Energywise

A report released today (Sept. 9) by John Podesta's Center for American Progress lays out a plan that could create 2 million new jobs in two years by spending $100 billion to "jumpstart" a clean energy economy. The report, written by economist Robert Pollin and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts's Political Economy Research Institute, would focus investments on energy-efficient building, mass transportation, smart electrical grids, wind and solar, and advanced biofuels. Funds could come from the proceeds of auctioned carbon emission credits and could be allocated in the form of tax credits, direct government spending, and loan guarantees.

An article by a former U.S. Air Force Secretary in this month's Physics Today magazine says that China turned over the blueprints for its own first atomic bomb to Pakistan, started to provide Pakistan with nuclear weapons technology as early as 1982, and likely helped Pakistan conduct that country's first nuclear weapons test at a Chinese test site. The article, by Thomas Reed, whose career started with nuclear weapons work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the early 1950s, is based largely on allegations by Danny Stillman. Stillman, as director of technical intelligence at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, was given official tours of Chinese nuclear facilities two decades ago. The two of them Reed and Stillman, are authors of a book telling the whole story, Nuclear Express, to be published early next year by Zenith Press.

Their arresting claims are best treated with caution. The American Institute of Physics, publisher of Physics Today, raises the question in its press release about the article of why the Chinese would have given Stillman the red carpet treatment he describes. "Why should the Chinese escort a knowledgeable American official on what became a sort of nuclear Marco Polo tour analogous to the fabled journey by the Venetian merchant through the heart of 13th century China?" asks Phil Schewe, AIP's chief physics information officer. Reed speculates that the Chinese wanted the West to be aware of their work, in which they took pride, and to treat them and their country with greater respect.

But does that explain why they would imply they directly helped Pakistan test nuclear weapons and say they started to share sensitive nuclear technology with Pakistan decades ago? To the extent they did such things--and there's been no doubt for a long time that to some extent they did--they have helped create a mega-problem for the West that is not making the West feel grateful.

Even if the most arresting allegations of the Reed-Stillman article and book turn out to not hold water, the secondary allegations are still absorbing. The various statements about China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation actually are tacked onto the article only at the very end. The bulk of the article describes visits to various highly sensitive facilities in detail, evoking a weirdness that often reminded this reader of passages in Don DeLillo's Underworld.

Stillman was impressed by the sophistication of the instrumentation the Chinese were using for nuclear test diagnostics, which he says "were every bit as good as those used in American nuclear tests." But he found an alarming absence of automated controls on Chinese nuclear weapons in the early 1990s; the Chinese basically were relying on human guards deemed loyal and trustworthy.

Research published in the Sept. 5 issue of Science puts two of the biggest problems in climate modeling--the respective roles of clouds and aerosols--in a new perspective. Of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the one that has the biggest overall effects is a natural one, water vapor. Yet the impacts of clouds on temperature are incredibly complicated and still quite poorly understood: depending on their height, density, and other factors, they can either trap radiation or reflect it back into space. Aerosols--tiny particles or drops of liquid, suspended in a gas--also have big effects on climate, and those effects also are complicated and ambiguous; black carbon particles, for example, reflect radiation and dampen warming locally or regionally, and yet also dry out the land they blanket, aggravating droughts.

The article published today in Science reviews the scientific literature on the relationship between aerosols and rainfall and comes to a striking conclusion. The authors find that rainfall is greatest when aerosols levels are intermediate, not too big and not too small, but just right. Water precipitates out too fast--may we say too precipitously?--from clouds in clean air with little aerosol content, so that the really big clouds that produce heavy rainfall never form. On the other hand, clouds in heavily polluted air get so warm that most water evaporates out of them before having the opportunity to form raindrops.

In a high-stakes gamble, a combat force of multinational troops has delivered a 200 metric ton turbine to a hydroelectric facility in Afghanistan's Helmand Province. The initiative posed security risks in its delivery phase and will provide many more in its installation and operations phases to come, according to informed sources.

To get the massive turbine from the city of Kandahar to the town of Kajaki in southern Afghanistan, a convoy under British command secretly moved 100 miles over rugged roads through some of the war-torn nation's most hostile territory. A report from the British Army on Wednesday states that the operation involved more than 2000 U.K. soldiers and an additional 2000 Afghan and NATO troops.

The objective of the mission is to help repair a hydroelectric dam at Kajaki that had been damaged by decades of fighting in the region. The Kajaki power station was built in 1975 with funding from USAID, an American civilian aid agency. At its peak, the dam's three turbines had an output capacity of 53 megawatts (MW), delivering electricity to the 1.5 million inhabitants of the remote province, as well as serving as a water resource for irrigation in the agricultural basin. However, years of turmoil saw two of the turbines fail, reducing its capacity to 16 MW.

