The Finite Four - Dead Industries Walking  

Jospeh Romm at grist has a look at the bleak future for some of our legacy (sunset) energy industries which he calls the "finite four".

It has not been a good year so far for King Coal, Big Oil, and whatever nickname we give to the nuclear energy industry.

Two weeks ago, TIME reported that nuclear plants in the southeastern U.S. may be forced to cut power production or temporarily shut down later this year because the year-long drought has left too little water to cool the reactors.

There already has been one drought-related shutdown in Alabama. And while officials aren't yet predicting brownouts, utilities will be forced to buy expensive replacement power from other places, leading to "shockingly high electric bills for millions of southerners."

Unfortunately, the Southeast is precisely where the nuclear energy industry has been looking as the best location for new power plants, in part because they believe there is less public resistance there. We'll see how the public feels when those "shockingly high electric bills" arrive in the mail.

The South's problems are not unique. The Associated Press reports that 24 of the nation's 104 nukes are in areas experiencing the most severe drought.

Then came an email from the chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell to his staff, predicting that the production of conventional oil supplies won't be able to keep pace with world demand after 2015 -- a mere seven years from now.

That's very bad news for oil-dependent economies, including ours. Five of the last seven recessions in the U.S. economy have been preceded by big increases in the price of oil (PDF), and today's oil prices are one of the factors being blamed for the economic slowdown and possible recession we're experiencing now. The email from Shell's Jeroen van der Veer suggests that unless we figure out how to replace conventional oil or how to stop economic development and population growth around the world, high oil prices are here to stay. It's the old law of supply and demand.

Next came word from the U.S. Department of Energy that it has cancelled plans to build the country's first clean-coal plant in Illinois. The DOE cited economics -- the cost to taxpayers has gone from $800 million when the project was announced five years ago to $1.33 billion today -- and said it wasn't ready to find the plant environmentally acceptable.

To make matters worse, the Wall Street Journal reported last week that three of the nation's biggest investment banks are going to make it harder to build coal-fired power plants in the United States. Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., and Morgan Stanley anticipate that the federal government will cap greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants before long. Investors don't want to loan money to a new power plant whose debt could go bad under the additional expense of carbon allowances.

What does all this bad news mean? For those who have the courage to look, the end of the era of finite fuels is in sight. The end always was inevitable, of course. That's what finite is all about. But I believe that oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy -- let's call them the Finite Four -- are entering their end game.

Like prisoners on the way to the gallows, they're bargaining desperately for a reprieve. Van der Veer recommends more effort to harvest unconventional oil from tar sands and more environmentally sensitive and harder-to-reach places. But tar sands, oil shale, liquid fuels from coal, and other unconventional fossil fuels promise nothing but more problems. They are filthy. They accelerate global warming. They use a lot of energy and water.

And water may be their biggest problem of all. Water already is considered a global crisis by some experts, and it seems to be reaching that status in the United States. A new study shows that the water crisis already underway in the far West is due to global warming. Snow pack is the source for 75 percent of the West's water -- and snow pack is declining. ...

Declining supplies, rising prices, worsening water problems ... it is time for the big, entrenched, troubled Finite Four to recognize that the end is near. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the well-known expert on dying, identified five stages through which patients pass when they discover they have a terminal illness: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

The Finite Four have entered Stage 3. Perhaps when they progress to State 5 -- acceptance -- they will grasp the new reality the world faces today: If they want life, they must end their own addiction to finite resources and join in a transition to sustainable, renewable energy.

Grist also has an interview with Google's "green energy czar", Bill Weihl about his RE<C initiative.

Question What exactly are your responsibilities?

Answer Narrowly speaking, my job is to make Google's energy supplies much cleaner, particularly focused on our data centers, which make up the bulk of our energy consumption.

But my boss and the founders have made clear that the goal isn't just to make Google green. We could green our operations completely tomorrow, but if we just did that, the world wouldn't care, the climate certainly wouldn't care -- we're not that big.

The real goal is to do this in a way that has a much broader impact. So it really gets into how we might invest in both renewable energy companies and internal R&D to help advance the state of technology and renewable markets -- to make renewable energy truly mainstream, not just a tiny fraction of the energy supply.

Question Your mandate, specifically, is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity more cheaply than coal-generated energy within years, not decades. That's an immense challenge. What's your plan of action?

