Category: Energy

Howard Lovy wrote:

The Michigan Microloan Fund Program has awarded three startup companies a combined total of $115,000, according to an announcement Monday by Ann Arbor SPARK, which manages the fund. Companies receiving the funds are CYJ Enterprises, a Detroit-based startup commercializing an emergency management system for child and adult care providers; Ann Arbor, MI based Ix Innovations, which makes a USB-powered picoammeter; and NextCAT, a Detroit-based developer of catalysts for biodiesel production.

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UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

Despite the economic recession, the solar industry grew significantly in 2009. The solar industry added 17,000 jobs to the US economy in 2009. Installed solar capacity grew by approximately 37%. And we saw a serious drop in the cost of solar. (more info and graphs below)

46,000 jobs are supported by the solar industry now, but that number is expected to climb to over 60,000 by the end of 2010.

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WRI’s Davida Wood answers questions on the current situation in Kyrgyzstan and its link to electricity governance.

The recent political upheaval and violent protests that rocked Kyrgyzstan – sparked in part by sharp hikes in tariffs for electricity and heat – serve as a reminder of the importance of the electric power sector in Central Asia.

In 2009, WRI’s Electricity Governance Initiative (EGI) supported local partners in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to conduct the first comprehensive Electricity Governance Assessments in their countries. These assessments allow civil society to gather data on the transparency, accountability, and inclusivity of a country’s electricity sector.

What has led up to the current tensions in Kyrgyzstan?

Since President Bakiyev was elected in the wake of the Tulip Revolution in 2005, Kyrgyz citizens have been increasingly disappointed by the failure of the new government to improve economic opportunity and deliver on vital services. At the same time, there has been an erosion of civil liberties and a rising perception of increased corruption.

These trends were manifested in the electricity sector, where mismanagement of the privatization process resulted in poor sector performance. In 2008 Kyrygzstan entered an energy crisis and rolling blackouts were imposed throughout the country. One of the key issues that triggered this latest revolt was rising electricity tariffs. The price of electricity was set to increase 100% starting on January 1, 2010, with plans for further increases.

Why have electricity costs increased so much?

In the former Soviet Union, there was universal access to electricity, and the service was virtually free of charge to citizens. A challenge for the former Soviet republics has been to develop a tariff system where the prices for electricity gradually increase to the point where the revenues cover the costs of electricity. The problem is exacerbated because the Soviet-era equipment is badly in need of upgrading, and also because trading patterns have been disrupted. Fuel – which Kyrgyzstan used to have easy access to from neighboring Soviet republics in exchange for hydropower – is now a globally traded commodity. So Kyrgyzstan has to either find ways to pay near market prices, or become energy independent by increasing its capacity to generate hydropower. Both of these are expensive options. Hence the need to increase tariffs.

Why are people so upset about the tariffs?

There is strong suspicion that tariff revenues are not being put to good use. Electricity companies continue to run at a loss, and services have deteriorated. Fundamental to the expectation that people pay for services is public confidence in the institutions which set prices, plan for improvements, and oversee sector performance. But basic good governance procedures have been withdrawn. Annual reports from the Ministry for Industry, Energy and Fuel Resources – once posted on the ministry website – are no longer publically available. The regulatory department has been weakened and the practice of public hearings for tariff increases has been suspended. So at the same time as electricity companies are writing off debt and electricity rations are being imposed, there are no mechanisms for holding the government accountable. People do not believe that the increased prices will help improve sector performance until financial oversight is improved and corruption is addressed.

Will privatization of electricity companies help with corruption?

It is possible. But the government will still have to play a role in issuing licenses, approving tariff revisions, and monitoring service quality. Kyrgyzstan’s privatization process is not off to a good start. SeverElectro, the first of the four state-owned distribution companies to be privatized, is said to have been sold for $3 million, well below what the public believes to be its true value, given investment in this company and the value of its assets. The problem is that there has been no transparency around asset valuation, nor around the criteria for selecting a buyer. This is another key issue that has fueled public anger. The basic ingredients of a credible market-based democracy are still lacking. Under these circumstances, privatization is not the answer.

