Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen …

When Bill McKibben and 350.org launched their amazing fossil-fuel Divestment Campaign in 2013, we had 15 years in which to avoid exhausting the carbon budget. We now have only 13 years left and ticking.

The divestment campaign importantly is branding the fossil fuel industry as an unethical enterprise. But we need to now go even further and actually criminalise their genocidal and ecocidal activities.

An essential first step would be to criminalise further investment in fossil fuel exploration. McKibben’s carbon budget means that 80% of already discovered fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground.

This means that globally the maximum we can afford to release is less than 475 billion more gigatonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere prior to 2050, to avoid catastrophic global temperature rises of more than 2C. But according to 350.org the carbon in the world’s proven reserves of coal, oil and gas amounts to 2,795 gigatonnes.

So why are government pouring trillions into fossil fuels?

Yet despite this alarming statistic, the Overseas Development Institute reports that global governments and oil corporations are squandering $125 billion dollars a year on finding yet more destructive fossil fuels! Government subsidies for fossil fuels amounted to a further $500 billion globally every year.

Both Labour and the Con-Dem coalition governments in the UK have provided huge subsidies for fossil fuel exploration both in the UK and around the world. Labour, Lib Dems, UKIP, the Tories and SNP all promised to provide even more subsidies in their 2015 general election manifestos – while simultaneously claiming they were committed to tackling the climate crisis!

The UK government claims it is helping firms “to find fossil fuels within the UK to increase energy security, attract royalties and help with the balance of payments.” In November 2014 the BBC reported that George Osborne has introduced annual subsidies of up to £757 million.

These included tax breaks worth £528 million to Total (France), £256 million to Statoil (Norway), £144 million to Centrica (UK) and £45 million to Chevron (USA). Added to this, Business Secretary Vince Cable has been spending £418 million annually in public finance for oil exploration in Siberia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Guinea and Ghana.

Con-Dems create a legal obligation to exploit fossil fuels

However, the corrupt influence of the fossil-fuel lobbying industry on the UK’s corridors of power excelled even itself in the pro-fossil fuel provisions it managed to get inserted into the 2015 Infrastructure Act.

Whilst fractivists were protesting across Britain against toxic polluting fossil-gas fracking in their communities, the oil lobbyists successfully got the government to legislate for a legal duty on the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change to “maximise the economic recovery of petroleum” and to legally collaborate with the petroleum industry to do this.

Remember this very same Secretary of State is simultaneously legally required to cut UK green-house gases by 80% by 2050 under the Climate Change Act!

A recent report by WWF and Ecofys, calculated that if we invested between$1-$2 trillion in renewable energy and energy efficiency per year now, by 2050 the world economy would be making a net saving of up to $4 trillion.

But there is good news – in January Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that in 2014 we were already investing $310 billion on renewable energy globally. So if we switch investment in the suicidal search for yet more fossil fuels and the government subsidies, to investments in renewables/efficiency, it would add up to nearly a trillion dollars annually.

Challenging the extremist media billionaires

As the UK’s extremist right wing and climate-sceptic billionaire-owned media are ensuring that our general election campaign is being almost totally silent on this existential threat to the future of the UK, we are organising a peaceful direct action on the bank holiday Monday 4th May, starting at 12 noon.

It is calling for the criminalisation of UK fossil-fuel exploration and investment. We are calling it ‘Occupy Gandhi: A Tarpaulin Meditation on Urgent Climate Action’. It is part of the Occupy Democracy week of protests leading up to the general election in Parliament Square.

It will take place at the feet of the recently installed statue of Mahatma Gandhi, the global exemplar of peaceful civil disobedience, in Parliament Square.

As Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London bizarrely declared in October that tarpaulin is “a proscribed item” in the square, as he claimed it was “sleeping equipment” which has been banned by Parliament, the meditation will take place with us sitting on tarpaulin, which we are asking protesters to bring with them.

Even if you do not wish to join in the act of peaceful civil disobedience but wish to join the meditation in support of those of us who are, you and people of all faiths and none are very welcome.

The clock is ticking fast. There will be only eight McKibben years left at end of this Parliament! The time for effective action is now.

Action: Please come and help demonstrate our determination to ensure urgent action takes place now! At the Mahatma Gandhi statue in Parliament Square, London, Monday 4th May, starting at 12 noon.

More information on Facebook and Twitter / #OccupyGandhi and Occupy Democracy. Telephone: 07947 884299.

Donnachadh McCarthy is a member of Occupy Democracy, co-organiser for Occupy Rupert Murdoch Week and is the author of “The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought”. contact@3acorns.co.uk

Tesla Energy’s new mains power battery has just transformed the energy market – giving a huge boost to small scale renewable energy and killing off both fossil fuelled and nuclear power in the process.

The announcement of its two domestic-scale lithium batteries, rated at 7kWh and 10kWh of energy storage was widely trailed.

But what no one expected was the price – which came in at a half to a quarter of market expectations: “Tesla’s selling price to installers is $3,500 for 10kWh and $3,000 for 7kWh. (Price excludes inverter and installation.) Deliveries begin in late Summer.”

And according to energy analyst Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education, that equates to a life-cycle cost of about $0,02 per kWh stored and released, or a little over 1p in UK money.

And that is transformational. With grid power prices typically 14p / kWh in the UK, or $0.12 in the US, it’s just a fraction of the cost of buying power in – for the first making it economic for small scale generators to ‘save and re-use’ their power surpluses.

Selling cheap, buying dear – no longer!

Currently power users with solar panels or wind turbines get paid just a few pence for every kWh (that’s one kilowatt of electrical power for one hour) they dump into the grid. So the main value they get (in addition to any feed-in tariff) is that while the sun is shining or the wind blowing, they get ‘free’ electricity.

The problem comes when there’s no sunshine or wind – and then they have to buy high-priced power in off the grid. But now with the Tesla battery system they will be able to store any power surplus to their needs – dumping less power onto the grid, and buying less in.

And that’s just what Tesla’s battery is designed to do. It can “provide a number of different benefits to the customer”, writes Tesla, including:

• “Load shifting – The battery can provide financial savings to its owner by charging during low rate periods when demand for electricity is lower and discharging during more expensive rate periods when electricity demand is higher
• “Increasing self-consumption of solar power generation – The battery can store surplus solar energy not used at the time it is generated and use that energy later when the sun is not shining
• “Back-up power – Assures power in the event of an outage.”

As they do this technology adopters will slash the money they spend buying grid electricity. And if enough people do it (as they surely will as prices continue to fall) the entire business model of centralized power generators is doomed as sales falls, fixed costs have to be shared among a dwindling pool of customers, and the incentive to ‘go renewable’ increases.

But the revolution doesn’t stop there!

It’s not just domestic-scale generators that can benefit from the technology – large utility-scale renewable power generators can also get in on the act by installing banks of batteries at solar and wind farm sites – holding back electricity when the price is low, and selling it when the price is high.

And yes, Tesla has a product for them too: “For utility scale systems, 100kWh battery blocks are grouped to scale from 500kWh to 10MWh+. These systems are capable of 2hr or 4hr continuous net discharge power.”

Result: returns to wind and solar investors go up, making wind and solar power even more competitive against fossil-generated electricity than they already are. In the process renewable generators will also stabilise the grid, playing a big part in ensuring that, second to second, power supply matches demand.

And as they do this it will cut away life support from coal and gas fired plants that are currently paid to step in and make good any fall-off in power from renewable generators, or meet demand surges from power users.

Good news for everyone … almost everyone

And that’s good news for everyone. Except the owners of the fossil fuel plants, that is, and the extractive industries that supply their fuel.

