Fractals of Change

Geothermal Installed!

 

Heating with our new electric geothermal "furnace" will cost less than half what it costs to heat with oil give current oil and electricity costs, even though electricity at $.20/Kwh here is much more expensive than in many parts of the country. This is an environmental investment which can be cost justified even without any subsidy; the whole installation was less than $20,000. Pictured below is the "furnace" – actually it's a heat pump. It's about three feet high and it's relatively noisy when it runs.

 

Here's how it works: the compressor part of the heat pump does the same thing that the compressor in an air conditioner or a refrigerator does; it squeezes a gas which cause that gas to heat up. In a refrigerator the heated gas runs through coils in the back or under the unit so it can dump that heat into the air; in that case, when the gas expands, it's cooler than it was before the whole process started and it makes the inside of your refrigerator cool but it also makes the air around the coil hot.

Since this heat pump is used for heating, the heat from compression is used in a heat exchanger to heat water. That water ends up heating the house (more on that below). Just as in the refrigerator, the gas is now cooler than it was before the whole process began because we harvested some of the energy in it to heat the water that heats the house. Water in a closed loop that runs from the heat pump over a hundred feet down into our well is used to warm the gas back up again. This exchange cools the water but, as it circulates through the well, which is a constant temperature of about 58 degrees Fahrenheit, the water warms up so that it can, in turn, warm the gas again. The well has to be deep enough or have enough flow through it or some combination of depth and flow so that it doesn't get chilled.

In warmer climates the same heat pump would be used to chill water or air and pump the excess heat back into the well. We don't have air conditioning so don't need that.

The heat pump is quite literally pumping heat out of or into the ground – that's why it's called geothermal. It does require some ground to go into; doesn't have to be a well but, if you have one, that makes it cheaper to install.

Our house is heated by circulating hot water in the floors. This heat pump can heat water to 120 degrees; but, on the coldest days, we might have to have water at 140 degrees leaving the utility room in order to assure that the furthest rooms get warmed. We could have put in an even bigger heat pump but this would have been overkill most of the time. Instead we have a small gas furnace which, when necessary (lots of computing here), steps the water up from 120 to 140. We'll experiment this winter and see how often – if at all –it's really necessary to post-heat the water. Another advantage to having the furnace is that it can run on our standby generator and keep the house warm even during a power failure. The compressor would require a monster generator because of the surge when it switches on.

The tank below is the buffer; the water flowing into it has just returned from warming the house so it, itself, has cooled. The water in this tank circulates through the heat pump which does its best to keep that water at 120 degrees. This water next goes through the furnace; so long as the water is as warm or warmer than the computer tells the furnace its output needs to be, the furnace doesn't fire.

In 2005 the United States used over 65 billion gallons of oil to heat residences. Switching to traditional radiant electrical heat is still more expensive than oil in most parts of the country – although that may well change. But geothermal electric heat use less than a third of the electricity required for radiant electrical heat. Where there is enough ground to put the coils, it's an alternative that's practical today. Look for it in much more new construction.

More on the economics of geothermal heat here although, at the time (last summer), I thought oil would only be $3.00/gallon this winter. This time next year, I hope to have some actual numbers to report.

Energy Policy – The Hard Work is Done

Mustering the political will to drive up the price of gasoline to a level where alternatives make economic sense would have been impossible – note the pandering attempts to knock it down a few cents for a few months. But the expansion of the world economy to include China and India in a big way has done that for us; there'll be ups and downs in the graph of gas and oil prices but, absent a world-wide depression, the trend line is up.

So now it's time to live with it. Hard as it is to take in the short term, higher prices for oil-based energy are a good thing in the long term. Too much money has been leaving our economy to pay for oil; the money's been going to all the wrong places; and, quite possibly, burning fossil fuels contributes to accelerated global warming.

Absent the recent run up in oil prices, we would have needed an elaborate systems of subsidies and penalties in order to get meaningful development of alternatives to oil any time soon. Now we're in a position where we can start unraveling those subsidies already in place – starting, I hope, with the subsidy for ethanol.

