Jumbo Solar  

News highlight of the day is a solar PV breakthrough by Boeing and Spectrolab - a multijunction cell combined with an optical concentrator (also reported at Red Herring, Gizmag, The Energy Blog and Groovy Green - the original press release is at the US DOE). I've got some longtime readers at Boeing who I always assumed were concerned about fuel prices but if you're working on the solar side of things then well done. I'm glad I haven't got organised enough to have bought solar panels yet (though I do have green power through my energy supplier which lets me sleep easy at night anyway)...

If that silly Hummer O2 concept vehicle we just saw didn't sate your appetite for environmental friendliness, try this on for size: researchers at Boeing-Spectrolab have just succeeded in building a multi-junction solar cell that achieves an incredible 40.7% efficiency, or -- to the best of our knowledge -- about twice that of the reigning champ in this space. To put this Department of Energy-backed breakthrough in perspective, it was less than two months ago that Silicon Valley-based SunPower announced a 22% efficient cell, and even that model was claimed to produce 50% more power over a given space than previous iterations. In case you're unfamiliar with multi-junction cells -- no shame in that game -- they can best be described as being composed of several layers, with each slice capturing only a portion of the solar spectrum; this method of optical concentration is what has allowed cells to surpass the 12% to 18% efficiency barrier faced by most traditional modules. In conclusion, while this is certainly an encouraging development, we remain somewhat skeptical about its potential for real-world implementation: once Big Oil gets wind of this new tech, it will likely "disappear" just as quickly as that guy who invented a car that runs on water, man.

Groovy Green also has a movie review of "Tapping Maple Ridge".

The new film, Tapping Maple Ridge , cleverly examines the parallels between maple syrup and wind energy. Why this is even applicable in the first place lies in the film's setting of Lewis County, NY; the largest producer of maple syrup in NY and the site of the largest wind farm east of the Mississippi at Maple Ridge . Here's an excerpt from their site,

"Tapping Maple Ridge is a meditation on the unexpected parallels between wind energy and maple syrup production. Shot on High-Definition video, the film illustrates the visual and conceptual correspondences between the sugar bush (a stand of maple trees tapped for syrup) and the wind farm. Interviews with maple syrup producers, Tug Hill landowners, Lewis County residents, and wind energy developers reinforce and elaborate on those relationships."

And indeed, the film does a remarkable job at showing how a community such as Lewis County uses the nature around it to maximum effect. This is not your average wind energy doc. The producers skillfully not only keep the two topics interesting, but actually allow you to enjoy the effort. The music, the flow of the story, the people, and the images all come together to form a beautiful story. It's important to keep in mind, however, that the film was funded by PPM Energy and Horizon Wind Energy; the two partners in the Maple Ridge Wind Farm. You're not going to hear the 'other side' of the wind energy debate here.

In a way, it's kind of nice to leave the arguments behind for a moment and simply focus on the marvels of harvesting renewable natural resources. In the beginning of the film, we're introduced to maple syrup; how it's tapped, its production, and history. We see the advances in efficiency over the years; and hear the stories of those directly involved. In fact, based on the first 10-15 minutes, it would be easy to mistake the film on being about nothing but syrup. Eventually, however, we slowly start to see images of turbines being installed and the next natural resource of Lewis County coming of age. This setup creates a gradual introduction to wind power that draws striking parallels to maple syrup production. It's a surprising new angle on the entire debate and the 'back-and-forth' between the two industries is engaging as a plotline. ...

Overall, I throughly enjoyed Tapping Maple Ridge. It tells a remarkable story of sustainability across two different industries and highlights our abilities to harness nature. It's educational (40 gallons of tree sap to make 1 gallon of pure maple syrup!), it's beautiful, and it's worth your time to experience.

Cosmos Magazine has an article that notes it will be cheaper for Australia to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than to pay for the damage global warming causes us.

Reducing carbon greenhouse gas emissions now will be cheaper for Australia than cleaning up the environmental damage that results from doing nothing, according to a new report.

The report, entitled The Heat is On: The Future of Energy in Australia is the final report of the Energy Futures Forum (EFF), a two-year long research project into the future of energy in Australia.