The British Army account said that its armored troops not only took part in the secret convoy but cleared the path ahead of enemy activity, engaging Taliban fighters close to its route.

"This is a significant military operation, which demonstrates that our strategy of delivering civil effect is making progress in southern Afghanistan," said Lt. Col David Reynolds, on behalf of the British task force in Helmand. "Ultimately, success in Afghanistan is about more than defeating the Taliban or the absence of fighting. It's also about creating jobs, security, and economic development."

Nevertheless, experts in the U.K. had deep reservations about proceeding with repair work on the dam and its associated electrical grid at this time. In an article yesterday from Britain's Manchester Guardian posted to a site affiliated with the Ministry of Defence (see Kajaki Turbine Worth the Effort?), defense experts wondered if the turbine installation, valued at US $100 million, will turn out as planned due to stiff opposition from insurgents in Helmand.

Engineers the Guardian spoke with said it will take months to properly install the turbine and get it fully operational, as well as years to repair the electrical lines running from it to the surrounding region. Even then, military experts told the newspaper, the dam and its grid will be subject to ongoing sabotage until the province is cleared of insurgent activity. Last year alone, at least 700 Taliban fighters crossed from Pakistan into Afghanistan to reinforce insurgents attacking the Kajaki dam.

"The power lines coming out of Kajaki are going to be extremely vulnerable to attack," said Matthew Clements, an analyst at Jane's Defence. "The arrival of the extra turbine is a major blow to the Taliban, so they are going to be keen to make sure the project fails."

Only a single transmission line connects the Kajaki power plant to the capital of the province, Lashkar Gah, but NATO engineers plan to install $77 million worth of new transmission lines to connect villages in the rest of the province in the years ahead, according to the Guardian account.

"In Iraq we've seen that overhead power lines are extremely difficult to protect, and there's no point generating electricity if you can't distribute it," Paul Smyth, head of operational studies at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, told the U.K. newspaper.

It's a tough assignment to rebuild war-ravaged infrastructure in a setting where ground combat is taking place on a regular basis. Still, it's a sign that the allies of the Afghani government are trying to employ a two-pronged strategy in the unconventional war they find themselves in: armed suppression of enemy fighters and relief efforts for the civilian population at the same time.

We can only wish this latest example of the latter all the best of luck in its future progress.

[Editor's Note: For a detailed report on similar obstacles that coalition forces faced in rebuilding the power grid in Iraq, please see Re-engineering Iraq (2006) by IEEE Spectrum Executive Editor Glenn Zorpette.]

The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert, author of an acclaimed magazine series and book about climate change, takes a wary look at the two U.S. presidential candidates in the latest issue of OnEarth, a quarterly published by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Though both McCain and Obama have sponsored legislation to curb carbon, "both [also] have supported laws whose goals are directly at odds with cutting emissions," Kolbert observes. Obama, for example, has favored incentives for corn ethanol, despite evidence that it is about as bad or worse than oil. Last year he sponsored legislation to support conversion of coal to liquids, "about the worst possible move the country could make," as Kolbert puts it.

Obama has since amended his position on the issue to say he only supports coal-to-liquids if the technology emits at least 20 percent less carbon over its lifecycle as competing conventional fuels. About the best that can be said about that--I'd add--is that the otherwise brilliantly well informed Obama seems to have been not so well informed about an issue he claims to care a lot about.

As for McCain, his outspoken support for offshore oil drilling is hardly consistent with the notion that we should use less oil so as to emit less carbon, Kolbert points out. And with benefit of additional experience we may add: why, if the cares so much about climate, would he pick a vice presidential candidate who considers the jury still to be out on the science, ignoring the effects of global warming all around her?

As Thomas Friedman noted in The New York Times, McCain had stood apart from President Bush by opposing drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and by advocating action on climate. But now, as the Sierra Club's Carl Pope says, he has picked a running mate who's dismissive of alternative energy. "While the northern edge of her state literally falls into the rising Arctic Ocean, Sarah Palin says, "The jury is still out on global warming.' "

The Chemical Engineer, a magazine published by Britain's Institution of Chemical Engineers, is reporting allegations that safety standards are being neglected in the design of a nuclear fuel fabrication facility being built in South Carolina. The $4 billion plant, near Aiken, will produce so-called mixed-oxide fuel, consisting of uranium and plutonium recovered from spent nuclear fuel or nuclear weapons. Dan Tedder, an emeritus professor of chemical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told The Chemical Engineer that basic process design information was incomplete, with serious implications for safety.

Tedder, who served last year as an independent technical reviewer on the project for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, predicted that safety problems will manifest themselves when the plant is operational. "The documentation provided in the license application is very superficial" and "isn't consistent with reasonable and generally accepted good engineering practice," Tedder told The Chemical Engineer.

