as posted to CleanTechBlog.com
Ever wonder whether recycling really works? Or, how it’s done? Last week, I found out — by touring a material recovery facility (MRF) operated by Waste Management (NYSE: WMI).

The process in an MRF is pretty straightforward. The recyclable materials accumulated from various end-user disposal points — for households, this would be curbside bins — are trucked into the facility and then dumped. The materials travel along a maze of conveyor belts, along the way being sorted by various means — mechanical shaking, blowers, magnets, and even some manual labor — into an increasing number of streams: paper, cardboard, clear plastics (e.g., water bottles), colored plastics (e.g., milk bottles), clear glass, colored glass, aluminum, other metals, and general refuse.

General refuse is then trucked to landfill (f.k.a. dump) for disposal. The other items are each quality-checked checked (97+% purity) and then compressed, for sale and delivery to processors to convert the material back to a state in which it can be reused.

I always wondered why phone books aren’t usually recycled, and now I know why: their bindings often jam the machinery, which causes lots of downtime and equipment repair expense. Apparently, newer equipment is being made today that can handle phone books. (A better answer is for phone books to stop being printed. Tell me, when you need to find a company to buy a product or service, would you rather use the Yellow Pages, or the Internet?)

The important point here is that, with an MRF of this type, the citizen isn’t required to separate out recyclable materials into different baskets depending on the material. All recyclables can be dumped into one bucket, and the recycler will take care of sorting it out. To me, this eliminates one of the key obstacles to recycling: the burden/hassle of having to maintain and manage multiple containers of recyclable material.

Something in excess of 40% of all disposed material can be recycled, so if you or your community isn’t recycling, this is unnecessarily contributing to landfills, while also taking prime resources out of the pool of future supplies, needlessly accelerating depletion rates.

The tour I took is one that every citizen, and especially every schoolchild, should take. Upon entering the MRF, I was greeted with an odor I hadn’t encountered since handling weekend trash duty in my college dormitory. By no means is it a pleasant smell. And, it’s not very pretty to see the incredible volumes of refuse being sorted.

But, I think it’s important that responsible citizens know what happens to the stuff they buy, consume and dispose. To paraphrase one of Bill McDonough’s zingers in his speeches, “When you throw something out, where is the ‘out’? It’s gotta end up here, on the planet, somewhere.”

Well, an MRF or a landfill is the “out.” The sights and smells are powerful reminders of the hidden but very real costs of a materialistic lifestyle.

As posted to CleanTechBlog.com

The community against taking action on climate change – skeptics who honestly or otherwise question the science, and deniers who have already concluded it’s all a bunch of bunk – seems particularly strident these days. For instance, check out the harsh comments underneath this blog post reviewing the recent release of a report from the U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program detailing the climatic changes that are already in evidence.

I’m somewhat knowledgeable about technologies to address climate change, but I’m less knowledgeable about climate science per se, and therefore less able to separate the wheat from the chaff in the climate debates. So I was very pleased when the Cleveland office of URS Corporation and ideastream recently hosted a presentation by someone who understands the issues very well: Peter Adams, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Prof. Adams offered a very cogent and non-hyperbolic synopsis of what is known and what is unknown about climate science. In his view, it can be stated with confidence that climate change is happening, and is being at least somewhat driven by human activities, though the degree/pace of future changes are highly uncertain.

I particularly appreciated the way he carefully and non-disparagingly handled the issue of climate skeptics and deniers. Prof. Adams noted that some of the skeptics have seemingly impressive credentials, but illustrated how nefarious their tactics can be by using a powerful analogy involving the statue of Venus de Milo:

“The scientist would say that the Venus de Milo is a statue of a woman, whereas the skeptic would say ‘A woman has arms, and this statue has no arms; therefore, it’s not certain that this is a statue of a woman, and it can’t be proven as such until the arms are found.’”

In other words, skeptics are having some successes undermining the consensus on climate science and reinforcing the vigor of the denier blogosphere by weaving intricate arguments in which each of their statements is factually or technically correct but completely lacking in context. Unfortunately, because much of the public is so poorly informed on energy and environmental issues, and on technical matters generally, many of our masses are unable to see how the “true” statements made by credentialed skeptics lead to a “false” (or at best, highly misleading) conclusion.

