Energywise

Makani Power, long one of the leaders in the growing field of airborne wind energy, now has a very large and rich parent. A statement on the company's website announced yesterday that Google would acquire Makani for an undisclosed amount; Google—or more specifically, Google.org, the company's philanthropic arm—had previously backed Makani to the tune of US $15 million.

Makani makes a kite-like wind energy device, essentially a fixed wing with small turbines on board. The wing is tethered to the ground and flies in vertical circles to generate power, which is sent back down the tether to the ground, where it could be sent on to the grid. In its statement, Makani wrote that "the timing couldn't be better, as we completed the first ever autonomous all-modes flight with our Wing 7 prototype last week." The video below shows that full test sped up five times.

Airborne wind power takes advantage of the fact that wind speeds are higher and more consistent as one gains altitude. Makani's current design would fly at around 500 meters; going even higher could garner even more energy. The recently-tested prototype is rated at 30 kilowatts capacity, but the company is on record as wanting to build a 600-kw wing that would have a wingspan of 92 feet. Google's money could potentially move that goal closer, quicker.

The purchase also may allay concerns about the loss, last fall, of Makani's founder and primary engineering pioneer, Corwin Hardham. Hardham, only 38 at the time, passed away unexpectedly at his desk. When I met him only a month or so earlier, he excitedly told me about plans to use even the 92-foot, 600-kw turbine as a mere starting point on the way to 5 megawatts.

The fact that Google was the one to purchase the company isn't all that surprising, given their ongoing efforts with renewable energy. The company has so far invested more than $1 billion toward renewables, including backing BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah solar plant soon to open in the Mojave, the ambitious Atlantic Wind Connection transmission "backbone" project (see also here), and others. Though airborne wind ideas have an air (no pun intended) of the far-fetched about them, having Google at your back can make even the most quixotic (this time, pun intended) scheme seem practical.

Strikingly different views of Obama's environmental record—and of environmental politics generally—have been appearing in the general press. At one extreme the president is portrayed as ineffectual because he lacks an activist base. At the other extreme are commentators who find him strikingly effective, the strength of grassroots activism being held as almost irrelevant.

Case in point: In a widely discussed article that appeared in The New Yorker in April, Nicholas Lemann bemoaned a drift toward inside-the-beltway bargaining on the part of  the top U.S. environmental organizations and their leaders, as compared to the glorious early days of the environmental movement when mass mobilization led to enactment of landmark clean air and water legislation. Lemann, a former dean of Columbia Journalism School and the author of well regarded books on a wide range of subjects, treated the failure of environmentalists to obtain a cap-and-trade carbon reduction bill as Exhibit A in what he considered their ineffectiveness as compared with forty years ago.

In a diametrically opposed assessment, journalist Jonathan Chait argued in a recent issue of New York magazine that environmental activism is less relevant today because it is less needed. By using a variety of regulatory authorities and instruments, notably the Environmental Protection Agency that Nixon created in response to grassroots pressure, Obama has been able to make himself in effect "the environmental president." Especially noteworthy in Chait's view have been the president's much more demanding long-term automotive fuel efficiency standards, the big boost given to clean and green tech by the 2009 stimulus bill, and plans in progress to regulate carbon under authority of the Clean Air Act and Amendments, as directed by a seminal U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Having argued here more than once that Obama has been pursuing a "stealth climate policy," I am somewhat more in sympathy with Chait's position than Lemann's. Lemann understates the extent of current environmental activism—he makes no mention of Bill McKibbon's 350.org or of the many local groups that have made it virtually impossible to build a new coal-fired plant in the United States—and he puts too much emphasis on the failed cap-and-trade bill. Chait, to be sure, does not always state or contextualize Obama's achievements quite rightly. He overstates the president's success in stimulating cuts in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, which actually began under his predecessor (and so far are largely the effect of factors for which neither president should do much bragging, notably the overall economic slowdown), and he exaggerates the significance of the toothless carbon reduction pledge the United States and other countries made at the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference.

Indeed, Obama's promise to cut emissions 17 percent by 2020 is widely seen as drastically inadequate and certainly, Chait's paeans notwithstanding, is not "the brass ring of the environmental movement." Broadly speaking, environmental leaders and the climate science community consider much more aggressive action urgently needed.

