Friday Five: October 4, 2013

A smarter grid that better manages our electrical resources does not just face the challenge of greater connectivity of renewables, but also the huge volume of data that will come from the meters.
Utilities try to learn from smart meters
"Val Jensen, senior vice president of customer operations at Chicago-based Commonwealth Edison Co., says his home in California recently was using abnormal amounts of electricity. With the help of his smart meter and local utility he learned that his pool pump was malfunctioning. Once fixed, his electricity bill dropped by about $100 a month."

We are starting to see solar installations at utility scale reach grid parity.  This not only creates opportunity for less destructive energy sources, but the challenge of managing the grid with greater variability of source intensity.
Xcel Energy asks Colo. PUC to approve solar as cost-competitive with gas plants
"'For the first time ever, we are adding cost competitive utility scale solar to the system,' Public Service Co. of Colorado President and CEO David Eves said in a Sept. 10 statement. Xcel Energy goes by the PSCo name for regulatory purposes in the state.
'The 170 MW we recommend would triple Xcel Energy's current utility scale solar in Colorado and it equates to all of the customer-sited solar in the state of Colorado, at about one half of the cost,' Eves said.
Xcel Energy's RES plan offers a proposed strategy for meeting the state's renewable energy goals, which include further diversifying Colorado's energy mix with solar, wind and other renewables, such as biogas, small hydro and recycled energy. Xcel Energy said it is ahead of schedule in meeting the state's RES goal of 30% renewable energy by 2020."

Because contrary to the claims of some, the investments from the ARRA have been better than any venture capital fund, and have driven the market to improve solar tech and cost effectiveness.
Fox distorts Energy Secretary's words in Solyndra attack
"He explained that despite the hype surrounding Solyndra, the portfolio has been a 'terrific success,' as evidenced by the fact that losses represent only a little over 2 percent of the $34.4 billion in loan guarantees, and under 10 percent of the reserve fund that Congress set aside to cover any defaults, knowing that not every company would succeed. Indeed, according to a Bloomberg Government analysis, the amount set aside by Congress for defaults will be more than enough even if every high-risk project fails. This is indicative of the caution that undergirded the program, which mostly apportioned funds to inherently low-risk power generation projects."

Even the armed forces recognizes the complications we create for ourselves when we base our systems on fossil-fuel-based energy sources.
Exploding fuel tankers driving US Army to solar power
"Instead, commanders have found they can save lives through energy conservation. It’s especially true in Afghanistan, where protecting fuel convoys is one of the most dangerous jobs, with one casualty for every 24 missions in some years.
With renewable energy, 'there is no supply chain vulnerability, there are no commodity costs and there’s a lower chance of disruption,' Richard Kidd, the deputy assistant secretary of the Army in charge of energy security, said in an interview. 'A fuel tanker can be shot at and blown up. The sun’s rays will still be there.'"

The complications go beyond the annoyance of climate change.  The extreme storm events have already damaged infrastructure and created environmental challenges that threaten our quality of life. 
Lawmakers seek answers after oil gushes during Colorado floods
"More than 60,000 gallons of oil and other petrochemical-laced fluids are now confirmed to have been spilled from fracking operations during recent floods in Colorado — and two congressmembers are calling for a hearing into the toxic eruption."

Happy Friday!

Don't think we need the EPA, FDA, OSHA etc.?

1960: Thalidomide given to women in pregnancy causes birth defects or death in about 10k children

1970s: Love Canal 900 families affected by toxic chemicals in the ground under their homes.