One such misled soul was in the audience for Prof. Adams’ talk: a member of the public who was apparently quite certain that climate change wasn’t happening, based presumably on readings of skeptic publications and websites. In the post-presentation Q&A session, our in-audience denier was sufficiently bold to offer a sequence of rebuttals to Prof. Adams’ talk, disguised in the form of awkwardly phrased questions to Prof. Adams. It was actually a bit humorous to watch Prof. Adams cordially but definitively dissect the denier’s parries – kind of like the scene in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in which the Black Knight stubbornly fights King Arthur and is sequentially severed of all his limbs, until as a bloody stump he cheerfully announces from the ground “OK, we’ll call it a draw.”

If I were a denier such as our misguided fellow audience member, I wouldn’t have been so stupid to take on Prof. Adams – an obviously intelligent researcher who studies this stuff every day for hours, and who is clearly not an extremist prone to overstatement. Actually, because he seemed to be such a thoughtful observer of the skeptic/denier universe, I asked Prof. Adams two questions related to climate skepticism that were puzzling me of late. While he responded verbally at the presentation, he did some follow-up research and subsequently e-mailed me more detailed commentary, which I’ve included below (with his permission):

1. Given that climate science and meterology are related in some important ways, why do some meterologists (such as ours here in Cleveland) have the opinion that climate change is NOT happening?

Prof. Adams’ response: “[Reporters] interviewed the head of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and asked him why so many meteorologists do publicly disagree with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) consensus. His comments are insightful, and he even admits to being a former skeptic. He personally accepts the IPCC position now, as does the AMS as an institution. Basically he points to some cultural factors in [the meteorologist] community: they have an inherent distrust of models, natural variability is their major focus, and long-term drivers of climate such as CO2 levels are not part of their world view (they are completely irrelevant to tomorrow’s forecast)…The danger is that [meteorologists] are not really climate experts, although the average person perceives them to be. They are bachelor’s level scientists, not researchers. Most probably have not read much of the climate change literature and, as even the AMS head points out, weather forecasting is different than climate science in significant ways.”

2. What has changed since the 1970’s, when many scientists were concerned about “global cooling,” not global warming?

Prof. Adams’ response: “[It appears that] the discussion of ‘global cooling’ was exaggerated in the popular press [in the 1970s] compared to scientific circles, and the scientists were much more tentative about it than they are today about global warming. Moreover, the ‘global cooling’ vs. ‘global warming’ apparent contradiction really is not a contradiction at all. Global cooling scientists were mostly concerned about the cooling effects of atmospheric haze particles, but there were already concerns about global warming from CO2. Of course, today, climate scientists still recognize the important cooling effects of haze particles that have partly offset global warming (the ‘air pollution that has saved us from global warming’ that I mentioned [in my talk]). So the major change between now and then is not a different physical understanding per se, but rather a reappraisal of the relative importance of these two factors.

“Moreover, there are very good reasons why this shift/reappraisal has taken place. First, with the advent of the Clean Air Act [of 1970], our greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase at the same time that we have reduced haze significantly. It is probably not a coincidence that the post-WWII cooling ended in the 70s (circa Clean Air Act). In fact, climate models that include greenhouse gases and haze particles tend to predict the observed flat temperatures or cooling from 1945 to the 70s, and then accelerated warming thereafter. Second, science tells us that greenhouse gases will always tend to win in the end. This is because haze particles are short-lived (atmospheric lifetime is about one week), whereas CO2 is long-lived (about 100 years). So even if your mix of CO2 and haze emissions cancel each other out in the short term, the haze goes away and the greenhouse gases continue to build up. We would eventually have flipped from cooling to warming even without the Clean Air Act.”

Prof. Adams closed his email to me with the final thought about climate skepticism/denial among the public:

“As long as enough of the public is predisposed towards believing in climate change, trusts the IPCC and/or simply acquiesces when CO2 caps come along, we can solve the problem. Witness how many areas of public policy there are (e.g., some subsidy) where the majority of people think it’s a bad idea but don’t care enough to override the efforts of a determined special interest group. Climate change policy may end up being like that, except in this case, [the special interest] helps to save the world. The idealist in me would prefer for everyone to buy into the science and the need for CO2 regulation. But acquiescence might be the ‘least bad’ of the possible solutions.”

I’d accept acquienscence, too – if we could even achieve that. But it’s hard to make progress on responsible climate legislation when the deniers are shouting so loudly, absolutely unwilling to entertain any views other than what they positively know to be the case, and drowning out discussion on the items where reasonable people can disagree reasonably.