Is there any optimism that the situation would improve under a new government?

Roza Otunbaeva, the interim President, has been at the forefront of the critique of mismanagement of the electricity sector. She has made statements that reflect a grasp of the governance issues that need to be addressed, and has been supportive of civil society working on these issues, including WRI’s Electricity Governance Initiative (EGI) partners in Kyrgyzstan. In her remarks at the launch of EGI’s governance assessment report (which she attended in her capacity as Deputy of Parliament), she stated that:

Transparent, reasonable, competent governance of the energy sector is a public issue, and it is necessary to discuss it, not only by means of barricades, posters and slogans, but also by means of governance principles. I was very glad to hear there are some approaches and initiatives that exist and are practiced in the energy sector, which will lead us to competent public participation.

The interim government, which Otunbaeva heads, needs to ensure that the necessary framework to enable informed public participation in electric power sector decision making is created. Without such participation, building a more transparent, accountable and efficient sector is impossible in Kyrgyzstan. EGI’s tools are designed to foster precisely these improvements.

EGI’s lead partner in Kyrgyzstan, Civic Environmental Foundation UNISON, continues to publish monthly updates and analysis on electricity issues, as well as a detailed chronology of events. These will be available in English later this week.

By Melissa Segrest
Green Right Now

Coal-fired power plant (Photo: Braen Gunem/Dreamstime.)

Sitting in a heap atop the list of climate change offenders is coal. Coal-burning power plants are the single biggest source of carbon emissions worldwide and their smokestacks spew sulfur and nitrogen dioxide, as well, contributing to the stew of greenhouse gases that are heating the Earth’s atmosphere.

Despite the growth of renewable energy sources, coal remains the single largest provider of energy for America, at 45 percent. And its toxic footprint doesn’t end with air pollution. The industry’s waste, leftover ash, is laced with metal oxides.

Thousands of coal-fired power plants are chugging away around the world, poisoning the air   all day, every day.

Around coal mines, runoff carries pollutants and heavy metals that befoul waterways and contaminate fish and smother streams and valleys below mountaintop operations. The environmental nightmare caused by blasting away mountaintops to reach coal (known as Mountain Top Removal or MTR) has compromised dozens of mountains in Appalachia, deforested the land, stripped the soil and left tons of waste in its wake. And there’re the well-known health and safety threats to those who work inside mines.

Coal is cheap for energy companies, and it has been historically plentiful, but the Earth pays a steep price for it. A National Academy of Sciences report places a $62 billion price tag on coal’s environmental toll annually.

What’s your part in this? You can find out how much of your power comes from coal at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Power Profiler.

This problem is so large, surely one person can’t make a difference. Wrong – everything starts with someone, and today that someone should be you.

Here are 5 ways that you can conserve energy and decrease the use of coal.

Aerial view of a mountain top removal operation (Photo: Appalachian Voices)

1. Buy Green Power. You may be able to buy green power and don’t even know it. The U.S. Department of Energy provides a map and links to various power providers who can offer more environmentally clean sources of electricity. If you can’t get green power directly, you can buy Renewable Energy Certificates that will go toward defraying the cost of more-expensive green energy to even the playing field. RECs help support clean energy being used elsewhere on the grid, when none is locally available.

2. Get Conservative at Home. The smart folk at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs have a Home Energy Saver tool that lets your bore deeply into potential energy savings at your home.

The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy also has a consumer checklist to help people make immediate changes to save energy — and use less coal — such as turning down the setting on your water heater to warm, caulking leaky windows, switching out incandescent light bulbs to CFLs (or LEDs) and changing dirty HVAC filters so the system runs efficiently.

3. Buy Energy Star. Starting with refrigerators, which can take the biggest energy gulp of all household appliances, to computers and TVs and assorted electronic gadgets, almost everything that plugs in (and a few things that don’t, like windows) is now assessed by Energy Star, the joint project of the EPA and DOE to help tamp down power use. The energy savings adds up.