Oh yes, and nuclear power operators. The nuclear industry argues that of all the ‘low carbon‘ power sources only nuclear can supply ‘base load’ demand, day in, day out. In fact the claim is highly dubious – not least because all nuclear plants are prone to sudden emergency cut-outs that require a huge ‘spinning reserve’ as backup.

But that, they argue, justified the very high prices consumers are forced to pay for their electricity. The UK’s planned Hinkley C nuclear power plant is set to receive about double the current wholesale price for power, index linked, for 35 years after it goes into production, at least a decade in the future (if indeed it ever does).

But with cheap battery power now, why bother? As wind and solar power get cheaper all the time, and now battery costs are collapsing into the bargain, nuclear power represents a very slow, expensive and completely inflexible solution to a ‘problem’ that no longer exists.

The end of the big centralized power generators and their nuclear and fossil fuelled plants is no longer in doubt: it’s not ‘if’, but ‘when?’ Will they last out another decade? As revenues, investor confidence and future prospects ebb away, it’s hard to see how.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

Manipulation of the petroleum market is not new. John D. Rockefeller with his Standard Oil Trust mastered it between the end of the 19th and start of the 20th Century.

Rockefeller and his trust succeeded in controlling virtually all the oil industry in the United States and also dominating the international market. The Standard Oil Trust fixed prices, set production quotas and ruthlessly forced out competitors.

The US Supreme Court in 1911, in the wake of muckraker Ida Tarbell’s investigative articles and book on the Standard Oil Trust, utilized the Sherman Antitrust Act to break the trust up into 34 pieces.

“For the safety of the Republic”, the court declared, “we now decree that this dangerous conspiracy must be ended.”

The most prominent corporate offshoots of Standard Oil today are ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips. The 34 were supposed to operate independently but, critics have long held, there’s been continued collusion: that the US-dominated oil industry went from being a monopoly to a cartel.

‘Oil shocks’ are not facts of nature – they are created

With discoveries of oil in the Middle East in the 1930s and with Standard Oil offshoots deeply involved, the Arabian American Oil Company – Aramco – was created in Saudi Arabia in 1944. In the 1970s, the Saudi government began acquiring more and more of a stake in Aramco, taking over full control in 1980 of what is now called Saudi Aramco.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries – OPEC – was formed in 1960 to “coordinate and unify the petroleum policies of its Member Countries and ensure the stabilization of oil markets in order to secure an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consumers, a steady income to producers and a fair return on capital for those investing in the petroleum industry.”

The senior partner in OPEC, now a 12-nation organization, is Saudi Arabia. This figures considering it has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves at more than 260 billion barrels.

OPEC sets production targets for its member countries. An early and major flexing of OPEC petroleum power, its system of control, came in 1973 with the ‘oil embargo’ or ‘oil shock’ of that year. It was an OPEC effort to punish the US for its support of Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Other OPEC-induced ‘oil shocks’ have followed.

The same goes for oil gluts – but the reasons are different

This historical background brings us to why the price of a barrel of oil has plummeted in half, from a high of $115 a barrel last June-and why you, as a result, are paying less for a gallon of gasoline at the pump.

The key reason is hydraulic fracturing – or fracking – and OPEC’s move to discourage competition to it from fracking. In recent years there’s been a revolution in petroleum extraction made possible by a new technique of splitting underground shale formations through hydraulic fracking. This has vastly expanded the gas and oil output of the fracking process.

Fracking is a messy and polluting process. Massive amounts of water and 600 chemicals are shot into the ground under high pressure to release the gas and oil.

Especially problematic is the leakage of gas from fracking wells into underground water causing not only serious contamination but the phenomenon of what comes out of a water faucet bursting into flames when touched with a match.

The 2010 film Gasland, nominated for an Academy Award, and the subsequent Gasland Part II, both written and directed by Josh Fox, documented this fiery aspect of fracking along with the many instances of water pollution and impact on people’s health caused by the contamination of water. There is also a major problem of fracking causing earthquakes.

Horizontal fracking in shale formations was first developed with federal government support in the United States starting in the 1980s It has enabled the US to again become a global giant in petroleum production.

The International Energy Agency last year projected that in 2015, because of fracking, the US would displace Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer. Fracking, however, is a relatively expensive process – about ten times more costly than the $5 to $6 per barrel cost of drilling oil from conventional wells in Saudi Arabia.

By letting the price of oil drop the Saudi-led move has applied substantial financial pressure – so far – on the fracking industry. With the current price per barrel cost at less than $60 a barrel, fracking has become a problematic undertaking economically. And consequently there have been reductions in and cancellations of numerous fracking operations.

Attacking US shale oil

As Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve between 1987 and 2006, put it recently: “At the root of the price collapse was the development in the US of technologies for extracting tight oil, mostly from shale deposits, by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. This reversed the decline in US oil production.”

“After the oil embargo of the 1970s”, he said, “OPEC wrested oil pricing power from the US.” But now, there’s been a “shale technology breakthrough. As a result, the gap between global production and consumption has widened, precipitating a rise in US and world inventories, and a fall in prices.

“Saudi Arabia, confronted with an oil supply glut but not wishing to lose market share, abandoned its leadership role as global swing producer and refused to cut production to support prices.”

Explains Jamie Webster, an oil market analyst at HIS Energy in Washington, DC: “The faster you bring the price down, the quicker you will have a response from US [fracking] production – that is the expectation and the hope. I cannot recall a time when several [OPEC] members were actively pushing the price down in both word and deed.”

How much longer can the fracking industry survive?

This gives rise to the question: how low can the price of a barrel of oil get, and frackers still make it economically with the price a barrel below what’s been their ‘break-even’ price of $70?

Dan K. Eberhart, CEO of Canary, a Colorado-based drilling services company, says “US producers are getting better and more economical” and the price to frack is falling, and this is “going to help US producers stay competitive in the worldwide oil market.”

According to Katusa of Casey Research, “the versatility and survivability of a lot of these shale producers will surprise people. I don’t see that the shale sector is going to collapse overnight.”

The fracking industry nevertheless is being hurt badly. “The shale oil revolution is in danger”, was the headline in Fortune. “The recent drop in oil prices poses a major challenge to the frackers.

“But oil producers, Wall Street analysts, and most industry experts claim the setback will be brief and minor. Don’t believe them“, the article continued. “The basic economies of fracking-what it costs to drill versus what oil now sells for-spells big trouble for the shale boom.”

As the Daily Kos headlined its piece on the matter: “97% of fracking now operating at loss at current oil prices.”

Then there’s the issue of how long the US shale boom can last. Fracked wells don’t last long. The International Energy Agency in its 2014 World Energy Outlook projects that as a result, fracking-dominated petroleum production in the US “levels off in the early 2020s and its total production eventually starts to fall back.”

Further, ‘proved reserves’ for petroleum from shale are about 10 billion barrels, according to the US Department of Energy, a small fraction of the reserves in the Middle East.

Keeping up the gasoline addiction

There are other factors, too. The plunging price of oil has impacted severely on Russia causing some analysts to see collusion between the US and Saudi Arabia to hurt the Putin regime in Russia – and some have extended this to seeing such a conspiracy as also being aimed at major oil producers Iran and Venezuela, too.

Russian President Vladimir Putin himself has raised this prospect declaring in December: “We all see the lowering of the oil price. There’s lots of talk about what’s causing it. Could it be the agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia to punish Iran and affect the economies of Russia and Venezuela? It could.”

A few days later, Venezuela’s President Nicholas Maduro charged: “Did you know there’s an oil war. And the war has an objective: to destroy Russia. It’s a strategically planned war…also aimed at Venezuela, to try and destroy our revolution and cause an economic collapse.”

In the US, Martin Katusa, believes chief energy investment strategist at Casey Research in Vermont, “It’s a three-way oil war between OPEC, Russia and North American shale.”