I see this as a highly unfortunate development: climate science has become a “hot button” moral issue, akin to abortion, wherein parties hold non-negotiable positions based on fundamental beliefs rather than any set of facts. 

At least a little bit of the blame for this must accrue to Al Gore and others of his ilk who make claims that are likely to be overly dramatic, from a lecturing and too-certain stance, that the planet is heading to certain/imminent climate disaster. 

But the problem is more fundamental across our society. As long as we live in a point/counterpoint world of people convinced of their rectitude and shouting past each other in insulting fashion – “Jane, you ignorant slut” – constructive dialogue will be near-impossible, and progress (much less resolution) on any important and complex social problem like the climate issue seems beyond grasp.

As posted to CleanTechBlog.com

In a world where people are both tightening their fiscal belts and aiming to reduce their environmental footprint, the topic of standby power – sometimes called “vampire loads” – has gained increasing attention.

Vampire loads surround you all the time, from just about anything with digital intelligence. These appliances suck surprising amounts of power all the time they are plugged in, even when they’re not actually being used.

A recent post on the Yahoo! Green blog provided some very interesting statistics, developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. For someone paying 11 cents/kwh (pretty typical for the average American), a household can easily blow hundreds of dollars per year on vampire loads. The big culprits are computers, cable boxes, and video game players.

According to the post, on a national basis, these silent killers could account for perhaps $4 billion of wasted money in aggregate. Ouch! A sizable market opportunity for entrepreneurs to develop products or services that can put a stake through the heart of these vampires.

As posted to CleanTechBlog.com

A few weeks ago, I wrote here that it is often a good thing to read and reflect upon intelligently crafted opinions that differ from those you hold.

A good example is offered by the essay “Bound to Burn” by Peter Huber, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. In this thought-provoking piece, Huber makes the following interesting statements about the challenges to be faced in moving to a lower-carbon economy:

• “We rich people can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach…We don’t control the global supply of carbon.”
• “We no longer control the demand for carbon, either. The 5 billion poor – the other 80 percent – are already the main problem, not us. Collectively, they emit 20 percent more greenhouse gas than we do. We burn a lot more carbon individually, but they have a lot more children. Their fecundity has eclipsed our gluttony, and the gap is now widening fast.”
• “Might we instead manage to give the world something cheaper than carbon?….For the very poorest, this would mean beating the price of the free rainforest that they burn down to clear land to plant a subsistence crop. For the slightly less poor, it would mean beating the price of coal used to generate electricity at under 3 cents per kilowatt-hour.”
• “Fossil fuels are extremely cheap because geological forces happen to have created large deposits of these dense forms of energy in accessible places. Find a mountain of coal and you can just shovel gargantuan amounts of energy into the boxcars. Shoveling wind and sun is much, much harder.”
• “Another argument commonly advanced is that getting over carbon will, nevertheless, be comparatively cheap, because it will get us over oil, too…But uranium aside, the most economical substitute for oil is, in fact, electricity generated with coal…By sharply boosting the cost of coal electricity, the war on carbon will make us more dependent on oil, not less.”
• “By pouring money into anything-but-carbon fuels, we will lower demand for carbon, making it even cheaper for the rest of the world to buy and burn. The rest will use cheaper energy to accelerate their own economic growth. Jobs will go where energy is cheap, just as they go where labor is cheap.”
• “If we’re truly worried about carbon, we must instead approach it as if the emissions originated in an annual eruption of Mount Krakatoa. Don’t try to persuade the volcano to sign a treaty promising to stop. Focus instead on what might be done to protect and promote the planet’s carbon sinks.”
• “Carbon zealots despise carbon-sinking schemes because, they insist, nobody can be sure that the sunk carbon will stay sunk. Yet everything they propose hinges on the assumption that carbon already sunk by nature in what are now hugely valuable deposits of oil and coal can be kept sunk by treaty and imaginary cheaper-than-carbon alternatives.”

By no means is Huber’s writing perfect: The essay is too long by half, runs a too-circuitous path with considerable redundancies, and doesn’t lead to a very satisfying or forceful conclusion.

Along the way, some of Huber’s snide asides are too pessimistic. As an example, he claims “there is no serious prospect of costs plummeting and performance soaring” for solar and wind energy, but there is ample evidence (and lots of activity funded by prominent venture capitalists) to dispute this assertion.

