CleanSpeak - Energy

Plugging in electric cars is easy, but paying for them might kill you

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 10:50:00-0400

Charging a plug-in vehicle is a lot like a middle school science project – except most middle school science projects don’t leave you stranded in a parking lot hundreds of miles from home.

That's the implicit message permeating the public duel between Tesla Motors CEO and founder Elon Musk and New York Times writer John Broder. The former objects to the latter’s review of Tesla’s swanky Model S electric sedan. Broder's travelogue legitimizes a central fear about plug-in vehicles: that they’re unreliable if they stray too far from a high-speed charging station. (Which, incidentally, aren't all that speedy at 30 minutes for a 150-mile charge.)

Broder wrote that he did everything short of pumping magic beans into the Model S to keep it rolling. He drove at low speeds without the heat on for miles to get from one charging station to another. He stayed in almost constant touch with Tesla customer service. He took long breaks while the Model S slowly sipped from electric outlets.

Even with those accommodations, Broder claimed that the Model S ran out of juice and shut itself down in Milford, Conn., about two thirds of the distance from his starting point of Washington DC to his destination of Boston.

Tesla struck back – persuasively. Musk cited the car’s on-board activity log and Broder’s own communications with Tesla customer service to charge that Broder deliberately ran the Model S down for dramatic effect. Oh yeah, and he didn’t putter along at 50 miles per hour with the heat off in February, as he claimed. He drove at highway speeds with the heat on.

No matter whom you believe in this beef, the underlying issue is bogus. Electric cars are not going to fail for lack of places to plug them in any more than gasoline-powered cars failed for lack of gas stations at the end of the horse-and-buggy era.

When gasoline engines hit the scene, the technology was good enough to spur growth of an infrastructure around it. The same thing is happening with plug-ins. Nissan and Tesla Motors are rolling out coast-to-coast networks of high-speed charging stations for their electric vehicles. There are already gujillions of charging devices on the market. The Baltic nation of Estonia has made it a national priority to establish a network of charging stations and they’re off to a good start.

I know, Estonia doesn’t compare to the U.S. in size or population. Yet it has 1.25 million people and 17,000 square miles to cover, so it’s not a throwaway comparison either.

No, the issue with plug-in cars isn’t where to plug them in. The issue is also not that they plug into a grid powered largely by dirty-burning coal, which is the other popular red herring around plug-ins. The grid is getting more environmentally friendly and will grow steadily more so as more renewable energy sources come online.

The issue with plug-in cars is that they’re too expensive for large-scale consumer adoption. A Tesla Model S costs $54,000. A similarly tricked-out Mercedes Benz E-class sedan goes for $51,000. A Chevy Volt is $39,000, compared to $21,000 for a Chevy Mailbu. A basic Nissan Leaf costs $21,300 – and the Leaf is the econobox of the electric car set. A comparable conventionally powered car costs about $14,500.

These price points make plug-in vehicles irrelevant to most consumers. Even if they care for the environment, they can’t pay for a car with good intentions. So treat spitting contests like Broder versus Musk for what they are: entertainment. But when someone talks about making a plug-in that the average consumer can afford, you might want to pay attention. That’s the real obstacle for plug-ins.

Renewable energy is showing spark for 2013 and beyond

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 09:12:00-0400

2012 had all the ingredients for a bummer year in renewable energy, but instead it gave us a lot to be optimistic about for 2013 and beyond.

Sure, the renewable energy and conservation grants in the stimulus bill are going away. Consumer demand for alternative energy systems dropped. A glut of solar photovoltaic equipment on the international market helped fuel a trade dispute between the U.S. and China. That dispute raised uncertainty about solar’s long-term prospects as free trade collided with low prices.

Solar energy companies, some backed by government loans and grants, scaled back operations or shut down. Critics in Congress derided each failure as a waste of tax money. Some tried to prevent the military from investing in biofuels.

In the end, Congress restored the military’s freedom to explore alternative energy sources. That was emblematic of what happened in the U.S. and the world in renewable energy. It didn’t look good for a while, but by the end of 2012, there were a lot of positives on the scoreboard.

Germany again showed what a developed nation with a large, complex economy can accomplish in renewable energy. The country’s renewable energy output rose to 25 percent of its total energy production in the first half of 2012. Wind led the way at 9.2 percent, followed by solar at 5.3 percent. When the final numbers from 2012 are in, Germany expects to beat its 2011 clean energy output by 15 percent.

China, the world’s largest energy consumer, erected 36 wind turbines per day in 2012. One of its provinces alone generates as much electricity through wind power as the entire United Kingdom does from all fossil-fueled and renewable sources. The Chinese government quadrupled the amount of solar power it wants to generate by 2015 to 21 gigawatts.

In the U.S., total renewable energy output dropped slightly in 2012 because of lower water levels in the Pacific Northwest that cut hydroelectric energy production. However, renewable output is forecast to rebound to 2011 levels in 2013.

As of Nov. 30, 2012, new wind power installations in the U.S. outpaced natural gas and coal with 6,519 megawatts of new capacity. Natural gas was at 6,335 megawatts and coal was less than half of the wind power total. Wind power electric generation increased 15 percent in 2012.

As good as 2012’s lagging indicators were, the signs of what’s coming in 2013 and beyond were even more encouraging.

Investor Warren Buffet bought the 579-megawatt Antelope Valley Solar Project in California for somewhere between $2 and $2.5 billion. It’s the world’s largest solar photovoltaic development. When a guy like Buffet puts that much down on a venture, he’s clearly not afraid of government subsidies drying up, or market peaks and valleys.

On the technology front, there are encouraging signs that companies are plugging away at the limitations holding renewable energy back from mass acceptance. A U.S.-based company has applied for a patent on a wind turbine design that stores energy as heat instead of immediately converting it to electricity. The heat generates steam to drive turbines when the wind isn’t blowing, a stubborn drawback of wind power.

In solar photovoltaics, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and partner Solar Junction announced a solar cell that converts 44 percent of the light that hits it into energy. Efficiency has been a drag on solar photovoltaic; most panels only convert somewhere around 20-25 percent of available light into electricity. At the same time, the government research agency DARPA is experimenting with nano materials that can boost solar cell efficiency to 50 percent.

Politicians and economists are still guarded in their predictions about renewable energy. Even so, there’s a feeling of inevitability building around it. The feeling ebbs from time to time, but even during slack tides like 2012, the trend is for better and smarter renewable energy technology and a bigger renewable energy market.

At current rates

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 10:41:00-0400

Today's blog is posted by guest blogger, Ed Marshall, a senior account director at Beaupre. Check out his bio in our "About Authors" section.

In the unfolding war of perception around fossil fuel availability, it’s always important to watch for key words and phrasings.

It’s important because they typically take two forms: “soothe and enthuse” and the “fine print.”

“Soothe and enthuse” phrases assure the public that there is plenty of resources available. In the realm of fracking and natural gas, the phrase that soothes and enthuses is “100-year supply,” as in “we have a 100-year supply of natural gas in the United States.”

The inline “fine print” wording ensures plausible deniability when physical realities and/or business needs undermine assertions made in the assurance phrases, thus dampening excitement. Again, in the natural gas fracking world, the one to watch for is “at current rates.” Sometimes the current rate cited is of consumption. Other times it’s production. Either way, it’s usually closely tied to the aforementioned “100-year supply” phrase.

With this in mind, I read with interest this story about a recently issued report written by NERA Economic Consulting at the behest of the Energy Department stating that exporting U.S. natural gas would be a big booster for the domestic economy. As I summarized previously, fracking for natural gas is expensive and not currently profitable. In short, fracking produces a quick rush and then a quick fall off in flow, requiring more drilling. That’s expensive. However, that initial rush produces a glut which drops prices, making the whole process rather uneconomic.

Clearly, shipping fracked gas overseas to growing markets such as Japan and China, where prices are currently more than triple what U.S. buyers pay, would do wonders for the bottom line of the frackers. But what would it mean for that “100-year supply”?

That’s where the aforementioned fine print kicks in.

You see, “at current rates” refers to a time when the U.S. natural gas supply isn’t part of a global market; it’s all consumed here for the things natural gas has historically been used for – cooking, heating homes and water, supplying chemical manufacturers with an important feedstock, pre-heating metals in iron and steel making, generating electricity in a power plant, that sort of thing – and produced at rates commensurate with those historical uses.

Open up the U.S. gas supply to the soaring demands of growing Asian economies and you are instantly no longer consuming “at current rates.” You’re consuming at much higher rates, which increases prices. Higher prices will drive driller’s revenue and provide capital for more fracking. Soon you’re no longer producing “at current rates” because it has jumped to meet the new, higher demand.

The boom in jobs fostered by this expensive, messy frenzy of resource extraction is unlikely to focus anyone on the math that “at current rates” encourages. Rather, some day hence, certainly much sooner than a century from now, when the issue becomes more than obvious, an intrepid scribe may wonder why the 100-year promise fell so short. This movie has played out before; but sadly it was a foreign film – British, to be precise – and we don’t really pay much attention to those here in the States.

Export Land Model watch - news from the Citi

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 10:43:17-0400

Today's blog is posted by guest blogger, Ed Marshall, a senior account manager at Beaupre. Check out his bio in our "About Authors" section.

Once upon a time, the United States of America was the world’s largest oil exporter. We grew rich from the oil we sold and the oil we used powered new industries and ways of living that, in turn, amped up our use of oil until we had nothing to spare. Simultaneously, natural events ran their course and oil fields became less productive, causing domestic production to peak in the early 1970s.

That about sums up the Export Land Model, a conundrum I touched upon in a previous post. Now, it seems to be playing out, with its own localized twists in the home of the current number one oil exporter, Saudi Arabia.

Earlier this month, a report by analysts at Citigroup echoed that assessment, saying that the world’s biggest oil exporter may become “an importer” by 2030 due to rising domestic use – which the Citgroup analysis estimated was growing by about eight percent per year.

Even more recently, a Reuters story notes that Saudi Arabia burned record monthly volumes of oil in June and July. The story notes that the reason for the increase is a need to produce more electricity for air conditioning. Unlike the United States and most other Western countries, Saudi Arabia uses oil to produce a large percentage of its electricity. Switching to solar would seem to be a no-brainer – they have a surplus of sun and the rise in oil prices is keeping the cash pipeline flowing. The trick is in the transition.

This Wall Street Journal article has some good numbers and perspective on the challenges the Saudis (and other OPEC countries) face in trying to transition up to a third of their electricity generation to alternatives by 2032.

Meanwhile, a story from this week quotes the Saudis as saying that they will be turning increasingly to natural gas for electricity generation to reduce their dependence on oil.

Ditching one fossil fuel for another to generate electricity? That sounds really familiar – where have I heard that idea before?

Where's that confounded bridge?

Thu, 03 May 2012 13:21:00-0400

Today's blog is posted by guest blogger, Ed Marshall, a senior account manager at Beaupre. Check out his bio in our "About Authors" section.