A scathing critique of current U.S. and global climate commitments came earlier this year, compliments of science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, writing in the winter of issue Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Taking what they call "a view from the future," Oreskes and Conway described how "the collapse of western civilization" began even as we speak. Their modus operandi was to proceed smoothly from seemingly implausible events like North's Carolina's 2012 Sea Level Rise Denial Bill and the 2010 heat wave and fires that killed an estimated 50 000 people in Russia to an enumeration of not yet occurred and yet all too plausible future events, among them: an unprecedented heat wave in summer 2041 that destroyed crops around the world, leading to "riots in virtually every major city"; the 2042 International Aerosol Injection Climate Engineering Project, which backfires badly; the appearance of the so-called Sagan feedback effect, which leads to an abrupt doubling of warming; the ensuing disintegration of the West Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets; and finally, with sharpy rising waters, the displacement of an estimated 1.5 billion people, and the disappearance of 60-70 percent of Earth's species. "The human populations of Australia and Africa, or course, were wiped out."

One thing Lemann, Chait and the rest of us can probably agree on is this: In his first term, Obama aggressively used his executive authority to discourage greenhouse gas emissions, without talking about it. This year, with the first State of the Union Address of his second term, he is saying he will continue to use that executive authority, making no bones about it. The real issue is whether that is enough.

Photo: Volkswagen's XL1. Credit: Volkswagen

Switching from steel to concrete somehow feels like a step backward, technologically speaking, but researchers at Iowa State University think doing so could aid in building ever-bigger wind turbine towers. Led by engineering professor Sri Sritharan, a group is using ultra-high performance concrete to build turbines that could soar past the 80 or so meters that steel has maxed out at.

Steel towers are the standard in the wind industry, but building 100-meter towers—needed to get better wind currents—becomes extremely expensive and logistically difficult. Sritharan's group is working on a couple of ideas using concrete that would allow a degree of modularity—instead of one big piece for the tower, panels attached to columns or pre-assembled "cells" could allow for towers of varying heights and would be easier to manage and transport.

So far, these designs have shown promise in load testing. Full-scale segments of the towers easily withstood the 100 000 pounds of operational load, and still performed well at much higher loads. Along with the modularity, concrete would increase the operational lifetime of a tower, from 20 years to as many as 40. And at even a mere 20 meters higher, turbines could take advantage of higher wind speeds.

To be clear, there are some concrete towers already out on the market. Acciona Windpower, for example, has a 3-megawatt turbine that can be installed using an 80-meter steel tower or a concrete version of varying heights. The concrete tower can get as high as 120 meters, and is also assembled in five or six sections. The vast majority of towers out there, though, are steel, and the Iowa State designs provide new methods of construction and assembly.

Of course, changing from steel to concrete carries some environmental questions: concrete contains cement, the production of which yields some serious carbon dioxide emissions. Like, five-percent-of-global-emissions serious. Steel production also emits CO2, though not on the same level; I asked Dr. Sritharan about this, and he said that he and a student have so far done only a limited analysis of the issue.

"The steel tower is likely to have less overall environmental impact if [a] duration of 20 years is used," he wrote in an e-mail. "However, the concrete tower can last longer as its design is not governed by fatigue." If the concrete tower lasts 40 years instead of 20, the overall environmental impact is likely smaller than that of the steel tower. "We definitely need to do more work in this area," he said.

The wind industry in general has long been interested in going both bigger and higher. Using concrete won't yield the 500-meter turbine, and it won't suddenly produce 10-megawatt behemoths, but it's a potentially useful step in those directions.

Photo: Iowa State University/Sri Sritharan

Last Thursday, global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, as measured atop Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano, reached 400 parts per million. The good news is that most educated people now have a sense of what that means—which would not have been the case 10 years ago. The bad news is that the world is more confused than ever regarding what to do about it.

Since humans started pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in large quantities with the beginning of the industrial revolution in the mid-1700s, CO₂ concentrations have increased about 50 percent. To put it another way, today's CO₂ concentrations are about 50 percent higher than at their interglacial peaks, going back at least 800 000 years, as estimated from the longest Antarctic ice core. And they are climbing at the highest rates in measured time. Two-thirds of the increase in industrial times has taken place in just the last half century, since Charles Keeling set up instruments on Mauna Loa to measure CO₂ in the late 1950s.

“The last time in the Earth’s history when we saw similar levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere was probably about 4.5 million years ago when the world was warmer on average by three or four degrees Celsius than it is today,” Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, told the Financial Times. “There was no permanent ice sheet on Greenland, sea levels were much higher, and the world was a very different place.”