And Huber’s clearly got some facts wrong. For instance, he talks of $500/ton carbon offsets and 15-cent/kwh wind energy. If you believe these far-too-high numbers, no wonder you reach conclusions that aren’t very favorable to low-carbon energy sources.

Huber has been wrong before. About 10 years ago, he and Mark Mills launched the Digital Power Report, which was touting the emergence of advanced technologies in distributed generation and energy storage to revolutionize electricity supply. Although quite compelling and seemingly well supported, the perspectives they put forth in their periodical were at best far premature – and less charitably, inaccurate or incorrect. After a run of a few years, Huber and Mills wound down the Digital Power Report, presumably because the world wasn’t turning out the way they were predicting.

But I still think this latest work by Huber is a worthy contribution to the discussion. Most notably, Huber’s concluding call for much more focus on carbon sinks as a no-regrets approach is hard to dispute.

Huber is no dummy. Many of the points he makes along the way are logically sound and ought to be factored into any strategy for moving toward a lower-carbon economy. As unpleasant as some of the concerns raised by Huber may be, they are nevertheless important to hear to develop a more compelling story that overcomes the objections to mobilize more real movement (rather than just talk) toward a low-carbon world.

As published on Huffington Post

Lately, I’ve been listening a lot on my iPod to a number of pop songs from the late 1960’s: “Wichita Lineman,” “Love Is Blue,” “Everybody’s Talkin,’” “To Sir With Love,” “Classical Gas,” and so on. These are some of the AM radio songs of my youth, sitting in the back seat of the car while watching the scenery go by.

My parents’ cars were always big and always American – Detroit steel. Although we did own a few Ford cars, my dad generally favored General Motors products, typically Chevy Impalas in my earliest memories, escalating to Cadillacs by the end of his too-short life.

In addition to the music from 40 years ago, I remember most of those long-ago cars very well. For some reason, circa 1968, I vividly recall the first time I saw a seat belt, the buckle of which was ornamented with the blue rectagonal GM logo and its motto, “Mark of Excellence.”

At the time, partly because of my dad’s loyalty to their cars (how could he be wrong?), I assumed that GM indeed did make superior automobiles. But as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, as I grew from childhood to adolescence, it became clear to me that Detroit autos – and GM cars in particular – were generally of very poor quality and design.

During that lamentable decade (remember leisure suits, everyone?), between the cars my family owned and the cars we rented on trips, we experienced innumerable lemons. These cars sometimes didn’t start, they would often sputter and stall, their bodies would rust through, trim pieces would be mismatched or fall off, and electronics wouldn’t work. My brother’s 1971 Chevy Vega was particularly laughable. It died an early death after but a couple of years and maybe 30,000 miles, the cylinder head blowing up one morning when he tried to start the engine.

As a senior in high school in 1979, my parents gifted me with a rust-colored 1975 Toyota Corolla with 75,000 miles on it (a lot of miles for a car in those days). It was butt ugly and had no carpeting. It couldn’t outrun a tortoise off the line, nor outcorner a garbage truck. It was by no means a chick magnet (or perhaps that was my problem?).

But that car didn’t pretend to be anything it wasn’t. It had no stupid gimmicks or features. It got pretty good gas mileage (~25 mpg), was cheap to keep running, and it was damned reliable – as hard as I tried to make it unreliable with misguided attempts to do my own maintenance (why did I even think about rebuilding the carburetor?)

As utterly unexciting as even that old beater Toyota Corolla was, I much preferred driving it to my parents’ 1979 Cadillac Sedan DeVille, which had the most god-awful bordello velour bench seats and a hideous vinyl roof that started peeling off within months. That awful land yacht clinched it: I had come to intensely dislike GM products and vowed never to own one. And I never have, and probably never will. I even avoid renting cars from Avis and National, because their fleets are heavily populated by GM vehicles.

I speak of my personal experience, but I think it is the experience of a significant segment of my generation. We walked away – no, ran away – from Detroit by our choice. And even though American cars have improved dramatically, imported cars seized the opportunity of the 1970s and have consistently stolen market share for decades. The brands were broken; Detroit couldn’t win us back.

A radical rethink is happening now across the U.S. auto industry, pushed in large part by the Obama Administration’s policy proposals, but it seems to be all too late for GM. The day of reckoning is now at hand.