The NRC has dismissed Tedder's accusations as unfounded but has barred access to documents in dispute, on security grounds.

Earthquake risks in the greater New York City area are reassessed in a major study released today by a team of seismologists based at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, N.Y. Though the report reaffirms that large earthquakes are relatively rare in New York, it finds that fault patterns are more complex than previously appreciated. In particular, two fault systems are found to converge very close to the controversial Indian Point nuclear power plant, 24 miles north of the city.

The authors of the study catalogued 383 earthquakes from 1677 to 2007, and, in those three-plus centuries, identified three magnitude 5 quakes capable of causing serious damage. They estimate that a potentially catastrophic category 6 quake might occur every 370 years, and a category 7 every 3,400 years. Though those probabilities are relatively low, the damage risk from a New York City earthquake is still very high because of the city's concentration of people and physical infrastructure, observes Lynn Sykes, the very eminent seismologist who led the study.

A previously known geologic feature, the Ramapo Seismic Zone, runs from eastern Pennsylvania to the Hudson Valley, passing within a couple of miles of Indian Point, with roughly parallel fault lines to the south, as far down as Harlem. Now, in addition, the study has identified a second fault line that originates to the east near Stamford, Connecticut, and intersects with the Ramapo zone, passing within a mile of Indian Point. Thus, "Indian Point is situated at the intersection of the two most striking linear features marking seismicity," says the paper. "This is clearly one of the least favorable sites in our study area from an earthquake hazard and risk perspective."

In hindsight, even without the new discovery, it's scarcely imaginable that a nuclear power plant would be sited today at Indian Point, if the decision were to be made again. It's bad enough that the reactor is at the edge of a metropolitan area with 25 million people, and directly upriver of the city, so that if there were a reactor meltdown, the whole harbor estuary would be permanently contaminated. But the issue of whether to keep recommissioning Indian Point will nonetheless be a difficult one to resolve. The plant supplies a large fraction of the city's energy, and in terms of climate, it's a big green fraction.

And that's not the only issue the city will have to consider and reconsider. "We need to step backward from the simple old model, where you worry about one large, obvious fault, like they do in California," observes study co-author Leonardo Seeber, reflecting on the webby fault systems they found. "The problem here comes from many subtle faultsâ''Ã'¶ Each one is small, but when you add them up, they are probably more dangerous than we thought."

Even as Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens is attracting national attention with his proposal to vastly increase U.S. reliance on wind energy, meeting personally with presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain to focus attention on the huge wind potential found in the nation's Great Plains states, cities at opposite sides of the country are seeking to get in on the action. Earlier this week, New York City 's Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced an initiative to explore all possible applications of wind in the greater metropolitan area, which he believes could have the city relying on wind for 10 percent of its electricity within a decade.

Bloomberg's speech, in which he evoked an image of the Statue of Liberty's torch being illuminated by green energy, got wide attention in the local press--initially positive, but then quite critical and skeptical. Bloomberg himself backed off from his suggestion the day after making it, expressing doubt as to whether wide deployment of wind in the city would actually make sense.

Separately but complementarily, Bloomberg announced the week before the creation of an expert task force to study how critical infrastructure can be adapted to the effects of climate change. This initiative may be the one that turns out to have more staying power. The panel will be co-chaired by Cynthia Rosenzweig, of Columbia University's Earth Institute, and William Solecki, director of Hunter College's Institute for Sustainable Cities. Rosenzweig and colleagues have been actively advising the city on global warming and infrastructure for several years, and already have issued pioneering studies that have attracted attention in other megacities around the world.

Meanwhile, earlier this summer San Franciso Mayor Gavin Newsom announced creation of a residential wind working group, tasked with figuring out how to revamp the city's zoning and building codes to allow wind turbines on private lots. On July 25, San Francisco issued an "over-the-counter permitting process for residential and commercial wind turbines," as one of the companies hoping to capitalize on the streamlined procedures--Whirligig--put in in a press release. Both the New York City and San Francisco initiatives open opportunities for companies marketing what might be called personal windmills, among which Whirligig is just one.

The Fiat Siena Tetrafuel can run on gasoline, ethanol, blends of gasoline and ethanol, and also natural gas. Is your next car going to be a multi-fuel? Photo: Fiat Brazil

A recent New York Times story describes the efforts of billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens to promote alternative energy, including wind and natural gas. What caught my attention was the beginning of the story, which says demand for natural gas cars like the Honda Civic GX is running high in certain corners of the United States where that fuel has become an attractive alternative to pricey gasoline.

This is interesting because consumers have long been dismissive of natural gas vehicles. The main problem is a lack of natural gas filling stations (there are only about 1,600 in the U.S.). And then there's range. Natural gas vehicles have around half the range of comparable gasoline cars. (See other pros and cons here.) These issues have discouraged consumers and automakers alike. The Times reports that Honda plans to produce just 2,000 Civic GX units this year; Ford and GM don't even have natural gas cars to offer.

