Friday Five: July 18, 2014

This week has seen a great number of stories about increased numbers of earthquakes, water shortages, and fracking chemical disclosure. With my birthday coming up, I am using my author's prerogative to focus on the positive and forward-thinking...it also helps that almost every one of these supports statements I have been making for several years now.

We start with the electric car revolution, and how it will not only change transportation, but also the ways we produce and use power at home. Combined with smart-grid communications technology, it will also change the way grid operators manage distributed resources. We have heard so much about the cost of battery storage for solar, and assumed it had to be a stand-alone battery system in the basement. What if the battery is sitting in your driveway surrounded by soft, bucket seats and an eight-CD sound system?
Electric cars will change the way you power your home
"The most striking data was from EV owners who also had solar panels. From 7 a.m. to midnight, they used about one-fourth as much power from the grid as the typical household, because they were getting power from their rooftops and often selling power back to the grid. In other words, they took very little from the grid when demand was high — at times even helping to increase supply — and took much more from the grid when demand was low. They helped smooth out demand."

Of course, in the future I see, there isn't a car in every driveway...but maybe we can adapt the plan a little bit to store cars around the city so they can balance out the grid and provide the same benefit as if they were parked right outside ones house.
Helsinki's ambitious plan to make car ownership pointless in 10 years
"Subscribers would specify an origin and a destination, and perhaps a few preferences. The app would then function as both journey planner and universal payment platform, knitting everything from driverless cars and nimble little buses to shared bikes and ferries into a single, supple mesh of mobility. Imagine the popular transit planner Citymapper fused to a cycle hire service and a taxi app such as Hailo or Uber, with only one payment required, and the whole thing run as a public utility, and you begin to understand the scale of ambition here."

Creating a space like this, powered by low-to-no cost renewable energy, with ubiquitous, low-cost public transportation, and full of the culture and activity that urban areas provide...it might just bring back a whole host of cities that we had left for dead.
What's the key to turning around Rust Belt cities?
"Some cities effectively prepared for this change, Piiparinen said. Pittsburgh’s educational institutions, for example, produced developers with strong tech skills who could create start-ups in Pittsburgh, especially in the areas of robotics. Buffalo just completed a clinical sciences building, part of $4.4 billion of medicine-related development announced in 2012. Cleveland’s new strengths are rooted in medical device companies, largely because of the Cleveland Clinic, which started doing heart research and married manufacturing and health sciences."

We can even look past carbon to other destructive forms of energy extraction, and if we trust our ingenuity, we can make sure that when we use energy to improve our quality of life, we do not threaten anyone's life or quality of life in the process.
As more nuclear plants shut down can distributed energy fill the gap?
"In the last couple of years, five nuclear power plants in the U.S. have been put on the list for closure. These plants are getting challenged from two sides: competitive natural gas and renewables are eroding the economics of merchant projects, while technical challenges associated with age are making the plants more expensive to operate. In this week's show, we'll look at whether renewables and efficiency are capable of filling the gap left by retired nuclear plants, including the SONGS plant in southern California."

As I predicted, utilities are at the crossroads: either get behind distributed renewables and energy efficiency, or go down fighting - but you will go down. We are already seeing that play out. We cannot life in a country based upon liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then tell someone they have to support a monopolistic business enterprise if it does not make sense to them. Those enterprises do not have to exist in that fashion...and the successful ones are already changing their business model willingly.
Green Mountain is a perfect example of how utilities can embrace distributed renewables
"Enter, Green Mountain Power, the leading electricity provider in the state of Vermont. Rather than simply working against the (likely inevitable) spread of distributed generation, the utility has been transforming itself a company with a business model that puts renewable energy and distributed generation at its core."
In Iowa, solar is fighting back against utilities, and winning
"IPL, the local utility, noticed the solar panels going up, and promptly complained to the Dubuque City Council. The local utility board agreed with IPL in March 2012, but Eagle Point appealed, and in April of last year, the Polk County District Court overturned the utility board’s decision, partly because, as the ruling put it, “The customer will still be connected to the grid, will still be an IPL customer, and must continue to purchase energy and capacity from IPL. Eagle Point is neither attempting to replace or sever the link between IPL and the city. it is simply allowing the city to decrease its demand for electricity from the grid.” In other words, the solar panels weren’t any more illegal than an energy-efficient appliance would be."