4. UnPlug. Your house (and everyone else’s) may be the single worst energy glutton going, but did you know that more than 5 percent of your home’s energy can be sapped daily by computers and TVs and video-game players and all your other electronic gear – when they’re not being used. Just pushing the off button doesn’t stop the energy drain. Unplug them when you can. Use a power strip on entertainment centers to turn the whole set up off when its not in use. Phones charged? Unplug them.

5. Hang It Out. Still in the mood to save money? Try a clothes line. Or put a line or rack in the garage if you think the neighbors might scowl. Your clothes dryer uses a lot of electricity (making things hot uses more power than making things cold). Reduce your dryer use, and remember to wash your clothes in cold water or get a front-loading washing machine and you will save several hundred dollars a year.

6. Cover It Up. The biggest home-energy wasters? Pool and spa pumps and heaters. Just getting a pool cover to preserve the water’s warmth will immediately shave off hundreds of dollars from the cost of heating. Downsize to a smaller, more efficient pump and you’ll save even more.  Install a timer to minimize how long the pump operates saves more.

Keep the pool a few degrees lower and there’s more money. When its time to replace the pool heater, go with a solar pool heater and get a pleasant sticker shock at the sight of your energy bill. All of this and more is on the government’s Energy Savers site.

Bonus points: Buy a home energy monitor. You can find some for around $130 and you can keep constant, real time tabs on your electricity use. This story provides more details about home energy management.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by GRN Network

Electricity, as we all know, isn’t easy to generate and even the power that reaches our wall sockets isn’t always green. In an era where everybody seems to be getting interested about renewable energy, there is no dearth of systems that harvest seemingly unconventional forms of energy like kinetic energy, human energy and piezoelectricity. Piezoelectricity is based around the ability of some materials, notably crystals and certain ceramics, to generate electrical field in response to applied mechanical stress. Though piezoelectricity doesn’t seem practical enough for portable electronic devices, certain designers are working to make it feasible not only for portable gadgets but also on a much larger scale. Here is a list of 12 such systems that rely on next-gen piezoelectric technologies which might well be the future of clean energy:

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Nick d'Arbeloff wrote:

Energy is a $6 trillion global industry, and will likely grow to more than $10 trillion by mid-century. As clean energy replaces carbon-based energy sources around the world, new markets employing millions of people will emerge.  Countries like China recognize this opportunity, and are racing decisively ahead. Meanwhile, the United States’ inaction is relegating our country to the back of the pack.

Passing a climate bill this session that establishes a price on carbon will send a critical price signal to the private sector. It will unleash a torrent of investment in new technologies, create countless new ventures, and catalyze the innovation required for the U.S. to gain a leadership position. Massachusetts is well positioned to be a “disproportionate beneficiary,” enjoying more job creation and economic prosperity from this revolution than any state save California. The Commonwealth received over $350 million in cleantech venture investment in 2009 (second only to California), and will receive a great deal more in the years to come if investors are provided with the market certainty that a price on carbon provides.

The benefits of passing strong energy & climate legislation this session are substantive:

• A climate & energy bill will create thousands of jobs in Massachusetts. Clean energy is already the state’s fastest growing industrial sector with nearly 2000 companies and over 26,000 jobs. Separate studies by UMass Amherst and UC Berkeley show that a federal low-carbon policy could create up to 40 thousand jobs in Massachusetts and increase the State’s real Gross Domestic Product by up to $2.8 billion between now and 2020.
• Clean energy investments create 16.7 jobs for every $1 million in spending. Fossil fuels, by contrast, generate only 5.3 jobs per $1 million in spending. Clean-energy investments create 2.6 times more jobs for people with college degrees or above, 3 times more jobs for people with some college, and 3.6 times more jobs for people with high school degrees or less.
• A climate & energy bill will give investors the market signals and long-term certainty they need to commit additional dollars to the sector. Under a federal low-carbon policy, Massachusetts could see a net increase of about $3.5 billion in investment revenue.
• Comprehensive climate and energy legislation will save money for consumers. Massachusetts’ experience under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) shows that Massachusetts electricity prices declined from 18¢/kWh at the start of the program in January 2009 to 16¢/kWh in November 2009.
• Strict limits on carbon emissions will improve our competitive standing with respect to the rest of the world.  A recent report from the Pew Charitable Trust finds that  China, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain—all with strong, national policies aimed at reducing global warming pollution and incentivizing the use of renewable energy—are establishing strong, defensible positions in the clean energy economy. Unless our country makes a significant, long-term commitment to this sector, we may find ourselves out of the running.