Hey, want to buy a bridge? How about a bridge fuel? It burns cleaner than coal for generating electricity, can heat homes and power a truck or a car. Best of all, we’ve got an embarrassing surplus of the stuff priced so low it’s sinful. It’s natural gas from shale, and it’s the answer to our energy problem for the next 100 years while we figure out this alternative energy stuff.

Or not.

The rosy assessments above are based on current consumption levels and an overly optimistic estimate of what we can get out of the ground at anything resembling a reasonable cost. In addition, the dollars don’t add up. The fracking that produces shale gas is expensive and when successful yields a short gusher of gas followed by a steep drop off, requiring a re-frack and repeat. It’s “an unprofitable treadmill.” The sheer number of wells drilled in the fracking frenzy has created a gas glut on the domestic market and, in turn, low prices that cannot support the expensive production model. Most companies producing shale gas are relying on steady inflows of investment cash to support their profit-challenged efforts.

Already used for cooking, heating homes and hot water as well as generate electricity and to provide feedstock for industry, expanding these uses of natural gas and creating new ones – such as in fleet trucking and even personal vehicles – is usually cited as a key way to put the shale gas glut to good use; lowering our national carbon footprint and increasing our energy independence. The big hope for producers, however, is in export. Clearing a few political and regulatory hurdles and building new facilities would allow for natural gas export in liquid form to foreign markets like Great Britain, Northern Europe and even Asia.

All of which would raise consumption levels well above current levels, reducing, in turn, the projected years of supply. Some estimates suggest shale may provide fewer than 30 years of additional natural gas supply when all is said and done. And as the glut diminishes, users will begin to be exposed to the true dollar costs of fracking extraction.

As this process plays out, a major concern is the effect on alternative energy. Another three decades of embracing the fossilized status quo aren’t going to help us achieve energy sustainability. People are fundamentally change-averse. Tales of “100 years of cheap energy under our feet” will resonate. And if the hype lures investment capital to shale companies, what does that do to the attractiveness of investment in green tech companies? Will cheaper natural-gas-fired electricity generation put further funding pressure on large-scale solar and wind projects?

If markets pick winners, then it’s hard to understand how an embrace of shale gas creates a bridge to a new energy regime, rather than to a familiar dead end. It’s time to stop digging for scraps in the past and find a new way forward.

Infographic: US renewable energy consumption on the rise

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:34:00-0400

Source:LiveScience

Export Land Model - the Saudi update

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 11:32:00-0400

Today's blog is posted by guest blogger, Ed Marshall, a senior account manager at Beaupre. Check out his bio in our "About Authors" section.

A quick update on the export land issue that I blogged about previously. In short, the problem is petroleum-producing countries becoming wealthy exporting oil and then finding their rising domestic oil use significantly cutting into what’s available for export even as their oil fields become less productive due to age. The ramifications are manifold – from unrest at home as shrinking revenues reduce subsidies and push up prices on things like food and gasoline, to turmoil on international markets as shrinking surplus capacity makes it easier for traders to drive price swings through speculation.

With this in mind, a few recent stories involving Saudi Arabia caught my eye. The first is a pretty straightforward endorsement of the export land model theory. In this story, Abdel Salam al-Yamani, head of the Saudi Electricity Company, is quoted as saying that, if left unchecked, Saudi Arabia’s current domestic oil consumption rates will deplete the country’s reserves by 2030. The second story involves the Saudi’s ramping up a nuclear energy program to the tune of at least $100 billion dollars. This story on the Saudi oil export and energy issue in the Wall Street Journal has a nice graph charting rising Saudi oil consumption. Finally, this story pulls in the previous points and also notes that the Saudi’s are going full bore into an energy source they’re likely to have in abundance for a long time to come: solar. Who knows, maybe one day they’ll be exporting that energy, too. In the meantime, the Middle East, in general, seems interested in conservation to ensure exports of their main revenue source remains high.

Global investors pour money into green energy

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 14:24:00-0400

Nothing like cool, refreshing facts to support the desperate hope for a renewable energy revolution.

New investment in green energy was up nearly one-third globally in 2010 to a record US$211 billion. That’s 32 percent above the 2009 level and more than five times that of 2004, says the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Other facts from UNEP’s new report:

Wind farms in China and rooftop solar panels in Europe were key drivers in the investment increase.
China was the world leader in “financial new investment” – i.e., investment in utility-scale renewable projects and equity capital for renewable energy companies. The nation's tally was US$48.9 billion, up 28 percent this year.
Developing economies (which invested US$72 billion this year) overtook developed ones (US$70 billion) in financial new investment.
Investments in small distributed capacity, e.g., rooftop solar, rose 132 percent in Germany to US$34 billion.
Costs for renewable technologies are falling.
Wind dominated financial new investment in large-scale renewable energy.
Biggest percentage jumps in overall investment were in small-scale projects, up 91 percent to US$60 billion, and in government funded R&D, up 121 percent to US$5.3 billion.

"The finance industry is still recovering from the recent financial crisis," Udo Steffens, president of the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, said in a UNEP news release. "The fact that the industry remains heavily committed to renewables demonstrates its strong belief in the prospects of sustainable energy investments."

So there’s hope. And now facts.

More here.

The Oil Curse (domestic version)

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 10:20:00-0400

Today's blog is posted by guest blogger, Ed Marshall, a senior account manager at Beaupre. Check out his bio in our "About Authors" section.

The Oil Curse is a subset of the Resource Curse, describing an apparent paradox in developing countries “blessed with” large reserves of petroleum. The term refers to the political repression, corruption and violence that seem to accompany the development of oil resources in places like Nigeria.

But that definition might need to stretch because we in the United States - still a top three global oil producer – are living our own Oil Curse. It’s the curse of addiction.

Our transportation system and its supporting infrastructure are the lifeblood of the American lifestyle (which I’m told is not negotiable) and they’re built from the ground up around oil: the roadside stations that keep cars and light trucks fueled, the tanker trucks that keep the stations supplied, the roads the tanker trucks travel on to and from the tank farms, the refineries that keep those tank farms filled, the pipelines snaking cross-country and tanker ships docking at specialized ports. Deeply woven over the past 100-plus years, it’s a blessing that's evolving into a curse.

As we bump along the plateau of Peak Oil, supply becomes more difficult to maintain at a flow rate demanded by a constant-growth economic model. There is a clear need to move beyond petroleum. However, the influence of stakeholders heavily invested in, and greatly benefitting from, the current energy model creates a drag on innovation and transition. And to be clear, the stakeholders aren't simply the major oil companies and the firms focused on exploration, extraction, refinement and delivery. They’re also us. And that’s our version of the Oil Curse.

Addiction creates dependence. From strip mall to skyscraper, cul-de-sac to office park, we all have an enormous personal stake in a business-as-usual energy model. There's a reason that “drill, baby drill” made it onto bumper stickers nationwide. Adopting a new energy infrastructure is not as simple, or easy, as ditching a laptop for a tablet. It's a big part of the reason that the current administration has placed its weight not only behind innovation in alternative and renewable energy sources, but also in a lot more drilling.

History shows that transitions from one type of energy infrastructure – say wood to coal or coal to oil – takes decades. With the peak of conventional crude oil apparently already in our rearview mirror, the challenge in front of us is to reverse the curse. Hey, the Red Sox managed it. But we don’t have 86 years to figure it out.

Corner-store energy, or 'yes please, in my backyard!'

Fri, 13 May 2011 12:50:00-0400

Pro- and anti-nuclear activists hit each other with everything short of chains and broken bottles during construction of the Seabrook Station nuclear power plant back in the mid-'70s. The Clamshell Alliance opposition group occupied the construction site and waged a nonstop PR campaign against Seabrook right up to 1986, when the beleaguered plant finally went online. The consortium that built the plant countered with its own multimedia PR campaign, including one television spot featuring a woman who owned a backyard hydroelectric plant. The ad sticks in my mind because almost 30 years later, it raises a relevant issue in renewable energy and how to make it work best.

The ad depicted the hydro plant owner, an elderly woman wearing a trench coat with a scarf around her neck, standing in front of her hydro plant, which looked like a tool shed perched over a brook near her home. She was one of those redoubtable New England doyennes you see making long, detailed comments at town meetings and staffing the coffee pots at church suppers. Her message, delivered in clipped, no-nonsense Yankee diction, was that New England needed every energy source it could get, and not just “my little hydro plant” but Seabrook Station too.

I doubt I would have contracted this formidable grande dame in person, but I wasn’t completely buying what she said. Why does electricity have to be created in huge, centralized power plants? The idea of getting my electricity from a network of neighborhood and backyard power sources tickled my imagination. Given a choice of buying my wattage from a nuclear plant perched upwind from the most heavily populated region in the U.S., or buying the same wattage from the nice old lady down the street, I’ll take “B” any day. Or maybe I could plug into the dairy farm two towns over that uses cow manure to power a small-scale methane plant, or the school bus company that put two wind turbines in their parking lot.

It seems odd to think of energy as a mom-and-pop industry like your local corner store, but with the way renewable technologies are developing, it’s not that far fetched. Think of it for a minute. How often can you read the news and NOT happen upon another idea for generating electricity, ranging from the familiar to the exotic? Energy from the sun, energy from the wind, energy from waves, energy from tides. Energy from garbage, energy from cow poop, energy from holes in the ground. Energy from waste water broken down into hydrogen atoms. Energy from fusing atoms together. Energy from weeds and algae. They all have the potential to make generating power as much a local business as the post office and the hardware store.

Consider concentrated solar photovoltaic (CPV) technology as an example. CPV modules pack more generating capacity into a smaller footprint than conventional solar photovoltaic (PV) modules. That means property that might not have produced economically practical amounts of electricity with PV modules now can. Picture your local storage space company, with all those acres of flat roofs. The owner makes most of his/her money on fees, but what if putting CPV modules on the roof turned into a profitable side business?

There’s an electrical production and distribution model called wholesale distributed generation (WDC) that’s gaining favor among renewable power advocates. WDC replaces large, remote power plants attached to the grid through long-distance transmission lines with smaller facilities hooked directly into local grids. It saves the land and cost of building new transmission lines to connect large facilities to local grids. The smaller facilities that thrive in WDC infrastructures will also require less permitting and face fewer regulatory obstacles. It’s a natural fit for local renewable energy sources, and a long-term sustainable power production model.

Allowing that renewable technologies were too immature 30 years ago to sustain the economy, I’ll concede the point made by the lady in the Seabrook commercial. Back then, facilities like her little hydro plant couldn’t carry the load, and realistically they still can’t today. In a few years though, don’t be surprised if you go to your local farmer’s market to shop for fresh local voltage along with fresh local produce. Technology writer Alex Steffen of Worldchanging.com predicted this movement four years ago, and his vision seems to be playing out.

