Cost of Coast to Coast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.