What’s at stake here is no less than America’s global competitiveness, and we are already being lapped. Today, the U.S. is home to only one of the top five wind turbine manufacturers, one of the ten largest solar panel producers, and two of the top ten advanced battery manufacturers. China is now the largest wind turbine manufacturer, the largest solar panel manufacturer, and a dominant market player in advanced vehicle and battery technology.

Each day we wait, we fall further behind, sacrificing economic growth and badly needed jobs here at home. And that will not change until Congress passes a strong energy/climate bill.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who is working with Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) to craft compromise energy and climate legislation in the Senate, recently noted: “Six months ago my biggest worry was that an emissions deal would make American business less competitive compared to China. Now my concern is that every day that we delay trying to find a price for carbon is a day that China uses to dominate the green economy.”

The 1900s were labeled “The American Century.” Unless we act now to enter our bid for market leadership in the world’s largest industry, we run the very real risk that the twenty-first century will have China’s name written all over it.

It’s time for the Senate to get our country out of the starting blocks and into the clean energy race.

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The tastiest design at this year’s Milan Furniture Fair isn’t furniture at all—it’s this tiny, tomato-powered LED lamp by Israeli group d-VISION. You say tomato, I say incisive commentary on energy production and consumer culture. [MocoLoco and Inhabitat] More »

Eco Factor: Using sunlight to split water into its constituent molecules.

A team of researchers at MIT have developed a process to replicate the natural process of photosynthesis in plants by engineering the M13 bacterial virus that can split water into its constituent molecules that is hydrogen and oxygen using abundant solar energy. The team hopes that the process can further be used to create hydrogen efficiently from water, which can later be used to produce electricity.

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The livestock power mill makes cows even more productive turning farms into virtual power plants. More »

It isn’t technically feasible to have renewable energy supply us with 100% of our electricity needs, right? Wrong. Renewable energy is prohibitively expensive, right? Wrong.

A new report just put out this week, Roadmap 2050: a practical guide to a prosperous, low-carbon Europe, gets into technical and economic details surrounding these important issues. The report includes contributions from world leading economists and renewable energy experts, including people from McKinsey, KEMA, Imperial College London and Oxford Economics.

The report claims to be the most comprehensive assessment of the viability of zero carbon power supplies available today (focused on Europe).

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Advocates of natural gas like to mention that it’s a relatively clean fuel in terms of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. But that may not be the case after all, according to Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University. He believes that the all-in impact of natural gas may turn out to be just as dirty as oil or coal.

Howarth told MIT’s Technology Review that his calculations factor in not only the amount of carbon dioxide produced by natural gas, but also the impact of natural gas leaks. Methane, the major component of natural gas, is more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide so those leaks can have a surprisingly large impact on the environment. In fact, Howarth calculates that using natural gas results in the equivalent of 33 grams of carbon dioxide per megajoule of energy while petroleum fuels emit only 20 grams of carbon dioxide for the same amount of energy.

Natural gas may not have much advantage over coal—usually thought of as the dirtiest fuel—in terms of overall environmental impact, Howarth says. While he’s still trying to calculate the overall impact of each fuel, he’s becoming increasingly convinced that the gap between coal and natural gas in terms of global warming is far smaller than generally thought.

At the very least, says Technology Review, Howarth’s work shows the importance of more research before legislation is passed to encourage the use of one fuel over another. But the implications may be more far reaching than that for investors. Howarth is already calling for a moratorium on extracting natural gas from shale because that process requires more energy (and thus more greenhouse gases) than extracting the fuel from conventional sources. On the other hand, his work could buttress the case for renewed interest in coal.

