Energywise

To hear some climate skeptics say it, you'd think the greenhouse effect was just a theory, concocted by dangerous radicals to undermine the American way of life; and to hear some of the climate alarmists, you'd think 100 percent of the science was nailed down, with nothing new to learn and nothing left to argue about. Well, a report by French and Russian scientists in Physical Review Letters, the world's premier publisher of new physics discoveries, finds that the mechanisms responsible for trapping the Sun's radiation in the Earth's atmosphere have been imperfectly understood. (Journalists can obtain pre-publication copies of the article at the American Institute of Physics' physics news/select.)

As every basic textbook in atmospheric science will tell you on page 1, the greenhouse effect is something of a misnomer: in an actual greenhouse, warming occurs because the glass roof stops the convection currents that normally carry warmer air up and away; in Earth's atmosphere, warming occurs because the infrared radiation reflected back from the Earth's surface is trapped by the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere--natural water vapor is by far the most important among them but human-generated carbon dioxide is increasingly significant.

Michael Chrysos and colleagues at the University of Angers and collaborators at the University of Saint Petersburg confirmed that absorption of IR radiation by triatomic carbon dioxide molecules is governed by the laws of quantum physics, involving their internal vibrations. But they found that IR absorption also occurs in collisions between CO2 molecules--and in collisions of diatomic molecules such as O2 and N2 as well--and that this kind of absorption is explained by Newtonian mechanics.

The Chrysos team estimates that the collisional IR absorption accounts for about 10 percent of the total greenhouse effect on Earth. On Venus, which has a super-hothouse climate, they believe the collisional absorption explained by classical mechanics may account for more than half the effect.

Vacationing here in Mexico's Federal District, one of the world's biggest of megacities, you can't ignore the bad air. Last year, in IEEE Spectrum magazine's special issue about megacities, Erico Guizzo drew attention to the innovative way Sao Paulo has introduced special reserved bus lanes to make bus travel speedier and discourage private cars. In Mexico City's Insurgentes, the main thoroughfare that traverses the city much as Broadway cuts diagonally all the way up Manhattan, lanes reserved for express buses also are to found.

Those dedicated bus lanes are just one of the many ways that Mexico City keeps a lid on inner-city traffic and automotive emissions--this splendid city has an outstanding subway system that the French and which costs just 20 pesos to ride (two U.S. cents) and ubiquitous minibuses (including the lovely new Volksbus built by VW). But in a sprawling metropolitan area of close to 20 million people, at a high altitude where the air is thin to begin with and catalytic converters work poorly, and where so many antiquated cars and trucks belch putrid fumes, curtailing air pollution is an uphill battle.

Five years ago, before Guizzo graced IEEE Spectrum with his presence, he wrote an article for a competitor publication (that we naturally prefer not to name) about how Luisa T. Molina and her husband the Nobelist Mario Molina had organized a program at MIT and Harvard to study air pollution in major urban areas worldwide; they have done closely related work in a joint program in La Jolla. Erico described how the Molinas had vans equipped with state-of-art monitors drive around Mexico City to test air and identify mobile and point sources of pollution.

That article came vividly to mind two days ago as I drove back into the city with my wife and son from Teotihuacan, the spectacular 2000-year-old complex of pyramids and temples northwest of the Federal District. We had the bad luck to get caught in a highway bottleneck, where a superhighway was being extended. For close to an hour and a half--resulting finally in a little burst of road rage on my part, a minor moving violation, the threat of a ticket, and the usual bribe paid to a well-organized group of extortionist traffic cops--we sat nearly motionless behind decades-old trucks belching black diesel smoke.

With some feeling of chagrin we thought and talked about how when the superhighway was completed, there would be fewer trucks sitting motionless spewing pollutants--but there also would be all the more trucks and cars speeding along the new highway into and out of the city.

That night we were blessed with a gigantic thunderstorm, and when we woke the next morning, the sky over Mexico's downtown was miraculously clear blue. I took my son up to the top of the television tower, to catch a rare glimpse of the two sacred volcanoes that loom over the city, almost always invisibly.

