Energywise

A three-member panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which after the Supreme Court is the most influential and important American court in matters of regulation and policy, has unanimously upheld the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases and declined to second-guess EPA’s timetable for limiting noxious emissions from motor vehicles, power plants, and industrial facilities. The panel said EPA was "unambiguously correct" in claiming authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under standing clean air law.

Today's appeals court ruling is notable as much for the force and clarity of its language, as for its substance. The 14 states challenging the EPA's authority argued that EPA had relied on unsound climate science in classing greenhouse gases as pollutants. "The E.P.A. is not required to reprove the existence of the atom every time it approaches a scientific question," said the court, leaving no doubt it considers mainstream climate science essentially credible.

The D.C. appeals panel that issued today's ruling was headed by David B. Sentelle, the court's chief judge, an appointee of Ronald Reagan. The two other members were appointees of Bill Clinton. While the plaintiffs can now appeal the ruling to the full court, it is not obvious that they would fare better with the 13-justice group. To be sure, the court often is sharply critical of regulations and regulators; recently it took the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to task for being too lax in its oversight of nuclear waste management. Then too, the court is known for rigorously and sometimes ruthlessly applying the kind of free-market economic analysis that is near and dear to business-oriented conservatives. At least three members of the court, including Sentelle, have been or are considered potential Republican nominees to the Supreme Court.

Yet, for all that, the character of today's decision strongly suggests the panel is in no doubt about where the court as a whole stands on this issue. A serious environmentalism can be found among conservatives as well as liberals, of course, and respect for scientific consensus is hardly a monopoly of one or the other party. Indeed, the interpretation of EPA's authority enunciated by the D.C. Appeals Court on Tuesday originated in a landmark 2007 decision by a Supreme Court that had essentially the same political balance as today's, despite the retirement and replacement of two justices in the intervening years--that is, a balance that is just slightly tilted to the right.

eBay announced this week that its expanded data center in Utah will rely on a 6 MW fuel cell array supplied by Bloom Energy, based in Sunnyvale, Cal., which makes an innovative solid oxide system. It will be the largest stationary fuel cell bank ever installed in a non-utility setting, and the first time a data center has been designed to rely on fuel cells as its primary energy source, with the grid serving as backup. The normal procedure is for data centers to get electricity from the grid, with some kind of backup system to kick in when the grid goes down—an expensive procedure.

The decision by eBay to commit to the Bloom energy system represents a significant vote of confidence not only in the company, which has has set itself the strategic objective of perfecting a fuel cell system reliable enough to power data centers, but also in the broader technology. A decade ago, mobile fuel cells fell out of favor and largely out of public view, when they failed to revolutionize vehicular transportation as manufacturers had promised. But meanwhile, makers of larger, stationary fuels cells have made steady if undramatic advances, building incrementally on existing technology like the solid oxide cell.

Advantages of the solid oxide fuel cell, which uses a ceramic electrolyte, include high efficiency, reliability and durability. A disadvantage is its high operating temperature, though waste heat can be used to generate the steam needed to reform a hydrocarbon feedstock. In the basic process, fuel reformed at the cathode—basically a source of hydrogen molecules—combine with oxygen from the anode to generate a current, with water and carbon dioxide the waste products. Bloom says it has made improvements in both materials and design, and though the details are proprietary, its claims appear to be validated by its market success. In the particular case of the fuel cell array Bloom is supplying eBay, most or all of the fuel is supposed to be derived from biogas. (Bloom's press release says flatly that the fuel cell bank will be powered by biogras; but an eBay spokesperson told the New York Times that  eBay "would pay a premium to enable the production of biogas somewhere in the United States in amounts comparable to its gas usage in South Jordan [Utah]."

In principle, whether the plant is running exclusively on biogas or biogras production is being subsidized to compensate for natural gas consumed at the plant, the facility would appear to be doubly green: It runs on a renenewable fuel and produces no solid waste, carbon dioxide being its only undesirable byproduct. So it's easy to see why the Bloom Energy Server is attractive to high-tech companies that depend on big energy-guzzling data centers and fervently wish to build green credentials. Apple has installed a 4.8 MW Bloom system at a North Carolina data center, albeit not one that will emphasize use of biogas. Facebook is putting a data center close to the Arctic Circle in Sweden, so that it can rely mainly on natural cooling rather than artificial refrigeration.

