Good piece, I'm just skeptical of a few things here.  First, I'm unsure whether or not McCain will support a Cap and Trade, obviously if he became president I would hope he does, but I'm skeptical of that.  

If however, I go along with your assumption that he would support a Cap+Trade, then the renewables that McCain "doesn't support" would economically be the better option than the coal.  By raising the price of the coal, the effect would obviously be the acceleration of renewable energy development.

Worst case scenario of course would be that McCain doesn't support cap and trade and then does support renewables.  

sorry I said "does support renewables" in the last sentence, i meant "doesn't"

At least with McCain you know what you are getting- no false hopes.

Obama will save us

   I'm rather amazed at the claims that McCain can direct the utilities' decisions concerning future energy generation. Or that utilities will be looking to maximize the costs of power generation or be unable to judge the relative costs of various technologies.
   I maintain that the utilities are the proper judges of which technology will be the best for its customers.
   The claim that conservation can solve the "energy crisis" (whatever that means) is pretty naiive. The world will always need more and more energy and conservation is an obsolete concept from another age - when fossil fuels were just about the only game in town and were understood as finite. When one moves into renewable energy sources, there are no limits to the amount of energy one can collect and then use.
   The anti-nuclear arguments of this writer are fallacious. He is cherry-picking his facts when he claims that rated capacity costs of nuclear power plants are $7700 per kilowatt, or $7.7
million per megawatt. I've seen many estimates in the past year and a half of nuclear plant costs estimates (over 34 plants have been proposed - the writer oddly picks one estimate for his argument, the highest estimate I've ever seen). Most estimates range from $2200 to around $4500 per kilowatt of rated capacity. Unfortunately for Mr Hoexter's argument, rated capacity is a meaningless characteristic when comparing
power generation costs. Rated capacity is simply the max amount of power that a given power generator is capable of producing, not the amount
that it will in fact produce over its lifespan. A wind farm (or wavefarm or PV farm), for example, can have a rated capacity of 100 Megawatts. Seldom does a windmill (etc.)
average over 30% of its rated capacity. We don't care about rated capacity - we care about how much electricity the power generator can
produce over its lifespan. The lifespan of a nuclear plant is typically 60 years, while a windmill or a photovoltaic solar panel will last less than half that long. A nuclear plant typically averages well over 94% of its rated capacity,while a windmill produces roughly a third of that.
    This means that a windmill that costs $2800 per rated kilowatt capacity, requires building 3 generators to produce the same output as
one single nuclear generator, and must replace each of those those at least once in order to have an equal lifespan. To compare the two
power generation technologies, one must therefore multiple the windmill's rated capacity by 6, which equals $16,800 per kilowatt for the windmill.
   But that's not all - the windmills will require more transmission line costs than the nuclear plant, which is situated in a single location, while windmills are located over very large geographic areas, usually
well away from any concentrated customer locales.
  There are also the seldom acknowledge side effect costs of using an unreliable power generator such as wind (or wave or PV solar) It cannot be counted on to meet ANY peak demand. This means that no matter how many windmills you errect, next year when power demand increases (as it will by 2% for each of the next 20 years),  new (reliable and controllable) power generators must be added to the system. Wind (or wave, or PV solar, or any unreliable generator technology) does not have the ability to replace ANY
of the existing or future dispatchable generation capacity.
   I have read some anti-nuclear arguments that claim that, since nuclear plants must shut down for about a month every two years or so for refueling, that means that they, too, are unreliable. But this is a spurious argument -
those shutdowns are scheduled to occur during the months of minimal energy demand, such as the Spring and Fall, and have zero effect on the reliability of the grid. Nuclear plants are so reliable that over the past decade, there
has been only one unscheduled shutdown of a reactor.
  The fuel costs for a nuclear plant are a bit less than one half a cent per kilowatt hour  (the average retail price for 1 kilowatt hour in the
U.S. is around 10 cents).  I have heard some ant-nuclear folks argue that the price of uranium ore will double or increase 5 fold. Aside from the suspican that estimates this far apart can have any credibility, even a doubling of price would have virtually no effect on retail electricity prices. A fivefold increase would still position nuclear way below other, inferior, technologies.

"McCain, like virtually all conservatives, has consistently voted against efforts to advance renewable electricity."

Here we go again - only the Democrats or the Green party can save us.............

Conservatives will destroy the planet..... I can hear it all yet again.

Victory in Pattani

Wow, what a price rise in coal generated electricity.  Natural gas is expected to go up 30% over for next heating season too.

It would seem that this is the time to invest in a storage and energy use timing system to lower electric bills by getting off peak power rates.  Add that to ground source heat pump heating and the extra costs would dissapear.  

Shorter payback could be obtained with conservation subsidies to homeowners.  This kind of system leads right into a futher investment in roof mounted solar PV/heat cogeneration.  Since the heating and battery storage system would work even better with this addition.

These systems ought to be targeted with a 5 to 10 cent per kwh subsidy payed right to homeoners.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

First its real estate, then oil, now coal...

Isn't this the same old game of taking hold of a resource that almost everyone needs and jacking up the price until the curtain falls away and the game is up?

This isn't about "peak oil" and "global warming" or any of the other ruses....those are cloaks that are being used to hoodwink people and put a lock on a market.