Renewable Energy – CleanSpeak

Stunning interactive wind map

Click on this screenshot and savor the beauty that is simply wind blowing around the United States.

Now can there be any doubt we have enough wind to make a serious contribution to our voracious energy demand?

The interactive map doesn’t tell us a thing we didn’t already know – the data that drives it comes from the National Weather Service – it just tells us in a sublime way. “These are near-term forecasts, revised once per hour,” say the creators. “So what you’re seeing is a living portrait.”

The U.S. government envisions generating 20 percent of our electricity through wind by 2030.

The Wind Map is a product of two people who lead Google’s “Big Picture” visualization group in Cambridge, Mass., Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, The gallery section of their site showcases some particularly striking animations, including this one from March 14:

(Click on the image above to see the animation.)

Wonder if it was a starry night.

When the sun don’t shine and the wind don’t blow, tides go with the flow

When the sun doesn’t shine on the beach it wrecks your tanning index. When the sun doesn’t shine on your solar panels you’re taking cold showers and eating soup out of the can – assuming you have a manual can opener.

The same goes for wind power. A wind turbine is a fine thing when the wind is blowing, but when the wind isn’t blowing the turbine is an overgrown, albino lawn flamingo.

Tidal power is not as flashy as solar and wind, but it’s insanely reliable. Tides come in and go back out without fail, no matter whether it’s cloudy or sunny, windy or calm. As they flow in and out, tides generate huge amounts of energy that can be converted into a predictable renewable energy stream.

By mid-March, up on the northeastern tip of the U.S., in Lubec, Maine, a company called Ocean Renewable Power Co. will begin operating the first grid-connected tidal power plant in the U.S. The 300-kilowatt (kW) tidal energy project consists of turbine generator units (TGUs) mounted on the sea floor. The 20-foot tide drives the turbines as it ebbs and flows. Check out what the Portland Press Herald wrote about the project. The coverage has a lot of good details.

Ocean Renewable’s Cobscook Bay Tidal Energy Project or is a fairly small pilot program that will produce enough electricity to supply 100-125 homes. The project’s larger purpose is to help determine the feasibility of larger-scale tidal power. The outlook is good, but what jumps out at students of renewable energy is what Ocean Renewable CEO Chris Sauer said about tidal power’s likely future.

“It’s never going to be the dominant power-generating resource in the state of Maine, but it’s going to be a significant contributor,” Sauer said.

That’s the kind of no-b.s. candor that the renewable energy industry is often missing. Too many rosy predictions about renewable energy’s prospects set unrealistic expectations. (Remember when “clean, safe” nuclear power was going to make electricity “too cheap to meter”? I do.)

Dissect Sauer’s observation and you find the likely shape of our energy future. Most of our energy won’t come from massive, centralized power plants like we have today because none of todays’ renewables have the energy density of fossil fuels. Instead, we’ll get electricity from a larger number of smaller renewable sources, each doing what they do best. Solar and wind will produce when the conditions are right. Tidal, biomass and players-to-be-named will fill in the gaps. And we’ll be consuming less because our homes, appliances and vehicles will be more efficient.

Offshore wind foe windfall

Watching the decade-long fight to approve the Cape Wind farm, my support for off-shore wind was always tempered by local resistance to the project. I didn’t buy into their NIMBY arguments, but having grown up near the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant, I was at least sensitive to their plight. It’s tough to battle against sincere civic opposition.

The good news is that the opposition to off-shore wind has shifted from civic to the tyrannical. As Grist magazine reported a couple of weeks ago, Big-Oil billionaire Koch Brothers have declared war on off-shore wind, starting with a grossly distorted cost-analysis report on a New Jersey off-shore wind project from Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity front group.

It’s good news because off-shore wind can use this new foe to its advantage. Shining a light on dirty money and astro-turfing efforts can sway public opinion and rally support from otherwise ambivalent citizens. Heroes need a villain.

Global investors pour money into green energy

Nothing like cool, refreshing facts to support the desperate hope for a renewable energy revolution.

New investment in green energy was up nearly one-third globally in 2010 to a record US$211 billion. That’s 32 percent above the 2009 level and more than five times that of 2004, says the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Other facts from UNEP’s new report:

Wind farms in China and rooftop solar panels in Europe were key drivers in the investment increase.
China was the world leader in “financial new investment” – i.e., investment in utility-scale renewable projects and equity capital for renewable energy companies. The nation’s tally was US$48.9 billion, up 28 percent this year.
Developing economies (which invested US$72 billion this year) overtook developed ones (US$70 billion) in financial new investment.
Investments in small distributed capacity, e.g., rooftop solar, rose 132 percent in Germany to US$34 billion.
Costs for renewable technologies are falling.
Wind dominated financial new investment in large-scale renewable energy.
Biggest percentage jumps in overall investment were in small-scale projects, up 91 percent to US$60 billion, and in government funded R&D, up 121 percent to US$5.3 billion.