The trouble with subsidies is that they require the subsidizers to pick the winners and losers – always a hard thing to do with new technologies and something governments are notoriously bad at. Subsidies are also very hard to unwind. With the price of gas and oil up, private capital becomes available to finance any number of promising new technologies – there'll be some huge winners and lots of losers but that's the way technology and economies move forward. There'll be lots of parallel development.

If we want to maximize the private capital available, we have to avoid the urge to subsidize particular solutions. That's because private capital is rightly leery of competing with "free" capital from the government.

An important set of subsidies to unwind as soon as we contractually can is those that we've given to oil companies for drilling and refining. This may seem counter-productive since more domestic oil would reduce the economic and strategic harm of importing. But, if these incentives were ever needed, they're certainly not needed now with current prices for the end products. What would be really crazy – but is politically quite possible, even attractive – would be to leave the subsidies in place but also have an "excess profits tax" on oil companies which attempts to determine how those companies invest.

The subsidies for "mineral extraction" are woven deep into the tax code; I have some investments which take advantage of this. These subsidies can and should be undone legislatively, not countered with another set of taxes.

Now that the market has raised oil to a price that's relatively easy to compete with, the most important reason for not subsidizing one form of energy over another is that we'll get the "right" mix of alternatives more quickly if we let private investors take the losses and gains and explore all the niches and crannies. But, if we're not subsidizing, we also save tax money (or raise more by reducing the subsidies hidden in the tax code). That money should be used to reduce the pain for low-income working Americans by reducing social security taxes collected from worker's pay checks and making the social security trust fund whole with the foregone subsidies.

It IS Pandering

The proposed gas tax holiday IS pandering – and bad economics to boot. Good for Barack Obama for saying so; bad for John McCain (whom I currently plan to vote for) for proposing it; bad for Hillary Clinton for supporting the proposal even though it helps her push Obama into the "elitist" corner.

If you assume that you get the whole 18.4 cents on every gallon you buy for two months – you won't end up with a whole lot of extra money in your pocket unless you plan to do a whole lot of driving. One thousand miles/month is well over the national average; that's 50 gallons at 20 miles per gallon; over two months you could save $18.40 – barely enough to take the family to McDonald's once not even counting the gas to get there. On the other hand, assuming gas has hit $4.00/gallon by then, if you saved 10% of the gas you would normally burn either by driving slower and/or driving less, you'd save $40 and none of that is gonna end up in any coffers but yours.

Of course, the $18.40 isn't really going to get to consumers. Retail prices don't go down as fast as they go up. To some extent, we're being charged what we're willing to pay for gas. Most economists agree that much if not all of the forgone federal tax revenue will end up sticking somewhere in the supply chain – some could even get all the way back to the countries that produce oil.

I do think it's elitist to say, as some environmentalists are, that gas prices ought to be pushed up even further to discourage consumption. I was for a gas tax increase for just that purpose when prices were a $1.50/gallon less than they are today. We've had enough discouragement for now; we are responding by driving less and buying smaller cars. As important as that response is for national security (or the environment, take your pick), it isn't going to do more than slow the increase in gas prices as Chinese and Indians drive into the middle class. The cost of driving may never come down from where it is today; it won't even stabilize until it becomes an all-electric experience for many people.

Wouldn't it be great if someone would just skip the campaign rhetoric and debates about debates and pandering and spell out a real energy policy? Between those of us suffering from higher energy prices and those of us concerned about the national security and economic implications of sending money to unstable oil-producing places and out of here and those of us concerned about global warming, it really would be possible to rally a consensus around much more than band-aids.

BTW, is it just me or has anyone else noticed that gas pumps seem to be dispensing gas more slowly even though the dollars roll up quicker? It can't be that their speed is measured in dollars per minute and has reached its limit; but it sure seems that way. Makes the pain even worse.

Seize the Moment!

High food prices create a great opportunity to cut agricultural subsidies around the world. High food prices create a perfect opportunity to end the agricultural protectionism – especially in Europe – which has left developing countries unable to sell the crops they grow.

