Yippie yi Ohhh - Renewables as Calvary

Those WSJ Enviro Capital guys are nailing it again, this time spotting a trend that's surfacing all around the country, and particularly out west. The short story is that because planners are not getting any consistent signals, let alone clear leadership, from Washington, they are making their own plans. And they are looking to Renewables to increasingly power their regions when more carbonaceous forms of power (coal, gas, cow farts) may start to bear additional costs in the form of carbon taxes. This is a great sign that the general public is getting it, even if the current administration is asleep at the wheel. And who knows, maybe it's the nature of Washington itself to lag on this stuff. Who can say that despite their forward looking words and pledges, O'McClinton would/could really deliver intelligent new energy policy for the USA? Government can only do so much, and what it does, it often does wrong or too late. The mass move to renewables looks like it's going to be one revolution that's truly driven by "We the People."

In the US, the Greenest Cities are the Best Cities

Popular Science has just come out with rankings on the most energy and environmentally proactive cities in the country. Taking into consideration four factors: (1) clean/sustainable electricity generation; (2) transportation; (3) green space; and (4) recycling, here's the top ten from the list of fifty:

1. Portland, OR
2. San Francisco
3. Boston
4. Oakland
5. Eugene, OR
6. Cambridge, MA
7. Berkeley, CA
8. Seattle
9. Chicago
10. Austin

Category winners were also named:

Electricity: Eugene
Transportation: New York City
Green Space: Chicago
Recycling: Lexington, KY

Is it is just a coincidence, or not, that these are all my favorite urban places in the USA?

Air Check

While the companies in the post below look forward with new technologies to improve the fuel efficiency and air-worthiness of their fleets, Texas is working on the tail end of the problem: dirty, old cars. To deal with possible non-attainment of EPA air quality standards, Texas launched AirCheckTexas, offering as much as $3,500 towards the purchase of a new car for those that qualify.

In place since December, the program gets 600 calls a day, and has disbursed vouchers to 2,150 in the Dallas area alone. With $20,000,000 in annual funding, almost 7,000 of Texas's dirtiest cars could be retired each year. If cars that are over ten years old emit 10 to 30 times as much pollution as this article claims, AirCheckTexas could do much to attack the big back end of the problem, by simply leveraging the current state of technology. And maybe get some ugly cars off the road in the process.

Bills Coming Due for Old King Coal

The free ride for coal is over. With guidance from Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council, big banks have banded together with large energy companies to form what's being called the Carbon Principles. You may think I'm exaggerating here, but this is BIG, BIG, BIG, BIG, BIG, BIG news. The increasing alignment of environmental and economic drivers means the sustainability team has just grown by a factor of 100, and some of the new teammates have very deep pockets indeed.

Short and mid term, coal plants are not going to disappear; they are going to change, however. And new ones likely will not be built in the numbers some in the industry had imagined. Put yourself in the place of investors considering placing their funds in a new plant. In Rumsfeld-speak, there are known knowns: carbon emissions are going to cost money; unknown knowns: don't know how much money yet; and unknown unknowns: how fast current electricity generating alternatives will be replaced by breakthrough clean energy alternatives we don't even know of yet.

You want to invest in a new coal plant? We definitely need the energy. But you've got a lot to think about these days before you lay your money down.

Electric Cars get Real in Israel (or, Shai Agassi Strikes Again !!!)

First, a statement of the obvious: Israel is not the United States. While gas here is high at $3 a gallon, it is well over $6 there. And another thing: the distances between its major cities can be measured in the dozens of miles, vs. our hundreds or thousands of miles.

So guess what? One way the two countries are very much alike is in their entrepreneurial spirit, and (depending on who's in charge) their support for bold new ideas and innovation. See today's NYT article about Israel's bold plan to move rapidly to electric cars and infrastructure. And for a little more detail on the young businessman/entrepreneur behind it all, see this recent Discovery Tech post on former SAP VP Shai Agassi.

You got to like it when our friends show us the way.

Mass (Finally) Kicks Energy Ass

The same "ultra progressive" state that can't get Cape Wind built has just passed some seriously far reaching legislation paving the way for all kinds of clean energy improvements and energy conservation. Wind, solar, LEED buildings and cleaner auto's will all benefit. I have an idea, let's make it a national movement. How about if Mass joins hands with California to form a nationwide clean energy scrum, and anybody who slips through gets a heap of whoop ass from any one of Texas' ten thousand turbines !!!???

