Jerry Brown, then and nowTrivia questions for energy geeks: Which state approved the country’s first energy-efficiency standards for appliances? The first green building codes? The first big wind farms? And who was governor when all those fine things happened?

The answer is California under Gov. Jerry Brown — aka Governor Moonbeam — who just happens to be running for the office again, some 30 years later. Last week, Brown, the Democratic nominee, unveiled a clean-energy plan to put far more solar panels on California’s rooftops, in addition to appointing a renewable energy czar and strengthening those sexy appliance standards.

Of course, plenty of politicians make lofty promises about ushering in an energy transformation, to little or no result. Like the last eight presidents, for example. But there’s good reason to take Brown seriously.

“He’s done it before. And really if you look across the landscape in American political history, there’s nobody else that can say that,” said John Geesman, who was executive director of the California Energy Commission during part of Jerry Brown’s first stint in the governor’s mansion. “Nobody at all.”

Brown then …

When Brown took office in 1975, energy was high on everyone’s agenda. Just over a year earlier, the Arab oil embargo had driven up energy prices and triggered lines at the gas pumps. California utilities were projecting a 7 percent annual growth in electric demand, and had dreams of building a string of nuclear power plants along the coast. 

Brown found another way.

In the mid-1970s, at a faculty club event at the University of California at Berkeley, he sat at the same dinner table as Art Rosenfeld, then at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who was just beginning a noted career in energy efficiency.

They talked shop, and the conversation turned to a controversial proposed nuclear plant, Sundesert. Rosenfeld told Brown that just by requiring refrigerators to be more efficient, the state could save as much energy as would be produced by the Sundesert plant. Brown left around 9 p.m. to drive back to Sacramento. Twelve hours later, Rosenfeld got a call from Gene Varanini of the California Energy Commission.

“He said, ‘Art, I think you’d be happy to know that Jerry Brown woke me up this morning at 8 a.m. to know if this guy Art Rosenfeld is real,’” Rosenfeld recalls. “And that was the unraveling of Sundesert.”

Under Brown’s leadership, California adopted Rosenfeld’s refrigerator standard in 1978. And the state continues to lead the nation in appliance standards today, having approved the nation’s first efficiency requirement for televisions last fall. As if to underscore Brown’s achievement, several large solar projects are now planned for the old Sundesert site.

Also under Brown’s watch, California became the first state to approve a strong energy-efficiency building code, called Title 24, in 1978.

In 1982, Brown’s final full year in office, California pioneered the idea of “decoupling” electric utilities’ revenues from how much electricity they sold — which means, in a nutshell, that utilities had an incentive to promote energy efficiency rather than simply generating and selling as much power as they could. (A handful of other states have embraced electric decoupling since then.)

Brown’s California also did renewables. In the mid-1970s, the legislature passed tax credits of a whopping 55 percent for wind, solar, geothermal, and some biomass. A 1978 federal law called the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act also helped. So California started building: In the early 1980s, a wind farm at Altamont Pass, east of the Bay Area, began operating, followed shortly by two other large wind farms. The state invested heavily in solar hot-water heaters, and also put in a number of geothermal and biomass plants, according to V. John White, the executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies.

To be sure, Brown, who is now California’s attorney general, hardly deserves all the credit for such measures. The legislature passed important bills, such as the tax credits. Even Ronald Reagan, who was governor of California before Brown, signed the law in 1974 creating the powerful California Energy Commission, which crafts appliance standards and building codes and licenses large power plants. (According to Rosenfeld and Geesman, Reagan had vetoed a similar bill a year earlier, but then a little thing called the oil embargo came along.)

But Brown was a key advocate for these changes and he made the most of them. One of his big achievements was staffing up the California Energy Commission and turning it into an activist body, and he did the same with the California Public Utilities Commission. Together, those two regulatory entities fast-tracked many of the policy objectives set forth by the legislature, like appliance standards and building codes.

According to Rosenfeld, Brown even tried to recruit a young John Holdren, then a professor of energy and resources at Berkeley, to chair the California Energy Commission, but Holdren, who is now Obama’s science advisor, wouldn’t jump.  Brown, Rosenfeld observes, has a knack “for picking future successful people.”

… and Brown now

Three decades on, California remains ahead of the country in energy efficiency. Its per-capita electricity usage has barely budged since Brown’s time despite the proliferation of gadgetry and a fondness for McMansions. California also continues to lead on solar, although without the emphasis on solar hot water that Brown had envisioned.

