next 30 days or you can kiss it good-bye. That is because of the logistics of governing, holiday breaks and re-election campaigns. Mike, an EEI stalward, reflected on the EEI's ability to get diverse utilities to endorse a common approach to cap-and-trade. He compared it to the paralysis in our governing sector, then observed, "Maybe Tom Kuhn should be president of the United States." Kuhn runs EEI.
Perhaps a highlight of CERA was when Dow Chemical's top guy, Andrew Leveris, gave a heartfelt plea for the need for effective government leadership on energy and the environment. "We need government," he said. "It helps markets function better."
Dow has been no slouch on its own, achieving $9 billion in energy cost savings off of a $1 billion investment, he said. Liveris said there is no doubt about the path forward for all of us, and it is to combat climate change and choke off greenhouse gas emissions. "We need to slow - stop - and reverse it." A price must be placed on carbon.
"Businesses like mine need it so we can innovate and invest." That is from LIveris, who oversees the energy appetite of the largest industrial energy user in the United States.
Stay tuned to learn more about a game-changer being cooked up by Dow. It is a solar shingle. "This will be solar for the masses," said the mustachioed corporate Zorba.
We are facing the global peak in oil supply. We will see a reduced supply of oil in the face of increasing demand. We are still dependent on increasing volumes of oil and other types of energy for economic growth. In order to fuel global supply chains and increasingly globalized markets we will continue to need increasing amounts of oil, unless we apply managed change tecniques and start to run large scale energy transformation programs on a large scale.
Unfortunately, we don't have very many renewable energy sources that are competitive with fossil fuels, and none that are really implemented on a large scale. Most renewable energy technologies are not even fully developed.
If oil supply is peaking soon we will increasingly, and at a rapid pace, have to move to electricity for transportation and we will need dramatically increasing volumes of electricity to make this possible. We will also need large volumes of electric vehicles at competitive prices to rapidly replace large fractions of the existing vehicle fleets.
We need large scale energy transformation programs, similar to the Apollo program, through which we drive Global Energy Transformation with determination and speed.
There was nothing said about this at the Swedish conference, and I doubt that anything was said about it at the leadership forum.