These prices aren’t going to go down any time soon any more than the price of energy is. There are simply more people who can afford to get enough to eat than their used to be – and that makes food even more unaffordable for those still stuck in poverty. The price of energy is obviously also part of the cost of growing food. Ethanol production is a relatively minor contributor although it certainly does somewhat reduce the land for food crops.

Speaking of ethanol production, this is a perfect time to end subsidies for that as well. The original (and seemingly enshrined) direct subsidy is $.50/gallon in the US. That was set when gasoline was about $1.50/gallon cheaper. So obviously this subsidy is no longer needed.

No subsidies are justified for oil or natural gas production with prices as high as they are. Some subsidies are protected by existing contracts but obviously should be allowed to expire as quickly as possible and should not be replaced nor should new subsidies be granted. There is certainly a good economic and strategic case for stepping up domestic production of petroleum but it’s restrictions on where production can take place rather than any problem selling the stuff at a good price which discourage production in the US.

All of these subsidies are a double whammy to taxpayers who pay the high prices and then pay subsidies to the producers who have high profits. Economically, all subsidies impede the ability of markets to adapt. Some may be justified to jumpstart important things but, once granted, subsidies and trade protections are hard to revoke. Now’s a perfect time to get rid of some of them which have long outlived any usefulness they might have had.

Positions on this are a good test for political candidates.

Cars Slated to Solve Denmark’s Wind Problem

Denmark gets 20% of its electricity from the wind; but that’s a problem. It isn’t a steady 20%; sometimes it’s 40%; sometimes it’s none.  Because the sources of the other 80% of their electricity can’t be turned of whenever there’s a gust of wind, Denmark sells surplus electricity to neighbors. That requires bigger and bigger grid connections and involves sales at very low prices.

The plan is to use electric cars to help solve the surplus problem, reduce pollution, and reduce petroleum imports. According to an article in the WSJ (subscription required),  the Danish utility Dong Energy A/S has a deal with Better PLC (aka Project Better Place in Palo Alto founded by former SAP CEO and blogger Shai Agassi). More about Project Better Place and its plan to market electric cars like cellphones with an upfront subsidy and a profit on the energy sold to run them in an upcoming post.

The electric cars, of course, are perfect for soaking up energy at night when other demand is low but wind speeds high. Assuming variable electric pricing, there’s an incentive for people to “top off” when electrons are cheapest. Swappable batteries and a network of battery swap stations by 2010 are part of the plan so there is an incentive, also, for both consumers and rechargers to invest in extra batteries to make sure they DON’T have to charge on windless nights when electricity costs more. From a grid POV, providing extra energy at night from traditional sources is much less of a problem and expense than any addition to peak load.

Let’s riff on this plan. Imagine that you have a Plugin Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) in your garage (The cars being built for the Better Project by a Renault-Nissan alliance are pure electric but you wanted more range since America doesn’t yet have a network of battery swap stations yet). When electricity is cheap, you buy it (or the robot you programmed does) and store it in your batteries. That’s good but there’s more.

Obviously, if the price of electricity gets high temporarily you can NOT buy and either not travel or use the gasoline that your hybrid also burns. But there’s more.

If the price of electricity spikes – could happen during the day when you’re home sick – you COULD sell the electricity in your battery back to the grid. But there’s still more.

If there’s a real spike, your PHEV could be instructed by the bot to turn on its engine and start generating electricity for sale.

But wait, you say, that’s not very green. But it is.

The more backup there is, the more feasible wind and solar are as a primary source. The more use you can get out of the capital you put into a PHEV, the more likely you are to buy it. The more local energy shortfalls can be met locally, the more efficient the grid is both in energy lost in transmission and use of transmission capacity. And the less capital that has to go into building backup and peak capacity in the grid, the more investment can go into building a greener baseline. By burning a little gasoline from time to time, you avoid burning a lot all the time which is what we’re doing now.

BTW, Shai claims that just the wind energy which Denmark sells to its neighbors is enough energy to power ALL Danish cars.