General Electric and the Norwegian firm Sargas announced today an alliance to make and sell natural gas fired power plants in which 90 percent of the carbon dioxide will be captured from flue gases and sold for re-injection into the earth for enhanced oil recovery. The first two plants, consisting of GE's LMS100 aeroderivative gas turbines and Sargas's system for scrubbing CO2 from flue gases (diagram above), are to be built on the U.S. Gulf Coast and on the Norwegian coast. A GE-Sargas "clean gas" plant has also been under discussion for Malta.

The two companies say that their technology will be economically competitive, without government subsidies, at today's cost of carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), which is about $30 per tonne in Texas, according to the Financial Times. As Sargas CEO Henrik Fleischer puts it, "Traditional EOR supplies of naturally occurring carbon dioxide stored underground is running out, and with oil prices expected to remain above $80/barrel, it is important for oil companies to maximize oil production with enhanced oil recovery. . . . Our solution . . .  also offers low-emissions electricity, in a proven and practical manner."

Generally, proposed carbon capture systems have focused on coal, because coal is so carbon-intense and its use still is so widespread in countries like China, India, and the United States. But as prices of natural gas have dropped with the advent of fracking, and as gas-fired electricity generation has rapidly displaced coal (at least in the United States), a system for capturing carbon dioxide from gas turbine plants is naturally attractive. Its appeal is all the greater as prospects for a nuclear renaissance have waned--at least in the United States.

Replacing a coal-fired electric power plant with a nuclear plant cuts greenhouse gas emissions virtually to zero; replacing the coal plant with the new GE-Sargas system would accomplish virtually the same thing. But, promising as the technology may be, the timing of the GE-Sargas announcement raises an obvious question. Brent crude oil prices have dropped from $120/barrel in the first quarter of this year to $95/barrel, and some other indexes of global oil prices today are hovering not far above $80/barrel, the level at which Fleischer says the new system will be competitive and commercially attractive. If the global economic recovery continues to falter and oil prices continue to plummet, it will be interesting to see whether GE and Sargas are able to stick with their plans.

A study published by the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) found that renewable energy sources could "adequately supply" as much as 80 percent of electricity demand in 2050, using only the technologies that are commercially available today. Such technologies, NREL says in the Renewable Electricity Futures study, could provide balance between supply and demand for electricity on an hourly level.

This is a remarkable endorsement for deep integration of renewables, given the ongoing concerns about intermittency and storage for wind and solar power. And the NREL report went even farther, saying that fully 50 percent of electricity could come from "variable renewable generation" (wind and photovoltaics) without any blips in supply. The modeling NREL used suggested a growing role for offshore wind as total renewable supply increases—a not-insignificant assumption, of course, given the zero offshore turbines currently spinning in U.S. waters. The agency also saw a need for dedicated biomass power plants, as opposed to just feeding biomass to coal plants. Hydropower, meanwhile, which is currently the biggest renewable contributor, plays less and less of a role over the next few decades. (We have dammed pretty much every river we are going to dam.)

Also importantly, NREL found no major geographical gaps in the renewables map. "All regions of the United States could contribute substantial renewable electricity supply in 2050, consistent with their local renewable resource base." This is notable especially for regions like the Southeast, which so far has lagged far behind other areas in terms of renewables generation. Photovoltaic and biomass plants will play the biggest role in that region.

Of course, actually getting to an 80 percent renewables scenario by 2050 is a lot harder than simply saying the grid can handle it. From the report:

"Annual renewable capacity additions that enable high renewable generation are consistent with current global production capacities but are significantly higher than recent U.S. annual capacity additions for the technologies considered. No insurmountable long-term constraints to renewable electricity technology manufacturing capacity, materials supply, or labor availability were identified."

They may not be insurmountable, but the numbers are daunting nonetheless. Take wind, for example. The 80 percent scenario requires 439 gigawatts of installed wind capacity in 2050, only about 50 GW of which is currently installed. Can the United States build more than 10 GW per year—or between 2500 and 3000 turbines—for almost 40 years? Or the extensive transmission requirements to move that power? Or the 150 GW of photovoltaic panels needed? It all remains to be seen, but the NREL sign-off on renewables' ability to support the grid is big either way. The fossil fuel supporters who claim coal and natural gas will always be required to provide baseload power are standing on shakier ground all the time.