Answer We're going to invest tens of millions of dollars each year over the next few years in our own people, lab space, building prototypes, and investing in start-up companies. All of this will be aimed at developing technologies that are proved at least at a pilot scale, and then ready to be manufactured and deployed at gigawatt-and-beyond scales in, say, five years.

There are lots of companies and research groups doing work on technologies that have a reasonable chance of getting to the price point we're talking about in 15 or 20 years, but we feel that there's both an urgent problem as well as an opportunity that demands getting there much faster, if at all possible. From a climate point of view, we can't afford to wait 15 or 20 years to really start to curb global emissions in a big way.

Question What renewable technologies are you focusing on -- far-out concepts, or proven technologies like solar panels and wind turbines?

Answer We are not at the moment focused on solar panels and traditional wind turbines. We are looking quite generally at solar, wind, and geothermal because those are pretty large resources that could potentially, any one of them, supply a very large fraction of the world's energy needs.

But there are technology problems that need to be solved, including cost and the fact that solar and wind are intermittent resources, they're not there all the time, which means if you want to have them be a large fraction of your electricity supply, you need to figure out how to store that kind of energy on a very large scale. There's also the issue of transmission, because the best solar and wind resources are in regions of the country where there aren't a lot of people and a lot of demand. So we need better high-voltage lines to allow you to move more power long distances.

Question What's an example of something you are working on?

answer In the realm of solar, we're concentrating on solar thermal technologies that capture the sun's energy as heat and use that to make steam, which then drives a steam turbine -- just as a coal plant might burn coal and use steam. (Photovoltaic panels, by contrast, convert the sun's light directly into electricity.) It's actually relatively cheap and easy to store the heat for a few hours, which makes this thermal plant one of most promising options for making solar a constant, base-load power source.

Question Many argue that coal's price advantage over renewables is an illusion, that the real costs of coal are not represented in its market price. So effectively you're fighting on a tilted playing field. Would Google lobby for regulatory measures that would level the playing field, like a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system?

Answer We might. We've been talking about that. I think generally we are supportive of internalizing those externalities.

At the same time, if you realistically look at the price differential between renewables and nonrenewables today, even with, say, a $30-per-ton price on carbon -- which is pretty high compared to what's been seen in the European trading system so far, or what's been proposed as a likely target of a carbon cap or tax in this country -- that might still not quite narrow the gap between renewables and coal. So we need the technology side, too.

At Google, our focus for the moment is on driving the cost of renewables down as much as possible. And if society manages to raise the cost of coal, then that will help renewables compete.

But remember, this is a global problem, it's not just a U.S. problem. China and India are rapidly increasing their use of coal. It strikes me as unlikely that they will put a substantial price on carbon anytime soon. So even if we make renewables competitive with coal in the U.S. with a carbon price, that still won't be cheap enough to really matter in China and India -- in which case the climate is still in deep trouble. ...

Question You are also charged with the task of making Google carbon neutral. What strategies are you implementing to this end?

Answer There are three pieces. The first is energy efficiency, and that really should be the first on anybody's list. For a number of years, we've been designing our own servers and data centers. Our computing facilities use less than half the energy of a typical industry facility for the same amount of useful computing. That is a huge competitive advantage for us.

Second thing is to deploy renewables as widely as you can, and the major step we've taken to date on that is the 1.6-megawatt photovoltaic array here on our Mountain View campus. We committed in June to deploy a minimum of 50 megawatts of renewables by 2012; I would expect that we'll do more than that.

Third, once we've done everything we can around energy efficiency and renewables to reduce our emissions, we're investing in offset projects that, for example, eliminate methane emissions from landfills, coal mines, or agricultural waste.

Grist notes that a move to clean energy will create jobs, jobs, jobs.

Right on the heels of Tappergate, The New York Times comes out with a couple of articles exploring the economic benefits of fighting global warming. As is evident to anyone but a Taphole, the energy business is the largest business there ever is or was or will be, and therein lies not only enormous money-making opportunities but jobs, jobs, jobs. These things, we hear, are good for the economy.

So, take California, which decided to get serious about developing a solar industry. The state committed $3 billion in declining incentives over a 10-year period, and in return leveraged a lot more than that in private equity. Venture capitalists have put $625 million into California solar companies in 2007 alone. Manufacturers are feverishly commercializing new technologies, and if you can spell solar you can get a job out here.

