Serious Implications

If you can carve out an hour, this presentation by Mark Jacobson, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford, is well worth it. Renewables can supply the world’s energy demand many times over. Jacobson lays out the data and compares the major energy systems. Wind comes out on top.

Daniel Nocera of MIT has found a process to efficiently split water into its constituent elements, hydrogen and oxygen.

School kids usually see a demonstration of electrolysis when a teacher hooks a battery to two wires that are submersed in water beneath two inverted test tubes. A slow stream of little bubbles rise from each wire. One tube collects oxygen, the other collects hydrogen. It takes a lot of electricity to do a little bit of electrolysis. Nocera’s breakthrough involves use of a catalyst to enhance and accelerate the electrolysis reaction, using less energy.

Read a little more and watch a video here.

Over the past week or so, we’ve seen some developments suggesting wind power and solar photovoltaics (PV) are catching on with some big companies.

Computer builder Dell and California utility Pacific Gas & Electric (PG & E) announced plans to get serious about renewables. Dell is partnering with the local utility in Oklahoma City to supply 100 percent of its campus there with electricity generated from wind.

Utility PG & E has committed to 500 MW of PV electricity with half of it coming from small-producer contracts and the other half coming from utility-scale projects. Other utilities recently announcing new PV capacity are Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric, Duke Energy, and PSE&G in New Jersey. California and “sunny” New Jersey are number one and two, respectively, in PV power generation.

Manufacturer Johnson Controls has just finished a 1,500 panel solar array at its headquarters in Wisconsin. That company looks like it’s positioning itself for production of renewable energy and battery technologies. Triple Pundit has more here

Associated Press reports here the German chemical manufacturer Wacker Chemie AG announced their intention of building a $1 Billion facility in Tennessee to make polycrystalline silicone for photovoltaic panels and semiconductors.

Paul Gipe reports here that the City of Gainesville, Florida quickly reserved its target of 4 MW of solar PV contracts after passing a renewable energy payment plan that will pay PV power producers $0.32 per kWh.

Today after church, we drove the kids down to Bowling Green to see four Vestas wind turbines running near the city landfill off of Route 6. Parked about 100 yards from the nearest tower my wife was especially impressed with the size and power of the blades sweeping the sky.

She asked, “Why has it taken so long to do this?”

During the news summary on Thursday July 17, 2008, Jim Lehrer misrepresented Al Gore’s recommendations for developing cleaner energy sources. Lehrer said this:

“Former Vice President Al Gore challenged the nation today to turn to clean sources of power within ten years. He said the U.S. should switch from oil and gas to generate electricity and to wind, sun, nuclear, and other forms.”

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Gore never mentioned nuclear. Here’s a portion of Gore’s speech where he recommends clean sources:

“What if we could use fuels that are not expensive, don’t cause pollution and are abundantly available right here at home?

We have such fuels. Scientists have confirmed that enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world’s energy needs for a full year. Tapping just a small portion of this solar energy could provide all of the electricity America uses.

And enough wind power blows through the Midwest corridor every day to also meet 100 percent of US electricity demand. Geothermal energy, similarly, is capable of providing enormous supplies of electricity for America.

The quickest, cheapest and best way to start using all this renewable energy is in the production of electricity. In fact, we can start right now using solar power, wind power and geothermal power to make electricity for our homes and businesses.”

Gore’s complete speech is available here.

Jim Lehrer grouped wind, solar and nuclear together as “clean sources of power,” Al Gore did not. Gore recommended wind, solar and geothermal. Was it an innocent mistake on Lehrer’s part? I don’t know, but for him to attribute nuclear advocacy to the Nobel Prize winner Al Gore is a nice little piece of salesmanship on behalf of the nuclear industry.

But it’s false advertising.

Texas Panhandle Country, 2006

According to PR Newswire, T. Boone Pickens, the oil geologist and wildly successful business man, is going big into the wind power business with Mesa Power LLP.