Freelance business journalist Ian McGugan blogs for the Financial Post

With nuclear energy in the spotlight at the industry’s Nuclear Security Conference 2010, our story last Friday focused on GE Hitachi’s technology to recycle fuel from nuclear power plants and use it to generate additional power. In Part 2 of the story, we’re taking a look at how that project involves reenergizing decades of research already undertaken at GE.

Pit stop: A GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy technician installs a fuel assembly from the core of a boiling water reactor during a refueling outage. Each fuel assembly remains in use for approximately six years, helping the plant generate enough power for roughly one million homes per year.

The recycling technology would use sodium rather than water in the cooling process — which gives the neutrons born from fission higher energies in the reactor. This fact makes it possible for a sodium-cooled reactor to “burn” the remaining energy reserves that would normally go unused in fuel removed from a traditional water-cooled reactor. While it sounds like a radical idea, the concept has been around since small tests were undertaken in the 1950s. After a demonstration project in the 1960s, it gained momentum in 1971 with the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project – which gathered thousands of government and industry scientists together to come up with a commercial prototype.

As Esquire magazine noted in its in-depth look at the technology: “Then GE started rethinking things. They [Clinch River teams] were trying to power huge turbines that put out 1,000 megawatts. So [GE] sat down and said, ‘You know what, we’re pretty good at making washing machines and jet engines in a factory and replicating them. Why don’t we make a sodium-cooled reactor that’s factory-built, modular, with passive safety and replicate that, instead of trying to scale up?’”

“Passive safety meant that it would shut itself off automatically instead of melting down. Replicability meant the reactor vessel couldn’t be more than twenty feet in diameter, because that’s the biggest you can ship down a rail line. So they would gang reactor modules together to power a single turbine. They named it the Power Reactor, Innovative Small Module, or PRISM. At the time, it was a renegade idea. So what if PRISM could be mass-produced, plopped right next to every coal plant in the world, and hooked straight to their existing electric turbines…”

GE proved the passive safety concept in 1986 and was ready to build a prototype in 1992. Although government interest in the technology waned in the 1990s, it gained renewed momentum in 2006 and is currently an option being considered.

Meanwhile during this week’s Nuclear Security Conference 2010, Jack Fuller, president and CEO of GEH, focused on another new technology – using lasers to enrich uranium rather than centrifuges. Most enrichment today is accomplished when uranium is separated by centrifugal force in rotating cylinders. With the new technology – being developed by Global Laser Enrichment, a business venture of GE, Hitachi and Cameco — lasers selectively excite the uranium so that the needed isotopes can be separated.

Jack told the panel that the early testing phase has been completed and the team is now beginning to “design the first commercial production facility for GLE.” With regulatory approvals, commercial deployment could be initiated in 2012. Click here to read Jack’s full comments at the panel.

* Read “GE Hitachi’s Fuller to Seek Nuclear Recycling” from Bloomberg News
* Read “Game-changing tech and the Nuclear Security Summit” on GE Reports
* Read Esquire’s story about nuclear recycling and see their video
* Read “GE’s Nuclear Waste Plan” in Forbes
* Learn more about the Nuclear Security Conference
* Watch a video recapping the Conference
* Read the Global Laser Enerichment announcement
* Learn more about Global Laser Enrichment
* Read FAQ’s about the laser enrichment technology

From Green Right Now Reports

Solar and wind dominate the clean energy headlines, but the nascent geothermal industry also continues to grow. The U.S. geothermal power sector reported a 26 percent growth in new projects in 2009.

In its April 2010 report, the US Geothermal Power Production and Development Update listed 188 projects underway in 15 states.

The Leathers Geothermal Plant in Calipatria, Calif. (Photo: DOE)

These projects could produce enough power to provide the electricity for 7.6 million people, or 20 percent of all of California’s total power needs, according to the Geothermal Energy Association (GEA).

“Geothermal power can be a critical part of the answer to global warming,” said GEA’s Executive Director, Karl Gawell. “For example, California could achieve its 2020 goal for global warming emissions reductions just by keeping energy demand level and replacing its coal-fired generation with geothermal,” he asserted.

Many western U.S. states have sites suitable for the production of commercial geothermal power, and this past year saw some southern U.S. states add their first geothermal plants.