“I think the things that would really blow us away if we could jump forward 20 years would not be the giant fields of windmills, but the 1,000 changes in daily life that have taken place in order to save energy,” he said in a Forbes interview. Power sources, he predicted, will move closer to home. “I think we're going to see a lot more local energy, especially in places that are gifted with lots of sunshine, or wind, or strong rivers. As houses and small communities produce their own energy, it will flow back and forth on 'smart infrastructure' two-way power grids that deliver from as well as to the home.”

A green job jewel in the spending bill dust heap

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 09:02:00-0400

A little-known provision in the compromise spending bill signed into law this weekend will help some threatened Recovery Act-funded clean technology projects breathe a sigh of relief and move forward in bringing green jobs to their respective regions.

You’d think that cleantech projects that received loan guarantees, tax breaks and other funding from the DOE would be churning along nicely by now. But an arcane rule in the Energy Policy Act – and how narrowly the DOE interprets it – cast a cold chill on many DOE award recipients.

To put it simply, cleantech companies that receive DOE loan guarantees must first pay a risk-based credit subsidy fee, which can amount to a whopping 20% or more of the loan amount… unless their projects actively generate renewable energy or produce biofuels.

In other words, solar, wind and hydro energy companies get a free pass, while energy efficiency and waste heat recovery companies get stuck holding the bill. Section 1705 of the Energy Policy Act waives subsidy fees for companies that manufacture renewable energy products that generate electricity or thermal energy. The loosely defined criteria in the bill provided the DOE broad flexibility to extend fee relief to many more loan recipients. But they didn’t, and as a result some projects were suddenly in jeopardy.

At a time when the Obama administration is strongly promoting energy efficiency technologies as the fastest, most cost-effective path to U.S. energy independence, this rule is not only counterintuitive, it is economically stifling for many of our most promising new cleantech companies. You can’t float them a loan guarantee, charging them tens of millions in subsidy fees for the “honor,” and then expect them to become the new engines of our green economy. Some award recipients have already withdrawn from the loan program, and countless potential applicants have chosen not to apply for participation in the program.

The good news is that, despite all the cuts to energy efficiency programs in the compromise spending bill, the bad policy was upended. Thanks to hard-fought negotiations by Minnesota’s legislative delegation in particular, the spending bill now includes terms that allow energy efficiency technology companies to avoid payment of those subsidy fees.

A smart policy rewards – not penalizes – our best entrepreneurial cleantech companies, which are those that will help us reduce reliance on fossil fuels, increase the use of renewable energy, cut carbon emissions and generate urgently needed jobs.

{DISCLOSURE: A Brodeur/Beaupre client benefited from the spending bill provision}

So, are we done with nuclear?

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 10:26:00-0400

As we pray for Japan – and their food and their water – nuclear power’s renaissance is halted in its tracks. Can the world continue to believe nuclear is cleaner than coal and more reliable than renewables?

Seven in 10 Americans have become more concerned since the earthquake about a nuclear disaster occurring in the United States, according to a Gallup poll taken four days after the catastrophe. Thirty-nine percent are now “a lot” more concerned.

It was just a year ago that support for nuclear power reached new high, with 62 percent of Americans surveyed favoring the use of nuclear energy for electricity. Last week, amid the specter of “meltdown” at Fukushima Daiichi, a mere 44 percent favored the construction of nuclear power plants in the US.

Quick caveat: this is a clean-tech communications blog, and for the purposes of this post, we’re going to remain neutral on whether nuclear is a clean technology or a blight on the planet. The label doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s both.

What is certain is that electricity demand is high. As you can see, per capita electricity use has tripled since 1960.

I don’t know anyone who loves nuclear power. Accidents are potentially cataclysmic, nuclear waste is a big issue, and now we’re hearing about tainted water in Tokyo. But I do know folks who are attached to their TVs, microwaves, stoves, refrigerators, battery chargers, toasters, and that creature comfort we call electric light. Mobile phones and computers are necessary evils, and the Internet, where we see some of the shrillest anti-nuke rants, generally works best when plugged in.

So let’s admit nuclear power is here for a reason that we consumers have created. Now let’s ask ourselves, do we really want to kill nuclear? And to what extent are we scapegoating nuclear out of sympathy for Japan’s suffering, in reaction to the wall-to-wall coverage, and in light of the potential for a nightmare?

More importantly, how many of us have the tools, time and analytical power to evaluate the risk objectively? What should be the yardstick?

Looking at the risk

The smartest comment I’ve heard on this subject comes from James Acton, a physicist with the Carnegie Endowment’s nuclear policy program: “[Y]ou’ve got to realize that all forms of energy generation carry risk,” he said on CNN last week. “Nuclear carries risk as we have dramatically seen in the last couple of days. But fossil fuels also carry risk: The risk of catastrophic climate change. Renewables, which I absolutely support a lot of research and development and funding for, right now carry the risk of not being able to produce enough energy.”

Acton expounds on his comments in this even-handed opinion piece on the Foreign Policy website. Despite increasingly robust plant designs, he says the nuclear industry needs to reassess to earn the public’s trust.

“Even after the ongoing disaster in Japan, the nuclear industry is unlikely to welcome such an exercise,” he writes. “It is almost certain to argue that a whole-scale reassessment is unnecessary because existing standards are adequate. But after two earthquakes in less than four years shook Japanese reactors beyond their design limits, this argument is simply not credible. It is also self-defeating.”

The unfolding story in Japan notwithstanding, nuclear is relatively safe if history and the Next Big Future website are to be believed. Nuclear power generation kills 0.004 persons per terawatt-hour (TWh) compared with 161 for coal, according to the site’s quasi-viral March 13 post. Citing a variety of sources, it goes on to say rooftop solar (!) is 11 times more dangerous than nuclear (again, measured by the death per TWh) because roofing is one of the top 10 most dangerous occupations. Here’s Seth Godin’s chart on the Next Big Future data.

The flyspeck on the far left is nuclear. Slate offers similarly lopsided figures, saying “you’d need 500 Chernobyls” to match a year’s worth of premature deaths caused by fossil fuel-related air pollution. (But visit Huffington Post and read that Chernobyl’s horror has been vastly underplayed.)

Could it be that nuclear power is being scapegoated because of the recency of Japan’s troubles but simultaneously embraced because, well, Chernobyl is so last century? Is there something about death by nuclear that’s more fearsome than slow death by coal-related air pollution?

I don’t know. I do know I don’t want to shill for the nuclear industry. I’d prefer not to have a plant down the road in Seabrook, N.H., looking for all the world like it’s floating in the estuary. I can certainly relate to James Carroll’s poignant observation in Monday’s Boston Globe: “More than 500 nuclear power plants are in operation or under construction around the world today, with every one of them being viewed with new skepticism,” he writes. “What have we done to ourselves?”

But what if the sheer complexity of nuclear ends up quashing a worthy component of our energy mix? I guess I come down on the side of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria: Don’t rush to judgment. At least not before we unplug.

Insulating against revolution?

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 13:07:00-0400

This blog post is from our colleague, Ed Marshall

In New England where I'm writing this, insulation is typically thought of as a way to keep the cold out and heating costs down. In hot climates, however, it's a way to keep the air conditioned cold in and the hot out. Think of your beach cooler keeping the ice from melting and, in turn, your beer cold. Same concept.

A recent Reuters story notes that the Saudi government is undertaking an ambitious program to cut energy use by some 40 percent, “largely by enforcing investment in insulation”. So, why the Saudi push to insulate? They need the money - specifically, the money made selling oil. The Reuters story quotes a Saudi official noting that 70-80 percent of their energy use goes to air conditioning and they use oil to generate the majority of their electricity. With a growing population and an extreme dependence on fossil fuels to subsidize the amenities of a comfortable life (cheap electricity, plentiful food, cars, roads, etc), the Saudis are staring at a classic export land problem.

Almost half of Saudi Arabia's GDP is directly related to oil exports. Some 75 percent of its government revenue comes from the oil industry. The more oil the Saudis use, the less is available for export, even as production from their aging oil fields slowly declines. The reduction in exports helps push up prices on the open market, increasing cash flow which encourages domestic economic growth and energy use. Eventually, this domestic demand increases enough to materially reduce revenue from oil exports, squeezing subsidies that support things like cheap and plentiful food and fuel. Exposing the national population to unsubsidized prices is politically perilous. Hello Cairo.

Iran is caught in a similar rock-and-a-hard-place bind. Indonesia dropped out of OPEC in 2008 when declining production and increasing consumption pushed it from being a net exporter to net importer of petroleum.

So, what does the export land issue mean to us, the oil importers? We don't generate much electricity in the United States with oil these days, but it certainly is vital to our transportation system. Whether by car, truck, train or plane, our consumer lifestyle is powered by petroleum. Gasoline, diesel and kerosene move everything from people, food and building materials to toys, toothpaste and auto parts. As oil prices rise, transportation costs increase, putting a drag on an already weak recovery. Hard to insulate our way out of that.

Sustainability knows no age limits

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 11:42:00-0400

Sprinting across a Portsmouth street to feed my parking meter before our ever-diligent meter officers presented me with another $10 love note, I had to stop short to let a car pass. At first it looked like any other car, albeit in a screaming shade of fluorescent green, but as it rolled toward me over the Memorial Bridge I saw it was one of those two-seat Smart Pure Coupes.

You’ve probably seen a Smart car. They’re about the size of your average household appliance and they look like they should have big wind-up keys sticking out of their butt ends. You could park one in the bed of a Ford Ranger pickup without touching either side. They’re popular as delivery cars in urban areas, so long as you’re delivering something small. Say a pack of Life Savers. One at a time.

It wasn’t the car itself that made me stop and take notice, though. It was who was driving it. The gent behind the wheel and woman sitting next to him appeared to be well into their seventies, with gray hair and glasses and clothes that, at least from the chest up, didn’t match their vehicle’s Skittle-lime, ultra-hip image. They appeared to be the kind of people who, if you’re schooled on your stereotypes, should be driving a Detroit dreadnought with the left blinker on. They did not look like a couple who should be driving a motorized Tonka truck that gets 33 mpg city and 41 highway, yet there they were tooling toward downtown Portsmouth in what could have been their living room Barcaloungers lashed side-by-side.

For most of my life (I’m 46) “tree hugging” has been mainly (and unfairly) associated with the younger set. If we’re going to build a sustainable society, however, it won’t be by waiting for the current generation of schoolchildren to start running the world. We have to change minds and behaviors now. That’s why the sight of that older couple in the Smart car gave me a pleasant jolt. It also brought back an unlikely “green” conversation I had with a city councilor when I was a reporter covering Marlboro, Massachusetts.

The councilor’s name was Herman, and from all outward appearances he was about as environmentally conscious as a Norwegian whale hunter. He was a conservative Republican, an Army veteran, and the retired owner of his own welding business. He was long on gruff and short on tact, though he had a deceptively good heart. He was the kind of guy who would make derogatory comments about an ethnic group but be a good neighbor to a family of that group who moved in next door.

