The URGE To Use Renewably Generated Electricity, Efficiently  

Red Herring has a roundup of "Clean Energy's Big Year" in 2006.

It’s been a landmark year for clean energy, as solar and wind power blew past the records, despite supply shortages.

Michael Rogol, managing director for Photon Consulting, in October estimated that global solar industry sales would reach $19 billion this year. That expectation was raised from $16 billion in March, and represents a 58 percent increase from 2005.

Global numbers for wind power aren’t out yet, but at least two groups are predicting a record year.

The American Wind Energy Association estimates the wind industry will have installed a record 2.75 gigawatts of generating capacity this year, enough electricity to power the state of Rhode Island. The association in August said total U.S. wind energy installations surpassed 10 gigawatts, and the world’s largest wind farm, a 735-megawatt project in Texas, was also completed in the third quarter of 2006.

The British Wind Energy Association said the UK also had a record-breaking year. Wind power commissions grew 50 percent to 630 megawatts. Some 625-megawatts-worth of projects are under construction in the UK, and another 2,120 megawatts (2.12 gigawatts) have been approved.

Clean energy made plenty of news this year:

Confidence in Clean

Institutional investors were generous. Research firm New Energy Finance expects the renewable energy and low-carbon technology industries to set a record of $70.9 billion in investment this year, a 43-percent increase from 2005. ...

Solar Silicon Shortage

While demand for solar continued to grow rapidly this year, the industry was constrained by a supply shortage of silicon, the material that turns sunlight into electricity in most solar panels. The shortage boosted prices and led solar manufacturers to strike long-term deals with silicon producers, which began installing new plants.

The shortage also sparked new interest in silicon technologies, as well as in silicon-efficient technologies like thin-film solar, a solar technology that uses little to no silicon, and concentrator technologies, which use mirrors and lenses to concentrate the sun into smaller solar cells (see Solar’s Going Thin).

Predictions about when the shortage will end vary from between 2007 and 2012. An ease in supply is likely to bring lower prices, and manufacturers have been investing in technology to hone their competitive edge once the shortage ends. Others have been looking at expanding into other solar services, such as installation and distribution. ...

Electric Cars Make Comeback

Electric cars enthusiasts had a great year, as startups came up with high-end electric sports cars like Tesla Motors’ Roadster and Venturi’s Fetish (see Green Machines Get Mean). Forget slow-moving, short-range neighborhood vehicles; these are meant to appeal to the mainstream, even if only the top echelon of earners can afford to actually buy one.

Plug-in hybrids are a mid-step between hybrids and electric cars, as they are hybrids with a plug so their owners can recharge at their wall outlets and reach up to 100 miles per gallon. Startups like EnergyCS and Hymotion started converting hybrids into plug-ins, and at the LA Auto Show, GM announced it would make a production version—but gave no timeline.

Red Herring also has an article on one of my favourite topics - "Eliminating Dirty Energy".

In an effort to lower greenhouse gases, the California Public Utilities Commission is considering a standard that would keep utilities from signing new contracts for electricity from “dirty” sources.


The Greenhouse Gas Emissions Performance Standard would apply to all new power plants in the state and to any new contracts more than five years in length, and would ban sources that produce more greenhouse gases than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour, according to the commission.


The standard calls for sources no dirtier than combined cycle natural gas turbines, which are more efficient—and cleaner—than older types of natural-gas plants because they not only convert gas into electricity, but also use heat from the process to generate more electricity.

And one more from red Herring - "Solar Gets Simpler"

Solar will get easier in 2007, which will be a step up from where it’s been. Aside from the pain of spending $20,000 upfront to buy the system, a solar enthusiast like Berkeley, California-based photographer Joseph Homes, for example, jumped hurdle after hurdle to get the equipment. Among other headaches, he had to schedule six installation phases between the roofer and the solar installer, navigate three different panel-rating systems to figure out which panels to buy, field inspections from the county, and buy costly homeowners’ liability insurance.

Solar’s complexity, costs, and risks have deterred all but the most determined. But 2007 may finally be the year that solar gets easy to install. With the end of a worldwide shortage of solar-grade silicon in sight, competition is expected to heat up, and the solar industry is preparing with a buying spree. System integrators—which match customers up with the right panels and other equipment—and installers could be attractive fodder for manufacturers looking for ways to place more panels on rooftops.

Renewable Energy Access has posted a lidt of their top 10 news stories of 2006.

* Million Solar Roofs Bill Signed into Law

* Solar Cell Breaks the 40% Efficiency Barrier - A photovoltaic (PV) cell achieved a milestone in December with a conversion efficiency of 40.7 percent. Produced by Spectrolab, Inc. -- a wholly owned subsidiary of Boeing -- and funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the breakthrough could lead to PV systems with an installed cost of $3 per watt and produce electricity at a cost of $0.08 to $0.10 cents per kilowatt-hour.

* Key Tax Bill for Renewables Passed by Congress

* SunPower to Acquire PowerLight

* Australia to Build 154 MW Solar Energy Plant - In the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, the Australian Government made a significant change in its energy policy this past October by announcing it will contribute AUS$ 75 million [US$ 57 million] toward building the world's largest solar energy plant as part of its recently unveiled renewable energy package.

* Virgin Group to Invest $3 Billion in Renewable Energy - Out of an estimated $7.3 billion pledged to address issues such as poverty, disease, conflict and climate change at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in September, nearly half of it will go toward renewable energy projects thanks to a $3 billion pledge by British business mogul Sir Richard Branson.

* UK Offshore Wind Projects Given Green Light - The British government gave the go-ahead for two major offshore wind farms -- the London Array and the Thanet -- to be built off the southeast coast of England in the Thames Estuary in December. Together, the projects will boast more than 400 turbines and are expected to produce up to 1.3 gigawatts of electricity when fully operational.

* Biodiesel Edges Out Ethanol - Five University of Minnesota researchers took a stand in the long-running debate over whether ethanol from corn requires more fossil fuel energy to produce than it delivers. Their answer? It delivers 25 percent more energy than is used (mostly fossil fuel) in producing it, though much of that 25 percent energy dividend comes from the production of an ethanol byproduct, animal feed.

* The Rebirth of Concentrating Photovoltaics - The Concentrating Photovoltaics (CPV) industry will soon take up a larger share of the solar market as technology improves, investment pours in and cost comes down, according to leading CPV manufacturers at the Solar Power 2006 conference and expo.

* Selling Solar to Mainstream America - When the clock strikes midnight on January 1, 2007, SB1, California's new state law that provides $3.2 billion in funding to build a million solar roofs over the next ten years, will officially take effect.

* Solar Energy Milestone Reached in the Arizona Desert - In the Arizona desert, 30 miles north of Tucson, the first Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) trough-style energy facility to be constructed in nearly two decades officially went online in April and began delivering power to the U.S. grid. The rows of gleaming mirrored troughs that power a one-megawatt (MW) generator represent a new phase for solar energy in Arizona and the broader U.S.

* Solar Power 2006 Overview, Vinod Khosla on Proposition 87

Business 2.0's "Green Wombat" column has a look at the top 10 green tech trends for 2007.

ThinkEquity alternative energy analyst David Edwards has released his Trends for 2007 list ...

No. 1 is a move from bolting solar panels to roofs - effective but not aesthetically pleasing - to integrating solar cells into building materials themselves. ... As Green Wombat recently reported, thin-film startup HelioVolt will work with building material companies to incorporate its solar cells into walls, windows and roofs.

[No. 2] is the emergence of new business models to finance alternative energy systems. Probably the biggest obstacle to wide-spread adoption of solar power systems is the fact that you have to wait as long as a decade before the free energy pays back the cost of the solar panels. "It’s like buying 25 years worth of gas when you buy your car," quipped Dave Pearce, CEO of thin-film solar company Miasole, at a recent conference. One possible alternative, according to Edwards, is to have the solar panel installer retain ownership of the rooftop system and then strike a power purchase deal with the homeowner or business owner. He notes that Wal-Mart's recent request for proposals to equip its stores with rooftop solar systems - a development first reported by green blogger Joel Makeover - requires bidders to present alternative ways to finance such systems, including ownership or leasing of solar panels by the retail giant or ownership by the installer.

Other green tech trends for the New Year predicted by Edwards are:
3. A move away from using silicon in solar cells.
4. More consolidation of solar panel producers and installers, such as SunPower's 2006 purchase solar systems installer PowerLight.
5. Adoption of new ethanol technologies.
6. The emergence of a bioplastics industry as an offshoot of biofuels production.
7. Stepped up efforts by automakers to develop electric cars or hybrids that rely more on battery power than internal combustion engines.
8. More investment in the development of storage technologies to be used with renewable energy sources like solar and wind power.
9. The continued rise of China as a huge market for renewable energy.
10. The Democrat-controlled Congress will take the lead on renewable energy legislation to bolster the solar and biofuels industries.

WorldWatch has a brief article on the 'renting solar panels" idea - "U.S. Homeowners Can Now "Rent" Solar Panels, Saving Money".

Residents of the United States will soon be able to install energy-efficient solar panels on their homes without paying significant upfront costs, according to the renewable energy development company Citizenre. The Delaware-based business has launched a program that allows customers to “rent” the panels for specified periods of time, paying a per-kilowatt fee that takes the place of the local utility bill. The monthly rate is locked in when the 1, 5 or 25-year contract is signed, so as energy prices go up participants are likely to save money while significantly reducing their output of greenhouse gases.

