Real Energy

Davy Jones

2009-11-16T19:41:00.013-05:00

Now that the promise made two years ago in Bali to have a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol by the end of this year has been deep sixed, we have a budget to work with. Each delay in cutting greenhouse gas emissions means we get to do something unthinkable to compensate. We could build dikes for example or try to move species poleward or attempt some other ridiculous adaptation measure like opening our borders to refugees. Mitigation is too easy and too cheap so let's plan on breaking the bank.

But still, there are things that fall in between, not exactly smart things like saving money by switching to renewable energy but then not exactly stupid either like letting many species go extinct but they still maybe a little expensive. We can say that all adaptation is stupid since it means that mitigation was not in time. And we can say that mitigation measures that preempt more effective mitigation efforts owing to higher cost like new nuclear power or carbon capture and sequestration at coal plants is stupid since they force more stupid adaptation. They have a highly amplified opportunity cost. But there are after-the-fact mitigation methods that might compensate for missed mitigation opportunities that could avoid some even more expensive adaptation, and perhaps more importantly, the sense of failure that adaptation evokes. Things that fall into this category might include renewably powered artificial trees that collect carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or getting fuel gas from making biochar. Pumping liquid carbon dioxide into the ground or spreading char on the surface though may leave some questions open about how permanent these actions might be. But, turning carbon dioxide into calcium carbonate might last for a while since this is how the main branch of the geological carbon cycle operates. How does the natural cycle work? Largely by making coral.

Yet coral is currently being harmed by increasing sea surface temperatures which cause bleaching and cut down the productivity of coral colonies. And, even though rising sea levels should stimulate coral growth in order to keep the coral tops illuminated, we would still need to increase the active coral surface area by about a factor of 15 and have 30 cm of sea level rise to clean up the mess we've made in the atmosphere. But 30 cm of sea level rise seems like an expensive proposition. What could we do to grow coral without the sea level rise?

Reef building coral need salt water, oxygen, stable temperatures, calcium ions, carbon dioxide and light to prosper. And there is lots and lots of ocean floor that has all of these but light because it is too deep. So, why not provide the light? In tropical seas that do not suffer from cyclones, floating islands built to collect solar power may soon be available. Running a power cable to the bottom and illuminating coral starts with blue LEDs using a portion of the generated power could make these islands not just carbon neutral but carbon negative. And, one would be building a new fishery supported by the new reef.

Off the Queensland coast there is good wind power potential. Stranded wind power might similarly be used to build the deep outer portions of the Great Barrier Reef in clean water with stable temperature.

And, it may be possible to construct buoys that can simply direct sunlight down through optical fibers to greater depth. No need for wiring or LEDs.

Although a slow process, it may be worthwhile to form novel architectural elements using directed light to determine the shape of coral growth that could be raised and used on land. Decorative columns or domes might be fabricated in this manner. Perhaps even sculpture could be made by directing how the light falls on the growing coral.

Full fathoms five thy father lies
Of his bones are coral made
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

--The Tempest

Coal is too expensive too

2009-04-22T08:41:00.005-05:00

The way to keep huge carbon reservoirs like tar sands and oil shale out of the atmosphere is to ensure that the world price of oil is well below the cost of production for these messes. And, we've seen that these carbon sources are horrible for our economy because they are barely energy sources at all. Oil is only useful as an energy source if it is cheap to produce.

For oil, we need to cut our consumption to match the declining availability of useful oil so that we don't encourage the development of economically harmful oil. Consumption is our lever for this because we don't control supply.

But, with coal, we do control supply. And there may be as much as 20 years of coal left of a quality not too dissimilar to what has been used in the last decade or so. To be sure, the quality of the coal supply is declining with less energy produced per miner than in the past. But, the decline is still at a fairly slow stage compared to the current decline in high quality oil.

For new power generation, wind is now the lowest cost choice so there should really be no reason to increase coal production at this point but there are reasons to cut coal production to fight global warming, end mercury pollution, end the destruction of the environment surrounding coal mines, and, most importantly, to stop the horrible toll of coal mining deaths which has ceased to reduce. How to do that?

The EPA thinks we should make carbon more expensive. But, from an economic point of view, making energy less expensive is something necessary for increased prosperity. Now, we already know that coal is not the least expensive form of new generation. What would be a way to ensure that replacing existing coal generation is done at the lowest cost so that the sunk costs associated with closing existing power plants that are still serviceable are compensated? The method to do this would be to lower the cost of generation for a period so that the sunk costs can be covered more quickly. To do this, we need to only use the coal which is the least expensive to mine, modulo environmental and safety concerns. Thus, the EPA approach of raising the price of carbon does not seem to be the best path to follow. A better approach is to place price controls on coal so that economically marginal mines are closed and the cost of coal powered generation can be cut.

Power producers will see lower fuel prices, but also lower availability. A portion of their savings on fuel prices can go into supporting conservation efforts so that less fuel will be needed and a portion can repay outstanding obligations for power plant construction faster so that the plant is ready to be shut down when the price of coal (and it availability) reach zero.

And, a zero price for coal is surely what we want in the end since this is the price of its main future competitors, wind and solar. There is not a fuel charge for these and so it should be for coal as well. A price control regime would seem to be more certainly effective and much less expensive than any method of setting a higher carbon price to discourage consumption. Price control selects the most efficient mines to continue operating into the transition and thus keeps costs down where raising the price would not. Further, coal mines shut down mine-by-mine rather than having scattered layoffs throughout the industry. With scattered layoffs, we pay for unemployment in the mining sector while mine-by-mine shut downs can be addressed with replacement employment such as polysilicon refineries.

So, if the EPA is concerned about costs, price controls for coal would be the best approach.

Out of Alaska

2009-03-23T11:44:00.005-05:00

This is the twentieth anniversary of Exxon's 11 million gallon oil spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska. The scum got out of about $2 billion of a judgment against them last year on the argument that shipping is special and above the law. While they may be able to play fast and loose with that law, the law of just deserts might still come up and bite them.

There is a whole lot of noise about energy independence these days. And while Exxon figures it is going to be importing oil for a long time, it does not mind the possibility of getting low cost oil leases and favorable tax treatment for oil on federal land. So, they give a lot of money to the "drill booboo drill" crowd to make noise about how we could get all the oil we need if we just drilled more oil wells domestically. These people are completely wrong but they are loud because they get all that money to say these things. They are wrong because essentially no amount of effort can produce what we consume domestically. There are only three years of recoverable oil in the ground and we can't make oil wells flow fast enough to bring all that up in three years. It is very unlikely that US production will do anything but decline for the next twenty years.

So, what would it take to get energy independence? We would have to stop using oil for the most part. The promise of the Obama administration is that we will get there in ten years. That means cutting about 13 million barrels a day of imports plus whatever decline in domestic production occurs in that time. Cutting consumption at that rate should keep the price of oil fairly low during that time, perhaps around $35/barrel. But, holding the price of oil down to that level means that there is very little new domestic oil that would be worth developing since we've already developed all of the cheap oil here. Thus, in a very real way, energy independence means not drilling for oil in the US. Continuing energy independence beyond that 10 year goal implies continuing to cut consumption as domestic supplies continue to decline. but if we do that, then we extend the period over which the world price of oil remains low and there remains no incentive to develop more domestic supply. Thus, it would seem that pushing the energy independence idea yields a smaller oil business sooner than otherwise. If this means that Exxon loses a trillion dollars or so, then perhaps the punishment they avoided for their oil spill will come right back to them.

Hungry money

2009-03-11T11:28:00.002-05:00

I think it might make sense to refinance our public debt to a lower interest rate. I put up a post last week about it here.

One reason we can get such a low interest rate for our public debt right now is that money is scared to take risks. It seems to me that if we can absorb this money at a low rate of return, releasing money that was earning a higher rate of return, then we may boost money's appetite for returns and thus risk. Those who were satisfied with 6% bonds may not themselves choose to invest in 2% bonds once they have received their reward for tuning in their bonds early. These investors may be a little more bold than the 2% bond customers and wish to go bargain hunting in the stock market or look to invest in banks. This hungry money may help to boost the economy by taking on a little more risk than the currently available money would do. After all, the money invested in public debt has not been burned the way the rest of the money has been so it has a right to feel more confident.

Refinancing our debt

2009-03-05T10:14:00.002-05:00

A portion of our government expenses is paying interest on the debt we have incurred over time. Last fiscal year it was about $450 billion or about 13% of $3 trillion in federal spending. The usual breakdown is 8% of federal spending so there is doubtless some accounting going on that apportions these numbers in some way or another.

We have also just started to spend about $800 billion is fiscal stimulus that includes some spending on renewable energy infrastructure. The last time we looked at this sort of approach, it looked like a very good investment to make. But, we are doing it now because there is a recession on and interest rates are near zero so that it would seem that only spending can help with the economy.

But, interest rates pinned near zero mean that we can free up $450 billion a year if we just refinance our debt to zero interest. If we sell treasury securities now at zero interest and use that money to buy back outstanding securities sold at a higher interest rate, we can refinance our national debt and strongly cut expenses. This makes the stimulus spending budget neutral over two years and allows further spending if needed. We really can't do anything more productive for our future prosperity than invest in renewable energy and education. Refinancing now during a window when we can borrow at zero interest would seem to be a very prudent way to assure the ability to make those investments.

Past, Present and Future Ghosts

2009-02-25T10:03:00.004-05:00

There are three fossil fuels, one solid, one liquid and one gas. In the United States we have very little oil left and it is pretty much universally recognized that we are going to have to use less oil. The means to do this are not settled. Some want to see more alternative liquid fuels while others look to substitution with electricity or with natural gas. Sources for alternative liquid fuels are possibly plants including algae or coal converted to a liquid or natural gas converted to a liquid. If given a choice between electricity generated with natural gas or natural gas burned directly in a vehicle, the electricity route is more efficient since gas turbines are 60% efficient and electric cars are 80% efficient so the overall efficiency is about 48% while average performance for car engines is about 20%. So, we'd use more than twice as much gas using it directly for transportation than if we converted it to electricity first. One thing that we are settled on is that when we do use oil in transportation, we will do it with better fuel efficiency though we could do more on this.

The US has oil reserves of about 21 billion barrels and consumes about 21 million barrels a day so that is three years of oil at our current rate of use. If we were to use only our own oil, it would not make sense to buy a car because we would be out of fuel before the warranty is done. However, oil is shipped all over the world so we mainly rely on imported oil. Oil is on its way out and so should be thought of as a ghost of the past.

Usually we think of coal as the most abundant fossil fuel in the United States with something like 200 years of supply at our current rate of use. However, new work suggests that only 20 years of economically viable coal remains. How does this compare to natural gas? One set of estimates gives a range of between 88 and 118 years of supply. In terms of primary energy we use about as much gas as coal so that we seem to have 4 to 6 times more usable gas than usable coal. So, we probably need to reverse the usual assumption that coal is the most abundant fossil fuel in the US and declare coal the ghost of the present and natural gas the ghost of the future.

When we consider oil, buying a car makes no sense without oil imports but for coal and natural gas, imports don't make too much sense. With coal, shipping the stuff takes about as much energy as mining the stuff as things stand so getting coal from overseas seems counter productive. Gas travels in pipelines fairly well but it needs to be liquefied to be shipped over oceans and this cost quite a lot of energy so importing gas does not make a lot of sense. And that is pretty much how the world markets work. Most coal and gas are used on a continent scale but don't cross oceans.

So, what we have on hand is all we are going to get for coal and natural gas to a pretty good approximation. What does this mean?

If there are only 20 years of coal left, it makes absolutely no sense to build a power plant that is meant to last 40 years to burn coal. Thus, all attempts to work out carbon capture and storage methods for coal are wasted efforts. First, most plans are to build new plants with this technology but it makes no sense to build a new plant. Second, we should be using less and less coal in order to save some for future steel making so there will be limited application for existing plants.

For natural gas, we only need about two thirds of the primary energy use of coal to replace coal since gas generation is more efficient so that completely replacing coal leads to between 53 and 70 years of natural gas available. A natural gas plant built today with a design lifetime of 40 years will not run out of fuel before this time. Thus, if one is going to attempt to capture and store carbon dioxide, doing it at a natural gas plant makes much more sense. It is also a lot easier to do since the exhaust is a lot cleaner to start with.

Oil use is on its way out already. Apparently we have been mistaken about coal and we need to start it in the same direction now. Only natural gas has the potential for expanded use and so if we are going to put effort into trying to use fossil fuels without emissions, this is where we need to concentrate what we do.

Clean coal is a dirty lie but it is also a pointless one.

Oil is still too expensive

2008-11-14T10:58:00.007-05:00

I had the following censored from what appears to be an oil industry astroturf site today:

"It seems to me that we should set a target price of $20/barrel by controlling demand. This is above the cost of production of most oil in the current supply, and there is ample future oil to maintain that price over a decade or so. All we need to do is to direct investments into cheap-to-produce oil exclusively as we cut demand to follow depletion down. This figure that rembrandt posted from the WEO 2008 shows that investments in expensive-to-produce oil is a whole other world.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4755#more

We can get at least 1 trillion barrels at less than $15/barrel cost of production and that is the amount of oil that got us on to oil so it should be plenty to get us off of oil. Investing in anything more expensive than that looks to be a true waste of money and effort."

What is wrong with the sentiment expressed here? Clearly it is factually accurate. Draw a line across the figure at $15/barrel cost of production and there is plenty of oil below that cost to use to transition off of oil. That can't be the problem. The idea that demand control can control price is historically validated. There was an oil glut from 1884 to 2000 brought about by switching electricity generation off of oil and boosting efficiency in transportation. The price of oil was forced down and then kept low then. That can't be the problem. So, what is the problem?

I think that the problem is that to deal with the finite oil resource in a cost effective way, we need to start shrinking the oil industry now. And, that is not happy news for oil industry advocates. On the Internet, censorship is practiced by corporate sponsored groups or non-democratic governments. Elsewhere the ethos of freedom of expression runs too strongly to tolerate censorship. We must thus take evidence of censorship as evidence of corporate or foreign sponsorship or both. It is not unusual for the oil industry to hide its attempts to influence public opinion with false information. What strength there is in global warming denialist propaganda comes from often hidden oil industry funding. It thus appears that this must be the cause of the censorship I experienced. We are likely seeing an industry scam attempting to manipulate the price of oil.

The present price of oil, $55/barrel, is still way above the cost of production and is thus too high. None of the proposed new investments in oil supply that fall in the expensive range makes any sense compared with real energy sources like wind and solar. So, there is no reason at all not to cut the price of oil in half right now. Oil is still too expensive!

Mountains

2008-10-15T21:48:00.004-05:00

Today is Blog Action Day which we've celebrated before. Today I want to say that in Glenville, West Virginia the church needs a coat of paint. That is a sign that people are poor. A lot of US 33 through West Virginia is poor. I have to say that in the midst of that, there are people fighting to keep their mountains whole, to keep the coal in its place in the ground. People with shabby clothes and a mountain song in their hearts. Almost heaven....

West Virginia has produced over 13 billion tons of coal since 1863, about twice the current annual input of carbon into the atmosphere. So, West Virginia is responsible for driving about 1% of world gross domestic product. Yet the poverty rate in West Virginia in the period 2005-2007 (15.2%) was only exceeded by Mississippi (21.1%), Louisiana (17.1%), Texas (16.4%), New Mexico (16.3%) and Kentucky (15.7%), all energy producing states, and DC (19.2%). Why would energy production be associated with poverty? It is pretty simple. We value energy sources that don't take a lot of effort to acquire. So, there is little economic benefit for the region from which energy resources are extracted. This can be changed by charging royalties. Alaska has an 8.1% poverty rate. But in most places the people get raped just as badly as the land.

Fossil energy extraction is a leading cause of poverty around the world even as it seems to boost prosperity elsewhere. Death and human rights abuses also follow in its wake. Closing the book on poverty is going to mean ending our use of fossil fuels.

Oil is too expensive

2008-06-13T21:02:00.001-05:00

The reason oil is too expensive is that the current price encourages seeking out new oil that is expensive to produce. That is not the same as the reason oil is expensive.

The US Senate defeated a windfall profits tax measure that would have taxed oil companies on the high price of oil. It was defeated on a cloture vote: 51 to 43, a majority supported the closing of debate. It is getting close and one can guess that in November, this will be a deciding factor in some senate races and is already an issue in the presidential race: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/06/10/america/NA-POL-US-Congress-Oil-Profits.php.

There is not really a good reason not to capture the portion of the profits that are made on domestically produced oil since the only use for them is to reinvest in oil exploration which is becoming fruitless. But, capturing the profits does not do anything about the price of oil except to push it up a little faster since the oil exploration is not yet entirely fruitless. But, oil exploration is pointless now and for this reason it needs to be strongly discouraged. The way to discourage oil exploration is to reduce the price of oil rather than to stomp on a bunch of profit brushfires. While prices are high, some one somewhere will be exploring and finding oil that is expensive to produce even if we (in the US) manage to keep that from happening here through tax policy. Then everyone will be able to buy just as much oil as they can afford and the cancer of expensive oil will metastasize right back here where we might have stamped out incentives to find expensive oil. But, if the price of oil is reduced below the cost of producing expensive oil, then only cheap oil will be pumped from the ground and no one anywhere will bother to explore for expensive oil.

We can tell that oil is too expensive when people are working to be able to get to work or when people who have retired are choosing between heat and food. The promise of oil has been broken and it is time to give it up as a bad job. So, we need to make sure that people can get to work and keep warm while having something to eat. And, we need a good portion of the remaining cheap oil to get through to a point where these things can be done without using any oil. How do we ensure that we get that cheap oil at a price that reflects what it costs to produce rather than the scarcity of oil compared to how we use it now? We need to be sure that we are not using oil any faster than the remaining cheap oil can be pulled from the ground. If we try to go faster than that, we'll encourage people to look for more expensive oil since oil will seem scarce and thus worthy of investment.

Our policy should be focused on keeping oil inexpensive and to do that we need to aggressively phase out the use of oil. There are some sectors where we can't do this such as aviation, but in most we can move rapidly, and, more importantly, we can move rapidly enough overall. If the US alone, were to cut its per capita consumption to seven gallons a week down from nine, (think carpools and second small cars) we'd cut world consumption by about 6%. Dropping another weekly half gallon a year for fourteen years would cut world consumption by 25%. That is surely enough to keep the world on the cheap oil supplies out to 2025 or so since these supplies will be extended a bit by the reduced demand.

How to implement this policy? We might try simply restricting imports by a quarter or so. This would surely drop the world price of oil below $20/barrel. But, the domestic price of oil would likely be pretty high, $400/barrel or so, and this would encourage all sorts of foolishness in terms of looking for expensive oil domestically. We don't want to encourage that.

We could try imposing a tax, say $380/barrel, and that should solve the problem of encouraging exploration for expensive oil domestically and abroad, but is might be destabilizing for the government since the revenue would cover much more government spending than current taxes and we were warned by the chairman of the Federal Reserve at the beginning of the current administration that paying our national debt would be a bad thing. Also, since domestic oil prices would be even higher than now, we will have failed on the getting to work and keeping warm and eating portion of our problem.

Usually, when we have something serious to undertake, we ration. If we can get gasoline down to about $0.60/gallon by being careful how we use it, then our shared sense of accomplishment should help us do the rest of the transition down to using no gasoline at all. We have an existing rationing plan http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=6307185 and it includes a white market in rations. This means that rations can be sold/traded, placing the cost of (rationing imposed) scarcity on the rations slips rather than the fuel. Getting to work or staying warm end up costing less though you might be making a choice on how to convert either of those two within a few years.

Just now, such an effort is doable, but if we wait for expensive oil to gain a greater share of the world total production, then controlling prices by controlling demand will be more difficult since there will be a floor price for much more of the production. In that situation, we will need to reduce our oil consumption probably just as much, but we won't gain the benefit of getting the cheap oil at a low price.

The core reason oil is too expensive is that the current price encourages exploration for expensive oil. Oil is useful when it is cheap to produce and cheap to buy, but it becomes harmful when it is expensive to buy, and even more harmful when it is expensive to produce since this places a price floor that no amount of consumption control can break. It is crucial not to spend resources on exploring for expensive oil. At present, only the US, as a single market entity, has the power to force only cheap oil to be produced and to end exploration for expensive oil. Others could, in combination, have a similar effect, but may not have the existing coordinated plan in place and thus may not be able to take such action before too much expensive (to produce) oil is on the market. The US should implement rationing as soon as possible to drive down the price of oil below $20/barrel and encourage other countries to also restrain demand. A window of perhaps 20 years of $20/barrel oil might be achieved through managed demand, plenty of time to manage a transition away from oil at low cost.

Reef relief

2008-03-19T09:16:00.006-05:00

There are 284,300 km² of coral reef in the world. They are basically made of calcium carbonate and if porosity accounts of one third of their volume, their density would be about 1.87 gm/cm³. This then is a carbon density of 0.22 gm/cm³. Coral is very stressed by silt and nitrogen runoff currently and may soon be attacked by ocean acidification, but is one of the ways that atmospheric carbon dioxide is converted into limestone. Coral seeks a certain depth below the surface of the ocean to have the right amount of light for its growth. We may well see 30 cm of sea level rise in the next 50 years since sea level rise appears to be accelerating. How much carbon would be sequestered by coral if we were to ensure that it can grow 30 cm where it is already established?
The total volume would be 8.5x10¹⁶ cm³ so the total carbon mass would be 19 Gigatonnes. This covers about 2 years of current carbon emissions or 4 years of carbon that is not already currently being absorbed from the atmosphere. To cover emissions since 1950 when emissions were 5 times lower, we'd need to increase the areas of coral reefs by about a factor of 5. Since corals grow in a range of conditions, establishing reefs in ways that anticipate both water temperature and sea level changes while doing what is needed to control silt and nitrogen runoff can apparently remove the extra carbon dioxide we have introduced into the atmosphere. Growth rates of corals are lower than what is needed (10 gm/m^{^2}/day) by about a factor of three, so increasing the coral surface area by a factor of 15 would make some sense. Once sea level begins to recede, further coral growth would be limited, providing protection against removing too much carbon from the atmosphere.

Doing what needs to be done to protect coral so that it can grow would also likely revive mollusk populations which also sequester carbon as calcium carbonate so that the amount of new reef needed may be less. One way to control nitrogen runoff is to use biochar as a buffer and this also had carbon sequestration potential itself. The changes we need to make to unmake our carbon dioxide waste look as though they also improve our ability to get food through restored land and ocean productivity.

Lux lucis tepida

2008-03-06T12:33:00.021-05:00

In which, energy can be delivered to homes for less than a penny per kilowatt-hour.

The etymology of the word lukewarm comes from old English meaning tepid rather than from the Evangelist whose name means bringer of light is some traditions. The advantages of using real energy to warm water before it is delivered to a home is the subject of this post so we have a Latin title meant to evoke both light and warmth while perhaps spurring a memory that the Romans would take almost any practical step to get a good bath.

The word plumbing comes from the word lead and, despite its unfortunate origins, this is our main theme. Lead, mercury and other heavy metals cause many of our misfortunes because they cause our minds to no longer function properly. As we end the use of coal as we ended the use of lead in gasoline we may well see further reductions in violent crime. Luke, who traveled with Paul, does not mention what Nero did to Paul. Some argue that this is because he wrote his Gospel and Acts before Paul died but others argue that it is because Luke considered Nero an aberration. The behavior of Nero and the other degenerate Emperors could well be explained by the ubiquitous presence of lead in the Roman environment, only some of which was from the plumbing; they used it to flavor food as well.

In our plumbing, water is delivered to homes at the ambient temperature which is just the average temperature of a region over a year (about 55^o F near the Chesapeake Bay). Depending on the depths of the water mains, it may be slightly warmer in the Autumn and cooler in the Spring as the heat from Summer or cooling from Winter reach those depths, but if it is sourced from a well, then these effects are even smaller because the water temperature coming from that low in the earth is constant. The effect of raising the temperature of the delivered water by 20^o F on home energy use is important. When the warmer water is heated in a water heater, less energy is required to bring it up to temperature saving about 25% in energy. Further, when the warmer water is mixed with hot water for bathing, less hot water is needed resulting in a 16% savings on hot water use. Together this comes to a 36% savings. In a home where water heating accounts for 20% of energy use, then the overall savings is about 7%. For a well insulated house where water heating accounts for half the energy use, the fractional savings are even larger. And, there is no need to change anything in the home to take advantage of this.

The water pipes we use to deliver water to homes are close to thermal equilibrium with the ground, but if we are to deliver warmed water they will lose heat to the ground. So, we need an estimate of how much heat they would lose. This depends on the thermal conductivity of the soil and the temperature gradient beside the pipe. We can get an upper limit on the steepness of the temperature gradient if we consider a pipe surrounded by a cylinder of insulating earth with a radius that corresponds to the depth at which the pipe is buried. This is rough upper limit. For dry soil such as under a road the distance down to the water table will often be greater than the distance to the surface implying more insulation in that direction. For soil subject to percolation of rain water, heat transfer could be greater downward if the percolation is rapid enough. For a 20 centimeter diameter pipe buried 2 meters below the surface in soil with a thermal conductivity of 1.5 W/m/K and a temperature difference of 10^o C we can calculate an energy loss of about 31 Watts for every meter of pipe. For a town of 10,000 homes laid out in a square of 5 by 5 kilometers there needs to be about 250 kilometers of water pipes so the energy lost would be 8 MW. If each home uses 350 gallons of water a day that is about 0.018 litres/second and to raise 18 grams of water per second by 10^o C requires 770 watts. So, all 10,000 homes also need 8 MW of power. All told 16 MW of energy input is needed.

For solar energy input we need the collecting area of about 16 house lots. Let's have our town served by four 50 meter high water towers, one at each corner. If we paint the bottom of the tank of each one black, we can arrange mirrors called heliostats around the base of the tower to reflect sunlight on the bottom of the tower. If these are arranged in a circle, then to deliver 2 MW of average power to the bottom of the tower we need to deliver 10 MW at noon so the radius of our circle of mirrors will be about 56 meters. Assuming that the bottom of the tank is 20 meters across, the sunlight will be concentrated in power by a factor of 32. As long as the reflectivity of the bottom of the tank is 10% or less, this poses no danger to vision. The cost of durable (30 year) heliostats is about $126/meter² so the delivered cost of energy, $4.9 million in heliostats for 2 billion kWh over 30 years is 0.23 cents/kWh. Since this mode of delivery displaces electricity or gas use for water heating this looks like a pretty good deal though not all water use is involved with hot water use. In operation, one of our towers would look something like this spanish power plant, but with a water tower instead of a solar furnace. We don't need hot water, just warm.

