Archive for November, 2007

When it comes to clean energy, it’s no secret that the Midwest lags far behind the East and West coasts. This is because, on the coasts, public policy more aggressively promotes advanced energy.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the Northeast and the Western Climate Initiative in the West are regional emission-reduction compacts that will drive significant adoption of renewable energy and energy efficiency. Correspondingly, much of the future advanced energy industry is emerging on the coasts, getting established to serve local markets, while the Midwestern industrial base largely hollows out and stagnates.

A few weeks ago, the Midwestern Governors Association began to take steps to close the gaps. The governors of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin, along with the premier of the Canadian province of Manitoba, met to discuss shared energy challenges. The result: Two pacts that start to lay the groundwork for regional collaboration and commitment to energy/emissions reductions.

The Energy Security and Climate Stewardship Platform (ESCSP) sets significant goals in four areas:

• Energy efficiency: Electricity demand reduced by 2% by 2015, 2% per year thereafter
• Biofuels: 1/2 of regional transportation satisfied by biofuels and other low-carbon fuels by 2025
• Renewable energy: 30% of regional electricity supply from renewables by 2030
• Coal with carbon sequestration: All new coal plants with sequestration by 2020, all plants in fleet by 2050

The ESCSP also proposes six areas of regional collaboration:

1. Carbon management infrastructure: For transporting and storing CO2 in a coordinated fashion
2. Bioproduct procurement: To establish a common marketing/sales framework for bioproducts
3. Electricity transmission: To expand transmission to accomodate greater amounts of renewables (especially wind)
4. Renewable fuels infrastructure: For transporting biofuels and other low-carbon fuels
5. Bioenergy permitting: To avoid duplicating or conflicting efforts in various jurisdictions and arrive at common standards
6. Low-carbon energy integration: To demonstrate the potential to harness multiple forms of advanced energy synergistically

Lastly, some of the Midwestern governors signed the Greenhouse Gas Accord, which commits the signatories to establishing targets and timeframes for greenhouse gas reductions on the order of 60 to 80 percent reductions by 2050, along with a cap-and-trade mechanism for reaching these targets.

Note that only some of the Midwestern governors got on board with the Greenhouse Gas Accord. Signatories were Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Manitoba. Indiana, Ohio and South Dakota only opted for “observer” status - whatever that really means.

A spokesman for Ohio Governor Ted Strickland was quoted that “the governor supports the Midwest states’ effort to move forward in the way outlined in the agenda, but Ohio is not in a position today to participate actively in [the Greenhouse Gas Accord].” I am compelled to ask: What exactly about Ohio’s current energy situation is materially different than, say, Michigan (which signed the Greenhouse Gas Accord)?

My good friend Gerrit visited me last week from Canada, driving down his prized Mercedes diesel. We talked about diesel autos and how they were likely to be an increasing part of the energy/environmental solution.

Gerrit told me he had been hearing that auto manufacturers were losing enthusiasm for hybrids, coming to the realization that most Americans drive lots of highway miles, for which diesels are simpler, cheaper and more efficient than hybrids.

Certainly, diesel hybrid designs are beginning to show up for commercial vehicles, such as delivery vans and garbage trucks. For instance, Eaton announced earlier this year a pilot program for UPS involving a diesel delivery truck with a hydraulic (not battery) motive augmentation system.

But what about diesel hybrid autos? Is anyone doing anything interesting in that field? If not, why not?

A number of people have contacted me recently for my perspective on a large new coal power plant being considered here in Ohio.

The plant is proposed by American Municipal Power of Ohio (AMP-Ohio), a nonprofit wholesale power supplier that provides electricity to several municipal utilities in Ohio, including Cleveland Public Power (CPP).

The implicit question is whether it’s a prudent course of action for AMP-Ohio, and for its clients such as CPP, to commit to building a new coal plant in a world in which climate change appears to be accelerating, and in which future constraints on carbon emissions to combat climate change will be relatively more burdensome for utilities that rely upon coal for power generation. Many environmental advocates clearly think that this proposed coal plant is just plain a bad idea.