The rental program, called REnU, is billed as a cost-effective response to the challenges many would-be solar users face when confronted with the high costs of solar system equipment, installation, and maintenance. The program’s only upfront charge is a security deposit of roughly US$500, which is paid back—with interest—at the end of the contract. Citizenre also eliminates other disincentives to solar power adoption by acquiring the necessary permits for the system itself and by monitoring a home’s electricity usage closely to make sure it is always equipped with the appropriate number of panels.

The solar panel rentals will be offered in all but the nine U.S. states that have not yet adopted “net metering” laws allowing renewable energy to flow into the national electricity grid.

Dave Roberts has the second of a series of posts up at Tom Paine on clean energy policy, this one titled "Unified Green Field Theory", which argues the need to achieve 4 specific changes - efficient use of energy, electrified transport, killing off coal and upgrading to a smart grid.

I've argued that 2007 promises to be a year of great ferment and opportunity for greens of all stripes. It's more important than ever that they get their act together and start pushing, as one, in the direction of sustainability and justice.

The bias of U.S. capitalism‚ in hock to the Chinese, awash in consumer debt, tottering atop a rickety real estate boom‚ is toward ever-escalating energy production, material consumption and concentration of wealth.

Pushing back against this tide will require a greater degree of coordination than the green movement has typically shown. Of course it would impractical to expect too specific a common agenda. Picking winners is a dodgy business, and each bloc in the green coalition has its own idiosyncratic interests. But if they can work out a common overarching chorus, one with which everybody from security hawks to conservationists to evangelicals can sing along, greens may finally start reaching beyond the choir.

I hereby propose just such an overarching message, a mere five words long: Use renewably generated electricity, efficiently, or URGE² (watch for the bumper sticker!). As far as greens are concerned, everything that advances that goal should be supported. What doesn't should be ignored or opposed. Let's pick it apart a little.

Mine negawatts. The cheapest source of new energy, as greens are practically hoarse from repeating, is not using it. Boosting efficiency will allow us to slash the growth of energy demand and offset the (for now) higher prices of renewable energy . Energy analyst Amory Lovins famously said that what we want is not energy itself but "cold beer and hot showers," i.e. the services energy provides. The goal of energy policy should not be to increase supply at any cost, but to encourage the provision of end-use services at minimal net energy cost.

Thousands of Americans—many more thousands to come with Oprah and Wal-Mart's backing—are discovering negawatts through a rather unlikely source, the once-homely light bulb. Compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) provide the same illumination as luminescent bulbs using far less energy. Greens should tie that simple, widely grasped fact to a whole panoply of similar examples: Cars can go farther on the same fuel; manufacturers can produce the same goods with less energy; power can be generated and transmitted with less loss. Low-hanging fruit is everywhere, just like lightbulbs.

Entrenched elites will always push for more supply. It's up to greens and their allies to beat the drum for demand reduction.

Electrify. For the most part, we use two basic kinds of fuel. Liquid fuels‚ oil and natural gas‚ directly power our vehicles and heat (some of) our homes. Other sources‚ coal and hydro, also natural gas, nuclear, wind and solar‚ are used to make electricity.

The simple fact all greens need to internalize is that it's easier to find clean, renewable sources of electricity than it is to find clean, renewable liquid fuels. The logic is inexorable: We need to shift almost all power use to electricity.

This will be a long, complex and likely chaotic process. We'll probably need somewhat greener liquid fuels like ethanol, liquid natural gas (LNG) and gasified coal as bridges. We'll have to vastly improve the resilience and intelligence of the electricity grid, and develop much more effective means of electricity storage. There will be exceptions—e.g. direct solar heating. Different greens will disagree about how fast to proceed and what steps to take.

But electrification has got to be the end goal.

That means dialing back the ethanol frenzy. It means pushing for plug-in hybrids and eventually fully electric vehicles, as well as an electrified national high-speed rail system. But primarily it means escalating the fight against public enemy No. 1: oil.

Kill coal. Coal is the enemy of the human race. It is corrosive to the communities and ecosystems where it is mined. Coal-fired power plants spew particulates and mercury pollution in to the air, cutting short some 30,000 lives a year. Those power plants are also responsible for 40 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions; electric power generation is the single biggest source of global greenhouse gases. The industry funds deliberately deceptive propaganda campaigns about global warming. Coal barons like Massey Energy's Don Blankenship openly purchase state government officials to fight off labor and environmental enforcement.

So-called "clean coal" is an improvement, if it is coupled with carbon sequestration. But, as I've argued, the full cost of coal liquefaction and carbon sequestration will make coal power uncompetitive with, for example, wind.

The quickest way to kill coal is by putting a steep price on carbon emissions, enforcing existing Clean Air Act provisions on particulate pollution, and passing a tougher federal mercury pollution law.

Upgrade the grid. Dirty sources of electricity must be phased out in favor of renewable sources like wind, solar, geothermal, hydrokinetic, cogeneration and biomethane.

All these sources share one of two characteristics, typically cast as fatal flaws: they are either intermittent ("the wind doesn't always blow") or localized ("the sun doesn't shine in Seattle"). It is often taken for granted that only coal, natural gas and nuclear can provide reliable "baseload" power.

It's not true. Intermittency can be beat with good storage, and localization, in a robust, decentralized energy grid, is a feature, not a bug.

Finding good power storage technology means devoting time and money above all to battery technology (both lithium and nano), but also worth investigating are hydrogen fuel cells, pumped storage, molten-salt storage, ultracapacitors and any other gizmo that has a shot at pulling it off. Soon enough, some combination of efficiency and flexible storage technology will render the problem of intermittency irrelevant.

While there will always be a place for large-scale infrastructure‚ big generation projects, long transmission lines‚ green advocacy should push in the direction of decentralization. To the extent any region can rely on a distributed array of clean, small- to mid-size, locally appropriate energy sources, it prospers. It creates more local jobs and becomes more economically independent. And its energy system becomes more resilient in the face of accidents, natural disasters or terrorist attacks.

The green coalition is vast and varied, but there isn't a constituency within it whose interests would not be served by URGE (watch for the t-shirt!). Less land would be despoiled by drilling and mining. Energy security would be improved. Imperial military adventures would be (even more) unnecessary. Fewer low-income and minority children would suffer from asthma or mercury poisoning. More high-quality, high-skilled, unionized jobs would be created. Political and economic power would be less concentrated in a few hands.

Entrenched elites will always favor switching out one set of large-scale, concentrated sources of energy for another. But that's a mug's game. It's up to greens to lobby on behalf of the broader public interest.

In 2007, a time of great change and instability, a time when a butterfly's wings can create a hurricane, greens should for once join forces and push in the same direction. Imagine what could happen.

TreeHugger has a post on a little boat on the Thames which proclaims "I eat rubbish".

This cage is floating along the Thames River and gathering rubbish that has been thrown into the water. "I eat rubbish!", the notice fixed to it claims that it collects 40 tons of rubbish every year; the equivalent of 800,000 plastic bottles. Called a "passive debris collector", nine of them have been bobbing along the river for the past five years. Each captures tons of floating litter; bottles, cans, and plastic, that otherwise would have flowed out to sea and killed fish and birds. It was initiated by Thames21, an environmental charity working with communities to clean up the river, get rid of graffiti and create new wildlife habitats. They also operate a river cleanup boat called the “Taranchewer,” which is specially designed with a front-mounted conveyer that scoops floating litter off the water's surface. Over the past 18 months, it has hauled out over 100 tons of rubbish from the London Canal system. The Thames is now one of the cleanest metropolitan rivers, home to 115 species of birds.

Apparently Dell is another large company to start down the path to sustainability, extending their computer recycling program. Greenpeace is trying to get Apple to follow Dell's lead.

Michael Dell, chairman of Dell Inc., issued a challenge Tuesday to the entire PC industry to adopt free recycling programs for customers as he announced that his company would offer to plant a tree for every PC sold. "Today, I challenge every PC maker to join us in providing free recycling for every customer in every country you do business, all the time — no exceptions," Dell said. "It's the right thing to do for our customers. It's the right thing to do for our earth." The company has received high "green" marks from some environmental groups, including Greenpeace.

In 2004, Dell began offering free recycling of any brand of computer or printer if consumers bought a new Dell system. The policy was revised in June so that consumers can recycle all Dell-branded printers, personal computers or other electronics gear for free, no purchase of new Dell gear required. For those not buying a new system or who don't have Dell equipment, the Round Rock, Texas, company will take back used electronics for $10 per box, as long as it weighs less than 50 lbs.

Dell, the company's founder, made his remarks during a keynote at the International Consumer Electronics Show.

With a comedic assist from actor Mike Myers appearing as the "Austin Powers" movie character Dr. Evil, Dell also announced a new "Plant a Tree for Me" program, in which customers can choose to have $2 of a laptop purchase, or $6 of a desktop purchase, go toward funds to plant trees around the world. "We're the first global technology company to offset emissions with the electricity of their computers," Dell said.

Dr. Evil gave his approval, and so did the audience, which clapped after the announcement. "We can't destroy the planet, otherwise I have nothing to take over," the stage villain quipped.