“The finance industry is still recovering from the recent financial crisis,” Udo Steffens, president of the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, said in a UNEP news release. “The fact that the industry remains heavily committed to renewables demonstrates its strong belief in the prospects of sustainable energy investments.”

So there’s hope. And now facts.

More here.

The Oil Curse (domestic version)

The Oil Curse is a subset of the Resource Curse, describing an apparent paradox in developing countries “blessed with” large reserves of petroleum. The term refers to the political repression, corruption and violence that seem to accompany the development of oil resources in places like Nigeria.

But that definition might need to stretch because we in the United States – still a top three global oil producer – are living our own Oil Curse. It’s the curse of addiction.

Our transportation system and its supporting infrastructure are the lifeblood of the American lifestyle (which I’m told is not negotiable) and they’re built from the ground up around oil: the roadside stations that keep cars and light trucks fueled, the tanker trucks that keep the stations supplied, the roads the tanker trucks travel on to and from the tank farms, the refineries that keep those tank farms filled, the pipelines snaking cross-country and tanker ships docking at specialized ports. Deeply woven over the past 100-plus years, it’s a blessing that’s evolving into a curse.

As we bump along the plateau of Peak Oil, supply becomes more difficult to maintain at a flow rate demanded by a constant-growth economic model. There is a clear need to move beyond petroleum. However, the influence of stakeholders heavily invested in, and greatly benefitting from, the current energy model creates a drag on innovation and transition. And to be clear, the stakeholders aren’t simply the major oil companies and the firms focused on exploration, extraction, refinement and delivery. They’re also us. And that’s our version of the Oil Curse.

Addiction creates dependence. From strip mall to skyscraper, cul-de-sac to office park, we all have an enormous personal stake in a business-as-usual energy model. There’s a reason that “drill, baby drill” made it onto bumper stickers nationwide. Adopting a new energy infrastructure is not as simple, or easy, as ditching a laptop for a tablet. It’s a big part of the reason that the current administration has placed its weight not only behind innovation in alternative and renewable energy sources, but also in a lot more drilling.

History shows that transitions from one type of energy infrastructure – say wood to coal or coal to oil – takes decades. With the peak of conventional crude oil apparently already in our rearview mirror, the challenge in front of us is to reverse the curse. Hey, the Red Sox managed it. But we don’t have 86 years to figure it out.

Nuclear will kill you! Nuclear will save you! A German-Japanese debate

Germany, which has never had a nuclear accident on the magnitude of a Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, plans to phase out nuclear power by 2022. At the same time in Japan, which is still trying to control one of history’s worst nuclear accidents, there is no serious opposition to nuclear power. The New York Times reports that a plan for expanding Japan’s nuclear industry, shelved as the crisis with the Fukushima reactors continues, will very likely be revived in the future because of the local economic benefits a nuclear plant offers.

The contrast between Germany and Japan’s nuclear attitudes invokes two recurring story lines in the larger environmental debate. The first is the inherent contradiction of nuclear power, and the second is growing faith in renewables.

Nuclear energy has always been a problem for us non-doctrinaire environmental types – environmental practicality and environmental disaster rolled into one. Go looking for opinions on what’s more environmentally sound, nuclear or fossil fuels, and you’re going to strike an emotionally charged mother lode. Some point to the respective death rates attributed to fossil versus nuclear. Some highlight the pollutants and greenhouse gasses fossil fuel plants emit. Others say it’s a false choice between two unacceptable solutions that draws attention from renewable energy development.

If you look at it from a day-in, day-out perspective, it’s hard to argue against nuclear. A nuclear plant does not emit pollutants during normal operation the way fossil-fuel-powered facilities do. Uranium enrichment is less environmentally damaging than coal mining, and much safer. Nuke plants operate for years on a complement of fuel rods. Fossil fuel plants need coal and oil shipped in constantly by rail or ship, which expends fuel and emits pollutants.

As Fukushima has demonstrated, though, when you go nuclear you’re entering a high-stakes game. Nuclear waste is arguably the most toxic material that humans produce, and it stays toxic for thousands of years. Nuclear accidents like Chernobyl and Kashima have huge social and economic costs. Five million people live in regions still contaminated with radionuclides from Chernobyl. The then-Soviet government of Russia had to move 350,000 people a safe distance from the ruined reactor. The town is deserted. The surrounding exclusion zone, where no residences or businesses are allowed, covers almost 300 square miles once occupied by 120,000 people. The reactor itself is still a danger. Nuclear experts are concerned that its concrete enclosure is decaying enough to raise the risk of radioactive dust.