I lunched last week with CPP Commissioner Ivan Henderson to get a more detailed view of CPP’s plans for subscribing to a portion of AMP-Ohio’s new coal plant. And from my discussions with Commissioner Henderson, it appears as if there are two underreported aspects of CPP’s plan that merit consideration before objections are lodged.

First, CPP’s approval of its share of the AMP-Ohio coal plant is contingent upon the results of an independent assessment of the viability of implementing the ECO2 CO2 carbon capture technology developed by Powerspan Corporation of New Hampshire.
This technology, essentially a CO2 scrubber, is designed to remove 90% of CO2 emissions from the plant’s flue stream, and is being tested in pilot scale at the R.E. Burger power plant owned and operated by First Energy. If the assessment indicates that the Powerspan ECO2 CO2 scrubber technology is not ready for prime time, CPP is out of the deal.

Second, assuming the new coal plant is built, AMP-Ohio is committed to retiring its 1950’s vintage Gorsuch coal power plant. Clearly, replacing an old relic with a new plant benefitting from 90% CO2 capture will lead to substantial CO2 emission reductions, relative to the status quo.

Thus, there is more to the story than might initially appear to the casual reader. Assuming that both of the above conditions apply, the construction of this new coal plant is actually a good idea, not a bad one. The moral of the story is that environmental advocates need not have a rabid knee-jerk reaction against new coal plants if new coal plant construction results in substantial CO2 emission reductions.

Make no mistake: I love wind energy and photovoltaics. However, they only provide intermittent sources of generation. On the electricity grid, lacking truly economic large-scale electricity storage, wind and photovoltaics cannot fulfill the role of dispatchable (a.k.a. “firm”) power.

I also love energy efficiency, and we should all do more of it. Energy efficiency can reduce our electricity generation requirements considerably. Ultimately, though, in our current society, we will still need some form of firm generation.

Coal power with 90% CO2 capture fits that bill pretty darn well. If the Powerspan technology works as advertised at reasonable economics, it might be a whole lot cheaper and more quickly available than zero-emission baseload technologies, such as IGCC with carbon sequestration or advanced nuclear designs. In which case, Powerspan is a company to watch.

As a subsidiary of General Electric, which of course is touting its Ecomagination strategy, NBC Universal recently declared a Green Week (with the tagline “Green is Universal”) in which NBC will weave environmental awareness into all its programming this week. All of its programming - including sports.

This made for a very weird halftime show during the Sunday Night Football game between Dallas and Philadelphia. Instead of highlights from games played earlier in the day, the studio hosts (Bob Costas, Keith Olbermann and Cris Collinsworth) spent 10 minutes huddled around a few flickering candles barely illuminating their faces amidst an otherwise completely dark set.

With this dramatization, NBC claimed to be doing its part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by lowering its energy consumption. Darkening the set for a few hours otherwise lit would save an amount equal to a typical household’s monthly electricity use.

While laudable in its intent, the dark set instead produced a scene that left me cringing. The hosts giggled like grade-school boys, clearly embarrassed, joking amidst the absurdity of attempting to televise a show in utter darkness. The good intentions of GE/NBC were thereby completely undermined by the snickering of the “talent.”

NBC’s implicit message to the audience was that reducing energy consumption means severely sacrificing commonly assumed standards of living. Remember Jimmy Carter in his much-ridiculed cardigan sweater, urging all of us in a famous late-1970’s national speech on energy (”Moral Equivalent of War”) to lower our heating thermostats and accept some discomfort so that we didn’t burn so much heating oil?

This was worse, much worse. It was as if to say that, to be solid citizens we need to use fire for lighting. What next, horse-drawn carriages? Through their laughter, the hosts recognized the message they were asked to deliver as ludicrous, completely untenable to a U.S. mass public, and they couldn’t help but distance themselves from NBC’s ill-conceived script.

For U.S. listeners, the conversation regarding energy efficiency needs to be framed in the context of the same (or better) lifestyles with lower energy consumption. A reversion to the Stone Age is simply NOT what the average American will entertain.