Alex at WorldChanging has a post on WorldWatch's "State of the World" report for 2007 which looks at Our Urban Future (which sounds a little like my "Cities are the future" slogan).

By the end of this decade, there will be nearly 3.5 billion city-dwellers.

The annual State of the World report, prepared by our allies at Worldwatch, has long been one of the most critical resources for understanding the problems facing our planet and their possible solutions. This year's report, though, Our Urban Future, is even more prescient and vital than usual.

That's because Our Urban Future tackles the challenge of building sustainable cities, and cities (as we've long remarked here) are the best levers we have for creating rapid transformation to a bright green future (which is why we devoted one of the seven chapters of Worldchanging to cities and the best tools, models and ideas for changing them).

Indeed, it's difficult, in some ways, for me to be fair in reviewing Our Urban Future, because it covers so much of the same ground as our book. If I didn't like it so much, I'd probably have assigned it to someone else. But I do: it's an excellent piece of work.

Obviously, if I'd edited it, I would have focused more on the potential of transformative innovations, from walkshed technologies and bright green urbanism to megacity leapfrogging, the sorts of social innovations we've seen in Bogota and the sorts of ecological innovations promised by Dongtan. Molly O'Meara Sheehan, on the other hand, has chosen to focus more on well-proven efforts.

Both are fine approaches, and if I think Worldchanging's take on these issues has the virtue of better helping people to imagine their own places wildly transformed (as they must be in order to meet the magnitude of the challenge), Worldwatch's has the advantage that existence is the proof of the possible, and the steps they discuss are ones whose tires you can go out and kick, so to speak. And like all of Worldwatch's books, it is analytically thorough, packed full of statistics and rigorously footnoted. Therefore, as a reference volume alone it offers real value.

Three chapters in particular are excellent and have already helped reshape my thinking.

* Providing Clean Water and Sanitation ...
* Farming the Cities ...
* Reducing Natural Disaster Risk in Cities ...

Mother Jones has a blog post on fuel efficiency gains that can be made courtesy of intelligent navigation systems that map out the most efficient driving route.

Just as we learn that 2006 was the warmest on record in the U.S., a study published in today’s Nature shows that storing nuclear waste over the tens of thousands, let alone hundreds of thousands, of years will be difficult because the storage containers are transformed by the radiation. Scientists from Cambridge University found that one of the ceramiclike materials favored by engineers, zirconium silicate, turned to glass in just 1,400 years.

Because many radioactive substances continue emitting radiation for a very long time, the containment must persist for an awesome duration. Plutonium-239, one of the most deadly by-products of nuclear power, has a half-life of 24,000 years, meaning that only half of any initial batch has decayed over this time. Ideally it should stay put for about ten times as long: a quarter of a million years.

So nuclear is still a big problem for a lot of reasons, and not the no-brainer fix some would hope. Odds are, the solution will come in smaller packages cobbled inventively together. NewScientist reports that a researcher at the Lund Institute of Technology in Sweden has been testing a satnav system programmed to work out the most efficient and least polluting route to drive.

[Eva] Ericsson and her colleagues report that the average fuel saving on the 22 streets was 8.2 per cent compared with journeys planned by other methods… None of the streets was particularly congested, however, and Ericsson estimates that savings on most journeys would be closer to 4 per cent.

The Daily Mail in the UK has an article on a "Waterwheel invention which promises cheap electricity" from small streams.

It's a mechanical problem that's troubled scientists since Archimedes and the ancient Greeks but now an electrician has come up with a new invention that could help save consumers thousands of pounds in energy bills.

Scotsman Ian Gilmartin, 60, and his friend Bob Cattley, 58, both from Kendal, Cumbria have invented a mini-waterwheel capable of supplying enough electricity to power a house - for free. The contraption is designed to be used in small rivers or streams - ideal for potentially thousands of homes across Britain. It is the first off-the-shelf waterwheel system which can generate a good supply of electricity from a water fall as little as 20cm.

The prototype has now been working successfully at St Catherine's, a National Trust site near Windermere, opening up previously untapped energy. The waterwheel produces one to two kilowatts of power and generates at least 24 kilowatt hours of sustainable green energy in a day, just under the average household's daily consumption of around 28 kilowatt hours. It will hope to cost around £2,000 to fully install - and will pay for itself in side two years.

The Beck Mickle 'low head' micro hydro generator could potentially provide electricity to more than 50,000 British homes and could be used industrially.

Mr Gilmartin said: "While we cannot say this provides free electricity, because of the initial cost of buying the machine, it is expected to pay for itself within two years and then greatly reduce the owner's electricity bills after then."

Waterwheels of various types have been known since Roman times and hydropower was widely used in the Middle Ages, powering most industry in Europe. But the energy produced from the flow of water depends on the height, or head, that the water falls. A 'high head' like a traditional water-wheel, is large, expensive and needs civil engineering. But with 'low heads' - under a 18 inches, no one had yet invented a method of successfully recovering the energy generated.

Researchers have long sought out low cost technology to exploit the vast number of suitable low head hydro sites as a source of renewable energy.

John Addison at CleanTech Blog has a post on WalMart's efforts to improve the fuel efficiency of their truck fleet.

Wal-Mart generated much excitement with an RFP to bring solar power to 300 stores. Wal-Mart is making more green investment as it sees early returns in investments already made.

Long distance trucks are vital to moving the goods. These big trucks are powered by efficient diesel engines, often achieving 25% better mileage than gasoline engines and 50% better than ethanol. These trucks will be one of the last vehicle types to switch to cleaner fuels or to use hybrid drive systems. Diesel engines are efficient, the infrastructure is there, and the fleets are replaced slowly. There are, however, many ways to make these diesel trucks more energy efficient.

Wal-Mart operates 3,300 trucks that in 2005 drove 455 million miles to make 900,000 deliveries to its 6,500 stores. Wal-Mart has set a goal of doubling the fuel efficiency of its new heavy-duty trucks from 6.5 to 13 miles per gallon by 2015, thereby keeping some 26 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the air between now and 2020. Green Car Congress

A big loss for Wal-Mart and all long distance truckers is that engines are left running at stops for many auxiliary needs including air conditioning, heating, running electronics inside the cab and more. Wal-Mart installed small diesel engines for auxiliary power units on all trucks. Wal-Mart installed APUs in 100% of its trucks during the past couple years, saving them 25 million a year in fuel costs and reducing carbon output from their trucks by 100,000 cubic feet per year. Bob Sutton

Wal-Mart worked with the Rocky Mountain Institute to introduce new trucks with many energy saving improvements including better aerodynamics, transmissions and tires. Wind skirts under the trailer significantly reduced wind resistance and improved mileage. Wal-Mart combined the two wheels normally seen on a rear axle into a single wheel that is not quite as wide as the sum of two wheels. This gives a smoother ride and better fuel economy from the reduced surface area and improved tire wall stiffness. Wal-Mart also has more than 100 hybrid light-duty vehicles fleet, with plans to double its hybrid fleet.

Wal-Mart saves diesel fuel both with vehicle technology and common sense. By working with its suppliers, Wal-Mart is fitting more goods in smaller and lighter packaging. More goods move in a truck without adding weight. Fuel is saved. Wal-Mart is also disciplined about keeping tires properly inflated. Small economies over 455 million miles create big results.

I came across Jethro Tull singer Ian Anderson's blog recently, in which he is pontificating on climate change.

In a year when the climate change message really started to kick in – especially via the good offices of Schwarzenegger and Gore – the personal guilt and questioning regarding professional our air travel and other carbon hoof-prints of a fairly giant sort are cause for concern Ian Andersonamongst us musicians. Oh, yes – I have planted many thousands of trees - mostly English Oak - in the last few years here, in middle England and they are growing rather better, it would appear, than that young Coldplay’s attempts at eco-afforestation. Now, they say, thousands of trees equals thousands of tons of CO2 absorption whereas I have contributed only about 800 tons of aircraft travel-related CO2 over all the years I have been a professional musician. Now while you might figure that gives me the right to make another few lifetimes of flights, it is not much of an argument. Reducing the mess-making in the first place is preferable to attempting to clear up afterwards….. Don’t you think?

Check out http://www.climatecare.org to calculate your carbon emissions and to contribute to an off-set scheme, for yourself or on behalf of friends and families.

So, guilt cap in hand, I made my first bus trip with the band and crew a few weeks ago through Holland, Germany, Denmark and Sweden to see if I could function as a lesser-carbon footprint, decent, hygienic and sociable bus-person after 39 years of going it alone on the worlds polluting airplanes, and slightly less-polluting trains and automobiles.

The precisely-steering and bump-avoiding Yorkie, Tull bus-driver for many a long year, made the journey more comfortable than I had hoped, but 3 hours sleep is not really enough for me. Maybe you get used to it. And maybe, speaking as a very light sleeper, you don’t.

It’s all right for that Ann Marie. She drops off at the turn of a bible page and the crew guys power down into the land of the nodders in less time than it takes them to log off Windows.

Yes, I know we are going off to work rather than goofing off on some unnecessary vacation but I guess we are all going to have bite bullets in the years to come. No point in blaming the Chinese and the Indians. We all have to swallow the nasty medicine stuff if we want to leave a tolerable planet for our great-grandchildren. So, it’s the long-life light bulbs, switching off electrical appliances at the wall, getting a new eco-friendly Toyota Prius, Honda hybrid or a bicycle. Shona and I are off to the nearest Toyota showroom next week.