But another purpose is surely to re-entrench the world’s gas-guzzling habits, as Joby Warrick, environmental reporter for The Washington Post recently wrote: “Now energy experts are seeing evidence that the oil bust is helping Saudi Arabia achieve another long-term goal: undermining global efforts to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.”

Among those seeing this is Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD) in Washington. “If a period of low prices gets consumers hooked on cheap gas and inefficient cars, that sustains their market”, he said.

In fact, with the sharp decrease in the price of gasoline, sales of SUVs and other low-efficiency vehicles has been rising. This past November was the best month for SUV sales since 2001, according to Autodata.

And at some point, with fuel consumption rising and production from fracking wells down, that’s the time to manipulate the market up – as the secretary-general of OPEC, Abdulla al-Badri recently hinted:

“Now that prices are around $45-$55 [a barrel], I think maybe they [have] reached the bottom and we [will] see some rebound very soon.” Badri went on that oil prices might get to “more than $200” a barrel, although he wouldn’t give a time frame.

Is renewable energy another target?

Is a Saudi Arabian assault on the clean energy movement a factor, too? If so, says Ken Johnson, vice president of communications for the Solar Energy Industries Association in Washington, it’s failing:

“We have not seen any direct link between the price of oil and the development of solar projects nationwide, which remains quite strong.”

So can oil – from fracking or conventional drilling in the Middle East – compete with the windfall in renewable energy technologies? A report recently done for the National Bank of Abu Dhabi by the University of Cambridge and Price WaterhouseCoopers, titled ‘Financing the Future of Energy‘, declares:

“The energy system of the past will not be the same as the energy system of the future. It is clear that renewables will be an established and significant part of the future energy mix, in the region and globally.”

“The sharp fall in the oil price in 2014 has raised the question of whether the trend towards a more integrated energy mix and the growth of renewables will continue, or be stalled by more affordable oil and gas”, says the report. “There are strong reasons to believe it will continue.”

Solar photovoltaic power and wind energy have “already a track record of successful deployment. Prices have fallen dramatically in the past few years: solar PV falling by 80% in six years, and on-shore wind by 40%. The speed of this shift towards grid parity with fossil fuels means that, in many instances, perceptions of the role of renewables in the energy mix have not caught up with reality.”

The report notes the bid of the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority in December 2014 to build a 200 megawatt solar photovoltaic facility in Dubai “set a new world benchmark for utility scale solar PV costs, showing that photovoltaic technologies are competitive today with oil at US$10/barrel.”

The report goes on that “solar is on track to achieve grid parity in 80 percent of countries within the next two years, so cost is no longer a reason not to proceed with renewables.” There have been numerous reports in recent years mirroring this analysis.

So what really is Saudi Arabia’s game? The country’s recent postponement by eight years of its target to complete a $109 billion investment program in solar and other clean power sources, from 2032 to 2040, may provide a clue.

One interpretation: Saudi Arabia knows that the future is solar, and that its oil will ultimately end up worthless. But it’s going to wait until solar power goes through a few more rounds of price falls before it invests big in the sector.

And until then, it wants to get as rich as it can from its oil – manipulating the market to its advantage for as long as possible.

The plan is sound, except for one detail. If Saudi Arabia’s rulers think the ‘good times’ for oil are going to roll on until 2040, they could just find they made a serious miscalculation.

Karl Grossman is professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, and the author of ‘Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power’ and host of the nationally-aired TV program ‘EnviroCloseup‘.

Additional reporting by The Ecologist.

Tesla Energy’s new mains power battery has just transformed the energy market – giving a huge boost to small scale renewable energy and killing off both fossil fuelled and nuclear power in the process.

The announcement of its two domestic-scale lithium batteries, rated at 7kWh and 10kWh of energy storage was widely trailed.

But what no one expected was the price – which came in at a half to a quarter of market expectations: “Tesla’s selling price to installers is $3,500 for 10kWh and $3,000 for 7kWh. (Price excludes inverter and installation.) Deliveries begin in late Summer.”

And according to energy analyst Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education, that equates to a life-cycle cost of about $0,02 per kWh stored and released, or a little over 1p in UK money.

And that is transformational. With grid power prices typically 14p / kWh in the UK, or $0.12 in the US, it’s just a fraction of the cost of buying power in – for the first making it economic for small scale generators to ‘save and re-use’ their power surpluses.

Selling cheap, buying dear – no longer!

Currently power users with solar panels or wind turbines get paid just a few pence for every kWh (that’s one kilowatt of electrical power for one hour) they dump into the grid. So the main value they get (in addition to any feed-in tariff) is that while the sun is shining or the wind blowing, they get ‘free’ electricity.

The problem comes when there’s no sunshine or wind – and then they have to buy high-priced power in off the grid. But now with the Tesla battery system they will be able to store any power surplus to their needs – dumping less power onto the grid, and buying less in.

And that’s just what Tesla’s battery is designed to do. It can “provide a number of different benefits to the customer”, writes Tesla, including:

• “Load shifting – The battery can provide financial savings to its owner by charging during low rate periods when demand for electricity is lower and discharging during more expensive rate periods when electricity demand is higher
• “Increasing self-consumption of solar power generation – The battery can store surplus solar energy not used at the time it is generated and use that energy later when the sun is not shining
• “Back-up power – Assures power in the event of an outage.”

As they do this technology adopters will slash the money they spend buying grid electricity. And if enough people do it (as they surely will as prices continue to fall) the entire business model of centralized power generators is doomed as sales falls, fixed costs have to be shared among a dwindling pool of customers, and the incentive to ‘go renewable’ increases.

But the revolution doesn’t stop there!

It’s not just domestic-scale generators that can benefit from the technology – large utility-scale renewable power generators can also get in on the act by installing banks of batteries at solar and wind farm sites – holding back electricity when the price is low, and selling it when the price is high.

And yes, Tesla has a product for them too: “For utility scale systems, 100kWh battery blocks are grouped to scale from 500kWh to 10MWh+. These systems are capable of 2hr or 4hr continuous net discharge power.”

Result: returns to wind and solar investors go up, making wind and solar power even more competitive against fossil-generated electricity than they already are. In the process renewable generators will also stabilise the grid, playing a big part in ensuring that, second to second, power supply matches demand.

And as they do this it will cut away life support from coal and gas fired plants that are currently paid to step in and make good any fall-off in power from renewable generators, or meet demand surges from power users.

Good news for everyone … almost everyone

And that’s good news for everyone. Except the owners of the fossil fuel plants, that is, and the extractive industries that supply their fuel.

Oh yes, and nuclear power operators. The nuclear industry argues that of all the ‘low carbon‘ power sources only nuclear can supply ‘base load’ demand, day in, day out. In fact the claim is highly dubious – not least because all nuclear plants are prone to sudden emergency cut-outs that require a huge ‘spinning reserve’ as backup.

But that, they argue, justified the very high prices consumers are forced to pay for their electricity. The UK’s planned Hinkley C nuclear power plant is set to receive about double the current wholesale price for power, index linked, for 35 years after it goes into production, at least a decade in the future (if indeed it ever does).

But with cheap battery power now, why bother? As wind and solar power get cheaper all the time, and now battery costs are collapsing into the bargain, nuclear power represents a very slow, expensive and completely inflexible solution to a ‘problem’ that no longer exists.

The end of the big centralized power generators and their nuclear and fossil fuelled plants is no longer in doubt: it’s not ‘if’, but ‘when?’ Will they last out another decade? As revenues, investor confidence and future prospects ebb away, it’s hard to see how.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

Manipulation of the petroleum market is not new. John D. Rockefeller with his Standard Oil Trust mastered it between the end of the 19th and start of the 20th Century.

Rockefeller and his trust succeeded in controlling virtually all the oil industry in the United States and also dominating the international market. The Standard Oil Trust fixed prices, set production quotas and ruthlessly forced out competitors.