What puzzles me is the this-or-that fuel approach. You can either run on gasoline or natural gas. Why aren't automakers offering cars designed to run on both?

Note the emphasis on designed. Sure, retrofitted vehicles that can burn gasoline and natural gas have been around for decades. But where are the truly multi-fuel automobiles for the masses?

The beauty of such vehicles is they help solve one of today's biggest energy problems: uncertainty. With fuel prices oscillating wildly, is it better to stick with gasoline, invest in a natural gas vehicle, buy a hybrid, or what? Who knows? That's why multi-fuel is interesting. You fill up with whatever fuel is cheaper, or available, where you live. It's no silver bullet for the energy crisis, sure, but it just makes sense in places where more than one fuel is available. The point is multi-fuel could work as a bridge from petroleum to other possible technologies and fuels, be it batteries, hydrogen, cellulosic ethanol, whatever.

Last year, I wrote about one such multi-fuel vehicle, the Siena Tetrafuel, created by Fiat in Brazil. This car can run on pure gasoline, pure ethanol, blends of gas and ethanol in any proportion, and also natural gas. It will burn the natural gas -- the cheapest car fuel in Brazil -- while cruising, and it will switch on the fly to the liquid fuel mix whenever it needs more power. From the article:

And here's the best part: you can put any mixture of gasoline and ethanol into its tank -- from 100 percent gasoline and no ethanol to 100 percent ethanol and no gasoline. The engine automatically adjusts its ignition timing and the quantity of fuel injected into the cylinders on each cycle to get the most power out of whatever mixture you've got while keeping emissions under control.

Cars that can use different mixes of gasoline and alcohol have been around for years. And vehicles that let the driver switch between natural gas and gasoline aren't new, either. But one car that can do both -- switching automatically between the fuels and adjusting its engine to suit an arbitrary gasoline-alcohol mix -- that's very new indeed.

In other words, Fiat engineers designed the Tetrafuel engine -- and programmed its engine control unit -- to operate optimally for all those fuels. Not your usual retrofit. Its multi-fuel capability eliminates the two main problems of natural gas-only vehicles. Can't find a filling station with natural gas? Just use gasoline or ethanol. And with both gas and natural gas tanks, range is not a problem anymore.

Fiat's Brazilian subsidiary unveiled the Siena Tetrafuel almost two years ago. It expected to sell 2,500 units in 2007; it sold more than 10,000. This year it has sold nearly 6,000 so far. In terms of annual sales, the Tetrafuel should represent less than 1 percent of all flex cars sold in Brazil (flex cars can use both gasoline and ethanol; 1.7 million were sold last year). It's still a tiny market. But for Fiat -- and Brazilians -- it's nice to have such option around in case oil prices skyrocket or something. It's all about flexibility. (In fact, gas prices oscillations and the availability of ethanol at filling stations led to an automotive revolution in Brazil; sales of flex cars went from virtually nothing in 2003 to about 90 percent of all new cars sold last year, when the Brazilian auto industry saw all-time record sales.)

So back to the original question: Why aren't other automakers considering multi-fuel? Well, in a sense they are. There are a number of projects around. BMW has shown off a gasoline-hydrogen luxury sedan. Volvo developed a prototype that runs on gasoline, E85, natural gas, hythane, and biomethane. Most of these projects, however, don't involve mass-produced, affordable vehicles. Automakers say developing multi-fuel vehicles require a lot of R&D and the cars will need extra parts like separate tanks, sensors, and so forth, making the vehicles expensive. But how expensive? Fiat, for example, did a good job in keeping the Siena Tetrafuel's price tag low enough. In Brazil -- the only place where the car is available -- it costs about the same as a regular Honda Fit.

I guess in the end automakers will regard multi-fuel as a niche, too small of a market to bother. They appear to be seeking the "next big thing" that will take them out of the hole they find themselves in. But then again, as uncertainty about energy prices and availability mount, it appears that betting on a single fuel is a bad bet. We need more omnivorous vehicles.

General Motors has announced plans to launch European versions of its much-ballyhooed Volt, the plug-in hybrid it expects to start producing in 2010, according to a report this week in the Financial Times. GM expects to sell it on the Continent as an Opel, and in the United Kingdom as a Vauxhall. The Volt will be a so-called series hybrid, in which the car is always propelled by its electric motor, with a backup internal combustion engine recharging its lithium-ion battery pack when necessary. Toyota's plug-in electric car, also scheduled for 2010, will be a parallel hybrid, in which the electric motor and internal combustion engine alternatively provide traction, as required. According to the FT, groups led by Korea's LG Chem and Boston's A123Systems are competing for the contract to provide the Volt's batteries.