“You find an oilfield, it peaks and starts declining, and you’ve got to find another one to replace it…It can drive you crazy. With wind, there’s no decline curve.”

Not only is there no decline curve, but unlike coal or waste-to-energy, or nuclear projects, there’s no foul odors, no massive water needs, no nuclear waste, and the land can continue to be farmed or grazed at the same time it’s generating power and profits.

When finished, Mesa’s Pampa Wind Project will be the largest in the United States and generate more than 4,000 megawatts of electricity, enough for 1.3 million homes.

Profits from Harvesting Wind
The wind farms are bringing serious money into the region and will continue to benefit maintenance companies, lease holders, and tax rolls.

The…project would generate an estimated 1,500 jobs during the construction phase, and 720 during a typical year of the operation phase; personal income in the project investment zone will rise by $68.7 million per year during the construction phase, and $120 million during the operation phase. The more significant impact during the operation phase is largely due to lease payments to be made to landowners in the project area amounting to $65.3 million per year.

Wind power has passed the test of hard-boiled business scrutiny by capitalists like Pickens. There is land all over the North American Plains with reliable winds that could produce low-carbon, clean, safe, renewable electricity.

During World War II, the Willow Run B-24 Bomber factory turned out almost 9,000 bombers in a few years. The electrical and mechanical technology are here, the industrial facilities could whirl once again – this time to build wind turbines.

In his Chicago Sun-Times editorial Steve Huntley makes a weak case for solving our energy problems by going nuclear. Steve supports this claim largely by citing a former Greenpeace leader who’s had a pro-nuclear epiphany.

Huntley does not mention any of the inconvenient truths associated with the nuclear fuel cycle, which is not a true cycle, like the water cycle, as it does not end with the same stuff it started with. It ends with highly radioactive nuclear waste for which the government and nuclear industry are yet to find a final means of disposal.

A summary of the nuclear “cycle” is available here. Basically, the nuclear process begins with mining and proceeds through milling, enrichment, fuel fabrication, fuel rod assembly, plant operation and maintenance, temporary storage, transportation, vitrification and final disposal or reprocessing. A biproduct of the fuel “cycle” is plutonium, which can be made into nuclear bombs. These processes do not all happen at the same place, so that nuclear material has to travel from one facility to another for various stages of the process. There are hazards associated with each step, and each transition.

In 2003, President Bush launched an invasion of Iraq. The justification had something to do with “a smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Anyone worried about nuclear proliferation should beware of an expanded nuclear power industry.

The Carbon Cost of Nuclear Power
One of the most misleading claims made by the pro-nuclear lobby is its “zero emitting” attribute. This is false. Each step of the nuclear fuel “cycle” consumes fossil fuel. There is an excellent analysis of the carbon cost of nuclear power available in this powerpoint presentation produced by PeakOil. According to two IPCC physicists cited by PeakOil, depending on the grade of uranium ore, nuclear power has just as high of carbon cost as conventional coal power plants!

Solutions?
The cleanest, cheapest and most immediate solutions to our energy problems are fuel conservation, electricity conservation, solar and wind power. There’s no good reason why Americans can’t drive cars that get 45-miles per gallon, better than twice the current rate. We waste about half the electricity produced in the United States. Wind power can provide reliable base load.

Related articles are available here and here.

Wind turbines near Bowling Green, Ohio

Critics of wind power have claimed that it is unreliable. “What do you do when the wind stops blowing?” Now, scientists Cristina Archer and Mark Jacobson at Stanford have demonstrated that wind farm networks can generate a consistent, steady supply of electricity. Studying wind data from 19 different locations in the midwestern United States, they found that, on average, 33% of the total potential wind power generation capacity for the 19-site network would be baseload.
The Stanford News Service cleverly describes the concept:

It’s a bit like having a bunch of hamsters generating your power, each in a separate cage with a treadmill. At any given time, some hamsters will be sleeping or eating and some will be running on their treadmill. If you have only one hamster, the treadmill is either turning or it isn’t, so the power’s either on or off. With two hamsters, the odds are better that one will be on a treadmill at any given point in time, and your chances of running, say, your blender, go up. Get enough hamsters together, and the odds are pretty good that at least a few will always be on the treadmill, cranking out the kilowatts.

