Author: Susan Kraemer

In a program designed to reduce California’s peak afternoon grid demand, the CPUC this month moved about 2,000 PG&E customers – large commercial power users with a demand over 200 KW – to a new pricing structure that charges more in summer afternoon hours, and less in off-peak hours.

The state’s peak summer demand forecast is expected to be 47,139 megawatts, lower than the 50,270 megawatts of four years ago. Rooftop solar already produces over 2.5% of California’s sunny afternoon electrons for the grid, which has reduced the peak summer afternoon demand over the last few years.

The change will provide an incentive for hotel chains, large manufacturers, school districts, hospitals and some office buildings to consider the many available alternatives that would move their power demand to off peak times.

Some examples include using night power to supply daytime air conditioning or adding solar that typically produces the most power during peak times, thus offsetting their peak load.

This policy greatly improves the already good economics now for solar for commercial users, whether investing in their own solar system, or simply contracting for the solar power itself, using a power purchase agreement (PPA) with a company that builds a solar system for them. Most companies that have added renewable energy have saved money.

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Are Republicans really Democrats to whom anything really bad has yet to happen? Now that America faces a crisis of almost Chernobyl-like proportions; fewer Republicans are thinking in chirpy slogans about scraping the bottom of the barrel for the last few drops of oil.

The gusher on the sea floor is so far out of the range of the human expertise and abilities of oil industry technicians – let alone Government agencies – to rein it in; that it might as well be taking place in outer space. Yet last year 86% of Republicans told Rasmussen they were fine with Drill, Baby, Drill.

But in a new Fox News poll, one month after the accident, Republicans’ support for off-shore oil drilling has now dropped to 68%. This brings overall support, according the Fox Poll, down to a new average low of 54% (including the views of Democrats and Independents), from a combined average of 72% support in August of 2009. (more…)

Just as we Americans are finally really and truly internalizing the real cost of sticking with fossil fuels, due to the Gulf sea floor gusher, a timely NREL study finds wind power makes electricity that’s not just cleaner, but it’s also much cheaper.

If the Western US generated 30% of its electricity with wind power, costs would drop 40%, the NREL reveals in The Western Wind and Solar Integration Study. Under various integration scenarios exhaustively considered in great detail in a “what-if” and “how-to” analysis for the WestConnect group of utilities, there would also be a reduction  in carbon dioxide emissions of at least 25% and as much as 45%.

The study comes at a welcome time, because this is the year that electric cars are finally poised to appear on the US market, creating a real alternative to the oil-powered commute, since EVs could be charged with clean energy like solar and wind power, and the gulf disaster shows us clearly what the alternative is.
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Spanish wind turbine builder Gamesa and San Diego wind farm developer Cannon Power Group have teamed up to start building a wind farm South of the Border to supply clean power to a quarter of a million households in both California and Mexico from 500 MW of power by 2015. Cannon says the site’s potential capacity is ultimately 1,000 MW.

The location’s wind production peaks when demand for electricity is highest; from mid-afternoon to early evening. Typically wind production peaks at low demand hours.

Cannon and Gamesa have signed a 10-year exclusivity agreement and will collaborate on further wind farms that Cannon has plans to develop in Baja California (Mexico) with Gamesa supplying some development assistance and the wind turbines. (more…)

Scientists testing how crops react in higher CO2 conditions than now – simulating conditions likely over the next 50 years, say that one effect will likely be that protein content will be reduced by one fifth. Plants lose the ability to absorb as much nitrogen in higher CO2 conditions. Most plants use nitrate as the most common form of nitrogen and convert it to protein.

Arnold Bloom, lead author of the UC Davis study published in Science, said that when they  increased the levels of CO2 in the test to the levels scientists predict over the next 50 years, it led to “nitrogen starved” crops that contained 20% less protein for human consumption.

“Wheat grain that has been exposed to the conditions that we expect in the next few decades declines about 20 per cent,” he said. (more…)

About 24 municipal buildings in Southern California are about to help ease the strain on the grid created by the peak need for air conditioning on hot California afternoons. Over the next few weeks, a consortium of municipal utilities in California will begin retrofitting government offices and commercial properties with systems that use ice made at night using cheap surplus wind power to replace air-conditioning that they would have required during the afternoon.

The first cheap energy storage cooling units housed at distributed sites on the buildings will be networked, providing utilities with a resource that can be dispatched as needed to help manage demand on the grid. If the pilot project works as expected, it will demonstrate savings, such that if put into general use, would reduce fuel consumption by state utilities by up to 30%, and by individual building owners by up to 90%. (more…)

The U.S. Department of Energy has just agreed to guarantee the loan for Abengoa Solar to start construction of the Solana CSP Project, announced in 2007. The decision marks the culmination of a lengthy environmental assessment with 286 pages of referenced impact statements, covering every possible reason to obstruct Abengoa’s Solana – Spanish for a sunny place – CSP Project.

