Why Renewable Energy?

Lower Cost, Lowered Volatility

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 ~ Furniture and home furnishings retailer Ikea plans to double spending on renewable energy to $4B by 2020. The PR value is probably great, but saving money is the driver:

The additional spending on projects such as wind farms and solar parks will be needed to keep expenses down as the company maintains its pace of expansion, Chief Executive Officer and President Mikael Ohlsson said in an interview in Malmo, Sweden.

“I foresee we’ll continue to increase our investments in renewable energy,” said Ohlsson.

Ikea plans to get 70% of its energy consumption from renewables by 2015, and 100% by 2020. Not only are wind and solar approaching or reaching grid parity in many places, they provide pricing stability and predictability for businesses, something not provided by volatile oil prices.

When Trees Grow to the Sky

Milan's Vertical Forest

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 ~ A novel take on a green-walled building is under construction in Milan.

The Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) places trees on custom-designed ledges all the way up the outside walls of the two apartment towers.

Each apartment balcony will have trees (900 plantings are planned for the two buildings) that will provide shade in the summer and drop their leaves in winter to allow in winter sunlight. Plant irrigation is provided via a grey-water filtration. Additionally, photovoltaic power generation will help provide sustainable power to the building.

12 Predictions for 2013

Clarity Moving Beyond the Past

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 ~ The best part of 2013 is that there won't be a federal election. Consequently, some useful things will get done. There will still be way too much partisan malarkey for my tastes, but the electorate expects action on a host of things and the political dynamic will allow more progress than last year's gridlocked, posturing debacle.

This year's predictions:

The Unlikely Opposition to Energy Independence

Tied to the Grid

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 ~ Ironically, aspirations of being (partly) off-grid are thwarted by the grid itself.

Even if the progress to national energy independence is halting, and frustrated by barely-concealed Big Oil interests at every turn, still we can each act locally, right? Each of us as individuals can buy plug-in electric vehicles, retrofit homes with energy efficiency measures, and install solar panels on roofs. Can't we?

Sure. But it turns out that these don't confer the independence one might imagine.

Take solar panels, for example. When Superstorm* Sandy savaged the US Northeast, there were doubtless many who thought their preparation installing rooftop solar panels would prove prudent, and reward them with continued electricity and the breadth of common Western comforts it affords.

They were wrong.

Our Abundant Energy

Abundant Language

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 ~ Energy is important.

So no surprise much is written about it. But what is surprising is how powerful and deliberate the messaging about it is. That messaging is, in a word, abundant.

It seems no one can talk about drilling without phrasing it as the development of "our abundant oil and gas" resources. You hear it in the Senate, in the House, from the API, from the US Chamber of Commerce, from industry periodicals, from the Obama Administration.

Other words in the English language for relative plenitude are, well, abundant, but when it comes to our oil and gas resources "abundant" is the overwhelming word choice by politicians, lobbyists and journalists.

It's almost as if someone circulated a memo with the talking points and key messaging language!

So why don't we hear so much about our "abundant wind resources" or our "abundant solar resources"?

Primitive Energy

Advancing Society?

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 ~ How would you explain our society to a visiting alien?

Neil deGrasse Tyson is not Bill Nye or Carl Sagan, but he is at least as effective in making science accessible and understandable to the general public.

He's embarrassed by our addiction to fossil fuels. We should all be so, because it is an indication that our society is primitive.

Why? Consider the anthropological arc of humanity.

A Renewable Future

Present-Day Germany

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 ~ Europe's largest national economy hit a milestone in the first half of this year—for the first time, 25% of German electricity generation came from renewable sources.

Wind energy was the largest contributor of green power, accounting for 9.2 percent of all energy output... Biomass, or material acquired from living organisms, accounted for 5.7 percent and solar technology for 5.3 percent.

Germany is the largest market for electricity in Europe, and has long been a leader in boldly reshaping its energy policy, including forswearing all nuclear after Japan's Fukushima disaster.

Interestingly, the policy has been driven the past many years by the country's conservative parties. Preserving resources and the environment for the future is a truly conservative notion, a truth lost on this country's radicals who inappropriately like to be called conservative.

Solar Facts

Myths and Misinformation Must Yield

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 ~ An excellent infographic that shines the positive light on solar it increasingly merits:

Solar:

• Is getting cheaper
• Reduces electricity costs long-term
• Generates a net surplus of energy
• Works on cloudy days
• Is becoming competitive with fossil fuels

As I posted earlier, solar has also been proven as an effective base-load energy source.