But, we can go a bit further. Silicon solar panels are about 20% efficient and currently cost about $5/Watt. They perform within 80% of their initial efficiency for at least 30 years. The main reason they lose their efficiency is owing to cosmic ray induced defects in the crystal lattice which provide places for charge carriers to become trapped. At the bottom of a water tank, they are substantially shielded from cosmic rays and thus should last much longer. Let's assume a lifetime of 60 years. The cosmic rays come mainly from straight up (cos³) and 5 meters of water is about the same as half the atmosphere in terms of mass so that is about 3.8 attenuation lengths for neutrons and panels should last more than 40 times longer mounted under a water tower if they were not also affected by local radioactivity. In practice, we need only be concerned with radioactive contamination of the water in the water tower and the tower itself since the ground is a long way away. Drinking water should not have more than 30 micrograms of uranium per litre according to the EPA so this is a low level of radiation compared to soil. For a steel tower, uranium should have slagged off when the steel was made. So, doubling the life of the panels seems fairly conservative; they might last a couple of centuries or more.

Silicon can be run at much higher light intensity than solar illumination but it loses efficiency when it gets hot. Since we want to heat water in any case, cooling the panels at the bottom of a water tank just requires a bit of plumbing to carry off the 26 kW/m² of power that is not converted to electricity. This is the reason you can boil water in a paper cup over an open flame. The water keeps the paper cool. Keeping the panels within temperature limits also helps with their durability. What is the cost of electricity if we install silicon solar panels with this plumbing? Lets assume that the plumbing costs as much as the solar panels and we employ a company that charges about the same for labor. Then $15/watt over 60 years at 5 hours per day of illumination comes to about 14 cents per kWh with regular illumination, but 0.43 cents per kWh with the concentration we have arranged in any case using the heliostats. This novel method is about ten times less expensive than using coal and twenty times less expensive than buying electricity. The average 1.6 MW of electricity generated this way could be put to use powering public buildings allowing reduced property taxes.

The idea for delivering warmed water to homes appears to be novel and it actually came to me when a friend asked me to attend a Maryland Public Services Commission hearing about a proposed gas fired power plant which is currently dealing with issues of sources of cooling water with the county government. They are asking for flexibility in their licence application to go with either grey water or dry cooling. My friend was concerned about the potable water they intend to draw because each time the water system in Waldorf expands people where I live have to drill new wells and more springs run dry around the county. The issue with the grey water is that it is 15 miles away from the proposed power plant site while the plant itself is much closer to town. The plant will be throwing off about 400 MW of heat so it seems to me that they could ingratiate themselves with the city of Waldorf by offering to warm the potable water using that heat rather than waiting for the water to be used and sent so much farther away. In the end, this idea may be just fiddling while the ghost energy burns but following Luke in attempting to bring more light than heat I put it forward. There may be a number of applications for this approach of delivering power to homes through tepid water. In cases where artificial reservoirs are used instead of water towers and wells, floating absorbing mats might reduce evaporation and warm the water. I like the water tower arrangement best because it shows how to get the most out of silicon solar panels while they are still bit pricey. It seems to me to be the lowest cost for electricity around. We'll be seeing more of that with solar.

The EPA estimates that 147,000 water systems are ground sourced in the US. If 5% of those have suitable water towers then at 400 kW of electricity generation per tower that is about 3 GW of average generation available at less than a penny per kWh. The required nameplate capacity is about 460 MW or 12% of world production of solar cells in 2007. Since the supply of silicon appears to be adequate, getting a home grown heliostat industry going looks as though it might be a good investment opportunity. Because the water tower bottom environment appears to be a good place to avoid soft errors in electronics as well, companies that need very high reliability in data processing might be interested in sponsoring water tower conversions to provide themselves with an extra-reliable server network in a thermally controlled environment using low cost high circuit density components.

Waste heat may also be available from Fischer-Tropsch or Sabatier process plants that produce hydrocarbon fuels from atmospheric carbon dioxide directly. The relatively steady demand for water compared to seasonal heating suggests than towns that don't have suitable water towers may be able to warm their water supply while producing hydrocarbon fuels for other purposes using low cost wind energy as an energy input. The advantage here is that compared to the home scale plants we considered earlier, the need for heat is constant so that the equipment for producing fuel can be used continuously. Conversion of some existing combined heat and power plants might also take advantage of this if their heat production is also configured to produce cooling so that the heat consumption is fairly steady throughout the year.

Anaximenes' way

2008-01-10T23:00:00.002-05:00

Anaximenes thought that the fundamental element was Air. He argued that rarefaction of Air produced Fire and condensation produced Water and eventually Earth. He was a predecessor of Democritus whose atomic theory of matter made possible the insights of Lavoisier and the understanding that the elements were more than four but still finite in the number of kinds.

Democritus is sometimes called the ultimate materialist but a Jungian who examined the structure of myth tagged him for including the spiritual in his theory related to his spherical and slippery soul particles. Almost, these soul atoms seem like the Chi of Lau Tzu or the breath of life of Genesis. Almost, they seem to be what Anaximenes took Air to be.

The direction of density in Anaximenes theory makes sense. Earth will silt out of a pool of Water, Air bubbles in Water and Fire rises in Air. In some ways we see Air becoming Fire as flame fills the Air. Rain also shows Air becoming Water. But what of Air becoming Earth? I'm not sure how he came to this though he is essentially correct about the formation of the Earth from a cloud of gas which at some point was entirely gas though it had already condensed out dust when the solar system formed. And, felt-like dust did play a role. One path he might have taken would be to observe a rotting log becoming soil and further observing that trees, no matter how large they grow, do not leave a depression in the soil around them. Where did the wood come from? Not from Earth. Perhaps from Water which came from Air? As we know now it comes from both water and air, but we need Lavoisier's division of air into its own elements to be clear about how.

Behind all of these ideas is the concept of conservation of matter which Democritus used to arrive at the ideas that there must be irreducible unchanging units, and which Lavoisier began to demonstrate quantitatively. A century after his false conviction and execution in the Terror of the French Revolution, we learned that there is a means of transmutation that ushered in the horrors of the nuclear age. But, even then, the core concept of conservation held but was shifted to baryons rather than elements and we were back to protons, which exist as Air as the basic unit. So, in a large sense, Anaximenes had it right to begin with.

The myth of the formation of Mankind from mud leads to the Ash Wednesday admonition: "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return." This is extremely helpful to set a penitent tone, and it is true that we are partly dust. But, by number, if not by mass, we are mostly hydrogen and so to Air we shall return as well whence we came for the most part. It seems fitting then that the conclusion of penitence is resurrection and ascension into Anaximenes' beloved Air.

I had originally thought to title this post Air Mining but decided to give it its present title because I think we'll be fulfilling Anaximenes' quest.

We've become troglodyte during the Stone, Bronze, Iron, Coal and Nuclear Ages, relying more and more on grubbing under the Earth for things that we use. When once the branches of trees and bones of animals were enough, we must have ever harder and hotter substitutes for our tools. But, we have not completely forsaken the air. We still get our water from it, and this, after all is the main constituent of our bodies. We get oxygen from it both to breath and to burn the coal and oil and gas that we drag up from the Earth. This is becoming a problem as last year was the second warmest on record. We get carbon from the air rather than the earth for our food at least, and to do this we also take nitrogen from the air to grow our plants, not being satisfied with the efforts of clover, beans and alder. We fill windows with argon to help with insulation. In bulk, we gather energy from its flow and rely on its mix of transparency and opacity to regulate our global temperature and let in the low entropy power of the Sun. We use its convective properties to carry away heat by constructing ugly cooling towers where even the much higher heat capacity and steady flow of a majestic river are not sufficient to deal with our wasteful methods of producing electricity. We have not forsaken the Air completely, but our deeper and deeper delving in the Earth is abusing it and unbalancing out ecosystem. The brimstone and quicksilver we dig out of the earth with our fuel spreads death through the air across our forests and waterways while the carbon itself accumulates in the atmosphere adding opacity to it, raising temperatures faster than the ecosystem can adapt.

In our discussions of Real Energy we have seen that there is no need to mine the Earth for energy; it is counter productive. And we have seen that if we do need fuel, we can make it directly from the air without burdening the ecosystem. Thus, real energy does away with the Coal and Nuclear ages. But what of the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages? Can we similarly pull ourselves out of our shadow haunted Cave and return to the open Air? The Coal and Nuclear Ages were about the hubris of out doing the Titan Prometheus but to overcome the Bronze and Iron Ages we must propitiate the Olympian Hephaestus, because while Prometheus' stolen goods are about the means, Hephaestus' art is about the ends, the making of harder substances than wood or bones or stones. And, that is what gave us mines in the first place.

It turns out that an insight of Lavoisier's allows us to break away from Bronze and Iron. He learned that diamond is actually crystallized carbon. Diamond is harder by far than bronze or iron but it is rarely formed in nature, requiring very high temperature and pressure deep in the Earth. Associated with volcanoes, it is perhaps Hephaestus' highest art. But, the feedstock, the concentrated carbon, often ultimately comes from Air unlike copper, tin or iron. Diamond is very permanently sequestered carbon dioxide, though, at a pinch, if we run low on carbon dioxide, it is possible to burn diamond in air. Diamond is also formed industrially using vapor deposition, a direct Anaximenesian approach, but here we will consider an unusual form of diamond, Lonsdaleite, which forms as meteors fall through the atmosphere, because Lavoisier's art seems to provide a simple approach to its production that might allow it to be used in structural applications. There are other forms of carbon that show promise in structural applications including nanotubes and buckyballs, but we want a direct comparison to steel for our demonstration so we'll stick with diamond.

When we looked at mining the air for fuel, we needed to obtain water and carbon dioxide. In this case we will need a supply of carbon dioxide only. The hydrogen and bromine we'll be using will be recycled in the process.

Our project is to construct a transmission line from a wind farm for lower energy cost than using steel by mining the air for our building material. We will build a GW capacity line, similar to current high voltage transmission lines. A difference though is that we will support our conductor using our building material rather than metal cable. This will allow us to change the conductor configuration, use a higher voltage and thus lower line loss.

We'll start with our conductor. High voltage transmission lines are often a composite. A strong cable is used to support the conducting material. This is because the better conductors like aluminum and copper are less strong than steel but the amount of conductor needed is not so great that it would be thick enough to hold up against its own weight and wind forces. You could space pylons more closely, but that would increase the overall use of steel. As we already saw, a conductor 6 cm in diameter (say aluminum) can be used to carry 30 GW of power at three times the voltage currently used High Voltage Direct Current transmission because the larger radius increases the limit set by corona discharge compared to a smaller radius used for the Pacific Intertie which carries 3 GW. We can retain the larger radius by making the conductor hollow. The cross sectional area of the conductor can be reduced by a factor of 30 to meet our 1 GW goal. So, the thickness of our cylindrical conductor will be about 0.5 cm. Diamond has a high tensile strength (about 95 GPa) compared to prestressed steel strands (about 1.6 GPa) so that the cross sectional area we will need will be (proportionally) less than the ratio of the radii of the hollow-to-non-hollow conductor (about a factor of three) times the ratio of steel-to-diamond tensile strengths (about 1/59). So we need about 20 times less cross sectional area compared to steel. By mass, this comes to about a factor of 44 less mass. We'll arrange this in the form of a sheath around the conductor which will need to be in the form of a woven cloth because the coefficient of thermal expansion of metals is a factor of ten or so larger than for diamond. We'll also include a few atmospheres of carbon dioxide within the supportive sheath so that in case it gets heated to 800 C, a breach of the sheath will cause any combustion to be extinguished. We'll also provide for an external conductor to avoid this situation arising from lightning.

We can largely ignore the improvements in weight that diamond conveys in the construction of our conductor because most of the weight is in the conductor itself. Also, we needn't really have gone to the trouble to improve our conductor since our wind farm may only need to build out a transmission line that is 100 miles or so long and conventional conductors using high voltage alternating current would do the job. So, this portion is mostly for fun. Much more of the embodied energy in out transmission line is in the pylons and we turn to this now.

Steel used in construction has a lower tensile strength than prestressed strands by a factor of 2 so that we can reduce the cross section of our structural members by a factor of 124 using diamond as opposed to steel and ignoring the reduced mass of the pylon itself. The amount of mass is thus a factor of 276 less. The embodied energy of steel is 32 MJ/kg so all we need to do is figure out how much energy we need to make 3.6 gm of diamond and we will be able estimate our energy savings.

We already calculated that to condense carbon dioxide from the air we need 0.77 MJ/kg so things are looking pretty good. We'll take a supply of hydrogen and form methane using the exothermic Sabatier reaction which means that we will need to recycle the water produced at this point. The energy input is about 14 MJ/kg. After these energy inputs we are basically doing room temperature chemistry (Lavoisier's specialty) producing bromoform from methane and then producing poly(hydridocarbyne) from the bromoform. We'll input about 2 MJ/kg of carbon using free radical halogenation to make the bromoform. The polymer is then painted in solution on our growing structural element and warmed using argon gas. The waste heat from the methane formation can be used for this step. To be safe, lets add another 14 MJ/kg to be sure the bromine, argon solvent and remaining hydrogen all get properly recycled. This assumes we use oxidation of hydrogen to separate our reactants but the hydrogen bromine can probably be handled with less energy input. So, in all we need about 31 MJ/kg to produce our structural element, similar to the value for steel. But, to replace the steel we need much less so we need a factor of 280 less energy to build a pylon.

Take a deep refreshing breath. Anaximenes would say "I told you so."

Now, world steel production is only 1.3 billion metric tons per year and to replace that we would need only 4.7 million metric tons of diamond compared to about 3 billion metric tons of carbon in our fossil fuel pollution. But, there are probably other materials that could be replaced as well. Concrete production comes to around 12 billion metric tons and wood is harvested at 3 billion metric tons per year. So, we might begin to sequester a few percent of our carbon emissions by mining the air for carbon. Leaving the trees alone might have the largest effect, since this would both take up carbon in forests and help to bring our estuaries back into balance.

We've been looking at Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) recently. How would replacing the steel in a wind turbine with diamond affect this value? The amount of steel used in 3 MW wind turbine is described in this life cycle analysis which estimates the EROEI to be 20. Assuming 10% steel by mass for the reinforced concrete foundation, the structure contains about 460 metric tons of steel/iron. Using our conversion factor of 32 MJ/kg, this is about 14 million MJ of embodied energy and about 55% of the 7405 MWh of energy used in construction of the turbine. So, replacing steel with diamond would give 3333 MWh instead. Thus the EROEI would be boosted by a factor of 2.2 to 44.

Back in our pylon, we would want to use the same method for protecting against combustion that we used in our conductor, namely, filling hollow structural elements with several atmospheres of carbon dioxide so that a combustion rupture would be self-extinguishing. This probably has fabrication advantages as well. The thermal conductivity of diamond is quite high and we need to build our tubes by painting layers which are warmed using argon gas to remove the hydrogen in the poly(hydridocarbyne) and the solvent. Thus, having heat flow down the tube once this is done will allow us to rapidly paint on the next layer. Arranging our painting and warming heads periodically around the growing mouth of the tube would essentially have us spinning the tube into existence. At a rate of tens of microns per second growth, we can grow a meter long tube in about a day. Our manufacturing facility would bear an uncanny resemblance to a uranium centrifuge enrichment facility with all that spinning going on, but would not be prone to seismic risk since the rotational frequencies would be much lower, in the neighborhood of tens of Hertz.

Lonsdaleite, our chosen form of diamond, has still not been characterized fully experimentally and the samples studied so far show a hardness somewhat lower than common diamond. Thus, we might have to use more than we have anticipated. Theoretical study suggests that the Lonsdaleite structure may be slightly stronger than regular diamond and that present samples are affected by defects and impurities. In any case, other carbon structures are even stronger. Fullerite may be twice as strong as regular diamond. The choice of what to mine the air for will likely come down to ease of fabrication and required energy. But, our passage through our troglodyte phase and our flirtation with Hephaestus would seem to be ending and drawing to a close the Ages with which we understand history. For our new Age, the name Carboniferous has already been taken and Anthropocene seems too ominous. Let's just call it the restoration of the Holocene instead.

EROEI

2008-01-09T11:03:00.002-05:00

Energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) is a measure of the feasibility of an energy source and so it should be useful for comparing different energy sources to try to pick which one to use. Here we are mainly concerned with real energy, but from time to time I get into discussions with people who feel that nuclear power is a good thing because it is suppose to have a high EROEI. They are deceiving themselves but they are being encouraged by the nuclear industry in this self-deception so lets look at the numbers. We won't do a full life cycle analysis, just find a few of the problems.

EROEI can be calculated as (net energy out)/(energy expended)+1. We can see that EROEI=1 is the break even point because if you are not getting any net energy out then you have zero in the numerator of the fraction and you are left with 1 in the sum. This is the situation where it takes just as much energy to get energy as you actually get. The classic example would be when an oil well needs a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of oil. Oil wells shut down before this happens. If an oil well gets two barrels of oil gross for every one used to run it then the EROEI(thermal) for the well is 2. We have pumped two barrels total to get one barrel net: 1/1+1. We are tagging the EROEI as thermal because that will be important later. Now let's consider an oil field where the output of half the wells are used to run the whole field. We'll consider this from the perspective of the oil input. The oil input produces itself in half the wells leaving an equal amount to take away (net). So, EROEI(thermal)=1/1+1, the same result as you might guess. For a similar system using nuclear power with half the reactors enriching uranium to power all the reactors we have net thermal energy from half the reactors (Eu/2) and energy input from half the reactors (Eu/2) so again we get EROEI(thermal)=(Eu/2)/(Eu/2)+1=2.

Now, we've introduced the tag thermal. This is important. The net energy is not really net until we figure out how its is used. For the example of nuclear power just now, we know that the power plants that are not used for enrichment will be producing electricity with a fairly low thermal to electric conversion factor near 30%. So, we should account for this by applying this to the net energy. We get EROEI(actual)=(Eu/2*0.3)/(Eu/2)+1=1.3. For the oil, it may be used in a furnace in which case EROEI(thermal) is just fine, or it may be used in an engine in which case we would have a similar conversion factor: EROEI(actual)=(1*0.3)/1+1=1.3. Or, it might be stored until fuel cells are available to use it in which case EROEI(actual)=1.7 might be about right. Because of this ambiguity, we want to know the scope of our calculation. Are we ending at the well head, at the furnace or at the wheels? In the case of electricity, we always end at the toaster so when comparing sources, this is where we want to set our scope.

Let's look at the EROEI of the French nuclear program. The French have 58 reactors of which three are devoted to uranium enrichment so we can estimate the EROEI(thermal)=55/3+1=19.3 and the EROEI(actual)=(55*0.3)/3+1=6.5. Because we are only looking at the energy input for uranium enrichment and ignoring the energy inputs for mining, ore processing, plant construction and decommissioning, and unmaking of the nuclear waste this is really an upper limit on the EROEI(actual) of the French nuclear program even if our method of estimating is a little imprecise.

We can use our estimate of the EROEI of the French nuclear program to make another estimate. Suppose that instead of enriching uranium from 0.7% U235 to 3% U235 for fuel, it is enriched to 25% U235 and then diluted this back down to 3% as the US is now doing. Since the US is using cold war enriched uranium, the process used in France, gaseous diffusion, is an appropriate model. Assuming that the depleted uranium that is a product of the enrichment process has a U235 content of 0.3%, Then one unit of natural uranium becomes about 0.14 units of 3% enriched uranium or 0.016 units of 25% enriched uranium with the remainder being depleted uranium. It takes about 1.55 times more energy to get to the higher level of enrichment. So, if France were following the US example, we'd have five of 58 reactors carrying out enrichment rather than three; EROEI(thermal) would be 53/5+1=11.6 and EROEI(actual) would be 4.2. Again, these are upper limits owing to neglect of other energy inputs.

The problem that we run into with the nuclear industry is that they will sometimes admit that the EROEI values they calculate are thermal values, but then they will compare these with actual values from real energy sources which power the toaster without conversion. So, if they calculate an EROEI(thermal) of 20 for nuclear power they'll compare this with an EROEI(actual) of 12.5 for silicon solar panels and say "Hey, nuclear is better!" But, as we have seen, the EROEI(actual) for nuclear power is less than 7 and thus lower than for the solar panels. We've noted before that extending the use of silicon to 100 years gives an EROEI(actual)=33 and recycling makes it approach 99 eventually. The reported values for the EROEI of wind power are also actual and they come in near 20 or above, again better than nuclear power.

The World Nuclear Association has put together a table (2) of estimates of EROEI from a number of sources but they are comparing thermal figures with non-thermal figures in many cases. Let's summarize their table here making the following corrections: for nuclear power we'll use a conversion of 30%, for coal, 40% and for gas 60% assuming a combined cycle:

Power Source	EROEI(actual)
Hydro	50, 43 and 205
Nuclear (centrifuge)	18.1, 18.4, 14.5, 13.6 and 14.8
Nuclear (diffusion)	6.0, 6.7, 5.8, 7.9, 5.3, 5.6 and 3.9
Coal	12.2, 7.4, 7.32, 3.4 and 14.2
Gas (piped)	16
Gas (piped a lot or liquefied)	3.4, 3.76 and 4
Solar	10.6
Solar PV	12-10, 7.5 and 3.7
Wind	12, 6, 34, 80 and 50

Here we also have corrections to their table 2 to be consistent with their table 1 for their own calculations. Their calculations are the first listed in each nucelar row and the rest are taken in the order they give them as well. I have not checked that they copied correctly from the references they cite (they left the referernces out) but the solar PV values look familiar and are somewhat out-of-date now. In all, nuclear power does not look as good as wind, even with centrifuge enrichment and with current solar EROEI for thin film PV around 30 in 2009, it does not look good in comparison there either. If the row marked just solar is concentrated solar thermal power, then a commenter below has kindly provided a reference which did not fear to look at conversion to electricty, finding an EROEI of 27 with thermal storage and 34 without (this last is a correction spotted by Brad F at TOD). And, it should be remembered that silicon can get to 30 if you are willing to wait just a little longer than the warrantee duration. It is notable also that present day coal does better than present day (diffusion sourced) nuclear power in most estimates. In all, the renewable sources of electricity, hydro, wind and solar do better than the non-renewable sources, which is pretty much what you would expect since they don't need fuel.

There are some, particularly nuclear power proponents, who might object to my procedure here saying that EROEI should only be applied to the energy source itself and not compared with other sources in this manner. We can easily overcome these objections by subtracting one from each of the numbers in the table. This gives us a new measure which we can call Energy Delivered on Energy Expended (EDOEE). For this measure, break even occurs at the value zero (it was at the value 1 previously). This allows us to look at another set of issues. Two sources in the table require primarily electrical energy be expended to make them work. For nuclear power, enrichment is done using electricity and for solar power refining silicon is also done in this manner. This means that the mix of generating sources is essentially the same for both. Nuclear proponents will often try to hide this by saying that enrichment of uranium is done using nuclear power, but electricity is fungible so this is quite dishonest. But, since both produce electricity, they have the potential to change the mixture of generating sources. Which can do this producing the least amount of emissions? Here we are talking about future growth so we should use the high numbers for nuclear power (around 14) since enrichment capacity is currently inadequate to supply even the current set of nuclear reactors to the end of their design lifetimes so new enrichment facilities would need to be built. Enrichment causes deaths owing to criticality accidents. And, we should take at least the EDOEE for thin film solar (29) (which also uses electricity) since competition will drive out the low EDOEE producers. By taking the ratio, we see that solar power can make electricity generation free of carbon dioxide emissions with half the associated emissions to get the job done. For a utility scale solar installation at an average US location, the two are about equal.

The emissions associated with either are not that large though, and so the largest gain comes in doing the job quickly so that fossil fuel use for general consumption is eliminated. Here, wind has an advantage. 20 GW were installed in 2007. For nuclear power, it is not clear that new construction can keep up with the retirement of existing reactors. With 30 reactors under construction and a ten year construction timescale, that comes to about 3 GW/year of new nuclear power without accounting for retirement of old reactors. So, the pace of nuclear energy is slow. In fact, it is even slow compared to solar which produced 3.8 GW of new capacity in 2007. With growth rates for wind at 30% and solar at 50% annually, both are faster off the block than the essentially replacement level activity in nuclear power. Now, these are all nameplate capacities and we do need to look at the capacity factors which are 82% for nuclear power worldwide, about 35% for wind and about 20% for solar, so wind is ahead of solar by a factor of nine. New nuclear power, not adjusted for retirements, is ahead of solar by a factor of three or less and wind is ahead of nuclear by a factor of three or more. At the present rates of growth, solar will match wind in adding capacity factor adjusted new capacity in 15 years at which point is would be adding 1920 GW of namplate and 384 GW of adjusted capacity. It seems unlikely that that nuclear power will be adding that much capacity in fifteen years while the growth of solar power seems sustainable over the next decade or so owing to the rapidly falling cost of production.

Comparing EROEI(actual) or EDOEE shows us that less effort is needed to eliminate fossil fuel use in electricity generation using wind and solar power compared to nuclear power. This probably partly explains why both wind and solar are doing so much better than nuclear power in getting the job done. It also tells us how much of our time we'll be spending on paying our energy bill rather than say educating our children or improving our health. Those sources which require more effort will be more expensive and a greater drain on our resources. Since nuclear power appears to have little to contribute to accomplishing what we need to do to reduce fossil fuel emissions, it can be viewed as a wasted effort which hinders that accomplishment. Such wasted efforts generally lead to financial losses so it would seem prudent to avoid placing public money at risk in such ventures.

On critic of this entry (mcrab) has proposed a Virtual EROEI (VEROEI) which, instead of adjusting the output of thermal sources of electricity by their conversion efficiency to electricity, one would multiply the outputs of the electricity only sources, hydro, wind and PV solar by factor of three to make a comparison. This is an interesting suggestion and it would provide a fair comparison of relative EROEI between the thermal and more direct sources, giving simliar results to what we have just done using EDOEE. In a way this is a fair thing to do since, if we are to electrify transportation, a wind mill only needs to put in a third as much energy as a gas pump. So, the virtual thermal energy returned is quite a bit more. And, it is true that one can get 4 times as much low grade heat with electricity as with, say, heating oil using a heat pump. But, we can only get a one-to-one conversion when we make fuel using electricity and then only if we have a use for the process heat. Further, to intercompare thermal sources, VEROEI is not all that useful since gas produces twice as much electricity as nuclear power for the same thermal input (one does not want the nuclear fuel to melt). VEROEI may be useful for comparing oranges to oranges, but for apples-to-apples, the method adopted here seems clearer and more physical.

