Climate Technology

Concentrated solar power is already doing great; no breakthroughs needed

Almost certainly not and absolutely not. I give two answers here because there are two very different types of solar energy:

1. Solar photovoltaics, PV, which is direct conversion of sunlight to electricity. It is well known, high-tech, uneconomically expensive in most parts of this country (but poised to resume dropping sharply in price), and intermittent (power only when the sun shines).
   
2. Solar thermal electric or concentrated solar power (CSP), which uses mirrors to focus sunlight to heat a fluid to run a turbine or engine to make electricity. It is, as I've blogged, "The solar power you don't hear about." It is relatively low-tech, competitive today (and poised to drop sharply in price), and can be made load-following (matching the demand curve during the day and evening) and possibly baseload (round-the-clock).

Absent major subsidies, solar PV is simply not a big-time winner (in terms of kWh delivered cost-effectively) in rich countries with built-out electric grids in the near term. It is, however, a big winner in the medium-term (post-2020). I don't agree with the Scientific American article that calls for a massive $400 billion 40-year plan for solar. I have been meaning to blog that it has many weaknesses, in my mind. No energy efficiency. No wind. Heck, nothing but PV and CSP, and it looks to be mostly PV, which needs expensive storage.

Why plowing up Conservation Reserve Program land won’t solve the food crisis

Uh oh. The New York Times reports that “thousands of farmers are taking their fields out of the government’s biggest conservation program, which pays them not to cultivate.” Rather then let the ground lie fallow, they’re planting it with corn, soy, and wheat — the price of each of which stands near or above all-time […]

Maryland House committee kills climate bill

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Kari Manlove, fellows assistant at the Center for American Progress.

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After reporting last week on the climate policy progression carving its way through the Maryland Senate, the same measures were defeated in a Maryland House committee this week. Supposedly, the bill was killed by pressure from industry and labor lobbyists, ironically accompanied by steelworkers draped with "Save Our Jobs" t-shirts.

First of all, the United Steelworkers of America Union endorses the Apollo Alliance -- a coalition of labor, business, and environmental groups that collaborate to advocate a clean economy revolution.

Additionally, just last Thursday, a handful of labor unions -- SEIU, UFCW, LIUNA -- declared their support for the legislation in question.

Global food riots edition

A couple of months ago, I raised the question, can industrial agriculture feed the world? I was being intentionally provocative. For decades, policymakers have treated low-input, diversified agriculture — “organic” in the sense described by the great British agriculture scholar Sir Albert Howard — as a kind of hippy indulgence. Sure, it’s nice to grow […]

The Dream Reborn: diverse speakers and audience with a common vision

Jennifer Oladipo is a writer from Louisville, Ky., whose recent Orion article "Global Warming is Colorblind" was just reprinted in Utne Reader. She was in Memphis last weekend to see firsthand what the green jobs movement is about. (To read more Grist coverage of the Dream Reborn conference, see Pat Walters' dispatches from day one and day two.)

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The hopeful skeptic in me was the part most drawn to The Dream Reborn conference hosted by Green For All last weekend in Memphis. So once I arrived, I stuck to what I deemed the practical path, sessions with titles like "Show Me the Money" and "Green-Collar Job Training Programs: Examples and Models" that would delineate exactly how to make this green economy happen.

Although I didn't attend sessions explicitly linked to civil rights, in other ways the conference kept true to its implied promise that it could effectively and sincerely link the green collar jobs movement to the one personified by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The decision to hold the conference on the 40th anniversary of King's death -- in the very city where he was gunned down -- spoke volumes for the weight organizers had hoped the conference would carry.

The faces of green

King references and quotes, though often inspiring, were expected. What I found more potent was a simple glance around the room. Organizers had hoped 70 percent of attendees would be people of color, and eyeballing the plenary sessions, it appeared that they were dead on.

India’s 4,000 MW coal plant is a bad answer to electricity woes

A few more thoughts on the 4,000 MW coal plant in India recently approved for international aid financing, which David and Joe have noted. I think this deserves attention because it's at the center of the biggest climate question out there: how to meet tens of thousands of megawatt hours of unmet and projected power demand in India and China without huge coal plants like this Tata Mundra "Ultra-Mega" plant. It's not simple. But following the logic for this project involves going down a "There Is No Alternative" rabbit hole.