1970s: Kerr-McGee plutonium processing plant workers exposed to harmful levels of radiation

1989: Exxon Valdez spills 750,000 gal. of crude oil into Prince William Sound, Alaska

1990: Use of lead in gasoline and paint affects brain development in children

1990: Use of asbestos in buildings causing 100k premature deaths to miners and construction workers

1990s: Acid rain created by sulfur emissions from coal plants damages property and plant life

1991: Dumping of 20k gal of Vapam into Upper Sacramento River killing marine life in 38 mile radius

2000: Massey Energy dumps 306 million gal. of coal slurry into the Tug Fork River

2008: TVA Kingston coal plant 1.1 billion gal. of coal-ash slurry dumped into Cinch and Emory Rivers

2011: Deep Water Horizons well in the Gulf of Mexico explodes releasing 4.9 million gallons of oil

2013: ExxonMobil pipeline near Mayflower, AK spills as many as 19,000 barrels of oil

2013: West Fertilizer Company plant explodes killing 14 and injuring 200 more in West, Texas

Present: Coal plant operations release mercury into the air and water gradually accumulating in fish

Present: Release of chlorofluorocarbons depletes upper atmosphere ozone increasing UV radiation

Present: Chicago River remains closed to human activity due to commercial and residential pollution 

All but one in my lifetime....40% in the lifetime of my oldest child....3 new ones in the lifetime of my three-year-old.  Pretending that industry is benevolent and does not require regulation or regulators is akin to pretending that people are benevolent and do not require laws or police.  Commercial activity boosts quality of life and standards of living, as long as we keep an eye on each other and make sure we all are protected.

*Note:  This covers only a portion of the more widely known accidents caused by "legal" activities that were not initially caught by regulators or known by the general public until long after the activity.

Flashes: October 2, 2013

The simple visual that sums up the various factors that affect the energy flows and temperature rises and drops that occur on our planet.



The net total energy flowing into our earth based upon those factors noted in the diagram.

The graphic summary of how our ability to measure, as well as our knowledge of climate impacts, has affected and improved our models.

Our present understanding (with uncertainty) of how the various contributors to energy changes impact that flow of energy into or away from earth.

The source and net distribution of carbon dioxide in our biosphere.

The predicted and actual global mean air temperature change over the last 150 years.

The change in the three most major ice masses over the last twenty years.

The change in ocean temperature energy content over the last 50 years (700-2000m) and 1992 to 2005 (2000-6000m).

What does healthcare have to do with innovation? Ask an entrepreneur.

It seems appropriate on the day when the health care exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act to look at an example from my own life.  When I opened a freelance consultancy in 2001, I ran up against my first hurdle: trying to get health insurance for me and my children.  My options at the time amounted to the following:

1.  Pay for a COBRA extension of my previous, employer-based plan: $650 per month.
2.  Purchase an individual plan: $0 per month.

On the surface, it might look like a no-brainer.  Take the individual plan!  But the reason it costs nothing is because not one company who did business in Illinois at the time would provide me even a quote for a plan.  You see, two of my children carried a scarlet "A" on their medical history: asthma.  Although we now know that their asthma was not really traditional asthma, but more akin to "exercise-induced" asthma that has not prevented either of them from participating in high-school athletics, the actuarial tables prohibited me from being able to find a plan.  Even looking at professional associations who offered plans to freelancers, no options existed.

So today, as I reach the halfway point of my second year of freelancing, my wife's employer-based plan covers me and my children.  If I found myself in the same situation now, however, as of today I would have the following options:

1.  Pay for a COBRA extension of my previous, employer-based plan:  $650 per month (2000 $).
2.  Pay for a platinum insurance plan through the Illinois health exchange:  $500 per month (2013 $).

That's right.  A plan worth $882 per month in 2013 dollars would now cost me about $500 per month.  (Note that my 2000 plan only covered 80% of most costs, while the platinum plan covers 90%.)

The broader implication of this is that with a marketplace for individuals to obtain health insurance, a person's career path no longer has to be tied to employers.  As Martin Wolf noted in the Financial Times, employer-based plans create "a form of serfdom".  Imagine what we might see if a nation of workers had the freedom to move from job to job, or could pursue an entrepreneurial enterprise without having to worry about whether they could obtain insurance.  Note, I did not say pay for it, just obtain it.  This is not about getting subsidized or free insurance, just access to it.