On her bicycle.

When I wrote about climate change in the song Skating Away On The Thin Ice Of The New Day back in 1974, the scientists of the day turned out to have got it wrong. The planet has warmed, not cooled, as a result of CO2 emissions. But none of my generation can claim innocence in regard to our individual and collective greed of the last 30 years, or so. Did it really take gas-guzzling Arnie to wake up California? The mild-mannered Al to shake up the rest of America? (An Inconvenient Truth is now available as a DVD in Europe as from this week. My copy arrived in the post this morning.)

My hope and belief is that when the great American public get motivated and demand of their political leaders the opportunity to make the necessary personal and industrial changes, that America will show the way to the rest of the world. The traditional Detroit auto industry, so long in the doldrums and lagging behind Asia, can rebuild, retool and reinvent the personal transport of tomorrow if it chooses the right way now. The resources are there. The workforce is there. The management is there. All it takes is the realisation that combating climate change is not some form of Federal Government-imposed industrial and economic punishment but the chance to stimulate the national and world economies with new thought and direction. At the Detroit Motor Show this month, a new prototype by General Motors, the Chevrolet Volt, was unveiled. Designed to produce 120 miles per hour, 150 staggering miles to the gallon, and 0 – 60 in 8 seconds, this would provide sports car performance from an electric car. A hybrid only in the sense that it has an on-board petrol-fueled generator to charge the batteries. If this is to be believed, it seems to show that the car industry can change and maybe the aviation industry too, in time.

Alternative energy investment and the transport industries re-thinking their futures, both technologically and commercially – even morally – have to be high on the agenda for America as well as the rest of the world. Like a fine wine, complex and slow to start but with a great finish, the USA can really influence the world if it wants to. The chance is there now to impact internationally and in infinitely more productive ways than the by some other results of US and UK foreign policy over the last years. Don’t get me started.

Tom Konrad has a post on Vehicle to Grid, without the Vehicle.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how plug-in hybrids will change the economics of wind. The idea is that they con be programmed to charge when there is surplus capacity on the electric grid (at night, and especially when the wind is blowing), and even act to do a little peak shaving by providing back up power during peak times, a technology referred to as Vehicle-to-Grid or V2G. Hybrids-Plus of Boulder has even teamed up with Colorado’s Office of Energy Management and Conservationand others to build a demonstration Prius+ with V2G capability.

This is a great idea, and it is likely to both speed the adoption of plug-in hybrids (because the energy management services a car with V2G capability can offer are valuable to a utility, and so some utilities will probably be persuaded to provide a rebate to buyers in their service area) and the adoption of wind power (because the intermittent power from can be used more effectively by plug-in-hybrids than it can by the current gird.

Unfortunately, it will be at least 5 years and probably a lot more before we see mass production plug-in-hybrid or electric vehicles with V2G, given the long lead times needed to introduce new models and technology in the automotive industry. This got me thinking: why does the V2G concept have to be limited to cars? Don’t we have lots of electronic equipment that has internal batteries for portable use, but which we often leave plugged in to the grid?

The answer, of course, is right in front of me: my laptop. There are lots of them, they all have batteries, and they’re usually plugged in (mine is, at least.)

Uninterruptible power supplies(UPS) are less common, but perhaps even better candidates, because there is no weight constraint imposed by the fact that we often lug our laptops around with us, and are always plugged in. If an electric utility were to offer relatively large rebates (through a Demand Side Management program) to customers who bought a special UPS that the could signal to only charge when there was surplus power was available on the grid, and to supply high-value power to the grid at peak, many businesses and individuals for whom a battery backup was only a matter of convenience rather than necessity might buy them. Such an upgraded UPS would likely extensive additions to the electronics, because they already have electronics to regulate voltage drops and spikes for the devices plugged into them. I’m no electrical engineer, but it seems to be that it would not be too difficult to reconfigure a UPS to provide regulation and virtual spinning reserves for the grid as a whole.

The great advantage of this approach is that a V2G UPS could be available to the public much sooner than a V2G plug-in hybrid. This would allow utilities the opportunity to evaluate the effects of fairly large scale deployment of V2G plug-in hybrids, without nearly as much expense, and years sooner than could happen with cars.

JCWinnie at After Gutenberg has a post on smart grids, energy storage and V2G. If I could find a way of registering so I could leave a comment on his blog, I'd note that that V2G without the vehicle isn't an idea that came from thinking about UPS' - its an idea of Richard Smalley's that well precedes the V2G concept.

Much has been made of V2G (Vehicle 2 Grid) as a way that utilities, by offering two-way charging stations, might have access to local storage of energy.



A molten salt system can be can be a means to store thermal energy, thus mitigating the problem of an intermittent source for generating electricity at night or during cloudy weather.

In [Tom Konrad's] next most recent post, he mentions that molten salt thermal storage is one of his top ten favorites for an alternative energy future. “It’s cheaper to store heat than electricity,” writes Dr. Konrad, “and molten salts can store a ton of BTu’s very cheaply. And concentrating solar power can produce a ton of heat… without pollution or fuel.”

He also mentioned V2G, but in his most recent post, he suggests V2G… without the Vehicle. What probably gave him the idea was the heavy, bulky, expensive, hardly-ever-used, UPS (Uninterruptible power supplies) sitting in his home office. He imagined that a way utilities could spread out the cost of spinning reserves by offering to lots of consumers a cheaper UPS that could be used by the utility.

While, in theory, lots and lots of batteries connected to a modern, optimized Grid can comprise a temporary energy repository, so that utilities could shave peak load, the consumer route seems somewhat unlikely. Perhaps, as the cost differential between peak and off-peak times increases, organizations with high peak demands or that need to invest in backup power systems will look to offsetting those costs by investing in systems that allow for peak shaving.

That’s not to say that Big Eddie is uninterested in providing a more ubiquitous, more efficient and potentially much cleaner fuel for grid connected transportation. Cal Cars News reports James Woolsey noting recently that utilities are interested “because of the substantial benefit to them of being able to sell off-peak power at night. Because off-peak nighttime charging uses unutilized capacity, DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory estimates that adopting plug-ins will not create a need for new base load electricity generation plants until plug-ins constitute over 84% of the country’s 220 million passenger vehicles.”

Thus, plug-in hybrids and other Grid connected transportation will “save the Grid5“, not in the way that Kevin Bullis rasps*, rather more simply, by a regaining importance as a critical, national energy program.

Tom Konrad also has an interesting post on the "importance of understanding the utlity mind" (ie. understanding the importance of grid reliability to utlities) when attempting to increase the penetration of renewable energy generation.

I feel that many of us renewable energy activists do not understand how utility planners think. To us, we see wind as cheap electricity, but to them it is the Predator (of movie fame), something that looks benign and friendly, but at any moment will wreak havoc on their grid by turning off unpredictably.

In order to have a constructive conversation with utility planners, I think it is important to understand their point of view. This is my attempt to do that, with the hope by doing so, we will be able to engage with them more productively.

These are what I see as the underlying principles that shape the utility planning process:

There is no God but Reliability, and Least-Cost is his prophet.

Or, put another way,

The Holy Trinity of electric resource planning: The Baseload, The Cost, and the Holy Reliability.

I use the religious references to make a point: reliability is a religion for utility planners, and people become defensive and angry when you threaten their religion. If we want to work with the utilities, we need to address their real concerns about intermittent renewable resources such as wind and solar. And we have to work with utilities if we are going to modernize the way we get and use electricity.

How do we deal with people committed to this religion? By taking their concerns seriously, and helping them find solutions. In short, when we hear “Wind is so unreliable,” we should say “That’s true. Here are some ways we can take advantage of the benefits of wind without compromising the integrity of the grid. We can be allies in getting regulators to approve rates that allow utilities to get a fair rate of return on these measures that improve reliability, while also allowing more wind onto the grid without impacting reliability.”

Why do we expect them to listen? Because they already have and have to work to deal with a problem that is very similar to unpredictable generation from wind: unpredictable loads. People and companies turn appliances and whole factories on and off unpredictably, and never once do they think about calling up the utility first to let them know that they should have the necessary capacity ready at the appropriate time. Instead, we as consumers just flip a switch, and never expect that the lights won’t come on because there is not enough capacity. If they don’t we get angry.

How do utilities accomplish this seemingly impossible feat of matching supply to capricious demand? They do it with extensive load modelling, so that they can predict approximately how much load will be on the system at any given time with a fair degree of accuracy, and by maintaining “Spinning reserves,” which are basically generators which are already up an running under very low power (hence “spinning”) and turning in synchronization with the current of the grid, like a non-hybrid car sitting at idle.

When there is a sudden increase in the necessary load, they can then increase the power produced from the spinning reserves almost instantaneously, like the motorist of our metaphor starting up when a light turns green.

There are many types of generation that can be used as spinning reserves, not only gas turbines. Hydroelectric dams can work well this way, and can agreements with neighboring utilities to supply power when it is needed, on the theory that two different utilities will not have the same load patterns, and so both utilities can gain by trading power back and forth as needed.

There are many proposals circulating to increase grid reliability and ability to accept more intermittent resources. As is usual in complex problems, there is no one solution, and in this case it will always be a combination of many of these (and some I don’t know about… please leave comments if you have ideas I’ve left out), and the mix will vary widely depending on the unique situation of any particular utility.