Jet fuel

2007-12-04T11:36:00.000-05:00

I has a request for an abstract so here it is:

It is noted that the costs of home heating with oil and with (ohmic) electricity are approaching parity. Methods to use renewably generated electricity for other needs while also heating the home are considered. It is suggested that indoor winter time food production can pay for the needed equipment and reduce carbon emissions related to transport of produce. With the anticipated reduced cost of renewably generated electricity and appropriate lighting technology a sharecropping-like business model might eventually be viable. It is found that renewable production of jet fuel using atmospheric water vapor and carbon dioxide as feed stocks could stabilize both heating and jet fuel costs while using both less land area than biomass based methods and less space in the home than winter vegetable co-heat production. Reuse of existing oil delivery infrastructure makes the conversion easier in terms of building a viable business model. It is also noted that reuse of natural gas delivery infrastructure could allow total US jet fuel use to be renewably sourced through co-production of volatile hydrocarbons with home heating, delivery to warmer regions and subsequent final conversion. A novel approach to the Fischer-Tropsch process for producing hydrocarbon fuel which relies on direct energy transfer to the catalyst using microwaves is proposed which has potential to reduce bulk heating requirements and improve loading of the reactants on the catalyst. This method should use carbon dioxide rather than carbon monoxide as an input. A possibly pedagogically useful analogy for understanding the PdV path integral is given in an explanatory note.

The average retail price of heating oil hit $3.29 a gallon this week while the average retail price of electricity is around $0.11/kWh. So, with a 75% efficient oil furnace the cost of heating a home with oil is about 3.2 cents per thousand British thermal units (BTUs), the same as for electricity using ohmic heating at 100% efficiency. And, since it is easier to selectively heat parts of a home with electricity, it is now cheaper to pull out those space heaters than to buy oil. People in Maine though, who are selectively heating just their beds with hair dryers because they are on fixed incomes need immediate relief because the cost of replacing your plumbing every year (if you don't drain it and create a public health hazard), is still pretty high. Our ambitions to set record oil company profits by violating the ninth commandment to sow violence in the Middle East have many follow-on costs.

Ohmic heating such as you get with an electric space heater has a Heating Seasonal Performance Factor of about 3.4 which is just the BTUs per watt-hour. In more moderate climates you can do about a factor of three better using an air heat pump so for people with these systems, their cost of heating is 3 times less than for oil heat.

Since I am moving over to less expensive renewable energy for electricity I've been planning on switching off of oil in any case to reduce carbon emissions but I have not settled on a heating system though I've been favoring a geothermal heat pump. For these, the constant ground temperature is used so that you don't have any ohmic heating at all since you aren't exposed to very cold outside temperatures when air heat pumps don't work and thus resort to heating coils. My resistance to ohmic heating is showing here. It is a rule of thumb that says don't waste electricity on heat since it is a much better energy source than that. As we've seen, the idea of wasting real energy does not make a lot of sense, but old habits die hard. George Monbiot, who wants to retain the use of natural gas for heating in England, wants to generate electricity in the home with a gas generator and use the waste heat from that to heat the home. My problem is the opposite, I want to use the electricity for something more useful first and then get the heat as a bonus. But, I can't really turn on enough appliances to heat the house so what to do?

One way to reduce carbon emissions is to eat locally, especially fresh greens which require a lot of fossil energy to get here from across the country. Looking at the improvements in lighting efficiency and the spectral requirements of plants it looks as though I could grow quite a lot of my winter greens with a basement greenhouse that uses blue and red light emitting diodes. Because plants are not all that efficient at using light, even when you spoon feed them their favorite colors, most of the light will turn to heat and heat the house. From my investigation so far though, it would be hard to turn this into a business because I can only anticipate a couple hundred dollars worth of vegetables which just covers the cost of equipment using the less expensive compact fluorescent lights. Also, I've run into trouble finding seeds locally. When I explained my idea to the salesperson at the hardware store where I did find some half price wax bean, green bean and pea seeds from Baltimore, I heard the same idea from him that electricity is more expensive than oil for heat, though as we've seen that is no longer really the case. I think that the potential for growing plants using renewable power is going to get better as the cost of power comes down and the cost of lighting reduces. One way to make this work would be to contract for wind power with demand management so that the lights are on when the wind blows. Then the cost of electricity should be about 6 cents per kWh and people who let their basements be used to grow plants in the winter could get a reduced price for heat. But, this is probably a few years off and individual efforts that document successes and failures would be the best way to proceed right now.

Not everyone is going to want to have a cellar sharecropper coming in and out delivering milk, eggs and vegetables every week while tending to the harvest and not everyone has an 8 foot by 10 foot space to devote to this. But, thinking more about George Monbiot's favorite subject heat, there is a valuable commodity that could be made at home using electricity and which could answer his last dilemma, air travel.

There is a fairly important paper by Agrawal et al. published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that grapples with the problem of biofuels just not having much of a place in a renewable energy economy owing to the low efficiency of plants at converting sunlight to energy. The paper goes about half way to converting our transportation fuels to renewable sources by supplementing plants with hydrogen generated from electrolysis. But, they still rely on plants to provide the carbon. We can see that we need the other shoe to drop if we consider the ill-fated Biosphere II experiment compared with the International Space Station. Biosphere II needed a little more than three sunlit acres, in theory, to support the respiration of a crew of ten. The space station devotes the volume of two fairly small canisters of zeolite and a small portion of the solar power they collect to do the same task for a crew of six. We are simply much better at collecting carbon from the atmosphere than plants are. A slight modification of the scheme proposed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper reduces the land area needed to produce liquid fuels that cover all our current transportation as we do it now from their admirable million square kilometers to just 100 thousand. Now, we don't really need to use liquid fuels for most of our transportation. We can do much better using electricity directly. So, really, the place to look at liquid fuel needs is aviation where its use seems irreducible without cutting service. This was Monbiot's sad conclusion, that he could retain most of our activities while cutting carbon emissions but aviation would have to be cut. He morns the loss of love miles.

So, lets make renewable jet fuel without encroaching on food production or wilderness. There are a lot of ways of doing this so what is outlined here may not be the cheapest but lets just put together a system that gets both carbon and hydrogen from the air and turns it into jet fuel while heating a home all while using renewably generated electricity. First we need our hydrogen and carbon sources. These are water vapor and carbon dioxide. We'll plan on producing about 150 gallons a month of jet fuel as our maximum production rate so we need to condense about 0.4 kg/hour of water and 1.9 kg/hour of carbon dioxide. We could go higher if we concentrate on the efficiency of our production method, but remember we want to heat a house so we'll put half the energy use into the chemical bonds in the jet fuel and half into heat (50% efficient) so we want to make about as much jet fuel as we would normally burn as heating oil. The water is easily had using a standard dehumidifier running at about 220 watts. We'll prefer this source of water to avoid impurities and in a basement application a dehumidifier is often welcome. To get the carbon dioxide we'll use the same system used aboard the space station, There are other methods such as that being developed by Klaus Lackner's collaborators in Arizona which may be more energy efficient but since we are heating a home, we'll just pick one since we want the waste heat.

The zelotite used on the space station has been characterized by NASA so it is fairly easy to estimate our material and power requirements for obtaining our carbon. The amount of air we need to process to get our hydrogen at 20 C and 25% relative humidity is 100 kilograms per hour. To get our carbon we need to process more air than this, about 4000 kilograms per hour. Entraining 20 C air with the output of our dehumidifier at -10 C we get the proper air flow at 19 C. The zeolite will carry about 10 grams of carbon dioxide per kilogram of absorber at this temperature and the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere so assuming 20 minutes each to equilibrate in both the loading and unloading phases, and taking the the space station model of constant operation using two separate zeolite components, we need 63 kilograms of zeolite in each component. Since zeolite has about the density of water, the space needed would be about the size of two relatively small adults. So far we are keeping our apparatus to a space smaller than a regular oil furnace so that the space issue that winter time basement farming might run into is not arising here. If we want to be more parsimonious in our use of zeolite, we can use the cold outside air to load the carbon dioxide, reducing our use of zeolite by a factor of about two for 0 C air. NASA didn't characterize zeolite below this temperature, but extrapolating suggests that we might limit our zeolite use substantially more if we were willing to throw energy at the problem, chilling the outside air. But, by then we'd have heated the house because this would be a standard air heat pump. Again, other technology might be used so we won't speculate further.

Now we just need to calculate the energy needed to pump the carbon dioxide from the unloading pressure of 0.01 torr (to get better than 90% unloading) up to a pressure that will be useful for Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, about 17 bar at 19 C if our working temperature is to be near 230 C. To do this we need a 410 watt pump. So far we've used 630 watts of power collecting our hydrogen and our carbon. The rest is chemical energy, and, as Agrawal et al. point out we only really need to separate the hydrogen out of the water since we could use the carbon dioxide in out Fischer-Tropsch process though we'll look at an interesting means of producing the traditional carbon monoxide in a bit. But let us look at the land area needed to gather a kilogram of carbon. Our 410 watt pump will run for 4 months a year gathering about 0.52 kilograms of carbon an hour. So all together it gathers 1500 kilograms of carbon. To do that it would need one third of the annual output of a three by three meter square solar array. You might power air conditioning in the summer with the same array. Here we are assuming 15% efficiency for the solar array for comparison with the calculations in Agrawal et al. So, to gather 1 kilogram of carbon we need a land area patch about 7 centimeters on a side and no tractor. Now we can see our advantage over plants at collecting carbon. They need about a square meter to do the same thing over a growing season. Even though the plants provide the carbon striped of oxygen, the awkwardness of compacting soil to collect the carbon and gather it all in for processing makes it seem silly to burden our ecosystem to provide jet fuel when we can do so much more compactly in a system where the infrastructure is already in place. In Maine, small oil companies are having a great deal of difficulty because their customers are only placing small orders so that they are running all over the place delivering very little oil at each stop. Would it not be better to go pick up 300 gallons of jet fuel every two months and take it to the airport in Portland or Bangor? Would it not be better to cap the price of heating and jet fuel now by contracting with Mars Hill Wind Farm to provide the power. At a flow through rate of $0.07/kWh it may be possible to beat the current price of $2.62/gal for jet fuel. At the least, Maine's fuel assistance program should be looking at this as a means to help in meeting the State's obligations under the northeastern regional agreement on climate change.

Well, as we've seen, the energy involved in gathering the hydrogen and the carbon is not so large. The main energy involved is in converting water and carbon dioxide into jet fuel. And, this is also where the relative inefficiency of thermal processes makes the production of sufficient heat for a home a natural result. The Fischer-Tropsch process revolves around the carbon monoxide bond which is one of the strongest, higher than the ionization potential of many elements. It is the strength of this bond, 11.2 electron volts, that determines what kind of dust, silicate or hydrocarbon, that stars form at the end of their lives. Oxygen and carbon are paired up one to one in the expanding atmosphere of the star until one or the other is used up. If there is extra oxygen left then silicate dust is formed, if there is extra carbon left, carbonaceous dust is formed including large molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Carbon monoxide is a tough molecule and so quite a lot of energy is needed to separate it. This is the reason for the fairly high temperature used in the Fischer-Tropsch process. High pressure is used to ensure that hydrogen and carbon monoxide get well enough layered onto the catalyst that helps to move oxygen off of the carbon monoxide molecule so that there is always another molecule to carry the oxygen away. To do standard Fischer-Tropsch we would first produce carbon monoxide from the carbon dioxide. This can be done rather elegantly using silicon as an assisted photcatalyst. If we were to use this method we would use artificial light for photons. Once we have the carbon monoxide we would mix it with hydrogen from electrolysis of the water we've collected and pass it through a kiln (ohmic heating) at high pressure within a pipe that contained our catalyst. Once brought up to temperature the process is exothermic and releases a large portion of the energy we have stored through making hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Water produced in the process would be recycled into hydrogen. This, together with the desired hydrocarbons, would be cooled by heating the home.

Perhaps alternatively we might dispense with the carbon monoxide production and use light in a similarly innovative way. Metal powders are easily heated with microwaves and microwave generators are more robust than kiln elements so we might arrange our catalyst as a powder suspended in fiberglass. Loading onto the catalyst works better at low temperatures so we might get a faster reaction if we pulsed microwaves to allow a load/react cycle. Since microwaves will tend to drive off water preferentially to carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrogen or the hydrocarbon product, we should expect the oxygen to transfer from the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide to hydrogen to form water. If the catalyst is shaped to include sharp points, it may be that corona discharge or simply strong electric fields owing to the induced currents in the catalyst will assist in transferring the oxygen without the need to reach bulk temperatures as high as usually used. The main thing though would be the better loading of hydrogen which should eliminate coking (we've already eliminated ammonia poisoning) and thus allow the catalyst to be used for a heating season or more. The use of silicon dioxide as a supporting material could be problematic but another non-conducting material might be found to be used as a alternative. In this case, the reactions is less exothermic than when carbon monoxide is used so that we would get a greater fraction of our home heating from the inefficiency factor of the electrolyzer.

Chemistry is fun so that little bit of speculation should be taken as just that, it is untested. But, running a standard Fischer-Tropsch process to make jet fuel is proven and even certified by the Air Force. Doing it in a way that produces only fuel, oxygen and heat is somewhat novel but relies, ignoring speculation about using microwaves, on demonstrated technology. Heating is used through the day and night, so using wind power seems like a good match. One could store a bit of hydrogen and oxygen as a backup in case the wind died down for a while and use this for process heat or for just straight home heat until the wind got blowing again. Right now, carbon dioxide is an industrial waste gas produced in pure form in the manfacture of quicklime for cement for example, so it may be best to begin using that supply first rather than condensing it out of the air. External tanks of liquid carbon dioxide could be sized so that deliveries could be no more frequent than pickups of of jet fuel. Adequate filtering of town or well water could also substitute for our dehumidifier. As the cost of renewable electricity continues to fall, it is almost certain that we will make fuel for aviation in this manner, but right now, people whose incomes are low and indexed to an inflation rate that excludes both energy and food need help. Making a start at a way to make home heating pay seems like something to pursue. Here is a sketch of how the whole system flows:

Schematic renewable jet fuel production method. Energy inputs assume 100% efficiency so heat output is a lower limit. 70% efficiency in electrolysis implies and additional 3000 W of heat.

The Northeast and Mid-Atlantic originate quite a lot of air travel and are also where heating fuel is most used. It is likely that conversion of homes that use oil to jet fuel production can supply the regional demand. But, to supply flights originating where home heating does not use so much energy would require using another kind of existing infrastructure. Forming hydrocarbons up to butane and sending them from homes through existing natural gas pipelines to the South and Southwest might allow minor further conversion to be done in those regions to produce their jet fuel.

Now, if I can just find some lettuce seed....

Calculation:

I get razzed sometimes for "not doing my homework" when in fact I am just leaving out details that people who might make that sort of comment could fill in themselves. I'm trying for a discursive engaging style here where the language is evocative. I was trained to the idea, attributed to Martin Rees, that you lose 10% of your readers with each equation. Ten equations, zero readers. So, I allow the blog to be a little less easy to use in the interest of making it more generally useful. Scan that again: You might need to pull down a calculator sometimes and fill in the blanks but you should be able to read all the way through an article and enjoy it before going back to check the math. Comments are open in case I've been too opaque on the maths.

In any case, I thought of a nice analogy for calculating the work done in pumping a gas up to a higher pressure that I thought might be pedagogical so if you have read this far and are a high school physics teacher, this is all yours.

When you calculate what is called PV work where PV stands for pressure times volume rather than photovoltaic, it makes a difference how you manage things. I learned statistical mechanics before I learned standard thermodynamics so I didn't get this drilled into me as much as some of you might have. But, I understand that it can be confusing.

A lazy man's load is trying to carry too much. If you are moving a wood pile into a wood shed, a very good idea because the wood shed works harder than you do (why?), you might think that you'll get the job done in fewer trips if you really load up on each trip. The lazy man wants to make fewer trips. But, what happens is that you end up dropping several sticks along the way so that you have to go back and bend over three times to pick these up so you end up doing more work than you would have if you had just taken loads you could handle. How much work you do to move the wood pile depends on the manner in which you do it. The great bugaboo of thermodynamics is just this kind of thing. If you go dropping sticks all over the place, creating more randomness than you need to, you end up doing more work. In statistical machanics, you are increasing the number of states avaiable to the system. In thermodynamics, you are raising the temperature.

We're going to use the ideal gas law, PV=nRT, to calculate how much power we need to condense carbon dioxide from 0.01 torr up to 17 bar. A torr is about 1/760th of 15 lbs/square inch, about atmospheric pressure, and a bar is about 15 lbs/square inch. In our equation, P is pressure, V is volume, n in the number of moles, R is the universal gas constant and T is the temperature. We can adjust R to whatever units we are using, but we need to be careful about T. To see why this might be, consider making both sides of the equation zero. To get zero pressure with finite volume and material we need a very special kind of temperature called absolute temperature. There is obviously atmospheric pressure on Earth when the temperature is zero in F or C so this is not what we mean by zero temperature. We use a scale called Kelvin which happens to have the same spacing as the C scale but has a value of about 273 K when water freezes (0 C). There will be about 385 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the end of the year so its partial pressure is about 0.28 torr so that is why we want to pump to 0.01 torr for unloading.

Now, we have two ways to increase P which is what we want to do. We can increase T or we can decrease V. Decreasing V is the way we'd like to increase P, but when we decrease V, both T and P go up. Try it. Get a bicycle pump and start pumping. You'll find that the base gets pretty warm. But, increasing T is a probem because the gas will eventually cool, but in the meantime you are working away against pressure that is going to come down with the cooling. This is the lazy man's load problem. If you get to 17 hot bars, you'll need to pump some more latter once the gas has cooled to get up to 17 cool bars. So, we're going to assume that the gas at high pressure can cool efficeintly as we are pumping so that we are not doing that extra work. So, we hold T constant at 19 C or 292 K. So we want to add up all the little bits of work we do to go from a large volume and low pressure to a low volume and high pressure so we want to keep track of P as we make small steps in volume and add up the products of the pressure and volume changes. When we do this kind of adding up, we notice that P changes like 1/V so the answer will look like the logorithm of the ratio of the beginning an ending volumes because that is what happens when you add up little bits of that form. This will be multiplied by the other terms, nRT, that we got when we wrote pressure in terms of volume. We know what that ratio is from the ideal gas law, it is just the ratio of the beginning and ending pressures. We are collecting 1.9 kilograms of carbon dioxide per hour so that is about 43 moles per hour. The logarithm of the ratio of the pressures is about 14, R is about 8.314 and T is 292 so we get 1.47 MJ of energy expended each hour or about 410 watts.

Reprise

2007-11-18T21:29:00.000-05:00

Over the last ten months we've followed the release of the Fourth Assessment Report on global warming from the IPCC. Since they've won the Nobel Prize for Peace, we don't really have to spell out Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change anymore. We looked at the fact of global warming in February, the consequences of global warming in April and the good news that we might all prosper in May. Now there is a synthesis of all of these pieces just before the week of Thanksgiving. And, now we stand with the biggest corn harvest ever (13.2 Billion Bushels) though here on the edge of the great southeastern drought yields have been too low for farmers to break even. We might give thanks for the bountiful harvest but we might also consider if we are using it wisely. World grain stocks won't replenish based on this harvest, in part, because we are converting much of the extra yield to fuel.

Both the Australian and Southeastern droughts have had an effect on wheat supply with Tennessee and Arkansas seeing lower yields though increased land in wheat. The droughts in both areas are part of what we might expect from global warming. The Australian drought has already been tied to warming through the increase in evaporation that higher temperatures bring. The drought in the US southeast is likely just a preview of reduced precipitation expected in the region as temperatures rise. On page 890 of the Working Group 1 report in figure 11.12 we see a projected 12% reduction in summer precipitation centered on Louisiana. Already the high heat and reduced river flow have shut down a nuclear power plant in the region while an emergency declaration seeks to override environmental protections for waterways Georgia shares with Florida and Alabama. It is easy to see why the new report from the IPCC favors mitigation over adaptation. We are slow to adapt when we won't even look straight at the problem and that slowness means people won't eat as grain stocks fall. Adaptation, planting crops in new areas and abandoning old areas that used to be fruitful, takes just as much effort, if not more, than working to decrease emissions and restoring the climate to the state we have adapted to for 10,000 years. But the report itself mentions both biofuels and nuclear power on the mitigation side, so there is more thinking to be done. We can't both eat well and burn biofuels as a substitute for fossil fuels. And, we can't both wait for nuclear power plants to attempt to displace coal plants and expect them to continue to work properly in a changing climate. They take much too long to build, and then may be inundated by the extra sea-level rise that the delay causes or be unable to run without killing a river because of the higher temperatures caused by that same delay. Reliance on nuclear power does not just mean large stranded costs as plants are closed before the end of their design lifetimes owing to both changing climate and lack of fuel, but huge opportunity costs owing to the lack of investment in more suitable technology.

The reason for the inclusion of these distractions from the main task, I think, is the involvement of economists in the preparation of the report. There is a obvious distinction drawn between the growth of mitigation efforts at a rate that markets can support on their own and at a rate that whole economies can support, but these economists, because they concentrate on failures rather than successes in their training, miss the even more obvious. Many of them have benefited from a gift of land from John Bulkeley, George Downing, Samuel Winthrop and John Alcock in 1649 that has since grown into $35 billion dollars in assets.

The economists ignore this even though many of them get almost monthly reminders in the mail that this small gift of land accounts for about half the of the $35 billion owing to compounding over 350 years and the other half owing to the example the first gift set. The economists do understand the compounding part though they often misapply it as discounting, but they don't understand that their very incomes depend, in part, on this initial gift which has played such a large role in the development of their field. The work is not done, of course, since there is still an obvious lack of rigor. Because economists are used to the dead end dynamic of exploitation of depletable resources, they apply discounting indiscriminately, implicitly assuming that anything we do today has a finite benefit. Thus, they include dead end and desperate technologies like large-scale biofuels, nuclear power and carbon capture and sequestration together with endowment technologies like wind and solar. They don't see that appropriate renewable energy technology takes progressively less and less effort just as the management of the Harvard endowment needs (proportionally) less care as it grows. As the fractional cost of renewable energy reduces, prosperity increases in a way that cannot be discounted away.

Buckminster Fuller understood the different nature of the dead end technologies and the endowment technologies. Perhaps economist would gain something by considering the role a perfidious rogue has played in making the ongoing support of the study of their subject possible, and come to draw reasonable distinctions between kinds of technology themselves. It is time for wisdom to take back the helm from the discounting pirates.

All the fish

2007-10-25T13:38:00.000-05:00

Between high school and college I made a pilgrimage with a friend to Seattle's Fisherman's Terminal. This a port behind locks that is home to salmon boats, trawlers, purse seiners, long liners and the majestic crabbers. The salmon boats, aside from purse seiners, are mostly trollers that go out to sea using lines and hooks or those that stay in Puget Sound laying gill nets. My friend signed aboard a troller while I went out on a longliner fishing for black cod, and then halibut as the season opened. We did catch a couple of large sharks but that is another story. We did not make enough to pay the boat on that trip though so the last on was the first off and I moved to a gillnetter. We fished at night in the San Juan islands, the place I first formed my understanding that island folks are just plain nicer than others. The people of the San Juans resembled the people of Mt. Desert where I had worked before in that they recognize each others existence cheerfully. This understanding is something that has been confirmed over again in Taiwan, Japan, and Hawaii.

I can say of all I met though, there was one whose recognition of my existence has left a very lasting impression. On a moonless night with a quarter mile of net set, my skipper, who was trying to teach me the lights of the islands, knew there was something close to the net. Sensing this kind of thing was beyond me but finally, in the deep dark I did see something at the end of the net, which had a light to mark it. And then it came back. Rising above the surface of the water, three times the length of the boat came a grey whale, one of the oldest mammals on Earth. It tipped an eye up to look at us and then moved on. Now, grey wales eat shellfish, so this one, swimming up the net then back down, was just stopping by to see what was going on and to say hello. Another person making a living from the sea.

The net did not hold especially more fish. It was webbed for Chinook, but I remember there was a big King with its hook tangled. Perhaps a gesture of goodwill from the whale.

Why the fish story? Today, the UN issued its Global Environmental Outlook which said, among other things, that all current fisheries are likely to collapse by 2050. About a third of fisheries have already done so because we are taking two and a half times more fish than the oceans can produce at a steady level. Centuries ago, we thought to get energy by killing whales for the oil that could be rendered from them. The grey whale was hunted to extinction in the Atlantic. The friendly eastern pacific grey that I met might do alright if we don't take all the shellfish too.

Real Energy, the subject of this blog, can be a way to ensure that what we do does not change the habitat of species so fast that they cannot adapt, if we all work together to achieve it. But we need to know how to work together. It seems to me that when a fishery collapses because of over fishing, everyone loses and by working together we can prevent this to the benefit of everyone. If we are clever enough to catch a fish, we ought to be able to figure out how to catch just the right number. Let us make a treaty to limit our fishing to what the ocean can sustain and so gain practice for limiting our greenhouse gas emissions to a level the ecosphere can accept. Yes, we must eat less fish now, but that is better than no fish at all later.

Splash plot

2007-10-15T10:18:00.000-05:00

My regular readers (all two of them) will have noticed that I have not posted since the end of August. This is owing to the fact that I don't mess with the blogspot format much and the August posts which remained listed in the side bar to the right amount to an outline of an energy transition that takes us to negative carbon emissions in sufficient time to avoid the most dangerous aspects of global warming. Now you are going to have to click on August to get the scoop. Since that time I've been flogging aspects of the plan around the net as my irregular readers know.

Today is Blog Action Day. So, I'm consigning the plan to the archive to try to contribute to this effort. The theme of Blog Action Day is the environment and the Real Energy Blog is very much concerned with this topic. Energy is such an important aspect of our interaction with the environment that to make positive changes, I feel that we need a new language and mythology about energy. I'm not really inventing this language or mythology. It is already there in the work of Buckminster Fuller or William McDonough or the environmental interviews you can hear on New Dimensions Internet Radio. What I'm trying to do is bring quantitative thinking into this kind of language based on fairly current energy data. Real Energy is participating in natural flows, Ghost Energy is grave robbing. The participation in the action of nature expands your soul. Grave robbing leads to tragedy. Saying this does make people uncomfortable. When I posted congratulations to the IPCC and Vice President Gore on winning the Nobel Peace Prize, I got 14 anonymous moderations of the message with the message going up and down. I take this as evidence that Gore's statement that Global Warming is a spiritual challenge is essentially correct. My message was a polite congratulations that should have received no moderation at all. Instead it became a battle ground of Brownian motion. There is much spiritual energy constellated around Global Warming.

Now, I notice that Andy's Blog Action Day post mentions Tim Flannery who wrote The Weather Makers, and this brings to mind the value of blogs to react to news. Flannery recently made a statement that the IPCC (one of the Peace Prize winners) will soon say that we have already passed the greenhouse gas concentration that will lead to dangerous warming. Within days, the RealClimate Blog came out to say that this is a misinterpretation. This is an example of how the worries that the blogosphere creates more heat than light are unfounded. There are self-correcting mechanisms.