Good heart or no, you would not tab Herman as an environmental maverick, which is why the talk we had in 1991 is so clear in my mind to this day. We were killing a few minutes outside city hall so Herman could have a smoke break before the next council session. I liked talking to Herman because he was completely uncensored, and told me a lot of stuff he later wished he hadn’t. That evening though, the conversation was about an article he read on plug-in cars. Not the glorified golf carts that passed as electric cars in the ‘70s, but real road vehicles. The concept fascinated him.

“I’d do that, have one of them little cars for around town and save the Pontiac for long trips,” he said between drags on a filtered Merit. “You’d pay for the electricity, but think of all the gasoline you wouldn’t burn.”

If Herman could be open minded about alternative transport, there’s hope for the world. Herman and the couple in the Smart car are proof that if you can make a good enough case and supply reasonable alternatives, even generations supposedly set in their ways will make the environmental choice.

Of course, when Herman was done educating me about plug-in cars, he snubbed out his cigarette on city hall’s granite staircase then flipped the butt onto the sidewalk. I guess we’ll have to take progress where we can get it, in small doses.

Mind the Gap

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 11:24:00-0400

Today’s blog is posted by guest blogger, Ed Marshall, a Senior Account Manager at Beaupre

Just this year, government agencies around the globe, from the United States to Germany to New Zealand, have generated studies warning that world oil production is within a few years of peaking. Projections for peak world oil demand, however, don’t match up with the projected peak in production.

That mismatch is a problem which only gets worse once past the peak. Current world oil production models see a bumpy plateau that lasts a few years and then a decline rate of about five percent a year sets in as a lack of new discoveries fails to make up the difference. The gap between supply and demand quickly becomes a chasm.

Renewables – wind, solar, biofuels – are seen as a way to erase that gap, but practical realities intrude. Take wind and solar. They really aren’t drop-in replacements for most oil uses; most notably in transportation where some 70 percent of oil gets used. Electric cars are still in their Model T era (fancy dashboard electronics aside) and lack the nationwide infrastructure for refueling, maintenance and repair that took decades to build out for gasoline and diesel vehicles. Biofuels also have a number of shortcomings as petroleum replacements, starting with their lower energy density per unit and moving on to their small scale of production that will limit their ability to make any significant contribution to closing the gap.

So, how best to narrow the gap? Well, at the outset, peak oil largely presents a liquid fuels and transportation problem. A real focus on driving efficiencies into the transportation sector would be a good place to start. We’ve lived large for decades because energy has been cheap. That needs to change and the good news is that it can. Trains, for instance, are far more efficient for long haul freight, even if it’s a diesel locomotive doing the pulling. Shorter distance delivery can be done by electrified trucks. On the gasoline passenger car front, 40 miles per gallon is becoming the new 30 mpg here in the United States. And, of course, getting more people on better trains that go more places would be a big help.

The real gap, ultimately, might better be seen as the one between our current scale of living and the one that our current mastery of physics can support. Fortunately, work continues apace on that front, too.

ARPA-E's fate foretells cleantech's future

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 09:26:00-0400

Folks across the entire political spectrum concur the new election may blow a chilling wind across the cleantech industry (if you omit nukes). Budget-cutting is job #1 for this upcoming Congress, and the change of guard within key budget appropriation committees does not bode well for future government cleantech investments.

While all eyes are on cap-and-trade legistlation and how the House will act to block EPA climate rules, perhaps the better barometer of cleantech’s future is the continuation of ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy) funding.

ARPA-E was created in 2008 with strong bipartisan support to reverse the nation’s falling position in global clean technology markets. What DARPA did for national defense, ARPA-E was to do for energy technologies, bridging the “gap between basic energy research and development/industrial innovation.”

But ARPA-E didn’t really get off the ground until the Obama administration, when Stimulus Bill funding filled its budget coffers. Since then, the agency has funded 37 cutting-edge projects from an initial pool of 3,600 applications. By most accounts, the program has been a strong success, as the New York Times points out:

Last week marked the anniversary of the first round of grants for the Department of Energy program, which is charged with finding game-changing energy research and awarding jolts of funding. Business leaders and other energy experts say ARPA-E not only has found such “breakthrough” projects, but has unleashed interest throughout the innovation chain – DOE, universities, corporations, startups and the financial world.

Beaupre client, SAGE Electrochromics, is one such example. In March it received $72 million in loan guarantees from the program to develop dynamic window glazing technologies that make buildings highly energy efficient. It has since broken ground on a new 300,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Minnesota that is bringing 160 new green jobs and 200 construction jobs.

But SAGE’s immediate impact is the exception within ARPA-E . Most projects probably won’t start yielding big results for at least five years. As the mid-term election showed, Americans are impatient. Congress already punted on funding ARPA-E for the current fiscal year, saying current Stimulus funds should be sufficient for now. Who knows what the lame duck Congress will do.
With a Teaparty-inflamed House itching to slash and burn budget expenditures anywhere they can find them, ARPA-E will be the bellwether by which America regains its advantage or falls farther behind the world in clean technology innovation, along with all the good jobs and good karma that comes with it. DARPA gave us the Internet. A short-sighted vote to chloroform ARPA-E could be an equally monumental loss.

A different green wave coming from Ireland

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 13:49:00-0400

And now a message from the “Signs of Hope for Renewable Energy” Department concerning that hotbed of renewable energy development – Ireland?

That’s right. A cloudy little island with no vast prairies or sun-drenched deserts recently announced that it generates 15 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, mainly wind and solar. To expand its renewable energy production, Ireland is now going hammer-and-tongs at the promising but under-unexplored area of wave power. Last week, Sustainable Energy Agency Ireland (SEAI), the country’s renewable energy agency, announced a major wave power development deal with the Australian company Carnegie Wave Energy to develop Ireland’s Belmullet wave energy area. SEAI estimates there is enough energy in the waves that wash against Ireland’s west coast to meet 75 percent of the country’s energy needs. Harnessing it is another matter, of course, with a lot of unanswered questions and untested technologies to evaluate. Nevertheless, the country is plowing ahead to help reach a goal of 40 percent renewable power by 2020.

Seeing as the United States has two thousand-mile coastlines, Ireland’s move into wave power should be of more than passing interest. There are pockets of interest in wave power in the U.S., most notably in Oregon, where the first U.S. wave power facility started construction in February of this year. The news coverage of the project, however, struck a skeptical note about the project’s potential, pointing out that a wave facility in Portugal went under for financial reasons, that a pilot wave power facility sank off the Oregon coast in 2008, and that the wave plant’s electricity will be five to six times more expensive than conventionally generated electricity.

Okay, so those projects bought the farm and the economics haven’t caught up to the technology. So what? Whatever happened to Yankee ingenuity? I’m old enough to remember watching the first Moon landing on television. It came after a lot of embarrassing and occasionally deadly mistakes, including the 1967 Apollo 1 launch pad explosion that killed three astronauts. Two years later, Neil Armstrong made history by jumping out of the Lunar Module. Is figuring out wave energy that much harder – if at all?

Not according to Ireland, and in my humble opinion the Irish have built up some cred in this area. Solar energy is a significant portion of Ireland’s renewable energy capacity. Solar means sun. How often do you think of Ireland and sun in the same breath? The place makes Seattle look like Santa Fe, it’s so cloudy. If the Irish can turn the same trick with waves that they did with the sun, they’ll reach their goal of 40 percent renewable energy by 2020 in a walk. Where will the resource-rich U.S., currently with 7 percent of its power generated renewably, be in the renewables race by then?

A greener alternative to ethanol? I'll drink to that!

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:29:00-0400

Today’s blog is posted by guest blogger, Ed Marshall, a Senior Account Manager at Beaupre.

Following up on my co-generation/ symbiosis post from earlier this summer, I came across a great example of this principle in action the other day. This story explains how scientists at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland have developed a way to turn two byproducts of whiskey production into a more-than-viable alternative to corn ethanol. Treading on stereotypes for a moment, I have to say this sort of discovery would seem destined to have been made by a Scottish or Irish scientist.

The article explains that the biofuel made from the byproducts, butanol, packs 30 percent more energy per unit than does ethanol, can be easily blended into gasoline at refineries, requires no modification to engines that use the blended fuel and does not pick up water, making it far easier to handle and use than the hydrophilic ethanol. This is all terrific, and from a symbiosis standpoint, the really good news is that it’s derived from a waste product created by a useful, needed, everyday manufacturing activity.

Truth be told, this isn’t the first time I’ve come across this sort of useful byproduct in distilling. CNET’s Martin LaMonica covered a story last year wherein Sierra Nevada Brewing entered into a partnership to turn its beer making leftovers into a feedstock for a home ethanol start-up. Out on the road, distilling byproducts are already helping save money while improving safety. Read all the way to the bottom of this Wall Street Journal article from 2009 and you’ll see that leftovers from the rum-making process are an effective supplement to road salt.

So while drinking and driving don’t mix, distilling and driving may be a rather different story.

Posted by: Ed Marshall

How many earths do you require?

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:14:00-0400

Eco science can boggle the mind, and it’s easy to drown in the data. Unless we can see, smell or feel an environmental threat, we tend to ignore it. So if you want to make a memorable point, dumb it down. Way down.

That’s what TreeHugger.com and the Global Footprint Network (GFN) have done with respect to natural resource consumption. Here, for example, is an environmental data point anyone can grasp:

If every human consumed natural resources like an American, we’d need five planet earths to support us.

Pretty simple way to represent complex information, isn’t it? The Global Footprint Network chart documents the fact that we, as a country and planet, consume more natural resources than the earth replenishes and generate waste faster than the planet can absorb it. The chart considers energy production, settlement, timber & paper harvest, food & fiber and seafood. It’s backed up by more data than any of us care to examine here.

The bottom line is we have a natural resources deficit. Having considered that, GFN, in another example of dumbing-down genius, declares that…

August 21 is Earth Overshoot Day.

That’s the day when we humans have used up the planet’s annual supply of resources. If you pretend we get a fresh start every Jan. 1, then August 21 is the day we go into deficit spending of our natural capital. If we were prevented from borrowing against the planet’s future, we’d run out of resources on that day. As consumption soars, Earth Overshoot Day comes earlier every year. Last year, it was Sept. 25.

Now that we know the day, do we know the solution to over-consumption? Well, that’s hard to dumb down. In addition to conventional sustainability measures, TreeHugger.com blogger Matthew McDermott

CALCULATE YOUR ECO FOOTPRINT

recommends “radically reassessing how much stuff we believe is required for our happiness. Rejiggering what we believe to be needs and not just wants.”

He’s not alone. In fact, a minimalist trend is already under way, says the BBC, starting with young American urbanites digitizing their books and music and shedding large swaths of possessions, including homes.

That’s sounds smart.

And so does this personal ecological footprint calculator. Try it, and tell us how many planet earths you need to support your lifestyle. (I’d need 4.6. Ouch!)

