Over Our Heads About Solar

Solar energy: mention it and people are likely to recall images of vast sun-drenched desert tracts covered with solar modules or mirrors. Searching the Web for "solar energy" is likely to produce news stories of big projects in the Mojave, Sahara and Negev (Israel,) places that reliably receive a potent daily dose of sunlight, measured in what industry professionals call sun hours.

Photo: A concentrated solar thermal project near Barstow, CA. Credit: U.S. Department of Energy

These projects attract hundreds of millions of dollars worth of public and private capital, each generating anywhere from 30 Megawatts to over 370 Megawatts of power, enough electrical generating capacity to meet the needs of a half million Americans.

To make this work, the U.S. government lavishes loan guarantees and expedites the review of projects on public land for multi-Megawatt and even Gigawatt solar power plants.

From an energy policy standpoint, how much should we rely on these utility-scale solar projects in our effort to secure a more sustainable system of electric power supply?

I think that the current zeal for projects like these should be tempered by more localized approaches to supplying renewable energy, with more control given to the states and cities in determining how much they achieve their own energy self-reliance. Renewable energy does not have to be harnessed in a few desert areas and shipped across country. In fact, public support for clean energy may hinge on the opposite.

These big power plants unarguably generate clean, renewable energy at an economic cost but also share some of the same drawbacks their coal- and nuclear-powered brethren do.

Developing large tracts of wild lands often raises concerns about the destruction of valuable wildlife habitat. Even if developers can successfully answer these concerns, it adds significant time and cost to the projects--and negative public opinion about solar energy.

Generating power at centralized locations far from our urban population centers creates additional challenges in terms of reliability, cost and economic value to consumers. The larger the facility, the greater the likelihood of its causing a major disruption in service due to an equipment malfunction, human error, or (heavens forbid) terrorist attack.

Despite the financial support and attention given to these large solar projects, the majority of our current solar power comes from thousands of systems as small as 3 Kilowatts in size installed on rooftops, in fields, over parking lots and even along highway rights-of-way.

2.4 MWp installation, Maryland. Photo courtesy of Kohl's

Since 2006 -- the first time a big concentrating solar thermal electricity power plant was built since the early 1990s -- solar photovoltaics (PV) has added 13 times more capacity to the U.S. electric grid than concentrating solar power plants, and with much less hub-bub.

This alternative approach to solar distributes our generating capacity over every locality from Alaska to Florida and California to Maine (and Hawaii and Puerto Rico,) closest to where the energy is needed. Recent studies show how distributed photovoltaic power could provide for much of what we need, including all of the projected growth in our electricity demand, both technically and commercially.

According to the report: Energy Self-Reliant States: Homegrown Renewable Power, more than 40 states plus the District of Columbia could generate 25 percent of their electricity just with rooftop solar photovoltaic systems.

Image courtesy of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance

Questions about cost and economics always must be first addressed. Solar electricity is not cost competitive with bulk, baseload power generated from coal and nuclear plants— but it does not have to be. Distributed solar provides electricity when and where power is most limited and most expensive, during those hot sunny afternoons when the demand for electricity can reach critical peaks. At these times local utility companies have to supplement their base generating capacity with more expensive electricity sourced from special-purpose “peaker” power plants, or from the spot market.

Solar electricity also mitigates the risk of fuel-price volatility, as ratepayers can understand when they find those pesky fuel surcharges in their power bills.

By the way, when a utility company like Georgia Power compares the cost of alternative energy with their costs, they frequently fail to mention this or any of the other surcharges and fees which appear on ratepayer bills. Consumer beware!

I'll continue this article next week, when we look further into the challenges of transmitting and distributing large amounts of electricity from remote plants, the economic benefits of localized renewable energy, and recent product developments that make rooftop solar more practical than ever.

Until then, thanks for reading!