Happy Friday!

Going nuclear on nuclear

I have a bit of a secret for you. If you find a room full of your tree-hugger friends getting a little too chummy with indignation over the recent reports of fracking-related media, or reveling in the environmental benefits of their new electric cars, you can break up that harmony by walking over and uttering one simple sentence...

"So you all have to love nuclear energy because of the reduced climate impact, eh?"

No issue sends environmental advocates to their corners more than the nuclear issue. On one hand, you have those screaming for climate impact reductions who think we have to use and maybe even expand nuclear to produce nearly carbon-free electricity. On the other, you have those who fear the safety of increased reliance on nuclear energy, and the continued risk of mining a limited resource. Like most issues related to energy, both camps are right environmentally and technologically speaking. The interesting thing is, economically speaking, the pro-nuclear camp is the one that is wrong.

The current technology for generating electricity from nuclear energy operates between 25% and 33% efficiency, not including the energy to mine and transport the fissile material to the generating plant. At the same time, among all the conventional fuel options, nuclear requires the largest number of people per unit of output. Despite these high labor costs, nuclear remains a moderately competitive because of low fuel costs. With a limited number of countries that have nuclear technology operating only 500 plants worldwide, demand for fuel remains constant and prices do not fluctuate greatly.

The most significant cost elements in nuclear power plants come from the capital-related expenditures associated with building, renovating, and decommissioning plants. Power plants have a 40-year life cycle after which they must receive an extension on their license to operate (which they will again have to do every 20 years going forward). At this time, they must meet all regulatory requirements. This requires a significant investment. As plant operators approach this milestone, they have a decision to make: invest in the plant upgrade or shut down the plant. This decision is entirely an economic one, and several operators have made the decision not to invest.

Several factors contribute to the economic downfall of nuclear. First, as mentioned previously, it has a high capital investment requirement - the most of any electricity generating source except solar, and that has changed drastically over the past several years. Second, natural gas mining through fracking has altered the course of projected electricity costs. Utilities and generators made huge investments in natural gas plants starting at the end of the last century, and that market now drives the cost of electricity. (This has also caused the shuttering of coal plants as they cannot keep up with the investments at the current historic low prices for electricity.) Third, due to significant drops in the rate of increasing electrical demand, we have historically high capacity factors in our electricity generating fleet. Capacity factor measures how much peak delivery capacity we have relative to the peak demand from the grid. Operators of the grid like to maintain at least 15% capacity factor, and we sit now at 22%. We can lose generating capacity and still have a cushion for unforeseen conditions.

Many advocates for nuclear fear that dropping our nuclear capacity will threaten future stability in the electricity market and could cause us to move sharply back to coal in the future. This concern has merit if you consider coal and nuclear to be the only options. Recent developments in solar technology and increases in production capacity have dropped the price of solar PV to a point where it nears grid parity with all forms of generation. If this trend continues (and with room to grow and improve, there is no reason to think it will not), it is just as likely that solar replaces nuclear. Even more economically feasible, new wind development already beats all other forms of electricity generation for cost effectiveness. We have only begun to tap both of these sources.

Even more importantly, we are a nation of waste and excess. We currently use twice as much energy per person as the rest of the developed world to deliver at best the same quality of life. Opportunities abound to reduce the amount of energy we consume, and more importantly for this discussion, the peak demand for that energy. Investing in real, permanent demand reduction costs less than investing in refurbishing nuclear plants - and certainly far less than investing in a new one. The other benefit is that we can realize these demand reductions in one or two years as opposed to the ten years it would take to install a new nuclear plant, and at about the same time horizon it would take to repair one. We can easily replace nuclear (and coal for that matter) with demand and consumption reductions and not change our quality of life one bit.

The nuclear plants we currently operate need to live out their useful life, and then retire. We should prioritize the decommissioning of those that sit in fault areas so that we avoid the consequences that Japan felt after the Fukushima disaster, and plan regionally to adjust capacity. We also must develop technologies that render the waste products from these plants inert. The case against nuclear does not have to include the fear of the nuclear waste, but we must consider the mitigation of that waste a priority going forward. We cannot leave a 10,000 year legacy of potential life-threatening material, and must include the cost of that mitigation in the analysis. For the coming decades, even if we eliminated nuclear power today, our country would pay billions of dollars to protect us from the consequences.