But on wind, the Golden State has become the Bronze State. Texas leads the nation in wind power production, having passed California for the top spot several years ago — and, embarrassingly, California now also trails Iowa, a state one-third of its size. Very few wind farms — or biomass or geothermal facilities — have been built since Brown’s time.  Wind farms or other power plants can no longer be blithely sited on empty land in California — a partial legacy of the many birds that have perished at Altamont Pass.

Brown can be proud of the changes he set in motion, but in today’s California, his job will be harder.  He’ll need new approaches — and he seems to get that. 

His clean-energy plan [PDF] emphasizes “localized electricity generation” — read: rooftop solar — which doesn’t face siting problems. The plan calls for more than 10 times as much of this small-scale generation as California has on its rooftops now, by 2020. That’s not a cheap proposition, however.

To push through bigger projects, renewable energy advocates say Brown could help out by cutting through some of California’s notorious red tape. “I think Jerry could make a difference [in] execution and planning,” says White. “I think one of the problems in this area is there are so many agencies, so many jurisdictions, so many personalities, that things take longer than they should. They take longer than any other state.”  Brown has already called for “dramatically reduced” permitting times for transmission lines. 

Brown also wants to:

• build a “solar highway” of panels along state roads
• encourage energy storage systems
• set tougher efficiency standards for new buildings and appliances
• make existing buildings more efficient, in part by helping to finance efficiency upgrades for homeowners and businesses

Meg Whitman, Brown’s Republican opponent, has an energy and environment plan of her own, though it’s less detailed.  She also supports further clean-energy development and promises to “work to update the law to ensure that vital infrastructure and energy projects are not stalled due to redundant reviews and overly bureaucratic processes.”

Brown, for his part, claims his clean-energy plan would create 500,000 jobs over 10 years.  If he can manage that — and that’s a big “if” — he’ll live up to his campaign slogan: “Let’s get California working again.”

Do you know more about this race? Tell us in comments below. And find out about other races in our Gubernatorial Tutorial special series.

The numbers get even more depressing. Last year, California’s wind capacity grew at a slower rate than any of the other top 10 wind-producing states. Texas’s wind production grew at a 39 percent clip and (What’s the Matter With) Kansas’ grew by 38 percent; California managed relatively meager 10 percent growth. That still leaves the Golden State as the No. 2 wind producer in the country, but it is clearly in a slump.

Has the sun set on California’s wind-power dominance?

Photo: iStockphoto

Why has California blown its lead (so to speak)? The state was an early champion of wind farms. During the 1980s, when Texans thought only of oil and gas drilling, California started putting in windmills. By 1985, turbines had sprouted in three key areas: Altamont, east of San Francisco; Tehachapi, near Bakersfield; and San Gorgonio, in the far south. The energy crisis of the 1970s, plus regulatory initiatives in California, had galvanized action.

Ironically, California’s early pioneering is part of its trouble. Regulations, well-developed through the years, make it hard for developments to get off the ground. Hal Romanowitz of Oak Creek Energy Systems, a Mojave-based wind developer focused on Tehachapi, describes California as “probably the most difficult state in the country to build in.” Nancy Rader of the California Wind Energy Association notes that land is quite expensive in California — and that while Texas provides property-tax exemptions to people with windmills on their land, California does not.

A big barrier is birds. Whereas Texan officials publicly scoff at avian travails, California developers have been cowed by lawsuits over bird deaths. The technology of 20 years ago — using small blades that rotated very quickly — did indeed spell the end for many birds. This January, Alameda County settled a lawsuit with Golden Gate Audubon Society and others concerning bird deaths at Altamont Pass. The wind industry is supposed to cut the number of raptor deaths there in half by the end of 2009. (Golden Gate says that up to 4,700 birds die each year in the Altamont windmills.) Development at Altamont remains basically frozen because of bird issues, though a few hundred megawatts have gone up in nearby Solano County, near the Sacramento River delta — including several 3-MW turbines that are the largest wind structures in the country.

The wind industry says that technology has improved: turbines nowadays have longer blades, which rotate more slowly than the old types while generating more energy. That is supposedly good news for birds. Also, the California Energy Commission is soon to come out with new (voluntary) guidelines for reducing impacts on birds and bats from wind turbines, which may help clarify matters for wind developers.