Betting on Balderdash

John Tierney competently glosses-over the complexities of "proving" who is correct in the longstanding economics debate between the Malthusians and the Cornucopians about the behavior of commodity prices over time. (New York Times, Economic Optimism? Yes, I’ll Take That Bet)
Five years ago, Tierney and an oil markets expert named Matthew R. Simmons made a bet. Simmons, who sadly has passed earlier this year, strenuously warned about the pending effects of a peak in global oil production and accused the Saudi Arabian government of overstating the condition of their remaining oil reserves. Not that the Saudis would ever do such a thing to manipulate the markets, but I digress...
In 2005 Simmons bet Tierney $5,000 that oil prices, which hovered around $65 a barrel, would in 2010 rise past $200. With prices now at $91 and going up, Tierney claims victory and demands respect for his brand of cornucopian macroeconomics: an unbridled faith in the ability of the free markets to regulate our consumption of natural resources.
As many free-market zealots are apt to do, Tierney criticizes the renewable energy industry's need for subsidies while not mentioning how our Government coddles the producers of nonrenewables with a plethora of tax breaks, discounts, waivers, guarantees and other socialized business expenses.
Never once does he mention the environmental externalities which are excluded from the cheap prices that he claims in his bet with Simmons: not a peep about the Exxon Valdez, BP's Macondo well blowout, the poisoning of underground aquifers by natural gas drillers, the TVA's coal ash lagoon disaster, or many more less well-known cases of energy costs not reflected in market prices.
Tierney ought to ask the residents of the Prince William Sound and the Gulf who have lost their livelihoods, the people in Pennsylvania who have lost their drinking water, and those in Tennessee who lost their towns how accurately they think current energy prices reflect the true costs that are exacted.
He really needs to get out from behind his computer.
Even more astoundingly, Tierney touts the success of the Canadian tar sands project in the same paragraph that he mentions how current trends in the energy industry may lead to reduced climate-changing gas emissions. Back in the real world, the Canadian tar sands project is a disaster both in the way that it strip mines vast areas of Alberta's pristine forests and in the way that it creates more carbon dioxide pollution than any other form of energy production.
Matthew R. Simmons, rest his soul, deserves to eat crow over his bet with John Tierney, but only because he should have known better than to make specific predictions about a commodity as chaotic as oil. As for Mr. Tierney, winning a bet is not the same as winning the argument. He has only proven that forecasting is for suckers, and so is blind faith in the "free markets" that are anything but free.

- As always, thank you for reading and stay in touch!

Peak Oil Out of the Closet

"Conventional oil production has been flat for four years; in that sense, at least, peak oil has arrived."

Yesterday, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman unceremoniously gave Peak Oil theory a shout-out in his NY Times column and with it a badly-needed shot of cred.
Crude oil prices have recently marched north of $91 a barrel, and gas pumps in the United States of Happy Motoring currently run at an average $3.05 a gallon. We have not seen prices this high since October of 2008, and there is no relief in sight.
Peak Oil is the theory that oil, like most natural resources, can be cost-effectively extracted for human consumption so long as we continue to discover new sources apace of our rising appetites for it. If the pace of those new discoveries falls behind the growth of demand, then eventually its availability also will fall behind.
Industry experts and reporters are fond of the term "oil production" when referring to the amount of oil that is available for our use where it is needed, although this term misleads in that we can "produce" oil no more than we can "produce" eggs at the church Easter egg hunt.
As with any finite resource, there comes a day when the pace of our discoveries reaches a peak, when the fruits of our continued enterprise produce fewer and fewer Easter eggs no matter how hard we try and how deftly we improve upon our methods. In our geologically-bound world of oil, that in turn leads to diminished "production," and then to higher prices and to various forms of conflict depending on the severity of this gap between supply and demand.
Krugman writes that while prices for oil and other commodities are increasing rapidly, some commentators are trying to blame it on government economic policies, to make this a political issue.
Krugman argues how the facts fail to support this claim, and that we are now experiencing real limitations to economic growth that transcend culture, ideology and nationality. Finally, what is painfully obvious to so many has made it to the pages of the NY Times.
We have entered an age where, like it or not, we will (at long last) reckon with geology, physics and chemistry when formulating our economic and social policies. If you are like most economists, it's high time you re-learn your craft.

- As always, thank you for reading and stay in touch!