Astonishingly and yet not so astonishingly, when we got to the top of the tower, everything right under us in the inner city was beautifully clear. But all around there was a doughnut of pollution so dense, we not could see through or over it to Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl (Popo and Ixta). In the inner city with its fabulous subway system, adorable VW minibuses, and dedicated express bus lanes, the air was almost pristine. But all around, where the city is sprawling cancerously in every direction, the air was perhaps worse than ever.

My son Liam, who is a high school junior in Berkeley, California, volunteers every Tuesday afternoon in the offices of the International Rivers, the world's leading advocacy group on the perils and economic problems associated with large dams. IR's chief, Patrick McCully, is one among the most knowledgeable people on the planet on the subject -- so tuned into trends in dams and hydro-electricity that my nickname for Paddy is "Doctor Dam."

I count McCully as a close friend, and I even share many of his environmental forebodings about large dams -- and especially his considered view that many dams don't make economic sense. But I am not anti-dam, or even categorically opposed to dams. I even think that some hydro-electric projects, so long as they generate economic benefits, ought to proceed even if they adversely impact the surrounding environment.

I'm especially sensitive about criticisms of planned dams and associated hydro-electric projects in sub-Saharan Africa, where poverty and high energy costs are serious obstacles to democratic development. Dams and hydro-electricity are greatly needed in Africa -- of all shapes and sizes.

I have elsewhere written with sympathy about small hydro-electric projects -- micro-, pico- and mini-dams that generate electricity from almost any amount of flowing water. I am hardly a bigot about size. I'm even suspicious of especially large infrastructure projects, of any kind in Africa, because they are more likely to fall prey to mismanagement and corruption.

I got to thinking about all this when I read the news about efforts to push forward the controversial Inga dam project in the central African country of Congo. Inga, in all its permuations, calls for a vast expansion of two existing dams on the Congo River, the world's second largest. The estimated cost of the full project -- which would generate twice as much electricity as China's Three Gorges complex, today the world's largest -- is upwards of $80 billion. The cost alone gives many pause, and not the least because large foreign investments in Congo -- among the least stable countries in the world, with a history of extreme corruption -- are exceedingly rare. And actually there are no examples of substantial foreign investments in the country outside of the mining industry.

Yet demand for electricity is no high, relative to supply, in Africa that even the astronomical price-tag on Inga does not frighten its advocates. The "grand" Inga expansion would not provide power for the people of Congo alone but for a half-dozen surrounding countries. Even countries far away, such as Nigeria and South Africa, might use the electricity, according to the project's advocates, who claim the full-blown expansion would double the total electricity generated in Africa.

Last week, the pro-Inga forces met in London. Little was settled at the meeting, but the visible enthusiasm for the project -- at a time of strong economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa and wrenching electricity shortages in many of the region's most important countries -- gave the impression that, if hardly a done deal, the Inga expansion was a live possibility.

That alarms McCully and his staff at IR. The organization's Africa field director, Terri Hathaway, declared that the project "would be a magnet for corruption" and ultimately an economic "white elephant."

I am not so sure that Inga is a grand delusion. For the forseeable future, however, there are many more practical and beneficial African hydro schemes. Talk of Inga is irresponsible and should cease, pending some clear watershed in the Congo's own stability. The country is riven by civil wars, badly governed and fatally wounded by its own sprawling geography. Supporters of Inga should be forced to shelve any financing maneuverings until the Congo sorts out politically and socially. Today, the country is essentially a fiction, propped up by the armed forces of the United Nations and the money of foreign donors.

That will take years -- maybe even decades. In the meantime, hydro-electric enthusiasts in Africa have no shortage of other projects to fund. Let them explore, study, improve, fund and build those projects that ultimately prove worthy -- and forget Inga for now.

The severe electricity shortage gripping sub-Saharan Africa -- and especially the region's largest economy -- South Africa is bringing fresh attention to a longstanding problem: organized and widespread theft of electricity.

