Energywise

Former vice president Al Gore got a lot of attention last week with a call to make the U.S. electric power system completely carbon-free within ten years, a startling idea that some find inspiring. Meanwhile, Texan oilman T. Boone Pickens has been running full-page newspaper ads promoting his "Pickens Plan," the idea being to replace the electricity we make by burning natural gas with wind-generated power, and to use the freed-up gas to fuel automobiles. It's not hard to detect the element of self-interest in that plan: Pickens is building a huge wind farm in Sweetwater, Texas--and reportedly owns the country's largest natural gas company. But even allowing for self-promotion versus self-sacrifice, if you had only the Gore or Pickens plan to choose from and wanted to take a stake, you'd do better to pick the T Boone.

This blogger yields to none in his admiration for Gore the science popularizer and Gore the proseletizer. The former senator and presidential contender has delivered his "inconvenient truth" lecture hundreds or thousands of times over the last few years, and devoted countless weekends at his home near Nashville to training selected volunteers to give proxy versions of the speech. But when it comes to politics and policy, oddly, the man is a loose cannon.

A couple of years ago Gore floated the idea of replacing all U.S. payroll taxes, including those that support the Social Security system, with environmental taxes. The politician who promised voters in the 2000 presidential election that he would treat Social Security as a "locked box" seemed to have forgotten that the whole point of environmental taxes is to be self-liquidating: they're meant to discourage and ultimately eliminate undesired activities. Once emission of pollutants and greenhouse gases is ended, where is the tax revenue going to come from to support Social Security?

Now Gore is saying we can completely abolish carbon-emitting electric generation within ten years, implying that anybody who disagrees has a can't do attitude. Well, the fact is we can't do it. Right now we produce half our electricity from coal, the most carbon-intense of fuels, and one-fifth from natural gas. Gore wants to replace all that by some combination of wind, solar, and geothermal. But geothermal is a tiny niche player in electricity generation and photovoltaic solar is still far from market-ready. That means that really only wind is available to do the job, and the most optimistic projection--one recently issued by Department of Energy labs--is that wind could deliver one fifth of our electricity by 2030, not three quarters and not by 2018.

From that point of view, the Pickens plan at least has the advantage of being realistic. T. Boone wants to take the natural gas that currently supplies 22 percent of U.S. electricity and have it, in compressed form, fuel automobiles instead. (He points out in his short and pointed video presentation that 6 million cars in the world already run on compressed natural gas, an excellent automotive fuel.) He will have wind-generated electricity replace the power currently made from gas, with the aim of sharply reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil. (Regarding nuclear, both Pickens and Gore propose to keep its electricity share at 20 percent--a notable concession to reality on the part of Gore, who previously has leaned anti-nuclear.)

Concern about energy dependence motivates the Pickens plan, while Gore's intent is to cut the chances of catastrophic climate change. This difference is key, because the Pickens plan, though eminently doable, does almost nothing to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. If one's main concern is to kick the carbon habit, however, it's desirable not to eliminate the role of natural gas in power generation but to increase it to replace some of the power now made from coal. (Natural gas emits only one third or one half as much carbon per unit energy as coal, and this is why developing countries that replace coal with gas generation qualify for Kyoto credits.) Together with expanded reliance on wind and nuclear, perhaps half of the electricity now made from coal could be generated by zero-carbon or low-carbon sources by 2020.

Whether your preference is Gore, Pickens or some other action plan, it all keeps coming back to the ongoing big story in power, which is wind. At the end of last week, as the ink was drying on the Pickens Plan, Texas regulators approved a $4.93 billion transmission expansion, to accommodate the state's fast-growing wind generation. Yes, $4.93 billion.

Actually it's almost as if in a game of Monopoly, you somehow drew Community Chest and Chance cards simultaneously, and both told you to go back to Go. On Friday, July 11, Environmental Protection Agency head Stephen L. Johnson announced the agency would not try to impose restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions, despite findings of a staff report he was releasing. The same day, in another part of town, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit threw out a plan the EPA adopted several years ago to reduce soot and smog, saying it was so flawed in so many ways no amount of tinkering could fix it.