The Electric Bill I’ve Been Waiting For

The $9.57 is the monthly service charge. Note that there are NO charges for kilowatt hours because our solar arrays generated more than we used, even late in the Vermont winter. It looks above as if our beginning and ending meter readings were the same; but, I suspect, that’s because the billing software can’t deal with a meter running backwards.

The arrays are now tilted down to their spring position and it’s clear that we’ll be in surplus on a full year basis since we’ll be generating more per day and using less as the days continue to get longer and the sun higher. In Vermont you can’t carry a credit forward more than a year so it’s time to think of ways to use some of that “surplus” electricity and displace some imported fossil fuel.

Plan is to go to geothermal heat. This uses electricity four times as efficiently as electric radiant heat.  Hopefully we can do that by next winter. Savings’ll be lots of oil which I think comes mainly from Venezuela at our location.

The geothermal heat will also provide domestic hot water. Otherwise we’d switch that to electric. Currently the oil furnace is heating that which means it has to be on all summer.

Now feel a little guilty when I use my gas grill since I could be “using the sun” to cook electrically.

In the future hope to be charging a car with some of this solar power. But plugin hybrids aren’t available yet.

One Nation

Almost very article on solar power concludes with the rather obvious fact that the sun doesn’t shine at night (or even on some days). Almost very article on wind energy gives prominence to the fact that the wind doesn’t always blow. Some articles on electrical production point out that there is almost no remaining opportunity for new dams to generate electricity.

Put those three things together and you have the beginning of the end of our dependence on foreign oil.

One of the wonderful things about being a continent-spanning country is that we are not all under the same weather pattern at the same time. We have a variety of climates that create a variety of opportunities. No one region has to be energy independent in order for the country to be energy independent as a whole. We just have to think out of the silo.

According to the US Department of Energy, about 7% of US energy came from hydropower in 2006. The limiting factor on the amount of energy we can get from hydropower is the amount of water flowing into the impoundments behind the dams. During periods of peak demand, the water is drawn down quickly; when demand slackens, the water can build up again. But, in general, we use the total amount of water available over the course of a year except that a minimum downstream flow has to maintained for ecological reasons and water can only be allowed to build to a certain height behind the dams for safety reasons before it must be released.

Suppose that we had a lot of new solar capacity. We would get our maximum output from that capacity during the day which happens to be the time of peak demand. All things being equal, we would then be able to turn the dams down to minimum flow during the day since the solar energy would meet the demand. Then we’d have more water to use for generation at night when the sun isn’t shining. Note that the effect is that we already have a mechanism which is the equivalent of being able to store solar energy.

Same thing goes for wind: if it’s blowing, the water builds up behind the dams; if it’s not blowing, we release the water from the dams. Effectively we’ve bottled the wind.

In fact, we can hold the water until the time when both the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.

In practice we’d run the dams during the day and avoid burning some natural gas (accounted for 20% of our electricity in 2006) and oil (2%). We’d just hold back enough water to meet nighttime demand because that’s when we’ll all be charging our electric and plug-in electric hybrid vehicles.

All we need is the will to rebuild our national electrical grid so that energy can flow from where it’s currently abundant to where it’s currently needed. We don’t need expensive ways to store solar and wind power to make those technologies practical. Our existing dams are that storage mechanism. Our size and the variability of weather over our expanse are another buffer.

But we need to rebuild the grid and then we need to add regionally appropriate power-generation capability to it. Wind and solar can be done much more quickly than new nuclear capacity (which ought to be built as well for baseline supply).

All of the presidential candidates agree that our dependence on foreign (meaning Middle Eastern) oil is both an economic and a national security danger. To a greater or lesser degree, they think that burning fossil fuels is an environmental threat. One of them should take the bold step of proclaiming that, if he or she is elected president, the nation will be a net exporter of oil in fifteen years. Details to follow – but rebuilding the grid is the immediate first step.

Plug-In Hybrid Vehicles – Readers Add to the Discussion

Lots of good comments from readers that deserve prominence and more discussion.