In South Africa alone, Eskom, the chief provider, is believed to lose hundreds of millions of dollars of revenues a year to thieves. Some of the losses are due to non-payment of bills, but a significant amount comes from unauthorized tapping of electricity lines.

Theft of electricity in Africa worsens the shortage by robbing companies of revenue needed for expansion. Sometime the thefts take place with the assistance of employees of electricity companies. Poor service by electricity companies also can fuel resentments that can be expressed through forms of customer protests which include theft or non-payment of bills.

In Uganda, for instance, customers are frustrated with an electricity provider who routinely blames high theft for poor service. Last year the government-owned New Vision newspaper published an article by an energy expert who argued, "It is not fair for an innocent power consumer to pay exorbitant tariffs because of the service provider has failed to stop theft."

Because losses to theft can be so high -- in some places, such as Uganda, as much as a third of the potential revenues are lost -- some African electricity providers have experimented with pre-paid services, offering a discount to new customers if they agree to accept meters that require an electronic debit card to work. In Ghana, the national electricity company has sharply reduced losses due to non-paynment of bills by requiring most new customers to accept the pre-pay meters. The payment cards are refilled by paying cash at offices of the electricity company.

Despite the success of the pre-pay program, Ghana is believed to lose as much as one quarter of its electricity revenues due to theft, complicating efforts to upgrade service.

Efforts to crack down on scofflaws can be difficult. In Cameroon, where the U.S. electricity company AES owns the national provider, raids on organized thieves are common. Company security officials come prepared to tear down illegal networks and even raid businesses suspected of tapping lines.

Electricity theft can cause a vicious cycle, where providers raise rates because of high losses, which in turn gives customers more incentive to steal more electricity. In Cameroon, for instance, thefts skyrocketed several years ago after a series of rate increases. When rates stabilized, thefts declined.

Yesterday, April 17, the state of New Jersey issued an energy master plan, notable for the frankness with which it address's the state's current and medium-term needs and resources. The plan carries the imprimatur of state governor Jon S. Corzine, notable too, because Corzine is squarely in the political mainstream, very smart, and--as a former partner in Goldman Sachs--comfortable thinking about macro variables.

Today's news reports emphasized the plan's suggestion that it may be necessary to build a new nuclear power plant to meet needs. But that notion is not contained in the report's executive summary and gets only passing mention on pp. 71-72 of the main text. Still, it is indeed significant that a state of New Jersey's importance and a governor of Corzine's stature has officially declared itself willing to take another look at nuclear.

Framing the difficult situation facing the state, the report states up front that natural gas prices and electricity prices doubled from 2002 to 2007, threatening the state's long-term economic competitiveness and livability. Meanwhile, energy demand has been rising sharply, along with electricity exports to the New York City metropolitan area , even as electrical generating capacity and transmission have failed to keep pace.

The plan proposes building code revisions that would make new construction 30 percent more energy efficient, while the efficiency of existing buildings would be improved by means of tighter standards for appliances and equipment. The state would seek to meet 22.5 percent of its needs from renewables by 2025, with the addition of 1,500 megawatts in solar capacity, 1,200 MW in wind, and 1,500 MW in combined heat and power.

But even with those ambitious measures, the plan anticipates that the state's current fleet of generating facilities will not be adequate to meet long-term power demand. Hence the cautious nod to nuclear.

If Corzine hews to the nuclear line, he will be following in the footsteps of Great Britain, which is in the painful process of committing itself to the construction of a new generation of nuclear power plants, mainly because of concerns about global warming. The implications are turning out to be even more difficult to digest than the English may have guessed. If the UK proceeds, it's considered all but a foregone conclusion that British Energy--which owns the most plausible sites for new reactors--will be taken over, most likely by a foreign bidder.

The leading candidates are France's EDF, Germany's RWE or E.ON, and Spain's Iberdrola. So if the British find themselves consuming much more nuclear electricity in ten or fifteen years time, they'll likely be buying it from a French, German or Spanish supplier.