1. More transmission. Wind not only needs massive new transmission capacity to get the electricity from windy rural areas to the places that need power, but a more robust grid means that widely dispersed wind farms can all provide power to a single utility. Since the weather varies in different places, this has the benefit of making the system as a whole a lot less variable. Denmark sells power to Germany, Norway, and Sweden when their wind farms produce more power than they can use.
2. Moving to a national electricity system from the current system of regional grids would also ease the flow of wind power from one region to another.

3. Time of Use/ time-based pricing. Time of use pricing allows a utility to charge less or more for power depending on how much power is available at any given time. Time of use pricing is currently a hodge-podge consisting of none at all for some utilities, and others that offer it (or even mandate it) for/to all customer classes. Often time of use pricing simply consists of two prices: on- and off-peak, but the ideal goal for this is to actually have real time pricing, which will even depend on that day’s weather forecast (on windy days, electricity should be cheaper than otherwise.) The ideal goal would be to eventually move all electricity customers to real-time or near real-time electricity pricing, so that customers who are willing to adjust their usage patterns are compensated for the service that they are providing to the system as a whole.
4. Demand side management goes hand in hand with time of use pricing. Demand side management involves giving customers incentives to keep their load from peaking too much at any one time.
5. Dispatchable/Interruptible loads involve allowing the utility a certain amount of control over their customer’s energy use. The classic example is installing a remote switch on an air conditioner, so that on a hot day, the utility can regulate it so that they don’t all come on a the same time, but rather take turns, lowering the peak demand on the grid. Utilities typically pay their customers for this right for remote control.
6. Large scale electricity storage: Pumped hydroelectric, flow batteries, hydrogen and stationary fuel cells, and compressed air energy storage are all ways to store large amounts of power when it is plentiful and cheap (on windy nights, for instance) until it is scarce and expensive (late afternoon and early evening.)
7. Distributed energy storage, such as plug in hybrid or electric vehicles with vehicle to grid. Vehicles which charge from the grid can be beneficial even if they are not capale of sending power back to the grid, simply because their owners can charge them only at non-peak times, a practice which is easy to incentivize with time of use pricing.
8. New forms of generation that can serve as backup power. Concentrating Solar with thermal storage, landfill gas turbines, and biomass gasification are all possibilities. One often overlooked advantage of IGCC(”Clean Coal”) is that electric power from IGCC is generated by a gas turbine which burns the syngas product of the gasification step. While it is quite possible that carbon capture and sequestration may never be made to work with IGCC, this is one reason (along with lower emissions of traditional pollutants and higher efficiency, which reduces carbon emissions for MWh generated) that renewable energy activists should prefer IGCC to old style pulverized coal plants.
9. Increase energy efficiency, especially in appliances that are often used during peak times. In most of the United States, peak load usually occurs on hot afternoons and evenings when air conditioners are running, so replacing an air conditioner with a more efficient one not only reduces overall energy use, it also reduced peak demand. Once again, the institution of time of use pricing would give customers the incentive to upgrade the right appliances for energy efficiency first. Here are two advances in efficient air conditioning I’m particularly excited about the Delphi HMX (formerly known as Coolerado), and thermally driven dessicant cooling.

For a contrarian view on my optimism about the potential for smart grids and a future global energy grid to solve a lot of our problems, Jason at Anthropik is opining that the grid (in North America) has reached the practical limits of complexity and is headed for collapse, in "The World’s Biggest Machine is Breaking Down". My view is the more sources of power you add to the grid, and the more interconnections you create within the grid, the more resilient it is likely to become to problems caused by sudden shifts in generation or load (whether due to accidents or deliberate acts of destruction) - much like a computer network.

Many of the so-called "alternatives" to fossil fuels rely on the electrical grid. We have seen the problems that nuclear and photovoltaics will face even delivering on their production promises, but even if they were to somehow solve those problems, there is still the problem of the grid itself. Most of the energy sources offered are simply means of generating electricity; this is applied to necessities like transportation through innovations like hydrogen batteries or electric cars. Even so, the electricity itself must be transported from the nuclear power plant, PV cell, or other means by which it is produced, to the car it will power, or the home it will heat, or whatever other task the energy is needed for.

That transportation is provided by the electrical power grid. Sometimes called "the world's biggest machine" by engineers, most of the energy "alternatives" proposed will require it to not only continue supplying us with the energy we use now (and the energy we'd need for economic growth anyway), but additionally to also carry the energy load we will need to replace our fossil fuel usage. This will be an impossible feat, since the current load alone is already breaking down "the world's biggest machine" under the weight of its own complexity.

First, we must establish some basic physics about electricity in order to understand why this giant "machine" is breaking down. Most importantly, electricity is an event more than it is a "thing." Electricity is the movement of electrons; to send electricity over some distance, it must propogate itself, with each electical charge causing more electrons down the line to move. Every object has some amount of conductivity for electrical current; copper is especially good at this, which is why electrical wires are typically made of copper. However, every object also has some amount of resistance: even travelling through copper, an electrical charge diminishes the farther it travels. This is why booster stations are necessary—this also means that the more electricity has to travel, the more energy must be generated simply to overcome resistance.

The second thing that must be understood is the result of this: the electrical grid is a graph. This is a term used here in the mathematical sense: a collection of nodes, connected by edges. The nodes here are both power plants and the various places where electricity is consumed (though electrical power companies differentiate between the long-range "transmission" and the short-range "distribution" of electrical power). Edges can have weights (and in this case, they do—the resistance that must be overcome to transport electricity along that line). This means that the "world's biggest machine" is a gigantic graph. ...

As a result of this, not every edge is created equal. Eliminating a key edge may cause cascading failure that will break the entire grid. What is more, in a complex graph, it may be difficult or even impossible to know which edges these are.

In August 2003, a tree branch in Ohio caused the largest blackout in North America's history, for a fairly simple reason: the electrical grid is so complex, and running so close to capacity, that even small problems can cascade into catastrophic breakdowns. As with most problems of complexity beyond the point of diminishing returns, the question of what finally pushed the system over the edge is much less important than the question of what made the system of complex that it became vulnerable to something so small in the first place. ...

In order for most "alternative energy" solutions to work, the electrical grid will need to carry a far greater load—yet it is already straining to carry its current load. The electrical power grid is reaching the practical limits of complexity; brute force efforts to increase its capacity simply will not work. ...

Moreover, the complexity of the grid makes it incredibly susceptible not only to accidents, but to attacks, as well. ...

In order to make electrical power secure, it must be low-scale and relatively local, eliminating the need for an expansive, complex grid to deliver it. ...

Of course, this does little to avert collapse, since this small-scale, localized approach is a collapse from the greater complexity of the international North American power grid. Photovoltaics and other renewable energy sources may play a role in the future, but they will not save civilization, for the simple fact that these energy sources are only viable on a local scale. By shifting the patterns of energy, one also shifts the patterns of control and power. ...

If "alternatives" force us to turn to localized energy, then they are not "alternatives" at all. Without domination of the energy one requires in society to survive, who would submit to a despotic political system? Without centralized control of energy, civilization collapses as local, sustainable cultures emerge to provide freedom and prosperity for their friends and kin. The complexity of the electricity grid precludes any of the "alternative energy" schemes from providing any actual alternative for civilization—though they may well provide creature comforts for human beings who will enjoy a new freedom rooted in their local landbase.

Lawrence Lessig has a column in Wired on network neutrality and the emergence of municipal broadband providers (there are a couple of examples of this beginning to be proposed in Australia as well. I occasionally wonder if this model has applicability to the smart (energy) grid - and if the even more distributed grassroots communications architecture (peer to peer wireless mesh networks) could also have some lessons for distributed energy generation and transmission.

I was one of those reluctant regulators. As the evidence of Microsoft's practices became clear, I remember well thinking, "Of course the government needs to do something." And I remember very well the universal impatience with the notion that the market would solve the problem. How could it, when any other company was likely to behave just as Microsoft did?

We pro-regulators were making an assumption that history has shown to be completely false: That something as complex as an OS has to be built by a commercial entity. Only crazies imagined that volunteers outside the control of a corporation could successfully create a system over which no one had exclusive command. We knew those crazies. They worked on something called Linux.

I wanted to believe that Linux would prevail. But I'm a lawyer, and lawyers aren't programmed to see how profitable innovation might happen without commercial control. I didn't like the idea of regulation; I just didn't see any alternative. The suits would always beat the rebels. Isn't that why they were so rich?

I think about this mistake whenever I think about the current Microsoft-like network-neutrality debate – whether network owners can pick the stuff that flows across "their" network. In this debate, too, I am a reluctant regulator. And again, I don't see how it's possible to steer broadband providers away from a business model that – like Microsoft's – may benefit them but could stifle innovation. Every dominant commercial competitor has the same incentive: to build a business that extracts all potential value from the pipes that company owns.

But life is all about repeating the same mistakes in many different contexts. So, are we reluctant regulators wrong again? Is there something we think is impossible today that will be obvious tomorrow? Can last-mile broadband be developed in a way that doesn't rely on the incentives that drive current providers toward innovation-stifling business models?

Yes. There isn't yet a Linus Torvalds of broadband, nor is a single competitive platform being built by volunteers to displace AT&T. But there are forces mucking up the game for those who would profit most from last-mile control.

