future clean tech

No. Absolutely not. And yet the conservative Wall Street Journal yesterday implied that America should, in a column entitled, “Down Under: Can the US Learn From Australia’s Emissions Plan?”

It’s easy to see why the Journal is pumped about Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” (that’s what they’re calling the Aussie ETS): it’s a sop to heavy polluting industry and the conservative opposition that supports it. The amended legislation gives a free ride to the carbon mafia, delaying really significant cuts in CO2 and passing on the residual costs to the average punter. The minimum “guaranteed” reduction is 5% by 2020 – talk about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Only this time there won’t be an iceberg in sight.

Interestingly, conservative Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull chose to lay his leadership on the line over this issue. His Liberal Party is severely divided over the legislation and the Liberals’ usual political bedfellows, the Nationals, are united against it.

Turnbull is an ideological descendant of the old, pre-John Howard Liberal Party: liberal on social issues, and to a greater or lesser extent conservative on economic issues. Global warming is a social issue with serious economic repercussions (and, what conservatives tend to discount, serious opportunities) and so it is no surprise that an old-school Liberal like Turnbull would support a sort of diluted version of action on climate change – but action nonetheless.

Turnbull’s dilution of the CPRS bill is worrying enough, but the really interesting thing is that much of his party thinks he’s gone too far. Former Prime Minister John Howard was almost singlehandedly responsible for the conservatisation of Australian politics, and the conservative rump of the party Howard left behind is about to commit collective suicide by declaring war on Turnbull for being too progressive. Turnbull, whose leadership is in serious trouble, is probably the best hope the Opposition has of breaking through the Government’s approval numbers anytime before 2013.

There is no lesson for America here. Australia’s electorate is overwhelmingly in favour of action on climate change, whereas the American electorate is somewhat more divided. I’d like to be able to say that Australia offers a warning to conservatives overseas not to oppose climate change action, but it seems like the Liberal Party, much like the Republican Party, is trending rightward.

From a policy perspective, Australia’s recent experience is a total disaster. It represents a triumph of politics over policy. The US and the EU are both looking at 17% and 20% cuts respectively by 2020, which is nowhere near enough. We need to cut 80% by 2020. Australia’s promising 5%. No lessons here.

Greeninc yesterday published a link to this piece in the Christian Science Monitor which reported that the United Nations Environment Program released The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity report:

As a result of this oversight, living systems are all too often liquidated when, in reality, preserving them would bring more economic benefit.

A forest gets clear-cut, for example, because standard economics accounts only for its value as wood pulp. The forest’s storage of carbon, its water filtration, and biodiversity preservation are ignored.

The Christian Science Monitor says that there are those who disagree with this fully monetized approach to ecological issues; that there are moral and aesthetic and various other reasons to preserve biodiversity. I’d argue that it’s a very important arrow in the quiver of those of us who understand the risks of our present course of wanton ecological destruction. Market economies understand only the language of the bottom line, and the bottom line is that it makes economic sense to preserve the wild.

There is something inspiring and deliciously subversive about having the head of an NGO talk about civil disobedience as his key tactic. Worth watching.

China’s Suntech today announced plans to set up shop in Arizona. This seemed to be suspiciously timed following the storm in a teacup of a couple of weeks ago that Senator Schumer (D-NY) set off – he was trying to block stimulus funds for a wind farm in Texas because, it was said, the lion’s share of the cash was going to end up in China.

Of course, this ignored the fact that China’s stimulus money earlier in the year had been benefiting American companies. No outcry over that.

The wrinkle in the story is that China has been enacting protectionist policies specifically to benefit its burgeoning clean energy industry.

Hence today’s announcement: the Chinese want to counter the nativist/protectionist sentiment like that caused by the Texas wind farm earlier this month. The jury’s out on whether or not it’s more of an elaborate and expensive PR exercise than anything else. It sounds great that China’s creating jobs in Phoenix, Arizona, but at this point it’s just going to be 75 new places:

ThinkEquity analyst Colin Rusch said that [between] six and 12 Chinese solar companies are “seriously considering” establishing small manufacturing in the United States to raise their profile in the country and gain market share.

“It’s a brand exercise,” Rusch said.

Stephen Dubner just won’t give up. He and his co-author, Steven Levitt, advocate geoengineering – shooting “huge quantities of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere” in their new, trendily counter-intuitive book, Superfreakonomics. Today in Greeninc he’s published yet another column railing against the ubiquitous critics of geoengineering.