Another example can be found in one of my August posts, where George Monbiot's statement that we might expect 25 meters of sea level rise this century is a misinterpretation of a recent paper in Philosophical Transactions.

A third example, so as not to pick exclusively on Australian activist sites, is a site that is attempting to shut down the nuclear power station at Indian Point in New York. While the aims of the site are quite congruent with the Real Energy Blog, the site has attacked Robert Kennedy Jr. wrongly by saying that he is invested in the company I sell solar power rental contracts for. The company has made it known that this is not the case in short order and comments on the post have cleared this up.

Blogging has a lot of reaction. The right wing blogs seem to be all a twitter about a judge in the UK who ruled that guidance is needed to show Gore's Inconvenient Truth movie there. They seem to be crowing that the judge found errors of fact in the movie. But, when you look at the list (google is your friend) it is clear that the judge was mistaken, and RealClimate has promised [and delivered] a response.

For my contribution to Blog Action Day, I'm going to take the big step of including some images in this blog. The first highlights what I consider to be an important criticism of the IPCC report. What RealClimate does goes in several directions. Correcting Flannery or Monbiot is a small thing. Pointing out that the IPCC report has not relied on the best available data is even more important. This plot from that post:

Points out that recent satellite data on sea level change shows a faster rate of increase than used in the IPCC report. So, like the way that polar sea ice is melting faster than anticipated, IPCC projections on sea level rise may be too conservative. James Hansen has been addressing this issue recently by considering the concept of scientific reticence. It may be that the IPCC cannot be relied upon to predict more than trends because warming is happening faster than can be captured using conservative methods. The post at RealClimate suggests 1 meter of sea level rise by the end of the century as a possible lower limit while Hansen has discussed 5 meters of sea level rise by the end of the century. This is 10 times as much as the prediction of the IPCC report.

Now, this correction comes from better data. Since I am not a climate scientist, I thought I would stick my neck out a bit with the following plot and stand ready to be corrected just like Flannery or Monbiot.

Mauna Loa measurements of the annual change in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (thin solid line) together with fossil fuel emissions (thick solid line) and various extrapolations. A linear extraoplation (short-dashed line) reaches dangerous climate change (450 ppm) near the year 2035 (where the line thickens). This and the exponential extrapolation (dot-dashed line) are fits minimizing Chi^2 in linear are log space respectively. The other two lines attempt to match these at the beginning and end of the measurements. They have the functional form of time to the power of time (triple-dot-dashed line) and a Gaussian (long-dashed line). The data point for 2007 is a guesstimate.

This plot is a little different from the sea level plot because it is a rate of change plot. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere goes up every year but here we just plot the amount it has increased each year rather than the cumulative change. This is a time derivative of the cumulative change measured at Mauna Loa. This is then easy to compare with the amount of carbon dioxide that we emit into the atmosphere each year by using ghost energy as counted by the Energy Information Administration. This is the bit we control. The amount we add to the atmosphere is less than the amount that stays. The place where the thick and thin lines touch is likely accounted for by forest fires in Asia. And, unlike the sea level data, we are not likely to see better data that can help us to refine trends. The ups and downs are real and not a matter of measurement error. But, we can draw the conclusion that, like our emissions, the rate of increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is accelerating. So, we can't really do better projections, and because we control the thick line, everyone uses emissions scenarios to look into the future. But, Flannery's worries lead to a question. Are there natural emissions feedbacks that could go beyond our control that are already underway? The answer is obviously yes if we look on the Asian forest fires as climate related but it is hard to make the case that this in more than a one-off event. So, the question remains open. I think that we can get a clue from the data about how bad such feedbacks could be by fitting a few functions. If there are the beginnings of a feedback, it can't be stronger that the early stages of a rapidly increasing function. So, I've thrown up an exponential function, and one that goes like time to the power of time. I thing that we can say that if such feedbacks are occurring, then they shorten the time to reaching the (nominal) dangerous level of climate change by a few years. On the other hand, if these feedbacks are present in the data, we are already in a dangerous state. It is also worth noting that gradualism is not so helpful. If we slowly reduce our emissions (Gaussian) we still reach the 450 ppm level about 15 years later.

So, that is my contribution to Blog Action Day: A diagram that is meant to spur thought and discussion. It is different from an emissions scenario approach and has some serious flaws compared to that method but it does give a little bit of a constraint on how bad things might be right now. Others might use data on forest fires or carbon uptake into the oceans to derive better constraints, but at that point would we be fitting feedbacks with feedbacks?

Cost of Freedom

2007-08-30T13:55:00.000-05:00

I've been expecting a revival of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young ever since the President said that Iraq is just like Vietnam. Those haunting lyrics:

Find the cost of freedom
Buried in the ground.
Mother Earth will swallow you
Lay your body down.

fit with Iraq even better than Vietnam since if we just left oil buried in the ground, we would not be spilling blood all over the sand. And, we'd be a heck of a lot more free too. Oil, coal and gas are like the chains ghosts rattle to show their misery.

But, the President is a kidder. In Korea or Vietnam we were there by invitation under a theory that we were fighting for our own freedom. In Iraq we are fighting for our enslavement to oil because any theory that we are fighting for someone else's freedom breaks on the hard rock that we are fighting all sides in a civil war; no motive but oil is left. So, what is the cost of freedom from oil?

I mentioned already that I'd raised the idea with Phil Sharp that rationing makes the most sense. This is an idea that I'd been kicking around for a few years on green email lists. The idea would be to have a second currency (like postage stamps) but instead of rationing the way we ration money to set the inflation rate, distributing the resource at the top, we would distribute the resource equally to all so that every one's creativity would become engaged in figuring out how to get off ghost energy. The way we ration cash is a cap-and-trade system at the top of the banking system. The way to ration carbon is a cap-and-trade system at the consumer level. I want to say right now that the term white market, as I coined it a few years ago, is a ration free portion of the economy that is already off carbon. As many Amish are moving to solar power for their workshops, the goods they sell would be pretty much part of a white market already. But, I don't mind a different coinage at all. E. Swanson's idea is that the white market is the place where people who have been especially successful in reducing their fossil fuel use go to sell their extra rations to people who need more time to get things figured out. And, I don't mind calling the rations icecaps as George Monbiot proposes, but I do think that his proposal to give the government it's share for free is a mistake. Government should recover the ability to use carbon the way that it recovers the ability to use cash. Then it is apparent to citizens how well the government itself is doing on getting off carbon. Citizens can't practice eternal vigilance if the government use is not coming out of their pockets. Monbiot's view seems to be changing though compared to the rationing ideas he presented in his book Heat. He does not mention granting rations to the government here but he is still concentrating on rations for electricity and fuel rather than having the rations trace fossil fuel use throughout the economy. (Note to George: the highest rate of sea level rise mentioned by Hansen et al. (2007) is 5 meters per century, it could go higher but when talking about 25 meters they say centuries rather than millennia. See this response at realclimate.org.) Ultimately, icecaps need to trace back to as close to the mine or well-head as possible to be retired. In the case of oil, many will be retired at the tanker, for coal at the mine and for imported goods at the border. It is doubtful to me that the WTO will object to requiring rations appropriate to the use of fossil fuels in the manufacture and transport of imported goods since all goods face the same treatment. To get a low ration burden a Chinese manufacturer need only use solar power and a sailing ship.

At first, the total rations match current use and then the total issued is reduced each year reaching zero at a particular date. That date should be set so that the impact on total demand for oil and gas is substantial even if production is curtailed for physical reasons such as the effects of exhaustion of the resource. The date should also be set to minimize the cost of carbon dioxide sequestration out of the atmosphere that we may well need to undertake. Finally, we need to work within a time frame that makes converting the transportation fleet, electrical energy sources and home heating feasible. The shape of the curve to zero should likely be steep at first down to a 20% reduction because conservation can manage this kind of reduction fairly easily and this saves everyone money. The time-scale for energy source conversion is about 20 years at the present rate of growth of renweables (45% annual) while the longest time-scale is for home heating since oil and gas furnaces last a long time. Fleet conversion has a shorter time-scale since automakers anticipate putting plugin hybrids on the market in 2010. Their retooling could take 5 years from that point so that fleet turnover would be nearly complete in 17 years. Monbiot urges a 23 years to zero emissions date. Very cheap renewable electricity might persuade those who rely on oil or gas for heat to convert before their furnaces are worn out so his date may be a good choice. A 5% of current use reduction per year for 4 years gets us to cheap oil and gas and captures the low hanging fruit of conservation. The remainder of the curve though would be nearly as steep at 4.2% of current use per year. Taking the date at 2035 would have us reducing at 3% of current use per year after the first four years, a rate that enhanced economic activity owing to lowering energy costs could likely sustain. Continued growth of the US renewable energy industry over the following few years after US zero emissions would cover world energy needs and would be produced below the cost of production of fossil fuels so that any lagging countries would be easily persuaded to get with the program. Presumably our balance of trade will be nicely positive as a result. This would also be the time to undertake technological carbon dioxide sequestration efforts since this would be the point at which the cheapest renewable energy equipment could be produced most abundantly and also the point at which we would know what scale of effort will be required.

The most important aspect of people-level rationing is that it makes a transition to real energy affordable because it reduces the cash price of coal, oil and gas by reducing demand. A carbon tax makes things more expensive by raising (cash) prices so people do not see the benefit in their wallets and don't have extra funds to buy a new plugin hybrid electric car, for example. Tax shifting only works up to the point where there are remaining taxes to shift and a rapid transition would need a very steep carbon tax which would likely overrun current taxation. Rations give everyone room to maneuver, a bit of freedom on the way to even greater freedom.

The Undertaking

2007-08-29T00:34:00.000-05:00

The reason, I think, that people get so infuriated with James Hansen is that he has such a long track record of being right much sooner than other people. He's the kid in class who gets the answer not only first, but right away, no sweat. He's also the kid who just blurts out the correct answer without being called on. So, people like the President attempt to censor him and there is a great roaring on the internet when some data published on the web has an unimportant flaw (see he's not perfect).

So, here comes another flap. A newspaper article has misquoted a new paper by Hansen and co-workers saying that they are predicting 25 meters of sea level rise by the end of the century. And, a number of blogs are cranking up the ridicule. But, if you read the paper you'll see that they predict 25 meters in centuries, not this century. This is still important because it is not 25 meters in a thousand years, but you end up with several meters by the end of this century, not 25 meters.

Let's work backwards in the paper because there is some really big new at the end that the newspaper article missed. First the last footnote:

The potential of these 'amber waves of grain' and coastal facilities for permanent underground storage 'from sea to shining sea' to help restore America's technical prowess, moral authority and prestige, for the sake of our children and grandchildren, in the course of helping to solve the climate problem, has not escaped our attention.

Back in the day, colorful footnotes used to set apart some of the better academic writers but you don't run into these as often now. The footnote is about a scheme to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by burning plants to make electricity and then squirting the carbon dioxide down below the bottom of the ocean where it should stay put. The big news is not about the particular scheme, which is a little awkward, but that they are discussing sequestration at all. This is a big departure because up until now Hansen has been saying that there is likely a decade or so over which we might simply reduce emissions and thus avoid a large sea level rise. Sequestration is likely to be more expensive than just reducing emissions. The cost to build a coal plant that captures carbon dioxide for sequestration is about $2.20/Watt while thin film photovoltaic panels are being manufactured now at a cost of $1.19/Watt. So, where we would be saving money by reducing emissions, adding on a requirement to clean up the mess we've made already through technological intervention could add to our costs. There is a large prize being offered to figure out how to do large scale sequestration and make money too so it may turn out that we'll learn that sequestration saves money as well, but so far, adding sequestration to a coal plant looks as though it adds about 40% to the cost of building a plant. For a biofuel plant there may be similar costs and since the methods we know to get photosynthesis to scale up to our energy use involve needing a source of concentrated carbon dioxide, a sequestration plan based on burning grasses won't have a big impact on the atmospheric CO2 concentration even though growing grasses does help. Biological methods to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, if needed at scale, probably have to occur in the oceans though the potential of coastal regions to support much more mineralization should not be overlooked. At a guess though, since we are seeing so much progress in shifting from thermodynamic to quantum means of generating electricity, a technological approach to sequestration of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will leverage the very low cost of electricity and high availability of energy we can anticipate to use chemical sorbants that can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere much faster than plants can so that we minimize the land use impacts of our clean up effort.

Again, the big news is that Hansen is calling for sequestration of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere rather than what particular method is given as an example. So, why the change? Let's keep working backwards:

The best chance for averting ice sheet disintegration seems to be intense simultaneous efforts to reduce both CO2 emissions and non-CO2 climate forcings. As mentioned above, there are multiple benefits from such actions. However, even with such actions, it is probable that the dangerous level of atmospheric GHGs will be passed, at least temporarily. We have presented evidence (Hansen et al. 2006b) that the dangerous level of CO2 can be no more than approximately 450 ppm. Our present discussion, including the conclusion that slow feedbacks (ice, vegetation and GHG) can come into play on century time-scales or sooner, makes it probable that the dangerous level is even lower.

This is it, we won't go farther though the paper seems virtuosic. They find no evidence that ice sheets linger once the temperature goes up when they examine big climate changes in the past. That makes changes in ice cover and plant cover into an additional feedback that boosts warming on a shorter time-scale than usually assumed. This puts us in a position where just reducing carbon dioxide emissions as quickly as we can may not be enough. The solution to global warming would then involve reversing it, not just ending it. And, this is why the position has changed.

Change sounds like just what we may be needing to lay on the eyes of the ghosts we have dug up to ferry them back where they belong. All the more reason to get real about energy so we can save our pennies for the task ahead.

Many more ghosts

2007-08-27T09:00:00.000-05:00

You never get a response from the New York Times if you submit a letter to the editor aside from an auto-response in the case of email. On the other hand, they don't want material submitted or published elsewhere so we're a bit stuck. I'll leave it up to them if they want to carry this.

The New York Times had a pretty good editorial on Thursday urging Congress to investigate the recent mining accident in Utah. They feel that some decisions of the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) could have played a role in the deaths. In the following letter I agree with them but point out again that the reduced productivity for coal mining implies that even more strenuous safety efforts are needed than those that in earlier years led to reduced annual mining fatalities. So, Congress take note:

Your Editorial, "Unsafe Mining" of August 23, 2007, rightly points out that continuing to reduce coal mining deaths after last year's rise will require greater effort and Congress should look into the specifics of the most recent disaster to understand how an MSHA official died, how the mine came to be reopened and if any official corruption was involved. That Gary Jensen, an MSHA inspector, died in the rescue attempt is very concerning since his experience is lost and cannot benefit the avoidance of future accidents. This, more than anything else, even the upsurge in mining deaths last year, suggests that the MSHA is not able to do the job it once did in reducing mining deaths.

But Congress also needs to go beyond understanding the institutional breakdown in the MSHA to a broader picture that we are moving towards diminishing returns for coal mining. An MSHA operating as it once did may not be able to reduce the number of mining deaths each year as it has in the past. A study conducted by the Energy Watch Group this year finds that in the US the per miner productivity has been declining since 2000 and energy production from coal has been declining since 2002 owing to greater reliance on poorer quality coal. This indicates that at a given level of safety, a larger number of miners must die each year since ever more miners must be employed to compensate for the reduced productivity. The report suggests that outsourcing our mining deaths could not be sustainable since China and Australia will soon see similar declines with only Former Soviet Union countries boosting production out to 2050 but with world production in decline after 2030. So, an MSHA that would continue to reduce mining deaths as it once did would need to work much harder than it has in the past because it will need to protect many more miners. For a grieving agency this may seem like hard news indeed, but Congress must push it to greater efforts. NASA has now returned a school teacher safely to Earth. The MSHA can take inspiration from this.

Relying on depleting resources inevitably means greater danger as the more easily obtained and higher quality portions of the reserves are exhausted. The days of Phoebe Snow and the Road of Anthracite are long past but now we are coming to a more serious turn: do we double the 104,621 deaths that got us from 1900 to 2006 as we dig deeper for lower quality coal or do we go to the extreme to preserve life?

What the dormouse said

2007-08-22T22:38:00.000-05:00

Note: Mr. DeVore has responded in comments linked below.

I don't know why Chuck DeVore, Orange County Assembly Person would insult the California utilities he says he wants to help, but he seems to be a bit deranged in most of his arguments. He wants to repeal a long standing law in California that bans new power nuclear plants. To open, he insults Californians, calling them hypocrites because 80% of them don't carpool or use mass transit. He is outraged that California will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25% in 13 years while growing 20% in population. For 7 million new people, that's about 400 new homes a day. Every day I hear of a new housing development in California with solar power built in. What part of 2 gigawatts doesn't he understand? And, what of existing homes? While new applications for rebates for solar installations were falling off earlier this year owing to time-of-use rates, applications for rental of solar power systems were more than covering the deficit. As of today there are more than 3,600 applications for no-rebate systems which don't immediately show up on the million solar roof books. Will the existing homes in California have fewer installations than the new homes? What part of 6 gigawatts doesn't he understand? Why, this is the capacity he is proposing for new nuclear power all in thirteen years.

He has particular problems with understanding electricity. He proposes that out-of-state power sources would suffer huge transmission losses and argues that nuclear power should not be sited out of state because of this. But he must not know that the Pacific Intertie already supplies LA from Washington and manages this distance quite well. But, since LA already sucks the Colorado River dry, north is about the only direction he can go to site new out-of-state nuclear power while closer solar installations like Solar One will require less in the way of new lines. In fact, north is the only direction he can go for new nuclear power even in-state since coastal sites will face the risk of sea level rise and are unsuitable for new nuclear power plants. So, what he really wants is for the City of Sacramento to build four new nuclear power plants to power southern California. But then he'll have to wait for the levy system to get repaired because Sacramento faces its own flooding issues. And with the changing flows that loss of snowpack will bring, the Sacramento and American Rivers may experience the same kind of problems that shut down reactors on the Tenneseee River and in Europe. So, four new nuclear power plants in the middle of the State Capital to be started after the levies are fixed (10 years) and the law is changed (? years) and taking 6 years for completion gives a minimum of 16 years before any electricity is produced at all with no certainty that the plants can even operate under changing flow conditions. The lack of realism is astounding. Perhaps it is not so much that the utilities are risk adverse as he demeans them, but rather they not raving mad.

He makes another astounding statement: converting transportation to electricity would require doubling generation capacity. This shows a complete lack of understanding of the poor efficiency of the internal combustion engine. Electric transportation is much more efficient and would require at most a 30% increase in generating capacity and likely much less. But most roofs can provide this, so the 8 gigawatts of solar capacity that we may easily anticipate from home roofs alone make a very good start on this.

Others of his deluded statements include that life cycle carbon dioxide emissions from nuclear power are lower than for solar power: Nuclear plants can't be built without fossil fuels and concrete and nuclear power plants can't be recycled while solar panels don't require fossil fuels to make and recycling makes their net energy ratio higher than any other power source.

His plan to change the law in California also apparently hinges on a plan to change the federal law aimed at preventing weapons proliferation. So, now he has to change two laws and meet a 13 year deadline. These are talking points, not serious proposals. The people of Orange County should take a good look at who is paying for the nuclear kool-aid he's been drinking and give him a good long rest.

Tuppence in the Sun

2007-08-21T11:17:00.000-05:00

Mr. Dawes Sr. If you invest your tuppence wisely in the bank, safe and sound, soon that tuppence, safely invested in the bank, will compound! And you'll achieve that sense of conquest, as your affluence expands! In the hands of the directors, who invest as propriety demands!

The lyrics to the song that follows this bit of wisdom in the musical Mary Poppins can be found here. The next song, Step In Time is much more energetic and it is perhaps understandable that a song about compound interest would fail to catch on.

We are seeing a lack of propriety these days in a number of financial transactions. The slicing and dicing of risk seems to have led to a question of what value many securities have if any at all. But, if you want to take on projects that extend over a substantial period of time, credit markets are likely to be a part of what you do.

One thing we need to do is transform how we get energy and a number of options include long term components. Nuclear power, for example, extends so far into a climatically uncertain future that it is seeking extra help with finance through federal loan guaranties.

While renewable energy is forever, its implementation can be taken in 10 to 25 year chunks so it fits much better with standard lending terms. Further, risk is low so while raising capital though venture mechanisms can happen, it is also attractive to banks, especially since renewable energy equipment can serve as insured collateral. This is why so much of the financing for renewable energy is coming from institutions like Credit Lyonnais and Morgan Stanley especially in the commercial sector. In the residential sector, solar power equipment is being rolled into a mortgages for new home construction while installers for existing homes are getting savvy at helping customers find financing through secured credit based on increased equity.

But, what if you want to follow the commercial sector model of separating ownership of the equipment from the use of the equipment in the residential sector. Individually financing each deal, as might work for supplying Walmart with solar power, becomes time consuming and thus expensive. What is needed is an aggregate instrument. One way that aggregation has been used with propriety is the securitization of leases. CVS, for example, financed its eastern expansion based on the security provided by the fact that it had property leases to conduct its business. This brought them lower cost financing since the aggregated leases were more secure than individual leases.

One way to secure low cost credit to allow the long term use of solar power on homes is to secure the credit on the basis of an aggregate of rental contracts which assure repayment of the debt. So long as those contracts are sufficiently attractive that few of them are likely to be broken (they save customers money) then you have a low risk security that does not require high interest. This is the form of financing that Citizenre has adopted for its solar power equipment rental business. Shaving the cost of financing puts it in a better competitive position than attempting to work out deal-by-deal financing, so much so, that it can afford to ignore state-level rebates available to individual purchasers of solar power equipment.

There is certainly room for venture capital in the solar power business, especially for high risk new technology development. But, for deployment of proven technology, the model being adopted in the commercial sector using more traditional financing leads to cost savings that are important for market competitiveness. Carrying this over to the residential market, with its much larger roof space resource, will likely rebalance the solar market towards an acceleration of its current 30% annual growth.

Cliffhanger

2007-08-06T00:34:00.000-05:00

People who should really know better are beginning to say we should consider nuclear power as an alternative to coal power as a way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. One person, who should be careful, has made history by being the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives. Her district strongly opposes nuclear power, and it is even illegal in her state to build new nuclear power plants. She may feel that she now represents the other members in Congress who elected her speaker, but she won't be Speaker for long if she stops representing her district. She is not required to abandoned the positions that got her elected to Congress just to be Speaker unless she became Speaker in a dishonest manner, promising to betray her constituents in exchange for power.

Another person who should be too smart to go for nuclear power is James Lovelock. His work towards understanding why the environment of the Earth is suitable for its inhabitants has been quite interesting. His thinking is that the world appears to take care of itself, adjust its atmosphere to keep a stable temperature, for example, because of feedbacks within the ecosystem. The ecosystem, viewed as a whole, acts to preserve itself in the same way that your body "acts" to keep its temperature stable. I was so impressed with his review of his work on a model called Daisyworld that appeared in Nature some years back, that I sent a copy to my daughter. It is a very simple model that acts as though it "knows" what is best for itself. Just a few simple behaviors on the part of some flowers controls the temperature of the whole world even as the luminosity of the Sun increases. In other words, life preserves itself as though all of life were aimed to do this without requiring collusion. Niches are adaptive in addition to species adapting to niches. Perhaps the problem is that Lovelock is looking for simple solutions, but he does not realize that nuclear power does not follow simple rules and so cannot fit into a self-stabilizing model.

Let's look at how this would break down. In the Power Plant World we have black power plants that warm the Earth and white power plants that cool the Earth just like the flowers in Daisyworld. As the Earth warms, a shift from black power plants to white power plants ensues. But, in Daisyworld there are simple rules, in Power Plant World there is an additional rule that the waste from the white power plants cannot touch the water. Now, we set the model to run. The temperature initially increases spurring a decrease in black power plants and an increase in white power plants, but the temperature continues to climb, as it must, because there is lag that is not present with the albedo mechanism used in Daisyworld. This means that the water level rises even as white power plants become more numerous and black power plants less numerous. And, the rule that the waste from white power plants can't touch the water has a devastating effect. It is so expensive to keep the waste from white power plants from touching the water, that when they die, their cores, which are very dangerous waste at that point, are usually just buried in place. But, when the water level rises, these cores have to be moved and buried somewhere else because of the don't touch the water rule. Moving the cores requires more energy than the white power plants produce in the first place so the whole system collapses.

Actually, in Power Plant World things are not really as black and white as they are in Daisyworld. There are also green power plants that can produce much much more power than either the black or white power plants can, so there is a happy ending which would not occur if white power plants were used.

Now, the purpose of the Daisyworld model is not to represent the full complexity of ecology, it is just to show that simple rules can lead to self-regulation. The purpose of Power Plant World is to show that adding more complex rules can destroy that self-regulation. We might add more and more rules to the construction of white power plants to perhaps avoid problems like sea level rise inundating their sites or warming temperatures requiring large cooling towers. We might anticipate where river flows will be large owing to climate change and put new white power plants there. In Daisyworld there is no planning, which is kind of the point, but in Power Plant World, there would not be more white power plants without anticipating the effects of the black power plants.

In fact, Power Plant World runs on good intentions with imperfect foresight, a combination that can lead to hellish results. But, it is pretty adaptable. The white power plants were never intended to regulate the temperature of the Earth, but rather as a bribe to limit the number of countries with nuclear weapons so that the chances that we'd blow ourselves up would be reduced. The idea that they might be used for temperature control only came up after it was realized that temperature control might be needed. Both white power plants and black power plants tend to kill those who are involved in running them disproportionally, so it is strange that the people who run them love them so much. But, this strange love, like a moth at a candle, has meant that there has been acceptance among the white power plant lovers that the rising temperature caused by the black power plants is a problem so they might be able to make more white power plants even though most people don't like them.

Nuclear power plants are very wasteful so they are very thirsty. To compete with the coal power plants, they have to be big to reduce costs, and since they waste most of the energy they produce, they need a way to get rid of that wasted energy so they pretty much need to be sited near a flow of water. Big coal power plants have similar problems because they are also wasteful, but they still try to get bigger to compete with the white power plants. They have somewhat fewer constraints though because they can shut down more easily if the waste heat becomes a problem, and they send a lot of their waste heat up a smoke stack, reducing their dependence on a flow of water.