Business As Usual

Last Wednesday I attended a monthly seminar sponsored by Georgia Tech, one in their Clean Energy Speaker Series. Something remarkable happened.

This month's topic was Greenhouse Gas Emissions Management in Complex Times, featuring guest speakers from McKinsey and Co. and from the UPS. As usual they were informative as was the subsequent Q&A.

I enjoy attending these sessions to learn and to converse with others in my field. But as I said something truly remarkable happened this time.

We learned about the possibly dramatic effects that newly-opened natural gas reserves in underground shale deposits will have on the domestic production of electricity. That is interesting and useful to know, but not particularly remarkable.

Neither was our learning about UPS' reporting of Scope-3 CO2 emissions for their customers or the relative carbon intensiveness of various shipping modes such as air, truck, rail and ocean freight. Interesting but not remarkable.

And so it went.

Then in the midst of his presentation Ken Ostrowski, the McKinsey consultant, stated that "Unconstrained growth is not an option (due to the damage it does to the environment)." OK, that is obvious to many people but not to those who refuse to pay attention to such matters or are committed to less-rigorous standards for reality. Amongst this audience of clean-techies, it's a safe statement for him to make.

Now comes the remarkable part. Ostrowski shows a Powerpoint graph showing the projected growth of worldwide carbon dioxide releases into the atmosphere for the next twenty years should we do nothing to change our current habits and policies. The line climbs steadily throughout, a climb towards runaway global warming fueled by large increases in human population and a growing per-capita appetite for energy.

In other words it is suicide, if we believe what 98% of the world's climate scientists tell us.

Ostrowski's graph shows a second line showing how much we must curtail worldwide emissions so as to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at 450 parts per million in 2030. 450 was the target that delegates to last year's failed international climate summit in Copenhagen attempted to negotiate.

Ostrowski's graph shows that to reach 450 ppm we need to reduce annual CO2 emissions by 14 gigatons by the year 2020, compared to the level we would be at if we continued on our present course. As a point of reference, he helpfully mentioned that 14 gigatons approximates the combined amount of CO2 emitted by the United States, China and India.

So we basically have 10 years to figure out how to reduce our carbon emissions as if we took three of the world's largest economies offline.

While you take a moment to savor this fact, also savor the fact that 450 ppm is a contrived target based less on scientific reasoning than on what most organizers of the Summit felt was politically achievable. At 450ppm, the Earth's surface warms an average of 2 degrees Celsius.

The specific effects of these 2 degrees currently elicits considerable speculation amongst climate experts, but suffice to say that our terrestrial home becomes much more, ahem, severe than it is today.

The most remarkable thing that happened at last week's Clean Energy Seminar is that no one freaked out, ran for the exits, found Jesus, or even shed a tear. Ostrowski finished his Powerpoint talking about how this all translates into action and opportunity.

I'll continue on this blog next week to examine whether Ostrowski's claims hold any validity, and to delve further into the reasons why audience members like myself remained so calm.

As usual, thanks for reading and please stay in touch!

Apple's iPad: Good but not Great

One month ago I bought an Apple iPad with 3G wireless and 16GB of memory. I am pleased with it but also hope that Apple addresses some of its shortcomings in future software updates.

The iPad offers a mixture of portability, simplicity and versatility that makes it my new trusty companion for informing me, organizing me, preserving what my frail memory cannot, and entertaining me. In this way laptop computers have served me well for many, many years.

New tablet computers like the iPad offer an alternative to the laptop that affords more availability, convenience and plain fun. These devices have no keyboards, no moving parts and truly place its operating system in the background, where it belongs. In this regard, I can turn my iPad on and off faster than any laptop or even any cell phone I have used.

The iPad device presents a sleek, solid feel. The multi-touch display responded well to my fingers and provides very high quality graphics with vibrant color rendering. I like using the on-screen keyboard and can type almost as fast as I can on my laptop.

The only shortcoming of the iPad device is in its lacking a camera. One can be sure that Apple's competitors will not miss this opportunity to one-up the iPad by including a camera.