First from Craig Plunkett:

“PHEV's do exist for the truck market. There is a small company on Long Island producing them. Bucket Trucks and Garbage Trucks are great targets for this technology. The CTO of Odyne at the time came to talk about them to a business group I belong to…”

In his own post about this presentation, Craig points out that PHEV garbage trucks are much quieter than their conventional equivalents. Not only is there not engine roar but the regenerating braking systems don’t make as much noise as truck brakes. I would think that there would also be a market for “pure” electrics in trucks that are heavy anyway (so batteries may not be as much of a problem) and have a predictably short route.

kent beuchert does some useful calculations:

“Actually, if you do the simple math using the DOT's graph of the distribution of commuting trips in the US, you'll find that a 40 mile ranged plug-in like the Volt would achieve 295 MPG in commuting, even without any workplace recharging occurring. This would avoid 93% of gasoline used for commuting. With 1/4 of commuters recharging at work, the fleet's MPG would jump to 397 MPG, avoiding 96% of gasoline usage.”

So why aren’t we (the collective we) doing more to move the world’s ground transportation fleet to PHEV? CJ does point out some practical concerns:

“I almost agree with you on this one. 1) The electric grid is in such poor shape that the added load of charging all these vehicles could put it over the edge. 2) Low temps effect the power output of batteries and 3) Gas electric hybrid's and their massive batteries are dangerous in a crash - both to the occupants and the emergency personnel - because disconnecting the battery no longer eliminates current flowing through the vehicle. As a member of a volunteer fire dept, there is a lot of concern over responding to hybrid's involved in accidents. The special training is just starting to hit small depts such as ours.”

Although CJ is right about the pathetic state of our electrical grid (like much of our infrastructure), I think the fact that PHEVs would be recharged mainly at night when the grid is way below peak usage mitigates this problem to a large extent (see more on this below). Moreover, having more nighttime usage for the grid improves the economics for capital improvements that need to be made anyway. The more kilowatt hours flow through a given segment, the more quickly investment in the segment can be amortized AND the less each kilowatt hour has to be burdened with depreciation.

Batteries do lose effectiveness in cold weather but the availability of the gasoline backup means that the driver isn’t stranded on a low electric mileage day.

The fire problem is an interesting one and CJ is much more qualified to comment on that than I am. Some work needs to be done here to prepare for a PHEV future.

CJ goes on to recommend fuel cell technology:

“However, there is a slightly different twist on your plugin that should be hitting the market soon from Honda (I believe). A fuel cell vehicle that will power the car without need for batteries and a gas engine, but the big advantage is that when you plug these vehicles in, they generate power. A home owner could supply their home electrical needs, or a portion of it, as well as get long range emission free driving. For businesses that have fleet vehicles, the generating benefits increase greatly. As well, small inputs into the existing grid from home power generation make the whole grid a more efficient system.”

The Honda he is talking about is the FCX Clarity which “Honda plans to lease to a limited number of retail consumers in Southern California with the first deliveries taking place in summer 2008.”  The FCX Clarity is NOT rechargeable; it requires a supply of hydrogen which, in turn, requires a delivery infrastructure which doesn’t yet exist. Moreover, although water is the only tailpipe emission from a fuel cell car; hydrocarbons are usually a by product of producing the hydrogen fuel supply just a some hydrocarbons are a by product of some methods of generating electricity. IMHO, fuel cells will be part of the global answer in time, perhaps the major part – but PHEVs are a quicker fix.

In an offline communication, friend Michael Birnbaum pointed to a post on salon.com by Andrew Leonard which talks about a study published in the March issue of Environmental Research Letters which concludes that the current electrical grid in California could support one million PHEVs without additional capacity assuming that they are not recharged in peak hours of peak days.

The study does say, however:

“Even with gasoline dear at $4.00/gallon and electricity cheap at $0.05/kWh, vehicle purchasers may only find a compact car plug-in hybrid economical if its cost premium relative to an ordinary hybrid vehicle were under $2000 and if its cost premium relative to a conventional vehicle were under $3500. Such price premiums may require battery pack costs (including electronics, etc) under $650/kWh, while current battery pack prices for plug-in hybrids applications may well be in excess of $1000/kWh.”