The modern environmental movement is not a one-trick pony focused on carbon. We can reduce carbon and address a more sustainable, renewable energy future without nuclear. It not only makes ecological sense to do so, but also economic sense.

Friday Five: June 27, 2014

It's not that we do dumb things that screw things up...it's that we do smart, well-intentioned things...

That screw things up.
Everything we know about neonic pesticides is awful
"The pesticides don’t just affect pest species. Most prominently, they affect bees and butterflies, which are poisoned when they gather pollen and nectar. But neonics’ negative impacts go far beyond pollinators. They kill all manner of animals and affect all kinds of ecosystems. They’re giving rise to Silent Spring 2.0."

And then we push it to scale and screw it up even more.
The brutal cost of cheap chicken
"American meat eaters live, for the most part, in happy ignorance of the system that grows animals for slaughter. When that ignorance is interrupted with a bit of information about the meat industry, we typically respond with outrage."

And then we build culture around it so that we hold onto it far longer than is practical.
The death of the American mall
"Dying shopping malls are speckled across the United States, often in middle-class suburbs wrestling with socioeconomic shifts. Some, like Rolling Acres, have already succumbed. Estimates on the share that might close or be repurposed in coming decades range from 15 to 50%. Americans are returning downtown; online shopping is taking a 6% bite out of brick-and-mortar sales; and to many iPhone-clutching, city-dwelling and frequently jobless young people, the culture that spawned satire like Mallrats seems increasingly dated, even cartoonish."

Finally, we do everything we can to try to hold onto it, even when it has never made economic sense. (Although, I will say that two of the points of the article: that there might be a way to produce energy without the damaging waste component, and that nuclear energy has to handle almost all of its waste products...they both have merit.  **Most, because they do not have to restore mined areas to pre-mining condition, and they do not have to account for the impact of the waste heat.**)
Is nuclear power ever coming back?
"According to those in the business of generating nuclear energy, other power producers should have to pay full price for the risks associated with their waste products. The way they see it, they’ve made their plants safer by prohibiting the release of critical, planet-damaging byproducts, and others should too."

I find it heartening when simple, time-tested mechanisms provide a path to a healthier future.  We need more electricity cooperatives and clean energy "building and loan" models to expedite the move to clean, community-based energy systems.  We have the knowledge, the technology, and now the economic incentive.  The only obstacle now are well-funded, obsolete industries.
Buying into solar power, no roof required
"The shared approach has its roots in rural electric cooperatives, said Elaine Ulrich of the Department of Energy’s SunShot program, but has only begun to take off in recent years, and still accounts for a tiny fraction of solar production. There are at least 52 projects in at least 17 states, and at least 10 states are encouraging their development through policy and programs, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, the main trade group."

Happy Friday!

Friday Five: May 9, 2014

The recent National Climate Assessment contains warnings not of impending issues, but rather concerns that some of the major causes of climate change are already upon us.
Climate change is already causing asthma. Cancer too.
"The National Climate Assessment, which hundreds of scientists helped put together, warns that the effects of global warming aren’t some far-off possibility. They are happening right now, here in the U.S. Those effects include all the familiar problems: drought, wildfires, extreme weather, and sea level rise. But they include something else: Threats to public health."

In addition to the direct health concerns, we will have to adjust the way and location in which we grow the crops that underpin our sustenance and our economy.
Our alarming food future explained in 7 charts
"Richard Cruse, an agronomist and the director of Iowa State University’s Iowa Water Center, has found Iowa’s soils are currently disappearing at a rate as much as 16 times faster than the natural regeneration. According to the National Assessment, days of heavy rain have increased steadily in Iowa over the past two decades, and will continue doing so."

We continue to learn that nuclear and natural gas are not the "bridging fuels" we once thought them to be, and that we would find a more cost-effective plan would focus only on efficiency and renewables.
The rising cost of decommissioning a nuclear power plant
"The Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Rowe, Massachusetts, took 15 years to decommission—or five times longer than was needed to build it. And decommissioning the plant—constructed early in the 1960s for $39 million—cost $608 million. The plant’s spent fuel rods are still stored in a facility on-site, because there is no permanent disposal repository to put them in. To monitor them and make sure the material does not fall into the hands of terrorists or spill into the nearby river costs $8 million per year. That cost will continue for an unknown number of years. David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that even without the ongoing costs of monitoring and security, the average reactor now costs about $500 million to deactivate."