A Washington truism that's held true longer than anybody can remember is that if you have to announce something potentially controversial, the best time to do so is on a Friday afternoon, preferably on a mid-summer day. The EPA and Circuit Court decisions conform to that pattern. Though they were reported in the Saturday papers, of course hardly anybody reads those papers on a hot July morning, and even the reporters filing them, instead of following up are off to the beach. That's one reason why have followed up here, albeit with a six-day delay, and why we posted on a Thursday rather than a Friday.

Both decisions had somewhat startling, even perplexing, dimensions. The EPA climate report was a response to a Supreme Court decision telling the agency to evaluate the human impact of greenhouse gases. EPA Administrator Johnson, rejecting mandatory action on GHG emissions even as he was issuing a report detailing their adverse impacts, "in effect was simultaneously publishing the policy analysis of his scientific and legal experts and repudiating its conclusions," as The New York Times observed. Even stranger, it continued, along with his staff's work he also published "the comments of its critics, which had a definite tinge of hostility toward the EPA regulators."

However weird his modus operandi, Johnson's decision was not really a surprise. Nobody expected the Bush Administration in its waning months, despite the Supreme Court directive, to initiate carbon regulation, which it has always opposed. One way or another it was going to punt, leaving the difficult decisions to a next administration and one, presumably, that will have its heart in the matter.

The appeals court decision, on the other hand, was a shocker. EPA's Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) "represented the Bush administration's most aggressive action to clean the air over the next two decades," as The Washington Post put it. CAIR's purpose was to reduce or eliminate impacts of upwind emissions on clean air attainment efforts in downwind states east of the Mississippi, an effort that EPA said would help prevent 17,000 premature deaths. Naturally, given its scope and complexity, CAIR faced a variety of detailed challenges: from a state and a municipality, several utility groups, and a national energy company with big nuclear holdings. But nobody had expected the court to toss out the whole next-phase plan for reducing SO2 and NOx--or, if anybody did, they're not admitting it.

Because of the decision's immense importance, it's worth lingering a little over some salient details. Again and again, considering various objections, the court found that EPA had adopted an overly regional approach, neglecting to assess the specific impact of one state's upwind emissions on another state's downwind attainment efforts; repeatedly, the decision takes EPA to task for adopting such a procedure merely because it was "logical" or "fair" rather than in strict compliance with statutes. With specific reference to CAIR's NOx trading program, the decision rebukes EPA for adopting a formula--evidently from the acid rain program--that favors coal-burning utilities over those relying mainly on gas and oil, working to the disfavor of a state like oil-rich Louisiana. With reference to SO2, it found that CAIR's proposed supplemental trading scheme would illegally devalue permits issued in the acid rain program.

"Unfortunately," the court concluded, "we cannot pick and choose portions of CAIR to preserve.â''Ã'¶CAIR is a single, regional program, as EPA has always maintained, and all its components must stand or fall together."

A number of the petitioners in the suit declared themselves dismayed by the outcome, including Duke Energy, based in Charlotte, N.C. Though one of the nation's top coal-burning utilities, Duke has been a leading industry advocate of carbon regulation; together with North Carolina, however, it was a major plaintiff in the CAIR suit. It appears now to be embarrassed and perhaps even damaged by the sweeping result. "It was not the intent of Duke Energy's participation in this litigation to overturn EPA's CAIR," a spokesman said. Though challenging just the SO2 portions of CAIR, now that the whole rule is overturned, Duke loses the benefits for coal-burning utilities contained in the NOx trading provisions.

Just how shocked--shocked!--should we be? Georgetown University law professor Lisa Heinzerling, who wrote the petitioners' brief in the 2007 Supreme Court climate decision, says it's quite unusual for a big rule like CAIR to be vacated in its entirety: generally courts will remand defective portions to the regulatory agency for revision. But in this case Heinzerling feels "the decision seems kind of right, assuming the court's accounting of EPA's reasoning is accurate."