Let's look at a particular example since we can see that the Power Plant World model has too many variables and interrelationships to be all that helpful. Calvert Cliffs has been a favorite of the strange love crowd because it got a licence extension even after the Three Mile Island accident made it quite clear that nuclear power is a very bad idea. It was a matter of letting thing cool down politically, and, as we will see, cooling down, in a radioactive sense, is going to be the issue that will make this license extension look very very foolish. Calvert Cliffs is a little unusual because it does not have cooling towers but rather relies on predictable tidal currents to carry away waste heat. It is located on the Chesapeake Bay right at current sea level. It has also recently submitted an application to build a third reactor at an estimated cost of $2.35/Watt, construction only, much higher than the capital cost of a wind farm ($1.30/Watt) which does not require fuel. You can see already that political rather than economic thinking is at work here. And, there are further political considerations. Maryland will be meeting all of it's new generation need with renewable energy as a result of its Renewable Energy Standards Portfolio, so the new generation from Clavert Cliffs will be for export, saddling the people of Maryland with the risks of nuclear power without any benefits.

Let's look at the 20 year license extension granted in 2000. The current reactors will be running until about 2035. But, the climate reports we have been studying predict that sea level rise is going to be more that two feet possibly before the end of the century. Non-linear effects on the ice sheets could bring this up to 15 feet by the end of the century. But, because of the international treaty, it is not legal to dispose of nuclear waste in the oceans. So, the reactors will have to be moved. Basically you can not move a reactor until it has cooled for a century so the licence extension means that the reactors cannot be removed to comply with the treaty until 2135. But, sea level rise will be 3 feet by that time pretty much for certain and the reactors in noncompliance with the treaty without drastic engineering on inundated and very soft muds. So, not only does the sea level rise imply that a never before tried reactor removal must be undertaken, but the license extension means that it must be done at even greater expense. The correct way to proceed would be to revoke the licence extension and even the license to operate so that cooling of the cores can commence now. A cost estimate for removing the cores in 2107 should be developed now, and a surcharge placed on other nuclear generation to cover this cost.

As noted above, the new reactor under consideration will be much more expensive than other forms of power, and it makes no sense to build a new reactor in a place that will be underwater even before the end of its design lifetime. But, even granting that it can be designed to remove the reactor as soon as needed rather than waiting for the hottest elements to decay, its construction costs cannot be levelized over the anticipate design lifetime, but only over a much short site suitability period. This likely brings the cost of power above $0.09/kWh, especially since credit markets are becoming aware of the risks associated with sea level rise. Federal loan guarantees don't really help this situation since they merely guarantee that default will occur, shifting costs onto the taxpayers. Similar conclusions have been drawn about proposed new reactors in England.

Nuclear power is anything but nimble. Very long timescales must be considered. The fact that the industry has been invoking global warming as a reason to build more plants, taken together with the fact that they have made Calvert Cliffs their success story example makes clear the need to scrutinize all of their proposals with much greater care than was taken in granting the license extension. The consequences of climate change: sea level rise, changing river flow patterns and heat balance need to be independently assessed for current reactors to see what increased costs are coming so that they may be added as surcharges now. There are a number of plants whose reactors will need to be removed to higher ground by the end of the century and these need to be identified and shut down to allow cooling time. Granting licences for new plants should be put on hold until such a study and surcharge apportionment can be completed. The industry's obvious inconsistencies in the case of Calvert Cliffs make their own assessments nearly useless. Either they have been disingenuous in their claim that a license extension was justified or they have been disingenuous in their claim that they have the foresight to make such a case since they quite obviously acknowledge the reality of climate change.

Will those who ought to know better come to their senses before they drive up the cost of energy by a factor of two or more while delaying real action on climate change? To be continued....

The Roof Pitch

2007-08-01T22:30:00.000-05:00

Abstract: This one is long enough for an abstract so here goes:
An estimate of the available US residential roof surface area is made and the fraction of current net generation that can be replaced with solar power is as much as 46% using this area. Policy issues that could hamper full attainment are discussed. A new fast Norwegian model for electrifying transportation which also provides 0.5 days stationary storage of total generation is considered and found likely to move rooftop solar from its policy limited maximum fraction of 22% towards 46%. Utilities are advised to avoid long term purchase contracts for new nuclear power.

All the trees behind my house were cut down during nesting season with machines straight out of The Lorax. The machine would grip the trunk and, with a high pitched whine, the machine would sever the tree from the ground in about 4 seconds, then back off carrying the tree upright and drop the tree somewhat indiscriminately out off the way. Last fall I put together a new metal shed (with much cursing for the last bits of roof that were hard to get to). It turns out that the old wooden shed was on property that is to be developed in front of the house and it was so old it could not be moved. Doesn't leak though. Nothing has been happening though since the trees were all cut down out back. It could be that houses won't sell for what the developers thought they might so they are holding off.

I don't quite know why we are building so many houses. There aren't that many more of us. Maybe it is the divorce rate. We need two houses per family.

Trees are what grow over most of my neighbor's homes. I picked mine to have sun and a south facing roof. I used to live under a ginourmous sweetgum tree and it's shade cooled that house in the summer, but a good bit of insulation in this house seems to work better. But, with trees being slaughtered using those strange contrivances which, I'm sure, violate Dr. Suess' intellectual property rights, I'm not going to suggest that my neighbor's homes be included in these calculations. We'll estimate assuming all roofs get sun, but there is no suggestion that those that don't should. And, with things slowing down in the building trades, we'll use numbers from a couple of years ago which might compensate for some shady roofs.

What are we doing? We're going to calculate how much sunlight can be turned into electricity just using home roofs. The thing is, FedEx, Google, GM, Coke, Walmart, Kohls, Target, BJs, Cosco, Staples and other businesses are all turning sunlight into electricity using their roofs so they can save money. But, their buildings use so much energy that only about 30% of what they use can be covered this way. But, a house can cover what it needs pretty easily because we tend to like a little less activity at home. Keeping the doors open for shopper past midnight to sell a book about a boy wizard would not allow us much rest. So, can houses make up the difference so that businesses can run on 100% real energy too?

These calculations came about because Robert Rapier had been looking at biodiesel and finding that it would be quite hard to cover transportation with what could be produced. Robert is a contributor to The Oil Drum which we've scolded before. His conclusion was that the future is solar. The main reason is land use. If we use rooted plants to get real energy, they don't put all their efforts into just converting sunlight into stored energy. They are more interested in their social life, hobnobbing with bees, sharing delicious seed holders for dispersal and generally sharing news through their roots. So, as we've seen, only a little bit of real energy is available for harvest compared to all that was used. Robert decided that if we want to have food, we can't also grow fuel at the level that we use it. Now the standard example came up that a square of land in Nevada about 80 miles on a side running a solar thermal plant at 20% efficiency can produce all the energy we use. This is an easy calculation: Nevada has regions that get 9 kWh per square meter of sunlight per day on average over a year, or 375 Watts per square meter of average power. At 20% efficiency you get 75 of those. So we just divide the 1.2 TW of energy we use that we calculated earlier by 75 W per square meter to get the number of square meters we need. Divided again by a million gives 16000 square kilometers. The square root of this, 126 km, gives the length of the edge of the square which is about 80 miles.

Now, many people objected that this was impractical even though it was just an example of how little land is actually needed compared to what we farm. So, we set to calculating what could be done with roofs since this is surface area that is already being used. We need an estimate of the size of a typical roof, how many roofs there are and what the typical available sunlight is. This is a rough estimate (remember the trees) so we won't do anything fancy like match houses in states with the solar resource in that state.

Let's begin. For a home size we'll take 1700 sq ft from 2002, for the number of houses we'll take 124,500,000 occupied and vacant from 2005 and for the available power we'll take 5 kWh/m^2/day from the middle of the country. We're going to adjust the home size which comes out to be 158 m^2 down to 100 m^2 because some houses have more than one story. We'll only use half the roof (50 m^2) assuming that this is the south facing side, or if we cover east and west facing surfaces we only get to use half at one time. Then we'll take a system efficiency of 17%. Each roof then produces 1.8 kW as average power (5 kWh/m^2/24 hours* 50 m^2 *0.17). All roofs produce 0.22 TW. In 2005 average net generation in the US was 0.46 TW (4.055e12 Wh/365 days/24 hours). So the roofs can provide 46% of the electricity the nation uses. But the residential sector uses 37% of the whole generation. The roofs can thus provide extra power for the businesses but they can't cover the whole thing, only about half of what businesses can't do for themselves. Hydro and wind provide about 9% of generation so we are looking for another 100% -(30% of 35% = 10% commercial solar)-(46% residential solar) = 35% to cover the rest of the commercial and also the industrial sectors. Wind power can certainly do this while, as we saw in the case of the Nevada example, solar farms on non-agricultural land can also work.

Just like the businesses that are converting as much of their power use as they can to save money, homes can do the same thing and it turns out we can get a majority of our electricity using just roofs. All of this works essentially under net metering and 41 states have such laws. But many allow the utilities to confiscate the excess power produced within a year of generation. So, unoccupied homes should not be counted in this circumstance. Also, their are few incentives for landlords to save their tenants money so we might want to consider only owner occupied homes. With these limitations, we only get 60% of the residential sector or 22% of the total. These restrictions would seem to be more important than shading from trees. There is some transfer between the rented, owned and vacant buildings so we'll likely get to close to the whole residential sector eventually, and, for the vacant homes, with the utilities confiscating over production, there should be little reason to maintain artificial caps on net metering capacity since they'll see a very healthy overall 11% profit if the owners of the vacant properties don't put in server farms or some other means of using the power generated at the property. We should note that this is actually a huge profit because distributed generation means that expensive upgrades to much of the distribution system can be delayed or avoided all together. In fact, it may well be that utilities can maximize profits by paying a fraction of retail for generation above use rather than nothing. In that case, as the cost for panels comes down, their may be an incentive to use all of the roof.

But, there is a much more important thing coming that will increase the fraction of roof area that is used. The ghost energy depleting industries that we want to displace like to use talking points that emphasize how little real energy we a using right now. They'll sometimes acknowledge the 30% growth per year in renewables, but then pick a date about 15 years before that growth shuts them down to say that the amount of generation will still be small. Then they say that we need more coal, oil, gas and uranium to meet projected demand, hiding the fact that new capacity there will be very expensive because it won't ever be used for its design lifetime. They also ignore the fact that the dollar cost of real energy is plummeting while the dollar cost of ghost energy is only going up. The effect this has of the growth rate can only be positive, especially since renewable energy fabrication is so nimble compared to power plant construction. So, a 150% annual growth rate may not be out of the question. A number of individual companies are planning 100% annual growth just to keep their market share high, a number than investors look at closely. Planning for 100% annual growth takes some doing, but it is much less cumbersome than gaining approval for a new nuclear plant, especially in today's security environment.

The thing that is coming is actually a new business model for transportation that will increase the amount of power people use at home while decreasing the amount of gasoline they use. Companies that manufacture hybrid vehicles are saying that they expect the cost to manufacture these will be the same as for their other lines in a few years. The reason for this is that though the systems are a little more complex, the cost of retooling per unit goes down as the share of production goes up. These vehicles can be modified to have electric only operation with a range of about 40 miles by adding more batteries. But, the batteries are expensive even though the cost of running the vehicles is much less expensive. Batteries, like solar panels degrade in performance over time but for different reasons. For solar panels it is high energy particles which degrade performance while for batteries it is use which degrades performance. The behavior of solar panels has interesting implications for the estimation of the quantity Energy Returned Over Energy Invested (EROEI) because this becomes quite dependent on what level of performance you are willing to accept. If you cut off at a 20% degradation in 25 years, with a 2 year payback time, you get a value of 12.5 trending towards 25 with recycling (because you don't have to purify the silicon again). But, if you accept a 60% degradation you get a value of 33 trending towards 66, the highest for any energy source. You might be willing to accept a 60% degradation if you are replacing the lost performance with less expensive more efficient panels as needed so long as you still have roof space. With batteries for transportation, you really have to set a lower acceptance criterion for performance degradation because the car won't get so far with degraded batteries. Battery degradation also depends on the manner of use. Transportation is a tough environment while managed power storage is a benign environment because an individual battery can be treated gently.

The new business model for transportation takes advantage of this behavior of batteries. Noticing that at least 75% of a battery's useful life will be outside of a vehicle, a company in Norway is planning on leasing about a quarter of the of a battery's life for transportation then selling the remaining battery life to utilities for the power storage we need. Stationary storage does not need nearly the performance levels required by transportation. Now, transportation is about 28% of our total energy use with most of that in trips under 40 miles. By passing batteries on to utilities, the transportation sector will be providing storage for about half of our total energy use. You might think it would be 84%, but using batteries is much more efficeint than gasoline engines so the transportation sector energy use will shrink by about 2 thirds. The business model greatly reduces the cost apportioned to transportation for batteries, making electricity as a transportation fuel very attractive, while at the same time saving utilities money on their most expensive generation costs by allowing storage to cover peak demand. This makes mostly electric transportation the least expensive, especially since people will add capacity to their roofs at lower costs when this mechanism comes in over the fleet replacement timescale. The effect of this is to increase residential use of electricity by about 30%, and similarly increase the contribution of the residential sector to distributed generation. But, the businesses that are adopting solar power now, won't get this energy because it will be displacing gasoline use instead. Notice, though, that the increase in electricity demand this implies is met with real energy even under current net metering policies (excluding overall caps).

In consideration of this, to maximize profits, investor owned utilities should be pursuing a policy of divesting themselves of ghost energy generating capacity, avoiding like the plague very long term ghost energy purchase agreements, especially for any new inflexible nuclear generating capacity, and encouraging rooftop solar as much as they possibly can while working out clever ways to profit from the approximately half day of energy storage they can anticipate coming in from the transportation sector. In short, they should adopt a supermarket or warehouse business model, where they profit by the continual exchange of real energy that their distribution networks can provide. And that is the pitch for rooftop solar.

New Mexicans Conspire?

2007-07-31T12:50:00.000-05:00

In a stealth move, New Mexican Senators Domenici and Bingaman inserted unlimited loan guarantees for nuclear power in the Senate Energy Bill. This provides the ability to obtain very low interest loans for the construction of new nuclear power plants. You might think that this is just standard corruption, a quid pro quo for financial support from the industry. But is it? None of the proposed new reactors is intended to be sited in New Mexico. You'd think that covertly adding such a thing to the legislation would at least have some kind of benefit for New Mexico like construction contracts or other pork. What is going on here?

We should not forget that the Governor of New Mexico is a former Secretary of Energy. While the Arizona Corporation Commission dithers about net metering, the Governator fumbles the million solar roof project, the Nevada legislature can't meet for long enough to keep up with technology and Utah is lulled by Northwest hyrdo, he is cornering the market on big solar. Why shouldn't he? New Mexico is right in there in the best resource. But, how to preserve the market in electricity? That is tricky. Texas has wind that is getting too cheap to meter, the Northeast states are implementing renewable energy standards. It is just the South and Midwest that are complacent in their coal use. What is needed to keep them off their own Real Energy long enough for his efforts to make them dependent on New Mexico and it's ultracheap solar power? Remember, once you go renewable, there is no reason to switch again, so if there are going to be non-local renewables, the markets have to be developed NOW.

Bait and Switch is an old game. Promise nuclear power, then just run it out of business with the taxpayers taking the fall. A single high-voltage high-capacity direct current transmission line from New Mexico to Georgia puts twelve of the proposed new plants out of business only a quarter of the way into their design lifetime with only a quarter of the very low interest loans paid off. Upon default, the taxpayers take the fall and the Richardson Solar Power Monopoly is in place for the next two centuries at least. Make no mistake. The Department of Energy has always been all about playing hardball, beating the Soviets in bombs, running weapons labs in complete disregard of nuclear safety, and crushing foreign uranium markets. For DOE, civilian nuclear power has always been a useful idiot rather than a real priority. Richardson is looking centuries ahead in the solar power projects he is supporting in New Mexico. Just look at this small sample:

Solar Reduction of Carbon
Pueblo of Pojoaque / SolareC - $363,000
This innovative development effort will test a full-scale concentrating solar power system. This system uses sunlight to break down CO2 and allows direct production of electricity and hydrogen, which can either be burned at night to provide electricity or to produce synthetic fuels. If successful, this technology could revolutionize the solar energy world by providing an innovative means of storing solar energy power for later use.

Solar Combined Heat and Power Project
New Mexico State University / Heliodyne--$280,000
This project will provide a demonstration facility that uses solar energy to produce electricity for a large building while using the waste heat from the system to heat and cool the building. This approach could provide a highly efficient system that could be employed in commercial and state buildings across New Mexico.

Utility Scale Concentrating Solar Project
UNM / SkyFuel--$226,000
This project will develop an improved capability to produce efficient concentrating solar power panels at a lower cost than is presently available. It could result in development of megawatt scale solar power installations in New Mexico and elsewhere along with new manufacturing facilities in New Mexico.

The question is, does this count as a conspiracy or is Richardson just making convenient use of the state delegation's penchant for pampering their funders? It may be hard to tell. What is for certain is that Richardson is preparing for a future of large scale dispatchable solar power at costs that will drive new nuclear power plants right out of business because base load is just not going to matter anymore. Convenient corruption or sly scheming, it is the taxpayers who will foot the bill for keeping competitive local renewables out of Richardson's intended market. Even the Sunshine state, with it's 10 kW limit on net metering, should watch out for the trap. At least, if we are lucky, giving the nuclear industry enough rope to hang itself, even at tax payer expense, will be a less ignominous end than another Three Mile Island. Have you run your evacuation drill lately? Did it work? Just like New Orleans?

Richardson is running for President, and he might be a good one depending on his ability to look past New Mexico's interests to those of the country. But this development should give even his staunchest supporters second (or third of fourth) thoughts.

Facile Fables

2007-07-20T13:12:00.000-05:00

Here it is, the report that will put us all at ease about fossil energy: Facing the Hard Truths about Energy.

Again, it is necessary to thank Alan Kelly for acknowledging that global warming may be a problem, or at least regulations related to controlling global warming could be a problem for oil companies. First, let's just note that factual errors of the most significant kind seem to be present in the report. The loudest howler seems to be this: on the core question, "Can incremental oil and natural gas supply be brought on-line, on-time, and at a reasonable price to meet future demand without jeopardizing economic growth?" they seem to have misquoted those who have tried to answer this question independently by a factor of two. Misquoting in that way seems just the sort of thing they like to do, so at least we know we are in for more of the same.

So, let's take their key findings in turn to see it there is anything worth knowing:

Findings:

1) Coal, oil, and natural gas will remain indispensable to meeting total projected energy demand growth.

As we have seen here, we can dispense with coal rather quickly and while achieving the efficiency to use photosynthesis to meet our current liquid fuel use is not possible, advances in this area suggest that meeting a good fraction can be done. The improved efficiency that comes with shifting the rest to wind and solar far outpaces the moderate efficiency measures they are calling for.

2) The world is not running out of energy resources, but there are accumulating risks to continuing expansion of oil and natural gas production from the conventional sources relied upon historically. These risks create significant challenges to meeting projected energy demand.

Here we may agree, to a point, we are only just beginning to participate again in real energy and there is more than enough, but what they mean is that the world is not running out of coal, oil and gas, and on this, it is very hard not to laugh. The world is always running out of these things so long as they are being used. Perhaps they are admitting that "conventional sources" the kind they have always said there are plenty of, are depleting to the point where they can't meet demand.

3) To mitigate these risks, expansion of all economic energy sources will be required, including coal, nuclear, renewables, and unconventional oil and natural gas. Each of these sources faces significant challenges—including safety, environmental, political, or economic hurdles—and imposes infrastructure requirements for development and delivery.

Of the sources listed, only renewables are economic and have the capacity to expand, everything else is more expensive and hastens depletion. It is also interesting that safety, the environment, politics and the economy are considered hurdles rather than just the things we want to sustain. I guess when you are in the business of creating oil spills, everything looks like a beach to defile.

4) “Energy Independence” should not be confused with strengthening energy security. The concept of energy independence is not realistic in the foreseeable future, whereas U.S. energy security can be enhanced by moderating demand, expanding and diversifying domestic energy supplies, and strengthening global energy trade and investment. There can be no U.S. energy security without global energy security.

We must hitch our wagon to dictatorships. Almost all of the projected growth of supply (yes the report projects growth) comes from the Middle East. Brazil, on the other hand, may seek energy independence since they are a smaller portion of the the market and so are less important to the National Petroleum Council's business interests. Oh well, who would expect any patriotism from multi-nationals? Best to cut them out of the energy supply entirely. We're not dipping too deeply into the report here, but it should be noted that their idea of security seems to include the notion that strategic reserves allow for Venezuela or Iran to be taken off-line for more than a year each (ES p. 27). More wars for oil would seem likely to do for US security what the current oil war does. Multi-nationals may not be the best source for advice on these kinds of issues. They would like us to provide security services for them but this does not enhance our security.

5) A majority of the U.S. energy sector workforce, including skilled scientists and engineers, is eligible to retire within the next decade. The workforce must be replenished and trained.

Apparently we need to encourage students to train for jobs in a dying industry. Now, if this industry can't fund it's own training program then they must know they are cooked. But, we should look to bar the treasury doors since the retirement of this work force that they warn of here may, in part, be insured through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation even as these types of companies move their assets offshore. Renewable energy is where the job growth potential is.

6) Policies aimed at curbing CO2 emissions will alter the energy mix, increase energy-related costs, and require reductions in demand growth.

This statement seems nowhere supported by facts. What we know is that wind is cheaper than gas wholesale and solar is cheaper than coal retail except very close to the mines. The only place where wind and solar compete directly now with oil (which is too expensive to really compete with coal except on a few islands) is in home heating. In most places, geothermal heat pumps make wind and solar the better deal. While it is silly to burn coal at a power plant and lose more than half the energy up the stack to run baseboard heaters, running efficient electric heating with wind or solar, which are not heat engines, makes loads of sense. So, yes the energy mix will alter, but costs will come down. Supply growth can lessen because wind and solar are not nearly as wasteful as combustion. Requiring reduction in carbon demand growth will reduce energy related costs (except for oil, coal and gas shareholders) rather than increase them.

Now, let's just run through those findings one more time: 1) We have to have oil, coal and gas to meet demand. 2) We're not running out but we are. 3) So, need to rely on other sources. 4) US security is hostage to oil company security: need a hand-out. 5) Need another hand-out to handle retirement of work force. and 6) Global warming is expensive so demand can't be met.

Laughter is the best medicine: Hope you'll see the humor in this even through the bathos.

Closets

2007-07-16T18:09:00.000-05:00

The closets of ghost energy are crammed full of skeletons. It is long past time to clean them out and as it turns out, real energy may need the storage space, not for skeletons, but rather to smooth the transition to full participation in and celebration of real energy.

Two newspaper articles are out talking about storage of real energy. Both articles fail to notice that the US grid already runs on about 20% stored real energy through hydroelectric power. About 24 GW of that capacity can run backwards rather than just throttle so we already have quite a lot of what we might need. And, the articles don't notice that distributed renewable power is not very intermittent. The wind is always blowing somewhere and clouds rarely cover all of a continent. The trick is to shuttle the power from where it is produced to where it is needed. If you have enough capacity to meet the peak use, then you don't really care about storing the extra power you don't need when you are using less, you just find something fun and interesting to do with it. Remember, real energy is extravagant. Think of the amazing fecundity and diversity of a rain forest. It is about prosperity not scarcity.

But, before we get to the point where we produce more energy than we use most of the time, methods of storage can help to retire ghost energy plants more quickly. So, lets just list the kinds of storage that are covered in the articles and here on the real energy blog so we know a few of the options. We'll organize it in the types of energy physicists like to use.

Thermal:

Hot or cold, thermal storage adds a certain amount of extra time to use the energy. In some cases like the high thermal mass house, you are just avoiding using energy that you don't really need. The daily fluctuations of external temperature are not important with good insulation and a high heat capacity. In one article ice is used to shift electricity use from day time to night time and also save on over all use while in the another, molten salts are used to keep solar energy for use at night. You can see how these might work together.

Chemical:

Batteries have the potential for large scale storage and are mentioned in both articles. The anticipated sizes run up to 6 MWh. The batteries mention in the article are not exactly flow batteries which are also used together with wind farms and run up to 12 MWh. We have also looked at using ammonia as a chemical storage method and producing hydrogen for later use is also a chemical method though it experiences high thermal loses. Aluminum can also be used for chemical storage and used to produce hydrogen on demand.

Mechanical:

Here we have two choices, potential energy or kinetic energy. Both articles mention gas pressure storage, essentially a form of potential energy similar to damming a river. The size of the facility mentioned is about 100 MW and presumably can run for a day or two. About half the energy comes from compressed air and half from natural gas. One article mentions flywheels which store kinetic energy. In this case the flywheel stores 18 MWs or 5 kWh. One can reduce the tensile strength requirements for a flywheel and increase its capacity by usinging a magenetic track. Then the strength requirements are compressive and, so, much simpler.

Electrical:

Capacitors are used to store power when very large currents pulses are needed as for example in inertial confinement fusion. These capacitors store about 3 kWh. Super capacitors are less bulky and are being developed for transportation applications.

Magnetic:

Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage is used in some applications with capacities moving toward 20 MWh.

Electromagnetic:

For very high energy density, excited nuclear states might be used. This is actually a new listing, but not very practical just now.

The complaint in the articles is that power storage adds cost to the the electric power distribution system. But, pretty clearly, the decreasing cost of renewable energy is making storage more attractive to utilities. Thermal storage in solar plants that work with thermal energy anyway is a natural extension to their capabilities. Similarly, those that work using chemical energy are designed to store energy from the beginning. It is clear that flywheel and magnetic storage are already being used for power conditioning. Very shortly, the cost of renewable power will drop well below the cost of other sources. For wind, it is already the cheapest way to produce power in many places. As it turns out, once we're ready to chase the skeletons our of the ghost energy closet, we'll be able to put in a great new closet organizer with slots for all kinds of storage that will make the exorcism of the ghosts all the more rapid. Energy storage is not an Achilles' heel for real energy, but rather a stepping stone to full abundance. Daniel Arvizu should know better.

Toadstools

2007-07-15T16:49:00.000-05:00

When forests meet industrialization, they lose and along with the loss go the noble woodland professions in a romantic mist. Deep ecologists like Gary Snyder make us aware that this loss is unacceptable and at least on post-industrial Turtle Island forests are making a bit of a comeback. So, if you can work with the strengthening poison ivy you have more opportunities to get close to the forest floor and look at the various kinds of fungi that grow there.

The cursed report we have been anticipating is due out this week and since it seems that its conclusions have been predetermined since at least February it should come as no surprise at all that we'll be hearing that we can make poison ivy even itchier to our heart's content. So, with plentiful ghost energy sources and constant attacks on the idea that their use is dangerous we might think that an effort to replace ghost energy with real energy from forests would be completely pointless. But, these grave robbers have shown themselves to be untrustworthy so checking up on them makes some sense.