But as if birds were not enough, there is the military. Turbines are commonly a few hundred feet high, not only making them a potential hazard for pilots in low-fly zones, but raising concerns about radar interference. Travis Air Force Base in Solano County recently held up a wind project at the last minute over radar issues. In Kern County, which includes Tehachapi, parts of the area were “out of play” for a few years, says Rader, because the military effectively barred anything above 200 feet. And in San Bernardino, there is “a huge amount of good wind land that is just not going to be useable because of military considerations,” says Romanowitz.

But the real bottleneck may be lack of transmission capacity — in particular in Tehachapi, home to the largest undeveloped, onshore wind resource in the state. “Basically since 1986 there has been no additional transmission capacity” in Tehachapi, with the exception of a private transmission line built some 15 years ago, says Romanowitz.

The good news is that California may be poised for a comeback. The state is certainly at the forefront of pushing renewable energy; 20 percent of California’s retail electricity is supposed to come from renewables by 2010.

Transmission shortages will soon ease, wind advocates hope. “California is now on a roll to do significant new transmission, significant new generation,” says Romanowitz. His company is committed to the Tehachapi region, where a project to build more than 4,000 MW of additional transmission capacity is in the works. In theory, it should start coming online in stages, starting next year. But the approval process — notoriously protracted in California — is still under way. Nonetheless, Rader says that 15,000 MW of new wind projects are currently planned in California — more than six times the current capacity. She believes that wind could supply 20 percent of California’s energy needs by 2020 — up from less than 2 percent today.

That sounds like the stuff of dreams. A more realistic goal may be catching Texas, whose cowboy wind developers may stumble over transmission problems themselves.

A Texas turbine.

Photo: NREL / Cielo Wind Power

One of Goldman’s subsidiaries, Houston-based Horizon Wind Energy, is constructing a $600 million, 400-megawatt wind farm in the boonies west of Dallas. Financiers of other wind-power projects and explorations, spread across central and west Texas, include Wells Fargo; JPMorgan Chase; Macquarie, Australia’s largest investment bank; and John Deere’s credit division, which already has close ties to rural America.

To some extent, the lure of wind for such financial powerhouses is obvious. Bankers are always looking for high-growth sectors for investment or loans. Wind fits the bill, as the fastest-growing energy segment in the world. In Texas — which last year passed California to become the largest wind-power producer in the U.S. — the boom is sometimes likened to the gold rush. Energy giants such as BP and Shell are investing heavily too.

From the perspective of local developers, the interest is more than welcome. “It’s nice to have steady financial backing,” says Randy Sowell, a wind developer in West Texas. His company, Austin-based Fremantle Energy, has entered into a joint venture with Macquarie to start up wind and renewable-energy projects in the U.S. “You need to have that substantial muscle behind you to have that commitment.”

Rob Powell of Austin-based Verde Energy also appreciates the long-range financing that big banks can provide. Verde Energy, which helps homeowners and businesses get quotes for installation of renewable-energy systems, recently partnered with Wells Fargo, which will make loans to homeowners seeking an installation.

Big-money backers are particularly crucial when it comes to buying wind turbines. Manufacturers haven’t been able to keep up with soaring global demand, so turbine prices have risen substantially in recent years and wind development now requires a sizeable capital outlay. Nowadays you need “millions of dollars of non-refundable reservation fees for turbines two to three years in the future,” says Sowell. Local developers have little prayer of raising that kind of cash, but to a Wells Fargo or a Goldman, it’s small change.

The prospect of a tight turbine market doesn’t faze Wells Fargo, which is soon to close on its fifth wind deal. (Of the four completed so far, three are in Texas and one is in Maine; the company has no solar deals yet.) Most major wind developers have pre-purchased the turbines they’ll need through 2009, says Barry Neal, Wells Fargo’s head of environmental finance, so they won’t suffer from the shortage.

Investment banks are also attracted to the wind biz by the federal production tax credit, which amounts to 1.9 cents-per-kilowatt-hour for wind-generated electricity over 10 years. “Many times the developer or sponsor of the wind farms doesn’t have the income to fully take advantage of those tax credits,” says Neal. “To do that, they really need to bring in large institutional investors.” Wind developers large and small hope (and expect) the feds will continue to renew the tax credit; it’s been allowed to lapse in years past.

