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Energy storage, emissions hotspots, waste-to-fuel, and feed-in tariffs again

• I wish I was as funny as The Editors.

• Interesting: AEP, one of the most coal-heavy and change-resistant utilities on the planet, is experimenting with backyard energy storage systems.

• A good piece from the Center for Progressive Reform examines the risk of "hotspots" in a carbon cap-and-trade program. Of course there's no such thing as a carbon hotspot, but facilities that create carbon also tend to create co-pollutants, so it's a legitimate fear. Author Shana Jones has some ideas for how cap-and-trade could be crafted to avoid this danger.

• Ontario recently instituted a feed-in tariff program. What happened?

So many local wind and solar developers -- as well as homeowners looking to install photovoltaic panels -- applied for Ontario’s standard offer that the government’s 10-year target cap of 1,000 megawatts was exceeded within a year.

Said one energy analyst, "The lesson is that renewable energy technology was a lot more market-ready than the energy planners thought it was." Golly, I wonder if that's true in the U.S. too?

• Biofuels Digest has an interesting report on the promise of "waste-to-fuel" companies, which take municipal solid waste -- i.e., garbage -- and make biofuel out of it:

Smart infrastructure, courts v. coal, and energy efficiency all over

• The Wall Street Journal has a long and fascinating piece that expands the "smart" conversation beyond the grid to discuss smart infrastructure generally, including smart transportation and smart water infrastructure. Turns out information technology can help out all sorts of places!

• Largely unnoticed by the media, EarthJustice won a big victory in court recently:

A federal court has ruled that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must close a loophole that -- for more than 25 years -- has made it easy for mining companies, coal ash dumps, and a host of other polluting industries to skip out on costly cleanups by declaring bankruptcy. The case concerned EPA's failure to issue "financial assurances" standards that ensure that polluting industries will always remain financially able to clean up dangerous spills and other contaminated sites.

• Homebuyers are starting to specifically request green, energy-saving features.

• PBS recently did an excellent hour-long documentary on "clean coal" called Dark Energy: The Clean Coal Controversy. You can watch the whole thing online at the linked site.

• This is pretty cool: the first zero-emission research station in the Arctic. Nice video:

New Greenpeace report details path to clean energy

Greenpeace has just released an important report called "Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable U.S.A. Energy Outlook." It details how the U.S. can cut greenhouse gas emissions without using nuclear or coal.

The report finds that off-the-shelf clean energy technology can cut U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels by at least 23 percent from current levels by 2020 and 85 percent by 2050 (equal to a 12 percent cut by 2020 and an 83 percent cut by 2050 from 1990 levels) -- at half the cost and double the job-creation of what it would take to meet U.S. energy needs with dirty energy sources.

Throughout, the study makes conservative assumptions to ensure the real-world viability of the scenario. The report assumes that only currently available technologies will be used and no appliances or power plants will be retired prematurely, and adopts the same projections for population and economic growth included in the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook.

Here's a video of Sen. Bernie Sanders discussing the report:

I'm going to read the thing before I say anything else about it.

Must-have slide No. 2: The 'global-change-type drought' and the future of extreme weather

This must-have slide comes from a 2005 study, "Regional vegetation die-off in response to global-change-type drought." I first saw it in a powerful 2005 presentation [PDF] by climatologist Jonathan Overpeck, "Warm climate abrupt change-paleo-perspectives," that concluded "climate change seldom occurs gradually."

Overpeck noted that the 2005 study, together with the recent evidence that temperature [in red] and annual precipitation [in blue] are headed in opposite directions in the U.S. Southwest, raises the question of whether we are at the "dawn of the super-interglacial drought."

Before explaining why I like this slide and how it shows the future of extreme weather, I need to review the conclusion of the study, which was led by the University of Arizona, with Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. Geological Survey:

Global climate change is projected to yield increases in frequency and intensity of drought occurring under warming temperatures, referred to here as global-change-type drought ...

Our results are notable in documenting rapid, regional-scale mortality of a dominant tree species in response to subcontinental drought accompanied by anomalously high temperatures.

The researchers examined a huge three-million acre die-off of vegetation in 2002-2003 "in response to drought and associated bark beetle infestations" in the Four Corners area (Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah).

This drought was not quite as dry as the one in that region in the 1950s, but it was much warmer, hence it was a global-warming-type drought. The recent drought had "nearly complete tree mortality across many size and age classes" whereas "most of the patchy mortality in the 1950s was associated with trees [greater than] 100 years old."

The study concluded:

California has much to lose from rising sea levels, study says

If global warming continues unchecked through 2100, rising sea levels will displace 480,000 Californians, put nearly $100 billion of property at risk of flooding, and erode away stone formations at Big Sur and other coastal bluffs, according to a new report from the Pacific Institute, a California environmental non-profit. Even Disneyland could end up underwater […]

Power Past Coal communities host anti-coal events during first 100 days of Obama administration

Appalachia needs no defense: It needs more defenders.