'Salt' plant and Duke study make solar outlook brighter

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:14:00-0400

In Northern New England, where I live, the sun exists only in rumor and faint memory for weeks at a time. So when sustainable energy advocates talk solar, I think of my late-February pallor and mentally check out of the discussion. Long nights, short days of limited sun. Wind for my region maybe, but solar?

Well, yes, actually. Two news items that filtered through the excellent Inhabitat blog recently give hope to anyone who thinks the sun could help wean us off fossil fuels. The first comes from Sicily, where the energy company Enel recently fired up “Archimede” the world’s first utility-scale molten salt power plant. Archimede uses mirror concentrators to super-heat a molten salt solution circulating through a pipe array. The heat pipes power boilers that create steam to drive electrical turbines. The key to this system is that it can store energy for nights and cloudy days, much like the solar thermal systems I blogged about a while back. The combination of sodium nitrates and potassium salts in the system can accumulate heat for extended periods. That ability to ride out nights and cloudy days makes thermal solar more practical for sun-deprived areas like mine. Photovoltaic solar, the more widely known solar technology, generates electricity directly from the sun’s rays instead of through turbines. It’s most often associated with places like the American Southwest, which have weeks on end of uninterrupted sunshine.

But photovoltaic’s geographical limitations were never a technology problem, they were an economic problem. Solar panels work as well on a sunny New England day as they do on a sunny day anywhere else. They just didn’t work often enough to make them economically feasible because solar panels are expensive. Maybe not for much longer, though. Researchers at Duke University just released a study that says solar energy is now cheaper than nuclear energy, partly because the cost of panels is dropping. When it drops enough, it will be economically feasible to mount solar panels on rooftops to power air conditioners during hot summer days, or heat during clear, sunny winter days to reduce oil and coal consumption.

Now if I could just do something about that late February pallor …

Talking 'bout Co-g-g-generation

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 10:54:00-0400

Today’s blog is posted by guest blogger, Ed Marshall, a Senior Account Manager at Beaupre.

Before I read this story in the New York Times, it didn’t occur to me that milk and data centers would have much in common. In a nutshell, IT behemoth Hewlett Packard has calculated the biogas generated by manure from a 10,000 cow dairy operation could be harnessed to generate enough electricity to power a one megawatt data center.

“Information technology and manure have a symbiotic relationship,” said Chandrakant D. Patel, the director of H.P.’s sustainable information technology laboratory, which wrote the report.

And that’s the key word – symbiotic. The natural world is typically portrayed as a zero-sum competition for survival, red in tooth and claw. But in truth it’s equally true that the natural world is a story of highly efficient symbiotic, win-win arrangements – just like the dairy farm co-generation scheme.

From bacteria in our intestines to birds hanging out with crocodiles, natural systems are an ongoing lesson in symbiotic efficiency with nary a niche going unexploited. Human systems need to get more symbiotic. We've blogged before on increased efficiency perhaps being a more pressing near term need than alternate energy. Co-generation is a concept that seems a symbiotic natural.

The first Wiktionary definition of co-generation is “the production of heat and/or power from the waste energy of an industrial process.” The city of Aalborg, Denmark provides an example. An agreement with Aalborg Portland, the largest producer of ready-mixed concrete in Scandinavia, delivers surplus heat from the factory’s cement production process to the city’s district heating system (itself a great way to boost building heating efficiency, but that’s another post), providing heat for some 30,000 homes.

On this side of the Atlantic, our client Wheelabrator launched the first large-scale, commercially successful waste-to-energy project in the United States in 1975 providing an effective way to drive a new efficiency into the existing waste disposal process. Today Wheelabrator has five such plants generating almost 230 megawatts of electricity annually.

And co-generation can scale down to the business or even the individual home with technology that seems a closer fit to the second Wiktionary definition for cogeneration: “The simultaneous or serial production of heat and electricity from the same source”.

The world is facing hard choices about energy sources and usage. The efficiencies of co-generation present an opportunity to get more out of things we’re already doing – like walking, for instance.

Ed Marshall has been in technology PR for over 12 years, following a stint in the non-profit world and a hitch in the journalism trenches at a daily newspaper. A cat magnet, avid reader and part-time unicyclist, Ed can be found most weekends reconfiguring the homestead or trying out yet another Linux distribution.

Fables of Abundance

Wed, 19 May 2010 13:25:00-0400

Today’s blog is part two in a series posted by guest blogger, Ed Marshall, a Senior Account Manager at Beaupre.

The other week, I blogged that renewable energy alone will not be able to compensate for an anticipated precipitous decline in world oil supply. We said we need to invest in energy efficiency to bridge the gap. This week, I look at the challenges of becoming a more efficient world, starting with you and me.

In the mind of the average consumer the image of efficiency and its close cousin conservation is one of deprivation and austerity. Certainly not the stuff that made America great! America was built on fables of abundance.

But doesn’t efficiency have its own attractive tale to tell? Take the iPad, for instance. Turns out it’s really energy efficient. Among the many ballyhooed features of the iPad, right up there with the sexy interface, is its amazing battery life. Wait - praise for efficiency? Sure, because that’s efficiency delivering something people really want; truly mobile computing. After all, who wants a mobile device that needs to be tethered to an outlet? The iPad isn’t just slick fun – it’s slick , fun, freedom!

The trick is to find similar gut-level needs that, “marketed” effectively, can motivate us to adopt ways of living that reduce our spiraling energy demand and offset some of the anticipated energy gap mentioned in my last post. So, what gut-level need can energy efficiency deliver?

How about control for starters? People like the ideas of self-sufficiency and self-determination. Especially in uncertain times, feeling like you have a firm grip on your ship’s tiller is empowering. Technologies and initiatives that increase energy efficiency could be positioned as delivering personal control – a bulwark against the uncertainties of see-sawing gasoline prices, rising utility bills, increased commuting costs and carbon taxes.

Or, what about status? People like to stand out, get noticed, feel like they’re ahead of the pack in some way. When gasoline breached $4 a gallon in the US back in 2008, a new breed of braggart emerged on the American car scene – the hypermiler. In the world of hypermiling, status wasn’t about horsepower and 0-60 times. It was all about miles-per-gallon. Want to be king of the hypermile hill? Drive smarter. Right now, utilities are tapping into that same competitive quest for eco status by sending monthly statements that show how your energy use stacks up to similar homes in your neighborhood. (It’s anonymous.) Many were surprised that the odd-cool look of the Prius sold so well even before the spike in gas prices. They assumed it would be best to camouflage a hybrid under the wrappings of a more traditional looking car body – like Honda did with its hybrid Civic. But early adopters often want to stand out. Why spend the extra money on planet and climate saving efficiency if nobody notices? The same principle can be applied well beyond the automotive segment.

And there are many more human needs and wants that efficiency can be paired with (how about efficiency gadgets for that never ending human need for novelty?), but the point is we need to harness self-interest, not pretend it doesn’t exist. We start by choosing and creating the right words, imagery and ideas that motivate action and behavior. Efficiency and conservation have been too often aligned with abstractly noble or utilitarian sentiments; saving the planet or perhaps saving some money (eventually). Getting an efficiency mindset to really take hold demands a belief that it can deliver something personally valuable.

By building more compelling imagery – starting with us as marketers and reaching all the way up to the Marketer in Chief – efficiency has as much, possibly more, intrinsic appeal as alternative energy. After all, lots of the alternative energy stuff is “five to 10 years away” and seemingly always will be (where is my hydrogen economy?). Insulation, smart glass, telecommuting, car sharing, geothermal heat pumps, new urbanism and smart planning? That’s efficiency, and that’s here, now ready to deliver more control in uncertain times, status among peers, novelty and more. So, if you’re starting out in a quest for green market dominance with a venture that’s efficiency or conservation-focused, look to spin a new fable of abundance based on the self-interest needs or wants that your product or service can deliver.

Are we there yet? Time for energy efficiency to get its sexy on

Tue, 04 May 2010 13:41:00-0400

Today’s blog is posted by guest blogger, Ed Marshall, a Senior Account Manager at Beaupre.

How soon before we hit peak oil production? According to the U.S. military, it might be two years from now, or even less. If true, we’re well on our way to the real Energy Crisis. And the key to riding it out just might be efficiency technologies like that itchy pink insulation in your attic.

Peak oil is the point when the world’s oil production reaches its highest rate and begins its inevitable decline, creating an oil deficit relative to demand.

That will happen globally in 2012 with “severe” shortfalls on world markets by 2015, according to a report issued by the United States Joint Forces Command. The UK’s Guardian newspaper covered it. Peak oil in the U.S. has already passed. It was 1970 for the lower 48 states.

So we just fill the gap with all kinds of renewable energy projects, right? Wrong.

It will take decades to spool up replacement technologies and attendant infrastructure. See, oil is a very energy dense and convenient source of power. Battery technology is a long way from matching oil’s energy density, and it has its own “peak” problems (lithium doesn’t exactly grown on trees). It will also need a materials-intensive charging infrastructure program to even begin propelling the millions of passenger cars currently on the road. Bio-fuels? Also not as energy-dense as petroleum, meaning you’d have to produce a hell of a lot more of it to replace a lesser volume of petroleum. Also, bio-fuels have a raft of production scaling issues that are, again, many years away from being addressed (let’s talk dry materials storage and handling!). Oh, and ethanol tends to pick up water easily and is fairly corrosive, so the existing gasoline pipeline transportation infrastructure isn’t well-suited to handling it.

Without a couple decades to work through these problems, we’d be better off focusing not on producing replacement fuels, but increasing efficiency – making the most of what’s at hand.

For instance, let’s tighten up our buildings. Buildings account for almost 50 percent of energy consumption in the U.S. (and a proportionate share of carbon emissions), according to the EIA. As we gin up those turbines, let’s be retrofitting the building sector – utilizing everything from smart glass like SAGE to advanced insulation materials and onsite combined heat units. And build this stuff into new construction.

Dare I suggest telecommuting? We’ve spent decades building a robust, intercontinental Internet. Surely it can handle remote workers, ecommerce and funny cat clips on YouTube.

Efficiency measures like these are in our collective DNA. A market-based economy is supposed to excel at efficiency and we’re generally good at it when we make the effort. Unfortunately, the easy availability of cheap energy has limited its appeal to date. Why insulate if heating oil is cheaper than Pepsi?

Back in December of 2009, President Obama unveiled a program of incentives to drive efficiency behaviors – and jobs – which subsequently became known as “cash for caulkers.” This passage from the linked article is telling:

"I know the idea may not be very glamorous, although I get really excited about it," Obama chuckled as he described the discussion at a roundtable on job creation he took part in just before his remarks. "Insulation is sexy stuff."

I agree, but for most folks, we’ll need to sex it up a bit, as the Brits say. There’s an image problem with energy efficiency. Ever since President Carter put on a sweater and went on national television in February of 1977 to say that we’d have to turn down the thermostat to build a better future, the concept of efficiency has been firmly wedded to that of sacrifice, rather than something sexier, like, say progress. Efficiency is a topic ripe for an extreme makeover.