Gas isn’t $4.00 gallon (yet) and electricity costs $.20/kWh here in the Northeast. Nevertheless, mass production should bring the cost of the battery pack down quickly to an acceptable level. The trick is to jump start the process so the battery cost can come down.

The Answer Is Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles

Whether the question is how to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, how to save money spent on transportation, how to reduce CO2 emissions much more quickly than anyone thought possible, or how to accommodate the transportation demands of the fast-developing developing world, the answer is Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEV). They’re almost too good to be true; and, in fact, they don’t exist commercially at the moment.

However, late this year Chinese manufacturer BYD plans to start selling its PHEV by the end of 2008; a plug-in Toyota Prius and Chevy’s Volt are scheduled for 2010.

Here’s the trick: theses plug-ins can only go about forty to sixty miles between rechargings. However, the average length of a car trip in the US is less than 10 miles so easily accomplished by even a partially charged car. Sure, we all take long trips at least occasionally; and sometimes we plan a short trip and end up going much further. Not to worry: remember, these are hybrids; they do have gas tanks. Once the battery runs down, the gasoline engine starts up to power the generator as in a conventional hybrid. You keep going; it just costs more per mile than when you’re all-electric but still less than today’s non-hybrid cars.

With current battery technology, the initial cost of an all-electric car with reasonable range for ordinary use is still prohibitive. That’s why these plug-in hybrids are such a good solution. The Chevy Volt is expected to cost about $35,000 and have the pickup and range we are used to in conventional cars.

The Electric Power Research Institute (funded by power companies mainly) and the National Resources Defense Council (funded by green types, mostly) did a joint study which comes out for very favorable for PHEVs. They say that, even if all the electricity for PHEVs came from coal-fired power plants (the dirtiest way to get electricity in terms of CO2 emissions), there’s still a net reduction in GHG (greenhouse gas) if we switch from inefficient gasoline to more efficient electricity for most of our driving.

In real life that wouldn’t happen. PHEVs presumably get recharged mostly at night; a high greater percentage of our night time electricity comes from hydro and nuclear since total demand is much less then. Moreover, we have lots of options including nuclear, wind, solar, and carbon-sequestration at coal plants for increasing electric power generation while decreasing emissions. Notice that most of these sources are domestic!

An article in Harvard Magazine by Michael B. McElroy commenting on the EPRI study says:

“Replacing 90 percent of gasoline consumption by electricity would be equivalent to raising the fleet’s average fuel efficiency from the present level of about 17 miles per gallon to close to 150 miles per gallon. Were we to accomplish this objective, total oil use would be reduced by 36 percent, cutting the demand for imported oil by as much as 60 percent (a savings of $270 billion per year at current prices for oil). ...”

40% of oil use in the US is to power cars and light trucks, obviously a good target for reduction. No way we’re going to replace a substantial part of this with corny ethanol nor should we try. The Harvard article suggests that, even if (or maybe when) biofuels are developed which don’t compete with food, it’d still be more efficient just to burn them (or the plants they come from) in electric generating facilities than to take all the extra steps needed to make them into transportation fuel.

The operating economics are already right thanks to the rising cost of oil. A gallon of gas is the transportation equivalent of 7.5 kWh of electricity. That mean that even at a pretty high rate of $.20/kWh, using electricity is the equivalent of paying $1.50/gallon. Better yet, it’s reasonable to assume that off-peak electricity can be purchased more cheaply and that there is a per unit savings in MORE use of the electric grid and power plants at night. So that price might at least stay reasonably stable even with escalating demand.

The proof should be in the pudding soon. There is no new technology required although there are some engineering problems: Chevy reports trouble getting the electrical budget of things like in car entertainment, air conditioning, and even windshield wipers down far enough to keep the all-electric range of the Volt high enough. Assuming charging mainly at night, we don’t need to rebuild the electrical grid right away (although we should). We don’t need massive new generating capacity; we just run what we have more hours (but we should be building).