Could the big boys lose interest? Texas may be poised for a slowdown. Not only are there turbine shortages, but construction of transmission lines has not kept up with growth — so even though Texas needs all the energy new wind farms could provide (especially with plans for a number of TXU coal plants recently scuttled), the immediate potential of wind is limited. Another problem is that the Panhandle, with some of the fiercest winds in the state, is on a different grid system from the rest of Texas.

“We’re getting ready to hit the wall on transmission all over the state by early next year or the end of this year,” says Sowell. That’s a problem the financial giants may not be able to buy their way out of.

How green is my Vista?

Photo: iStockphoto

The efficiency advances involve sleep mode, a computer’s ability to power down after an idle spell. With Vista, says Microsoft, sleep will be as energy efficient as shutdown. “We’ve worked very hard to make the sleep experience a much easier and more elegant one for users,” says Michael Rawding, Microsoft’s vice president for special projects.

In the past, Microsoft has fielded complaints from users about sleep. Sometimes an application or driver interfered with a computer’s ability to doze off; a laptop that one thought was asleep might be surprisingly hot when pulled from a bag hours later, or even have a drained battery.

Vista will make it harder for applications to impede sleep. And sleep and other power-saving options will now be the default on machines running Vista — they will start snoozing after an hour of non-use — whereas before users had to change the default settings to ensure sleep.

Vista’s sleep-mode improvements will make the biggest difference at large companies. Corporate IT departments regularly do mass updates on thousands of desktop computers in the middle of the night. Often, however, it is hard for IT engineers to order them all back to sleep without going from machine to machine. Vista’s new set-up will fix this, forcing the computers back to sleep after two minutes.

“What you’ve seen in the last couple of years, both among hardware manufacturers and among users, particularly in a productivity scenario, is a recognition of the cost of power,” says Rawding. “Overall efficiency of power is just becoming a major design criterion across the board for systems.”

But Vista has efficiency shortcomings too. According to early reports, its much ballyhooed 3-D interface will require slightly more energy to run than XP, Microsoft’s previous operating system. On balance, though, the improvement in the sleep process will probably outweigh the energy costs of the new features, according to Tom Bolioli, an energy-efficiency consultant with the firm Terra Novum.

Look Before You Sleep

Computer energy use is no trivial matter. Microsoft reckons that a PC using an old-style cathode-ray tube monitor, if left awake around the clock, results in the emission of over half a ton of carbon dioxide a year just during the time when it’s not in use. At a typical electricity cost of roughly nine cents per kilowatt hour, that translates to over $70 wasted per year per machine. Computers with flat-screen LCD monitors, which are more energy efficient, still drain almost $56 a year for sleepless idleness.

The Foreign Policy blog, building on the conservative estimate that 100 million computers using a Microsoft operating system are running nonstop and aren’t currently optimized for sleep, speculates that $5 billion to $7 billion is wasted each year powering the machines when they don’t need to be powered, and that 45 million tons of CO2 is emitted in the process.

This means Vista has the potential to save an enormous amount of energy. Then again, as Hank Green points out in Treehugger, if Microsoft had gotten these features right when it released its XP operating system in late 2001, roughly $25 billion and 225 million tons of CO2 might have been saved over the past five years. But the bugs in its sleep functionality have gone unaddressed until now. Apple, it’s worth noting, mastered the sleep mode years ago.

Consider also that most of the hundreds of millions of computers in use around the world aren’t powerful enough to run Vista, no matter how much electricity they suck from the nearest outlet; they lack the memory and graphics cards needed to power the 3-D interface. Disabling Vista’s flashiest features will help on some machines, but still won’t solve the problem for many others. Critics like the U.K. Green Party are warning that Vista could trigger a huge new wave of electronic waste as companies and individuals ditch their old computers for more powerful new ones that can meet the operating system’s demands.

The Foreign Policy blog argues that Microsoft should offer a software upgrade for its older operating systems that would adjust energy-saving settings for maximum efficiency. Because the vast majority of the world’s computers run on Microsoft software, the move could result in huge energy savings. “[N]o other company has an opportunity like Microsoft to make such a direct impact — and practically overnight,” the blog writes. “Microsoft could seize this chance to lead the pack, and come out on top as the greenest software company in the world.”

No word yet on whether Microsoft might take up the challenge — but don’t lose any sleep waiting for it.

A different kind of drive-thru.

Photos: iStockphoto

As the $14 billion organic food industry gathers steam, the concept of healthy fast food is spreading. While Whole Foods is in the vanguard, others are catching up. More and more restaurants are tapping into Americans’ desire to eat quickly, and realizing that fast food can involve much healthier stuff than a Whopper and fries.