Surfing the Web on the iPad is as easy as pushing the "on" button, which as I mentioned before instantly puts the iPad into service. It establishes Wi-Fi and 3G wireless connections with ease.

The iPad comes preloaded with a stripped-down version of Safari, Apple's web browser. The browser lacks so much capability as to make it barely acceptable. Topping its list of shortcomings is the lack of support for Adobe's Flash plug-in.

This makes a visiting many animated web sites a frustrating experience of "sorry." Safari also does not allow the user to search for text within a page. While one can open multiple pages at once, navigating amongst them is clumsy without the availability of tabs. Safari's controls for navigating forwards and backwards through recently visited pages is also very limited.

I have not yet tried any of the other web browsers available through the App Store. I give the iPad's version of Safari a "D."

The other productivity apps that come preloaded with the iPad are unexceptional. None of them support rich text formatting which makes composing email messages particularly dull.

The iWork apps, Apple's office productivity suite, are where the iPad demonstrates its mo-jo. The word processor (Pages), spreadsheet (Numbers) and presentation (Keynote) apps offer plenty of power and function at the bargain price of $9.99 apiece.

The iWork apps can store and share files through Apple's iWork.com and MobileMe cloud services. I wish they'd add Google Docs to that list.

To be sure, the iPad has a ways to go before one could consider it an outright replacement of laptop and desktop computers. You still cannot print from it. It has little capacity for managing files or running multiple programs at once.

Apple promises to address these shortcomings in an update to the iPad's operating system (iOS 4.2) due out any day now. It will remain to be seen how well they do with it.

Excepting the lack of a camera, all of the shortcomings I have cited can be remedied by Apple with new software. Apple clearly has demonstrated once again its desire to exceed its customers' expectations, but their desires may get upended by their troubling tendency to fight with the Adobes and the Googles of the world.

I am more comfortable buying my technology from companies that play nice with others in the belief that customer choices guide future market innovations better than when a technology giant like Apple plays hardball with its perceived competitors.

For those interested in buying a tablet computer, I think you should wait to see what new products hit the market in time for the upcoming holiday shopping season. Toshiba and Microsoft/HP have already introduced their respective "iPad killers" and stumbled, but they won't be the last to try.

With the iPad in its current state, Apple has certainly left the door open. I am most interested to see what Google might have in store for us.

- As always, thank you for reading and stay in touch!

BOOK: The Bicycle Diaries

The Bicycle Diaries is a suitable title for this book, although you should not assume this book is about bicycles or bicycling. For David Byrne the bicycle is simply an effective means of everyday transport. He loves the freedom, health benefits and human-scale perspectives afforded by riding his bicycle, but he is not interested in discussing bicycle equipment, clothing, riding technique, and such topics of interest for bicycle enthusiasts.

Through the bicycle, Byrne's life and the world around him takes a distinct form worthy of a diary. The bicycle is Byrne's silent partner, passive yet essential to the life he enjoys.

Byrne studies the human condition as many talented artists are apt to do, and he wields a keen sense for details. During his national and international travels, Byrne developed a habit of exploring the cities he visited by bicycle and forming connections with life on the streets in a way that is not possible if he were riding inside a car.

He found that riding a bike enhanced his ability to see, hear, smell and fully savor his surroundings and the people he encountered.

It became my panoramic window on much of the world over the past thirty years. Through this window I catch glimpses of my fellow man as expressed by the cities he lives in.

In the Bicycle Diaries Byrne interprets those precious glimpses though stories and social commentary.

Early in the book Byrne describes his ride from Buffalo, NY (my hometown) to see Niagara Falls. The ride takes him down Niagara Falls Boulevard, a sad arterial offering little comfort or safety for the intrepid bicyclist.
The NFB originates as an outsized strip of suburban big-box retail stores. Byrne fruitlessly searches for the humanity in it all.

There are no people visible anywhere, just cars pulling in and out of parking lots.