• Nevada leads the nation with more than 3,000 MegaWatts under development.
• Utah quadrupled the geothermal power it has under development.
• New Mexico, Idaho and Oregon  are the next fastest growing geothermal locations.
• Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas started their first geothermal projects in 2009.
• The other seven states with projects are Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Washington and Wyoming.

Like other renewable energy projects, geothermal brings local jobs and a cleaner energy that can permanently replace coal-fired power plants.

“Not only are we seeing more and more development and hiring in places with a long history of geothermal like Nevada and California, but for the first time these jobs are being created in the Gulf Coast, in states such as Louisiana and Mississippi,” Gawell said in a statement. “Along with a huge number of new construction jobs, geothermal power also creates many permanent positions that can never be outsourced.”

The projects underway are projected to create  29,750 permanent jobs.   Gawell said that federal stimulus dollars, tax incentives and the states’ Renewable Electricity Standards (targets for clean energy)were fueling the growth in geothermal projects.

In many cases, geothermal development is strongest in states with strong RES targets. California, a leader in geothermal projects, has a RES calling for 33 percent of its power to come from renewables by 2020. Nevada’s RES is set at 25 percent and Utah’s at 20 percent.

All of the geothermal power projects that came on line in 2009 used new federal tax grant provisions that were authorized in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

For more information on geothermal power, how it works and where it is installed, see the GEA’s current use webpage.

The military consumes a lot of oil; precisely how much, not even they seem to know. But not only do they buy and consume lots of oil, but they ship it all over the world to whatever theater they need. It isn’t exactly efficient, and the Department of Defense knows it. They’ve been moving towards greener, less oily ideas of getting troops and equipment around, ideas that may one day filter down to the civilian population.

But while the Department of Defense may not know how much oil it uses, it has a good idea of when it will start running short of supplies. A recent report suggests that as soon as 2015 all the surplus oil production could be gone, and production could fall short on the order of 10 million barrels… per day

There are lots of arguments for, and against, peak oil, when it will happen, and just how bad it will be. But as a single entity, the US Military is the top consumer of energy in the world. The military pays as much as $400 a gallon for gas, when you figure in all the shipping, equipment, and personal required to get the fuel where it is destined to go. So when the military is predicting massive shortages just a few years out, we should all tune in and pay attention. (more…)

Lynne Kiesling

We were in Columbus, Ohio over the weekend and early this week and, not surprisingly, the airwaves were full of news of a new ad campaign to rehabilitate ethanol and, in the words of one of the news stories we heard, “correct myths about ethanol”. So are they saying that it’s a myth that the ethanol production that receives generous federal taxpayer subsidies raises the prices of corn and other grains while not reducing greenhouse gases? No, that’s true, so Growth Energy is having to deflect these criticisms by steering inside-the-Beltway attention to other effects of ethanol that in truth are economically specious but potentially politically potent, such as “Ethanol has not shipped a single job overseas. America’s economic fuel.”

This one really made me laugh: “No beaches have been closed due to ethanol spills. America’s clean fuel.” Why? Because ethanol is incredibly hydrophilic and corrosive, so if it spills it absorbs all water in its reach, and it can’t be shipped long distance in existing pipelines, so the federal ethanol mandates and subsidies mean that we employ trucks to transport ethanol nearer to the point of consumption to blend it with gasoline. Yeah, that’s clean! How’s that for some truthiness for you?

I prefer the list of advertising tag lines that Ron Bailey devised yesterday, although I doubt that the ethanol industry would! You should check them all out because they are funny, but my favorite is “No carbon dioxide emissions have been cut due to ethanol subsidies. America’s greenhouse fuel.” That really hits at the heart of the boondoggle that is the perverse bootleggers-and-Baptists energy-agriculture policy in the U.S.

Why all of this action right now? Congress appears to be working on a new energy bill, and some of the federal ethanol subsidies are set to expire soon. As noted in this New York Times article on Tuesday,

Domestic ethanol producers are facing the expiration at the end of this year of the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit, also known as VEETC and the blender’s tax credit. The federal benefit that started in 2005 gives a tax credit of 51 cents for every gallon of pure ethanol blended into gasoline. Reps. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.) and John Shimkus (R-Ill.) have introduced legislation with a five-year extension of the benefit.