The US Supreme Court in 1911, in the wake of muckraker Ida Tarbell’s investigative articles and book on the Standard Oil Trust, utilized the Sherman Antitrust Act to break the trust up into 34 pieces.

“For the safety of the Republic”, the court declared, “we now decree that this dangerous conspiracy must be ended.”

The most prominent corporate offshoots of Standard Oil today are ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips. The 34 were supposed to operate independently but, critics have long held, there’s been continued collusion: that the US-dominated oil industry went from being a monopoly to a cartel.

‘Oil shocks’ are not facts of nature – they are created

With discoveries of oil in the Middle East in the 1930s and with Standard Oil offshoots deeply involved, the Arabian American Oil Company – Aramco – was created in Saudi Arabia in 1944. In the 1970s, the Saudi government began acquiring more and more of a stake in Aramco, taking over full control in 1980 of what is now called Saudi Aramco.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries – OPEC – was formed in 1960 to “coordinate and unify the petroleum policies of its Member Countries and ensure the stabilization of oil markets in order to secure an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consumers, a steady income to producers and a fair return on capital for those investing in the petroleum industry.”

The senior partner in OPEC, now a 12-nation organization, is Saudi Arabia. This figures considering it has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves at more than 260 billion barrels.

OPEC sets production targets for its member countries. An early and major flexing of OPEC petroleum power, its system of control, came in 1973 with the ‘oil embargo’ or ‘oil shock’ of that year. It was an OPEC effort to punish the US for its support of Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Other OPEC-induced ‘oil shocks’ have followed.

The same goes for oil gluts – but the reasons are different

This historical background brings us to why the price of a barrel of oil has plummeted in half, from a high of $115 a barrel last June-and why you, as a result, are paying less for a gallon of gasoline at the pump.

The key reason is hydraulic fracturing – or fracking – and OPEC’s move to discourage competition to it from fracking. In recent years there’s been a revolution in petroleum extraction made possible by a new technique of splitting underground shale formations through hydraulic fracking. This has vastly expanded the gas and oil output of the fracking process.

Fracking is a messy and polluting process. Massive amounts of water and 600 chemicals are shot into the ground under high pressure to release the gas and oil.

Especially problematic is the leakage of gas from fracking wells into underground water causing not only serious contamination but the phenomenon of what comes out of a water faucet bursting into flames when touched with a match.

The 2010 film Gasland, nominated for an Academy Award, and the subsequent Gasland Part II, both written and directed by Josh Fox, documented this fiery aspect of fracking along with the many instances of water pollution and impact on people’s health caused by the contamination of water. There is also a major problem of fracking causing earthquakes.

Horizontal fracking in shale formations was first developed with federal government support in the United States starting in the 1980s It has enabled the US to again become a global giant in petroleum production.

The International Energy Agency last year projected that in 2015, because of fracking, the US would displace Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer. Fracking, however, is a relatively expensive process – about ten times more costly than the $5 to $6 per barrel cost of drilling oil from conventional wells in Saudi Arabia.

By letting the price of oil drop the Saudi-led move has applied substantial financial pressure – so far – on the fracking industry. With the current price per barrel cost at less than $60 a barrel, fracking has become a problematic undertaking economically. And consequently there have been reductions in and cancellations of numerous fracking operations.

Attacking US shale oil

As Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve between 1987 and 2006, put it recently: “At the root of the price collapse was the development in the US of technologies for extracting tight oil, mostly from shale deposits, by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. This reversed the decline in US oil production.”

“After the oil embargo of the 1970s”, he said, “OPEC wrested oil pricing power from the US.” But now, there’s been a “shale technology breakthrough. As a result, the gap between global production and consumption has widened, precipitating a rise in US and world inventories, and a fall in prices.

“Saudi Arabia, confronted with an oil supply glut but not wishing to lose market share, abandoned its leadership role as global swing producer and refused to cut production to support prices.”

Explains Jamie Webster, an oil market analyst at HIS Energy in Washington, DC: “The faster you bring the price down, the quicker you will have a response from US [fracking] production – that is the expectation and the hope. I cannot recall a time when several [OPEC] members were actively pushing the price down in both word and deed.”

How much longer can the fracking industry survive?

This gives rise to the question: how low can the price of a barrel of oil get, and frackers still make it economically with the price a barrel below what’s been their ‘break-even’ price of $70?

Dan K. Eberhart, CEO of Canary, a Colorado-based drilling services company, says “US producers are getting better and more economical” and the price to frack is falling, and this is “going to help US producers stay competitive in the worldwide oil market.”

According to Katusa of Casey Research, “the versatility and survivability of a lot of these shale producers will surprise people. I don’t see that the shale sector is going to collapse overnight.”

The fracking industry nevertheless is being hurt badly. “The shale oil revolution is in danger”, was the headline in Fortune. “The recent drop in oil prices poses a major challenge to the frackers.

“But oil producers, Wall Street analysts, and most industry experts claim the setback will be brief and minor. Don’t believe them“, the article continued. “The basic economies of fracking-what it costs to drill versus what oil now sells for-spells big trouble for the shale boom.”

As the Daily Kos headlined its piece on the matter: “97% of fracking now operating at loss at current oil prices.”

Then there’s the issue of how long the US shale boom can last. Fracked wells don’t last long. The International Energy Agency in its 2014 World Energy Outlook projects that as a result, fracking-dominated petroleum production in the US “levels off in the early 2020s and its total production eventually starts to fall back.”

Further, ‘proved reserves’ for petroleum from shale are about 10 billion barrels, according to the US Department of Energy, a small fraction of the reserves in the Middle East.

Keeping up the gasoline addiction

There are other factors, too. The plunging price of oil has impacted severely on Russia causing some analysts to see collusion between the US and Saudi Arabia to hurt the Putin regime in Russia – and some have extended this to seeing such a conspiracy as also being aimed at major oil producers Iran and Venezuela, too.

Russian President Vladimir Putin himself has raised this prospect declaring in December: “We all see the lowering of the oil price. There’s lots of talk about what’s causing it. Could it be the agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia to punish Iran and affect the economies of Russia and Venezuela? It could.”

A few days later, Venezuela’s President Nicholas Maduro charged: “Did you know there’s an oil war. And the war has an objective: to destroy Russia. It’s a strategically planned war…also aimed at Venezuela, to try and destroy our revolution and cause an economic collapse.”

In the US, Martin Katusa, believes chief energy investment strategist at Casey Research in Vermont, “It’s a three-way oil war between OPEC, Russia and North American shale.”

But another purpose is surely to re-entrench the world’s gas-guzzling habits, as Joby Warrick, environmental reporter for The Washington Post recently wrote: “Now energy experts are seeing evidence that the oil bust is helping Saudi Arabia achieve another long-term goal: undermining global efforts to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.”

Among those seeing this is Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD) in Washington. “If a period of low prices gets consumers hooked on cheap gas and inefficient cars, that sustains their market”, he said.

In fact, with the sharp decrease in the price of gasoline, sales of SUVs and other low-efficiency vehicles has been rising. This past November was the best month for SUV sales since 2001, according to Autodata.

And at some point, with fuel consumption rising and production from fracking wells down, that’s the time to manipulate the market up – as the secretary-general of OPEC, Abdulla al-Badri recently hinted:

“Now that prices are around $45-$55 [a barrel], I think maybe they [have] reached the bottom and we [will] see some rebound very soon.” Badri went on that oil prices might get to “more than $200” a barrel, although he wouldn’t give a time frame.

Is renewable energy another target?

Is a Saudi Arabian assault on the clean energy movement a factor, too? If so, says Ken Johnson, vice president of communications for the Solar Energy Industries Association in Washington, it’s failing:

“We have not seen any direct link between the price of oil and the development of solar projects nationwide, which remains quite strong.”