Further on, the NFB passes through miles of postindustrial wasteland--shuttered factories and toxic landfills--then though a ghetto, and then it unceremoniously deposits him before one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

Byrne observes the various built environments--urban, suburban, or small town--he encounters and tries to understand the meaning behind them. In most settings throughout the United States he finds dysfunction and missed opportunity.

In small-town Texas he senses a Puritanical streak at the root of their teetotalling laws and draws a connection with the town's spare building designs. In this case, all he wanted was to enjoy a glass of wine with his dinner.

I suspect that drinking...is considered a sign of moral weakness. The assumption that there lurks within us a secret desire for pure, sensuous, all hell-breaking-loose pleasure that is to be nipped in the bud, for pragmatic reasons...You never know what will come out of that bottle once you open it...slipping off of the straight and narrow could have serious consequences.
Drinking, therefore, became like drug use relegated to "bad" places like honky-tonks and dark, sad bars. Either way both druggies and drinkers tend to create their own countercultures. Being ostracized then creates the "bad" scenes that the punishment hoped it avoid.

As I said, the Bicycle Diaries is not a book about bicycles and bicycling.

He goes further to note how the same Puritanical aesthetic informs much of everyday America's building architectures in the towns and contrived landscapes he visits:

The whacky religious fundamentalism that drives much of the United States makes for places that on the surface don't betray any religious foundation at all. But it's there, a deep invisible base implicit in the landscaped industrial parks and weird nonspaces that evoke a nostalgia for the nonexistent.

In city after city, he wryly critiques the social and economic pathos he encounters. It's a dismal but often fascinating preoccupation.

He extensively covers the San Francisco-Bay region and its rich history of revolution-for-the-hell-of-it, from the Beats to the psychedelics to the modern-day digerati. While Byrne has no interest in re-hashing his personal fame as a musician, he recounts an experience of his while visiting this area which provides a fascinating view into his genius:

I first came out here in the early 70's, lured by the hippie eco techno worldview embodied by the Whole Earth Catalog. I joined a friend in an attempt to build a dome in a field in the Napa Valley. I eventually lost focus on the dome project and ended up busking with another friend on the streets of Berkley. He played the accordion, I played the violin and the ukulele and struck ironic poses...I realized at that time that I was more interested in irony than in utopia.

He also engages in a discussion about the pros and cons of Powerpoint as a mode of communication and veers off into a fascinating talk about our linguistic roots:

I am a prisoner of my language.

I wish cycling made me this interesting.

Eventually, Byrne arrives in New Orleans, and his wry critiques give way to hopefulness. He notes that more so than any other American city New Orleans is a city about living.

He openly debates how the citizens of New Orleans, unlike those in other poverty-stricken American cities, can possibly maintain such friendliness towards strangers, appear to be happier on the job, and have a somewhat more relaxed interracial relations. Was it influenced by the French Catholic church's historic attitudes sin and pleasure?...the fusion of African cultures?...or the propensity for businesses to be locally- owned and operated?

His oversea travels open up further possibilities and questions. In Adelaide, Australia, he notes a small group of Aboriginals congregated, enigmatically, alongside a bustling urban thoroughfare and muses:

...their physical presence advertises a deep, slow biological and geological history that this new European colonial world seeks to quietly cover over with a frenzy of commerce...

As I said, he sometimes wanders far from the bicycle, but these are the deep thoughts that a cyclist can entertain. In another scene he notices the pervasive application of video surveillance on London's streets and the British Government's ubiquitous warnings for people to stay "alert," which prompts Byrne to muse brilliantly about the nature of thought control, self-censorship and the mental hazards of suppressed feelings.

He has an amusing section about cultural stereotypes where he addresses the duality of English high- and low-culture:

The larger the front, the larger the back.

Through it all Byrne often returns to a fundamental question of why don't more cities and their inhabitants embrace the bicycle as a mode of transport. I strongly agree with his conclusion that for most, whether they live in New York or in Istanbul, it's a matter of social status.

Some will ask, "but isn't it dangerous, and where will I park my bike?" These questions get answered rapidly when there is a political will--or when the price of gas is five times what it is today. They are really just excuses, justifications for inaction--not real questions.