So, how does an enterprising young state get a piece of that action? I'm glad you asked. Last Wednesday, in Denver, with Governor Ritter on hand, we released a report that we developed with the Center for American Progress titled "Developing State Photovoltaic Markets" (PDF). It's a blueprint for making a solar market work. The premise here is that the key to lowering solar's costs -- and generating good jobs while you are at it -- is creating markets. The folks at NREL have done a great job in developing the technology; photovoltaics work great. Government R&D efforts should be redoubled, but using policy to open markets will leverage orders of magnitude more in private equity and further accelerate solar's entry into the mainstream.

Continuing on the theme, one more from Grist, this time from Jon Rynn on "converting the permanent military economy to a green economy".

The way I see it, we need to understand three things: the nature of the military budget, the needs of the current infrastructure, and how infrastructure renewal could be used to create a green economy.

First, how much of the military budget could theoretically be transferred to civilian work? According to Chalmers Johnson, quoting other experts, in fiscal year 2009 the Department of Defense wants to spend $766.5 billion for "salaries, operations ... and equipment" ($481.4 billion), as well as to fight "the two on-going wars" in Iraq and Afganistan ($141.7 billion), "hitherto unmentioned war costs in the remainder of 2007" ($93.4 billion), and an "allowance" ($50 billion).

Then there's the "$23.4 billion for the Department of Energy [that] goes toward developing and maintaining nuclear warheads; and $25.3 billion in the Department of State budget" for "foreign military assistance." There's a couple of extra billions for various expenses (why count those?), and another $7.6 billion "for the military-related activities of NASA."

Thus, there is about $825 billion in direct expenses, and also another $230-billion-plus that is used to repay interest on past military expenditures and payments to veterans, and also the $46 billion for Homeland Security; but let's use the $825 billion as the available pot of money.

The second area to understand is the current needs of the infrastructure. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, we need to spend $1.6 trillion in the next five years in order to bring the infrastructure up to an adequate level. So that's $320 billion a year for five years, or about 39 percent of the available military budget.

Now, Johnson quotes Thomas Woods, to the effect that between 1947 and 1987, the U.S. military had spent enough money that the entire network of factories and infrastructure could have been rebuilt instead. Woods is a libertarian economist who once contacted me concerning the work of the late Professor Seymour Melman, a friend of mine.

Melman was, according to Johnson, "The pioneer in analyzing what has been lost as a result of military Keynesianism," that is, the use of military spending to try to keep the economy moving; Melman wrote several books and many articles backing up his assertions with in-depth research and analysis, and published several op-ed pieces in The New York Times showing the trade-offs between expensive military programs and critical infrastructure needs in the U.S., such as education and housing.

At the rate we're going, then, the military budgets will preempt the building of a green infrastructure and economy. Unless the military budget is reined in, it will be very difficult to find the resources to create the "green engine," to quote Barack Obama, that "can drive growth for many years to come."

As Miriam Pemberton showed in a recent report for the Institute for Policy Studies, there is an enormous gulf between spending for the military and spending to reverse global warming.

The third major consideration I proposed was greening the economy. Including the $320 billion that the ASCE advocates spending on infrastructure, what could the $825 billion military budget be used to for? Here are a few ideas, which I will grandly call the National Program of Economic Reconstruction and Environmental Restoration:

1. A high-speed rail network among all of the bigger cities;
2. Light rail networks within most cities
3. Bus rapid transit between cities and near suburbs
4. Bike lanes with physical barriers along most city streets
5. A program to put solar panels on most rooftops
6. A program to put geothermal exchange units under most buildings (for heating and cooling)
7. A federally owned, or at least regulated, national high-voltage DC electrical grid, hooking up to:
* Environmentally sensitive wind farms
* Environmentally sensitive solar thermal farms, and
* Environmentally sensitive deep geothermal plants
8. A policy of encouraging organic, permaculture-like farm belts around most cities;
9. A policy of encouraging the building of walkable communities in cities and near suburbs
10. A national policy of no more than 15 students per classroom, with:
* Universal pre-kindergarten, starting with one-year-olds, and
* Universal health insurance, of course
11. Contribution to Lester R. Brown's global plan for alleviating poverty and environmental destruction, as laid out in his book, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civiliation

In other news :

Reuters also reports on Google's clean energy investment plans, announced at the Cleantech investor summit.