So can oil – from fracking or conventional drilling in the Middle East – compete with the windfall in renewable energy technologies? A report recently done for the National Bank of Abu Dhabi by the University of Cambridge and Price WaterhouseCoopers, titled ‘Financing the Future of Energy‘, declares:

“The energy system of the past will not be the same as the energy system of the future. It is clear that renewables will be an established and significant part of the future energy mix, in the region and globally.”

“The sharp fall in the oil price in 2014 has raised the question of whether the trend towards a more integrated energy mix and the growth of renewables will continue, or be stalled by more affordable oil and gas”, says the report. “There are strong reasons to believe it will continue.”

Solar photovoltaic power and wind energy have “already a track record of successful deployment. Prices have fallen dramatically in the past few years: solar PV falling by 80% in six years, and on-shore wind by 40%. The speed of this shift towards grid parity with fossil fuels means that, in many instances, perceptions of the role of renewables in the energy mix have not caught up with reality.”

The report notes the bid of the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority in December 2014 to build a 200 megawatt solar photovoltaic facility in Dubai “set a new world benchmark for utility scale solar PV costs, showing that photovoltaic technologies are competitive today with oil at US$10/barrel.”

The report goes on that “solar is on track to achieve grid parity in 80 percent of countries within the next two years, so cost is no longer a reason not to proceed with renewables.” There have been numerous reports in recent years mirroring this analysis.

So what really is Saudi Arabia’s game? The country’s recent postponement by eight years of its target to complete a $109 billion investment program in solar and other clean power sources, from 2032 to 2040, may provide a clue.

One interpretation: Saudi Arabia knows that the future is solar, and that its oil will ultimately end up worthless. But it’s going to wait until solar power goes through a few more rounds of price falls before it invests big in the sector.

And until then, it wants to get as rich as it can from its oil – manipulating the market to its advantage for as long as possible.

The plan is sound, except for one detail. If Saudi Arabia’s rulers think the ‘good times’ for oil are going to roll on until 2040, they could just find they made a serious miscalculation.

Karl Grossman is professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, and the author of ‘Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power’ and host of the nationally-aired TV program ‘EnviroCloseup‘.

Additional reporting by The Ecologist.

Tesla Energy’s new mains power battery has just transformed the energy market – giving a huge boost to small scale renewable energy and killing off both fossil fuelled and nuclear power in the process.

The announcement of its two domestic-scale lithium batteries, rated at 7kWh and 10kWh of energy storage was widely trailed.

But what no one expected was the price – which came in at a half to a quarter of market expectations: “Tesla’s selling price to installers is $3,500 for 10kWh and $3,000 for 7kWh. (Price excludes inverter and installation.) Deliveries begin in late Summer.”

And according to energy analyst Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education, that equates to a life-cycle cost of about $0,02 per kWh stored and released, or a little over 1p in UK money.

And that is transformational. With grid power prices typically 14p / kWh in the UK, or $0.12 in the US, it’s just a fraction of the cost of buying power in – for the first making it economic for small scale generators to ‘save and re-use’ their power surpluses.

Selling cheap, buying dear – no longer!

Currently power users with solar panels or wind turbines get paid just a few pence for every kWh (that’s one kilowatt of electrical power for one hour) they dump into the grid. So the main value they get (in addition to any feed-in tariff) is that while the sun is shining or the wind blowing, they get ‘free’ electricity.

The problem comes when there’s no sunshine or wind – and then they have to buy high-priced power in off the grid. But now with the Tesla battery system they will be able to store any power surplus to their needs – dumping less power onto the grid, and buying less in.

And that’s just what Tesla’s battery is designed to do. It can “provide a number of different benefits to the customer”, writes Tesla, including:

• “Load shifting – The battery can provide financial savings to its owner by charging during low rate periods when demand for electricity is lower and discharging during more expensive rate periods when electricity demand is higher
• “Increasing self-consumption of solar power generation – The battery can store surplus solar energy not used at the time it is generated and use that energy later when the sun is not shining
• “Back-up power – Assures power in the event of an outage.”

As they do this technology adopters will slash the money they spend buying grid electricity. And if enough people do it (as they surely will as prices continue to fall) the entire business model of centralized power generators is doomed as sales falls, fixed costs have to be shared among a dwindling pool of customers, and the incentive to ‘go renewable’ increases.

But the revolution doesn’t stop there!

It’s not just domestic-scale generators that can benefit from the technology – large utility-scale renewable power generators can also get in on the act by installing banks of batteries at solar and wind farm sites – holding back electricity when the price is low, and selling it when the price is high.

And yes, Tesla has a product for them too: “For utility scale systems, 100kWh battery blocks are grouped to scale from 500kWh to 10MWh+. These systems are capable of 2hr or 4hr continuous net discharge power.”

Result: returns to wind and solar investors go up, making wind and solar power even more competitive against fossil-generated electricity than they already are. In the process renewable generators will also stabilise the grid, playing a big part in ensuring that, second to second, power supply matches demand.

And as they do this it will cut away life support from coal and gas fired plants that are currently paid to step in and make good any fall-off in power from renewable generators, or meet demand surges from power users.

Good news for everyone … almost everyone

And that’s good news for everyone. Except the owners of the fossil fuel plants, that is, and the extractive industries that supply their fuel.

Oh yes, and nuclear power operators. The nuclear industry argues that of all the ‘low carbon‘ power sources only nuclear can supply ‘base load’ demand, day in, day out. In fact the claim is highly dubious – not least because all nuclear plants are prone to sudden emergency cut-outs that require a huge ‘spinning reserve’ as backup.

But that, they argue, justified the very high prices consumers are forced to pay for their electricity. The UK’s planned Hinkley C nuclear power plant is set to receive about double the current wholesale price for power, index linked, for 35 years after it goes into production, at least a decade in the future (if indeed it ever does).

But with cheap battery power now, why bother? As wind and solar power get cheaper all the time, and now battery costs are collapsing into the bargain, nuclear power represents a very slow, expensive and completely inflexible solution to a ‘problem’ that no longer exists.

The end of the big centralized power generators and their nuclear and fossil fuelled plants is no longer in doubt: it’s not ‘if’, but ‘when?’ Will they last out another decade? As revenues, investor confidence and future prospects ebb away, it’s hard to see how.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

Manipulation of the petroleum market is not new. John D. Rockefeller with his Standard Oil Trust mastered it between the end of the 19th and start of the 20th Century.

Rockefeller and his trust succeeded in controlling virtually all the oil industry in the United States and also dominating the international market. The Standard Oil Trust fixed prices, set production quotas and ruthlessly forced out competitors.

The US Supreme Court in 1911, in the wake of muckraker Ida Tarbell’s investigative articles and book on the Standard Oil Trust, utilized the Sherman Antitrust Act to break the trust up into 34 pieces.

“For the safety of the Republic”, the court declared, “we now decree that this dangerous conspiracy must be ended.”

The most prominent corporate offshoots of Standard Oil today are ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips. The 34 were supposed to operate independently but, critics have long held, there’s been continued collusion: that the US-dominated oil industry went from being a monopoly to a cartel.

‘Oil shocks’ are not facts of nature – they are created

With discoveries of oil in the Middle East in the 1930s and with Standard Oil offshoots deeply involved, the Arabian American Oil Company – Aramco – was created in Saudi Arabia in 1944. In the 1970s, the Saudi government began acquiring more and more of a stake in Aramco, taking over full control in 1980 of what is now called Saudi Aramco.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries – OPEC – was formed in 1960 to “coordinate and unify the petroleum policies of its Member Countries and ensure the stabilization of oil markets in order to secure an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consumers, a steady income to producers and a fair return on capital for those investing in the petroleum industry.”