Most of which I want to say about this has been adequately covered in the latest New Yorker article that demolishes Dubner and Levitt and their “fix” for our environmental woes. The Guardian’s piece is also great, and David Roberts at Grist writes that “the problems humanity faces are systemic and interrelated. The idea that sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere will save us is akin to the hope that a math equation can be solved by erasing one of the numbers.” I couldn’t put it better.

Levitt and Dubner (and Richard Branson) disingenuously, I think, argue for a technocratic “fix” for a huge systemic problem. It is exceptionally arrogant; it presumes that we can continue with business as usual if humans just do what they usually do and concrete over the problem. This arrogance is typified by Branson’s breathtaking comment last month, as reported by Dot Earth:

“If we could come up with a geoengineering answer to this problem, then Copenhagen wouldn’t be necessary,” he said. “We could carry on flying our planes and driving our cars.”

It won’t work, and it presents tremendous risks: it multiplies the risks of our already precarious experiment with our planet’s climate by the risks of a massive new one, the results of which we can’t begin to predict. As Al Gore has written in Our Choice, ““We are already involved in a massive, unplanned planetary experiment. We should not begin yet another planetary experiment in the hope that it will somehow magically cancel out the effects of the one we already have.”

Australia’s left-leaning New Matilda yesterday published a piece asking, Is Geothermal The Baseload Alternative? It reminds me that I want to get around to publishing my own calculations of price per megawatt for various energy sources in both Australia and the US. Geothermal could be crucial to the energy mix over the next few years but there are too many figures floating around out there. So more on that soon.

The author, David Hollier, provides a neat summary of how geothermal works:

To harvest geothermal energy, you need to drill four to five kilometres below the surface, where the rock temperatures are 200 degrees or more, hot enough for the liquid they heat to drive turbines. The first challenge is to get wells down into this layer to check that the rocks are hot enough. If they are, you can pump water into the rock at a pressure high enough to fracture the rock, and to allow the water to move through the fractures, forming a reservoir. Then other wells are drilled, and the hot water is pumped back up to surface where it drives the turbines.

Once the system is up and running, this hot water can be constantly recycled. There are no other inputs into the process. Unlike wind and solar, it does not rely on specific weather conditions. And apart from the wells, there is no “mine” as such: minimal demands are made of the land. Geothermal is a renewable energy source that taps the ceaseless heat production at the earth’s core as it radiates towards the surface.

He raises an issue that I’ve mentioned a few times recently here:

So if all this is true, why have we heard so little about geothermal? If it’s a solution to the clean energy crisis, why hasn’t industry development been accelerated before now? Is it a victim of coal industry resistance — or a PR failure? Or might it have something to do with the fact that there are now more lobbyists than credible climate change scientists doing the rounds in Canberra?

Too bloody right. As Al Gore has noted many times, the lack of political will is the chief obstacle to action on global warming:

A couple of minor points. First, geothermal is not totally GHG-neutral. There are some emissions, primarily associated with the construction of the plant. Also, I take issue with David’s point here: “Solar and wind. Wind, tidal and solar. We all know that these can’t yet deliver baseload.” This is not true and I’ve written about it before.

Thomas Weisel Partners is an investment banking firm based in San Francisco with offices here in New York, and I attended their annual energy conference this week. I skipped the natural resources presentations on the fourth floor of the New York Palace and headed straight to the fifth where the “alternative” energy presentations were taking place.

Around 40 public and private “alternative” energy companies presented – in three different rooms simultaneously, so I could only get to a few of them. I did notice that one or more of Thomas Weisel’s analysts are particularly interested in electric motors – they seemed to be disproportionately represented, with firms like UQM Technologies and Zenn Motor Company presenting.

Although I am particularly interested in energy generation – and especially geothermal which was also very well represented at the conference – I forced myself to attend presentations in other areas of cleantech. One area that I hadn’t spent much time focusing on was energy efficiency/management, and CPower, based here in New York, caught my attention.

The core of CPower’s business is demand response: basically, energy utilities are prepared to pay market rates for large energy consumers to be on standby to reduce their energy consumption when demand is high. Effectively, when grid capacity is strained, the utility remotely controls a company’s high-demand appliances and will shut them down after giving notice as short as half an hour or even 10 minutes. In exchange, the utility compensates the company for lost production time. This is cheaper – and more energy efficient – than the utility building out more energy production capacity.

CPower also provides other services for their clients, such as helping improve energy efficiency for clients, and peak load management. Peak load management is important because utilities will charge energy consumers a base rate based on the previous year’s peak load. So even if the company only averages 50% of its maximum power usage (”peak load”), they’ll still pay a premium for the privilege of drawing the peak load they drew last year. So CPower helps companies save money by reducing their peak load.