Image via NREL

This is certainly not the first time I've mentioned, and probably not be the fist time you've noticed, how carelessly the terms alternative energy, clean energy and green energy are bandied about, as if they mean exactly the same thing.

What occasions me to repeat this complaint is the revival of the television series "Dallas," which epitomized everything we love to hate about oil. In the new version, says New York Times television correspondent Alessandra Stanley, "the writers have reconstituted the feuds of the second generation of Ewings as an allegory about clean energy versus fossil fuels." Thus Christopher Ewing, nephew of the infamous J.R. (photo), "has turned his back on drilling and wants to develop methane hydrates as an energy source."

There are a couple of problems here, at least as the setup is described by Stanley. Methane hydrates, or methane clathrates if you prefer, are fossil fuels; and unless perfectly extracted—an art still waiting for a virtuoso performance—they are not necessarily clean.

The so-called hydrates or clathrates are cystalline solids (consisting generally of methane, the basic constituent of natural gas) which happen to be trapped in ice deep under oceans. In terms of available energy, the amount of gas hydrates may be twice the world's total conventional fossil reserves, according to the U.S. Geologic Survey. If safe and practical extraction methods can be found, they could obviously contribute significantly to world energy resources.

The rub is that methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, ten times as effective per molecule as carbon dioxide in causing global warming. If the ice surrounding the hydrates were to melt as a result of warming and the trapped methane were liberated, the effect would be to accelerate warming. "Methane released as a result of landslides caused by a sea-level fall would warm the Earth, as would methane released from gas hydrates in Arctic sediments as they become warmed during a sea-level rise," says the USGS.

In fairness, the term "alternative energy" is a bit slippery, inasmuch as it's often used without specifying what something is alternative to. This is why it so easily lends itself to use as a synonym for "clean" or "green" or "renewable," which it is not. So the Times correspondent may be forgiven for having written a little carelessly (even though, let it be said, she attained such a reputation for carelessness that the Times assigned her a special factchecker several years ago).

Having not seen the episode in question myself, I cannot attest whether the writers got the distinction between clean energy and alternative energy right. But a detailed recap of the premier Dallas episode  posted on one website refers only to a proposed methane extraction plant and a dinner argument concerning alternative energy versus oil, without saying anything about clean energy. However, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, the actor who plays Christopher Ewing, a young fellow by the name of Jesse Metcalfe, says he took the part "because my character is trying to pull the family away from the old way of doing things into the more environmentally friendly fossil fuels."

So Metcalf gets credit for being half right. He recognizes that the methane hydrates are a fossil fuel. But whether they are environmentally friendly remains to be shown.

The German energy company Conergy is working with Hong Kong-based Ensunt to build a 50-megawatt solar plant in Bahawalpur, in the Cholistan region of Pakistan. According to a Conergy press release, when completed, the plant will be the biggest solar facility in the country; it will be owned by the Pakistani government and the DACC Power Generation Company Limited.

Pakistan relies heavily on hydroelectric generation, and is thus at the whims of variable river flows. Marc Lohoff, a Conergy board member, said in a press release that only 63 percent of the country's population even has access to electricity at present, and those that do face frequent blackouts. Just a glimpse at the Pakistan Ministry of Water and Power's "daily power situation" snapshots suggests a broad gap between electricity demand and supply, with substantial variations. For example, in early April the country's hydro facilities were generating at a capacity of around 2000 MW, while over the last few days in June it has been closer to 4500 MW. The most recent day's data indicates a shortfall of more than 6000 MW on a total electricity demand of almost 18 000 MW.

Critics of solar power may find it strange to look to the sun for a reliable answer to an intermittency problem, but when a shortfall is in the thousands of megawatts then beefing up the total capacity is a good first step. And Pakistan—in particular the Cholistan region—has ample and consistent sunshine. Conergy says that Pakistan gets about 8 to 9 hours of sunshine per day, with an annual insolation rate (basically, how much of the sun's energy hits a given spot) of over 1700 kilowatt-hours/m². That's far better than, say, Germany, which has the most solar capacity in the world and recently set a record by getting half its power from the sun.

The new 50-MW plant will eventually supply power to more than 30 000 households in Pakistan. Says Conergy's Lohoff, "Due to the decentralized character of this form of energy and the high insolation levels, solar energy is ideally suited to close [the demand] gap and to supply the population with safe, clean, and affordable energy. At the same time, solar power can support the economic development of the country."