To people in India facing daily brown-outs or a lack of electricity altogether, it may seem like environmental organizations in the U.S. are opposing this power development from a different universe. They may be. But the financiers trying to justify this project in the public interest are themselves in their own universe of self-justifying arguments.

The main justification for international aid for this project is that "super-critical" coal-generating technology will make this plant more efficient than others in India. However, the broader situation in India's power sector is such that nearly all of the efficiency gains at the plant are likely to be eaten up by the world-beating levels of transmission and distribution loss of the rickety Indian electricity grid. It's a good bet that the equivalent of the output of at least one of the plant's five 800 MW generating units will disappear before it gets to an actual electricity consumer [PDF].

Examining the IPCC’s ‘portfolio of technologies’

In 2007, the IPCC wrote [PDF] in its Working Group III summary (page 16):

The range of stabilization levels assessed can be achieved by deployment of a portfolio of technologies that are currently available and those that are expected to be commercialised in coming decades. This assumes that appropriate and effective incentives are in place for development, acquisition, deployment and diffusion of technologies, and for addressing related barriers (high agreement, much evidence).

This range of levels includes reaching atmospheric concentrations of 445 to 490 ppm CO2-equivalent, or 400 to 450 ppm of CO2. The first sentence does beg the question, what exactly does "expected to be commercialized" mean? I'll return to that in Part 2.

So, what exactly are these climate-saving technologies? You can read about every conceivable one in the full WG III report, "Mitigation of Climate Change." But the summary lists the "Key mitigation technologies and practices" (page 10) in several sectors divided into two groups: those that are "currently commercially available" and those "projected to be commercialized before 2030." I will simply list them all here. In a later post, I'll discuss which ones I believe could deliver the biggest reductions at lowest cost -- my 14-plus "wedges," as it were -- and the political process for achieving them.

It is worth seeing them all, I think, to understand exactly how we might stabilize below 450 ppm CO2. Also, one of the technologies is the closest thing we have to the "silver bullet" needed to save the climate, as I will blog on in a few days.

Enterprise Rent-a-Car opens six ‘green’ branches in Atlanta

The largest car rental company in the United States, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, announced it’s opening six “green” branches in Atlanta, Ga., where 60 percent of the available rental vehicles will be hybrids or other fuel-efficient cars. The agency said the increase in efficient vehicles is due to consumer demand. Enterprise currently has a fleet of about […]

GOOD magazine’s profile on the black green activist

What Grist readers might have predicted over a year ago, when David interviewed Van Jones, is quickly becoming reality. In October, Thomas Friedman, in a gushing editorial, called Jones a "rare bird" who "exudes enough energy to light a few buildings on his own." Now he's appeared on the Colbert Report where, despite the always-awkward position of Stephen's interviewees, he managed to land "green jobs" in the mental dictionary of millions of young viewers.

I had the privilege of speaking to Jones last month as he cabbed it from Capitol Hill back to the airport. The profile appears in this month's issue of GOOD magazine, and is now online here. Despite seeming a bit exhausted, he was patient, articulate, and just plain kind. Something I wasn't able to include in the piece, but which he took great joy in telling, was how his grandfather, a bishop in the Methodist Church, was a huge inspiration to him, as were the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr. When asked if celebrity, and schmoozing with the big dogs in Washington, might divert his attention from grassroots activity, he responded, "On any given day, I might be in a public high school or in a prison, in D.C. or at a funeral. My life has a lot of sunshine and a lot of shit." On the other hand, he added, "That's what it takes to make a strong plant -- a lot of sunshine and a lot of fertilizer."

The hog giant CAFOizes Poland and Romania to gain access to Western Europe

Farmers in Iowa and North Carolina — the two states that together house nearly half of U.S. hog production [PDF] — won’t be surprised by this report, from the International Herald Tribune: The American bacon producer, Smithfield Farms, now operates a dozen vast industrial pig farms in Poland. Importing cheap soy feed from South America, […]