The talk today is of the imminent bankruptcy of GM, with outpourings of grief throughout the Midwest, as if the company were dying just now. But in my view, the company became terminal long ago, when a whole chunk of the U.S. population turned away from American to imported cars. And the autopsy offers interesting lessons for the future industrial economy of the U.S.

Management was at fault for designing and offering lousy products in which style trumped substance, and for dragging their feet on advancements in safety and efficiency. Labor was at fault, too, for setting unreasonable wage rates, benefits packages, and work rules, and for being so inattentive to the quality of the product coming off the line.

It’s impossible to date exactly when both management and labor started travelling down the slippery slopes, and when the decline became irreversible. However, something tells me that the late 1960s represents something of a turning point – when U.S. industrial hegemony was seemingly permanent and big American beasts powered by thirsty V-8s roamed the newly opened highways across our seemingly endless landscapes.

And while it’s embarrassing to reflect on the outright arrogance of thinking and feeling as if we ruled the world, it’s nevertheless still seductive to remember those sepia-toned days. Today’s economic difficulties, and the possible death (and certain major restructuring) of GM, intensify the bittersweetness of those 1960s tunes, as we look backward in the rearview mirror to naively happier – though patently unsustainable – days.

In life, I have learned to find more satisfaction when looking through the windshield to the future. In moving forward – rebuilding the U.S. auto industry, and growing the cleantech and green energy industry at large – we need to bear in mind the sobering lessons of the demise of GM so as not to plant the seeds of future collapse.

Management teams cannot consistently insult the intelligence of their customers by offering crappy products with poor value. Labor must also keep the customer in mind by not demanding unreasonable agreements that inflate prices or by producing inferior products. Management and labor must work together in much better harmony, and the unifying theme must be technological leadership to produce customer satisfaction.

If we want to build a sustainable economy, it means we need both economic and environmental sustainability. We need sustainable businesses producing environmentally sustainable products with an economically sustainable business model. And economic sustainability only comes when management and labor work together to serve the customer well by superior product innovation.

Interestingly, many of today’s behemoth energy corporations – electric utilities and oil companies – are in a situation similar to GM’s 40 years ago. With little competition from alternative supply sources, token efforts to portray their meager technological diversification as leadership, and sometimes haughty disdain for their customers, their brands are weak: Customers can’t wait to leave once a compelling option is presented to them.

When that day comes, many of today’s gargantuan energy companies may follow the same fate as we’re seeing now with GM.

Will the U.S. public care then? Will Houston follow Detroit? Will today’s kids be yearning for the songs of “American Idol?”

As posted to CleanTechBlog.com

One of the more popular policy prescriptions often made by ardent renewable energy advocates is the adoption of a “feed-in tariff” (FIT).

With a FIT, the government sets a price for electricity supplied by a qualifying renewable energy source, and the price is usually sufficiently high to produce a good return for the investor to install the renewable energy project. This, in turn, provides a substantial economic motivation for the growth of the renewable energy sector.

Supporters love the fact that a FIT policy provides a long-term, stable, predictable, and lucrative return on renewable energy investment. Naturally, this leads to booming markets for renewable energy where FITs are in place.

FITs are in wide use in many parts of the world – mainly in Europe, but increasingly in Canada as well. Correspondingly, these markets are experiencing exploding growth for renewables.

However, to date, traction has been slow to come for FITs in the United States because the policy mechanism is innately at odds with the prevailing philosophy of the American economy: to let market forces sort things out. 

In the U.S., the renewable portfolio standard (RPS) has been the preferred policy mechanism to promote the penetration of renewable energy (along with the predictable potpourri of incentives and subsidies buried in the piles of the tax codes). In an RPS, the government sets a target for a quantity of renewables to be adopted by a certain date, and then lets market forces dictate what mix of renewables will supply the requirement, as well as the price implications of that mix.

By contrast, a FIT explicitly puts the government in the position of price-setter, and picks technological winners by placing prices as a function of the renewable energy technology in question. 

If the price of the FIT is set too high, unquestionably this pushes renewable energy adoption but tramples competitive forces in doing so: bad (meaning, to me, highly uneconomic) projects get done, and/or companies or investors make outrageous profits. On the other hand, if the price of the FIT is set too low, then the policy won’t have any impact at all: no incremental investment in the desired renewables will occur.