"We looked at how much it would cost to do mitigation in a range of different scenarios out to 2050 and we asked, 'what's the minimum damage that could be done that would [offset] the cost of the mitigation?'" said EFF member John Wright, of the CSIRO, Australia's national science agency.

The EFF's findings, while independent, confirm those of the British Government-sponsored Stern Report, released in November (See 'Stern reactions to climate change report', Cosmos Online), which found that fighting climate change now would be far less expensive economically than waiting to do so. "There's a real economic impact to not doing anything about it," said Wright.

According to the report, the Australian and global economies need not falter while the world works to slash greenhouse gases, but Wright admits that economic growth will be slower under carbon restrictions.

For consumers, retail electricity prices will increase between 7 and 20 per cent by 2050 due to carbon offset costs, but those increases will be below the change in real income per capita in Australia, which is expected to rise by over 100 per cent in the same period.

While electricity for households will likely remain affordable, energy-intensive industries like steel and aluminium production could suffer. According to Wright, "There's no doubt about it: if we want to make some serious cuts in greenhouse gas emissions there is going to be some pain to some parts of industry. The question is how do we minimise that pain?"

The Energy Blog has a post on a large tidal power project planned for New Zealand.

A 200 MW tidal power plant is being proposed in New Zealand. The US$400 million Crest Kaipara Energy Project, to be completed in 2011, if started as planned next year, would be located in the Kaipara harbor in New Zealand and generate 4% of New Zealand's power.

Crest Energy is developing the project that will place 200, 1 MW, 22m-high marine turbines, rotating at 5 rpm, in one of the largest harbors in the world. The turbines will located in the deepest part of the channel, submerged an average of 30 meters, 15 meters at low tide. The channel is rarely used for commercial purposes due to shifting sand bars and treacherous tides, and there are no large communities close to the shores of the harbor which makes it a good location for the project.

Two 30km-long cables 125mm in diameter would carry electricity from the turbines to a substation at the entrance to the Hoteo River near Glorit, south-west of Wellsford, where it would be fed into the national grid.

Annual revenue from 200 operational turbines would be about $110 million at present wholesale electricity prices.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that affluent lifestyles are harming the climate. I think this isn't quite the right way to frame this issue - its not such much affluence that is the problem but waste and consumption of products created in non-sustainable ways - it should be possible to live a very affluent lifestyle while not impacting on the environment at all - if we try hard enough to build systems that enable this.

AFFLUENT lifestyles are producing more waste, using more water and energy and relying more on cars with damaging effects on the environment.

The State of the Environment report, produced every five years and released yesterday, warned that most of the threats reported in 2001 were still present and, in some cases, had worsened.

The past decade had produced higher incomes and lower unemployment, the report found, but the higher consumption rates this brought had affected the environment.

"Realising a sustainable human environment requires a reduction in net consumption and waste," the report found. "This will involve greater population densities than currently is the case, significant increases in building and material recycling, the capture and use of stormwater, the recycling of wastewater and biological waste, and improved urban form and urban structures. It also requires changes in behaviour by individuals."

The chairman of the report committee, University of Queensland Associate Professor Bob Beeton, said "business as usual is not an acceptable model". "We have got to plan to live in this country," he said.

A different approach was needed to get people thinking about their impact on the environment and changing their lifestyles, Professor Beeton said. "The shock-horror approach is not working," he said. "If you scare people with something they can't fix they switch off."

Spending on environmental programs had increased in the past decade, he said, and the Government was near to its target of planting 1 billion trees.

But the Opposition's environment spokesman, Anthony Albanese, said despite the billions of dollars spent, most environmental indicators were going backwards. "On John Howard's watch, Australia's greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise and our vital waterways are deteriorating," he said.

Technology Review has an article on using wind to extract fresh water - something we're going to see a lot more of I suspect - though I'm not sure that extracting every last drop out of the big aquifers and leaving just the salt behind is going to be a good long term move - this sort of stuff is best done on the coasts.

Researchers at Texas Tech are teaming up with General Electric (GE) to try to optimize what is in theory an ideal marriage: using wind turbines to power water-desalination plants. That way, many water-deprived areas could ultimately obtain clean drinking water in a sustainable way. And wind-turbine farms could gain a place to use excess electricity on high-wind days.