Austin, never shy about its green tendencies, is also home to drive-through salad bars and a pair of tasty restaurants called Mr. Natural, which offer wholesome Mexican food and baked goods. In other cities, organic pizza and burgers — which are relatively easy to make — are becoming a staple.

Some big chains are scrambling to get a share of this niche. Chipotle, a fast-expanding burrito company that went public earlier this year, boasts that about 20 percent of its beans are organic — and “next year I imagine that percentage will be higher,” says Steve Ells, the chief executive. The pork, too, is sustainably raised and hormone-free. Best of all, customers can watch their food being prepared — the onions and peppers being chopped up, and the chicken readied on an open grill. In fact, Ells bristles at being lumped in with other, more traditional fast food — despite the fact that much of his chain’s success is due to support from McDonald’s. “Just because it’s fast doesn’t mean it has to be a typical fast-food experience,” he argues.

That philosophy is shared by plenty of start-ups. O’Naturals, a New England chain that currently has two restaurants each in Maine and Massachusetts, notes that one-third of its food is organic. There are organic roast-beef sandwiches, organic hummus, and organic greens for salads, not to mention bottled smoothies to wash everything down. Gary Hirshberg, who cofounded Stonyfield Yogurt and dreamed up O’Naturals while shuttling his children between soccer games, is now busy extending the franchise. On the West Coast, the Organic To Go chain touts everything from ham and cheese to veggie salads, with 70 percent of its ingredients typically being organic.

Several of Organic To Go’s dining spots are on college campuses, many of which are offering more local and healthy fare in response to student demand. At the University of Colorado at Boulder, the recently opened Piazanos “grab n’ go” café peddles natural and organic food. Vanderbilt University just opened a 900-square-foot convenience store called Nectar that does organic. The Otter Bay Café at California State University at Monterey Bay offers organic salads and fruits.

Then there are ballparks. Some bold entrepreneurs, Dakota Beef Company and Delaware North Companies Sportservice, have begun selling organic bratwurst and hot dogs at baseball stadiums in San Diego, Cleveland, and even Detroit, which is currently cohosting the World Series. But executives at both companies admit to challenges.

For one thing, there’s fan awareness. “You’ve got to really ask yourself, when sitting in a stadium drinking beer, are you going to care whether your hot dog is organic or not?” says Scott Lively of Dakota Beef. And Rolf Baumann, executive chef for Delaware North, says that often ballparks even avoid the organic label “because an organic hot dog doesn’t sound too appetizing.”

An excellent choice.

Despite the disinterest from sports fans, those fronting the fast-food wave say organic diners are not just yoga types. At O’Naturals, there are seniors wanting to stay fit as well as health-conscious mothers and professionals in a hurry. Chipotle caters to businesspeople at the lunch hour, as does Whole Foods. And this is no coastal trend: Jason Brown, head of Organic To Go, anticipates expanding into at least one Midwestern city by the year’s end, and Chipotle is based in Denver.

So the outlook looks good. Still, challenges abound. First, there are relatively few organic growers, and supply is seasonal. Organic food can be hard to certify, and certification itself is a notoriously hot topic. Some in the restaurant industry are worried that Wal-Mart’s recent entry into the organic market will disrupt supply or reduce the quality of available ingredients. Also, because organic food lacks artificial preservatives, finding the right recipe can be a challenge. Lively says Dakota Beef spent a year coming up with a tasty-enough hot dog, with the use of organic garlic and “a good organic beet juice to make it a little more red.” The company says its hot dogs have a 41-day shelf life, and are made only after a customer order is received.

Besides tinkering with recipes, the process can also be slowed by high prices. At O’Naturals, the Wrangler sandwich — organic roast beef, Swiss cheese, rosemary onions, organic lettuce, and tomato on flatbread — costs twice as much as a Big Mac. But as farms expand their organic capacity and the supply chain gets more reliable, high prices may come down.

Perhaps the definitive word comes from the conventional fast-food chains. McDonald’s has not only begun swapping milk and fruit for the soda and fries in its Happy Meals, it also now offers Newman’s Own organic coffee to customers in New England and New York. With pressure on the burger chains to cut calories and add healthier options to their menus — and boost their bottom lines with premium products — it could be only a matter of time before the other heavy hitters start offering organic dishes of their own.