Our nation grew up on the belief that innovation drives prosperity.  Innovation comes from the freedom to pursue opportunity.  Now that we have a system that removes one obstacle to the entrepreneurship we need to thrive, I have hope that we will create a culture that can finally solve many of our wicked problems.

Is it chaos? Is it disorder? Nope, it's just what makes Marty McFly a fictional character.

When giving speeches or workshops about energy, I use a graphic that shows the primary forms of energy and their relationship to each other.

It highlights that almost all of what we know as "energy" starts as nuclear energy, and eventually becomes heat.  In between, we have become expert at manipulating the various forms of energy in ways that help to improve our quality of life.  The faster we move from the upper left corner to the lower right corner, or the more twists and turns we take in moving along that path, the more we waste the initial nuclear "fuel" in delivering a unit of quality of life (whether it be food, light, heat, or motion). Until Ephraim Cochrane perfects the warp coil, this is our relationship with energy.  (I have a small following at present, and enough of them are Star Trek geeks that it's worth planting that reference there for them.)   Our present understanding also impacts another of my favorite fictional characters: Marty McFly.

This property of near-uni-directional, near-linear, always-imperfect energy flow also means that time travel to the past is impossible.

Life always moves forward.  Heat always moves from hot areas to cold ones.  Fluids - air and water - always flow from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure.  We grow from children into adults.  Life always moves in one direction.

For those who remember their high-school science, you have already learned the property of energy (life) that governs this...we call it entropy.  We have commonly thought of entropy as a measure of chaos or disorder, but in a way, this oversimplifies it.  Entropy does describe relative positions of "order" but more in a sense of probability than a sense of discipline.  If we think of combinations of atoms as a deck of cards, there are thousands of possibilities for how a deck can be shuffled into an "out of order" state, but only one way that it can be arranged from the 2 of clubs to the ace of spades.  If I go into any home in the country and open a used deck of cards, I am much more likely to find a shuffled deck than an ordered one.  Even more precisely, when I drop a deck of cards and randomly recombine the deck, the chance that I have created a deck with all cards in order is slim to nonexistent.  Whenever I move from a low probability state of energy to a highly probable one, I create entropy in the process.  Moving back to the low probability state requires me to expend significant energy (much akin to the process of manually rearranging the deck).

Going back to the concept of nuclear energy and our various ways of manipulating it, our sun fuses simple hydrogen atoms into slightly less simple helium atoms, releasing significant amounts of radiation and heat energy.  When we put this to direct use, for example heating or lighting our buildings, we create no additional entropy than the original process.  The heat finds its way in and through our world. When we grow plants, we reverse the entropy generation process because we take the radiative form of energy and use it to synthesize organized matter (this is not a closed system, so it does not violate the second law).  When we eat those plants, we break down the bonds into the constituent components, release heat energy, and build our bodies.  All these forms of transfer and energy use must happen to sustain our life, therefore a balance of entropy production defines the forward path of animal and plant life here on earth.

Where we have changed things drastically is with our use of "stored" energy, namely in the decayed and compressed plant and animal life that forms our "fossil fuels".  The process of growth, decay, and compression has created highly arranged substances that contain significant nuclear bonds.  When we break these bonds - as we do in both fossil fuel and what we classically term nuclear energy, we release heat in amounts significant enough to drive motion, create electricity, or heat our homes.  In a sense, we take hundreds of millions of years of "ordering" and release it in less than a decade.  The drastic inefficiencies within this process of breaking down highly arranged materials exemplifies one of the benefits of understanding entropy.  As a known, predictable quantity, it stands as a measure of how inefficiently we do the work that maintains our quality of life.  Both in the amount and rate of entropy production, we have measures and predictors of how close to natural our actions can are, have been, and can be.