Image: Solar panels on a road in Pakistan, via wetlandsofpakistan

The U.S. Photovoltaic Manufacturing Consortium has launched an effort to develop a roadmap for the copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) photovoltaic materials, long considered one of the most promising technologies for next-generation solar cells. The exercise presumably will be based on the influential roadmaps developed in recent decade for technologies deemed critically important to the nation's future, such as semiconductors and chip lithography. In keeping with the potential significance of the latest such exercise, the PV consortium has put three extremely well known solar technology experts in charge of building the CIGS roadmap.

The three co-chairs of the CiGS PV Roadmap will be Larry Kazmerski, long-time director of the National Center for Photovoltaics at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., the go-to place for certification of claimed advances in solar cells; Richard Swanson, the founding president emeritus of  SunPower Corporation in San Jose, well established as a world leader in solar; and Joseph Laia, CEO of MiaSolé in Santa Clara, which specialized in CIGS and thin-film technology. Laia was previously group vice president for metrology at KLA-Tencor.

The Photovoltaic Manufacturing Consortium is headquartered at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the University of Albany, in Albany, N.Y. It is closely affiliated with the semiconductor industry consortium Sematech and is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative. The PV consortium is shooting for a 75 percent reduction in the installed cost of solar systems over the next decade.

Fellow blogger Dexter Johnson has commented, in connection with the recent Konarka bankruptcy, on the perils of "market push" politics in green tech and on assertions Konarka might be billed as "Romney's Solyndra." The fact of the matter is, the $1.5 million the state of Massachusetts pumped into Konarka during Romney's governorship was but a tiny fraction of what credulous investors would bet on the company during the years that followed. "Driven by the promise of cheap, printed solar modules that can be made colorful and transparent, technically unsavvy investors rushed to invest in Massachusetts organic photovoltaic developer Konarka to the tune of $170 million, with an additional $30 million coming from grant funding," as Lux Research put it.

Initially, to be sure, Konarka's technology appeared very promising. The company had a prestigious Nobelist in its corner, and the claims it made for its material's light-to-energy conversion efficiency were independently verified. But then doubts emerged about whether the company was going to meet cost targets and ramp up production as fast as it needed to. Lux rated Konarka a "strong caution" for three years running, while technology journalists including those at Eart2Tech also expressed skepticism about Konarka's prospects.

So one lesson from the bankruptcy, surely, is that the private sector can be just as bad at picking technology winners as the public sector. That does not play well with Candidate Romney's theme about government, but it does not make Konarka Romney's Solyndra.

The bigger lesson from bankruptcies like Solyndra and Konarka is that the best way to encourage growth of such companies is not to pick specific ones but rather to tilt the playing field to favor any company that develops desirable technology. That can be done either by means of a feed-in tariff of the kind Germany and Denmark pioneered, which guarantees a market for electricity generated from renewable resources, at specified rates for each major category over time, or by taxing energy or carbon. The feed-in tariff creates a stable, predictable market for innovators and entrepreneurs, in that they know what target they have to meet to make a technology profitable at any given time. So if you're developing a new photovoltatic material, for example, and you know with confidence what it will cost to make it three years from now, you know for sure whether you stand to make a profit or not.

Almost as effective a means of tilting the playing field is a fossil energy tax or a cap-and-trade system that raises costs of carbon-emitting energy technology while favoring all low-carbon or zero-carbon technologies equally. Best of all, perhaps, would be the measures in a combination--a cap-and-trade system in which proceeds from sale of emissions credits would be used to subsidize clean energy tech according to a schedule of feed-in tariffs.

If the Obama administration is open to criticism in clean tech policy, it's for not having promoted a feed-in tariff system and for not having pushed a cap-and-trade bill through Congress. But that is not a criticism Romney or Republicans will make. Instead Democrats and Republicans will trade shots about who is the worse investor, the public or private sectors, all the while neglecting the much better approach, which is to engineer a market that equally favors anybody developing innovative green technology.

A three-member panel of the D.C. Federal Court of Appeals said yesterday that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission must reconsider whether spent nuclear fuel can safely be stored until a solution to the problem of permanent disposal is found, or even if such a solution never is found. The decision by the District of Columbia court, which has influence second only to the Supreme Court in matters of public policy, is bound to have a wide impact on current practices, proceedings for renewing reactor operating licenses, and future waste policy development.