The core of this resistance comes from municipalities. Local governments are building neutral infrastructures that allow anyone, from ISPs to community networks, to use and extend blisteringly fast broadband networks. At the end of its first year, a project in Sandoval County, New Mexico, for example, already provides many in the area with more than 10 times the capacity than anywhere else in the US.

And municipal networks are just a first step. Many Linux-style volunteers are building free wireless networks that enable participants to share access and offer capacity to others. These volunteers are also building free protocols that enable legal access without shifting control to a last-mile access provider.

These activists recognize the basic truth of what I call the McAdams theorem: Monopolists, as Cornell economist Alan McAdams puts it, don't monopolize themselves. If the monopoly-like asset is owned by the user, he has little incentive to exploit himself. Put differently, private ownership by users creates its own business model.

Will these grassroots alternatives check the power of the big companies? I remain skeptical. But the frantic efforts of traditional broadband providers to persuade states to ban municipal broadband should give you some clue as to the potential of these services.

Those who oppose network-neutrality regulation should also oppose this regulation of last-mile broadband's most important competitor. Municipal competition won't kill commercial broadband any more than Linux has killed Windows. Yet it could change the business model of last-mile broadband, just as Linux has changed the business model of Microsoft. If there's going to be a Linux-like miracle to counteract innovation-threatening broadband business models, then, at a minimum, miracles must not be a crime.

Bruce Sterling has his customary "state of the world" chat at the Well over the New Year which contained all manner of interesting snippets.

inkwell.vue.289 : Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2007
permalink #3 of 104: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Fri 29 Dec 06 10:43

*Here I am, logging in this year from Belgrade, Serbia.

*I agree that 2006 wasn't one of those big dramatic 2001-style years when everybody agrees that all bets are off and then they start shoving each other through the keyhole of their own strategies. It looked to me like a year when the world was on autopilot and deeper trends just kept piling up.

*First, the US mission in Iraq got pretty severely un-accomplished. Now that this has finally been publicly admitted, the US is in for two years of lame-duckness. Bush can't do much; he spent all his credibility and the country's wealth in his military adventure. The previous Congress wanted to do as little as possible, while the new Congress doesn't know what it wants and doesn't have a big enough majority to do anything radical.

*In 2006, the rest of the world finally learned how to ignore the USA. The US has no diplomatic or economic soft-power initiatives to offer, and nobody's
eager to mimic their line of development, so they frankly don't matter much. The US probably hasn't looked this bewildered and helpless since before World War I.

*Everybody wants to disown neocon strategy, including the neocons, because that strategy never worked. Still, it was, in point of fact, a strategy. Nobody else has one.

*Europe didn't exhaust its military hard-power (because it scarcely has any) and it's doing more than okay economically. but it definitely bogged down in
imperio-political overstretch. It doesn't know how to govern the host of new territories it has agglomerated. The governing class had some swell ideas and the voting population spat on those, so Europe is in for another sleepy, python-like digestive period.

On the plus side, Germany seems to have finally managed that feat and is looking perkier than it has since reunification. This is a cheery sign that all these Eastern European newhires are gonna catch a clue eventually, so the expansion will pay off someday. There really isn't a counterforce eager to scourge and crush Europe, so it can blunder along Hapsburg-Empire style for at least a while. Those left out of Europe are gonna get resentful, but they may cling to each other for comfort rather than get all aggressive.

*Russia was the winner of the War for Oil, so they've learned how to turn off the gas taps and wax all petrocratic. Unfortunately they're run by a tiny Czarist-style clique of spooky Rasputin radioactive poison fanatics, so when their shadow crosses the global landscape everybody crosses their fingers and shies away. Luckily, a surprising number of guys they managed to poison, ambush and shoot were Chechen warlords, so their personal Islamic crisis is on the back burner.

*Castro got sick, but Chavez is the new Castro and he's got megatons of oil. Chavez could do whatever he wants, but he's not very bright and he likes the look of his own face in the mirror better than any sight in the world. History will likely judge that Castro and even Bolivar get much the same assessment.

*There were no massive hurricanes in the US this year, but typhoons kicked the hell out of Asia, and Australia is having the worst drought in a thousand years. Everybody's been figuring climate change for a poor man's problem, mostly because the Left own the green issue and they're very big on social issues, but Australia is a right-wing state full of rich white guys, and they may be more direly vulnerable to climate change than any nation in the
world.

*Ethiopia is a Christian state and decided to invade Somalia before the weird Islamic-court non-state there got totally out of hand. Ethiopia has something akin to a national army, so they rumbled right into Somalia with the same armored glee that Israel showed in south Lebanon, NATO showed in Afghanistan and the US did in Iraq. I can't imagine that this is going to end well.

*Al Qaeda's strategy has been dominant since 9/11. It's to crack nation-states apart by killing so many innocents that daily life becomes unendurable.
They didn't launch any major action in 2006; with Afghanistan and Iran ungovernable and Israel at their wits' ends behind towering walls, they probably figure they're winning. They probably are, but whenever they do win, they're like a gang of weasels who've caught a car.

*Al Qaeda can't govern; they just produce chaos. Hezbollah is a paramilitary terror network that can almost manage to govern. Sort of. The Islamic Courts
in Somalia weren't even terrorists; they are a serious-minded justice system very interested in law and order, but they were home-made courts without a legislature or an executive, so they're not a legitimate state and states want nothing to do with them. Islamic peoples has never thrived in the alien Westphalian nation-state system. Unfortunately they thrive even worse outside of it.

*I think there were two polities in 2006 who really managed to play their cards right: India and China. If you were Indian or Chinese, 2006 felt like solid progress and you'd love more of the same. Given that the two of them are a major chunk of the planet's population, 2006 wasn't that bad a year. The least-reported major story of the year was probably that China and India seriously and thoughtfully decided to make nice with each other. I think they looked at their global shipping figures and they figured out that they are no longer regional rivals. A "region" doesn't matter worth a damn any more. Their ambitions are global, and it makes a lot more great-power sense to tackle the world shoulder-to-shoulder than it does to try to divvy up Asia.

*In conclusion, I'd agree that there is a frenzy of creative green thinking this year. I've never seen the like. Unfortunately, green doing, as opposed to thinking, is about forty years overdue. Even though there's quite a lot of green doing, too, it's starting mighty small.

How can we ramp it up? I've been working with Worldchanging, and we talk a
lot about solutions, and we find a few, but I'm wondering how to orchestrate
the solutions so that they synergize and produce something more than a lot of
ahas and back-patting?

Sell out, man. That's the answer. It's gotta be money. Huge amounts of money. Ford and Rockefeller amounts of money. There isn't any worlchanging mechanism that moves as fast, as ruthlessly, as comprehensively as the market.

You could do it with state intervention, if you had a really stout, solid, honest, well-governed state, but there aren't any left. Not even one. The global market ate all of them. It ate the state system so comprehensively that there are big scary gaps in the planet with no states at all.

It's gonna take a tremendous amount of money to fix a soiled planetary atmosphere. There's never been a state-sponsored project that size. Not even close. It makes the Hoover Dam look like a cork.

You look around at people taking serious remediary steps... they're not politicians. They're not shoestring activists and Seattle 99ers. They're rich moguls. Michael Bloomberg. Vinod Khosla. Richard Branson. The Google boys. Wal-Mart. Two percent of the population, the financial super-elite, owns fifty percent of the planet.

I'm not saying that's a good situation, or that its politically smart to suck up to such profoundly antidemocratic characters, but they're the only ones with levers in their hands. ...


So the rich and powerful still run the show, despite all the lip
service paid to supposed democracy. We still have whole movements
scrambling to adopt technologies that will give everybody a voice in
the governance discussion, and we spend volumes of money and energy on
political campaigns that hope to sway the voters this way or that. Does
the collective intelligence matter? Does it matter whether the average
joe or jolene is informed about what's happenging, and has something
to say about it?

I don't think today's rich and powerful "run the show" -- in the sense that there used to be a coherent show and it used to be runnable. Today's rich and powerful are meritocrats and plutocrats, rather than some class-based old-school-tie phalanx Establishment. Any earlier set of the rich-and-powerful would have regarded contemporary players like Gates and Soros and Perot and Berlusconi and Murdoch and Bloomberg and bin Laden to be strange, jumped-up, arriviste, nouveau-riche types, crazily unstable pretenders who don't even bother to send their daughters to the cotillion ball.

We really need some new class-term for these modern tycoons who've been flung into the planetary stratosphere by today's amazingly unequal wealth distributions. "Mogul" is a pretty good revived word. It suggests that current Russian model of five or six guys who've divvied up a national economy into privatized secretive satrapies that exist outside the rule of law.

But to imagine that some mogul in exile in London, sweating bullets over radioactive poison, is really "running the show..." I mean, yeah, he's surely a player of some kind... but is he "running it?" By what right? Through what clear and legitimized set of accountabilities and responsibilities? There aren't any. He's obviously winging it totally. They guy's not a conventional political or economic actor at all. The guy's basically a conspirator.

This Russian Mogul isn't the time-honored Duke of Aluminum, he's just a hustler who blundered into de-facto control of a hastily privatized industrial sector. Would a Russian Joe Sixpack or a Russian Jane Winecooler behave any differently in this mogul's shoes? Probably not, actually. After about a week surviving this guy's parlous condition they'd be behaving exactly like he does.