The tax credit could be worth plenty in the future. The 2007 energy bill created a requirement that the United States use 36 billion gallons a year of biofuels by 2022.

The NYT also reports a new ad campaign in support of Brazilian cane sugar ethanol imports, arguing for elimination of the 54-cent import tariff per gallon of cane sugar ethanol, which is more energy-efficient through its life cycle than corn ethanol. Clearly the elimination of the import tariff is the economically sensible policy … for everyone except the politically powerful corn and sugar industries. Sadly, as Mancur Olson pointed out in The Logic of Collective Action, those folks with their concentrated benefits will vote on the basis of this issue, but the rest of us will not, even if we see its costs and despise its cravenness.

The way to avoid this inferior outcome is to lower government spending and the size of government overall, which gives all lobbyists and special interests less of a target.

Eco Factor: New solar cell designed to capture visible, infrared and ultraviolet light.

Researchers at the Kyoto Institute of Technology have introduced a new photovoltaic cell that is capable of generating electricity from visible, infrared and ultraviolet light. The team now hopes that this new cell will lead to the development of highly-efficient photovoltaic cells that can be single-junction rather than the more conventional multi-junction.

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The United States plans to cut its fossil fuel use from about 80 percent of the energy consumed now to just 20 percent by 2050, an ambitious undertaking that requires immediate shifts to be achieved, according to a key U.S. energy official.

Kristina Johnson, undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), said an array of measures will be needed to achieve that goal, including conservation and new technologies. But if technology is to help solve the climate conundrum, the process of turning new discoveries into usable products has to be accelerated, since it now can take decades to go from the lab to the market, Johnson said.

Johnson spoke Tuesday (April 13) at the Graduate School of Design’s Gund Hall as part of the Harvard University Center for the Environment’s (HUCE) “Future of Energy” lecture series. Her talk, “The Role of Innovation in Solving America’s Energy and Environmental Challenges,” was introduced by HUCE Director Daniel Schrag, who said Johnson is part of an “amazing cohort” of educated leaders brought into the government to deal with energy issues. Before joining the DOE, Johnson, who has a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University, was provost at The Johns Hopkins University.

Johnson said the DOE’s energy goals can be summed up rather simply: Put people back to work, get them back to school, and save the planet. Turning innovation in the energy sector into jobs is important, she said, as is ensuring that students graduating from U.S. schools have the skills needed for the energy sector. Saving the planet is part and parcel of the reduction in fossil fuel use needed to fight climate change.

Johnson said that switching the transportation sector from fossil fuels is a bigger challenge than reducing such fuels in the electricity sector. The biggest challenge, however, is time. There is little of it if the world is to keep global temperature change to an average of 2 degrees Celsius above 1990 levels. Doing nothing and passing the problem on to our children would be like “rolling up the window of a car on a hot summer day with our children trapped inside.”

Americans also have competition for supremacy of the emerging clean energy industry, she said, since China is moving rapidly toward generating renewable energy, investing as much as $12.6 million on clean energy every hour.

The United States emits about 6 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere each year. If no systemic changes are made, she said, that number will mushroom to 8 gigatons annually by 2050. The goal is to get it below 2 gigatons, she said. Energy efficiency could make a significant dent in that number, but alone could only keep it roughly at today’s level. A suite of changes, including increased use of biofuels, more nuclear power, carbon capture, sequestration technology (which keeps carbon dioxide generated by fossil fuel burning plants from the atmosphere), renewable energy sources, and other options will be needed to meet the goal.

The DOE has several programs to foster innovation in solar, wind, geothermal, and other energy sources.

The United States, she said, has a long history of world-changing innovation, from the model T car to the transistor. The DOE is working not only to foster innovation in the lab, but to speed its transition through the long process of reaching the marketplace.

“We have an urgency to invent or discover anything that possibly can help us now,” Johnson said. “We need to create a technologically savvy culture where everyone understands how we use energy.”