In other words, the government has to be able to set the price at exactly the right level to induce a lot of investment, but no higher so as to provide a free wealth grab, and no lower so as to discourage the market from happening at all. No government is that smart to be able to perfectly set the price of a FIT. So in practice, FIT prices are very high – and the renewable energy interests profit immensely from it.

Although FIT policy has historically gone nowhere in the U.S., that may be changing, as FITs are starting to get more serious consideration. In early 2008, the California Public Utilities Commission adopted the first FIT in the U.S. to promote up to a maximum of 480 megawatts installed. Earlier this year, the city of Gainesville, Fla., enacted a feed-in tariff for its municipal utility. Even in Michigan, not considered one of the leading states in pro-renewables policies, the Public Service Commission is considering a pilot feed-in tariff.

I am not sold on the FIT mechanism as good policy, because it is so heavy-handed and arbitrary. However, as the rest of the world adopts FIT policies, they extend their leadership over the U.S. And the leadership is not just in market size, but also in technological advancement. If the U.S. doesn’t maintain technological leadership, then we’ve lost arguably our best asset. If a FIT policy is necessary to be leaders in renewable energy, then maybe it’s a necessary evil.

It wouldn’t be the first time I’d have had to swallow hard in lukewarmly supporting a policy that otherwise I find fundamentally challenging.

Some have argued that the aggregate economic subsidy associated with a national FIT policy is outweighed by the faster reduction in costs associated with renewable energy advancement promoted by the FIT, plus the avoided expenditures on fossil fuels displaced by the increased renewable energy production caused by the FIT. It’s an interesting argument, but counter-intuitive to me, and I’d like to see some quantitative support for this line of reasoning.

As posted to CleanTechBlog.com

You heard it here first: The energy consultancy Douglas-Westwood is claiming in a May 11 white paper that “peak oil” may have already happened, as far back as October 2004, and that the oil price boom followed by economic collapse is indicative of how things will play out over the decades to come as oil supplies are unable to expand in the face of increasing demands. Stay tuned….

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) exposition WINDPOWER 2009 attracted 23,000 attendees to Chicago earlier this month. Glad AWEA didn’t ask me to do the headcount!….

Your stock portfolio isn’t the only thing that’s plummeted. According to a snippet in the March 2009 issue of Power, so too have PV prices fallen, by an estimated 10 percent since last October, with a further 15 to 20 percent decline expected in the coming year. Seems that, after several years of tight supplies, there’s now a glut in the market due to collapsing demand in Europe….

Lots happening in D.C. these days. Looks like cap-and-trade requirements for carbon dioxide emissions are making real progress, embodied in the grandiosely named “American Clean Energy and Security Act” (H.R. 2454) - better known as the Waxman-Markey bill. Cap-and-trade might even pass the House sometime this summer. Don’t think it’s going to be so easy in the Senate, though….

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has created ARPA-E to fund the initial evaluation of new whizbang ideas for energy, just like DARPA’s been doing for out-of-the-box defense gizmos for decades. One can only imagine what’s going to come out of that shop in years to come….

It also appears that the e-DII concept floated by Brookings earlier this year (to create Clean Energy Innovation Centers mainly affiliated with universities) is gaining traction, now having been tucked into the Waxman-Markey bill. Wonder what the national research labs, such as NREL, NETL, ORNL, LBNL and other alphabet soupers, think of this?….

Speaking of NREL, hats off to Joel Serface, who just completed a year’s residence there on behalf of uber-VC firm Kleiner Perkins to help accelerate technology commercialization and spinouts from the lab.  A year in Golden/Boulder is hardly hardship duty, but as Joel indicates in a recent blog post, it wasn’t enough time to make much of a dent in the bureaucracy….

Congratulations to my former colleague Cathy Zoi, who’s been tabbed by President Obama to lead the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at DOE. Wish her good luck:  She’ll need it!….

Let’s hear it for Joseph Romm, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He calls ‘em like he sees ‘em. In a note in the May/June Technology Review, Romm claims “it’s not possible to have a sustained economic recovery that isn’t green” and calls our economic system a “global Ponzi scheme: investors (i.e., current generations) are paying themselves (i.e., you and me) by taking from future generations.”  Whew!….

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce just released a study performed by Charles River Associates estimating 3 million jobs to be lost in the U.S. by 2030 as a result of climate change legislation. Last year, the chamber commissioned a similar study announcing a similar doom-and-gloom result. I’m not saying there won’t be job losses as a result of cap-and-trade – there certainly will – but I don’t think it’s going to be apocalyptic, either….