Labor unions used to exist as a counterforce to this kind of robber-baron phenomenon, but current wealth-generation techniques don't actually need a lot of mass labor. There's never been a big popular strike against Gates and Soros and Perot and Bloomberg and bin Laden. The very idea sounds weird.

Most normal people never meet the modern ultrawealthy, because they are shy gated-community creatures who are very scared of stalkers and harassers. The ones I've met don't certainly come across like silk-hatted Wall Street exploiters of the masses. They're blandly indifferent to the masses; they don't have any practical need for the masses. Basically, they're business geeks. They're workaholic and slightly monomaniacal characters who spend most of their time reading financial briefing papers and practicing "due diligence."

They're not a gilded elite splashing champagne around like Donald Trump -- the Donald is a cornball blingbling TV showman, he's like a poor guy's comic-book version of a rich guy. Everyday modern super-rich guys tend to be glum and somewhat cheerless Type A overachievers, very dedicated and focussed. They're kind of a drag to be around, frankly.

Let's suppose that Joe and Jolene get fully briefed on this issue, successfully frame it as "unfairness", and decide to take political steps to reform it. What are they supposed to do in the way of wielding a small-d democratic counterforce? What's the victory condition?

I think there is one. It's doable. It would look more or less like a Swedish economic model. The Swedes are well-informed citizens. They vote. They spend reasonable amounts of money on political campaigns. They have an overwhelmingly large middle class. They have a highly confiscatory tax system that keeps the tall poppies from overshadowing the field. The Swedes have high literacy rates, honest politics, public transport, low infant mortality, relatively clean cities... The Swedes oughta be the avant-garde of mankind, I guess. We should all want to be Swedish.

But everybody else just kinda stares at them and shrugs. ...

And while you're chewing on that, I've got something. I, too, live in
Europe, in one of those more successful than not societies, but the
general perception of Sweden -- which, I agree, is a success story in
so many ways -- is that, well, yeah, they've got it together, man, but
they're...dull. *Irremediably* dull. And this perception is not only
in the U.S., but in Germany, too, which is dull enough itself.

How do you do good and stay sexy? Because that issue has to be dealt
with if you want people to head down a good path.

*You want to do good and also be sexy? Be 23 years old. Fifty years from now, it's gonna take a lot of very dedicated social, political and economic engineering to be a society with any decent number of 23 year olds. But those are going to be the sex-appeal societies in 2057 AD. The unsexy societies are gonna be the ones where people were too busy clipping stock-option coupons to bother to have kids.

*I know that sounds very weird and counterintuitive by the standards of the "Population Bomb" era circa 1968, but 1968 was almost 40 years ago. Wherever there is prosperity and cheap contraception, the population crashes -- it doesn't merely gently decline a bit, it CRASHES, to way below replacement level. You really want Germany to become less dull? Have more German kids, give them money, guns, and lawyers, and get out of their way. They'll be more than just mildly entertaining: you won't even know what they're talking about. ...


How do you see drugwar policies changing in America and abroad over
the next year or so? How does the rise of sophisticated black networks
and their integration with militant extremist groups that John Robb's
described change the dynamics of the decades-old "war" America's waging
on drugs?

I don't think it's entirely possible to turn America Swedish, any more than it was possible to turn America into the Confederate States of America during the past 6 years of earnest effort. I'd be guessing, though, that if there's a social change in a "Swedish" direction, it would likely start in a region, like a model city, and then percolate outward. In other words, win people over through some functional real-world examples rather than spinning them a new political framework and haranguing them about how incorrect they are.

Living in Eastern Europe, I get a close-up look at the impact of European power. Some of it is political, the not particularly effectual part, and the rest of it is infrastructural and economic, stuff like banks, airports, retail chains, highways, power supplies, sewers. The power of the European regulatory and commercial structure is awesome: it comes on fast, and it comes high low and middle in a vast imperial wave. It's "soft" power, but it really is imperial power, and it doesn't brook dissent any more than a rising tide does.

What's happening to places like Poland and Bulgaria now is pretty much the exact polar opposite of what's happening to Iraq.

People talk about "the government" as though it was some kind of monolithic
entity, but it's not. It's a framework that exists because people agree it
should exist to manage the commons, however that's defined. I think the
so-called neoconservatives have learned that your can use government to your
own ends only as long as you have "the consent of the governed," in a complex
democracy like the U.S. If you persistently misuse power, your hold on the people
will unravel and you'll find yourself losing, perhaps ultimately locked out by
the people, their representatives, and the system of checks and balances.

Brute force dictatorships like Saddam Hussein's survive in part because
people fear the alternative of the kind of chaos we see in Iraq
now, which is both horrifying and fascinating, the latter because it
shows us what we have when the center doesn't hold. You saw similar
chaos in the former Soviet republics after the fall, no? How have those
evolved? Are there lessons for Iraq?

Iraq's a petrocracy. With the signal exception of Norway, practically every nation or smashed-nation that has oil is in turmoil, running scared, rattling sabers, or just plain catching it in the neck. There's a global war for oil, but we're not getting more oil by using bayonets; we're getting less.

I don't think the chaos in Iraq is some kind of scary null-state that arrives when the petrocrat is chased out of his palace. Fanatical young men are sacrificing their lives every day to create that chaos. That level of chaos is damn hard work. The chaos is there because important political and social actors are engineering it. They can't defeat the US Army hand-to-hand, but they can certainly defeat US policy.

I don't think it was popular indignation at his policies that drove Bush into this corner. If gas was a buck-fifty and there was a calm puppet government in Baghdad, everyone would think W. was Teddy Roosevelt. The guy is losing a war he didn't have to start and is blowing out the bank. That's what really scares his former backers, not the one-party state, the imperial signing statements, the loss of civil liberties, spying, torture, and all the rest of it. People watch the guy make power-grab after power-grab, then he either does nothing or he blows it. The more you hand over to him, the more he screws up.
He's delusionary.

Putin is doing all the anti-democratic things that Bush is doing and then some, but Putin is hugely popular, seventy percent ratings. The Russians enjoy watching him work. They think he's the Man, he's poisoning traitors and turning off gas taps to entire countries... If Bush could have satisfied the angry and vengeful Red States with some similar competent acrobatics, we'd be looking at Republican dominance as far as the eye can see.

I'm phrasing this in a rather raw and confrontational way here, but this guy is a lot rawer:
http://www.exile.ru/2006-December-29/the_year_russia_schooled_the_west.html

There's a lot of street-punk mordant irony there, but that's pretty much the story. He's telling the truth. ...

I'm with Jamais: d'you have a public list of bookmarks anywhere?

*No, I don't have a public list of bookmarks, if you don't count my WIRED blog.
http://blog.wired.com/sterling/

*I used to have "sources." I can't say I do that much any more. These days it seems to be mostly about Sphere, Technorati, Feedster, Digg, Reddit and Google. I've joined the people and machines who are boiling it all down to an insidious algorithmic flow of liquid chunks of deep-linked micromedia.

And even below that, it's tags. I use search engines to look methodically for words. Neologisms, commonly. I learn a lot from using machines to track jargon.

I used to be fanatically devoted to paper books and magazines. Nowadays I splash around in formless electronic pools of web semantics. I don't even "research" any more -- I can research stuff in seconds flat. Instead, I spend a lot of my time doing the work that editors and publishers used to do: trying to invest the slushpile with some credibility. "I found this stuff pronto: but is it all a pack of lies?"

That's where it helps to have friends: but even if you've got 'em, on the Net they tend to agglomerate into echo-chambers and whispering campaigns. The Internet is really coming into its own now, and it's scary how intrinsically different it is from previous forms of media. The deeper you dig into what it's really good at, the more alien it becomes. ...

Got a bit of a curveball for you, Bruce. Have you read "Mycelium
Running" or anything else by Paul Stamets? If so, any thoughts on his
idea that mycelia constitute "nature's internet" and a possibly
sentient neural net for Gaia? (I've just started reading the book and
was quite willing to write it off as hippie/psilocybist hooey but I
have to admit there are some pretty compelling ideas in thar.)

I thought of it because Stamets believes mycelium may be key to
healing the ecosystem.

...

Soil bacteria were shown last year to connect themselves in networks of
electrically conductive filaments--nanowires. Google "pnas gorby" for
details: author Gorby published in PNAS on 10 July 2006.

Well, if a hallucinatory network of intelligent fungal filaments is in charge of the planet's ecosystem, it needs to do a better damn job.

Y'know, as a science fiction writer, I dote on that kind of daft deep-green whimsy, I'm kind of a connoisseur of it. It's not much use in case of trouble, though. It's like going to a broken levee in New Orleans and signalling the sky with bottle rockets because, you know, the Space Brothers might help out. ...

Bruce has also put out a few new Viridian Notes recently - Energy Policy for Europe and Metcalfe on Enertech.

Bruce touched on the ability of the giant foundations to direct a lot of money towards good causes if sufficiently motivated - unfortunately sometimes they can find themselves giving with one hand while taking away with the other, as Paul Hawken recently pointed out about the Gates Foundations' activities in Africa.