John Walke, the top air lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, sharply disagrees. In a blog he posted on July 15, he said that if Duke hadn't wanted to overturn CAIR then it shouldn't have brought suit in the first place, as "any decent attorney practicing in the D.C. Circuit would know that the frequent practice in that [quite conservative] court is to vacate unlawful rules in their entirety." Walke said this should have been particularly true of the able attorney who argued Duke's case in court, coincidentally a former classmate of his at Harvard Law School.

The immediate impact of the court's decision is that a previous NOx trading scheme, the so-called NOx SIP call, comes back into effect. But Walke, Heinzerling, and just about everybody else agree that in the longer run, stronger regulation of NOx and SO2 particulate will not be possible without new and revised statutory authority, which will have to await the next Congress and next Administration, along with a carbon mandate.

One final note: everybody considers the decision, as such, to be final. The D.C. Appeals Court, which is the one designated to deal with challenges to federal regulations, is after the Supreme Court the country's most prestigious and most powerful legal authority. The decision in the case of North Carolina versus EPA, written by the court's chief judge David B. Sentelle (coincidentally a native of North Carolina), can be readily found and downloaded at FindLaw, after a short log-in procedure.

This morning I walked a few blocks from my house and waited for the bus. The Big Green Bus, that is, a cooking-oil fueled, solar-panel powered, Dartmouth-college-student carrying, sustainable-living-promoting road show.

The bus was a little late, thanks to freeway accidents and massive traffic tie-ups. By the time it arrived, a crowd of moms, kids, and local journalists had gathered.

The point of the 40-state, 20,000 km summer tour, recent Dartmouth graduate and bus rider Ro Wang told me, is to make people realize that small changes in your lifestyle now can make a meaningful difference to the environment in the future, and you don't have to make big sacrifices.

"You don't have to go back to the ice age," says Dartmouth environmental studies major Nathan Mazonson.

Dartmouth mechanical engineering major Trey Roy pointed out that the twelve students and recent graduates on the tour were not giving up their high-tech college student lifestyle. Thanks to five top-of-the-line 215 W Sunpower solar panels, donated by T.J. Rodgers, and eight golf cart batteries, the students have flat-screen television, surround sound, videogames, computers, cell phones, and a refrigerator and freezer to hold their snacks day and night. On windy days, they stick a wind turbine out on the roof for a 400 W power boost.

The bus itself runs on a little diesel (to warm up the engine for the first five minutes of driving) and a lot of used vegetable oil, collected from restaurants that fry food. "We've never paid for the oil," Mazonson said. And if you get to close to the exhaust, you'll get hit with the smell of stale french fries.

The road trip is sponsored by Newman's Own, Waste Management, Timberland's Earthkeepers, Changents, and Burt's Bees.

Below, a photo tour:

ON THE BUS. Twelve Dartmouth students and recent grads, including environmental studies major Nathan Mazonson (left), mechanical engineering major Trey Roy (center), and physics major Elysa Corin are riding 20,000 km this summer to encourage people to make lifestyle changes to help the environment.

VEGGIE POWERED. The Big Green Bus runs on waste vegetable oil, with a parallel diesel system that briefly warms the oil and can be switched in when fast food restaurants can't be found.

CLEAN OIL. Two filtering systems in the back of the bus, plus a final filtering pass near the engine, make sure french fry fragments don't clog the fuel lines.

THANKS, TJ! Five solar panels donated by Cypress Semiconductor's TJ Rodgers mean that bus riders don't have to leave their high-tech toys, like multimedia systems and videogame players, behind.

Last Wednesday evening, I dined in a fashionable Nairobi restaurant with three recent graduates from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Big brains, these three young men have chosen to pursue a distinctly unusual set of inventive possibilities. They are seeking to design, engineer and implement new sources of energy for people in the developing world living "off the grid."

Step back a moment. For generations, the "grid" referred to the national electricity grid, the cornerstone of all power-generating activities in a given country. Throughout Africa and Asia, national grids are now straining to generate sufficient electricity to meet the growing appetites of bustling cities.

For rural dwellers in the developing world, large technological systems often bypass them completely. In Kenya, for instance, villages that are not reached by the national grid must survive for years -- if not an eternity -- before the grid reaches them. The power demands by city dwellers are simply too urgent to put rural needs very high on the electricity agenda.