The senior partner in OPEC, now a 12-nation organization, is Saudi Arabia. This figures considering it has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves at more than 260 billion barrels.

OPEC sets production targets for its member countries. An early and major flexing of OPEC petroleum power, its system of control, came in 1973 with the ‘oil embargo’ or ‘oil shock’ of that year. It was an OPEC effort to punish the US for its support of Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Other OPEC-induced ‘oil shocks’ have followed.

The same goes for oil gluts – but the reasons are different

This historical background brings us to why the price of a barrel of oil has plummeted in half, from a high of $115 a barrel last June-and why you, as a result, are paying less for a gallon of gasoline at the pump.

The key reason is hydraulic fracturing – or fracking – and OPEC’s move to discourage competition to it from fracking. In recent years there’s been a revolution in petroleum extraction made possible by a new technique of splitting underground shale formations through hydraulic fracking. This has vastly expanded the gas and oil output of the fracking process.

Fracking is a messy and polluting process. Massive amounts of water and 600 chemicals are shot into the ground under high pressure to release the gas and oil.

Especially problematic is the leakage of gas from fracking wells into underground water causing not only serious contamination but the phenomenon of what comes out of a water faucet bursting into flames when touched with a match.

The 2010 film Gasland, nominated for an Academy Award, and the subsequent Gasland Part II, both written and directed by Josh Fox, documented this fiery aspect of fracking along with the many instances of water pollution and impact on people’s health caused by the contamination of water. There is also a major problem of fracking causing earthquakes.

Horizontal fracking in shale formations was first developed with federal government support in the United States starting in the 1980s It has enabled the US to again become a global giant in petroleum production.

The International Energy Agency last year projected that in 2015, because of fracking, the US would displace Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer. Fracking, however, is a relatively expensive process – about ten times more costly than the $5 to $6 per barrel cost of drilling oil from conventional wells in Saudi Arabia.

By letting the price of oil drop the Saudi-led move has applied substantial financial pressure – so far – on the fracking industry. With the current price per barrel cost at less than $60 a barrel, fracking has become a problematic undertaking economically. And consequently there have been reductions in and cancellations of numerous fracking operations.

Attacking US shale oil

As Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve between 1987 and 2006, put it recently: “At the root of the price collapse was the development in the US of technologies for extracting tight oil, mostly from shale deposits, by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. This reversed the decline in US oil production.”

“After the oil embargo of the 1970s”, he said, “OPEC wrested oil pricing power from the US.” But now, there’s been a “shale technology breakthrough. As a result, the gap between global production and consumption has widened, precipitating a rise in US and world inventories, and a fall in prices.

“Saudi Arabia, confronted with an oil supply glut but not wishing to lose market share, abandoned its leadership role as global swing producer and refused to cut production to support prices.”

Explains Jamie Webster, an oil market analyst at HIS Energy in Washington, DC: “The faster you bring the price down, the quicker you will have a response from US [fracking] production – that is the expectation and the hope. I cannot recall a time when several [OPEC] members were actively pushing the price down in both word and deed.”

How much longer can the fracking industry survive?

This gives rise to the question: how low can the price of a barrel of oil get, and frackers still make it economically with the price a barrel below what’s been their ‘break-even’ price of $70?

Dan K. Eberhart, CEO of Canary, a Colorado-based drilling services company, says “US producers are getting better and more economical” and the price to frack is falling, and this is “going to help US producers stay competitive in the worldwide oil market.”

According to Katusa of Casey Research, “the versatility and survivability of a lot of these shale producers will surprise people. I don’t see that the shale sector is going to collapse overnight.”

The fracking industry nevertheless is being hurt badly. “The shale oil revolution is in danger”, was the headline in Fortune. “The recent drop in oil prices poses a major challenge to the frackers.

“But oil producers, Wall Street analysts, and most industry experts claim the setback will be brief and minor. Don’t believe them“, the article continued. “The basic economies of fracking-what it costs to drill versus what oil now sells for-spells big trouble for the shale boom.”

As the Daily Kos headlined its piece on the matter: “97% of fracking now operating at loss at current oil prices.”

Then there’s the issue of how long the US shale boom can last. Fracked wells don’t last long. The International Energy Agency in its 2014 World Energy Outlook projects that as a result, fracking-dominated petroleum production in the US “levels off in the early 2020s and its total production eventually starts to fall back.”

Further, ‘proved reserves’ for petroleum from shale are about 10 billion barrels, according to the US Department of Energy, a small fraction of the reserves in the Middle East.

Keeping up the gasoline addiction

There are other factors, too. The plunging price of oil has impacted severely on Russia causing some analysts to see collusion between the US and Saudi Arabia to hurt the Putin regime in Russia – and some have extended this to seeing such a conspiracy as also being aimed at major oil producers Iran and Venezuela, too.

Russian President Vladimir Putin himself has raised this prospect declaring in December: “We all see the lowering of the oil price. There’s lots of talk about what’s causing it. Could it be the agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia to punish Iran and affect the economies of Russia and Venezuela? It could.”

A few days later, Venezuela’s President Nicholas Maduro charged: “Did you know there’s an oil war. And the war has an objective: to destroy Russia. It’s a strategically planned war…also aimed at Venezuela, to try and destroy our revolution and cause an economic collapse.”

In the US, Martin Katusa, believes chief energy investment strategist at Casey Research in Vermont, “It’s a three-way oil war between OPEC, Russia and North American shale.”

But another purpose is surely to re-entrench the world’s gas-guzzling habits, as Joby Warrick, environmental reporter for The Washington Post recently wrote: “Now energy experts are seeing evidence that the oil bust is helping Saudi Arabia achieve another long-term goal: undermining global efforts to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.”

Among those seeing this is Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD) in Washington. “If a period of low prices gets consumers hooked on cheap gas and inefficient cars, that sustains their market”, he said.

In fact, with the sharp decrease in the price of gasoline, sales of SUVs and other low-efficiency vehicles has been rising. This past November was the best month for SUV sales since 2001, according to Autodata.

And at some point, with fuel consumption rising and production from fracking wells down, that’s the time to manipulate the market up – as the secretary-general of OPEC, Abdulla al-Badri recently hinted:

“Now that prices are around $45-$55 [a barrel], I think maybe they [have] reached the bottom and we [will] see some rebound very soon.” Badri went on that oil prices might get to “more than $200” a barrel, although he wouldn’t give a time frame.

Is renewable energy another target?

Is a Saudi Arabian assault on the clean energy movement a factor, too? If so, says Ken Johnson, vice president of communications for the Solar Energy Industries Association in Washington, it’s failing:

“We have not seen any direct link between the price of oil and the development of solar projects nationwide, which remains quite strong.”

So can oil – from fracking or conventional drilling in the Middle East – compete with the windfall in renewable energy technologies? A report recently done for the National Bank of Abu Dhabi by the University of Cambridge and Price WaterhouseCoopers, titled ‘Financing the Future of Energy‘, declares:

“The energy system of the past will not be the same as the energy system of the future. It is clear that renewables will be an established and significant part of the future energy mix, in the region and globally.”

“The sharp fall in the oil price in 2014 has raised the question of whether the trend towards a more integrated energy mix and the growth of renewables will continue, or be stalled by more affordable oil and gas”, says the report. “There are strong reasons to believe it will continue.”

Solar photovoltaic power and wind energy have “already a track record of successful deployment. Prices have fallen dramatically in the past few years: solar PV falling by 80% in six years, and on-shore wind by 40%. The speed of this shift towards grid parity with fossil fuels means that, in many instances, perceptions of the role of renewables in the energy mix have not caught up with reality.”