This energy stuff really is more an opportunity than a crisis.

Danger: Biofuels Cause Global Warming

The abstract of an article in a recent edition of Science Magazine says:

“Most prior studies have found that substituting biofuels for gasoline will reduce greenhouse gases because biofuels sequester carbon through the growth of the feedstock. These analyses have failed to count the carbon emissions that occur as farmers worldwide respond to higher prices and convert forest and grassland to new cropland to replace the grain (or cropland) diverted to biofuels. Using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land use change, we found that corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years. Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%. This result raises concerns about large biofuel mandates and highlights the value of using waste products.^”

Europeans trying to comply with Kyoto mandates have proposed stipulating that biofuels used to meet their alternative fuel mandates cannot come from land that was previously rain forest. However, the study points out that such restrictions are window dressing. Food, like energy, is fungible. If European biofuels come only from existing agricultural land, the food crops formerly grown there will be grown somewhere else; good chance that somewhere else will be newly cleared.

A New York Times article by Elizabeth Rosenthal about the studies published in Science gives this example:

“…Previously, Midwestern farmers had alternated corn with soy in their fields, one year to the next. Now many grow only corn, meaning that soy has to be grown elsewhere.

“Increasingly, that elsewhere, Dr. Fargione said, is Brazil, on land that was previously forest or savanna. ‘Brazilian farmers are planting more of the world’s soybeans — and they’re deforesting the Amazon to do it,’ he said.”

The studies do point out that biofuels made from agricultural waste (technologies for which are being worked on but have not yet been made remotely economical) and that biofuels from sugar – as made in Brazil and, inexplicably to me, not made in any quantity in Hawaii – would and do have a positive carbon impact.

Defenders of the subsidized biofuels industry are quick to point out that biofuels do help energy independence. On a global basis, use of farmland to “grow energy” diversifies energy sources – a good thing – and increases income to farmers in poor as well as wealthy areas – another good thing. On the other hand, diversion of cropland raises food prices.

The world economy isn’t as complex as the environment but it may be as chaotic and hard to model. Food prices and the amount of land under cultivation would both be going up now even without corn-based ethanol production because the huge number of people escaping poverty in India and China are using some of their new income to eat more and better – as well as to buy motorcycles and cars.

In the long term it seems foolish to use plants to convert sunlight to energy for fuel when solar collectors – after a huge capital outlay and with big infrastructure changes – yields one hundred times more energy per acre than growing corn. Moreover, some of the best places for solar generated electricity are not cropland because they are arid.

But now it seems that corny ethanol may not be a good short term solution either. Suppose, for example, we burn more coal even before we have a way to sequester or divert the atmospheric carbon dioxide produced. Even giving full credit to the most alarming predictions of carbon-based global warming, this may be environmentally more friendly than clearing a rain forest. You can stop burning the coal if you can’t sequester the CO2 or whenever replacement energy comes online; you can’t  replant the rain forest. Hmm…

Some will argue reasonably that discrediting ethanol as a panacea is one more reason why conservation (aka less driving in smaller cars) is the only solution to the twin problems of energy independence and global warming. Trouble with that thinking is that the aforementioned newly unpoor aren’t going to forgo the pleasures of personal transportation which we have long enjoyed. We need more energy sources.

The math behind my claim that solar produces 100 times the yield of corn in net energy per acre at 1800 times the capital cost is here.

tSolar Use and Disuse

On the Island of San Francisco in the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California) there are salt pits, an ancient marvel of solar engineering. The pits are rectangles of about fifty feet by twenty five and dug two or three feet into sand which is slightly below sea level. Salt water percolates up into the pits (not a good place to drill a well which is why no one lives here). The water evaporates and leaves the salt behind. This keeps happening until the pit is crusted over with a foot or so of salt. The subsistence fisherman from nearby Coyote Island scoop up the salt and use it to preserve their catch. The pit is ready to make the next batch.