Into the breach comes Distributed World Power, a Pasadena, Calif. company that wants to specialize in off-grid electricity sources. Backed by private funds, Distributed World Power sounds like the name for a political movement, not an energy startup. At dinner, John Howard, vice president of business development for the company and the oldest of the three Caltech grads, explained that Asia would probably be the best region for the company. But personally, he was drawn to Africa, Kenya in particular.

Howard and his fellow Caltech alumni had just spent the past week sleeping in remote Kenyan villages, far off the grid. The trio was assessing the potential for wind-generation. They also were looking at solar because, as Howard explained, consumption of off-the-shelf solar systems was greater in Kenya than anywhere else on the continent other than South Africa.

"They are straightforward engineering options," Howard said, that could deliver vast amounts of off-grid electricity to African villages. Yet the non-technical issues loom large in Africa -- and much larger than in usually-orderly and effecient Asian countries. So Howard questioned the wisdom of investing heavily in parts of Africa too.

"Maybe we try one country," he said.

The problem is identifying partners, which isn't easy in sub-Saharan Africa, where "good" partners often fetch a high price. The Cal Tech grads can't roll out systems on their own; rather they prefer to do the less-costly and more creative part of the job, namely conceiving and designing systems.

"The distances in Africa are enormous," Howard said, confessing this after a full day of traveling from a rural area to Nairobi. Indeed, densely-packed Asia, linked by all manner of transport, is quite a contrast from sub-Saharan Africa, where despite high birth rates the landscape at times seems almost lunar, bereft of people.

In such a region, can bright young Americans make a difference. John Howard thinks he and his Caltech alums can but he admits, "these are early days."

The shanty towns of Africa's great cities are incubators for material innovations that easily escape the ambitions of people living in wealthier surroundings. In Nairobi's Kibera slum, the latest sensation is a "bio-latrine" that converts human waste into energy that produces gas for lighting and domestic cooking.

The technology behind the bio-latrine was developed by the governments of Kenya and France. Under a project supported by the United Nation's Habitat agency, about 20 bio-latrines that convert waste into gas will be installed in four areas of Kibera.

The bio-latrine consists of a shallow pit latrine, a "bio-digester" that produces gas and fertilizer; and a dispenser. Above the latrine are toilets, a kitchen and a community meeting room.

The bio-latrine requires cooperation among neighbors -- and that may be its undoing. Crime in Kibera runs high; so does envy and conflict between neighbors. Yet the problem of human waste in African shanty towns is large and growing. Informal settlements in cities can't wait for government to act. Small-scale technologies, under the control of ordinary people, provide one answer to the glaring need in Nairobi -- and other African cities -- for better sanitation and less costly fuel for cooking.

While the bio-latrine is surprisingly complicated for an "appropriate" technology, it does address the two most vexing problems of poor Africans in makeshift neighborhoods and even schools. And that's reason enough for more experiments with them.

Just a month ago, we told you that Hymotion named 4 Toyota dealers as official installers for its $9,995 plug-in conversion module for 2004-2008 Priuses.

Now, in a comprehensive piece in Green Car Advisor, the Edmunds.com blog on all matters automotive and green, Scott Doggett writes that two of the four seem to be getting cold feet.

There's a continuing story with much left to be played out here, but we wanted to bring you the latest update as soon as we could.

And what, dear readers, are your thoughts? Should Toyota permit its dealers to install Hymotion's kits--assuming the company can back up their claim that the kit passed all relevant new-car crash tests? If you chose to install a plug-in kit in your Prius, how much would the liability issues worry you?

High fuel prices are hammering the airline industry. I know that, and that all these annoying surcharges recently announced--for luggage, for drinks--are attempts to somehow make up for the extra fuel costs.

What I didn't know until yesterday was that airlines are also saving money on fuel by simply not filling up the tanks as high as they ought to. The FAA requires that an aircraft carry enough fuel to reach its destination and its most distant alternate airport, plus 45 minutes worth. It's not to the airline's advantage to carry any more than the minimum requirement--more fuel means a heavier plane; a heavier plane gets worse mileage.