The report notes the bid of the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority in December 2014 to build a 200 megawatt solar photovoltaic facility in Dubai “set a new world benchmark for utility scale solar PV costs, showing that photovoltaic technologies are competitive today with oil at US$10/barrel.”

The report goes on that “solar is on track to achieve grid parity in 80 percent of countries within the next two years, so cost is no longer a reason not to proceed with renewables.” There have been numerous reports in recent years mirroring this analysis.

So what really is Saudi Arabia’s game? The country’s recent postponement by eight years of its target to complete a $109 billion investment program in solar and other clean power sources, from 2032 to 2040, may provide a clue.

One interpretation: Saudi Arabia knows that the future is solar, and that its oil will ultimately end up worthless. But it’s going to wait until solar power goes through a few more rounds of price falls before it invests big in the sector.

And until then, it wants to get as rich as it can from its oil – manipulating the market to its advantage for as long as possible.

The plan is sound, except for one detail. If Saudi Arabia’s rulers think the ‘good times’ for oil are going to roll on until 2040, they could just find they made a serious miscalculation.

Karl Grossman is professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, and the author of ‘Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power’ and host of the nationally-aired TV program ‘EnviroCloseup‘.

Additional reporting by The Ecologist.

Tesla Energy’s new mains power battery has just transformed the energy market – giving a huge boost to small scale renewable energy and killing off both fossil fuelled and nuclear power in the process.

The announcement of its two domestic-scale lithium batteries, rated at 7kWh and 10kWh of energy storage was widely trailed.

But what no one expected was the price – which came in at a half to a quarter of market expectations: “Tesla’s selling price to installers is $3,500 for 10kWh and $3,000 for 7kWh. (Price excludes inverter and installation.) Deliveries begin in late Summer.”

And according to energy analyst Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education, that equates to a life-cycle cost of about $0,02 per kWh stored and released, or a little over 1p in UK money.

And that is transformational. With grid power prices typically 14p / kWh in the UK, or $0.12 in the US, it’s just a fraction of the cost of buying power in – for the first making it economic for small scale generators to ‘save and re-use’ their power surpluses.

Selling cheap, buying dear – no longer!

Currently power users with solar panels or wind turbines get paid just a few pence for every kWh (that’s one kilowatt of electrical power for one hour) they dump into the grid. So the main value they get (in addition to any feed-in tariff) is that while the sun is shining or the wind blowing, they get ‘free’ electricity.

The problem comes when there’s no sunshine or wind – and then they have to buy high-priced power in off the grid. But now with the Tesla battery system they will be able to store any power surplus to their needs – dumping less power onto the grid, and buying less in.

And that’s just what Tesla’s battery is designed to do. It can “provide a number of different benefits to the customer”, writes Tesla, including:

• “Load shifting – The battery can provide financial savings to its owner by charging during low rate periods when demand for electricity is lower and discharging during more expensive rate periods when electricity demand is higher
• “Increasing self-consumption of solar power generation – The battery can store surplus solar energy not used at the time it is generated and use that energy later when the sun is not shining
• “Back-up power – Assures power in the event of an outage.”

As they do this technology adopters will slash the money they spend buying grid electricity. And if enough people do it (as they surely will as prices continue to fall) the entire business model of centralized power generators is doomed as sales falls, fixed costs have to be shared among a dwindling pool of customers, and the incentive to ‘go renewable’ increases.

But the revolution doesn’t stop there!

It’s not just domestic-scale generators that can benefit from the technology – large utility-scale renewable power generators can also get in on the act by installing banks of batteries at solar and wind farm sites – holding back electricity when the price is low, and selling it when the price is high.

And yes, Tesla has a product for them too: “For utility scale systems, 100kWh battery blocks are grouped to scale from 500kWh to 10MWh+. These systems are capable of 2hr or 4hr continuous net discharge power.”

Result: returns to wind and solar investors go up, making wind and solar power even more competitive against fossil-generated electricity than they already are. In the process renewable generators will also stabilise the grid, playing a big part in ensuring that, second to second, power supply matches demand.

And as they do this it will cut away life support from coal and gas fired plants that are currently paid to step in and make good any fall-off in power from renewable generators, or meet demand surges from power users.

Good news for everyone … almost everyone

And that’s good news for everyone. Except the owners of the fossil fuel plants, that is, and the extractive industries that supply their fuel.

Oh yes, and nuclear power operators. The nuclear industry argues that of all the ‘low carbon‘ power sources only nuclear can supply ‘base load’ demand, day in, day out. In fact the claim is highly dubious – not least because all nuclear plants are prone to sudden emergency cut-outs that require a huge ‘spinning reserve’ as backup.

But that, they argue, justified the very high prices consumers are forced to pay for their electricity. The UK’s planned Hinkley C nuclear power plant is set to receive about double the current wholesale price for power, index linked, for 35 years after it goes into production, at least a decade in the future (if indeed it ever does).

But with cheap battery power now, why bother? As wind and solar power get cheaper all the time, and now battery costs are collapsing into the bargain, nuclear power represents a very slow, expensive and completely inflexible solution to a ‘problem’ that no longer exists.

The end of the big centralized power generators and their nuclear and fossil fuelled plants is no longer in doubt: it’s not ‘if’, but ‘when?’ Will they last out another decade? As revenues, investor confidence and future prospects ebb away, it’s hard to see how.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

Manipulation of the petroleum market is not new. John D. Rockefeller with his Standard Oil Trust mastered it between the end of the 19th and start of the 20th Century.

Rockefeller and his trust succeeded in controlling virtually all the oil industry in the United States and also dominating the international market. The Standard Oil Trust fixed prices, set production quotas and ruthlessly forced out competitors.

The US Supreme Court in 1911, in the wake of muckraker Ida Tarbell’s investigative articles and book on the Standard Oil Trust, utilized the Sherman Antitrust Act to break the trust up into 34 pieces.

“For the safety of the Republic”, the court declared, “we now decree that this dangerous conspiracy must be ended.”

The most prominent corporate offshoots of Standard Oil today are ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips. The 34 were supposed to operate independently but, critics have long held, there’s been continued collusion: that the US-dominated oil industry went from being a monopoly to a cartel.

‘Oil shocks’ are not facts of nature – they are created

With discoveries of oil in the Middle East in the 1930s and with Standard Oil offshoots deeply involved, the Arabian American Oil Company – Aramco – was created in Saudi Arabia in 1944. In the 1970s, the Saudi government began acquiring more and more of a stake in Aramco, taking over full control in 1980 of what is now called Saudi Aramco.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries – OPEC – was formed in 1960 to “coordinate and unify the petroleum policies of its Member Countries and ensure the stabilization of oil markets in order to secure an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consumers, a steady income to producers and a fair return on capital for those investing in the petroleum industry.”

The senior partner in OPEC, now a 12-nation organization, is Saudi Arabia. This figures considering it has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves at more than 260 billion barrels.

OPEC sets production targets for its member countries. An early and major flexing of OPEC petroleum power, its system of control, came in 1973 with the ‘oil embargo’ or ‘oil shock’ of that year. It was an OPEC effort to punish the US for its support of Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Other OPEC-induced ‘oil shocks’ have followed.

The same goes for oil gluts – but the reasons are different

This historical background brings us to why the price of a barrel of oil has plummeted in half, from a high of $115 a barrel last June-and why you, as a result, are paying less for a gallon of gasoline at the pump.

The key reason is hydraulic fracturing – or fracking – and OPEC’s move to discourage competition to it from fracking. In recent years there’s been a revolution in petroleum extraction made possible by a new technique of splitting underground shale formations through hydraulic fracking. This has vastly expanded the gas and oil output of the fracking process.

Fracking is a messy and polluting process. Massive amounts of water and 600 chemicals are shot into the ground under high pressure to release the gas and oil.