“If you’re looking to stave off climate perturbations that I don’t believe our culture is ready to adapt to, then significant reductions in CO₂ emissions have to occur right away,” Mark Pagani, a Yale geochemist and paleoclimatologist, told The New York Times. “I feel like the time to do something was yesterday.”

There's the rub. Metaphorically speaking, the day before yesterday saw the conclusion of the Rio Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 and the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol 1997, whereupon many of the leading industrial countries did start making serious efforts to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. But the United States opted out of that process, and rapidly industrialized countries like China and India were not required to join in. Then, yesterday, with the global financial meltdown and near-depression, the whole world took a timeout on climate policy. Traumatic events like the U.S. heat wave last summer and Hurricane Sandy last fall continued to deliver rude reminders of what climate change could mean. But with major economies still struggling to get moving again, much of the public remained unready to get—and certainly unready to act on—the message.

What now? Is it not time for the United States, which seems at last to be getting over the economic hump, to get into the game of climate diplomacy in a serious way?

Photo: Mauna Loa Observatory, by Chris Stewart/AP Photo

Texas and California are the two biggest states in the country by population, and second and third by area. So it's no surprise they're one-two on the installed wind power state ranking list. But what's Iowa—26th biggest by area and 30th by population—doing there at third place?

Iowa, already impressive in its wind power progress, continues its march into the energy future with one of it's two main utilities announcing plans to build US $1.9 billion worth of new turbines by 2015. MidAmerican Energy says the project's 656 new turbines will generate hundreds of millions of dollars in property tax revenues and will arrive at zero extra expense to utility customers. In fact, after only a few years of operation, ratepayers will see a decrease in electricity bills thanks to the 1050 megawatts of new wind.

That full gigawatt of power joins more than 5 GW already installed in the Hawkeye State through the end of 2012, and would add about 1.5 percent to the total installed capacity in the U.S. And though Iowa may be smaller than Texas and California by just about any measure that doesn't include corn production, in 2012 it led the way in percentage of electricity generation from wind, at 24.5 percent. According to Iowa's own wind industry group, the installed capacity is enough for about 1.1 million homes; guess how many households the state even has. Yup, just over 1.2 million.

So what gives? Some of it is grandfathered in at this point, with a historically strong wind industry in the region leading residents to welcome the sight of wind energy towers instead of resent them. And yes, there is a lot of wind to go around: 26th in size, but seventh in total wind resource, with an enormous 570 000 potential megawatts floating in the first 100 meters off the ground. But interestingly, state policies aren't really pushing the rotors of wind power in Iowa: While the state does have a renewable energy portfolio standard, it sets a weak goal, in terms of megawatts rather than a percentage. California, by contrast, requires itself to have 33 percent of electricity from renewables by 2020; Iowa's now-ancient standard (passed in 1983) calls for 105 MW from renewables divided between the two main utilities. The state passed that mark long ago.

Whatever the reason, the $1.9 billion in new turbines suggests Iowa isn't ready to slow down, even though now it can essentially power every home in the state with just those spinning blades.

Photo: JG Photography/Alamy 

The Ivanpah solar plant in the Mojave Desert marches ever closer to its official opening this summer. That plant, a huge concentrating solar power (CSP) facility using mirrors aimed at central towers, will join others in Spain, Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere. So there's a sizeable capacity potential for CSP, but is the technology worth it? When Ivanpah and a number of other plants were designed or suggested, photovoltaic prices hadn't dropped off the map just yet, so the economics of building plants that concentrated light seemed reasonable. That has since changed and PV is incredibly cheap, and the actual value CSP provides has yet to really be quantified. A recent analysis from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) tries to do that—specifically in California, though the methodology can certainly be used elsewhere.

The basic answer is that CSP is very valuable to the grid, especially when it is capable of providing "operating reserves," or short-term extra capacity in times of high demand or failures in other parts of the grid. The value is essentially based on how much fossil fuel-based generation can be avoided through the use of CSP; the NREL researchers compared a baseline scenario to photovoltaics, CSP alone, and CSP with operating reserves. CSP beats out the baseline scenario by about US $6 per megawatt-hour, and by $12 per MWh over PV.

By using operating reserves, though, those differences increase fairly dramatically: CSP wins in that case by $22 per MWh over baseload and $29 per MWh over PV. Interestingly, running CSP plants with operating reserves would mean a shift in standard practice: generally, these plants are run at full capacity whenever the sun shines, but to provide operating reserves would mean running at only partial capacity some of the time and then ramping up when needed.