Of course, the calculations are based on estimates--estimated passenger weights, estimated luggage, estimated speed. And since my experience yesterday, I'm thinking the airlines are estimating a little low.

I flew from San Francisco to Newark on a Continental 737. Great weather on both ends, only a little turbulence. A lovely flight, actually, best I've had in a long time; the flight attendants were cheerful, passengers got two drink services and a bagel-and-egg sandwich without charge.

A little more than four hours into the flight, the pilot reported that we'd be landing about half an hour ahead of schedule, and flight attendants began collecting trash in preparation for our approach. Perhaps ten minutes later the pilot announced that we'd have to slow down a little to get in line for landing, but we'd still get in well ahead of schedule. I was thrilled; this would be my first flight in at least a year that landed on time, perhaps I could call a friend for dinner.

And then, just a few minutes later, the pilot came on the P.A. system again. "Uh, folks, we're going to make a quick stop for refueling." Huh? Passengers looked at each other in surprise. Flight attendants passed rapidly through the cabin checking seat backs and tray tables and strapped themselves in. Minutes later, we landed at Stewart Air National Guard Base, less than 100 miles from our destination. After a long taxi past National Guard cargo planes, we parked and waited for the fuel trucks.

I was flabbergasted. I've logged a lot of airline miles over the years; I've never been on a flight that ran out of gas. The pilot blamed the problem on air traffic delays; but from what he had said the delay seemed minimal; certainly not enough to eat up the

45-minute reserve the FAA requires. I wondered about the fact that we'd gotten so far ahead of schedule--likely we'd been flying a little faster than is optimal for fuel conservation. I also looked around me at the planeload of European tourists heading home, and wondered if they'd been taking advantage of the cheap dollar and ended up bringing back a lot of extra luggage.

Turns out, though, that the Department of Transportation recently singled Continental out for having the most of what it calls "minimum fuel declarations" into Newark airport last year--96, more than twice the amount it made the previous year. Declaring "minimum fuel" flags the air traffic controllers that, if incoming planes need to be delayed, they shouldn't delay this particular flight too much. The Department of Transportation also found out that Continental has been pressuring pilots to cut back on the amount of fuel they carry, for ultimately the pilot makes that decision. In October, the airline sent out a memo to pilots pointing out that "adding fuel indiscriminately without critical thinking ultimately reduces profit sharing and possibly pension funding." Gee, ya think that's why I ended up sitting on a deserted runway for an hour and a half?

Next time, Continental, forget the bagel, just fill up the tank.

The big problems with national electricity grids in Africa get a lot of attention, but for most Africans who live in rural areas -- of the grid -- the only hope to get electricity at all is to do it themselves.

I've long been a promoter of the idea that home-grown electricity systems based on tiny dams and so-called "micro-hydro" systems can provide a lot of relief for poor or marginalized African peasants. There is hardly a bandwagon behind inexpensive micro-hydro electricity systems, even though tens of thousands of them could be installed easily in such water-rich and electricity-poor countries as Uganda and Malawi, for instance. But micro-hydro in Africa is growing nicely, providing hope for the future in an otherwise gloomy electricity outlook for the world's poorest region.

Reports this month out of central Kenya -- where I happen to be at the time of posting -- naturally caught my interest. Residents of a village named Kibai are benefit from a miniature hydro generating facility at a small waterfall on a river called the Mukengeria. The electricity generated by the system isn't much actually; an estimated 2.5 kilowatts a day. Yet the power is enough to charge batteries for mobiles, run a few computers, a television set and some small industrial machinery.

Sounds modest but it adds up to a revolution in daily life in Kibai.

Such projects can be easily duplicated, so long as prices for the basic materials, can be brought down through mass purchasing. The turbine is especially important to get right. Kibai relied on a United Nations agency for help (the U.N.'s Industrial Development Organization). Not exactly a low-cost provider, the U.N. deserves credit for keeping alive the micro-hydro dream.

The real leap forward will come when governments offer micro-hydro packages in do-it-yourself kits -- and by the tens of thousands. Anywhere water runs, even a little a bit, there is the promise of electricity. Governments are showing more interest in the concept, though not a single African country currently is supporting more than a token effort, which is too bad.