Not all energy suppliers speed through environmental reviews in under 90 days like off-shore oil projects in the Gulf of Mexico apparently do. Dangerous, “risky!” solar projects are “energy gambles” that needs must take at least two years to review. No rubber stamp for energy sources that might compete with the mighty fossil industry.

Abengoa can now begin to build the 280 MW concentrating solar power plant near Gila Bend, Arizona, and an associated 230 kilovolt transmission line. (more…)

Oceanlinx; named one of the world’s Top Ten Renewable Energy Investments by the UN, needs to go back to the drawing board to iron out some kinks in the design of its 2.5 MW wave energy power station.

A massive swell at the Port Kembla site, 93 miles off the coast of Australia was able to sink the continent’s first wave power device to feed power to the Australian grid. The $5 million pre-commercial pilot project had just begun supplying power to the shore in February 2010.

The wave energy industry is in its infancy. Other than this, only half a dozen pilots are actually are delivering electricity to grids, (most in Europe) and which designs will prevail remains to be seen. The US has tremendous potential off the Northwest coast from Oregon to Alaska.

Because it is a completely new industry, wave power entrepreneurs are trying out many different engineering designs to capture the power of the ocean. Some are sited on the sea floor, some float, and some are moored to the sea floor.

The Oceanlinx design was modeled on an off-shore oil rig – and moored to the sea floor (more…)

Palo Alto-based Tesla is the only company currently building real four- wheeled electric cars in the US that can go at freeway speeds (and much faster). Its plan has always been to leverage the initial luxury Roadster into funding increasingly affordable models  – and it has hit all its goals so far. With a new affiliation with Toyota, Tesla moves one step closer to that goal.

Toyota is investing $50 million in Tesla, and the two will cooperate on developing electric vehicles, parts, production systems and engineering support. California’s Governor Schwarzenegger told the Sacramento Bee some of the details during an environmental event at Google headquarters in Mountain View.

“Today is a very exciting day for me because … I am also going over to the Bay Area to talk about Tesla and Toyota forming a partnership, where they take one of the Toyota cars and make them electric,” Schwarzenegger said.

“And again, they’re going to do that here in California,” he added. “Because in California, we have the laws in place, the laws are consistent and this is why one company after the other is coming into our state and producing those electric cars, and doing innovative stuff with solar, innovative stuff with windmills.” (more…)

Gary Pierce, one of four commissioners on the Arizona Corporate Commission, that oversees state utilities, is threatening an energy boycott against Los Angeles.  The move is reminiscent of the Russian embargo of Natural Gas to Europe a couple of winters ago. Los Angeles gets a quarter of its power from nuclear, hydro and coal plants in Arizona.

The Arizona commissioner wrote the letter in retaliation against the Los Angeles City Council which approved a resolution directing city staff to consider which contracts with Arizona could be terminated in protest over Arizona’s draconian new immigration law. Berkeley and San Francisco are among other cities considering a boycott over the law.

Border wars: they’re not just between nations.
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While a Wyoming coal plant and one Chevron refinery are the largest pollution sources for California, the three industries that together account for 40% of California’s GHG emissions include electric utilities, oil refineries and cement manufacturers – so these are the three industries most impacted by California’s climate legislation, AB32, which will begin next year.

California is the largest cement-producing state in the U.S., accounting for between 10% and 15% of U.S. cement production and cement industry employment with about 2,000 workers between 31 cement facilities.

The fossil energy that it takes to heat the cement mix up to 2,642 degrees Fahrenheit is why cement production has such high carbon dioxide emissions. (more…)

Oklahoma, the state that gave the world Senator James “global warming is a hoax”  Inhofe (R-Big Oil), has just passed a proposed 15% by 2015 Renewable Energy Standard, in the House. The Oklahoma Energy Security Act would have to pass its Senate too, to be the law. Or, as Senator Inhofe has described clean energy legislation; be “a job-killing agenda.”

If it does pass the state Senate, this would make Oklahoma a trailblazer among most Southern states,  in passing legislation to add clean renewable power, albeit as a “goal.” The bill is unusual in that it encourages the development of natural gas, not normally considered a “renewable” source, but still one that has about half the global warming properties of coal.

In the 35 states that now have a Renewable Energy Standard (RES), greenhouse gases have been lowered, compared with states that have no legislation, and green jobs created by adding more renewable power.

Four of the RES states have actually achieved ambitious European-scale greenhouse gas reductions below 1990 levels – while growing their economies an average of 65%.

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When the very controversial South Dakota coal plant Big Stone II – with all its permits in place and finally due to be built this year – was finally canceled at the end of last year; the cancellation created an opportunity for wind power.

It was to have supplied customers in Minnesota.  New transmission lines were to have hauled its dirty power from the coal plant to supply the Twin Cities.

A month later, Minnesota, which has a Renewable Energy Standard and clean energy legislation in place, slapped the first ever border carbon tax on coal power from across its North Dakota border.