Dave Rutledge at Caltech, has tried to compare what they say with what they do to try understand just how much more carbon dioxide can be added to the atmosphere if we try just about as hard as we are trying now. His talk attempts to figure out what profile of emissions should be used when calculating the amount of temperature and sea level rise we might expect in the next 400 years. Based on the way that ghost energy companies have actually behaved rather than on what they say they can do, he finds that none of the scenarios used in the climate reports we have been following seem realistic because they all over estimate the amount of carbon available to further pollute the atmosphere. If his analysis is accurate, then this is pretty good news on the climate front, we just barely avoid the so-called dangerous climate change through no effort of our own. All of the economists will have to revise their models, but they would have needed to do that anyway because they have, for the most part, missed the prosperity real energy sustains.

Dave's analysis, like the ones we have already looked at that point in this direction, will need more checking but we can see a little motivation for looking to the forests for fuel. Now, just as in Brazil, the issue of cutting forests to make fuel needs careful attention. The new effort in Georgia intends to use forest products that are produced anyway in the lumber and paper industries there. They are competing (at the industrial level) with a method that uses enzymes to accomplish the same goal. So far, the enzyme method is pretty expensive, while the method to be used in Georgia could be considered wasteful since so much heat is needed to turn the wood waste into a gas. Both processes involve restrictive intellectual property. If Dave's analysis is correct, we may want to get this sort of thing going faster than patents might allow. So, I'm going to throw this out into the public domain:

The enzymes needed to break down wood or straw are naturally occurring is some kinds of fungi. Lentinus tigrinus in particular can grow quickly in straw because of the enzymes it produces. A mushroom is mostly protein but it also contains fiber and carbohydrate, the last of which is fermentable. So, one could produce protein from straw or sawdust and at the same time draw off the carbohydrates to produce fuel. A bit of reprocessing of the fiber may also yield further fuel. The process might even be made recursive. Most importantly, they do not require any extra sunlight, so they do not compete for real energy input. The fungi can be grown in old mines or in tall buildings so that forests or hay fields that collect the real energy need not be displaced to process the real energy. Suppose you have an unused 40 ft silo with a 14 ft diameter. You rig it up so that an interior scaffold can hold growing trays that pack at a typical square bale density leaving a similar space for fruiting. Then you can use the hay from a single cutting of about 16 acres to grow a mushroom crop. But since the mushrooms mature in under 15 days, you can do four crops before the next hay cutting. So a single silo of this size can service 60 acres or more if the silo use is extended past the hay growing season. Compared to about 8 ton of carbohydrate per acre per year for corn, we might expect about 1 ton of carbohydrate per acre per year (three cuttings) but the protein yield will be a bit larger than for corn and without a high nitrogen fertilizer input. The used mushroom mash should have a good value as chicken, hog or fish feed. (Talapia scraps can be used to make biodiesel.) To get started though, making a portion of the crop gastronomic would help to pay for the scaffolding costs. At about a dollar per pound wholesale, mushrooms easily beat corn on price even at $4 per bushel by factor of 1.5 adjusting for yield.

Cellulosic ethanol with no intellectual property to slow down implementations. Maybe Gary will write us another mushroom poem to celebrate.

"So here's to the mushroom family
A far-flung friendly clan
For food, for fun, for poison
They are a help to man."

Necromancers

2007-06-30T10:46:00.000-05:00

Hecate, the queen of ghosts, is sometimes considered to be Agamemnon's daughter Iphigeneia who was sacrificed to get a favorable wind to invade Troy. This was the seed that eventually led to Agamemnon's murder by his wife Clytemnestra. She was later killed by Iphigeneia's brother Orestes. Out of these stories came the birth of tragedy as a dramatic form. This form, together with comedy have fascinated us ever since. Consideration of Real Energy leads us to to look on the modern devotees of Hecate, the ghost energy necromancers, in a comic light. Their Petroleum Council report on how much more ghost energy they insist we need has been haunting these pages along with the secretive offices of government like bad penny. So, it was with much mirth that the imminence of their report was the occasion for a fairly elaborate joke.

The Yes Men volunteer to give presentations on behalf of corporations that take themselves a little too seriously. The have, for example, announced that Dow Chemical will liquidate Union Carbide to pay for the clean up of the Bhopal disaster. To get the joke, you need to understand that corporations are not allowed to behave ethically or take responsibility for the harm they cause because this could harm the stockholders' financial interests. Corporations, however they may feel, must wait for a legal authority to assign responsibility and they are pretty much required to defend themselves from being assigned that responsibility through legal arguments and political influence or else they fail in their prime fiduciary responsibilities. So, in the case of an unintended accident like that in India or the big oil spill in Alaska, they must make every effort not to accept blame. So, when the Yes Men announced that Dow took full responsibility for the disaster in India, it gave us all a good laugh.

The joke the Yes Men perpetrated in the middle of June was to present a new product on behalf of ExxonMobil called Vivoleum. Vivoleum is a biofuel rendered from human corpses, the supply of which is increased by global warming. They were invited to present before a meeting of oil people in Canada because the group was lusting after news of a report being prepared by the Petroleum Council that is going to say that the outlook for oil is very cheerful, at least this is what I took away from Alan Kelly's presentation in February. So, when a speaker's agency offered the Yes Men volunteers, they were happy to take them, no questions asked.

How far they were able to carry off the joke is pretty amazing. They gave a slide presentation on the new corpse rendered biofuel, and then got attendees to light candles purportedly made from the body of and ExxonMobil worker who volunteered to be sacrificed. Iphigeneia was tricked into her sacrifice by the promise of marriage to the hero Achilles, who, if he knew of this, really was a heel. The meeting began to cotton on when they watched this memorial video for the ExxonMobil worker. After that, the Yes Men were escorted from the building by police officers at the insistence of the meeting organizers.

But, the devotees of Hecate can't seem to laugh off a good joke. The access to the Yes Men's web site was shut down, and only allowed to be restored after ExxonMobil's name was removed. Since there was never going to be any real confusion over the use of their name, one needed to be licking ones chops for the Petroleum Council's report to be taken in to begin with, the use is protected fair use as parody. For Hecate's minions to force the removal of the web site under color of law is very likely to be a crime. But, what more can be expected of this family, so like that of Atreus. May we just hope that Hermione will somehow escape the tangles of fate and emerge from the dark times that drive them to such excess as a purveyor of lubricants rather than fuel.

Tabby

2007-06-06T22:23:00.000-05:00

Some people think cement is boring and just soldier on anyway. They consider the considerable amount of ghost energy that is used in making cement and try to figure out ways to reduce it. The proposed solution, geopolymeric cement actually has historic, folkloric and even quasi-automotive aspects so it is puzzling why it would be considered dull. Monbiot is single minded in his effort to find ways to reduce carbon dioxide emission while preserving a civilized life. In converting from temperamental Portland cement to more durable geopolymeric cement he finds an 80% reduction in emission.

Owing to natural gas supplies from Russia, Monbiot tends to support the the idea of pumping carbon dioxide into deep saline aquifers to store it in a relatively stable liquid form while still using ghost energy. He runs into difficulty though when considering home heating because he needs two sets of pipes, one to bring in the gas and one to return the carbon dioxide to a central location for liquification. He feels that the timescale for reducing emissions is so short that a complete transition to real energy may not be possible before a 90% reduction in emissions is required. There are actually three sets of pipes connecting a typical British home and it seems to me that Monbiot has overlooked this. One set brings in natural gas, one set brings in water and one set carries water away. If Monbiot is looking for an extra pipe, it seems to me that the last set would work just fine for his purposes. A slight negative pressure would draw flue gas from his boilers and an application of this technology at the egress would condense the carbon dioxide in the manner he desires. With a high carbon dioxide partial pressure in the pipe a couple of other benefits occur. Anoxic bioprocessing of the sewage on the trip through the pipe will produce methane which can be mixed back with the natural gas while the carbonated water is just about perfect for biofuel production using algae and light. In gloomy England, he may want to use wind powered artificial light, but it does get around the land use issues that worry him. Deficiencies in the third set of pipes for this purpose would really be a matter of maintenance to correct rather than new infrastructure so that his timescale could be met.

But, let's not deal further with such spirits and turn to real sequestration using real energy (note to George: Klaus has cost estimates here, drop me a line if you don't have a subscription). In order to counter-act our interference in the geological carbon cycle we need to return carbon to the ground. But, as Lackner points out, there is not really enough room in the ground whence we have summoned the carbon to put it all back. Thus, he considers harvesting metal ions from silicate rocks in order to produce carbonates which can be left exposed on the surface of the Earth for very long periods without risk of the carbon returning to the atmosphere. He would have coal burned at rock quarries (it takes about five or six times the mass of rock to convert the carbon dioxide to carbonates so you bring the carbon to the rock) to produce power without releasing carbon dioxide. Like Monbiot, he still flirts with ghosts. But it seems a little silly to do for ourselves what real energy does for us, and surely the weathering of rock on the continents produces an abundant supply of the metal ions Lackner requires throughout our oceans and estuaries. Calcium ions, together with carbon dioxide are the raw material our of which corals and shellfish form their exoskeletons. Weathering of rock is a real energy process and the growth of these creatures is a real energy process and both are the real geological carbon cycle. Ghost energy is largely an accident that is only significant because it has had such a long time to accumulate. Most carbon sits in carbonates.

How can we participate in this real energy process while also reducing our reliance on Portland cement? This also turns out to be interesting in historic, folkloric and quasi-automotive ways. The only puzzle is: how did we killed our oysters? The answer is that we have overfed them. Historically, the Chesapeake Bay produced about 700,000 tons of oysters each year and since the wet flesh weight is less that 10% of the total weight, most of this was a harvest of calcium carbonate. Folklorically, you could walk across the bay on oyster reefs. And, in a quasi-automotive manner, crushed oyster shells once made permeable driveways near the Bay though now they are used for chicken feed and oyster restoration.

How does the carbon in 700,000 tons of oyster shells compare with the carbon in the 7 million tons of carbon dioxide emitted from home heating in Maryland in 1990? Well carbon is about 12% of the weight of the shells and about 27% of the weight of the gas so
a historic oyster harvest can sequester about 4.4% of a year's worth carbon from home heating. Or, 23 years of harvest can make up for each year we continue to use oil and gas for heating. This is not planting trees! This is permanent sequestration!

What could we do with all those shells? Tabby is a building material made from oyster shells that hearkens back to a day when we didn't use ghost energy. Returning to it's use may make some sense. But to do that, we've got to reduce the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus flowing into the Bay (and the Gulf on Mexico) because the anoxic conditions they produce, which might be useful in a sewer pipe (above), kill the oysters, crabs and other sea life that can help us in cleaning up our carbon mess. It is not enough to reduce the amount of carbon used to make nitrogen fertilizer, we also need to manage much more carefully where it ends up when we are done with it.

Three Cornered Ghost

2007-05-25T22:53:00.000-05:00

Gas, oil and coal form ghostly triangles in a number of ways. Our necromancy for one affects our necromancy for the other two: as gas becomes harder to come by, we turn to coal, for example. Or, when the body count begins to rise in our efforts to secure oil supplies, thoughts again turn to coal.

There is one particular triangle that turns out to be very important and that is the shape of an oil fields production with time. When an oil field is discovered, its production increases as more and more wells are drilled to draw it out of its grave. But once one of these wells run dry, the rest soon follow and there a steep drop in production. This triangular shape forms the basis for an analysis which looks at the rate of discovery of oil fields to estimate future production integrated over all oil fields. Oil is the easiest (and most dangerous) of the three to transport so people generally look at the world supply in this case while local supplies are more important for the other two. The analysis of oil production is made difficult because oil companies tend to lie about what they have discovered to boost their share prices but it is thought that oil production has already reached its apex or soon will.

It is usually assumed that, at some expense, declining gas and oil supplies can be replaced by coal because there are centuries of reserves. Even George Monbiot, in his new book Heat makes this assumption though perhaps his goal of reducing energy use is reason enough to leave this unexamined. A new look at the available data throws this assumption into question. Using the same sort of predictive modeling that has been applied oil production, it could be that coal production will peak in fifteen years.

Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute gives an interesting summary and analysis of the report. Here, I want to look at its very suprising contention that coal production in the US has already peaked in terms of energy extracted.

Coal comes in various grades. The best, anthracite, contains the most energy and is the cleanest burning. Advertisers, attempting to displace a cleaner, more efficient and pleasant alternative used to say that a lady's dress would stay ghost white on a train ride through New York because the engine burned anthracite. Advertising is usually needed to get people to choose something so deadly.

Until recently the cost of coal in terms of mining deaths in the US has been declining owing to better regulation and, while the total mining deaths since 1900 still out number the oil war deaths, the numbers are becoming comparable. Grades of coal below anthracite are progressively softer and yield less energy. As can be seen in the last link, the number of miners has been growing recently (figures in include office workers) and, as might be expected, the amount of coal produced is also increasing, but what the German report says is that the amount of energy being produced from all this dangerous effort is going down. This is because softer coal is replacing harder coal. So, getting the number of mining deaths declining again is going to take a great deal of effort since more and more miners will be needed to mine more and more coal of lesser quality to just keep even on energy production.

It is not clear that the analysis applied to oil production works in just the same way for coal. In terms of energy extraction, the US is past its peak production for oil (1970s), gas (this decade) and now coal. But, whereas no amount extra fiddling gets an oil field to produce what is once did after it starts to decline, extra money could make coal production increase. We just have to pay more miners for less energy per miner as we have already begun to do. But, one thing looks to be similar, the cost in money should increase for coal just as it has for gas and schemes to replace gas or oil with coal will be more expensive as the trend towards less productive mining continues.

The triangles of ghost energy lead inevitably to disappointment. The shape of real energy is completely different. Striving is rewarded evermore richly as we hone our skills in participating in it. Costs come down as our efforts increase, reaching a sustainable plateau that is not set by some fixed lower limit on cost per unit energy but rather by what we will find satisfactory.

Juicing

2007-05-23T13:21:00.000-05:00

A common characteristic of bio-fuels is that their feedstock is squeezed, mashed, pressed, shredded or otherwise processed to get the juice out. I used to live next door to a cane plantation in Hawaii and we'd end up with sticks of cane to chew from time to time as a treat. Even bio-gas from manure is twice chewed grass. There is quite a lot of work that goes into making bio-fuels.

The reason all this effort might be worth it is that liquid (or gas) fuels are pretty convenient to use in machines with automated power control. Furnaces are run by thermostats so you don't have to build a fire early in the morning when you first wake up. Car engines respond quickly to the accelerator rather than waiting for a head of stream from a boiler. Gas stoves heat right up rather than waiting for a wood fire to light. Pellet stoves are an attempted compromise, getting the fuel to flow by using smaller pieces, and hauling the sacks of pellets might be an adequate substitute for the swing of the splitting maul for those who like a bit if ruggedness, but pellets still don't flow through a pump.

Liquid fuels are easier to control as they burn, leading to higher efficiency engines and lower pollution with the addition of catalytic converters which would be poisoned by low temperature combustion products.

On Monday, I went to a conference that was mostly about how to divvy up the work of juicing the various feedstocks so that it would make sense to use these potentially real energy sources instead of ghost energy sources. The conference was organized by the Maryland Secretary of State's office as part of a sister state program with Brazil's Rio de Janeiro state that has been ongoing for a number of years. Brazil has the greatest experience with biofuels and so there was quite a lot to learn from the attendees from there.

The first presentation was given by Paulo de Sousa Coutinho of Brazil Ecodiesel. This presentation was impressive and I'm just going to steal figures from it to give an idea of the thought and planning that has gone into this effort. So, let's take the Energy Balance figures he gave:

Ethanol:
Corn (US) 1.3
Beet (EU) 1.9
Cane (Brazil) 8.3
Biodiesel:
Soy (US) 1.9
Rapeseed (EU) 3.0
Sunflower (EU) 3.2
Castor bean (Brazil) 10.5

Now, Energy Balance is being used in a particular way here. It is the ratio of real energy out to ghost energy in. So, if it takes just as much energy from natural gas to produce the fertilizer for an energy crop as you get out in energy, then the value would be one. Now, let me say that some at the conference calculated the value for gasoline to be about 0.7, less than one, and this use does not make a lot of sense because there is no real energy out in the case of gasoline, but perhaps this was just an illustration assuming the numerator was nonzero. In any case, the numbers can be changed in the denominator as well by including more real energy in the production process. De Sousa Coutinho made this point rather dramatically when he pointed out that as soon as ethanol can be used instead of methanol for transesterification of plant oil to biodiesel, then the Energy Balance for their castor bean feedstock shoots up to 40. Similarly, for corn, which is very nitrogen hungry, substituting solar fertilizer production would raise its rather low value. Part of Brazil's high numbers are owing to their advances in real energy. Their farm equipment runs partly on ethanol for example. They are also planning for efficient use by spreading production of biodiesel across Brazil in close cooperation with unions. They expect 100,000 farmers this year. With more and more real energy bootstrapping all of these numbers head to infinity as the denominators go to zero. Since real energy is free, anything that has a positive (real) net energy gain should be fine.

Or should it?

While real energy just makes sense and we'll laugh at ourselves for our flirtation with ghost energy as one of our greatest follies, let us not forget that we are being pushed back to sanity by a crisis. We are stressing the ecosystem that sustains us, and we don't have a lot of room to make mistakes just now. If we make liquid fuels too high of a priority, we can make mistakes that may not be at all easy to recover from. Both de Sousa Coutinho and Alfred Szwarc, who presented next on ethanol in Brazil, emphasized the sustainability of their efforts and particularly that neither castor beans nor sugarcane are grown where the rain forest areas are. Why is this a sensitive topic? In part because EU demand for biodiesel has led the the deforestation of rain forests to produce palm oil and this causes much more carbon dioxide emission than using ghost energy because the peat in the soil rots. Oops....

There was another area of discomfort at the conference: $4/bushel corn. May people were quick to say its about time and this can't have anything to do with the price of tortillas. People were quick to point out that an extra $50 a year in grocery costs were nothing compared to the high gas prices we're seeing.

This is spin. High corn prices and high tortilla prices are related in a fundamental way and saying someone else is worse (OPEC) is not saying what you are doing is good. There are big problems with low corn prices but they are based on some pretty ancient wisdom: in Genesis 41 skinny cows eat up fat cows. Ensuring a surplus of grain avoids famine and surpluses mean low prices in a market economy. If we are seeing higher corn prices, we need to look to see if our policy for avoiding famine is still working.

In any case, Maryland seems like a good place to grow energy crops and it was interesting that barley came up at the environmental breakout session. This is a winter cover crop so it hardly seems like it is competing for food production. In Maryland, what we are really missing is our huge oyster harvest, the shells of which happen to sequester permanently about 30% of the carbon dioxide emission from cars in Maryland when it is at historic productivity. At this session Tom Simpson from UMD spoke on the impacts of bio-fuels on water quality and especially what fertilizer does to the Chesapeake Bay. You have to be smart about this kind of thing but I do wonder what oyster oil smells like run through a diesel engine?

Some people like their oyster raw
To feel it slither down their craw
I prefer my oyster juiced
To get the temperature reduced.

With apologies to Roy Blount Jr.

Scrooge

2007-05-09T09:51:00.001-05:00

There is a great deal of panic going on with regard to ghost energy because of estimates that the growth in our grave robbing can't continue. The idea is that we will want more and more of the deathly diet of coal, oil and gas but the amount we can disinterre per year will not increase so that an economic law will put prices so high that civilization will collapse.

This is sometimes clothed in biological language that comes from the application of differential equations to the study of (non-human) population dynamics. Terms like overshoot, carrying capacity and overpopulation get bandied about without even a hint that clear thinkers have understood for quite some time that the use of the term surplus applied to people reflects more on the shriveled soul and lack of education of the speaker than on the situation at hand. It is as if the contradictions of Jeremy Bentham's support for both the abolition of slavery and the punitive workhouse have not been outgrown. The power of ghosts is enormous until we learn to laugh at them.

So, what is so ridiculous about thinking there is such a thing as overpopulation or overshoot. Why are these over-the-top?

Population dynamics modeling is a fine example of the use of coupled differential equations. Set up a situation, say foxes and rabbits on an island, or goats and grass on an island, enter a rate at which rabbits or grass increase and a rate at which an individual fox of goat consumes rabbits or grass. Then, let the equations run. At first the rabbits multiply because there are not enough foxes but then fox kits increase and there are too many foxes for the number of rabbits and both populations crash until there are not enough foxes and rabbits multiply again. This oscillation comes from the lag in the response of the fox population to the increase in the rabbit population. With the goats, everyone likes to add an additional factor like erosion. Then the goats multiply until there is not enough grass, both populations crash and the recovery of the grass is reduced owing to the erosion so that on the next cycle the goat population does not rise so high and so on.

Here we see an illustration of overshoot: the fox population continues to grow beyond the number of available rabbits, an illustration of carrying capacity: the grass can only support so many goats, and an illustration of carrying capacity degradation: erosion leads to less grass so the goat population can never rise so high again. It is a little hard to pin down the term overpopulation here since it is really a value judgement. The populations are what they are in these kinds of models. Should we say that there is an underpopulation of foxes when the model first starts out? From the rabbit's point of view that would seem foolish. Rabbits don't usually chew up the roots (except for carrots) so they would be just fine without the foxes reaching a stable population. Overshoot is just a mathematical term to describe ringing in oscillating systems, but somehow it implies blame when we start talking about ourselves.

Now, here is something to understand about differential equations: they like boundary conditions. In these examples, we have islands and this is what makes the whole thing go. Without the island, if foxes eat up most of the rabbits, they won't usually stick around so they won't experience a population crash. Goats also are known for wandering in their foraging. The idea of carrying capacity is really strongly based on the idea of boundary conditions. This time the island is the whole Earth. The ecology, as it is, may only support so many humans. What if goats decided to practice soil conservation and improvement? What if they enhanced the amount of grass for food by realizing that they could produce energy more efficiently with a wind mill, build a seven story greenhouse with artificial light powered with wind, used that for food and leave the rest of the grass on the island alone?

All of a sudden, it is not an island but an open system with plenty of free (real) energy.

The concept of the artificial boundary condition was defeated in World War II. The idea of lebensraum was replaced by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Our reliance on ghost energy makes some of us regress to the old way of thinking because we start thinking it terms of scarcity, but the truth is that the amount of ghost energy we use is minuscule compared to the amount of real energy that is available. With this real energy we are able to support and enhance the ecosystem. We have no idea what the Earth's ecosystem's carrying capacity can be because we have not really begun to apply our creativity to nurturing it. We should know that it is vast because even our feeble, ghost energy using, and short sighted efforts have had a tremendous effect already. Thus, we have every reason to welcome, as an infinite blessing, every new person who might bring their new creativity to helping with this and honoring every person who brings their wisdom along to a riper age who can help in guiding our newest people.

Surplus Population? Bah Humbug!

Act Three: ACT!

2007-05-04T21:36:00.000-05:00

We have been following the releases of the summaries for policymakers in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Executive Summary and Doom below) as though a play in three acts.

Act One: the scene is set, the villain, carbon, is shown in his evil lair, his plots already hatching.

Act Two: Carbon's plots are revealed, the deaths, the tyranny, the destruction already among us and bound to grow worse.

Now, Act Three: The hero raises his sword and what? Who let all these economists in?

The dismal science dominates this report and it is very heavily ladened with GDPs, sectors, carbon prices and mitigation potentials. Nowhere does the word "prosperity" appear in the report even though this is what it points to; talk about dismal. Let's see if we can make sense of it: The basic idea is that by increasing the price for carbon emissions, you reduce them. So, what will the impact of this be on economic activity? As it turns out, there is little downside and in some models economic activity is increased (more jobs at better pay). As we saw in the last post the green numbers look very very good. The choice is now clear even if the report is a little hard to read. Reduce carbon emissions and improvements in energy security, pollution, technological base and improved health follow in such a way that reducing emissions to stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere seems almost secondary.

So, stabilization can be accomplished by just doing it. No one is going to die from doing it and most people will live better as a result. Let's act and no longer let fear of economic bogeymen keep us in the pathos of indecision.

The Green Numbers

2007-04-30T22:55:00.000-05:00

With all the racket about the color green these days, it seems a little hard to remember the simple principles of grassroots democracy, social justice and equal opportunity, ecological wisdom, non-violence, decentralization, community based economics, gender equality, respect for diversity, responsibility and sustainability. Maybe it was a mistake to name a movement after the color of money, but then not everyone's money is green. But, you had to pay for that first link, so maybe the noise is not so deafening that we can't think a little bit for ourselves. The green movement is definitely not about geo-political war mongering, it springs out of hope rather than fear. And it is not a throwback to the flat earth society, it is future focused.

But, as Luke 14:28 points out, if you are going to build for the future you've got to see if you have what it takes to complete the effort. So, let's start counting the green backs. We are spending a huge amount of money to little purpose, servicing debt and keeping forces in the field. So, it might not seem as though we've much wiggle room, especially when larger and larger costs are looming. But, our credit is not as extended as it has been in the past so long as we can inspire confidence among potential lenders. (Open that last link in another window. We'll be using it.)

How can such confidence be inspired? The proper way to borrow is to not really borrow at all but invest. It is just fine to borrow to pay for a road that will last as long or longer than the period over which the debt is repaid. This is not so much borrowing but rather acknowledging that the benefits of the road will be spread out in time and so the costs might be fairly spread as well. Borrowing to cover current accounts or to service debt, however, is not the way to inspire confidence. Part of the huge peak in the last link was investment in the GI bill. Bucky Fuller attributes prosperity since then to this one thing. Future Focus does actually work pretty well. The figure showing the US national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) is a ratio. So, some of the ups and downs reflect increased or decreased borrowing and some reflect decreased of increased GDP. For example, GDP fell about 25% from 1929 to 1932 so this accounts for most of the increase in the percentage of GPD that the debt represented during this period. It took a while for idea that bold, persistent experimentation might be the proper response to a crisis, a policy that another wise man named Franklin would have approved. A period of fruitful investment ensued which is shown by the continued increase after 1932, until the war effort took over in about 1941. We reached the highest ratio in 1946, after the war at a level of 120%.

Here is the question we have to address: Is a national debt that is 120% of GDP a bad thing? Well, lets look at what a young family does. A thirty year mortgage might be issued at 7 times gross annual income leading to about 25% of income going to housing over 30 years. So, that is 700% of gross family product (GFP) initially, and if income remains stable it would be an average of 350% over the 30 years. A lot of families think of their home as an investment since they get back at least a portion of what they pay for it if they sell. For secured credit, much higher numbers than 120% are routine. The continued borrowing after the war, to properly handle demobilization, was also an investment that assured prosperity, but it was done on the good faith and credit of the US government, which some feel isn't worth the paper it's written on. History, however, is not on their side. The US does not always keep it's promises but neither has it defaulted on acknowledged debt.