It may sound straightforward, but it's a tricky task: the water-desalination process envisioned for the project--known as reverse osmosis--operates best at stable, continuous rates. And that's difficult to achieve when the electricity source is variable. The technology goal is a control unit that can keep the desalination plant running as stably as possible, store some power at certain times, sell some to the grid at peak times, and also pump water to and from the system as necessary.

Within several years, the Texas Tech researchers hope to erect a 1.5 megawatt turbine that will power a desalination plant capable of supplying water to the town of Seminole, TX, which has about 10,000 residents. A 1.5 megawatt wind turbine, generating full power and supplying electricity to a reverse-osmosis unit, could generate about 1,500 cubic meters of clean water per hour from brackish supplies. (Ocean water is saltier and would yield less fresh water.) GE hopes the project--one in a handful of similar R&D initiatives around the world--will yield a commercial product capable of meeting the demands of municipal water suppliers.

The project will get started in early 2007 with a scaled-down test model at Texas Tech that uses a very small, five kilowatt wind turbine.

Supplies of fresh water around Lubbock, a windy but dry area in west Texas, are running out fast. The vast Ogallala aquifer--which sits under eight Great Plains states--is being exhausted by farms, businesses, and homes far faster than it can be naturally replenished. "We are now looking at a potentially serious water problem in west Texas," says Andy Swift, director of the wind-science engineering center at Texas Tech. "That aquifer is simply being drained faster than it recharges. It could be bled dry within 50 years." Beneath the Ogallala aquifer, there is a brackish aquifer at depths of 1,000 to 2,000 feet that these states may have to tap.

Slate and TreeHugger dare you to take their "green challenge" and go on an 8 week carbon diet.

There's no longer any real doubt about it: Global warming is happening. The average temperature of the Earth's surface has risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past hundred years, and overwhelming evidence suggests that most of the increase is due to greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide released by humans. Though a 1-degree increase might not seem like much, even a small rise in global temperature significantly changes the climate, potentially resulting in major storms and droughts, disruption of the food supply, and the catastrophic spread of disease.

Human carbon-dioxide emissions come mainly from two sources: burning fossil fuels and changes in land use, such as deforestation. Americans are the climate's worst enemy. On average, each of us is responsible for about 22 tons of carbon-dioxide emissions every year, according to the United Nations, compared with an average of six tons per person throughout the rest of the world. That means the typical U.S citizen emits the equivalent of four cars.

Much of the discussion around climate change involves national and international policy—should the United States sign the Kyoto Treaty or increase auto efficiency standards? But even without major political or legislative changes, there's a lot that concerned individuals can do to make the problem better. To that end, we've created the Slate Green Challenge—a straightforward program to evaluate and reduce your carbon emissions between now and the end of the year.

The folks at NEI Nuclear Notes were kind enough to provide a link to my "A is for Atom" post recently as an example of a dissenting viewpoint regarding nuclear power (they are very pro nuclear, whereas I'm obviously rather anti). I might note that given a choice between the status quo (a massive coal fired power station building spree in China, India and the US) vs a slightly smaller nuclear power station building spree I'd reluctantly opt for the latter, as for all its faults, nuclear isn't as dangerous in the short term as coal, the enemy of all life (this is probably a good point to say hi to the guys at the UK coal lobby who dropped by today).

An Australian Parliamentary committee has approved uranium sales to China, and sales to India may very well be next.

The Daily Reckoning puts it all into the propoer perspective:

The nuclear debate in Australia isn’t so much about Australia as it is about China and India. Australia, like every other major Western economy, ought to develop a safe, efficient, and clean nuclear industry for the day when conventional hydro-carbons like oil, coal, and gas, are no longer plentiful and cheap. That day is fast approaching, and is probably already upon us.

But the main reason Australia ought to encourage nuclear power use is that if China and India don’t go the nuclear route, the world will soon be a dirtier, sweater, and more dimly lit place. The sunsets might be romantic. But if you can’t breathe, you won’t be able to enjoy them all that much.

Something to think about. For a dissenting perspective, click here.