Explaining the background to the suit, which was brought by New York State and a group of intervenors, the court wrote, "Due to the government’s failure to establish a final resting place for spent [nuclear] fuel , SNF is currently stored on site at nuclear plants. This type of storage, optimistically labeled 'temporary storage,' has been used for decades longer than originally anticipated. The delay has required plants to expand storage pools and to pack SNF more densely within them. The lack of progress on a permanent repository has caused considerable uncertainty regarding the environmental effects of temporary SNF storage and the reasonableness of continuing to license and relicense nuclear reactors."

A national plan adopted in the 1990s called for a permanent geologic storage facility to be built at Yucca Mountain, near the former nuclear weapons test site in Nevada, but that plan ran into sharp local opposition, fueled in part by scientific uncertainty as to whether the underground facility would be impervious to water intrusion over thousands of years. President Obama killed the plan after taking office, fulfilling a campaign commitment. In the meantime, reactors were regularly relicensed on the basis of  findings by the NRC that spent fuel could be safely stored in cooling ponds and dry casks until such time as a permanent resting place was found. But then, last year, the catatrophe at Japan's Fukushima plant— and in particular a fire that broke out in a spent fuel pond—refocused attention in the United States (and elsewhere) on whether spent fuel is in fact safe in increasingly crowded ponds.

The D.C. court panel unanimously took the NRC to task for neglecting to assess the safety of individual storage ponds across the country (treating the problem of cooling pond safety generically instead). The court also chided the agency for not adequately considering the possibility that water might leak from ponds and fuel might subsequently ignite. According to Matthew Wald, who has covered spent nuclear fuel disposal authoritatively for many years at the New York Times, the NRC will now have to "prepare and publicly defend an assessment that [local] storage for many decades or even indefinitely [does] not entail large risks." And that assessment will again be open to challenge in reactor licensing proceedings.

That, in turn, would appear to have two other obvious implications. One is that pressure will mount further for accelerated movement of spent fuel out of crowded ponds and into safer dry casks. As noted here this time last year, a much larger fraction of U.S. spent fuel could be in dry casks than is the case at present. Second, the new chairwoman of the NRC, who happens to be a well-regarded geologist, has her work cut out for her. Finding a new approach to the problem of permanent spent fuel disposal will be hugely difficult and perhaps impossible. But Allison M. Macfarlane at least appears to be about as well qualified for the job as one could hope.

Efforts to turn waste into energy are increasing around world, and booming in the United Kingdom. Supermarkets especially are investing in biogas technologies, or at least shipping their waste to renewable energy plants, according to a Bloomberg report.

Government subsidies and requirements play a part in encouraging the purchase of clean energy, but so do the hefty landfill taxes. The U.K. garbage tax, which was £64 (about US $100) per ton in April, increases by £8 every year. For the large supermarket chains, that fee adds up, as do their heavy energy bills. Executives agree that reducing energy costs is just good business, and that means renewable energy—and the government energy credits that go with it.

The Renewable Obligation program requires utilities to buy a certain amount of electricity from clean sources. The program issues certificates for each megawatt-hour produced from renewable sources. If a utility company doesn’t get enough Renewable Obligation Certificates, it must pay a penalty. Different techs get different credits, with anaerobic digestion getting two.

Anaerobic digestion turns organic material into biogas by breaking down the substance in an oxygen-free environment. For supermarkets burdened with food waste, it’s an irresistible option. Experiments with leftovers—fish heads, rotisserie chicken fats, lamb chops, rotting vegetables, sandwich breads—are taking place across the U.K. Market chains are also exploring and using solar panels, wood chips, and geothermal power. And the demonstrated financial benefits are spurring the construction of new power plants.

Tesco saves £200 million a year. Marks & Spencer saved £70 million last year. And Wal-Mart’s Asda expects to save £800 million by 2020. Sainsbury’s plans to build 40 waste-to-energy electricity plants in the next five years.

With the increasing costs of sending trash to landfills, shipping it to bioenergy plants makes tremendous sense. Government predictions state that bioenergy could supply at least 8 percent of the U.K.’s demand by 2020.

But investments and benefits are not limited to one country. Worldwide, companies have invested about $18.2 billion in waste energy technology. In North America it's the trash haulers. In Brazil, incinerators are being built. French and Dutch airlines are running planes on cooking oil. And a Brazilian airline is even testing sugarcane as a fuel. 

Photo: Courtesy Ze-gen, Waste Gasification Goes Commercial