Now, according to Businessweek, those new and upgraded high-voltage transmission lines, originally slated to carry the dirty power from Big Stone II, will instead be used to carry South Dakota’s clean wind power. (more…)

Until this year, California homeowners have usually arranged to have their solar installations slightly undersized, because it didn’t pay to get stuck with excess “roll-over” kilowatt hours at the true-up period at the end of each year. But that will change in six months.

If voters are not tricked by Big Oil into repealing California’s AB32 climate bill; starting in 2011,  Californians will be paid for excess renewable power they make at the end of each year – or they can choose to roll-over extra kilowatt hours and use them later.

As part of meeting the renewable energy requirements to reduce greenhouse gases, the CPUC is scheduled to decide by January 2011 what exact amount will be paid – per kilowatt hour – to individual homeowners and businesses that produce an annual excess of solar or wind power for the grid.

To help policy makers with fine-tuning this decision – to a Goldilocks-like just-right fairness to both sides – Bernard Chabot, the French expert in Feed-in Tariff policy design is offering an advanced Feed-In Tariff workshop in San Francisco  on July 13th. Investors and other interested parties are welcome, and it is free. (more…)

Today, a Republican Senator joined with Democrats representing coastal states threatened by the massive oil spill in voicing continued alarms over including off-shore drilling in a climate and energy bill. As new reports reveal that the oil spill is now five times worse than estimated: “We need to move heaven and earth to stop this from becoming an environmental disaster.” said Florida’s Republican Senator, George LeMieux.

“The continued failure to stop the leak threatens to wreak untold damage on Florida’s coastlines” says Republican Senator LeMieux – albeit along with his diatribes against “government spending” – on his YouTube web page.

“The federal government needs to make this their immediate, number one priority.”

There is an economic cost of failure to keep the Everglades safe. The huge oil spill could prove to be a tipping point; switching a Republican vote from dirty energy to clean energy. (more…)

On a day when further down the Atlantic coast lawmakers actually ponder setting fire to an uncontained deep-sea oil spill, the Obama administration just approved the first off-shore wind farm ever for the USA. After nine years of delays and legal battles using part of the $1 billion pricetag to build it, the Cape Wind project off the coast of Nantucket has been given the go-ahead.

The potential of Atlantic Coast off-shore wind energy is staggering: a colossal 330 Gigawatts, or  almost 200% of the total amount (185 Gigawatts) needed to supply nine states from Massachusetts to North Carolina.

Off-shore wind power off even just the (polled) No-NIMBY states of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia could take one third of the US population off the fossil grid. Today we break ground on the beginning of US off-shore wind power.

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Here’s a truly great business idea. Maybe even the next Craigslist or eBay. Rent your car to a neighbor when you don’t need to use it. You could be earning money from your car.

What a timely idea: over the next few years, as long-awaited electric cars become available, with their high initial costs; many of us are finally going to buy a car again. We know an investment in an EV is the right thing to do for the planet, and over the long term will pay back those initial costs, but how to cover the upfront higher cost?

In London; WhipCar is just opening its virtual doors for business this week. They expect to be able to help participants earn back some of the nearly $8,000 a year it takes to operate a car in London. In San Francisco, serial entrepreneur Sunil Paul is working on the same idea, but he has a small hurdle to overcome first. The law. (more…)

Today 31 environmental groups including the Sierra Club, the NRDC and the League of Conservation Voters sent a strongly worded letter to the Senate to get the climate bill moving again.

The only holdout organizations were Greenpeace and Bill McKibben’s 350.org, not because they don’t want climate legislation. On the contrary. They want perfect policy. Both are holding out for something that will never happen.

Ponies will not descend from the heavens magically bearing Republican Senators who don’t filibuster every bill. The most powerful industry on the planet will not be magically robbed of its power to prevent policy enactment.

Although they don’t mean to, their intransigence only helps the opposition. (more…)

“The energy bill is much further down the road…. Common sense dictates that if you have a bill that’s ready to go, that’s the one I’m going to go to,” Reid told reporters at his weekly press conference this afternoon, according to Kate Shepard at Mother Jones Network.

Reid had already signaled this reminder of how the Senate prioritizes legislation to the media over the weekend. He laid it out even more unequivocally today.

“The energy bill is ready and we’ll move that more quickly than the bill we don’t have. I don’t have an immigration bill,” he said. (more…)

After a weekend climate rally on the Mall in Washington attended by 150,000 people – including at least two blue Navii people – the 31 major environmental groups in the US today sent a letter to congress demanding that it return to the table on the climate bill before the summer recess, citing the Senate’s “profound responsibility to future generations to enact policies that enhance our economic, environmental and national security”.

The letter was signed by the key representatives of all of the major environmental groups – the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environment America. The activist groups signed on; led by 1Sky, Climate Solutions and the Alliance for Climate Protection.

They were joined by the groups that have expertize in the field of climate policy – the Union of Concerned Scientists, Environmental Defense Fund, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Center for International Environmental Law and the Pew Environment Group. (more…)