Baseload Solar

It Can Be Done

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 ~ Many have asserted that renewable energy generation is impractical because it is too variable and too intermittent. Not true, as installations in Spain demonstrate:

Gemasolar, which officially launched last month (May 2011), is a 19.9-MW plant with a 15-hour ‘battery’. Gemasolar’s expected production is 110,000 MWh per year—or about enough to fully power 25,000 households. Because it can store energy, this 19.9 MW generates the equivalent of a 50 MW solar power plant without storage, according to Mr. Arias.

Gemasolar’s battery consists of two tanks of molten salt thermal energy storage that allows the solar plant to generate on-demand electricity: during the evening, during cloud cover or rain, or even days or weeks later.

Gemasolar, and similar renewable energy generation installations is part of the solution that allows us to create a renewable energy future. It is possible with wind too.

A Renewable Energy Future

80% By 2050

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 ~ A new study by the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) shows that the future of electrical energy could be composed primarily from renewable technologies. Is it really possible?

It's not the first such study. Several others have come to similar conclusions. The NREL study adds further rigor and detail to the argument and makes a straightforward statement:

Renewable electricity generation from technologies that are commercially available today, in combination with a more flexible electric system, is more than adequate to supply 80% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while meeting electricity demand on an hourly basis in every region of the country.

Shining Examples of Solar Power

Renewable Aesthetic

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 ~ Beautiful and eye-catching for sure, but mostly appealing because they show that sustainability doesn't need to be spartan or severely functional:

The Job Creators—IV

By Industry

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 ~ Public transit just makes sense in so many ways.

Oh, and where is Big Oil which the API keeps telling us is such a wonderful job creator? The original study suggests combined oil and gas is 5.18 jobs per $1M investment, but that is, well, all gas. If oil were broken out in this chart, their number would be negative. The oil industry has been shedding jobs for years and pales as a job creator to the renewable energy industry.

Others of interest: roads and bridges repair (20), conservation (20), water infrastructure (20), school buildings (19), financial industry (7), nuclear industry (4). Study details here.

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Cross-posted to the Fare-Free Northwest blog.

Solar Around the World

Another Electric Vehicle

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 ~ If hybrid and all-electric cars and airplanes can be built, then why not a boat? Billed as the world's first solar circumnavigation by boat, the voyage of the MS Turanor PlanetSolar took almost 585 days:

The catamaran has a solar PV surface area that covers more than 530 square meters with a capacity of 93.5 kilowatts. That onboard power has been enough to lead the crew from Monaco through the Straight of Gibraltar, past Cuba, to Miami and Mexico, through the Panama Canal, across the span of the Pacific, to the eastern coast of Australia, up through Southeast Asia to Hong Kong, westward to the southern tip of India, into the Gulf of Iman, back down and into the Red Sea, where it crossed through the Suez Canal and back into the home waters of the Mediterranean.

It's a piece of nerdy coolness to power a boat from solar energy (and to give it a name from J.R.R. Tolkien) but rather impractical when another renewable energy source—wind—can be mechanically harnessed. Wind also can be converted to electricity with higher efficiency than solar. Still, it is another demonstration that our remaining enslaved to fossil fuels is no more than a choice, and a poor one at that. We could make other choices.

Boat details here.

(h/t Renewable Energy World)

Compare and Contrast

BP and Solyndra

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 ~ Rate the disaster:

Solyndra was developing a cylindrical solar module unlike anything else. It was a daringly different technological approach in an industry crowded with alternatives. When conventional solar modules became suddenly much cheaper, Solyndra's technology became uneconomical, and the company failed.

BP has substantial experience drilling in deep water for oil. It uses technologies that have been incrementally refined for decades and which are standard practice in its industry. When its Deepwater Horizon platform exploded, burned and sank, nearly 5,000,000 barrels of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico.

The Solyndra bankruptcy cost the government, and hence us taxpayers, more than $500M. Hundreds lost their jobs.

The BP debacle has cost the economy at least $40B in activity, and many billions in lost tax revenue. Thousands lost their jobs.

So which makes our economic problems (e.g. the deficit and national debt) worse?

My 2011 Predictions Revisited

About 2/3 Accurate

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 ~ A year ago I took a stab at predictions for 2011. Seems like I've run out of time waiting for most of them to come to pass, so it's time for a report card, using a scale of 1 (utterly wrong) to 10 (perfectly prescient):

Electricity in the Developing World

Small Scale, Local Generation

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 ~ The need for electricity throughout the developing world is immense and will continue to grow. Unlike in the industrialized countries, much of the developing world does not have large centralized power plants and transmission lines to carry that power to widely-spread users. Nor are they likely to ever have such a system:

Building out the power grid can be prohibitively expensive, which is why in many countries, like Haiti, less than three quarters of the population have grid access. Pike Research’s Clint Wheelock says just for the transmission portion alone it can cost at least $500,000 per mile. And that’s without the distribution portion and any kind of the grid intelligence (smart grid) that is getting all of the investment this year.