Even when a nuclear accident occurs, it doesn’t take the familiar refrain of “if not nuclear, what?” to appear. I didn’t have an answer myself until this week. Germany provided it: renewables. Germany’s plan to get out of the nuke business does not include falling back on fossil-fuel-generated power. It’s based on the country’s long-term plan to go heavily into renewables.

This is Germany we’re talking about. Eighy-five million people. Europe’s largest economy. Source of some of the world’s finest science and engineering. Not a country or a people prone to irrational decisions made in the heat of passion. About 70 percent of Germans expect electrical rates to rise as nuclear is phased out, and they’re willing to pay the price. If they believe renewables can support a heavily industrialized economy, I’m sold. Germany is setting a goal that the rest of the world should aim for as well. Every major technological development in history looked crazy at one time. (A week’s worth of music on a credit card, anyone? How about guiding a rover around Mars from Earth like it was a radio-controlled car?) With the pace of renewable energy technology development, Germany’s goal looks less crazy than it does savvy.

Corner-store energy, or ‘yes please, in my backyard!’

Pro- and anti-nuclear activists hit each other with everything short of chains and broken bottles during construction of the Seabrook Station nuclear power plant back in the mid-’70s. The Clamshell Alliance opposition group occupied the construction site and waged a nonstop PR campaign against Seabrook right up to 1986, when the beleaguered plant finally went online. The consortium that built the plant countered with its own multimedia PR campaign, including one television spot featuring a woman who owned a backyard hydroelectric plant. The ad sticks in my mind because almost 30 years later, it raises a relevant issue in renewable energy and how to make it work best.

The ad depicted the hydro plant owner, an elderly woman wearing a trench coat with a scarf around her neck, standing in front of her hydro plant, which looked like a tool shed perched over a brook near her home. She was one of those redoubtable New England doyennes you see making long, detailed comments at town meetings and staffing the coffee pots at church suppers. Her message, delivered in clipped, no-nonsense Yankee diction, was that New England needed every energy source it could get, and not just “my little hydro plant” but Seabrook Station too.

I doubt I would have contradicted this formidable grande dame in person, but I wasn’t completely buying what she said. Why does electricity have to be created in huge, centralized power plants? The idea of getting my electricity from a network of neighborhood and backyard power sources tickled my imagination. Given a choice of buying my wattage from a nuclear plant perched upwind from the most heavily populated region in the U.S., or buying the same wattage from the nice old lady down the street, I’ll take “B” any day. Or maybe I could plug into the dairy farm two towns over that uses cow manure to power a small-scale methane plant, or the school bus company that put two wind turbines in their parking lot.

It seems odd to think of energy as a mom-and-pop industry like your local corner store, but with the way renewable technologies are developing, it’s not that far fetched. Think of it for a minute. How often can you read the news and NOT happen upon another idea for generating electricity, ranging from the familiar to the exotic? Energy from the sun, energy from the wind, energy from waves, energy from tides. Energy from garbage, energy from cow poop, energy from holes in the ground. Energy from waste water broken down into hydrogen atoms. Energy from fusing atoms together. Energy from weeds and algae. They all have the potential to make generating power as much a local business as the post office and the hardware store.

Consider concentrated solar photovoltaic (CPV) technology as an example. CPV modules pack more generating capacity into a smaller footprint than conventional solar photovoltaic (PV) modules. That means property that might not have produced economically practical amounts of electricity with PV modules now can. Picture your local storage space company, with all those acres of flat roofs. The owner makes most of his/her money on fees, but what if putting CPV modules on the roof turned into a profitable side business?

There’s an electrical production and distribution model called wholesale distributed generation (WDC) that’s gaining favor among renewable power advocates. WDC replaces large, remote power plants attached to the grid through long-distance transmission lines with smaller facilities hooked directly into local grids. It saves the land and cost of building new transmission lines to connect large facilities to local grids. The smaller facilities that thrive in WDC infrastructures will also require less permitting and face fewer regulatory obstacles. It’s a natural fit for local renewable energy sources, and a long-term sustainable power production model.

Allowing that renewable technologies were too immature 30 years ago to sustain the economy, I’ll concede the point made by the lady in the Seabrook commercial. Back then, facilities like her little hydro plant couldn’t carry the load, and realistically they still can’t today. In a few years though, don’t be surprised if you go to your local farmer’s market to shop for fresh local voltage along with fresh local produce. Technology writer Alex Steffen of Worldchanging.com predicted this movement four years ago, and his vision seems to be playing out.

“I think the things that would really blow us away if we could jump forward 20 years would not be the giant fields of windmills, but the 1,000 changes in daily life that have taken place in order to save energy,” he said in a Forbes interview. Power sources, he predicted, will move closer to home. “I think we’re going to see a lot more local energy, especially in places that are gifted with lots of sunshine, or wind, or strong rivers. As houses and small communities produce their own energy, it will flow back and forth on ‘smart infrastructure’ two-way power grids that deliver from as well as to the home.”