One thing I find a little frustrating about some of the online debate about nuclear power is that a lot of the people who advocate nuclear power are obviously really smart engineers (as opposed to the corporate propagandists and flunky politicians who do the mainstream nuclear advocacy). A lot of these guys seem to be pretty hostile to green types and I think this tends to cloud some rational decision making on the best way forward.

Given that a large section of the population is opposed to nuclear power and a career in nuclear engineering is probably utterly frustrating thanks to the endless planning and legal hassles involved in trying to get a plant up and running, wouldn't it be better to think about more enjoyable ways to use those strong technical skills ?

I can understand the attraction of nuclear power given the basic coolness of the underlying science (and the engineering challenges) but couldn't just as much satisfaction be gained from trying to put together smart grids hooking up solar and wind farms with plenty of storage in the middle for resiliency (and there's also the profit maximisation aspect which leads to another interesting technical area - that of building trading systems that manipulate all this other good stuff in order to achieve some financial goals).

Not only is this approach free of endless red tape and aggravation, its also a lot more entreprenurial and there is a lot more innovation occurring in these fields. Plus the industry is much more open to competition as you don't need the immense amounts of capital required to construct or operate nuclear power stations. And you can get projects up and running in timeframes measured in months instead of decades for that added buzz of actually finishing a project.

Just a thought - you don't have to turn into a hippie or a socialist to decide that nuclear power's days are gone (even if I'd concede we are probably in for a mini nuclear renaissance over the next decade until common sense prevails)...

Moving onwards, Grist has a look at the subsidy farmers at Archer Daniels Midland.

Before it became widely used as a car fuel, ethanol was just grain liquor -- and the federal government was not particularly kind to it.

Shortly after the American Revolution, the new government imposed a draconian tax on the stuff, hoping to pay down wartime debt. Instead, it got the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, an insurrection eventually put down by forces led by President Washington himself. Similar hostility -- including the indignity of Prohibition, the 1920s-era federal ban on alcohol production -- marked official attitudes toward ethanol until 1978.

That year and thereafter, however, the government warmed considerably to "white lightning," as the 200-proof elixir is sometimes known. Rather than tax ethanol heavily, the government now lavishes it with tax breaks. Rather than ban production, the government subsidizes it. And commercial ethanol production, which withered away after World War II, now booms.

Why the change in fortune?

Ethanol's revival is intimately linked to one company, the giant grain-trading firm Archer Daniels Midland, and one seemingly unrelated product, high-fructose corn syrup. The story centers on a man who arguably counts as corporate America's most generous and influential political donor of the second half of the 20th century, former ADM CEO Dwayne Andreas. To understand the weird and lucrative nexus between an industrial sweetener, a gas substitute, and a grain magnate, we need to go back to the days of disco.

By the late 1970s, Decatur, Ill.-based ADM was already one of the most politically connected companies in the United States. The ultimate agribusiness, ADM ran a powerful network of grain elevators and mills throughout the Midwest. Along with its more demure rival Cargill and a handful of other firms, ADM was and remains the middleman between farmers and the food-processing companies and confined-animal feedlots that turn U.S. grain into the stuff that stocks supermarkets: bread, Twinkies, breakfast cereal, and meat.

ADM won friends and influenced people by spreading its largesse across the political spectrum. CEO Andreas gained legendary status as a double-dealer during the Watergate investigations, when the congressional hearings revealed that he had cut the $25,000 check used by Richard Nixon's "plumbers" to finance the famous hotel break-in. From the same hearings it emerged that in 1968, Andreas had illegally donated $100,000 to Minnesota Sen. Hubert Humphrey -- Nixon's Democratic opponent in the 1968 election, and a longtime Andreas favorite.

Andreas earned a solid return on his promiscuous generosity. The grain titan is widely credited with convincing President Nixon to initiate and provide financing for an historic $700 million sale of U.S. grain to the Soviet Union in 1972 -- a deal for which Archer Daniels Midland played the profitable role of middleman. The sale had a dramatic and lasting effect on U.S. agriculture. The resulting spike in demand, exacerbated by a drought the following year -- sent grain prices surging. High grain prices rippled through the U.S. food system, helping (along with the 1973 OPEC oil embargo) to spark the "stagflation" that gripped the U.S. economy into the next decade.