The conventional wisdom about the president's climate speech yesterday, April 16, is that it was calculated to head off international efforts to tighten binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions and U.S. legislation to cap and reduce emissions. I see no reason to dispute the usual view. What's a little puzzling is why Bush thinks, given his rock-bottom standing in national opinion polls and his short remaining time in office, he still has any real political capital to expend on the climate issue.

Oddly, the president's mastery of mathematical calculus seems better than his command of political calculus. The following captures the essense of what he had to say: "To reach our 2025 goal we'll need to more rapidly slow the growth of power sector greenhouse gas emissions so they peak within 10 to 15 years." That is, rather than belatedly accept the Kyoto goal of reducing U.S. emissions to 7 percent below their 1990 level, or alternatively agree in upcoming climate talks to some less ambitious schedule of greenhouse gas reductions, the United States will only try to reduce the rate at which emissions are increasing. What the president is proposing is that we merely tinker with the first derivative.

Why does he think that's going to impress anybody? The underlying logic of the Kyoto Protocol is that those countries responsible now for the most emissions and that have the greatest per-capita emissions should start cutting them immediately, and that the countries with fast-growing emissions--China and India, first and foremost--should start cutting theirs in the next phase. The diplomatic rationale is exactly analogous to that underlying the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which requires non-nuclear-weapons countries to not acquire atomic bombs now, in exchange from a longer-term commitment from the nuclear weapons states to start getting rid of theirs in the future.

The non-nuclear weapons states have shown a growing impatience with the lackluster pace at which those countries with atomic bombs have been disarming. But it would be a tragedy is they lost patience altogether and all started acquiring nuclear weapons. By the way token, it will be most unfortunate if the American people gives into demagogic reasoning and persists in refusing to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions: the inevitable effect will be China's refusing to ever do anything constructive, and the Europeans giving up on ambitious efforts they're already making.

In his speech, Bush said he sought to reconcile climate policy with continued economic growth, roundly rejecting the Kyoto approach. He took some credit --justly--for working to tighten automotive fuel efficiency standards (over the opposition of some Democratic Party leaders) and for mandating higher efficiency standards for lighting and appliances. Those wishing to dissect the speech in every detail can go to the blog maintained by Andrew Revkin, the lead climate reporter at The New York Times. Revkin's posting includes both his own comments and those from readers.

Mutual funds, having long resisted shareholder resolutions demanding they focus more on financial risks arising from climate change, are starting to have second thoughts. That is the central conclusion of a report released today by Ceres, a coalition of investors and environmentalists that encourages big financial players to factor environmental sustainability into their strategic decision making. Among other things, Ceres directs the Investor Network on Climate Risk, with 60 institutional investors whose collective assets total $5 trillion.

The Ceres mutual funds report, covering the years 1004-2007, finds that in that period firms were somewhat less likely to oppose shareholder resolutions on climate or more likely to abstain in proxy fights about climate risks. Such financial risks, says Ceres president Mindy S. Lubber, can include penalties caused by regulatory changes (e.g. carbon caps or taxes), the costs of Katrina-type disasters, law suits against emitters, and "reputational damage" (being seen as a bad actor rather than a good guy).

In previous reports and actions, Ceres initially focused on utilities and energy firms with big carbon footprints, encouraging investors to demand formulation of long-term strategies that would reduce footprints and exposure to financial risk. Then it took on the automobile industry, and takes satisfaction from Ford's move last year to assess its own contributions to the climate problem. Increasingly, Ceres sees climate risk as an economy-wide issue.

In its most recent report on mutual funds, Ceres says that most firms still are resisting shareholder action, with some standout exceptions such as Goldman Sachs, which has supported some resolutions outright and also has steered its investments in directions that minimize exposure to climate risks. "Schwab, MassMutual and Janus also registered relatively high suppoirt for climate resolutions compared to other mutual fund firms," the report says.

Lubber, speaking in a media teleconference this morning, asserted that investors should be "scrubbing their portfolios" for climate risk the same way they've had to scrub their sub-prime mortgages.

From the outside, Stanford University's just-opened Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment & Energy building (Y2E2) looks a lot like the other buildings on campus. Its fa⿿ÿade is mostly stone, its roof is mostly tile, and its surrounded by long colonnades with graceful arches.