So how, exactly, do we make energy efficiency sexy? More about that in my next post.

Posted by: Ed Marshall

What if we could cool the planet?

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:14:00-0400

Manmade carbon dioxide emissions are knitting a wooly blanket around the planet at a time when we really need to throw off the covers. Yet even if we could stop driving, manufacturing things and producing dirty power, it may be too late: climate scientists agree that without major intervention, existing CO2 will keep warming the planet for the rest of the century.

A potential solution is geoengineering, says Jeff Goodell, who appeared at RiverRun Bookstore Wednesday for his new book “How to Cool the Planet.” The Rolling Stone/New York Times Magazine contributor’s previous book is “Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future” (2006).

We have the technology, he says. We can brighten clouds or blow tiny sulfur mirrors into the atmosphere to deflect sunlight from the earth’s surface. Deflecting 1 to 2 percent of sunlight would offset the warming effect of doubling today’s carbon emissions. We can also sequester CO2 by tossing iron in the ocean, thereby feeding plankton that will consume CO2 in photosynthesis and sink to the ocean floor. Oh, and there are tree-like machines that suck carbon from the air.

So how does this sound? Like a quick fix? Like Star Wars (the missile shield)? Like a threat to our spiritual integrity?

“Reaganesque,” said one young man in the audience, almost certainly born after the 40th president left office.

Goodell understands the anxiety. He’s conservation-minded himself and, in fact, headed to the Arctic Circle this weekend to better understand the warming threat. Geoengineering was “science fiction writ large” until he talked to enough smart people to conclude that we don’t have the luxury of being properly appalled. We’re staring down calamity.

Some of his conclusions:

Geoengineering is dangerous politically. A quick fix is precisely what some people like. As the ink on the book dried, he got a delighted call from the nation’s biggest fossil-fuel lobbyist. “We love your book!” Gulp.

Worse, geoengineering could enable rich individuals or states to act unilaterally to manipulate the climate. It’s like nuclear weapons: “How do you keep the crazy person’s finger off the trigger?”

Geoengineering will happen sooner or later. We’re in a position where we’ll have to consider this at some point, he says. We should start talking about it now.

Worse than technological hubris is human apathy. “The real risk is being fat dumb and stupid a lot longer and riding into this superheated world without any heed,” he says.

Ultimately, Goodell concludes that we are, like it or not, a species that manipulates our environment. Do you own an air conditioner? Do you like heat in the winter? He works another metaphor beautifully:

I’ve discovered that the people who understand this best are gardeners. I’m not much of a gardener myself, but I am married to one. My wife, Michele, is happiest when she has dirt under her fingernails, and one of her highest aspirations in life is to grow all our own food. It’s because of her that our kids have such a heightened sensitivity to the freshness of green beans that they can take one bite and tell you, with a good chance of being correct, whether the bean is store-bought or homegrown.

My wife’s garden is, by any standard, a product of human artifice. There is nothing “wild” about it, nothing undisturbed, nothing left alone. She has planted every plant and mixed the soil to her liking with imported alpaca manure. The garden is entirely organic – she’s no more likely to use Miracle-Gro than she is to dye her hair pink – but it is also entirely human. It is an artifact, but it is a living artifact. You do not walk through her vegetable garden and admire the basil and the asparagus an feel that nature has been banished.

Compelling thought indeed, but still, it’s just Goodell’s backyard.

I want to learn more. And as a professional communicator, I’m eager to see how geoengineering alights on our national radar screen. I cringe at the possibility (certainty?) that politicians and pundits will get hold of this and club one another silly with it, as with health care. And despite my status as a card-carrying independent, the possibility (certainty?) of the profit motive getting further entangled with the fate of the planet concerns me.

Can we start a conversation on geoengineering? Should we start one? If so, how?

Let us know what you think.

Nominating an unlikely new Earth Day saint

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:21:00-0400

It’s Earth Day, and you can practically hear tributes to Rachel Carson and Senator Gaylord Nelson and other patron saints of the environmental movement ringing from hybrid to shining hybrid. As well they should. Without Nelson there would be no Earth Day, and without Carson and her ilk the Earth would be in rougher shape than it already is. I would, however, like to commemorate a different figure on this Earth Day: Col. Edwin Drake, the man who pioneered commercial oil drilling.

That’s right, oil drilling. On Earth Day. Bear with me, I’m going somewhere with this.

Drake is credited with inventing economically viable oil extraction in 1858, when Seneca Oil hired the semi-retired railroad worker to explore oil deposits on its land near Titusville, Penn. Most homes and businesses of Drake’s era were lit by lamps burning whale oil, which grew scarce and expensive as the whale population plummeted from overhunting. Seneca Oil founder Samuel Martin Kier had invented a method for refining crude oil into kerosene to replace whale oil in lamps several years before the company sent Drake to Titusville. The problem was there was no reliable supply of oil to refine, which meant kerosene couldn’t replace whale oil on a large scale. Before Drake, people skimmed oil off creeks from the water that seeped into salt mines. Those sources were too erratic to provide the masses with kerosene for lamps.

It was Drake’s idea to dig for oil instead of skimming it. The good people of Titusville thought Drake was off his rocker. They called his operation “Drake’s Folly” and crowded around the drilling site to jeer. When his first mine shaft collapsed, it looked like they might be right. But Drake thought of sinking a pipe into the ground and drilling inside it to prevent the bore hole from collapsing. Just days after Drake’s bore hole started belching up oil, there were imitators up and down the creek using his methods to get oil out of the ground. The oil era, for good or ill, was launched.

I bring up Drake on Earth Day because of the parallels between his story and what’s going on in renewable energy right now. Listen to some of the skepticism that persists around renewable energy: Wind and solar are too sporadic to replace fossil fuels. Renewables cost too much and don’t deliver a big enough return on investment. They have lower energy content than fossil fuels. Now rewind 152 years to Edwin Drake’s era. Do any of today’s criticisms sound familiar?

Regardless of what you think about his legacy, Edwin Drake was not an environmental criminal. He was a resourceful man who solved his era’s energy problem by ignoring conventional wisdom and trying new things. He had a vision, and he persevered until he found a way to get it done. Yes, he left us a mixed legacy. Nevertheless, our generation needs its own version of Edwin Drake, to do for renewable energy what Drake did for oil. It happened once, and it can happen again.

On a side note: Check out the last page of this week’s Newsweek magazine for a scorecard of how well we’ve done at cleaning up the environment since the first Earth Day. There are reasons to be glad, and reasons why we still have a lot of work to do. Happy Earth Day!

A rosy idea for clean energy measurement

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:15:00-0400

In a recent news release for a cleantech client I struggled to quantify the energy savings and environmental impact that the technology delivered in a meaningful way. Communicating clean energy benefits can often trigger a mish-mash of metrics, like energy units (e.g. kilowatts/hour) made, dollars saved or potential pollutants scrubbed from the atmosphere.

To that end, Scientific American introduces us to a new scientific measurement for energy savings called the "Rosenfeld" named after the so-called "godfather of energy efficiency," Scientist Arthur Rosenfeld.

One Rosenfeld equals an energy savings of 3 billion kilowatt-hours per year -- the same amount generated by a 500-megawatt coal-run power plant. As Scientific American describes it, the Rosenfeld metric provides a much needed:

"... measurement that would help regular people visualize efficiency's massive potential, but also be as accurate as possible."

Weight Watchers have calories, cars have MPG and my woodstove boasts in BTUs. It's not a bad idea that communications pros in clean tech industries coalesce around a standard, meaningful unit of energy savings measurement. And while we’re at, let’s nickname it the Rosy for simplicity’s sake.

SAGE's re-imagining of windows will help save $300 billion in energy

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:35:00-0400

This morning Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Steven Chu – joined by Senators Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar – announced $100+ million in DOE funding and IRS green manufacturing tax credits for our client SAGE Electrochromics.

These funds will help SAGE establish a new 250,000 sq. ft. facility in Faribault, Minnesota used to manufacture energy-saving, electronically tintable dynamic glass that makes buildings more energy efficient and creates hundreds of new, skilled, green manufacturing jobs.

While hundreds of buildings have already installed SageGlass windows, this new government funding will enable the company to mass produce its glass and bring this energy saving technology to the world.

Secretary Chu has repeatedly said the biggest gains in decreasing this country’s energy bill, the amount of carbon dioxide and our dependency on foreign oil will come from energy efficiency and conservation in

SAGE Electrochromics' SageGlass
Courtesy photo

the next 20 years. SageGlass is a leading example of an energy efficiency technology.

SageGlass products transform windows from an energy liability to an energy source. The potential for energy savings is significant because energy loss through windows accounts for about 30% of heating and cooling energy. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), electrochromic windows like those produced by SAGE can save one-eighth of all the energy used by U.S. buildings each year. This is equivalent to about 5% of the nation’s energy budget. This translates into savings of approximately $300 billion over the next 20 years.

That’s not chump change.

SAGE focused on something each of us experiences every day – glass – and re-imagined it, transforming glass into something innovative that helps make the world a better place and America more competitive.

This is a great example of how something seemingly mundane like a window can become highly transformational.

Smart grid marketers rejoice

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:04:00-0400

Marketers for smart grid products have had it rough because it's like trying to sell a movie without a story line. Few people outside the energy industry have a clue as to how the smart grid will work. Unresolved standards keep us from knowing what it will be made out of. And the smart grid's promise of energy efficiency and cleaner air have been unsubstantiated guesses at best.

But on this last point, smart grid marketers now have a reason to smile. The U.S. Department of Energy has done the math and has finally wrapped some great numbers around smart grid efficiencies, providing much-needed fuel for the marketing machine.

According to a new DOE report, the smart grid will enable us to cut energy consumption by 12% by 2030, and cut carbon emissions from power plants by the same amount.

Smart grid marketers can now crisply message around how they're going to reduce your electric bill while also greening the planet.

But for the message to stick, they also have to tackle the other fore mentioned obstacles by scrubbing the unnecessary technobabble from smart grid conversations. Today, smart grid marketers trumpet things like Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), peak-load demand response and home area networks (HANs). These terms are fine for B2B sales and marketing within the energy industry. But to create the consumer pull-demand that could accelerate smart grid deployments, marketers will need to create a new consumer-friendly lexicon.

Getting off the grid and into green biz: one man's story

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:20:00-0400

Dave Bonta hasn’t paid an electric bill in 12 years. He has no heating bill, either.

That’s because he kicked his 40 kilowatt/hr electricity habit in the 1990s and used solar electricity to fill the gap. “I learned to live on less,” he told an audience at RiverRun bookstore the other night. “Surprise, I made it to one kilowatt. It wasn’t hard.... It’s kind of nice to think we can throw our electric bills away. It’s kind of empowering.”