Can the US Become Energy Independent? Denmark Did

Middelgrunden off-shore wind farm (Photo: René Seindal [Flickr])

In 1973, Denmark was 99 percent dependent on foreign oil. The '73 oil embargo pushed the Dutch to make a profound comittment to change. The result: Denmark is now energy independent, and in fact, exports electricity to neighboring European countries.

Some highlights of their efforts:

• Wind supplies 21 percent of their energy
  
• They now export wind technology, making 20,000 jobs for a country with half the population of the state of Maine
  
• Cars are taxed at 105% of the cost of the vehicle
  
• The government put up $1 billion to develop and integrate solar, tidal and fuel-cell technology

My original source is a SolarAustin@yahoogroups.com email, but see this Fox News report on the Dutch.

Necessity mothered Danish energy indepenence, the same necessity is coming for the United States.

US Fed Goes Green

OMB - otherwise known as the Office of Management and Budget, has just issued new policy that guides the acquisition of new product and services, including IT equipment like PCs, designed to give energy efficient solutions an upper hand in competitive bids. This news may not be as titillating as a new X Prize for in-home solar/nuclear power plants, but it does mark a very substantial win for the good guys in the new energy battle. Read it here.

The Oil for Wind Program

If the energy bill passed by the House (but not the Senate) would have drawn down $13.5B over ten years in oil industry subsidies, and assuming you could frictionlessly redeploy this money, what could you buy? Follow this simple, klunky math to gauge the magnitude of $13.5B:


Subsidies forgone by the oil industry in the failed energy bill: $13,500,000,000 over ten years

If it cost $1M to build a 1 MW wind turbine,

You could buy 13,500 wind turbines outright, or,

If you subsidized 25% of wind turbines' construction cost

Then 13,500 turbines x 4 (representing the 25% subsidy): 54,000 turbines

Since 1 GW = 1,000 MW

New wind power created: 54 GW

Current US Renewable Nameplate Capacity: 26.5 GW

So you could more than double US renewable energy capacity by 2018. Since wind competes on cost with other power sources on occasion now, a 25 percent subsidy ought to make wind consistently, broadly competitive.

Sure, these calcs might be simplistic and hurried, but they're intended to serve as a ten minute assessment of the opportunity to buy the future instead of simply continuing to dole out for what the future used to be. Transform the oil subsidy into the wind subsidy. The Oil for Wind Program.

Out of Africa - Winds of Change

The Wall Street Journal featured this story on page one today about a young man in Malawi named William Kamkwamba showing some incredible imagination and initiative. He's building windmills (and changing lives) out of local materials and old bicycle parts based on pictures he saw in textbooks. William's blog here reprints the WSJ article and provides more background on this great success story. So, individuals can do it. Countries can do it (see recent post on Great Britain's 20 Gigawatt plan for offshore turbines). So what's keeping the mighty US from taking a giant step forward? What do you think it could be?

I'll Take Climate Change Linkage for 50, Alex

Here's a nice write-up on the recent Presidential Forum on Global Warming at the group blogging site, Celsias. Personally, I'm in the better-safe-than-sorry mode on the human contribution to global warming. We not be able to change a thing through our actions. Or we make it worse if we don't change our ways soon ... or soonish. We are working with lots of partial information on this problem, and we may never understand all the mechanisms that are playing a part. But if the draft solution to the perceived problem involves getting us out of oil and into better means of energy production fast, I'm all for it. Seems like each of candidates know how to articulate bold visions for bringing new energy online with urgency. Got to keep an eye on this, and that that connection alive.

"Beyond Bush"

The 15 November 2007 edition of the journal Nature raises a question almost too tantalizing to bear: what happens with climate and energy policy once GWB's administration is outta here?

I wonder which way this will play out. While Bush might have revived his image and salvaged his historical reputation by crafting aggressive policies to deal with climate and energy in his second term, and while he did appear to be moving in this direction if the last two State of the Union addresses, and made moves towards investment in hydrogen tech and biofuels, he still seems to be largely tied to the status quo mast. That means that US inaction to date is all his fault. So what happens when he's gone? What if we learn that a President Giuliani or Clinton or Obama can accomplish little more than their tongue tied, oil industry predecessor?

A charismatic leader can sometimes unite a nation into swift and unified action (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse), and we may get such a leader. But the scope of the challenges is so enormous ... this is such a very large ship to turn ... that it may take more than one or two 4-year terms before progressive thinking get implemented as tangible action. How much time, from a climate change perspective, from an energy security perspective, from an economic perspective, do you think we really have? Do you know which candidate would do the most? Do you know which candidate could to the most? The clock is ticking ... and it's twelve months till November ...