Energywise

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

New York City, with its massive buildings, high population density, poor ratio of roofttop to resident, and rather northerly latitude, has represented a tough frontier for solar energy to conquer. Eight years ago, when I looked into the economics of putting a photovoltaic array on the roof of a home in the central Brooklyn neighborhood where I reside, I found that even with enormous state subsidies, going solar did not pay.

As laid out in a book about energy and climate that I was writing at the time, for a PV array costing about US $32 000, the homeowner stood to collect $20 000 in subsidies from New York State. Still, the payback period would be at least a decade—and then only if everything turned out to work as advertized.

Now, however, a few PV arrays are popping up on roofs in my neighborhood. The ones nearby are being installed by VoltaicSolaire, a four-year-old company founded by Carlos Berger, owner and operator of a successful electrical contracting business. (Why the French-sounding name? He just wanted the company to sound different, Berger explains.) The arrays are provided by an American company in Wisconsin, says Berger, and the PV material is standard silica.

Berger says that VoltaicSolaire's system installation costs run $4 to $6/Watt. The installer stands to collect a 30-percent subsidy from the federal government upon completion of the system, with another 25 percent (up to $5000), coming from the state of New York. 

Even so, the economics are still a close call. Berger says the expected payback period is now 5 to 7 years, a big improvement from what it was eight years ago. But the installation will pay off only if the home has a rooftop with a large expanse facing south or southwest. (A killer eight years ago was that my roof faced mainly west.) Another set of hurdles are the bureaucratic type. Obtaining city building permits can involve a lot of red tape, and so can getting net metering set up, which is essential. Berger expects such obstacles to diminish with time, however.

Will we soon see a deluge of photovoltaic installation in places like Brooklyn? It will depend largely on whether global PV prices stabilize near their current level—despite a general meltdown in solar manufacturing—or bounce back to much higher levels. Future price scenarios are explored in a current IEEE Spectrum news report by Peter Fairley.

Photo: VoltaicSolaire

This week a scrappy little online publication with no physical headquarters and an editorial staff of just seven was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious award in American journalism. InsideClimate News, based theoretically in Brooklyn, N.Y., is just the third electronic-only publication to be given a Pulitzer--ProPublica, the first to get one, now has two, and Huffington Post has one.

InsideClimate news won the Putlizer for an investigative story by three of its reporters about an under-covered oil spill in Michigan, an article that testifies to the publication's broad interest in energy and the environment, going beyond climate news as such.

The publication's report that most caught my eye was one in January, on the subject of drastic cuts in environmental reporting staffs at top U.S. newspapers. Prompted by the news that The New York Times was dismantling its environmental desk and reassigning many of the desk's reporters to other beats, InsideClimate News said that the country's leading five newspapers now had only a dozen journalists covering the environment, despite the general public's obvious interest in the subject.

The second paragraph to that story noted that Hurricane Sandy had just "brought home the reality of climate dangers to many Americans," and that a recently released draft government report predicted "far worse to come." Temperatures could rise by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit by mid-century, threatening "Americans' health and livelihoods and the ecosystems that sustain us," as the draft report put it.

Michael Mann—whom the Yale University alumni magazine has dubbed "the most hated climate scientist in the U.S."—told InsideClimate News that "specialized, experienced environment editors and reporters are essential to navigate the escalating politics and complicated science of climate change." Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, said that climate change was "not just the biggest crisis ever, it's the biggest story ever."

Another InsideCimate News story catching my eye concerned John Kerry's appointment as Secretary of State: It said that he would take personal control of the controversial Keystone XL review. This struck me as a shrewd political observation. When President Obama delayed his decision on the pipeline last year, calling for further review, it was widely assumed that he would approve construction after the election. But his appointment of Kerry as Secretary of State may indeed have changed the political chemistry. Kerry is well known to be a passionate advocate of strong policy to counter climate change, respected as such around the world.

One of the InsideClimate News reporters who won this week's Pulitzer told The New York Times that though people think of the publication as an advocacy organization because of its name, that's wrong. This may be a trifle disingenuous. If you decide to devote a publication, say, to the science of evolution, that would seem to imply that you take evolution seriously. Or if you were to devote it to planetary science, that might imply you think the Earth is spherical and rotates around the Sun. By the same token, if you call your publication InsideClimate News, that will generally communicate that you take climate science seriously.

In any event, the award should hearten anyone who fears for the future of investigative journalism—a fear that all too often seems warranted. Like ProPublica, InsideClimate News has a set of media partners and makes its stories available to other publications. As other publications reduce their editorial staffs, it's a hopeful sign that other organizations are emerging to pick up the slack.