Byrne saves some of his most illuminated prose for a riff about our collective narrative. While visiting Manilla, he notes former Phillipine dictator Ferdinand Marcos carefully manipulated his public image and merged it with a national mythology.

Once "stories" like these are in place and accepted, one need only to supply the appropriate images and anecdotes to make them seem self-fulfilling and indisputable.
Living "in" a story, being part of a narrative, is much more satisfying than living without one.

He wonders about his own narrative. What about your "story?"

I enjoyed the ride with David. His prose is a lot like his spoken persona: witty, thoughtful and a bit disjointed.

For many years I found it surreal, amusing, and just downright weird to bike through dead zones, barren suburbs, or downtowns on the verge of becoming ruins...But the novelty has worn off a little, and now I am more drawn to destinations where I can bike on paths in parklands bordering on rivers and lakes rather than on shoulders of expressways sucking in fumes and risking my life.

Amen.

- As always, thank you for reading and stay in touch!

Farewell, Juan Williams

National Public Radio has every right and justification to sack their longtime employee. As well, Fox "News" has every right to extend its employment of him.
NPR claims they are sacking Juan Williams, because he made comments during a recent appearance on Fox's The O'Reilly Factor that compromised his credibility as a political analyst for NPR.
The
New York Times is reporting this as a story of one reporter caught between two news organizations having vastly different journalistic values. This is a terribly misleading perspective, because NPR is the only news organization involved.
Indeed, Mr. Williams is caught between a sort of paradox, but not between news organizations as the NY Times frames it. He is caught between professions, a distinction lost on many Americans who have little appreciation for what constitutes quality journalism.
When Juan Williams works in the employ of Fox, he crosses a clear line separating journalism from entertainment. To understand why requires the benefit of an experience with recent history.
There was a time, perhaps before Juan Williams can remember, when broadcast news organizations served the American public under the dictates of our Federal Communications Commission.
Our government licensed the airwaves, a public commons, to the broadcasters and demanded in turn that the broadcasters deliver the news to us as fairly as possible. It worked fine for over 40 years, and then President Ronald Reagan removed that mandate. This freed the commercial broadcasters to operate their news organizations to a higher profit motive as they do with their other sports and entertainment programming.
What we now get is less news and more analysis: more talk, less bothersome fact-checking.
Also, it's cheaper for the networks to hire a few telegenic talking heads than it is to staff and operate an array of domestic and foreign bureaus run by professional journalists gathering hard news.
NPR has more correspondents stationed overseas than any of the for-profit "news" networks (including Fox and CNN) do. This alone speaks volumes about how seriously NPR takes their mission to inform us.
With the added emphasis on profits, we also get network "news" that is carefully-censored to avoid offending current and potential corporate sponsors.
In this regard NPR is not immune, since they, too, rely heavily on corporate underwriting.
Fox, however, goes even further than the other commercial networks, to the extent that Fox "News" is news in name only. They clearly demonstrate little interest in serving as a source of information for the broader American public and even have dropped their Orwellian fair and balanced tag line.
Fox delivers a right-wing corporatist perspective of the world espoused by its parent corporation's two largest shareholders, Rupert Murdoch and Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.
To this end Fox produces faux news and analysis wrapped in slick, spectacular set pieces. Their programs occasionally use a point-counterpoint format, which provides an entertaining form of verbal combat but often oversimplifies the true nature of the real world.
In this, Fox pays Juan Williams to provide the Liberal counterpoint, which makes him an actor for Fox.
As for NPR's stated reason for firing Williams, we should apply the Walter Cronkite test. Could you imagine dear Walter telling David Brinkley that it makes him uncomfortable to sit next to a Russian? How might such a remark possibly help us, the American people, make further sense of our modern world in the midst of the Cold War?
Cronkite wouldn't waste his breath--or our time. Unfortunately, our commercial "news" programs are full of those who do.
NPR has a right to defend its public reputation as a quality purveyor of news, and the law does not prevent a private employer from limiting the speech of an employee.
So, Juan Williams, good luck with your career, whatever you want that to be.

- As always, thank you for reading and stay in touch!