So, are we done with nuclear? Follow-up post

Last week, we looked at nuclear energy from the risk perspective, i.e., deaths per terawatt-hour compared to other energy generation technologies. Given the deadliness of coal (mining and air pollution), this perspective positions nuclear as a safe and rational choice for our energy mix. But what about nuclear’s financial cost?

That alone is enough to table nuclear power indefinitely, suggests energy researcher Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute in a new column. After nine harrowing paragraphs documenting nuclear’s physical risks comes the money passage, which begins:

Each dollar spent on a new reactor buys about 2-10 times less carbon savings, 20-40 times more slowly, than spending that dollar on the cheaper, faster, safer solutions that make nuclear power unnecessary and uneconomic: efficient use of electricity, making heat and power together in factories or buildings (“cogeneration”), and renewable energy.

He makes a strong case to back this up, contrasting the flows of private and public money. (Spoiler: of 66 nuclear plants listed as under construction, “zero were free market purchases.”) Read the column here.

Coal is cheap, except when it costs $500 billion

Coal is the cheapest fuel for electricity – if you spin it right and ignore the costs of coal-related waste, health problems and environmental damage.

That’s the gist of a new report saying coal really costs the U.S. public as much as half a trillion dollars annually. If true, that is equivalent to adding 27 cents per kWh to the market cost of coal-fired electricity (2008 dollars). This perspective strengthens the case for renewables.

“Accounting for the damages conservatively doubles to triples the price of electricity from coal per kWh generated, making wind, solar, and other forms of non-fossil fuel power generation, along with investments in efficiency and electricity conservation methods, economically competitive,” says the report in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences titled “Full cost accounting for the life cycle of coal.”

Hidden costs of coal-fired electricity include mining deaths, climate damage, cleanup, health-care, rail fatalities, acid rain, harmful algal blooms, retardation, subsidies, abandoned lands and the “energy penalty” of carbon capture and storage (CCS). Coal is the predominant fuel for electricity generation worldwide, generating 40 percent of electricity (2005) and responsible for 30 percent of worldwide CO₂ emissions.

Perhaps this information could somehow help the behavioral scientists, neuro-economists, environmental scientists and others at the Climate, Mind and Behavior Symposium. They are trying to figure out how to take our intellectual understanding of the climate threat and get people to actually change their behaviors.

Part of the challenge “has been the assumption that science and logic will suffice in making the case for changes in human behavior,” blogs the New York Times. In the real world, gut instincts, friends and personal passions also play a role. (Treehugger.com has a nice overview of day one here.)

Insulating against revolution?

insulated cooler In New England where I’m writing this, insulation is typically thought of as a way to keep the cold out and heating costs down. In hot climates, however, it’s a way to keep the air conditioned cold in and the hot out. Think of your beach cooler keeping the ice from melting and, in turn, your beer cold. Same concept.

A recent Reuters story notes that the Saudi government is undertaking an ambitious program to cut energy use by some 40 percent, “largely by enforcing investment in insulation”. So, why the Saudi push to insulate? They need the money – specifically, the money made selling oil. The Reuters story quotes a Saudi official noting that 70-80 percent of their energy use goes to air conditioning and they use oil to generate the majority of their electricity. With a growing population and an extreme dependence on fossil fuels to subsidize the amenities of a comfortable life (cheap electricity, plentiful food, cars, roads, etc), the Saudis are staring at a classic export land problem.

Almost half of Saudi Arabia’s GDP is directly related to oil exports. Some 75 percent of its government revenue comes from the oil industry. The more oil the Saudis use, the less is available for export, even as production from their aging oil fields slowly declines. The reduction in exports helps push up prices on the open market, increasing cash flow which encourages domestic economic growth and energy use. Eventually, this domestic demand increases enough to materially reduce revenue from oil exports, squeezing subsidies that support things like cheap and plentiful food and fuel. Exposing the national population to unsubsidized prices is politically perilous. Hello Cairo.

Saudi market Iran is caught in a similar rock-and-a-hard-place bind. Indonesia dropped out of OPEC in 2008 when declining production and increasing consumption pushed it from being a net exporter to net importer of petroleum.

So, what does the export land issue mean to us, the oil importers? We don’t generate much electricity in the United States with oil these days, but it certainly is vital to our transportation system. Whether by car, truck, train or plane, our consumer lifestyle is powered by petroleum. Gasoline, diesel and kerosene move everything from people, food and building materials to toys, toothpaste and auto parts. As oil prices rise, transportation costs increase, putting a drag on an already weak recovery. Hard to insulate our way out of that.