We see opportunities all around us for how to maintain life in "low entropy" ways.  Plants take the radiation from the sun and create matter.  Spiders use food at relatively low temperatures to create a material stronger than any steel cable (ounce for ounce) that we can produce with much heat and wasted energy.  Our bodies create bone, and recreate it when necessary, without the aid of high pressure, temperature, or additional energy sources.  As we learn more about those actions that truly sustain us, and understand the fundamental processes behind the actions, we arrive at a couple of basic conclusions:

1.  The more we accomplish without any form of energy transfer, the lower the resource use and the lower the entropy generation.  This means maximizing direct use of the heat, light, and radiation from the sun.
2.  When we have maximized the input from these naturally occurring sources, the fewer steps we take in converting the fundamental results of the natural nuclear reactions into useful forms of energy, the more we can accomplish and the less we disrupt our surroundings.  From growing food to generating electricity to developing highly efficient thermal batteries, when we maximize the amount of energy we harness and store without transfer, we create an easily sustainable future.
3.  Once we have accomplished all we can through these two methods, then - and only then - we can supplement these resources to meet our needs.  Until we make significant improvements in thermal and electrical battery storage, we will have trouble navigating the variability in natural energy exposure.  Transitioning from our present day to a low entropy future will require a smart transition based upon low-temperature energy conversion.  This will both extend the life of resources and reduce the environmental impact of the shocks associated with high-temperature, material destruction.

I will review entropy in more depth, and with some more specific applications, over the coming months.  The long and the short of it is that entropy acts like nature's clock.  The natural cycle of energy moving through our life occurs at a pace to which nature has adapted, and one that it expects.  When we accelerate the processes of life, we introduce an element of disruption - measured by the production of entropy - that forces our surroundings to adapt to a new way of life.  As we have seen over the past decades, this level of disruption negatively affects our quality of life, and we must find a way around it. We are quickly developing and deploying technologies - and more importantly learning strategies to maintain quality of life without large, destructive energy inputs - that avoid or even reverse this disruption.  If we look toward entropy as our predictor of which actions will best minimize disruption and maximize productivity, we can quickly and effectively move to a largely sustainable future.

The only ones who can do this is we...because thanks to entropy, there are no Martys or Doc Browns from the future coming to tell us what to do.

Friday Five: September 27, 2013

Read it for yourself

Working Group 1 contribution to IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Summary for Policymakers

We have to end the mantra that "gas is better" and understand that like everything else, natural gas is only better than coal if done and managed properly.  There is not enough monitoring and reporting to suggest it is, and enough anecdotal evidence that much more is needed.

Is natural gas "clean"?

"Then there’s this: Natural gas is made up mostly of methane, and methane, unburned, is around 70 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. There isn’t nearly as much of it, and it’s shorter lived, but it’s not so short-lived that we can allow a great deal to escape into the atmosphere, which it does when anything in the production, transmission or distribution processes leaks. It’s a scarily powerful greenhouse gas for over 20 years, and merely powerful (25 times stronger than carbon dioxide) over a span of 100 years. By which time much of the world’s coastline will be what we now call 'inland.'"

Two things about the measures that mitigate climate impacts: we know enough of them to have an immediate and significant impact, and almost every one of them will have a net positive impact on our economy - both near and long-term.

How the Obama administration could hit its climate targets in one chart

"This chart shows how recent policies such as the administration’s support for solar and wind power and stricter fuel efficiency standards for automobiles, along with market forces like utilities’ switching from coal to natural gas, have cut the nation’s emissions in recent years. But unless Obama pursues other federal curbs on greenhouse emissions, they will begin rising again."

One of the newest and most ambitious projects is how online, however questionsrain as to how the technology will balance energy and water needs in practice....especially if deployed on a more significant scale. 