Triple Pundit has a post looking at the question "has world oil supply peaked" ?



The Wall Street Journal has a post on ASPO USA's offer of a wager on the peak date to CERA.

The Wall Street Journal is also wondering Siberia will be Solar Power's Next Heartland, looking at Russian company nitol solar's plans to join Wacker Chemie and Hemlock Semiconductor in producing high purity silicon for solar panel manufacturers.

Cleantech.com has an article on China-based Yingli Green Energy Holding which says it has trimmed the thickness of its solar wafers by 10 percent, cutting the amount of polysilicon needed and reducing the cost of production. The company plans to expand its capacity to 400 MW by the end of 2008 and to 600 MW by the end of 2009.

Cleantech.com also reports that iceland's Glitnir Bank looking to invest in geothermal projects in India.

Cleantech.com also has an article on the Earth-1 tire from Yokohama, which they claim reduces rolling resistance by 21 percent (and thus is more fuel efficient) by using a proprietary compound they call Super Nanopower Rubber made from orange oil and natural rubber.

Renewable Energy Access reports that the Ontario government has had a change of policy and the Great Lakes May Soon be Home to Offshore Wind.

Grist reports that wind power technicians are in high demand.

The Energy Blog notes that the National Geographic Special on Global Warming, "Six Degrees Could Change the World", starts on Sunday.

The Energy Blog also reports that MIT and TI have teamed up to develop a chip that is up to 10 times more energy-efficient than current chips.

After Gutenberg notes Google isn't the only tech giant going green - Intel is purchasing 1.3 Billion kWh of Renewable Energy.

Popular Science has a look at wireless electricity transmission - also known as "WiTricity" (one of Nicola Tesla's old ideas).

Tom at EE/RE Investing has a post on another reason to drive a hybrid - you never need to replace your brake pads (thanks to regenerative braking).

Technology Review has a post on generative-braking power system that converts energy expended while a person is walking into electricity, without adding any extra drag.

Inhabitat also has a couple of posts on human power, looking at a "Energy-Generating Green Microgym in Seattle" and an energy generating revolving door from Fluxxlab, seeking to help us all empathise with hamsters.



There is plenty more at Inhabitat including a Tesla Motors have announced a hybrid car as well as their pure electric vehicle and some guerilla gardening strategies.

One final image from Inhabitat, this one from a post noting the plans for Norman Foster’s Masdar carbon neutral city have made their debut.



I'll close with Tyler Hamilton from Clean Break, looking at "Harnessing Back EMF to create "free" energy?". Yes - this is the first time Tyler has made it to the tinfoil slot - but its worth a read - the free energy memeworld has endless energy and refuses to admit defeat...

The story, published in the Toronto Star today, takes a look at an Ottawa-area inventor who stumbled upon a way of making electric induction motors work, at the very least, more efficiently. At most, he believes he's figured out a way to manipulate magnetic fields so that instead of slowing down a generator (according to Lenz's law in physics) it speeds it up. In fact, it gets caught in a positive feedback loop, resulting in a dramatic acceleration without any change to power input.

The story is divided into two links. The first is more about the inventor's journey, the second is a closer look at what he has found.

Normally I would shy away from covering such stories, but three things convinced me it was worth telling: 1) The University of Ottawa has opened its doors and is currently putting the invention through tests; 2) A respected MIT electromagnetics engineer/professor who recently saw a demonstration admitted to me afterwards that he was stumped, and while he didn't admit (or deny) it broke any laws of physics his reaction was telling: "It's an unusual phenomenon... But I saw it. It's real. I'm just now trying to figure it out."; 3) The inventor, Thane Heins, has conviction and understands that what he has found seems, on the surface, ludicrous. He wants to find out what's going on as much as the next guy. He is no scammer, in my judgement.

As a reporter who isn't an engineer or physicist, I'm in no position to say I believe Heins claims. I'll leave that debate up to people smarter than, but hopefully as open-minded as myself. I will say I believe that Heins believes, and that several well-trained, highly respected academics he has demonstrated it to can't seem to explain it. At least not yet.