It was also great to see Petra Solar, whose utility pole solar project in New Jersey I’d written about previously.

Great article in the Kansas City Star yesterday – “Lack of power lines a blow to wind energy“. One of the most crucial prerequisites to the transition to a GHG-free economy is a modern, national power grid:

Driving through western Kansas, you’ll see hundreds of whirling wind turbines. But you won’t see lots of people — or high-voltage power lines.

And that is the big obstacle to realizing the wind-energy potential of Kansas and the Midwest: You can put up all the towers and turbines you like, but without more transmission lines, the added electricity won’t get to the cities that could use it.

Those lines will take years to build and cost tens of billions of dollars — if they are built at all.

“It’s a showstopper for renewable development,” said Ralph Cavanaugh, co-director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group with 1.3 million members.

The national power grid is a mishmash because much of it was built to serve utilities’ individual territories. That left the country with high-powered lines serving big populations in the East and West — but not connected to the windy corridor from the Dakotas to Texas…

Read the rest in the original article.

Yesterday I wrote about an email exchange I had with a friend of mine back in Sydney about global warming science. Ultimately, he agreed that it would be prudent to stop burning fossil fuels, if only because the particulate matter they leave in the atmosphere is self-evidently harmful to human health. I find that there is usually common ground with even the most hardened climate skeptics (which my friend insists he is not, as he believes that “the climate is changing, but it is natural.”)

The conversation turned to the challenges facing clean energy in replacing energy from fossil fuels. He wrote:

The problem is that at the moment we don’t have an energy source which is as efficient and as reliable as coal for base-load power, i.e. power for industrial use.

Solar, hydro, nuclear are all fine for residences, but none of them will be able to replace coal at the industry level. You would need to cover the entire state of NSW in solar panels in order to supply enough energy to run our industries.

My reply:

I don’t agree with you about base load. I don’t know why this myth persists. It is true that you can simply keep feeding coal or gas into a traditional plant and keep it running at all times, but there are loads of ways to mitigate renewable intermittency.

One is by spreading the energy receptors across a broad footprint. A recent study showed that Europe could be fully powered just by wind, without any additional energy sources, because when it’s not blowing in Sweden it is blowing elsewhere. People with the training and disposition of actuaries are able to work these kinds of things out to a high degree of accuracy. We even know what percentage of the year a certain site gets wind – with astonishing levels of accuracy – even though we don’t know precisely when the wind will blow.

And then of course you have tidal, which is nascent but does not suffer from any intermittency; geothermal which is constant; and you can augment any of the intermittent sources with other intermittent sources. Wind by itself would do just fine if you located it over a broad area, as I’ve mentioned, and you could always have backup coal plants to fire up when needed; but you could easily have a 100% renewable grid by using an appropriate mix of solar, wind, tidal and geothermal.

And then you have additional measures like demand response and load shedding to manage demand; energy storage using large battery banks… the possibilities are endless.

The Environment News Service reports that leaders of climate-vulnerable island nations met in the Maldives over the last couple of days, headed by Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed, essentially to draw attention to the fact that they’re slowly but surely going underwater.

“We are a diverse group of countries. But we share one common enemy. For us, climate change is no distant or abstract threat; but a clear and present danger to our survival,” Nasheed said.

“Climate change is melting the glaciers in Nepal. It is causing flooding in Bangladesh. It threatens to submerge the Maldives and Kiribati And in recent weeks, it has exacerbated drought in Tanzania, and typhoons in the Philippines,” he said. “We are the frontline states in the climate change battle.”

… On Monday, he asked the Vulnerable Countries Forum to join in this effort, saying, “I think a bloc of carbon-neutral, developing nations could change the outcome of Copenhagen.

“At the moment every country arrives at the negotiations seeking to keep their own emissions as high as possible and never to make commitments unless someone else does first,” Nasheed said.

“This is the logic of the madhouse, a recipe for collective suicide,” he told Forum delegates. “We don’t want a global suicide pact. And we will not sign a global suicide pact, in Copenhagen or anywhere.”

This reminded me of an email exchange I had with a good friend of mine who is an engineer back in Sydney, Australia, who questions climate change science. He asked me, on several occasions, “If the planet is warming then why am I constantly freezing cold?” I regard this, of course, as the stuff of conspiracy theory, and told him so, referring him to the IPCC’s website and the various national and international science academies, all of whom agree with the fundamentals of the IPCC’s raison d’être – namely, human-induced global warming.

I couldn’t help thinking, though, that my friend wouldn’t even be capable of bringing himself to raise these questions if he lived in a low-altitude island nation.