JUSTICE ETA, 14 months old, held out his tiny thumb. An ink spot certified that he had been immunised against polio and measles, thanks to a vaccination drive in Ebocha, Nigeria, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

But polio is not the only threat Justice faces; he has suffered from respiratory ailments since birth. Many people blame this on the flames and smoke that rise 100 metres over a nearby oil plant. The plant is owned by the Italian petroleum giant Eni, whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The makeshift clinic where Justice Eta was vaccinated and the flares spewing over Ebocha represent a head-on conflict for the Gates Foundation. In a contradiction between its grants and its endowment holdings, the foundation reaps vast financial gains every year from investments that contravene its good works.

Elekwachi Okey, a local doctor, says hundreds of flares at oil plants in the Niger Delta have caused an epidemic of bronchitis in adults, and asthma and blurred vision in children. Many of the 250 toxic chemicals in the fumes and soot have long been linked to respiratory disease and cancer. "We're all smokers here," Dr Okey said, "but not with cigarettes."

The Gates Foundation has poured $US218 million ($280 million) into polio and measles immunisation and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time it has invested $US423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Total of France - the companies responsible for blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the US or Europe.

Local leaders blame oil development for fostering some of the very afflictions the foundation combats. Oil bore holes fill with stagnant water, a breeding ground for mosquitoes that spread malaria. Health inspectors also cite an oil spill clogging rivers as a cause of cholera. The gas flares contain toxic byproducts such as benzene, mercury and chromium and lower immunity, said the area's health commissioner, Dr Nonyenim Solomon Enyidah.

Another area Bruce touched on was "soft power", and the fact that Europe now has a lot of it - and the US has almost none left. The Times has a good description of how this happened (which parallels my own disillusionment with US foreign policy over the past 4 years) - and notes that an attack on Iran will probably be the final straw for most of us who still hope things will be turned around within the US. From "Yes, America's my friend. Or is it? Suddenly I'm not sure":

The trouble with Margaret,” one of the then-Prime Minister’s Cabinet colleagues once observed, “is that when she speaks without thinking she says what she thinks.” We all do this. It’s like that microsecond between catching the reflection in a shop window of a disagreeably tense-looking person — and realising it’s you. Oops. Me? Not tense, then: purposeful. But that tiny delay before the official censor moves to correct the record can be the moment when we make assessments that we didn’t know were ours: the moment the unconscious mind blurts it out. Typically this is associated either with a thought too awkward to acknowledge, or with a new opinion to which we are unconsciously moving but not quite ready to declare — even to ourselves.

Such moments are precious. I believe I experienced one yesterday. A familiar remark had caught my eye. Hard upon it came an unfamiliar reaction. The familiar remark was between quotes on the front page of The Times: “If we’re going to follow the US or the EU, I’d take clumsy America any time.” The sentence came from an article within, by my fellow columnist, Gerard Baker.

The unfamiliar reaction was mine. It was unfamiliar because it was negative. “Take America any time? No, I’m not sure I would. Not any more.”

This was not what I had thought I thought. I remain unsure whether it’s what I do think. But I sense the approach of some sort of mental tipping point: a throwing of the switch. And though what is occurring in one columnist’s mind is of little significance in itself, it may be indicative of a more general shift in public sentiment. I begin to sense this is so.

Here, first, is what I thought I thought. I’ve certainly written it often enough. That, like a big, rough, but loveable bear, “clumsy” America can be an embarrassing friend but must remain at the deepest level a friend. That it makes mistakes, awful mistakes, from time to time, but mostly from excess of confidence or lack of finesse, and usually with good intentions. That there will be presidents and administrations (like the present one) who stray badly off course, but that in doing so they betray their own country and its abiding purposes.

That we can disapprove of one president without disapproving of a whole country. That no matter how many American mistakes and wrongs you pile onto the negative side of the scales, they are somehow only aberrations: they can never outweigh the essential good faith of our erstwhile colony. That whatever rows may arise between us, it must always be our expectation that afterwards we can get back together. And that beneath and beyond all the twists and turns of events and policymaking in a messy world, there is an abiding national soul — a Platonic essence — that is America: and it is good. At heart, at root, at centre, and in a very final way, we and the United States are on the same side.

I’m sure this has represented not just my own thinking, but my country’s instinct too. For me personally, two years (funded by an American philanthropist) at Yale University helped to cement it. For millions of my countrymen, experience of world wars and Cold War in the 20th century has lodged it very deep.

Could it ever be dislodged? For the first time, and rather late in my life, I am beginning to wonder. The negative side of the scales, for so long obdurately refusing to dip, has been piling ever higher over the years. Carbon emissions and a destructive attitude towards the campaign against global warming, protectionism, Guantanamo, sponsorship of intransigence in Israel, “rendition”, torture, support for dreadful regimes in Latin America . . . and of course most recently that monster of an issue: Iraq.

But still in my own mind the ever-more-crowded negative scale has not dipped. The balance still felt positive. And oddly enough it is not Iraq that now theatens that balance. I’ve always been able to explain Iraq as a simple blunder. Hell, it might have worked (I once rather expected it to); weapons of mass destruction might have been found (I thought they would). A stable democracy might have been established there (I hoped so). Though none of these hopes added (in my own mind) to an argument sufficient to justify a new doctrine of unilateral international intervention, they were enough to keep the American way as a morally defensible proposition, internationally.

No, it’s not Iraq, but Iran that is pushing me towards a complete reassessment of the moral relativities. ...

Glenn Greenwald has a post on conservative Rod Dreher starting down the same path a lot of us have headed down...

Rod Dreher is as conservative as it gets -- a contributor to National Review and the Corner, a current columnist for The Dallas Morning News, a self-described "practicing Christian and political conservative."

Today, Dreher has an extraordinary (oral) essay at NPR in which he recounts how the conduct of President Bush (for whom he voted twice) in the Iraq War (which he supported) is causing him to question, really to abandon, the core political beliefs he has held since childhood.

Dreher, 40, recounts that his "first real political memory" was the 1979 failed rescue effort of the U.S. hostages in Iran. He says he "hated" Jimmy Carter for "shaming America before our enemies with weakness and incompetence." When Reagan was elected, he believed "America was saved." Reagan was "strong and confident." Democrats were "weak and depressed."

In particular, Dreher recounts how much, during the 1980s, he "disliked hippies - the blame America first liberals who were so hung up on Vietnam, who surrendered to Communists back then just like they want to do now." In short, Republicans were "winners." Democrats were "defeatists."

On 9/11, Dreher's first thought was : "Thank God we have a Republican in the White House." The rest of his essay:

As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool's errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic.

But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool.

In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Carter did.

The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government's conduct of the Iraq war have been shattering to me.

It wasn't supposed to turn out like this. Not under a Republican President.

I turn 40 next month -- middle aged at last -- a time of discovering limits, finitude. I expected that. But what I did not expect was to see the limits of finitude of American power revealed so painfully.

I did not expect Vietnam.

As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war.

I had a heretical thought for a conservative - that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word - that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot - that they have to question authority.

On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn't the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?

Will my children, too small now to understand Iraq, take me seriously when I tell them one day what powerful men, whom their father once believed in, did to this country? Heavy thoughts for someone who is still a conservative despite it all. It was a long drive home.

Dreher's essay is extreme and intense but also increasingly commonplace and illustrative. The disaster of unparalleled magnitude that President Bush and his integrity-free and bloodthirsty administration and followers wrought on this country will have a profound impact not only on American strength and credibility for a long, long time to come, but also on the views of Americans towards their political leaders and, almost certainly, towards the Republican Party.

One of the very few potential benefits of the Iraq tragedy is that it may raise the level of doubt and cynicism with which Americans evaluate the claims of the Government when it tries -- as Dreher put it -- "to send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot."

Apparently Bush has told 60 Minutes that he can, and will, escalate the war in Iraq regardless of what Congress thinks.

In an interview set to air on this Sunday's 60 Minutes, President George W. Bush vows to send an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq "no matter what" the Democratic-controlled Congress tries to do.

"Do you believe as Commander in Chief you have the authority to put the troops in there no matter what the Congress wants to do," 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley asks Bush in the short clip uploaded to the CBS News web site Friday night.

"I think I've got, in this situation, I do, yeah," Bush said. "Now I fully understand they will," Bush continued, "they could try to stop me from doing it, but, uh, I've made my decision and we're going forward."

In an address to the nation on Wednesday, Bush announced his new plan which calls for an increase in US troops to end ongoing violence in the country, which many believe is either at or approaching "civil war," with Iraqi civilian deaths tripling at the end of 2006, according to one report.

The plan, nicknamed "surge" by the administration but referred to as an "escalation" by most Democrats has drawn fire from both parties, and Congressional members have threatened to cut funding – though not for the troops that are already there.

Texas Republican Ron Paul has made another one of his remarkable speeches in the US House of Representatives - this one warning that the US may create a "Gulf of Tonkin" style incident to provoke a war with Iran. Apparently Paul is running for President in 2008, which is delighting some libertarians and conspiracy theorists.

While searching for the video of Jim McDermott using AlterNet's Joshua Holland articles I ran across this speech by Bush's fellow Texas Republican, Ron Paul, reacting to the speech.

It is crystal clear. Americans beware of the Bush administration's attempts to trump up some BS reason to attack Iran. Iran is a 3rd world country with a frail military and remains a decade away from a nuclear weapon -- if it's even building one.