Energy Lies—VI

"Renewable Energy Standards Boost Electricity Rates"

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 ~ Do state mandates for renewable energy generation increase electricity rates?

Some of the usual suspects, like Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, labor to convince you they do. But the signature claim, that ratepayers fork over more in states with a RES, is a classic case of lying with statistics.

Let’s start with their first assertion:

Renewable energy standards, by design, are intended to drive up energy costs — requiring utilities to use more expensive and often less reliable sources of energy. Not surprisingly, such laws have hit ratepayers hard. States that have a binding RES now have electricity costs that are 39 percent higher than states that don’t have a binding RES.

That’s a scary number. But it’s also totally meaningless. The problem is that these states had higher rates before they ever put the RES in place.

States with high electricity rates before continue to have electricity rates. Also, rates are affected by many factors, not just the existence or details of a RES. In fact the 5 states with the most installed wind and solar power saw the least increase in electricity prices over the past 6 years.

Impacts are either overblown or outright false:

The Federal Venture Capitalist

Solyndra was the Exception

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 ~ No venture capital fund picks only winners, not even (especially) the federal government. There will always be losers. It's baked into that particular cake.

Now it turns out that the stimulus funds invested in various companies actually turned out pretty well. The government did a better job than most venture capital firms:

The stimulus has helped spark an 82% gain in the stocks of 11 health care technology companies since President Obama took office and a 263% gain in the three public companies that took $7.8 billion of federal financing to build next-generation vehicle factories. It contributed to a 79% jump in stocks of the four leading energy-efficiency companies identified by IDC, including diversified companies such as Johnson Controls and Honeywell. Companies involved in developing smart electric grids, nine big tech firms that are also in many other businesses, have risen 54%.

All these match or exceed the 51% gain in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, and beat the 4.9% average annual gain in venture funds raised in 2008, according to Cambridge Associates. The big exception is that the five solar-power companies and advanced-battery manufacturers on IDC's list have fallen 70%. Similarly, among the loan-guarantee recipients examined by USA TODAY, solar-power-related companies such as Solyndra and energy-storage companies such as Beacon Power, which filed for bankruptcy reorganization Oct. 31, have fared the worst.

Solyndra is not representative of overall returns, although such a washout is hardly atypical in a portfolio of new enterprise investments. Scott Sandell, a partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the nation's largest venture firm, commented on the federal government's stimulus funding mirroring the role of a VC:

"If it succeeds, it will succeed because a handful of companies produced extraordinary results," said Sandell. "The lemons always show up first. That's the story of the venture capital business."

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Away from the computer for a few days, so no posts. Back in the groove now.

Solar is a Commie Plot

The Dear Leader Praises Solar

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 ~ Hereditary leader of reclusive North Korea, Kim Jong Il, toured various facilities in his country recently, including the Solar Equipment Centre, which is building solar hot water heaters "on a trial basis."

According to the press release, he was pleased with the work of the Centre, and appreciated the building's various features, including rain water collecting, a wind turbine, and solar energy harvesting. He "stressed the importance of the use of renewable energy sources."

How long will it be before some wingnut uses the support of Kim to attack renewable energy?

The press release itself is laughable for the hagiography of Kim, the stilted language and the way it strives to make the ordinary remarkable:

An American Grandee

Short Term Self-Interest Prevails

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 ~ A key Congressman on energy policy figuratively threw up his arms this week, declaring that against China in the global market for solar panels and wind turbines, the US "can't compete." He's wrong, and he's a hypocrite. He also repeats the interesting history of long-term losers clinging to the short-term gains of a vanishing status quo.

Florida Republican Cliff Stearns, Chair of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, stated that federal efforts to support renewable energy were a waste of taxpayer dollars, too risky, and weren't creating jobs. He stated that further green energy loan guarantees be halted "so that they could be looked at more carefully," which is Washington-speak for killing the program.

The White House showed some spine for a change, as spokesman Dan Pfeiffer shot back:

Chairman Stearns and other members of his party in Congress believe that America cannot, or should not, try to compete for jobs in a cutting edge and rapidly growing industry. We simply disagree: the answer to this challenge is not to wave the white flag and give up on American workers. America has never declared defeat after a single setback – and we shouldn’t start now.