Let's conservatively take 120% of GDP as a dept ceiling in the case of a crisis and on the assumption that we will be borrowing to invest rather than to cover current accounts. Can we transform our dangerous current accounts borrowing in energy into an investment in money that leads to prosperity rather than the rather unforgiving debt collection practices of ecological collapse?

Where we stand now is that debt is about 60% of GDP and is close to $9 trillion dollars so let's assume we have $8 trillion of credit to work with. It is not at all clear that we actually have this much because we need willing lenders in addition to our willingness to borrow. And, since money for lending is probably invested somewhere else right now, we'd need to look carefully at what would happen if we attempted to redirect those investments. But, we are considering a complete shift in the way we use energy, so there is a clear economic sector where money might come from. Transforming ExxonMobil into a lubricants company and Peabody Energy into a Christmas novelty company would free up quite a lot of dollars.

The US uses about 35.2 quadrillion BTU (quad) of energy a year and wastes about 56.2 quad a year owing mostly to thermodynamic laws. Let's consider solar photovoltaic power as a limiting case, since some consider it expensive, and for simplicity since we can largely ignore the wasted energy and concentrate on the used energy because we won't be dealing with a heat engine. First we'll convert quads per year to watts and get 35.2 quads/year * 1.06e18 Joules/quad / 3e7 seconds/year = 1.2e12 watts, or about a terawatt. So our final number is we can spend $8/watt capacity installed. Is this feasible?

A 500 MW solar fabrication plant costs about $600 million and at this kind of scale estimates of installed cost come in at about $4/watt. Over twenty years, such a plant produces 10 GW of capacity so the cost of plant construction is only $0.06 per watt capacity with the rest of the cost being in raw materials, operation costs, transportation and labor for installation. Now, to get to a terawatt over 20 years we need 100 such plants. Actually, we should multiply by 3 or 4 to account for the fact that the Sun isn't always up. Let's take 3 since we might not be finished with hydro power in twenty years. So, our initial investment cost in solar power fabrication plants is $180 billion. But, as noted above, we make spending outlays of this size just to keep troops in Iraq. Now, at $4/watt installed the cost of power is $4/watt /6 hours/day / 365 days/year / 25 years of installed life * 1000 kw/watt= $0.073 per kWh. Oops, this is less that I pay for delivered electricity now. So, since I'm paying more than that anyway, maybe private financing would be the way to go for that part, especially since there is obvious collateral to secure the credit. It is beginning to look as though the green numbers indicate that we don't have to go any where near the level of public debt we were at in 1946 to completely transform our energy use to renewable energy. And, we'd actually save money.

Since the cost of building a manufacturing plant is such a small fraction of the total cost, perhaps the thing to do is to build 600 of them and preserve 300 of them to handle recycling 20 years on. Or, just keep them going beyond our needs and reverse our trade deficit. The next thing to look at is how much we could save by using electric transportation, geothermal heating and air conditioning and such. We could boost our disposable income by quite a bit by financing these things in a sensible way. So, with more than $7 trillion of credit still left to play with, perhaps the proper government role would be to invest in a strategic energy reserve through renewable energy storage, though I doubt this would cost as much as this project, still well less than a trillion dollars.

The green numbers look more than feasible, they look far superior to the ghost energy numbers. Sometimes it takes a crisis to realize that you could have been doing much better all along and maybe green is the color of money. Now, if we just made the GI Bill universal.

Smelling Salts

2007-04-22T17:41:00.000-05:00

That last entry was a little gloomy so let's revive ourselves a little and shake off the stupor with a few thoughts on energy storage. So far, we've given a little consideration to flywheels, biofuels, gravitational potential energy and load shifting (demand side management). Let's consider something that is just a little bit like a battery. Batteries are chemical storage of energy. Sometimes they are just constructed as chemical reactions waiting to happen (as when you stick two different kinds of metal into a lemon) and sometimes they are made so the chemical reaction can go forward or backwards depending on whether the battery is charging or discharging (like the lead-acid battery in your car). Batteries are an important kind of energy storage and they are already used in many off grid real energy systems. Their technology is also improving pretty rapidly as hybrid electric vehicles start to prove themselves and push demand.

Here I want to talk about chemical storage of solar energy because of a new discovery. Ammonia is used in making fertilizer and the process for making it is called the Haber-Bosch process and it works by stripping hydrogen from natural gas and combining it with nitrogen from the atmosphere at high pressure and temperature using and iron catalyst. This is an incredibly big deal because this process allows us to grow grains on the same piece of land season after season, in your eye Mr. Malthus! This is also why ethanol fermented from grains gives so little back as a biofuel. The natural gas feedstock and the heat from burning natural gas to get the needed high pressure and temperature mean that a lot of fossil fuel is used to make this kind of ethanol. Rooted plants don't turn solar energy into stored energy with a high efficiency in any case though they do great things for our food chain and air supply.

Ammonia is also a fuel. It oxidises to nitrogen and water and it can be used in turbines or fuel cells. In Australia there has been some work on using ammonia as a substitute for water in the basic hydrogen fuel picture. Under high pressure, ammonia is heated by concentrated sunlight over a catalyst and dissociated, the reverse Haber-Bosch process, and then recombined to produce heat again at a later time. But this requires the high pressure of the Haber-Bosch process. Oxidizing ammonia can occur at close to atmospheric pressure which means less equipment. What has caught my attention is the idea of synthesising ammonia using solar power by making aluminum nitride first. This can occur at low pressure. The next step is to mix the aluminum nitride with steam to produce ammonia and recover the aluminum oxide that was reduced using solar power to form the aluminum nitride in the first place.

Reduced? Oh No! That involved carbon! Well, the folks who thought this up were interested in fertilizer and they found a way to avoid burning fossil fuels needed to get the Haber-Bosch process to go, but they still need the feedstock. That is a big step by itself, but if we want a fuel, we'd better not be sending carbon into the atmosphere just to make it. Not to worry. When methane is used as the carbon source you get carbon monoxide and hydrogen out in addition to the aluminum nitride. These can be recombined using a catalyst to get methane back so the whole thing can be closed cycle. A biological process might be even better, cycling the carbon monoxide through ethanol and then cracking. One then gets a hydrogen stream for free.

Does this compete with the efficiency of photovoltaics? It might not matter. By the time we are ready to say energy storage is the crucial next step, real energy will be quite a large part of our energy use and so long as we're there, we can be a bit extravagant if we're not encroaching on arable land. My guess is that it could compete because the main step, the endothermic production of aluminum nitride, should stick: that is, one is not going to be fighting the reverse reaction since the carbon monoxide carries the oxygen away. This is the step at which energy is stored and so long as the reaction goes quickly enough this will be the main draw on the solar power rather than the radiative and convective losses. The ammonia formation is exothermic and can probably be used to help pre-heat the main reaction. Burning the ammonia in a turbine may not be as efficient as using it in a fuel cell but it may also fit the on-demand profile for this kind of energy storage a little better.

Remember, we're thinking about energy storage ahead of time because this is where real energy is taking us. We have a whole list of posibilities and any one or two might do the job. I thought I'd poke at this one because I thought the idea that we can make ammonia from the Sun is pretty neat. Clover can do it too so be sure to plant some in your yard so you won't need all of that lawn fertilizer every year. You only need about a pound of seed which costs about four dollars and you'll be good for the next twenty years or more.

Doom

2007-04-07T20:42:00.000-05:00

The next summary of a portion of the new report on climate change is out and even without the Highway to Extinction charts or a proper caution about sea level rise it is pretty gloomy. As pointed out in the first summary, the temperature rise caused by us is real. Now we learn that it is having real effects now. People have died already in heat waves assigned with medium confidence to warming. The way people hunt in the Arctic has been changed owing to warming. And, as the insurance companies are already noting, coastal flooding is also becoming a problem. In the first figure of the report, the changes are represented by blue and green dots. For the US, they seem to pour off the Rocky Mountains towards Senator Inhofe's Tulsa office in an accusing flood ready to sweep on over the President's Texas ranch.

It is true that these guys bear some responsibility for our slow response to warming, or at least their submission to their paymasters is culpable, but even if we did not intend it, we have caused the deaths in Europe, disturbed the Inuit and poisoned the mangroves by causing the warming. The way our pushers use the money we pay them to keep on pushing their product does not absolve us.

Up to now, we can plea to manslaughter and unintended destruction of property, but beyond this point we will have to admit to murder and vandalism.

How well does this metaphor work? As long as it is someone else who is killed or someone else's island that sinks below the wave it goes along pretty well. Reading further into the report though, we see that we'll be harming ourselves too. At that point, we're not just being cruel, we're being stupid. If we're merely beasts soiling our den, then we bear little responsibility since we aren't capable of taking responsibility. Al Gore calls warming a moral issue. He could be wrong.

Cost of Coast to Coast

2007-03-25T19:58:00.000-05:00

With ghost energy it costs less to carry the corpses to where you'll use them. Shipping coal by rail or barge to power plants close to or within cities saves on the losses from resistance in power lines. Keeping troubled nuclear plants like Indian Point running in densely populated areas continues for the same reason. Oil pipelines are strung out through ecologically sensitive and politically precarious regions because you can't uses the ghoulish stuff where it's at.

Some years ago I read Bucky Fuller's "Critical Path." If you haven't read Fuller you can get a taste here. After you get used to his style what he has to say flows pretty well. I'm a fan of e.e. cummings and I saw a bit of his style in Fuller's writings. Fuller had a plan to connect all the continents into one large energy grid. Now when you're working with ghost energy this just sounds silly. It costs less to just lug the corpses around. But what if you are using real energy? Does it make any sense to share real energy over large distances? What is different about real energy that might lead us to consider such a thing?

When we build an energy grid we do it on a fundamentally temporary basis. Our nuclear power plants will have to be decommissioned, our coal plants will run out of coal, even our large hydro power dams have reservoirs that silt up. There is no point in building power lines to last longer than the power plants. So the basic calculation is how little material can we get away with using and still get power delivered fairly reliably over say 50 years. Roman roads were built with the idea of permanence but ghost energy has impermanence built in because it can't possibly be sustainable. So, when Enron was ripping off California a few years back, it was not as if they were holding up power from Chicago that San Fransisco could have used. They were manipulating things so that power from Chicago was not supplying people a bit further west and step-by-step a little further on so that power generated in Nevada couldn't be freed up for California. It was a matter of clever nudging through manipulating the deregulated market to run up prices rather than actually having (or not) power from the Great Lakes region flow all the way to California. Power losses keep energy from going all the way across the country.

Let's look at that: the power dissipated in transmission is the current squared times the resistance in the line. The current is power divided by voltage so to reduce the current for a given amount of transmitted power the voltage is increased. But, you can't increase the voltage too much because with the lowest possible cost power lines we use we end up with high potential gradients leading to corona discharge. What if, like the Romans, we were thinking build it right once and it will be more profitable in the long run? With real energy we might want to think this way since it does not run out the way ghost energy does. There is actually an organization called GENI that has been looking at aspects of this and they find that it can make sense to run power transmission over distances up to 7000 km. Here they are interested in remote renewable energy sources.

The Sun shines everywhere but not everywhen. (I'm beginning to sound like cummings or Fuller) So let's think about what it would take for California to get its predawn power from the East Coast. In 2005 California used about 270 billion kWh so let's neglect peak or non-peak and just say we want two hours of that per day from the East Coast so we need a transmission line that can carry 30 GW somewhere along the Union-Pacific right of way. Now to carry that much power we need to increase the cross-sectional area of the conductor of the 3 GW Pacific Intertie by a factor of 10. But if we do this, we will also increase the radius of curvature by a factor of 3 so that we can increase the voltage by that much without hitting the corona discharge limit and so reduce power loss by a factor of 10. That means we can go 8000 miles instead of 800. Actually we get more than this. We had to make the conductor thicker to carry more power but resistance goes like length (the trouble with long transmision lines) divided by the cross-sectional area which we just increased by a factor 10 to accomodate the extra power. So really we should be able to go 80,000 miles with the same loss. Thus, if we don't want to get too fancy about pushing up the voltage, we're still where we need to be just by increasing the cross-section. Can you think of a piece of metal about 6 cm wide running from the East Coast to the West Coast? We've had a pair since 1869. We just don't want to corrupt Congress with the next set.

Why in the world would the East Coast want to supply California with power? Actually it is a better deal for the East Coast. They get power from California in the evening when the Sun is still shining on the West Coast. Both the East and West Coasts would need to be generating more real energy that they use for this to be beneficial. But, they may be doing this anyway if power storage has replaced the base load concept. Once they are doing this, they may want to expand what they're doing, running a cable to Europe or Asia and before long, the Sun never sets on solar power. Building over specified links makes much more sense when we expect them to last for centuries. They can also replace transitional power storage technology with limited design lifetimes, perhaps reducing costs associated with distributed power storage. Think of them as the pavimentum of a sustainable world.

Net metering

2007-03-07T20:16:00.000-05:00

McDonough made a good point this week on New Dimensions Internet Radio in the Monticello Dialogs Part 6. Our reliance on ghost energy puts us in a position where returning to nature is not possible, we must move through technology. Now McDonough is immediately followed by Gary Snyder making an equally important point that direct experience of nature is required to become a deep ecologist. Nice programing. There is not really a contradiction here, the man who wrote Ax Handles does not eschew technology while the man who is redesigning technology to follow a natural flow does so, in part, to leave space for nature.

Let's go with what McDonough is saying. We are reliant on a system to support a world population that is going to get to 11 billion people that uses more energy than photosynthesis can support. This is why ghost energy seems like such an addiction. Doing anything that might interfere with out ghost energy seems scary. Some states provide huge subsidies for ghost energy while limiting people's access to real energy. Real energy seems like the nose of the camel coming in under the tent. It feels this way because ghost energy, with its thousand fleas, is already so comfortably bedded down in the tent that we don't notice ourselves scratching anymore.

But, now we do have an itch and it is a pretty big one. It turns out that since we started burning coal we've changed the atmosphere to the point where we are not really sure what might happen as a result. So, instead of looking at real energy as a interloper we're beginning to look at is as a means of salvation. There are a number of ways that real energy is becoming available but I thought I'd talk about net metering because I'm paying attention to it just now.

Net metering means that when people generate real energy they can send what they are not using themselves out to the grid for other people to use and when they are not producing real energy, they can pull in some ghost energy for use. That's ghost energy that other people didn't use when the net metering rate payer was sending real energy out. All together, the net metering rate payer is only using real energy. One meter is used which can run backwards or forwards to to keep track of how energy flows into and out of the grid. So, the electric utility no longer knows how much power you use, but rather what the difference is between what you produce and what you use. If you use less than you produce, you pay them the difference. If it is the other way around, well, rules vary. But there is another important aspect of net metering. It has to last at least a year. So, for solar power, if your system can generate all the power you use in a year, it is no longer important for it to generate the most power you ever use. Your system can build up energy credits in the Spring and Fall and these can be used in the Summer to cover air conditioning and in the Winter to account for the shorter days. This sounds honest and fair except for when some utilities just confiscate the extra power you might have produced in a year. Where is the problem?

The main difficulty is that rate payers don't pay their bills anymore. Now the utility doesn't have to pay for fuel any more either, and especially when the fuel is the most expensive kind during peak demand so they actually save money. But what is scary is that the utility's ability to skim profit off a rate payer's bill goes away. This means share prices will be lower because there is less profit to skim per share.

So, utilities try to minimize the amount of real energy coming into the grid through net metering by asking for very tight caps. In Maryland, I've already mentioned Senate Bill 595 on my new sales site which would increase the cap from 34.7 MW to 1.5 GW. In the House of Delegates there is House Bill 858 which would remove any cap on net metering capacity. The sponsor of Senate Bill 595 would probably go along with the House Bill, so really the only thing to do is to check the House Bill, which is a bit longer, for booby traps and then give that support once inconsistent carryover language has been adjusted.

In Maryland, people can save money using real energy under net metering so removing the cap should get us away from ghost energy in an important way. What about the utilities? They've got it wired. They are pushing for time of use rates so they can charge other rate payers extra for what the net metering rate payers are producing. So, my advise to utility share holders is double dip: start net metering and skim the profits too.

An Heir of Leadership

2007-02-26T17:17:00.000-05:00

This is more of a straight post taken from my journal at Slashdot. No redefinition.

The US negotiated the Montreal Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol in the 1980's to control chlorofluorocarbons which had been shown to disrupt the Earth's ozone layer, allowing ultraviolet radiation to penetrate to ground level. This treaty has, until recently, been considered one of the most successful international treaties ever made. Control of these chemicals has reduced the rate of destruction of the ozone layer, preserving both health and the productivity of agriculture.

The Montreal Protocol was taken an a model for the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at limiting the emissions of greenhouse gases which cause global warming. The problem of greenhouse gases is considered to be more difficult because the mechanism of replacement of chloroflurocarbons needed to make the Montreal Protocol work is not so clearly available for the most important greenhouse gas, CO2. Further, there was a large disparity in the level of greenhouse gas emissions between developed and developing countries and reducing greenhouse gas emissions was thought to impact economic development. So, developing countries were left out of the first round on emissions reductions and had no responsibility, on their own, to limit the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, but rather were to be a testing ground for the efforts of developed nations to assist in economic development while also helping to avoid some of the worst emissions.

While the US negotiated this treaty, there were clear indications that it could not be ratified without stronger commitments from developing countries. In essence, the US negotiated in bad faith.

Now, the problem of economic development is catching up with the Montreal Protocol as well. The substituted materials worked when the demand for them was limited largely to the developed nations, but now economic development has brought in a larger pool of demand http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/business/23cool. html. The substitute chemicals, while better, do not bode well with a much increased load. The solution for this problem may well end up being further substitution such as magnetic refrigeration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_refrigeration. But the fact of the problem raises another issue. If the Montreal Protocol needs revision, who can provide the leadership to bring this about?

US leadership was crucial to both the Montreal and the Kyoto Protocols but US credibility now lies in shambles because in never intended to implement the second protocol. Yet, the US has most at risk should the first protocol not succeed since mid-latitude food production will be at risk. I would suggest that it is time to end the patronizing attitude that divides the world into developed and developing countries and admit that leadership could come from those who have been left out. China is already taking a lead on renewable energy http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/33389.html, and perhaps India could bring us together again on ozone depletion. Hey, Ross, what's that great whooshing sound?

It's everyone else filling the vacuum we've left in credibility space.

Trimming

2007-02-17T07:34:00.000-05:00

I keep on changing the sense of terms in what I'm trying to do here. So, ghost energy is the opposite of Real Energy, borrowing energy is about realizing the cost of clean up rather than depleting a resource and saving energy is about storage rather than turning off the lights. This is pretty normal when your trying to work out a new way of looking at things since there is a need to avoid old habits. But now I'm forced to make up a term because I've already used saving energy for another purpose. This is fine since I'm still following McDonough who has railed against the ecoefficiency movement as completely uninteresting. I think he's done this to be provocative, and many of my friends and corespondents are big on ecoefficiency, so I'm going to choose a more neutral term, trimming energy. Besides, I'm interested in just about everything, and I see a lot of innovation going into trimming our energy use around the edges. I think that the term trimming also evokes a sense of attentiveness, as in "Sister help to trim the sail, Alleluia!" In deference to McDonough though I should say he has a point: participation in Real Energy is much more visceral than the detailed work of scrimping for savings here and there.

I went to the Great Energy Efficiency Day IV at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in DC on Wednesday with one main goal. I wanted to rent solar panels to James Rogers, Chairman, President and CEO of Duke Energy. He was speaking when I got there. I didn't talk with him because he was off to an interview afterwards, but I did leave my card with his assistant. So, we'll see how that goes. I was thinking of him because he is one of the biggest polluters but he wants to do something about it. Putting solar panels on his house would help. Also, I thought it might be a link in an energy web that could mimic an ecological web. Once I was there, I probably should have approached Alan Kelly of ExxonMobil on the same principle, but his presentation was so self-serving and misleading in the context of the meeting that I just didn't have the stomach for it. I'm never going to be any good at sales if I keep up this judgemental attitude though. Still, I will make one remark: You keep on harping on how energy efficiency is such a long term investment, and it is only big players like you who can afford to take such a long view and manage this sort of thing. Little players like citizens or governments really shouldn't bother their little heads about it. So, you've had a good long 16 years since Kyoto to make your investments yet the fruits of your plan are so withered that it is laughable. You're projecting a huge increase in fossil fuel use out to 2030. Would it not be better to say that big players like you are simply so inflexible in your complacency that adequate innovation is just beyond you? Still, it was nice of you to mention that global warming "may" be a problem.

The event, The Great Energy Efficiency Day IV, was a corporate sponsored political event and it is encouraging that so many companies are looking hard at the real problems we are having with ghost energy. So what solutions does trimming energy provide? Since we are really in a crisis, it actually has to be a big part of the near term approaches to the problem. Sorry, Alan, efficiency is a quick solution, not a sometime after 2030 solution. There is enough available with present technology to trim 20 to 30% of our ghost energy consumption, enough to eliminate the need for any new ghost energy plants according to David Wooley of the Energy Foundation. The point was made over and over again that trimming energy costs much much less that bringing on more ghost energy borrowing capacity, and that was in terms of dollars spent, not warming mitigation costs.

Much of the talk was about how to encourage the adoption of that technology. I got a huge rise out of Phil Sharp when I pointed out that, in his analysis, the options boiled down to a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system which left out what Americans usually do during a war: they ration. He went on about burning the printed rations from the Carter administration during the Reagan administration and huge administrative costs and all that. Seems to me that the Reagan administration burned a lot of energy bridges. But his main theme is that there is no political will to ask any sacrifice of the American people. I was a little saddened that this point got applause from the front rows because it shows little faith in America's people. I guess cynicism grows as you move up the pecking order. Speaking with a bright guy from Dow afterwards, we agreed that cap-and-trade was rationing for the big players to enjoy. Polluters get to monopolize their pollution niche. Still, he wanted to consider a sector-by-sector approach. I think this makes sense as a friendly competition in the way that the Chicago Climate Exchange runs things, but as a regulatory matter it is still prescribing that polluting is OK. I also spoke a little with Phil Sharp after the ration burning speech and pointed out that if you do cap-and-trade with rations to citizens, then everyone's creativity is brought to bear in making decisions about carbon. He still worried about having two currencies, though I pointed out that we already use both cash and postage stamps. He's a smart guy too, so maybe he'll think about it more.

There was also talk of reregulating utilities. The idea here was to make the compensation for utilities proportional to increased efficiency rather than increased energy use. Well, if you think about it, utilities aren't really deregulated since they are still monopolies, it is just that they write their own regulations these days. With Real Energy, they'll be ripe for actual deregulation. You can find some thinking about this relying on government subsidies to utilities here from Reid Detchon's web site.

There were a few people there who were not wearing suits. A few people from the Sierra Club and Josh Forgotson and we had a good chat about Step it up 2007, an April 14 political event, but this time not a corporate event. I also met a good listener, Wendy Burt from DOE.

So, there are many ways to trim energy use which work and can reduce our ghost energy use by 20 to 30% in a short amount of time, short enough to meet the obligations we negotiated at Kyoto. There are also many lumbering approaches to how these might be implemented. Perhaps a forum less influenced by the slow-go thinking of the big players would be the best place to figure that part out.

Photosynthesis

2007-02-07T14:48:00.000-05:00

One way we all participate in Real Energy is to eat. True, fossil fuels make up a portion of the way we get food, but at base we all rely on photosynthesis to eat. The food chain is grounded in this. Actually, it is better to call it a food web and in a more immediate way than usually taught in school. For most of our lives, when we eat we are not making a bigger us, adding mass to our bodies, we are making a more active us. If we sum up at the end of our lives what we've eaten and subtract what we've eliminated and what's left to bury there is a whole lot of food mass that is missing. Where did it go? It's been pushing up daisies all along.

The carbon that plants pull from the air to construct their bodies is sent right back to them when we eat and then exhale that carbon back to the atmosphere. We are carbon evaporators built to feed plants. Plants are carbon catchers built to feed us. The plants have it a little easier because they don't have to chew.

While the picture of returning our bodies to the solid soil and the web of life is correct, it misses the main show which is the passing back and forth of carbon through the tenuous air. At the center of all this is the process of photosynthesis that frees the carbon we've bound to oxygen and makes it available to make the starch and sugar we eat.

Another way many of us participate in photosynthetically mediated real energy is through combustion. The ethanol that is added to our gasoline to reduce smog comes from plants and those who heat with wood or pellet stoves also use combustion to evaporate carbon back to plants. The question I'd like to look at is: Can we do this more to get away from ghost energy and participate more fully in real energy?

I've mentioned algae before and there is a reason for that. The amount of oil you can get from algae compared to rooted plants is much greater. The main thing is to look at energy per unit area per unit time. For ethanol production we get:

400 gal/acre Corn
665 gal/acre Cane
1000 gal/acre Switchgrass

For oil production we get:

18 gal/acre Corn
48 gal/acre Soy
110 gal/acre Peanut
10,000 gal/acre Algae

And you get about as much ethanol from algae to boot. Ethanol comes in at about 20 Mega Joules per liter and oil comes in at around 33 Mega Joules per liter so taking an acre to be 4047 square meters and a liter to be 0.264 gal and one year to be 3e7 seconds we get 0.25 watts per square meter for corn ethanol, and 0.02 watts per square meter for corn oil. For algae we get about 11 watts per square meters from the oil. The algae is getting close to what we can get from silicon solar cells (about 40 watts per square meter averaged over day and night).

There is a catch though, for the algae, the high efficiency is boosted by using a concentrated source of carbon dioxide such as a power plant. So, a source that could provide something like the amount of liquid fuel we consume for transportation is stuck to consuming fuel in another way. People like to enclose the algae to ensure that the particular strain that is good for producing oil is not out competed by a less useful strain and also to reduce water evaporation but this makes getting the carbon dioxide to the algae a little tough. Sounds like a job for hemoglobin or something like it.

If we demand less in the way of liquid fuels so that we are not setting up a competition between food and fuel, then there is an opportunity to reduce the extra carbon we've put into the atmosphere and still derive some fuels from plants. Not too surprisingly, the method is organic.

Executive Summary

2007-02-03T01:47:00.000-05:00

To me, it is refreshing to see markups in the IPCC 4th Assessment Summary for Policy Makers . It's out even if there are still places where the units are still being converted or the wording is shifting. They know what they mean and mean what they say but consensus takes work all along the way.