This analysis was conducted solely for the California grid, and was based on the state's renewable energy portfolio standard calling for 33 percent of electricity from renewables by 2020. The same method, though, could be extended to other regions as well. And quantifying CSP's value may help it continue to grow, given some recent struggles; BrightSource Energy, the Ivanpah plant's developer, has shelved a full gigawatt of further CSP plans this year alone thanks to cost and other issues. PV is cheap these days, but can't incorporate storage using molten salts or other ideas the way CSP can, and clearly doesn't add value to the overall grid the way CSP does. To really scale up renewables we will need both in huge amounts, but understanding CSP's value is an important step toward its expansion.

Photo: BrightSource Energy

Eurotechnology Japan noted in a recent e-mail circular that Japan's ten major electricity operators were deeply in the red for the year ending 31 March—the second year in a row that the utilities took such a hit. Their combined 2012-13 losses came to US $15 billion, almost exactly the same as the year before. In its annual report for the fiscal year that ended 31 March 2011 (three weeks after the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe), Tepco had to report a $10 billion loss—nearly all as a direct result of the accident. In the next fiscal year, says the e-mail alert, all but one of the country's nuclear operators were affected by the shutdown of Japan's reactors and the urgent need to replace nuclear electricity with power generated from imported natural gas. "Currently all Japanese regional electricity operators, except Hokuriku Electric Power Company and Okinawa Electric Power Company show net losses." As a result, the country as a whole has seen its trade balance slip into the red, despite its position as an exporter to the world.

Japan need not have found itself in such dire straights following an event like Fukushima, an author of the Eurotechnology Japan report told Britain's Economist magazine. Although the country has great potential in renewables--from rooftop solar to offshore wind and geothermal energy--Japan's utilities have arbitrarily sought to limit the share of renewables in electricity production to 1 percent, an unspoken rule, said Gerhard Fasol. Though officials now are talking of boosting that share to 15-25 percent, actually getting that done will surely require a battle royal with vested interests.

Meanwhile, Fukushima has been a huge blow to nuclear manufacturers everywhere, Japan's first and foremost. So it was big news for them and something of a breakthrough last week when Turkey announced it would purchase a huge, 4.5 Gigawatt atomic power plant complex from an international group led by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries at an estimated price of more than $20 billion. Though Mitsubishi will have the role of prime contractor, the actual technology will be provided mainly by France's Areva—its first big nuclear sale since Fukushima as well.

Many financial details of the deal remain unresolved, and the deal cannot be considered fully done until they are worked out. Evidently Turkey will take a large capital stake in the project, but most costs will be carried by the international contractors, who will be repaid out of revenues from the plant's electricity sales. The issue of just how much risk will be shifted to investors is key, given the jittery financial climate for nuclear power post-Fukushima. In the case of an earlier 4.5-GW nuclear power complex commissioned by Turkey (the nation's first such deal), Russia's nuclear supplier assumed all the risk.

Photo: The third and fourth reactors buildings at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, as seen from the air on Feb. 20, 2013.
Credit: The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images

You would think that to the extent the old-fashioned car powered by an internal combustion engine comes into disrepute, because of its noxious emissions and oil consumption, the obvious beneficiaries will be the hybrid-electric and all-electric vehicle. But you might be wrong, to judge from the New York Times's second annual "energy for tomorrow" conference, which was devoted to "Building Sustainable Cities."

Last year the Gray Lady knocked the ball out of the park with a conference sharply focused on a single theme, the radically stronger U.S. position in energy—a development little noticed then that has become a virtual truism in the meantime. A repeat performance was not to be expected this year. But even so, "Building Sustainable Cities" delivered some startling perspectives too.

Most shocking, perhaps, was the level of hostility expressed by many speakers to the automobile as such. Jaime Lerner, a former mayor of Brazil's Curitiba, known for the work he did there introducing an integrated mass transportation system that has been copied the world over, expressed the belief that cars some day soon will be seen as noxious as tobacco is today. "The car is going to be the cigarette of the future," Lerner said.

The distaste Lerner and others expressed had to do not merely with pollutants and gasoline but, first and foremost, with congestion and what you might call human equities. Enrique Penalosa, the former mayor of Bogota, said his transportation reforms emphasized wide use of mini-buses (like the VW "Volksbus" seen ubiquitously in Mexico City), which after all emit pollutants and consume hydrocarbons too. The decisive factor for Penalosa is the amount of urban space consumed by a bus, as compared with a private car. "If we are all equal before the law," he said, then "a bus carrying 100 people should be entitled to 100 times as much road space as a private car."