New technology can offer a potential way to mitigate some of the water issues we face due both to climate change and to inherent challenges due to consumption.
UCLA researchers unveil a better way to treat brackish water
"The system treats water at a cost of about $1.50 per 1,000 liters, said Cohen, who has installed desalination technology on U.S. military vessels. By way of comparison, bottled water costs about $1 to $3 per liter."

In the information economy, we no longer need to hold onto outdated and extractive business models, but can use information to link local businesses in a way that taps into the power of aggregated risk management while preserving the personal relationships that truly define a society.
The socio-economic power of renewable energy production cooperatives in Germany
"Energy cooperatives have turned into important supporters of renewable and decentralised energy structures, due to their strong growth since the year 2006, their participation in local renewable energy projects and their democratic awareness. The cooperative form of coordinating local renewable energy projects applies to a decentralised energy system that is managed by many smaller firms - a system concept that is preferred by the majority of German citizens. However, there is not enough knowledge to understand to what extent this organisational form is able to unify a broad group of actors in promoting a renewable energy system (societal power) and to gather capital for elaborating renewable energy supply structures (economic power)."

Happy Friday!

If Indiana is against energy efficiency, then what are they for?

Indiana's governor, Mike Pence has a serious decision to make.  The Indiana General Assembly has come out against energy efficiency with an overwhelming vote to end the popular, and by most accounts effective, Energizing Indiana program.  Senate Bill 340 originally sought to give large industrial customers a chance to opt-out of the program - shifting more of the responsibility to small and mid-sized customers.  The House hijacked it, however, and turned it into a bill that as of December 31, 2014 would make it illegal for the Indiana regulatory commission to require an energy efficiency program.  In 2009, that regulatory body enacted the program to help drive energy efficiency and boost job growth in the state, keeping up with programs enacted in most of the neighboring states.  Since its inception, the program has created as many as 5,000 permanent, direct jobs, resulted in three times as many indirect jobs, and saved almost a billion kilowatt hours at a cost of approximately $500 million.

More importantly, the programs have reduced demand by 100 MW, and if continued would reduce it by almost 1800 MW in 2020 when the program would have cost $2 billion.  We often think of building new power plants to meet increased demand, but given the size of our current demand, we can offset increases by reducing usage elsewhere.  Every dollar we spend on permanent energy efficiency avoids us having to build a power plant.  Currently, the reductions of energy efficiency cost about $5 per kilowatt of power.  By 2020, the 1800 MW reduction will have cost about $1 per kilowatt.  Compared with $6 per kilowatt of nuclear, $2.3 per kilowatt for coal, and $1 per kilowatt for natural gas, the investment makes the most economic sense.  This is especially true when factoring in the job creation impact.  Energy efficiency creates twice as many jobs per dollar invested as any of the fossil fuels, and just slightly more than nuclear energy.

The reason for the backlash against the bill comes from the utility industry in Indiana.  Although they accurately claim no direct sponsorship of the bill, their interests get ignored if the program continues. In Indiana, unlike other states, the utilities still control both the generation assets and the delivery network, and their profits are coupled to usage: as people use more energy, they receive more revenue and profit.  In deregulated states, utilities can decouple their charges from usage, recouping the cost of investment even as usage flattens out or drops.  Although this creates a whole set of issues that all utilities will have to deal with by changing their business model, it at least gives the utility economic incentive to improve reliability and efficiency.

The other issue, and perhaps more important one, comes from the fact that the program resulted not from direct legislation, but rather from a legal order from a regulatory agency.  Although fully supported by the governor at the time, and even the majority of the legislature, the program did not come from a newly enacted law as in other nearby states.  This perceived "over-reach" provides an opportunity for those who would oppose the effect to claim that the rules do not have the appropriate legitimacy.

Both of the objections raise valid arguments, and after nearly four years, it makes sense to revisit programs to make sure they maintain relevancy and effectiveness.  Mike Pence has a hard decision because his own party did not deliver him the most important thing he needs right now....