Real Energy is what the report is all about, or at least an abstraction of real energy. The units are given in equivalent solar forcing, watts per square meter all over the place. So, green house gasses add some of these and aerosols subtract some of these, and the change in the reflectivity of the Earth takes away some. The equation comes to people do 2.3 (greenhouse gasses) -0.5 (aerosols) -0.5 (cloud formation because of our aerosols) +0.35 (because we also make smog) +0.34 (evaporation of fuel) -0.2 (changing the reflectivity through land use) and +0.1 (making the snow dirty) which comes to 1.9 W/m^2. From the Sun we get an estimated extra 0.12 W/m^2 since 1750. What is really important about these numbers is that the uncertainties have been estimated. You can't be confident of what the consequences of these measurements are until you know how well the measurements have been done. For the last number the range the report gives is 0.06 to 0.30 W/m^2 and the solar constant is about 1400 W/m^2 so we now work to about 0.004%. As an astronomer, that makes be feel pretty proud. In ground based mid-infrared astronomy we start at about a part in a million just to measure anything at all, but measuring the Sun is actually a more difficult problem.

Now, all of these numbers are changes from 1750 AD and all but the one for the Sun are changes that happened because of what we've been doing. And, what we've been doing has been happening most in the last 4 decades so we really ought to take this into account if we want to look at the relative importance of what we do and what the Sun does. In a rough way we can just multiply what the Sun does by the ratio of 4 decades to 25 decades or about 0.15 which means that what we're doing is about 100 times more important than what the Sun is doing in terms of changing the temperature of the Earth. Isn't it great to know something with quantified uncertainties?

All of this is about physical measurement and modeling but there is more to the report. The report also looks at how the climate is likely to behave based on different ways that we might behave in the future. Here, estimates of political, economic and demographic conditions in the future are assumed and the amount of greenhouse gas emissions are projected from that. The demographic numbers are probably the soundest portion of these though they all feed into each other. China, for example, is retaining its one child policy which is a political impact on demographics. Now all of this is very uncertain because the future of human behavior is notoriously unpredictable. There are always a few seers who get it mostly right, but knowing which ones those are is very hard to do.

What I find really important about the assumptions about future human behavior is that they do not include any reasonable ones. The report ignores completely the effect of meeting Kyoto and going forward from there. This is a huge hole in the report because it hides the estimated results of policy initiatives that are already underway from policy makers.

While it is true that until about the end of 2006, the prospects of meeting Kyoto obligations looked bleak for a number of countries, some have made real progress which means that there are models that work. The prospect of a major effort by the rest of us to meet the end of the 2012 compliance period is not really impossible, but it's been excluded from consideration.

At the end of 2006, sales began for long term rental contracts for solar power that cost no more than what utilities charge for delivered electricity. This is possible because the cost per peak Watt is now $1.53 owing to large scale production. Because the contracts are fixed rate, they actually cost less than taking delivery of power from a utility in the inflation regulated economic environment we've maintained since the seventies.

For the US to meet the Kyoto obligations it needs to reduce it's emissions by about 20% from current levels. We get a pretty good shot at that if we build about forty 500 MW per year capacity solar panel fabrication plants by 2011. That's one plant per net metering state, a tall order, but not beyond what could be done given that there is an economic incentive to do so. Taken together with increase in wind capacity and the introduction of plugin hybrids which make a lot of sense in the current high oil price environment, meeting the Kyoto obligations is not out of the question for either the US or Australia regardless of good faith issues affecting both countries.

So, as an advance on quantitative understanding of global warming, the report is really really nice, but in terms of modeling the effects of pursuing various policy options, it is pretty much a failure since it excludes the economically most likely scenarios.

Saving not Borrowing

2007-01-24T14:42:00.000-05:00

Continuing with the theme that nature runs on current accounts, there are two situations I'd like to cover. One is that nuclear power is really borrowing and the other is that storing energy looks much more promising now.

Borrowing

To follow the first argument, you'll probably want to look at this plot of average binding energy per nucleon as a function of the number of nucleons in an atom. Open it in a new window. You'll see from left to right that the energy rises steeply from hydrogen (H) the lightest element to a peak at iron (Fe) and tails of slowly to uranium (U). It is a beautiful curve with all sorts of fascinating stories to tell, but we just want to look at a simple aspect: you don't get much energy from nuclear energy. True, the scale is in Mega electron volts (MeV) which is high, but what happens in a nuclear chain reaction is that uranium splits producing daughter species at around 120 on the horizontal axis of the plot. So, the energy release comes only from moving left up the slow tail.

Now, when this is done, it makes a mess because the daughter species often end up with too many or too few neutrons to be stable and so they are dangerously radioactive. Some of that mess cleans itself up in under a thousand years, but some of it remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands or millions of years.

We can't build things to last that long; even Hittler's thousand year nightmare did not presume to this. So, we pretty much have to clean up the mess. Now, to clean up the mess we have to remove from or add neutrons to the daughter species to make them stable. Now, here is the problem, for each unstable daughter species you need energies around 8 MeV and so you need a power source as powerful as the nuclear plant to clean up the mess from the nuclear plant.

This means that we have to pay back all of the nuclear power we have ever used and probably more to clean up after ourselves. That means we've borrowed tomorrows energy for today. Nature does not like to work this way, so we're probably on the wrong track using nuclear power. The other end of the curve, where it rises steeply is much more interesting for producing energy. For one thing, it is much harder to produce long lived waste on this end of the curve. This is also how the Sun works.

Saving

Usually when we talk about saving energy we mean turning off the lights when they're not being used or insulating a house. This really means avoiding using commoditized energy, not putting energy away for later use. It is true that with ghost energy you could think of this as not burning today what you could burn tomorrow though it really still means borrowing since we still have to clean up the mess. But this is about real energy.

So, by saving I mean storing. There is a little discussion about this further on but here is something that seems very exciting: this flywheel seems as though it might hold a few days of energy, real energy, in a distributed system. To me this means that we can work on current accounts with just the right amount of prudence to allow us to accomodate the intermittancy of renewable energy. This looks very scalable as well, just put them wherever we are participating in real energy. I don't mean to say that this is the only way to store real energy. Sustainable forestry comes to mind as do algae based biofuels. But with this, you don't have to cart it around, which is kind of nice.

Thanks to Ron Backman for the flywheel link.

Knowing Warming

2007-01-23T22:29:00.000-05:00

I want to argue that ignorance rather than carelessness is the main reason for the global warming problem. It is true that hummers are wasteful when they are not used for their intended purpose: muscling through tough terrain. And, we could get much more efficiency out of the way we use fuel. Market induced efficiency gets us to arguments like "the cost of home heating fuel makes insulated windows pay for themselves." So there is a trade off between the cost of fancy widows and fuel use and one is not being careless, exactly, if one waits for the payback time to be short enough to meet some other consideration such as how soon you think you'll move or how much more you might gain by investing the money you'd spend elsewhere.

In the seventies, people began to consider the idea that fossil fuels were a depletable resource and began to use the argument that we should use less in order to prudently preserve the resource for future use. This was sometimes countered by the argument that we should go full speed using them because the growth would help to finance development of a replacement: inexhaustible fusion. People concerned about environmental damage largely conceded the need for cars and power plants but wanted them made cleaner and thus safer.

In the eighties it was pretty easy for people like me to see a potential warming problem with fossil fuels because I studied planetary atmospheres then and the example of Venus and the theory of why it had no oceans tickled the mind with regards to CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. That was a concern at that time about a runaway greenhouse and I have to say that the much more imminent issue of nuclear winter dominated my activism. However by the early nineties I'd thought of a potential solution to global warming involving sequestration of CO2 in Antarctica which I kept to myself thinking that it would be a desperate measure and fusion was still an out. Others have thought of potential sequestration solutions that might work better than my scheme which takes advantage of the cold in Antarctica an one of Bucky Fuller's favorite ideas about the relation of surface area to volume. For example, sequestration through mineralization makes some sense because it imitates the geological carbon cycle we have been interfering with.

I say that this kind of thinking was easy for people like me. But, there are not so many people trained so broadly in the relevant sciences. Astronomy is, in many ways a hopelessly complex subject, and we (joyfully) throw everything we can at it. It was only by the mid-nineties that atmospheric scientists began to arrive at somewhat robust conclusions that global warming is a near term problem. In February we'll see firm consensus statements that it is happening and that the consequences are likely to be severe.

It is true that there has been some carelessness in fossil fuel use, but I would argue that even if we had been 20% more efficient in our fuel use, we'd still be in trouble. We would have had to know in the fifties that fossil fuel use had clear and quantified global warming implications to be accused of carelessness. What we have been is ignorant up until just about now. We have been as children playing with matches, unaware that we might burn down the whole house, and even unaware that we're not suppose to play with those neat little paper packages because no one could have told us of the danger.

So, here we are, in trouble and finally aware that we are in real trouble. What do we do?

We have known since the seventies that we should not be playing with the particular pack of matches called nuclear power. We might have beguiled ourselves with the dream of Yucca Mountain but it was truly irresponsible not to have continued the Clam Shell Alliance work and shutdown all the plants until the waste problem was solved. Yes, this would have added to or present global warming problem, but you have to go with what you know. I was out of the country then so I don't know how we got to the insane position that letting the current plants live out their design lifetime was somehow OK. They are producing waste as they operate and there is no place to put it. Some very serious and hard working people have been working on the waste disposal problem, but it has been considered a very difficult problem with potentially no reasonable solution since the seventies and it makes no sense at all to continue to make more waste. We have been careless here.

What we don't do is make the same mistake that we have made with the nuclear plants. We should not say that the investment has been made in the coal, oil and gas infrastructure and it would somehow be unfair to investors to put all of that out of business before they see return on investment. Investing is risky, even in utilities, and the interests of shareholders is none of our concern. It is a false efficiency to let these things run out their design lifetime.

One thing I'm trying to do right now, and something that makes me both hopeful and excited, is to replace our infrastructure through market competition. This is not the whole solution, it only gets us to a 25% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions without other efforts coming into play, but it does it very quickly, and that is what we most need right now since we just can't afford to wait.

Another effort that looks promising is Stepitup2007.org .

So, carelessness and ignorance are two distinct roots of the kind of trouble we get ourselves into. It seems to me that we can now learn from our real carelessness with regard to nuclear power to address our ignorance about how to respond to global warming. Don't give shareholder interests any weight at all!

Slashdot users selling solar

2007-01-23T14:13:00.000-05:00

The number of slashdot users selling solar is growing so this is an external link to list their sites so you can pick friends, foes or freaks to do business with. When you get to the sites, try the solar savings calculator at the bottom left to estimate how much money you'll save. When you click on "Reserve Your System" you'll lock in the offered 2005 rate which could start saving you money as soon as your system is installed. Any of us will be happy to help you understand the offer in more detail.

In order of appearance:

mdsolar

Keebler1175

modemboy

Olero

The company we are selling for has been discussed on slashdot in response to an article in Wired Magazine. Slashdot readers are pretty tech savvy and have been following advances in solar power for years. To me, the three main things to remember as you read through these comments are net metering, net metering and net metering. Net metering is the reason solar power can work as a distributed power generation method today. It competes at retail prices.

There are other important aspects to the residential solar power business that also need to be considered to make that competition successful. Most of these have to do with reducing costs. On the manufacturing side, a larger fabrication plant reduces production costs by a large amount though it is risky to build a large plant without an assured market since the cost of sitting idle is proportionally larger. The flow of distribution of panels can also be less expensive when the specifics of the market are well known. With a wait list of customers, delivery of panels to installers can be better managed reducing logistical costs. An installer I know has lost a day on the roof because a parts supplier sent the wrong mounting equipment. With panels, mounts, inverters and interconnects all designed to work together these sorts of expensive delays can be more easily avoided. There is also a scaling effect in installation. When an installer is assured of may years of back-to-back jobs, investing in labor saving equipment becomes more attractive even when the initial cost is high. Getting workers and equipment to the roof with lifting equipment avoids the labor cost of erecting scaffolding and trips up and down a ladder. The use of automation to monitor system performance and to handle billing also represents a cost savings since much of customer service is anticipated and the requirements for a customer service staff are reduced. Most people have a monthly personal visit from their utility to read the meter. With automated billing, this cost is avoided (for the company, customers still pay to have their utility provided meter reading, that is the connect charge in your utility bill). Finally, since the sales force works on commission, the costs of attracting customers is controlled to a specific percentage of revenue. This aspect has come in for some criticism on slashdot, but it does lead to large sales at controlled costs. The sales force has already registered enough customers to account for half of the total capacity installed in 2006 in the US (both residential and commercial). This is important because the plant capacity has to be sold in advance to ensure that it produces continuously. Offering rental rates of $0.07/kWh and up ensures a large potential market while long term fixed rate contracts offer customers a chance to save money over time.

Skepticism seen on slashdot and in the industry is pretty understandable, but as one of the lobbyists for a company that does this business in the commercial sector acknowledged to me, someone is going to profit from this business model even it this company does not. In the commercial sector Morgan Stanley, for example, is behind some of Walmart's current solar expansion, though not, so far, part of this company's financing. The trick is to make it work with the smaller systems that are appropriate for homes as it already does for larger systems on commercial buildings. The vertical integration and economy-of-scale savings described here make me think that this business is not "too good to be true" but rather too good not to promote.

What is Real Energy?

2007-01-20T17:09:00.000-05:00

This blog got it's title from something William McDonough said. If you don't know about William McDonough, he co-wrote "Cradle to Cradle," a book about designing things so that you know how they end up once people are done with them. His web site has a sample of his writings.

What I heard him say in an interview with Michael Toms was that nature does everything on current accounts. There is no borrowing. On considering this, I think we can say that there is a little saving going on. Seeds, for example, can store energy for a long time until they sprout, and a camel's hump is made for storage. But the point about not borrowing is pretty profound I think. You can't use tomorrow's sunlight today and repay it in two days time. The energy input is taken up instantaneously and all the follow on activity is
a process of expending that energy, from leaf to ruminant to steak to microbes, it is all one run.

Now, there are many kinds of energy: chemical, potential, kinetic, nuclear and all of that. I got to wondering just what the difference is between the natural flow that McDonough was describing and what we do. It seems to me that when we capture the dregs of ancient supernovae, or dig up ancient forests, we are dealing with something unreal. Not that the supernovae didn't happen or the forests of a hundred million years ago did not grow, but that they are just not part of the present natural flow. We have to summon them rather than participate in them.

So, the ghostliness of those sources of energy got me to the present blog title, Real Energy, owing to its substantialness compared to the spectres. I know that some people call this renewable energy and so do I most of the time, but there are some who call nuclear energy, the supernova's spirit, renewable, thinking that breeder reactors somehow make things perpetual. I'm not interested in extent into the future, I'm interested in the present natural flow, the here and now. This, being the only reality we have, is where the term Real Energy comes from.

Probably the RealClimate title had an influence as well.

Your opinion could be paid for by ExxonMobil

2007-01-19T00:59:00.000-05:00

As material from the web site of Sen. James Inhofe makes Slashdot's front page in what is basically an ad hominem attach on a Weather Channel meteorologist, the tactics of ExxonMobil in using smoke, mirrors and hot air to slow our response to global warming is revealed by the Union of Concerned Scientists. From the Executive Summary:

In an effort to deceive the public about the reality of global warming, ExxonMobil has underwritten the most sophisticated and most successful disinformation campaign since the tobacco industry misled the public about the scientific evidence linking smoking to lung cancer and heart disease.

It goes on to say that information laundering was used to attempt to confuse the public.

If you don't know that fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) is being fed to you, how can you be sure your opinion is your own?

State of the Earth Report

2007-01-18T00:30:00.000-05:00

This is reposted from http://www.gp.org/committees/ecoaction/eco_2006_04_25.shtml

The Green Party of the United States EcoAction Committee marks Earth Day 2006 with its State of the Earth Report.

Posted April 25, 2006

Human life relies entirely on the Earth's complex and resilient Biosphere and the Ecosystems that sustain it. The oxygen we breathe is replenished by plants, which also help to create the soil in which we grow our food to feed our children. Our wastes are cleansed and our water is purified through wetland ecosystems. Much of the building materials for our homes are derived from the forests we love or from the rock we stand upon. The air, food, water, and shelter that benefits us as a species; all of these are supplied by the Earth's ecosystems.

While the Biosphere of the Earth is inherently resilient it not impervious to harm. The diversity of the Earth's species enables this inherent resilience and leads to an ever evolving yet subtle equilibrium. Existing niches are filled and re-filled leading to new and more specialized species which, in the face of environmental change, respond to produce highly functional and elegant adaptations. The resiliency of Ecosystems can be measured by the level of species diversity, and thus, are threatened when ever-expanding resource depletion and environmental degradation exceed the replenishment capacity of the Biosphere. Human induced environmental changes that exceed the natural pace of specie adaptation leads to mass extinction, weakened ecosystems and a reduced Biosphere.

On this Earth Day, the current rate of species extinction has never before been matched, not even by the great mass extinctions observed in the fossil record. Those were periods of geologically induced ecological collapse when the character of life on Earth changed over millions of years, or a geological-blink of an eye. The boundary of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event in the geological record shows the effect of mass extinction, where approximately 50% of all plant and animal species on the Earth disappeared.

While there maybe multiple hypotheses for the cause of the extinction, there is no debate on the effect. After mass-extinction events geologist have noted "gaps" in the fossil record. These gaps are understood to be a time of measured recovery of the species diversity that is characteristic of robust ecosystems.

That is, the recovery of healthy ecosystems that are capable of sustaining large creatures, like human beings, took geologic periods of time to retrieve their lost diversity.

It has only been a few decades since humans first realized that their actions, deforestation for example, can be directly responsible for causing high rates of extinction in sentinel species. What we know now, on this Earth Day, is that just stopping deforestation and adopting better natural resource management may not be all that is required to halt the high extinction rates in forest ecosystems. What we know now, this Earth Day, is that we are rapidly changing the whole of Earth's climate: our Biosphere. Forest ecosystems, even left to themselves and untouched by logging, may disappear in a generation in response to changing precipitation patterns, stress from invasive species distributed by humans, and changing temperatures. All of which conspire to overwhelm their capacity to adapt.

Last year we witnessed the huge human toll exacted by large and violent storms, but what we witnessed will be nothing compared to the human toll that will accompany a rapidly collapsing Biosphere. We only need to look to those who live on the edge, such as the Inuit of Russia, Alaska and northern Canada. The plight of the Inuit, who are losing their ability to hunt, along with their brothers and sisters in the animal kingdom may seem slight compared to the loss of majestic cities to rising sea levels, but the Inuit's plight is a clear sentinel warning to us all. The changes leading to ecological collapse are happening and will cause us to lose what we hold dear.

The greatest threat to bio diversity and human society today is from Global Warming caused by increased levels of CO2 released from the burning of fossil fuels. The USA is the largest per-capita emitter of CO2 and as such each citizen has a primary responsibility, an individual duty, to curb unsustainable and harmful appetites for energy. We must find ways to improve our lives and our way of life, while using clean and sustainable forms of energy. We believe that the Green Party of the United States is the sole political leader in the effort to achieve these goals. The Green Party of the US has been leading the call to reduce our CO2 emissions, and in the interest of planetary ecosystems as well as humanity, we implore each citizen and the Nation to join us.

Theodore Roosevelt said, "The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired in value."

This Earth Day, we recognize that to help our sisters and brothers of the Inuit to restore the ecosystem they rely on, and to ensure the survival and well-being of future generations, we must set aside our wars and our divisions first to stabilize and then to reduce green house gas concentrations in the atmosphere. We declare that in order for all future generations of Americans and Inuit to enjoy the Earth as we have, ecosystems must be preserved and not shattered by our actions. For in reality, all people, past present and future are Inuit, and all future generations are our children.

As representatives of the people, it is critical for public officials at all levels of government to initiate actions that will begin to address the damage done to the atmosphere and develop comprehensive and realistic plans that can be implemented to construct a renewable infrastructure alternative. The GPUS EcoAction Committee seeks to promote and advance the existing science and policies to provide leadership in the new century that takes America away from depleting, non-renewable fossil fuels and towards renewable and sustainable forms of energy. We encourage the system-wide approach for national energy retooling.

To these ends, the GPUS EcoAction Committee calls on the government and people of the United States to aggressively support and implement the following measures:

-- We, as individuals must make profound changes in our own lifestyles, demonstrating to elected officials our own commitment to and expectation of change in local, regional, national and global environmental policy;

-- We must phase out all subsidies and tax breaks to fossil and nuclear energy industries;

-- We must move to full cost pricing starting with carbon taxes;

--We must provide incentives, legislation, and institutional reforms to bring renewable energy technologies on line and readily available to the consumer;

-- We must encourage the export and expansion of these technologies into overseas markets to competitively displace fossil and nuclear power, and large-scale hydroelectric projects;

--We must research and implement interim, as well as long term offsets, such as reforestation, accompanied by measurable cutbacks in emissions;

-- We must reject biomass incineration and inefficient biofuels production as unnecessary, insufficient, polluting, damaging to ecosystems and a waste of energy;

--We reject the concept of "clean coal";

--We must put an absolute limit on CO2 emissions Nationally and work to facilitate a Worldwide CAP. This limit should be based on the amount we need to cut fossil fuel usage in order to aid in reversing the rise in average global temperatures.

--We must base our cutbacks in fossil fuel usage on this limit; this means stabilization as quickly as possible and an 80% cutback to be reached within ten years;

This Earth Day, the GPUS EcoAction Committee calls on all citizens and all branches of the US government to provide responsible stewardship and care of the Earth and all people, and we call on the people to demand justice and accountability from your representatives and from yourselves. We must act to ensure that future generations are not harmed by our way of life, but that their lives are enhanced by it.

American Interests in the Middle East

2007-01-18T00:02:00.000-05:00

American vital interests in the Middle East, cited in the President's speech on January 10 are really two fold. The first is that uninterrupted oil supplies be available and the second that theocratic states not become so powerful that they pose a challenge to our position as the only superpower. Our military presence in the region is related to the first interest while our support of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, and a number of smaller Arab states is related to the second. They are also intertwined in the sense that our support of those states enables our military presence in the region through bases and ports which support logistics.

The strategic picture changes substantially if our interests change. The ability of theocraticists to imagine a strategically significant state is enabled by the presence of ready cash available through the sale of oil at prices much higher than the cost of production. Saudi oil income is easily diverted to theocratically minded organizations while Iranian oil income is already attached to such a system. In Iraq, oil revenues, such as they are, are also available to those who are sympathetic to the theocratic movement both legitimately and through massive corruption. In short, the theocratic movement is well funded because there is such a large cash flow to skim.

Changing this situation by eliminating our use of Middle East oil can only help. Oil is a global market, so eliminating our use of Middle East oil really means eliminating our use of oil altogether. Taking US demand for oil out of the market reduces the price of oil to much closer to its cost of production which is going up in the Middle East as more elaborate extraction methods are needed. The cartel structure for Middle East oil sales would have a hard time surviving a market with slim profit margins since production quotas would be difficult to allocate.

If America has no demand for oil, then our interests in maintaining the flow of Middle East oil devolve to support of our allies' needs for such a flow. However, our most important allies are already committed to reducing their use of fossil fuels generally (apologies to those down under) so it is not so hard to envision a world where the free navigation of the waters near the Middle East are of little strategic importance.

The technology is available now to eliminate our use of oil and to save money at the same time, so it seems like a strategic approach to the Middle East and Iraq would be preferable to the tactical approach the President is advocating.

Why Renewables Displace Nukes First

2007-01-17T23:48:00.000-05:00

Renewable energy is intermittent. Solar is in the day time, wind is available when it is available. But, one fine sunny cool breezy day our renewable capacity is going to meet total demand. What is a regulator to do? The renewables will be too dispersed to tell them to shutdown. All the rapid response generating capacity will already be shutdown because the renewables are free and who wants to compete with that. Hydro is in the middle of a mandated water allocation flow.

So, rather than blow the grid, the regulators will call the nuclear plant and tell it to go off line. But to do that, it has to shut down so it won't be up again for three days. A week later it happens again, and so it goes that spring and the next fall and all of a sudden, the cost of operation of the reactor just went through the roof. The nuclear industry whines about base load and all that but shortly the economics take over and that plant is decommissioned because it just isn't flexible enough to work in a renewables dominated grid.

At this point, or a little sooner, it is realized that what we really need is energy storage, fast in to handle over production, and slow out as a reservoir to handle night time. Any thoughts on what that technology would look like would be appreciated.

Check this to see how quickly renewable energy might happen.

Solar Power the Amway Way

2007-01-17T23:22:00.000-05:00

Solar photovoltaic power is competitive with retail electricity. If you could borrow at 3% and your electric bill were about $200 per month, you could buy a $30K solar PV system that produced all your power usage over the course of a year for the same amount that you pay for electricity now with a 30 year loan. This works in the states that have net metering laws. http://www.eere.energy.gov/greenpower/markets/netm etering.shtml

But, borrowing at 3% is little difficult to come by. Another way to look at it is that at today's retail rates for electricity, you get a 3% return on investment in a solar PV system. You'll get a higher effective rate of return if electric rates go up. This ties into inflation which might make borrowing even at a higher rate (than 3%) make sense but I'm not going to try to calculate that.

That said, venture capital has been moving into the solar PV market because solar is competitive at the retail level. One example where FedEx went solar is here http://www.powerlight.com/success/fedex.php.

At the corporate level that's fine. Big systems and big deals with risk management and all that. At the residential level, things are a lot slower. Enter a new player: Citizenre which plans on renting solar PV systems to home owners for what their utility currently charges them for electricity. Their model for coming to market is like that of Amway: Multilevel marketing. They plan to begin installing in the Fall of this year (2007) and they are signing up customers now through a word-of-mouth campaign. How far will this go? I'm not sure, but they've doubled their customer base in a very short time (about 10 days) and they are approaching 3000 contracts now. That could be 3 million contracts in 4 months if the viral marketing model works. I doubt that this can happen for practical reasons like server overload and the ability to build production facilities fast enough, but the eventual number of customers is not so unrealistic.

Another limit is the amount of net metering that states will allow as a percentage of total energy use. In Maryland, it looks like there is an out for the utilities at 34.7 MW of capacity http://www.energy.state.md.us/programs/renewable/s olargrant/netmetering_statute.pdf which is not a lot.

---------------------------------------------

As an update (3/4/07), Maryland Senate Bill 595 would increase the cap on net metering to 1.5 GW or about 8% of the 1998 peak capacity in the state. A PDF of the first reading can be found at the bottom of this link. New Jersey and a number of other states have removed caps on net metering. State-by-state information on net metering rules can be found here.

8% of the 1998 capacity is still not a whole lot. We are supposed to do that much under Kyoto but our use of electricity has grown since then so to meet those obligations we should really be trying to switch over 20% of current use, and be conserving at the same time.

I've posted some sales materials in PDF format at www.mdsolarpower.com if anyone wants to help me try to fill out the current cap. Post them in your lunchroom with my thanks.