ADM feature heavily in Richard Manning's book Against The Grain, as well as one of MonkeyGrinder's recent rants. MG also has posts on ethanol and the value of old forests.

Engineer Poet's recent proposal for more efficient use of our energy endowment (can be read as conservation) and reliance on closed systems where possible reminds us of an essential fact.

The tools to solve our problems exist. The barriers are not technology. We have the techology. In my country, the USA, we have a pluralistic society where ideas are meant compete and vie for dominance in the marketplace, although this is not what happens.

There is no "marketplace". Our western economy is as artificial and materialistic as the modern mega-farm, where genetically addled corn springs forth from puddles of carbon fuel. The barriers to solving our big problems are the shimmering dreams of vested interests, written into the grooves of our monkey brains.

There is no propaganda on TV to say,

"Hey, we need five million americans to learn how to farm organically, and distribute their product locally. Grants, education and housing will be provided for those undertaking this vital service. Meanwhile, we are cutting off all welfare to Archer Daniels Midland."

or,

"Please turn in your car for a brown bicycle. Smart cars will become available after we have recycled your hummer, but speed limits will 20 miles an hour for the majority of roads which will be dual use for human powered transport."

or

"Your local Walmart has been flattened. Your exurbs are slated to be turned into farmland. Relocation assistance will be provided."

Toby Hemenway (who popped up earlier in the year with an article called "Apocalypse Not") has an interesting analysis of the origins of peak oil doomerism.

People in the Peak Oil movement chafe at the label of doomer, but many of us do have an apocalyptic bent. Although plenty of Peak Oil commentary is sober analysis, a survey of the major websites and books quickly brings up apocalyptic titles like dieoff.org, oilcrash.com, The Death of the Oil Economy, The End of Suburbia, and The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. Peak Oil writings are sprinkled with predictions that billions will die, civil order will collapse, and even that civilization will end. Scientists, too, aren’t immune. During geologist Ken Deffeyes’s Peak Oil presentations, he displays the words “war,” “famine,” “pestilence,” and “death”—the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The Right, the saying goes, has the Left Behind books, and the Left has Peak Oil. Both predict that the end is near.

After I published an article suggesting that Peak Oil may lead “merely” to widespread unemployment and hardship rather than collapse [Apocalypse, not, April 2006], hundreds wrote to tell me I was a naïve optimist and a cornucopian. A significant part of the Peak Oil community holds the rock-solid sentiment that the only future is one of chaos. While the end of the oil era possesses “death and taxes” certitude, plausible post-peak scenarios span a wide scope. So why is the most touted one the most extreme? Predictions of any stripe, a review will quickly show, are almost always wrong. The future rarely goes in the direction we expect. The certainty of coming doom held by so many made me wonder why we are drawn to societal collapse and our own extinction.

The point of this article is not to argue for or against a Peak Oil collapse—a futile debate that won’t end until we enter that future—or to discuss whether our civilization deserves to continue. Rather, it’s an exploration into why, given an impending crisis or major challenge, many people in our culture spiral so quickly and automatically toward an “end of the world” vision rather than imagining any of the countless other options.

Bart from Energy Bulletin has a few notes on Dave Pollard's review of "A Theory Of Power".

hanks to Dave Pollard for an excellent summary, as well as his thoughts on the book. We've run several of Jeff Vail's articles and are interested in his theories. Although they are abstract and not easy to digest, the theories make explicit ideas that seem to be on the minds of many people.

Vail's theory about "rhizome" structures has a lot of applications today: the permaculture movement, guerrilla warfare, the Web, the peak oil blogosphere...

The idea of rhizome social structures as an alternative to hierarchy has historical roots:

* Communitarian anarchism, as in the works of Peter Kropotkin
* Utopian socialism
* A strain within libertarianism, voiced by Karl Hess.
* Jeffersonian democracy and agrarianism (as in the works of Wendell Berry).
* The self-sufficiency and commune movements of 60s and 70s, as well as the back-to-the-land movements of the 30s and 40s, and communal movements in the 19th century (e.g., Shakers).
* Many traditional and peasant cultures have similar elements.