Ask an economist for the best way to reduce carbon emissions, and the answer almost always is a carbon tax: drive up the cost of emitting CO2, and then let free markets find the technologies to avoid or reduce emissions. Ask a politician, and the answer is almost always cap-and-trade: set annual ceilings for carbon emissions, sell or issue emissions allowances to the major emitters, and let them trade the allowances so that those best able to cut emissions do so first. Every half-wit knows that either scheme will drive up energy and electricity prices. But economists prefer the tax because it's technology-neutral and virtually self-administering, while politicians dislike the tax because it's a tax and prefer to make it look as if in their system the emitters are bearing almost all compliance costs.

The Lieberman-Warner cap and trade bill that was introduced in the Senate a couple of weeks ago, only to be withdrawn moments later because its backers lacked the clout to bring it to a vote, reflected the politicians' point of view. Because the tax route is so unpopular in the corridors of power, and because both McCain and Obama have endorsed cap and trade, it's been considered almost a foregone conclusion that sooner or later the United States will have a carbon trading system. But the alacrity with which the Lieberman-Warner forces folded has prompted some speculation that other approaches to carbon reduction may turn out to be attractive after all. Sure, the bill's backers figured that next year, with a strongly Democratic Congress and a president sympathetic to cap and trade, it will be much easier to get a bill through. But if they really had the courage of their convictions, shouldn't they have hung on a little longer--at least long enough to get it across to the public that this is an important item on the political agenda? A lot of editorialists and commentators certainly thought so.

One thing that alarmed the bill's backers was the insistence by its opponents, mostly Republican, on having the whole bill, which runs to hundreds of pages, read out loud in session. That's a tactic that could end up backfiring. If carbon trading will create an administrative nightmare, then the answer may be--not to do nothing about climate change--but to enact a carbon tax. Days after the bill's 2008 demise, the New York Times climate reporter Andrew Revkin drew attention in his blog to a proposal from the climatologist James E. Hansen for what Hansen calls a "carbon tax with 100 percent dividend."

Taking his inspiration from freelance economist Peter Barnes, who has proposed creation of a "sky trust" consisting of the proceeds from sales of emissions allowances, Hansen suggests an escalating carbon tax, with 100 percent of the proceeds fed directly back to the public, with each taxpayer getting the same monthly share. Hansen's formulation is geared to satisfy both economists, who don't want politicians to treat a carbon tax as just an easy source of revenue, and political progressives, who want taxes to be progressive. Since richer people tend to use more energy and emit more carbon, a carbon tax will tend to take a bigger bite than they get back, when proceeds are rebated equally.

Carbon trading has come under considerable criticism not only on the political right but the political left as well, often for overlapping and complementary reasons. The Hansen-Barnes approach could be appealing at both ends of the political spectrum, to the extent concern about possibly catastrophic climate change is real.

To the extent carbon trading loses its aura of political inevitably, the door opens for other possibilities as well. Joseph Romm, a former Energy Department official and author of a devastating critique of the "hydrogen economy" vision, has a commentary in today's Nature Reports Climate Change (June 20), in which he condemns cap and trade as too slow and indirect. Romm wants to ban construction of coal fired plants, unless they make full provision for carbon capture and storage, and at the same time provide generous tax credits and incentives for energy efficiency and low-carbon generation and fuels.

"These are all features of the climate plan of the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama," says Romm, showing his hand. But note: Obama is not the only candidate proposing a direct attack on climate and energy problems. McCain said this week that he wants to add 45 nuclear reactors to the nation's fleet of atomic power plants.

Perhaps nothing beats the Sahara for feelings of timelessness and unboundedness, but surely the world's icy deserts take second place in the metaphysical imagination. It's more than a little disconcerting to learn then, in the June 20 issue of Science magazine, that just 400,000 years ago--well into the era in which modern humans were evolving--the southern reaches of Greenland were not just green but covered with vast spruce forests. A second article in the same issue discusses two very sudden warmings Greenland experienced 15 thousand and 11 thousand years ago, while a perspective piece addresses the implications of Greenland's climate changes for tomorrow's world.