But this building, the first of four to go up in what will be Stanford's new engineering quad, is different. It is as environmentally friendly as its designers at Boora Architects and Hargreaves Associates could make it; a level that the university calls LEED-platinum equivalent. Stanford did not seek official LEED platinum certification like some Bay Area builders; some building requirements, like the separate ventilation systems for the basement laboratories, aren't accounted for in the LEED system, and certification would have added a costly paperwork burden that, says Stanford civil and environmental engineering professor Richard Luthy, would have come out of the budget for solar cells, for example. While the building is too new for operating data to be available, Luthy expects about a 60 percent energy savings and about a 90 percent savings in potable water use.

I toured the 11,000 square meter building last week. I've toured a lot of green buildings, and I'm always impressed with how features that are good for the environment--like natural lighting--also create a space that feels good to the people working inside of it.

The Y2E2 building struck me by its level of detail. It's not just the four atria letting in natural light, the automatic louvers and windows bringing in cool air at night to chill the mostly carpet-less concrete floor for daytime cooling, or the grey-water system used for the toilets that gives this building its tiny environmental footprint. It's all the little things: like making the shelving and tables out of bamboo and recycled press-board; the fly ash, a byproduct of coal burning, that replaced cement in the concrete; the angled landscaping that sends rainwater into channels where it is collected and used for irrigation.

Take a look for yourself.

Europe's leading solar energy research, the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, and MIT are jointly establishing a Center for Sustainable Energy Systems at the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The center will emphasize use of novel materials and techniques to bring down the costs of solar systems, and advanced construction technology to reduce the energy consumption of new and retrofitted buildings.

It's a measure of the importance attached to sustainable energy systems that the German foreign minister showed up in Cambridge to witness, with MIT's president and the Massachusetts energy secretary, the signing of the center's memo of understanding. Besides getting an initial $5 million in funding from MIT, the center is receiving $1 million from Britain's National Grid--the organization created when the UK deregulated and "unbundled" its electricity system, and which now has acquired energy companies outside the UK. (It was a surprise to this blogger when he learned his natural gas in Brooklyn was being supplied by England's electricity system operator.)

The Fraunhofer solar institute in Freiburg is one of 56 German institutes of the Fraunhofer Society, a national organization partly funded by the federal government, and partly by contract research done for public and private sector customers. The society is a close analogue of the Max Planck Society, a network of institutes dedicated to basic research, many of them very prestigious. Fraunhofer concentrates exclusively on applied research and, increasingly, has global connections.

Though it's unusual for Fraunhofer to jointly sponsor research centers outside Germany, it's not unprecedented in the United States. The first such center was set up a dozen years ago, and there are now five in all--two in Michigan, one connected with Boston University, one Maryland, and one in Delaware.

In all, Fraunhofer supports about 12,700 researchers, 160 of them in the United States.

Though signs abound that the U.S. energy industry is expecting a nuclear energy renaissance, sharp questions have been raised about the ability of the domestic power plant construction industry to deliver. Now ace energy reporter Rebecca Smith is reporting in The Wall Street Journal evidence of substandard counterfeit components being sold to operating atomic power plants. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has alerted utilities of two cases.

One case involved sale of circuit breakers designed to protect equipment from electrical surges: in all, 140,000 breakers sold in the United States as products of France's Schneider Electric Co. turned out to have been made in China, and a few may have found their way into a nuclear power plant operated by Duke Energy Corp. A second case involved water valves for the Southern Company's Hatch nuclear power plant in Georgia.

At present, according to Smith, applications for 15 new U.S. nuclear power plants are pending in eight states. But how fast could manufacturers actually deliver all the parts needed? The NRC chairman notes that the number of U.S. suppliers has declined from 1,350 in 1977 to about 700 today. Last year, an executive with Southern Company told this reporter that the U.S. industry could initiate at most two or three new reactor projects per year, for the time. In terms of energy delivery, that is roughly equivalent to the rate at which wind power currently is being expanded in the United States.