The combined output of all the hamsters will vary, depending on how many are on treadmills at any one time, but there will be a certain level of power that is always being generated, even as different hamsters hop on or off their individual treadmills. That’s the reliable baseload power.

The connected wind farms would operate the same way.

During peak wind power production, the electricity could be stored in new battery systems, compressed air, hydrogen (through hydrolysis of water), and other options. The paradigm of power generation and transmission is changing in a hurry and the Europeans appear to be out in front. Last week, President Bush called for more nuclear power plants. As described in this post at the Energy Blog, solar, wind, tidal, biomass, and geothermal interconnected with internet-based “smart grid” technology could minimize the use of coal and nuclear power.

According to Who rocker Roger Daltrey, “the last thing the planet needs is a rock concert.”

He’s right isn’t he?

The Live Earth Concert seemed a bit hackneyed and overdone. It just doesn’t seem necessary given twenty years of debate about global warming.

Scribbles gets it right:

Global warming is not just a buzz word anymore, it is a gravy train. Everyone from scientists, to politicians, to rock stars, are jumping on the train and earning themselves loads of money…

Personally, I will continue to turn lights off when not needed, not leave my appliances on standby, recycle as much as I can, use supermarket bags for life rather than disposable plastic bags, and turn the tap off whilst I clean my teeth, but this morning it all feels a bit futile. Just how much difference can one person make when even the global warming brigade don’t see anything wrong with mass orgies of energy consumption?

We’re all aware of global warming, the question is what to do about it given our own tendencies to waste and corporations with vested interests in our continuing to waste.

Sheila at One Shade Greener has a good article about the “100 calorie” packaging scheme designed for folks who think one serving comes in one bag. For folks too busy and too focused on the increasingly competitive global economy to use a measuring cup and do simple arithmetic, the new micropackaging puts lots of little bags in a big bag and takes all the guess work out of counting calories. It also creates a shit load of waste.

But, hey, one less thing to think about. Soon we won’t need to think at all. Just work and consume.

We’ve listened to the wise. We’ve heard the songs of the stars. Perhaps now, they can show us how to live. It would be nice if they would stand up to the crassist kinds of capitalism, as well.

One of my old departed relatives used to say “charity covers a mutitude of sins.” Maybe, maybe not. Rich people like Al Gore and John Edwards can afford carbon offsets (of quesionable effecacy) to compensate for their heavy carbon footprints, but most people can’t. Most of us are going to have to live differently. We’ll have to break old habits because it will be too expensive not to.

We need public transportation, updated infrastructure, far more wind and solar installations. We need to design places for people to live and work without commuting so far. We need employers to allow more people to work more at home. We need to grow some of our own food.

We need to keep the best of what globalization has to offer but realise the value of diversified local economies, an aspect of Biorgionalism

Sheila Samuelson has a good article “a Mighty Wind” at One Shade Greener about the Skystream 3.7, a small-scale wind power generator designed for the residential and small-business market. If massed-produced like Ford’s Model T, this kind of energy production could radically change the way electricity is produced and sold in this country, and around the world, moving from highly capitalized and centralized large-scale power plants to something as common as a backyard bird feeder.

To get enough wind to power the turbine, it is recommended for lot sizes of 1/2 acre or more and the manufacturers claim to be able to supply between 40 and 100 percent of home electricity needs. The units could integrate with the regional power grid.

At $5,400, the unit is a bit pricey for some of us but if folks will spend $500 on an iPhone, there should be plenty of customers.

The Skystream 3.7 may or may not live up to its advertising, but its concept of the individual citizen power generator is a big shift away from the “bigger is better” mentality that supports global corporate conglomerates and mega-utilities.