Gotta hand it to Bob Galvin, former chairman of Motorola. Not content to be retired, he has launched the Galvin Electricity Initiative to promote a “Perfect Power System” to help prevent future blackouts. In a sense, he’s trying to Galvinize the grid….

Last Wednesday evening, the Cleveland chapter of the American Jewish Committee honored the Cleveland Foundation for its advanced energy initiative. Accepting the award on behalf of the foundation was President and CEO Ronn Richard. A good time was had by all….As posted to CleanTechBlog.com

As posted on CleanTechBlog.com

One of my favorite bumper stickers of all time reads, “My Karma Ran Over Your Dogma.”

In addition to being a wonderful word play, the one-liner reflects my deep disdain for those who are far too certain of their positions - whatever their positions may be. I haven’t done any statistical analysis, but I often find that the strength of people’s opinions is inversely correlated with their knowledge of the subject.

So it’s actually a service to be reminded by intelligent people offering alternative views with substantial supporting evidence that what we think we really know may not actually be truth.

In the energy realm, I’ve encountered a number of articles by or about very accomplished and expert individuals who don’t subscribe to conventional wisdom.

For instance, in late March, the New York Times Magazine ran a provocative article called “The Civil Heretic,” profiling the Princeton mathematician Freeman Dyson, who has been the subject of significant and hostile criticism for suggesting (as has Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist) that too much concern is being paid to the phenomenon of climate change.

On the oil front, Ruchir Sharma, the head of emerging market research at Morgan Stanley wrote an article in the April 20 Newsweek titled “If It’s In the Ground, It Can Only Go Down.” Sharma doesn’t buy the peak oil theory, and he argues that the long-term trend of declining oil prices will reemerge.

Even if you disagree with their positions, you can’t say they are stupid people. There are grains of truth in their arguments that we are all well-served to recognize and embrace.

As stated so beautifully in The Tree of Knowledge by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela: “The knowledge of knowledge compels. It compels us to adopt an attitude of permanent vigilance against the temptation of certainty. It compels us to recognize that certainty is not a proof of truth. It compels us to realize that the world everyone sees is not the world but a world.”

We must be honest with ourselves in admitting that the future is not knowable with certainty in advance, and that all projections can at best only be grounded speculations. Being confronted by obviously smart and wise people who hold different views than ours about the future is a good exercise in humility for all of us. If we respond thoughtfully to considerate alternative views, we are driven to reexamine our own thinking and logic, and strengthen or alter it accordingly.

As posted to CleanTechBlog.com

The federal government is a mighty bureaucracy, so it’s impossible to keep track of all the parts. Still, few areas are as unknown by the general public as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

The FERC (it’s always referrred to as “the FERC”) is responsible for interstate regulation of energy markets, which in practice means the transmission or transportation of electricity and natural gas. As a result, the FERC is going to be a key player in all Smart Grid developments, which in turn will be a key driver of a variety of new energy technologies: renewable energy, energy storage, advanced meters, and so on.

President Obama recently appointed Jon Wellinghoff to be chairman of the commission. Wellinghoff is a long-time proponent of environmental protection, so it’s no surprise that he’s rapidly making moves to promote renewable energy and energy efficiency. For instance, Wellinghoff recently announced the formation of the Office of Energy Policy and Innovation, to be effective today. (Innovation in a Federal agency? Hmmmmm.)

Wellinghoff has already demonstrated the gall to radically challenge conventional wisdom, which is always a risky and courageous thing to do in the electricity sector. In late April, as noted in the New York Times, Wellinghoff told reporters following a United States Energy Association forum that baseload generation options may not be necessary in the future, thereby undercutting one of the key selling points for the construction or continued operation of nuclear and coal-fired powerplants.

Quoting Wellinghoff: “I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism…People talk about ‘Oh, we need baseload.’ It’s like people saying we need more computing power, we need mainframes. We don’t need mainframes; we have distributed computing.”

Of course, Wellinghoff’s seductive vision depends on a major and costly overhaul of the national power grid, which seems light years away to me. In his seminal New York Times editorial last November, Al Gore projected the cost of a Smart Grid at $400 billion - whereas the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (a.k.a., the stimulus bill) allocates a seemingly large but comparatively paltry $4.5 billion to Smart Grid projects.