Options.

By making it an all-or-nothing, the governor faces the decision to either eliminate jobs and create a further burden on the middle class, or further enrage a portion of the corporate base.  (I should note that business groups come down on both sides of this issue as many large and small businesses have seen growth in the marketplace because of the program.)  If the legislature had proposed a fix that addressed the concerns of utilities, and provided some realistic relief for large corporate customers, the decision would not be about a politically-charged ending of a program, but rather a fix.  There are many possibilities the legislature could have proposed: scaling the contribution based upon customer size, fully deregulating the utilities to allow them to decouple cost from usage, and/or setting the rate of contribution at the cost of new investment to ensure that energy efficiency targets only the most cost-effective programs.  Any of these would have made reasonable sense, and given the governor options.

But right now, he really has no options.  He must veto this bill and tell the Assembly to start anew.

Friday Five: March 14, 2014

All the arguments about climate change and carbon dioxide emissions ignores another great challenge of fossil fuel pollution, and one that industry has yet to find an adequate solution for: fine particulate matter.  The unburned, solid carbon creates a whole host of health issues, and left unaddressed, it will continue to plague us.
New research shows air pollution might make you bad at your job
"What they found was that every 10-microgram per cubic meter increase in PM2.5 levels decreased worker productivity by 0.6%, as measured by the number pear boxes packed by each worker. Since workers were paid piecemeal, this translated to a decrease of roughly 41 cents per hour, per 10 micrograms of PM2.5."

The urban pollution caused largely by automobile emissions, but also by industrial activity and building heating, leads to consequences that affect our nations poor and people of color at rates higher than that of other population groups.
Dyin' to live: Biggie Smalls and the silent killers in urban America
"Cancer and heart disease are still the top causes for premature deaths in Brooklyn today. Environmental factors have long been suspected as possible causes for both. The National Cancer Institute conducted a study in the 1990s in Long Island (just north of Brooklyn) to examine the role of environmental factors in the high breast cancer rates in that area. The researchers found a “modest increase” in cancer risk due to exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), cancer-causing agents formed mostly from burning fossil fuels. A 2008 study found a link between PAH exposure and heart disease, and concluded that “chronic environmental stress is an important determinant” in cardiovascular disease risk."

Over the last several years, I have called for a planned, stable transition from utilities of infrastructure to utilities of service.  In order for utilities to survive, they have to make that transition, and it looks like in the nations on the forefront of renewable energy, that transition has started...to a point.
The future of large German utilities: It's already here
"If I would have written this paper two years ago and included the following, I would have called it utopia. Nobody would have believed it. But this unbelievable story actually happened. These four large German utilities decided to become 'green.' This can be seen from their recent advertisements, which show that all of the four major German utilities are 'solarized.'"

Making change that has lasting economic impact requires correctly identifying the value of the improvement and working that into the business plan of those developing, improving, or refurbishing.  Many homeowners and developers avoid improvements with long-term benefits because they cannot monetize those in the present.  A system that correctly values the improvements - and holds developers especially accountable for their performance - provides the proper incentive to make choices that improve quality of life. 
How to help appraisers fairly value home energy efficiency improvements
"Nothing works in the appraisal process unless high performance homes are consistently documented. Right now, the majority of home appraisers use Fannie Mae’s Uniform Residential Appraisal Report to provide opinions on the market value of a given property. But, this form lacks an adequate section in which to document energy efficiency features."

Economics can produce poor decisions.  The economics of developing, maintaining, and decommissioning nuclear energy do not really work, and the risk of catastrophe only exacerbates the point.  That said, in a nation whose economy depends on a fixed level of energy cost, it is tempting to go back to it...even when it has already damaged your country and its people.
Nuclear power in Japan: Start 'em up
"The sense of urgency is driven, first, by the mounting costs of doing without the nuclear plants. One by one, nearly all reactors were shut down in 2011-12. Utilities fired up conventional power stations to make up for lost electricity generation. But the cost of importing extra oil, coal and gas has been all the steeper with a weak yen. The trade deficit has climbed, along with electricity charges, particularly for businesses. Should nuclear plants be left idle, the programme of Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, to revive the economy could be in doubt."

Happy Friday!