To reduce his power usage, Bonta – who has since co-authored the “The New Solar Home” and created the USA Solar Store chain – replaced light bulbs, got an energy-efficient washing machine, switched from a vacuum cleaner to a broom, and tossed the electric toothbrushes. “Anything that could be done with human power we did.” Even the press he used in his printing business was human-powered. He pedaled it.

Once he’d shrunk his energy footprint, he installed a small-scale solar electricity system in his rustic Vermont home. Printing customers immediately peppered him with questions about his set-up. That’s when the light bulb went off. He could sell this stuff, along with the know-how. Which is exactly what USA Solar Stores do, and the chain now has 27 stores in 11 states. It’s “about to grow like wildfire,” he says earnestly.

Bonta models his stores after the crunchy old Gateway stores, where the PCs were displayed on barnboard tables and salespeople didn’t bug you till you had a question. At USA Solar Stores, you can get anything from a conversation to a compact fluorescent light bulb to a full-fledged solar electricity setup. Or you can come in, look and leave. No worries. In any case, Bonta’s team is eager to address what he calls the three solar bogey men: expense, viability, aesthetics.

Bogey Man #1: Solar electricity is too expensive. Bonta will look at your current electric bill, figure in current incentives, find ways to reduce your demand, and show you how long it will take to pay off your gear. Even if the incentives disappear, he says, it’s still a good deal. The joy of sticking it to the man? Priceless.

Bogey Man #2: It doesn’t work too well. Wrong, he says.There’s a myth that if you wait, solar technology will get less expensive and super technology will come along. “The way it is now is pretty good. The technology is there, and the only thing missing is people who will try it.”

Bogey Man #3: It’s ugly. No, Bonta says, solar is becoming increasingly “building integrated” – where it’s embedded in your roof, not tacked on like an afterthought. And you don’t need it on your house at all. Bonta’s panels are on his shed, which gets better light anyway. The homes in his book are of jaw-dropping beauty.

Bonta is a softspoken guy. Although he has the conviction of a preacher, he has the slickness of, well, the guy who melted down in his first speech to the Rotary. But in the bookstore, once he warmed up you could tell he will not be denied: “Everything we can do to get our country on a sustainable path, we’re going to do.” If not, he says, generations will hold us accountable for the demise of the world’s ecology. “We can either explain it to them from a wheelchair, or fix it now.”

2009: Looking back at the year in environmental issues

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:59:00-0400

The scribes at here at CleanSpeak central have written about everything from wind, to solar, to endangered natural landscapes, to endangered McMansions, to Christmas trees, to hybrid vehicles this year. We decided to take a look back and nominate our own slate of candidates for the Top 5 Environmental Stories of 2009.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. It included $80 billion for green/sustainable initiatives like a smart power grid, renewable energy technology, home heating efficiency and green job training programs. If the American economy is going to be more sustainable, it’s going to take this kind of government leadership.
The Copenhagen Climate Conference. It didn’t accomplish much of substance, but all of the major players were in one place duking it out, which at least elevates the issue of climate change to a more prominent place in the public eye.
Boeing gets the 787 jet liner off the ground. The 787 Dreamliner, with a composite rather than aluminum skin, represents a future of more environmentally friendly air travel. With its more efficient engines and lightweight construction, the Dreamliner can make long hauls on less fuel than any of its forerunners or its ostensible competitor, the oversized Airbus A380.
More polar bears are going hungry. Polar bears might be to this generation what the canary in the coal mine was the previous generations. Scientists in 2009 announced that the number of under-nourished bears has tripled in the last 20 years. The culprit is warmer global temperatures that are shrinking the ice masses where the world’s largest land predator hunts for seals.
Chevrolet officially unveils the Volt. General Motors is staking a lot of its future on the plug-in hybrid, which is its long-delayed answer to hybrids from Toyota, Honda, Ford, and now Mercedes. That’s quite a turnaround for the company known for environmental nightmares like the Humvee, which gets about nine yards per gallon if it has a good tail wind.

There were, of course, innumerable other environmentally tinged stories this year. Any thoughts on what should have made the list? Let us know!

Cuttyhunk says 'YIMBY' to wind power

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:57:00-0400

Unlike the new NIMBYs, selectmen in the town encompassing Massachusetts’ Cuttyhunk Island say they will support a wind farm off their shores, a position directly at odds with many of their neighbors to the immediate east on Martha’s Vineyard.

Residents seem to back the decision:

“I don’t think you can just say, ‘Not in my backyard,’ and expect that will be OK,’’ said resident Nina Brodeur. “If I had my preference, I’d choose not to see them. But I understand the needs of the state, and if it’s not in my backyard, it would have to be in somebody else’s. We can’t close our eyes and think we’re more special than anyone else.’’

At issue is Cape Wind, the embattled wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound. Opponents say the landmark project will be a blight on the horizon and ruin a historic Native American site. The project also help Cuttyhunk residents, as part of Massachusetts’ poorest community, pay their utilities:

“I think the wind farm is a great idea,’’ said George Isabel, 59, who has lived on Cuttyhunk since 1968 and serves as police chief and harbor master. “People here can’t afford to turn on their air conditioners or electric heat. Something has to give, because it’s hard to survive. There could be big benefits for us.’’ (Source: Boston Globe)

Maine may be next for offshore wind. The state just announced three offshore wind test sites.

A couple other developments in the wind arena:

Endangered bat concerns stall another wind farm

A West Virginia judge just halted progress of an Appalachian ridgeline wind farm because the developer failed to account for endangered Indiana bats on the property. Developers don’t have to prove that nobats will die in the project, just that the damage – presumably from construction, displacement and/or turbine blades – is minimized. That means potentially years of surveying, planning and permits. Plaintiffs in the case said the project would kill 6,746 bats of all kinds annually. Source: New York Times.

Report: Turbines are annoying, perhaps, but not sickening

An expert panel issued a report this month questioning the validity of wind-turbine syndrome, the constellation of symptoms – including sleep problems, headaches, dizziness, anxiety, ringing in the ears – sometimes associated with turbine noise.

“There is no evidence that the audible or sub-audible sounds emitted by wind turbines

have any direct adverse physiological effects,” says the report, prepared by a multidisciplinary panel of medical doctors, audiologists, and acoustical professionals for the American and Canadian wind energy industry associations. The 85-page document does admit that turbine noise can be annoying.

“An annoyance factor to wind turbine sounds undoubtedly exists, to which there is a great deal of individual variability. Stress has multiple causes and is additive. Associated stress from annoyance, exacerbated by the rhetoric, fears, and negative publicity generated by the wind turbine controversy, may contribute to the reported symptoms described by some people living near rural wind turbines.”

Source: Wind Energy

Solar in a bottle is the practical alternative for wind and sun poor states

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:00:00-0400

Did you ever expect to find cutting-edge renewable energy technology in your grammar school lunch box? Right there, next to your PB&J and a slightly bruised apple most likely sat a thermos bottle of milk or soup. That bottle worked on the same basic principle as solar thermal technology, the most practical renewable energy source for regions without the right weather to support today’s marquee renewables – wind power and solar photovoltaic. Which would be much of the continental U.S.

Unlike photovoltaic and wind systems, solar thermal systems can store energy for use at night or on cloudy, windless days. Photo thermal systems are like huge thermos bottles that use sunlight to super-heat highly concentrated salt solutions. Insulated “bottles” trap the heat. When the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine, the trapped heat can generate steam to produce electricity or heat water to warm homes and businesses. Spain is starting work on a large-scale solar thermal plant for its Seville province in 2010.

Regions like New England, the Mid Atlantic and the Pacific Northwest could go Spain one better by combining solar thermal, wind and photovoltaic in one super-renewable energy system. We here in New England get wind, but not the steady, predicable wind that makes the Great Plains states ideal for wind power. We get sun, but not enough for large-scale solar, like the Southwest. So here’s an idea for the renewable-poor states. Build wind turbine farms for when the wind blows. Build photovoltaic arrays for when the sun shines. But don’t hook them up directly to the grid, use them to generate and store heat in solar thermal systems to match energy production with energy demand. What do you think? Practical, or a crackpot idea?

Geothermal heat gets real

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:54:00-0400

I love renewable energy stories. We know that if we can reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, we can reduce global warming, our utility bills and, one hopes, our military presence in the Middle East.

But renewable energy stories frequently disappoint. What starts out like a success story turns out to be merely a hint at renewable energy’s potential. Too often, the project isn’t quite there yet. It’s merely proposed, or it’s in the demonstration stage, or it’s underwritten by a one-of-a-kind grant, or it’s only a tiny improvement on traditional methods.

That’s why I’m delighted to hear that a local developer has invested in geothermal to heat and cool a four-unit residential condominium now on the market. According to the local paper, the holes have been dug, the pipes have been laid, and the condos are more than 90 percent complete. It looks like a rare marriage of renewable energy and the free market: private money going into a private project (with any tax credits going to the eventual homeowners).

So while the success story isn’t complete, it’s real. Explaining his rationale for the project, developer Steve Kelm said the owners will never have to worry about rate shock of fluctuating heating oil prices: “I’d rather be ahead of the curve.”

The payback on a project like this is about five years, estimates Andy Livingston, chairman and CEO of American Ecothermal Inc., also of Portsmouth, which installed the geothermal “wells.”

How does geothermal heating and cooling work?

Geothermal uses heat from the earth’s core and sun-baked surface to heat homes in the winter and cool them in the summer. You need a geothermal heat pump (GHP), which circulates a carrier fluid through underground pipes. In the winter, the heat pump uses electricity to extract heat from the ground-warmed fluid, sending re-chilled fluid back through the ground to pick up more heat. And the cycle continues. The principle is similar to an air conditioner or refrigerator. This approach is 48 percent more efficient than the best gas furnaces and more than 75 percent more efficient than oil furnaces, according to the EPA.

To cool a home in the summer months, switch the direction of the heat flow, and the same system can extract heat from the air, thereby cooling it.

What are the benefits?

Geothermal heating and cooling offer a potential large reduction in energy use, peak demand and utility bills. Aggressive deployment of GHPs could nearly halve the need for net new electricity capacity needed by 2030, according to a U.S. Department of Energy study. It could reduce electricity bills by as much as $38 billion.

More stats from the Geothermal Heat Pump Consortium, the non-profit trade association for the GHP industry:

Operating 100,000 geothermal heat pump units over 20 years would be the greenhouse gas/carbon reduction equivalent of taking 58,700 cars off the road or planting 120,000 acres of trees.

Owners can expect savings of 30 to 70 percent in heating mode and 20 to 50 percent in cooling mode compared with conventional systems.

GHPs reduce energy consumption and corresponding emissions by 40 to 70 percent over traditional heating methods (e.g., furnaces).

And there are concrete tax incentives. The IRS is offering tax credits for 30 percent of the spending on geothermal heat pump equipment, including labor. Installing a $12,000 geothermal heat pump system would give you a $3,600 credit.