To get over the formidable humps we face in Washington, we’re going to need leaders who are willing to rattle the china on the dinner table. In Wellinghoff, it looks like we have one.  His comments no doubt have a lot of people in the energy sector muttering, “What the FERC?”

As posted to CleanTechBlog.com

I don’t know if it’s a myth, but I’ve heard it said that a city’s suicide rates and average wind speeds are correlated. According to the claim, there may be something fundamental about human biology – perhaps within the inner ear – that makes windiness tend to drive people crazy.

Whether it’s true or not, it’s indisputable that where there’s lots of wind, there tends to be few people. And vice versa: Where there’s a lot of people, there tends to be little wind.

A casual look at a U.S. wind map confirms this: Most of the best wind resources are in the middle of the country, from West Texas in the south to the Dakotas in the north. If you’ve ever driven in any of these parts, you know that this is an endless expanse of desolate, sparsely populated land.

Unsurprisingly, it’s also the case that, where there are few people, there tend to be few electric transmission lines. Logically, it follows then that there is little electric transmission capacity in the places where wind resources are greatest.

So when parts of the Great Plains get touted as the “Saudi Arabia of wind,” it may be true, but imagine the need to build a big set of pipelines to get that useful wind energy to customers in Minneapolis, Chicago and points further east and south.

Ask any wind developer about their business prospects and it doesn’t take long for the conversation to turn to transmission – or, more precisely, the lack of enough of it.

Look at the study “20% Wind Energy by 2030,” released in 2008 by the U.S. Department of Energy to envision the implications of supplying 20 percent of the nation’s electricity needs by 2030 from wind. Oh, there’s plenty of wind to actually supply the electricity, no problem. It’s just that tons of new transmission capacity would be needed.

And there’s the rub. It’s only marginally easier to site and build a new transmission line than a new nuclear powerplant. Transmission lines take many years and sometimes even decades to get done, due to a variety of NIMBY forces and overlapping regulatory regimes at the local, state and federal levels. And they cost a fortune, easily a million dollars a mile, often considerably more.

So that “pipeline” from the Dakotas to Chicago is on the order of a billion dollars of merely enabling infrastructure – and since there are many pinchpoints in the national power grid, that wind power probably couldn’t go much further than the terminating point anyway.

(From a technical standpoint, I’m massively oversimplifying here by comparing the power grid to a commodity pipeline, but the gist of the conclusion is essentially sound.)

Last year, most of the transmission grid operators from the eastern half of the U.S. convened for the first time (that’s scary, isn’t it?) to develop what has come to be called the Joint Coordinated System Plan (JCSP) 2008. The JCSP report suggests that 10,000 new miles of transmission lines, at an investment of about $50 billion, will be needed east of the Rocky Mountains over the next 15 years just to meet expected load growth and current renewable portfolio standards on the books. Little of this required expansion is much beyond the drawing board.

The JCSP’s 20 percent wind scenario is even more daunting: 15,000 miles and $80 billion of capital. The map associated with this scenario is especially intriguing, with three major new hypothetical 800-kV DC corridors drawn right across Northeast Ohio to New York City. (No doubt, the nightmare of the August 2003 Northeastern blackout still sends nightmares through these transmission planners.)

Sorry, I just don’t see this happening in my lifetime.

In passing, the authors point out that neither energy efficiency nor offshore wind resources were investigated to alleviate these transmission requirements. My guess is that inclusion of these possibilities would change the results – a lot.

Significant penetration of energy efficiency could probably seriously reduce the quantity of new wind generation required to make up 20 percent of the region’s supply. Instead of nearly 230 gigawatts (!) of projected new wind capacity in the eastern U.S. by 2024, my guess is that concerted exploitation of cost-effective energy efficiency opportunities could cut that investment requirement in half.

As for the 100-plus gigawatts of new wind turbines in the eastern U.S., it might be cheaper overall to put higher-cost installations offshore in the Great Lakes and in the Atlantic to avoid facing the perhaps impossible prospect of building lots of expensive new transmission lines to import onshore wind from the Great Plains.

The inability to expand transmission is a major impediment to the onshore wind business, and while it might be mitigated (slightly) with some regulatory reform, I don’t see it going away. Offshore wind may have its own development challenges, but for those in the wind industry, going offshore should become an increasingly interesting way to skirt the gridlock problem.