Especially problematic is the leakage of gas from fracking wells into underground water causing not only serious contamination but the phenomenon of what comes out of a water faucet bursting into flames when touched with a match.

The 2010 film Gasland, nominated for an Academy Award, and the subsequent Gasland Part II, both written and directed by Josh Fox, documented this fiery aspect of fracking along with the many instances of water pollution and impact on people’s health caused by the contamination of water. There is also a major problem of fracking causing earthquakes.

Horizontal fracking in shale formations was first developed with federal government support in the United States starting in the 1980s It has enabled the US to again become a global giant in petroleum production.

The International Energy Agency last year projected that in 2015, because of fracking, the US would displace Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer. Fracking, however, is a relatively expensive process – about ten times more costly than the $5 to $6 per barrel cost of drilling oil from conventional wells in Saudi Arabia.

By letting the price of oil drop the Saudi-led move has applied substantial financial pressure – so far – on the fracking industry. With the current price per barrel cost at less than $60 a barrel, fracking has become a problematic undertaking economically. And consequently there have been reductions in and cancellations of numerous fracking operations.

Attacking US shale oil

As Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve between 1987 and 2006, put it recently: “At the root of the price collapse was the development in the US of technologies for extracting tight oil, mostly from shale deposits, by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. This reversed the decline in US oil production.”

“After the oil embargo of the 1970s”, he said, “OPEC wrested oil pricing power from the US.” But now, there’s been a “shale technology breakthrough. As a result, the gap between global production and consumption has widened, precipitating a rise in US and world inventories, and a fall in prices.

“Saudi Arabia, confronted with an oil supply glut but not wishing to lose market share, abandoned its leadership role as global swing producer and refused to cut production to support prices.”

Explains Jamie Webster, an oil market analyst at HIS Energy in Washington, DC: “The faster you bring the price down, the quicker you will have a response from US [fracking] production – that is the expectation and the hope. I cannot recall a time when several [OPEC] members were actively pushing the price down in both word and deed.”

How much longer can the fracking industry survive?

This gives rise to the question: how low can the price of a barrel of oil get, and frackers still make it economically with the price a barrel below what’s been their ‘break-even’ price of $70?

Dan K. Eberhart, CEO of Canary, a Colorado-based drilling services company, says “US producers are getting better and more economical” and the price to frack is falling, and this is “going to help US producers stay competitive in the worldwide oil market.”

According to Katusa of Casey Research, “the versatility and survivability of a lot of these shale producers will surprise people. I don’t see that the shale sector is going to collapse overnight.”

The fracking industry nevertheless is being hurt badly. “The shale oil revolution is in danger”, was the headline in Fortune. “The recent drop in oil prices poses a major challenge to the frackers.

“But oil producers, Wall Street analysts, and most industry experts claim the setback will be brief and minor. Don’t believe them“, the article continued. “The basic economies of fracking-what it costs to drill versus what oil now sells for-spells big trouble for the shale boom.”

As the Daily Kos headlined its piece on the matter: “97% of fracking now operating at loss at current oil prices.”

Then there’s the issue of how long the US shale boom can last. Fracked wells don’t last long. The International Energy Agency in its 2014 World Energy Outlook projects that as a result, fracking-dominated petroleum production in the US “levels off in the early 2020s and its total production eventually starts to fall back.”

Further, ‘proved reserves’ for petroleum from shale are about 10 billion barrels, according to the US Department of Energy, a small fraction of the reserves in the Middle East.

Keeping up the gasoline addiction

There are other factors, too. The plunging price of oil has impacted severely on Russia causing some analysts to see collusion between the US and Saudi Arabia to hurt the Putin regime in Russia – and some have extended this to seeing such a conspiracy as also being aimed at major oil producers Iran and Venezuela, too.

Russian President Vladimir Putin himself has raised this prospect declaring in December: “We all see the lowering of the oil price. There’s lots of talk about what’s causing it. Could it be the agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia to punish Iran and affect the economies of Russia and Venezuela? It could.”

A few days later, Venezuela’s President Nicholas Maduro charged: “Did you know there’s an oil war. And the war has an objective: to destroy Russia. It’s a strategically planned war…also aimed at Venezuela, to try and destroy our revolution and cause an economic collapse.”

In the US, Martin Katusa, believes chief energy investment strategist at Casey Research in Vermont, “It’s a three-way oil war between OPEC, Russia and North American shale.”

But another purpose is surely to re-entrench the world’s gas-guzzling habits, as Joby Warrick, environmental reporter for The Washington Post recently wrote: “Now energy experts are seeing evidence that the oil bust is helping Saudi Arabia achieve another long-term goal: undermining global efforts to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.”

Among those seeing this is Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD) in Washington. “If a period of low prices gets consumers hooked on cheap gas and inefficient cars, that sustains their market”, he said.

In fact, with the sharp decrease in the price of gasoline, sales of SUVs and other low-efficiency vehicles has been rising. This past November was the best month for SUV sales since 2001, according to Autodata.

And at some point, with fuel consumption rising and production from fracking wells down, that’s the time to manipulate the market up – as the secretary-general of OPEC, Abdulla al-Badri recently hinted:

“Now that prices are around $45-$55 [a barrel], I think maybe they [have] reached the bottom and we [will] see some rebound very soon.” Badri went on that oil prices might get to “more than $200” a barrel, although he wouldn’t give a time frame.

Is renewable energy another target?

Is a Saudi Arabian assault on the clean energy movement a factor, too? If so, says Ken Johnson, vice president of communications for the Solar Energy Industries Association in Washington, it’s failing:

“We have not seen any direct link between the price of oil and the development of solar projects nationwide, which remains quite strong.”

So can oil – from fracking or conventional drilling in the Middle East – compete with the windfall in renewable energy technologies? A report recently done for the National Bank of Abu Dhabi by the University of Cambridge and Price WaterhouseCoopers, titled ‘Financing the Future of Energy‘, declares:

“The energy system of the past will not be the same as the energy system of the future. It is clear that renewables will be an established and significant part of the future energy mix, in the region and globally.”

“The sharp fall in the oil price in 2014 has raised the question of whether the trend towards a more integrated energy mix and the growth of renewables will continue, or be stalled by more affordable oil and gas”, says the report. “There are strong reasons to believe it will continue.”

Solar photovoltaic power and wind energy have “already a track record of successful deployment. Prices have fallen dramatically in the past few years: solar PV falling by 80% in six years, and on-shore wind by 40%. The speed of this shift towards grid parity with fossil fuels means that, in many instances, perceptions of the role of renewables in the energy mix have not caught up with reality.”

The report notes the bid of the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority in December 2014 to build a 200 megawatt solar photovoltaic facility in Dubai “set a new world benchmark for utility scale solar PV costs, showing that photovoltaic technologies are competitive today with oil at US$10/barrel.”

The report goes on that “solar is on track to achieve grid parity in 80 percent of countries within the next two years, so cost is no longer a reason not to proceed with renewables.” There have been numerous reports in recent years mirroring this analysis.

So what really is Saudi Arabia’s game? The country’s recent postponement by eight years of its target to complete a $109 billion investment program in solar and other clean power sources, from 2032 to 2040, may provide a clue.

One interpretation: Saudi Arabia knows that the future is solar, and that its oil will ultimately end up worthless. But it’s going to wait until solar power goes through a few more rounds of price falls before it invests big in the sector.

And until then, it wants to get as rich as it can from its oil – manipulating the market to its advantage for as long as possible.

The plan is sound, except for one detail. If Saudi Arabia’s rulers think the ‘good times’ for oil are going to roll on until 2040, they could just find they made a serious miscalculation.

Karl Grossman is professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, and the author of ‘Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power’ and host of the nationally-aired TV program ‘EnviroCloseup‘.

Additional reporting by The Ecologist.