Wonkette reports that rumours of a Kissinger-Ratzinger alliance have been denied by the Catholic News Service.

The world’s scariest two people — Henry Kissinger and Pope Joseph Ratzinger — have reportedly formed an alliance that Iranian officials soberly described as a “papal-Jewish conspiracy.”

Italy’s La Stampa broke the news Monday that the 84-year-old Kissinger has become a special diplomatic adviser to the 79-year-old pope. Hilariously, both were born in Bavaria: Kissinger as a Jew who had to flee the country or become a doomed slave laborer, and Ratzinger as a Nazi who kept Jewish slave laborers from escaping German factories.

The Catholic News Service denies the story, admitting only that Kissinger has been meeting with Ratzi and they’re planning something worse than Iraq and Vietnam combined.

Wonkette also has a report noting that even Rick Santorum hates Exxon - just like everyone else.

Like Peggy Noonan and several Pennsylvanians, we’re sorry to see Rick Santorum leave the Senate. (He’ll be back in town in a few weeks, as a lobbyist for Jesus, Inc.) Today he delivered his final piece of … oratory, yes, that’s what they call it. Let’s take a quick trip to Fearville, where Rick’s actually killing terrorists in Yemen or something, and Exxon’s directors want to kill us out of pure hate:

* “I will do my best after I leave this place to continue to confront these enemies and to give the United States the opportunity to succeed in this war.”
* It is lunacy, it is suicidal to continue to allow the energy markets at the levels they are now given the fact that a vast majority of those energy dollars are going to people who want to kill us and destroy everything we believe in.”

Santorum also cast one of the two brave Senate votes against Robert “Not Rumsfeld” Gates.

Back to Kissinger, the "Life Site" (which clearly has almost nothing in common with Wonkette) also notes the refuting of reports on the Kissinger - Vatican axis.

The Vatican has dispelled any rumor that former U.S. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger is acting as a foreign advisor to Pope Benedict XVI reports the Catholic News Agency. The veracity of the report was held in question, since Kissinger was the architect of US foreign policy supporting population control.

Vatican Spokesman Father Lombardi clarified yesterday that the report from the Italian Newspaper La Stampa saying Benedict XVI had enlisted Kissinger as an advisor is “without any foundation.” Father Lombardi told CNS that Pope Benedict XVI has neither a foreign affairs advisory board, and he has not asked former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to become one of his advisers.

The truth is that Kissinger met privately with the pope on Sept. 28 and that Mary Ann Glendon, a U.S. law professor and president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, has extended an invitation to Kissinger to speak to the academy in late April.

"Those are the only two concrete facts," Father Lomardi said.

The Nov. 4 report from La Stampa was quickly circulated over newspapers and the internet on the basis that "a diplomatic source" at the Vatican had confirmed that "an important dialogue is under way" for Kissinger to accept a papal offer to assist him on foreign affairs.

The veracity of the report was first held in question, however, because in 1974 Kissinger as Secretary of State issued National Security Study Memorandum 200 entitled "Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests." The extensive document warned that increasing populations in developing countries endangered U.S. strategic, economic, and military interests.

For more information on Henry Kissinger and Population Control:
http://www.lifesite.net/waronfamily/nssm200/index.html

As I've noted before, Kissinger is the subject of almost as many conspiracy theories (usually from the left, though that site I just referenced doesn't look even remotely left wing) as Maurice Strong is (from the right) - many of them based on the National Security Study mentioned by the Life Site above. Which leads me nicely into my closing ramblings.

Between Rob's recent post on "peak oil pessimism" and Toby's post on "the origins of peak oil doomerism" there seems to be something a whiff of introspection in the peak oil air lately. Combine that with some of the news flow and various comments in the blogosphere in recent weeks that caught my eye and I think its time for one of those rants on something thats bugging me (I know how much you all love them because they get far more readers than the relatively normal posts here).

In this case the topic is probably the most toxic meme of all - the population bomb. I even know the title of the post a day out, which is very unusual as I traditionally make them up once I'm done writing - "Charles Manson, Ecofascism and the Population Bomb"...