Geothermal in the works

We’re just getting started with geothermal heating and cooling. The United states has more than 600,000 GHP units, the largest installed base in the world, but many European companies are ahead on a per capita basis, according to the DOE.

A Reno casino, the Peppermill Resort Spa, has tapped an underground aquifer holding 170-degree water to heat a 17-story hotel tower, including restaurants, 1,600 rooms, and the water for the sinks and showers. Owners are predicting $1 million in a year in savings with an eight-year payback.

An Iowa town is using part of a $1 million community development grant to create a shared geothermal heating and cooling system for the downtown.

Some homeowners are designing homes that combine geothermal with passive solar and knock $1,000 off their utility bills. This geothermal/solar design involves solid wood walls, an airflow envelope just inside the walls, and lots of windows on the southern exposure.

Meanwhile, there’s an entire separate industry using geothermal to produce electricity. That’s for another post, but one exciting possibility is in oil production. Oil extraction is accompanied by non-petroleum hot fluids that can help power field equipment. “With an estimated 10 barrels of hot water produced along with each barrel of oil in the United states, there is significant resource potential for this technology,” says the US DOE.

Bring it on. It’s time for more success stories.

Wind energy's huge opportunity ... and its challenges

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:06:00-0400

I see so many windmill blades I feel like Don Quixote. There are at least five windmills – turbines we call them now, since they’re only milling electrons – within a 20-minute bike ride of my doorstep. These devices hint at the appeal, promise and challenges of wind power as a major energy source for the country and the world.

A trio of turbine towers spikes the farmland just up the road in Eliot, Maine. Although the proud owners expect an eventual payback, are receiving tax credits, and are putting a few kilowatts back into the grid, their motives are largely ecological: In the first month, John Sullivan’s 2.4-kilowatt[1] turbine “saved 120.4 pounds of CO² from going in the air.” That’s the amount he figures a coal-powered plant would have pumped out making that electricity.

Unfortunately, the next town over, Kittery, is dismantling the 50-kilowatt turbine it erected in 2008 and returning it to the manufacturer for a refund, citing “underperformance” of the project. Trees and buildings created turbulence no one had accounted for, and the tower was producing only 15 percent of its projected power.

But there’s more hope back in Eliot. East of the farms, on the banks of the Piscataqua River, deep sea engineer Ben Brickett has been developing a turbine that turns in a breeze as gentle as 2 mph. That’s big, because low-wind days are the bane of traditional turbines. Called a variable force generator, Brickett’s invention converts wind directly into electricity, bypassing the conventional gearbox. Unlike other turbines, he says, it also manages to produce power in proportion to the wind speed, up to 60 mph. His company, Blue Water Concepts, is deep into prototype testing and is attracting interest from academia and manufacturing partners.

These are just a few small examples of how the Unites States has come to be the world leader in wind power with the fastest-growing capacity.

A mighty wind

The U.S. wind energy industry installed a record-breaking 8,500 megawatts of new wind-generation capacity last year, enough to serve more than 2 million homes, according to the American Wind Energy Association. That brought the country’s total capacity up to 23,500 megawatts and pumped $17 billion into the economy. The new projects accounted for roughly 42 percent of the entire new power-producing capacity added in 2008. It was like taking more than 7 million cars off the road.

The country has more than enough wind resources to reach a 20-percent wind energy contribution to the US elecrtricity supply by 2030, according to a DOE report. We’re currently at 4 percent for wind, biomass, geothermal, solar, and miscellaneous sources combined.

As this DOE map shows, the best wind is on the coasts and in the plains states. Texas leads the country with the most installed wind-based capacity by a wide margin, followed by Iowa, California, Minnesota and Washington.

Without losing sight of our tremendous progress, to follow is a list of obstacles impeding even more robust wind development. Anyone promoting wind, whether a new turbine design or 500-megawatt wind farm, needs to consider these obstacles as they set out on their crusade.

Infrastructure

The country needs transmission systems that can shuttle power from rural wind farms to urban centers as well as load balancing installations that enable regions to consume a mix of generation sources.

Aesthetics

Green, in addition to being good, is fashionable. So your neighbor may never be more welcoming of the sight of a windmill, or fleet of them, on your roof or farm. That said, there’s plenty of resistance. The $900 million Cape Wind project slated for Nantucket, Mass., has dragged on in permitting, politics and litigation since 2001. Viewshed impact is high on opponents’ list of concerns. So why not site wind farms on sparsely populated land? That’s not so simple either, as a Wyoming farmer is finding out.

Ecology

Ten thousand birds, including 80 golden eagles, die every year at a California wind farm near San Francisco, according to a study by the local community development agency. Wind proponents blame that carnage an unlikely convergence of factors, including bad siting and older turbine technology. On average, they say, wind power’s avian toll is extremely low.

Noise

No doubt about it, windmills make noise. But the key questions include: How loud? Is the sound of whooshing blades a bad noise? How far away are you? How fast is the wind blowing? Wind proponents put windmill noise in the decibel range of household background noise or the sound of trees and leaves rustling on a blustery day.

Taxes

The government (i.e., taxpayers) has begun issuing $500 million in grants to spur wind energy development as part of the economic recovery package. They’re a double-edged sword for people worrying about personal and national debt.

Foreign Investments

One company with Spanish DNA has received more than half of that $500 million grant money, says the Environmental News Service. Too many reports like this won’t sit well with the public.

The communications strategy

So what does this all mean for the inventor or company promoting wind? The good news is there’s abundant popular support and a persuasive case for wind and other renewable energy sources. Yet, as with any complex technology that needs to go in someone’s backyard, there is bound to be wariness, if not opposition, to siting proposals.

Consequently, any development effort requires a solid communications plan born out of this strategy:

Identify all the potential benefits of a project, not just those in your market segment or locale. Include the benefits of wind to the planet.
Talking points promoting your project are just a start. You need data, and there is plenty of it out there. As you can see by the links in this blog, the American Wind Energy Association is a great place to start.
Develop content up front that documents all of the benefits. Main audiences include the public, planners and regulators.
Connect with advocacy organizations, politicians, utilities, business groups, landowners, conservationists and educators who are likely to favor your project.
Anticipate all potential concerns and prepare to address them squarely. Avoid defensiveness or reactivity. Listen and talk rather than argue. Some skeptics just need to be informed.
Depending on what you’re proposing, you could end up with a lot of energized opposition. Make sure you have the arms, legs and content to swiftly and effectively address the concerns.
If you believe in your project, stay the course.

…

Some helpful resources from the American Wind Energy Association:

Handbook for permitting small wind turbines:

Talking points on the benefits of wind energy.

Handbook for commercial scale siting.

Wind power outlook for 2009

[1] A 5kW turbine is sufficient on average to power a home. Variables include wind speed, turbine height, terrain and home energy usage, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

McMansions: new life as multi-family homes?

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:56:00-0400

Architect Susanka champions “not so big” approach

McMansions, those suburban Titanics cruising on chemically enhanced lawns from Maine to California, are a durable symbol of American excess. The environmental punditocracy hates them, and as far back as 2005, The New York Times reported that the McMansion era was waning. That turned out to be wishful thinking, but a lot has changed in the ensuing years. More recent studies by the American Institute of Architects and the National Association of Home Builders, reported in the Wall Street Journal, suggest the McMansion backlash is for real this time. To find out why, you can’t do any better than asking Sarah Susanka, author of the book “The Not So Big House” and its sequels. First, though, let’s examine our quarry.

“McMansion” is often used as an unflattering synonym for any big house. That’s wrong. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a big house. The problem is big and wasteful. A true McMansion is a homily to wasted space. You enter the average McMansion through a foyer that needs only a teller line and an ATM machine to make a smashing bank lobby. The ceilings in every room soar to nosebleed heights. There is a formal dining room to go with the eat-in kitchen and the breakfast nook. Grandma needs a golf cart to make it to lunch from the guest room, which is occupied a total of three weeks per year.

Building this wasted space consumes materials and energy, which is enough of a price tag, but the long-term cost is even worse. McMansions promote energy waste and pollution. They consume electricity and oil to light, heat and cool space the owners can’t actually live in, which is why the McMansion era’s end would be great news for the environment. But how can we be sure it’s really ending? There have been earlier predictions of their demise. What’s to be done with the thousands of McMansions sucking up energy across the country?

Susanka, a Minnesota-based architect who has been writing and speaking about the “Not So Big” concept since the 1990s, sees signs that this time, the McMansion is getting a permanent “to go” order.

“I think something pretty dramatic has shifted in how we see things, how we invest money and how we buy,” Susanka said from her architectural firm’s office in Minnesota. “The reason I’m saying that now is because our collective confidence level has been deeply shaken by the economic downturn in a way it hasn’t for a generation. For a long time before the recession, there was a lot of impetus for building McMansions because it was easy to get mortgages for larger homes. Today, all the bankruptcies and foreclosures have made a lot of people stop and think more about how they want to live. Since 1929, we haven’t had something that hit home this hard, making people wish they had more savings and had not overspent to the degree they did. That put their worlds into a new framework.”

That new framework, she says, will encompass a new attitude toward home construction. Rather than reflexively building rooms that get little use, like formal living and dining rooms, Susanka says consumers in the post-recessionary economy are more likely to seek houses designed around the way they live, and not a one-set-of-rooms-fits all floor plan. For a casual family, a formal living room is a waste. The “Not So Big” approach would be to build a slightly larger family room with a small “away” space for privacy. Don’t do formal dinners? Forget the formal dining room. Build a bigger kitchen with a multi-purpose eating area. Have occasional guests? Install a Murphy bed in your home office so it can double as a guest room. And enough with the 22-foot ceilings, unless your pituitary gland has gone haywire. Instead, Susanka says, use varying ceiling heights to define space in a way that makes less square footage seem just as roomy.

“Touches like that help a house feel big but not be so large,” she said. That’s a key point. Susanka and other like-minded architects aren’t trying to shoehorn us into 400-square-foot garden sheds. The homes in her books are spacious, airy, and classy. They’ve taken resources away from wasted space and put it into durable, useful features like built-in bookcases, cabinets and window seats. In other words, more storage in less space.

A shift in attitude toward home design will take care of the future, but what of the existing ranks of McMansions, and ongoing energy drain? Susanka points to another generation of house that could have become white elephants but for economic necessity and American ingenuity.

“Look at the Victorian era, where we had a similar pattern of development. Houses got bigger and bigger because families had servants and it was a more formal era. They needed formal dining rooms and butler’s pantries and parlors. When the era passed, many of those homes were big enough to break up into duplexes and triplexes. That’s entirely possible for McMansions,” she said. “They can be remodeled to make better use of existing space so they don’t consume as much energy. It can be relatively inexpensive to do.”

Giving McMansions a new life as multi-family homes is the best solution for the environment. Knocking them down would be a waste of energy and building material. Turning them into a new era of Victorian multi-family homes will add more affordable housing to the country’s stock, reduce energy consumption, and maybe even put the “Mc” back in front of “Donald’s,” where it belongs.

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