Climate Climate & Energy

How can renewable energy ‘power up’?

In coming days, we'll be talking about how to "power up" renewable energy.

Everyone's talking renewables. G8 leaders are talking about reducing CO2 emissions and increasing renewables; federal and state officials are talking about tough new renewable portfolio standards; many in the general public seem eager to embrace renewables as the only logical way to address global warming (although whether or not they are aware of the price of renewable energy remains unclear).

There's a fundamental problem, however. The one thing no one is talking about is perhaps the one thing that would make the transition to renewables work, namely energy storage.

Built to scale

Small and medium size wind generators of about 100 KW each are playing an important role in the power supplied by the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative (AVEC) -- a non-profit customer-owned electric co-op serving 52 villages throughout interior and western Alaska.

Wind power on this scale, and in these conditions, is not cheap. Unlike megawatt scale wind turbines which cost around $1,600 per KW of installed capacity, these smaller generators run around $10,000 per installed KW. Part of that cost is simply a matter of buying on a smaller scale. But according to Brent Petrie, Key Accounts Manager for AVEC, the harsh Alaska conditions are responsible for much of this cost. Building in permafrost has always been tough, especially when that permafrost undergoes seasonal melts that turns it to mush and marsh. As an environmentally sensitive utility, AVEC is careful to minimize damage during installation. Overall, electricity costs from such small scale generation are estimated by Petrie to run around 15 cents per kWh -- three to four times the price of larger scale wind farms in milder conditions.

But the same conditions that drive the price of wind electricity for the AVEC customers drive up conventional sources even more. Fuel is shipped by barge to the small isolated communities, or even flows in, meaning that electricity is supplied by diesel generators run on the most expensive of fossil fuels. Since transporting large amount of fuel is an expensive prospect, normally fuel is delivered only once a year.

According to Petrie, AVEC tries to make sure that as a cushion each village has storage capacity for 13 months of fuel. Building a diesel storage facility on permafrost is an expensive prospect too. Combined fuel purchase, shipping, and storage for diesel in these villages runs between 13 cents and 25 cents per kWh -- even before purchase and maintenance of generators is considered. Overall, electricity to these villages averages 45 cents per kWh; so the 15 cents per kWh for wind electricity represents a real savings.

Dirt cheap carbon

Great interview over on Mongabay with Daniel Nepstad, head of the Woods Hole Research Center's Amazon program. When it comes to immediate carbon emissions reductions, the biggest bang for the buck is to stop deforestation of the tropics. This revelation would have much less relevance if there were not also a mechanism envisioned to achieve it called the RED initiative (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation).

As with anything, the concept has its critics. In my unqualified opinion, one of the biggest potential flies in the ointment is fire. How do you keep a carbon sink from going up in smoke? Once the land becomes more valuable for soy, sugarcane or palm oil, how can you stop the local profiteers from setting the forests on fire, nullifying them as carbon sinks?

Hopefully, the authors of this scheme will do a better job than the bozos (again, no offense to you clowns out there) who put the agrofuel consumption mandates in place that are currently consuming carbon sinks, food, and biodiversity all around the world while simultaneously increasing CO2 emissions.

Say the developed countries to OPEC

Biofuels will provide only a small proportion of the world’s demand for fuel in the next decade, the developed countries’ energy watchdog has said in an attempt to reassure OPEC that the need for oil will continue to grow. Well I feel reassured.

Lovins v. Richter

Energy guru Amory Lovins and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. Burton Richter face off, mano a mano, debating the merits of nuclear energy for addressing the climate crisis. MongaBay offers a blow-by-blow account. No one will be shocked to hear that I would call the bout for Lovins, though it was far from a TKO.

Recent report published projecting values of sea-level rise

As anyone who reads my posts knows, I am a big fan of the IPCC reports. They are the best summary of what the scientific community knows about climate change and how confidently we know it.

A recent article (subscription required, sorry) in Science suggests that some scientists view the IPCC as overly cautious:

In the latest report, its fourth since 1990, the IPCC spoke for scientists in a calm, predictably conservative tone (Science, 9 February, p. 754). It is, after all, an exhaustive, many-tiered assessment of the state of climate science based exclusively on the published literature. In IPCC's Working Group I report on the physical science of climate, 600 authors contributed to an 11-chapter report that drew 30,000 comments from reviewers. The report was in turn boiled down to a 21-page "Summary for Policymakers" (SPM). Its central projection of sea-level rise by the century's end -- 0.34 meter -- came within 10% of the 2001 number. And by getting a better handle on some uncertainties, it even brought down the upper limit of its projected range, from 0.89 to 0.59 meter.

The SPM did add that "larger values [of sea-level rise] cannot be excluded." Whatever has accelerated ice-sheet flow to the sea, the report said, might really take off with further warming -- or not. "Understanding of these effects is too limited" to put a number on what might happen at the high end of sea-level rise, it concluded. Lacking such a number, the media tended to go with the comforting 0.34-meter projection or ignore sea level altogether.

I have two conflicting views of this.

A short, powerful video

Greenpeace UK passes along this short, powerful video drawing attention to the dangers of biofuels:

Anyone got those cans of instant water? (Just add water)

"A drought for the ages."

Dam it all

Tucuruí, Brazil's second largest dam has many times the GHG emissions of a natural gas plant of the same capacity -- though there is fierce argument over whether that output substantially exceeds what a natural watercourse would produce. (The emissions are due to methane from trapped organic matter in the dam.)

There is now a proposal to tap that methane to run gas turbines and produce electricity, reducing the emissions many times, since CO2 from burning the methane has a much lower impact than the methane itself. It would also close to double the electrical output from the dam. This seems very close to an acknowledgment that critics of methane from dams are correct. Outside of estuaries, I don't know many natural water courses that might be tapped in such a way. I have to admit that it is an ingenious solution to the problems of dams as methane sources.

Find ITT on eBay

Ecuador offers to keep oil in the ground for compensation Ecuador offered to play “Let’s Make a Deal” this week, suggesting that it could afford to keep a pristine area from oil drilling if developed nations and green groups ponied up some cold, hard cash. “We are willing to do this sacrifice, but not for […]