As one who believes that nuclear power has a vital role to play in guaranteeing our future energy supplies and in lowering the risk of catastrophic climate change, I am chagrined to report that Fukushima is still providing plenty of ammunition to anti-nuclear forces, two years after the worse-than-imagined cascading disasters that befell the reactor complex in the wake of a devastating earthquake and tsunami.

The New York Times reported on April 30 that groundwater is infiltrating the ravaged reactor complex at a rate of 75 gallons per minute (almost 300 liters/m), straining the operators' ability to collect the contaminated water and prevent it for escaping into the Pacific Ocean.

On top of that, there is serious concern that the accumulating water could swamp the improvised systems that cool the damaged cores, and cause another major accident.

"It feels like we are being chased, but we are doing our best to stay a step in front," a Tepco general manager and spokesperson told the Times.

Already, tanks built to accommodate the strontium-laden groundwater have the capacity of 112 Olympic-size pools (photo). And yet Tepco is planning to remove a small forest near the plant to make room for more tanks. Originally, Tepco thought it would be able to dump wastewater from the plant into the ocean, after filtering out most of the strontium and other radioactive materials. But public outcry over the amount of tritium remaining in the water has led to that idea being scotched.

Could a new generation of small, modular reactors, built underground, give new life to nuclear construction in the advanced industrial countries? Two designs are looking especially promising, as Matthew Wald of the Times reported separately last week. But, as one caustic critic told Wald, the nice thing about paper designs is that they only carry the risk of paper cuts; defects often become apparent only when designs are further along and construction begins.

Photo: Kyodo/AP Images

New York City being New York City, it was hardly surprising Monday night that eight of the nine candidates vying to replace Michael Bloomberg as mayor said addressing climate change was a major city responsibility. Where New York City stands on issues of sustainability is, of course, of more than merely local interest. Besides being one of the world's great cities, under Bloomberg New York has emerged as a world leader in efforts to promote green development and plan for disruptive climate change effects. Bloomberg himself is a leader in national and international efforts to address climate change.

What was much more surprising was that eight of the nine—not exactly the same eight—declined to call for closure of the controversial Indian Point nuclear power plant, when invited to do so by the moderator. A relatively old nuclear power plant, Indian Point is situated on the Hudson River just 35 miles (55 kilometers) north of the city; a meltdown could contaminate the river basin and spread contamination to an area that would be virtually impossible to evacuate.

That was one highlight of the New York City Sustainability Forum held Monday evening at Cooper Union, in which five Democratic Party candidates, three Republicans and one Independent squared off on energy and the environment, with WNYC's highly regarded radio host Brian Lehrer presiding.

Public opinion on Indian Point has been rather evenly split, to be sure, with almost half of New Yorkers in favor of keeping the plant open and about 40 percent favoring its closure. But considering that opponents are likely to be the more passionate and activist voters, appealing to them might tempt the demagogue. To be sure, a reluctance to phase out nuclear is not inconsistent with taking a strong position on climate change, but that has not stopped most environmental organizations from remaining staunchly anti-nuclear and it has not stopped countries with strong climate policies (like Germany) from adopting a nuclear exit.

So it's noteworthy that eight of the nine mayoral candidates specifically opposing closure of the plant until the city knew how to replace its output, which accounts for up to a quarter of the city's electricity consumption. (And this is not to say that the one candidate advocating immediate closure of the plant, City Council chair Christine Quinn, the current front-runner, is demoagogic or insincere in her position. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo also would like to see it shuttered.)

That said, many of the issues discussed in detail last night are of mainly local interest: The particulars of flood-zone planning, for example, and siting of solid waste disposal facilities. But even when it comes down to such nuts and bolts other cities may have something to learn from NYC--and NYC may have a few things to learn as well. One candidate pointed out, for example, that New York recycles 20 percent of its trash, while San Francisco is close to 80 percent. Moderator Lehrer observed that one of eight New Yorkers suffer from asthma, and that the rates are much higher in poor neighborhoods where there is a lot of trucking.

Urban air pollution was an area in which the nine candidates were surprisingly weak, though eight of the the nine agreed there is too much traffic south of Manhattan's 59th Street—an issue that Bloomberg tried unsuccessfully to address with a plan for congestion pricing, modeled on London's. Figuring out how to reduce automotive traffic in major cities is of course a major issue everywhere.

Photo: Seth Wenig/AP Photo