World's largest solar thermal power plant delivers power for the first time

"Today, Brightsource Energy announced that its huge, DOE-funded solar thermal power plant at Ivanpah, California, delivered power to the grid for the first time. It was part of a test to demonstrate the system, which uses mirrors to focus sunlight on towers to generate steam. The steam is then used to spin turbines and generate electricity. The plant isn’t quite finished yet, but is expected to be done by the end of the year."

With all the industry attacks against GMO labeling, I thought that they were a financial boon for farmers.  It is interesting to learn that is not the case, and that it is only a matter of insurance reform to make organic farms financially more viable.

Are GMO crops worth their weight in gold? To farmers, not exactly

"The organic land makes less money in the off years of the typical one-year-on, one-year-off rotation, when the farmers grow alfalfa and oats, instead of the soy they grow on the GM farms. Soy is clearly more profitable, but not so profitable as to erase the lead from organic corn, Soper said, 'On a two-year average, organic is still way ahead. The bottom line was that our organic farms have 30 percent higher profits.'"

Happy Friday!

Mayor Emanuel can have his cake and eat it too

The Chicago Public Schools closed 50 school buildings this last summer amid valid concerns about the cost of maintaining older buildings and allocating resources to schools that no longer have the neighborhood population to support them.  In a publicly embarrassing week of announcements, the Mayor noted that four new schools, renovations or additions will be performed using TIF dollars, and the more cynical among us noted that at least three of them will be executed  in time for the Mayor to do a ribbon-cutting while he seeks re-election.  Those with experience in facilities management know that the borrowing done through TIF allocation does not overlap with operation funds (although the two have an inextricable link as they both get their value from the property taxes we pay), but watching politicians try to explain to all of us how they can claim they do not have enough money to keep 50 schools open but they have the money to open or renovate four new schools provides theater-of-the-absurd-level entertainment value.  That said, in every failure comes an opportunity.

The Mayor can turn this into a revolution in public funding of buildings and their operation that can have a impact long beyond his tenure.

Universities and long-term owners of facilities have begun to approach the funding of new buildings not just focusing on the first-cost of design, development, and construction, but also incorporating long-term facility maintenance.  Traditionally, an owning business or entity commissions a new building, raises the money they need to design, develop, and build, then turn the facility over to operations and maintenance with a budget coming from annual revenues.  This places the performance of the building at the mercy of annual appropriations, and in the case of municipal buildings, at the whim of politically motivated boards and managers.  The new approach raises both the funding for construction and an escrow/endowment to fund long-term maintenance and operation.

This innovative, and more responsible, approach greatly improves the value of the building in several ways.  First, with all of this funding raised at the start of the project, the owner immediately has the opportunity to fund project scope that will improve maintenance or create energy efficiency.  Think of it this way, if you were able to raise $100,000 to build an addition on your house and set aside money to pay for a child's college education, then realized your child was going to get a scholarship to reduce the cost of college in half, you could increase how much you allocate to build that addition.  Second, it draws the attention of everyone to designing, developing, and building a structure that provides maintainable service.  This focus alone usually delivers results.  Lastly, by putting an immediate monetary focus on the lifetime services the building will provide, the owning entity will not have to worry about politically-motivated annual appropriations to keep the occupants in a comfortable, productive, and high-performing building.

Because the Chicago Public Schools funds future operations out of the future property taxes paid by citizens, and TIF allocations come from a portion of those same property taxes, the opportunity exists to fund both the development of these projects as well as their life-cycle operations.  If the Mayor has the courage to propose this action, he can push back against those who have called out the hypocrisy of the closings and new buildings.  By noting that through building these new projects, the Mayor sets a standard that he will add no new annual budget needs for facilities operations, and he can present a fiscally responsible plan that completely supports the foundation of the facility closures.

School buildings have stood for 50, 75, up to over 100 years in the Chicago Public Schools.  They outlive politicians and provide a foundation to their communities.  It is time that our politicians recognized this and approached the long-term funding of operations and maintenance as more important than the first cost.

If he takes this approach, the Mayor just might turn a stumble into big step forward.