Check out the footage of the bright blast that greeted Bo Webb, a decorated Vietnam veteran, and his community last night and today in Clay's Branch, Peachtree, W. Va. A shower of rock dust mixed with a toxic brew of diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate explosives swept down their hollow, as the Richmond-based Massey Energy behemoth detonated another round of explosives in their haste to bring down the mountain for a thin seam of coal. Nearby, children attended the Marsh Fork Elementary School, the blasting in the distance like a harbinger of Massey's brutal force -- the company is now infamously embroiled in a U.S. Supreme Court case for compromising judicial neutrality in their efforts to contribute their way into the good graces of West Virginia judges -- as 2.8 billion gallons of coal sludge held back by a 385-foot-high earthen dam hover a few football fields above the school like an accident waiting to happen.

Good morning, Appalachia!

Just another day of mountaintop removal; that process of wiping out America's natural landmarks, dumping the waste into waterways and valleys, and effectively removing historic communities from their homeplaces through a campaign of horrific blasting, dusting, poisoning, and harassment.

We've reached a new landmark in the central Appalachian coalfields of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and southwest Virginia: Over 500 mountains in one of the most diverse forests in the Americas -- the same kind of mountains that garner protection and preservation status in a blink of an eye in other regions -- -have now been eliminated from our American maps.

Five hundred mountains are gone. For what? Less than 5 percent of our nation's supply of coal, while 50 million tons of West Virginia coal are annually exported to CO2-spewing plants in countries like China.

As a new report [PDF] by Quentin Gee, Nicholas Allen and their colleagues at the Associated Students Environmental Affairs Board of UC Santa Barbara recently found, the overlooked external costs of coal further debunk the black diamond's image as a "clean" and "cheap" source of energy.

Gee and Allen write:

The EPA announces its plan for a national greenhouse-gas reporting system

As Kate reported, the EPA is moving forward with its long-delayed national reporting system for greenhouse gas emissions. They estimate that it will cover 85 to 90 percent of total U.S. emissions. The agency set the reporting threshold at 25,000 tons of carbon, which will exempt individuals and small businesses, but will apply to all other industrial and commercial sources of GHG emissions.

That includes ethanol factories, by the way, which should provide further proof that the whole ethanol boondoggle won't play a meaningful role in addressing climate change. Also included in the survey will be Confined Animal Feeding Operations (aka factory farms) due to their "manure management" practices. Being tagged as a massive source of GHG emissions certainly won't make their business model any more sustainable.  However, the EPA -- clearly stung by the controversy over the non-existent "cow tax" proposal -- leaves exempt from its inventory "GHG emissions from enteric fermentation from cattle," aka cow farts.

In fact, aside from manure (to be fair, no small contribution) most agricultural sources of emissions won't be counted.  The other exemptions include:

... rice cultivation, field burning of agricultural residues, composting, and agricultural soils would not be covered under this reporting requirement. The challenges to including these sources in the rule are that available methods to estimate facility-level emissions for these sources yield uncertain results, and that these sources are characterized by a large number of small emitters.

In other words, "biological" sources of emissions that are still the result of industrial production are left out.  Despite this, the EPA maintains that this inventory will indeed be almost totally comprehensive. If the Danes are right, however, and a single cow emits four tons of methane in burps and farts a year, you have to wonder if the EPA is letting livestock producers off the hook too easily. Still, with chemical plants and fuel production covered under the reporting system, the climate impact of most of industrial agriculture's "inputs" such as diesel fuel and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, will be measured. All in all, it's a reasonable place to start.

What's the rush on addressing climate change?

New York Times columnist David Brooks, on which priorities -- health-care reform, energy, global warming, and education -- Obama should abandon:

"As for what policies I'd drop from the to-do list because of the crisis, at this point I'd have to say all of them."

Jim Rogers' chutzpah, geothermal's promise, Larson's carbon tax, and efficiency's returns

• Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy and prominent member of USCAP, says that it's a bad idea to refund carbon auction money back to taxpayers. Instead, the vast bulk of the money should be given to public utility regulators. Really, he said that.

• According to a new report from Credit Suisse, geothermal power now has a lower cost-per-kilowatt-hour than coal. ScientificAmerican takes a look at the report and finds that it contains several important caveats (it presumes reasonable interest rate financing, doesn't include explorations costs, etc.). Even with the caveats, though, this is heartening stuff.

• Shell Oil now has a climate change blog. So far, it's surprisingly good and substantive.

• Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) has introduced a carbon tax bill to the House (updating and improving a similar bill from 2007). It would start with a $15/ton tax, which would rise $10 per year, and it would refund all revenue to taxpayers through payroll tax rebates. $10 billion a year in tax credits are also made available to cleantech R&D and investments. The guys at the Carbon Tax Center love it. They say one of the prospective losers is "cynics who said the U.S. could never enact a meaningful carbon tax." But the U.S. won't enact this one either, so ...

• The Berkeley National Laboratory has an interesting report out: "Financial Analysis of Incentive Mechanisms to Promote Energy Efficiency: Case Study of a Prototypical Southwest Utility (PDF)." (I know, sounds fascinating, right?) It runs through scenarios whereby a utility aggressively pursues energy efficiency, based on various policies (decoupling, performance standards, etc.). What does it do to rates? Equity? Shareholder returns? Here are the key conclusions:

Free beer

Now Republicans are framing their total-deregulation, fossil-happy, drill-and-burn energy policies as "no cost stimulus."

Sometimes my powers of snark just fail me.