Articles by Patrick Mazza

Climate disruption comes home to the Northwest

In the late 1990s, after pineapple express storms caused severe flooding and deadly mudslides across the Northwest, National Climatic Data Center Chief Scientist Thomas Karl said the storms were "an example of the type of weather patterns that would be expected to become more frequent and yield an increase in precipitation extremes as the climate continues to warm."

Welcome to the future.

The Northwest was fire-hosed again in recent days, flooding communities and leaving them in the dark throughout western Washington state, while cutting I-5 from Portland to Seattle, and rail service to boot. As of today, a lengthy detour to the east or an air flight remain the options for travel between the two major U.S. Northwest cities. Costs are placed at $4 million per day, and that is before expensive repairs to the I-5 roadbed are taken into account.

The connection of global warming to increased storms and rainfall is as easy to make as the connection of steam rising from a pot of water to the stove flame beneath -- Heat causes evaporation. Global warming is heating the oceans, and the steamy, moist air rising from ocean surfaces is rocket fuel for storms. A warmer atmosphere also holds moisture better. The line of clouds pointing from the tropical Pacific to the Northwest that show up on the weather report satellite photos are the physical illustration of these phenomena.

Of course, the scientific caveat is that no one weather event conclusively demonstrates global warming. The point here is that global warming loads the dice for more frequent and intense storms such as the Northwest has seen in recent days. When rainfall in the rain city of Seattle hits the second greatest one-day level in recorded history, and the record was set only in 2003, it provides a very suggestive indicator.

A great summary of recent studies on green jobs

Clean energy, a job-creation engine already generating impressive performance, will rev up to even higher levels in coming years. A comprehensive new fact sheet (PDF) from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute strongly documents these trends with capsule summaries of dozens of recent studies on the topic.

In the last several years, numerous studies have validated the emergence of renewable energy and energy efficiency as a major new economic and employment driver. EESI -- a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that educates Capitol Hill on energy issues and the general public on energy legislation -- has created this invaluable fact sheet to survey many of the major national, state, and industry studies. Here are a few samples:

Who will lead on advancing smart-grid technologies?

To bring on the amounts of variable wind and solar energy and plug-in vehicles needed to meet our vast energy challenges, we will need a smart grid capable of managing much more complex power flows. Outside of some progressive exemplars, however, don't expect leadership to come from the utility sector. Instead, changes will be forced by new policies and players, including some you might not expect, like big box retailers.

Those were my key takeaways from the stellar line-up of smart grid speakers at the Discover Brilliant sustainable technology conference in Seattle this week. David has been blogging away from the conference, so I don't want to go over too much of the same turf. Instead I'm going to synthesize what I heard across a number of sessions and offer my interpretations.

A few statistics from the conference underscore the sluggishness of the electric utility industry when it comes to advanced technologies:

Keeping the air conditioners running in muggy Pennsylvania

Just back from visiting the family in Pennsylvania, where temperatures were hitting the high 90s. It was the kind of sticky, muggy, oppressively hot weather that reminds me why I live in the cool corner that is the Pacific Northwest.

As air conditioners were blasting away everywhere and lights were flickering, I was thinking that grid operators must be calling on every demand-response resource they could.

Back into post-vacation action, I came across an Aug. 10 release [PDF] from PJM Interconnect that confirmed it. The power grid was on emergency status and PJM, in fact, drew a record demand response -- 1,945 megawatts -- equal to a fair-sized city.

PJM also reduced voltage in the overall system by 1,000 MW, explaining those flickers. So I actually lived through the scenario with which I opened "Adventures in the smart grid no. 2." Damned glad they kept those air conditioners on.