Ironically, electricity for La Paz, Mexico, which has over 300 days of sunshine/year and is only 24 degrees north of the equator comes from a sprawling 600 megawatt natural-gas fired generating plant proudly opened in 2002. The plant is on a shore surrounded by desert and bare hills, great place for solar collectors. Oil and gas prices were low when the plant was planned and built and Pemex may have been looking for markets for its natural gas. But I suspect that gas would now find a ready market to the north if solar power displaced it here during sunny days as an energy source. Fortunately, the world is full of such opportunities.

Remote communities off the electric grid here are beginning to use solar desalinization and also harvest commercial quantities of salt as a byproduct.

BTW, I realize that people who fly in jets to sail in plastic boats and motor for four out of seven days are scarcely in a position to lecture anyone on energy use. These are meant as observations and not as rants.

Watching the Meter Run Backwards - Priceless

If you don't see a YouTube graphic above, click here for the video.

Holding a camera in video mode sideways - really dumb.

But you can see the black dot on the wheel go from right to left (top to bottom) indicating that on a hazy midafternoon in January in Vermont, I'm generating enough electricity from my photovoltaic array to drive the meter backward (not much load at this time either).

A Question Which Should Be Asked

Writing in the New York Times on New Years Day, John Tierney repeats a question asked almost a year ago by Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado on the Prometheus blog:

“What behavior of the climate system could hypothetically be observed over the next 1, 5, 10 years that would be inconsistent with the current consensus on climate change? My focus is on extreme events like floods and hurricanes, so please consider those, but consider any other climate metric or phenomena you think important as well for answering this question. Ideally, a response would focus on more than just sea level rise and global average temperature, but if these are the only metrics that are relevant here that too would be very interesting to know.”

We often hear that warmer temperatures (in some places), rising sea levels, melting ice (in some places), greater weather extremes, and even cold spells are evidence that the “consensus” theory of anthropogenic global warming is correct. It’s a reasonable question – in fact, a very important question from both a scientific and a policy point of view – to ask what would tend to indicate that the theory is incorrect. Note that Pielke is not asking what would “prove” the theory incorrect; in the short term that is as impossible as proving that it is correct; he is asking for indicators which might raise doubts in the same way that many indicators are taken to indicate certainty.

This should be a question which engage climatologists and other scientists. Theories should be challenged; that’s the way we learn more; that’s the way “correct” theories get strengthened and improved; that’s the way errors are uncovered.

Predictably, many of the comments on  Tierney’s column are attacks on both him and Pielke for raising the question. That’s dumb: doesn’t matter what their motives are in asking the question; doesn’t matter whether your own working hypothesis is that the cause of observable recent global warming is anthropogenic or not; the question deserves to be asked.

In a recent comment on a post in which I quoted the skepticism (which is different from disbelief) of John R. Christy, Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and a participant in the IPCC, reader Mark A. York writes:

“It's a pity the top climate scientists on Earth disagree. Why do you think that is? Yeah everyone is crazy but you guys. LOL! Do some homework. www.realclimate.org”

Don’t know why Mark reads Christy out of the ranks of top climate scientists and don’t know who “you guys” is either. I’ve never been given my membership in the secret society of doubters.

Action and skepticism aren’t mutually exclusive. Now that I have that off my chest, I’m gonna go out in the seven degree weather (five below windchill) and brush the snow off my solar collectors (really). It’s sunny and I can’t stand to see them ineffectual.

 

By the time I got there, the sun and wind had done half my job for me (they’re at the winter angle of 80 degrees both to shed snow and to face the low winter sun). When I finished cleaning them off, I had the great pleasure of seeing my electric meter run swiftly backwards.

King Coal

King Coal was the ghost at the air-conditioned tables of the global warming get-together in Bali. Most of the energy-consuming world can agree that cutting down on the use of $100/barrel oil is a good thing. Moreover, steps governments take to reduce oil imports may have enough economic gain in avoided wealth transfer to offset the cost of clumsy and politicized regulation.

Coal is a different story.

In 2006, according to the US Department of Energy, the top three coal producing countries were China, US, and India. These countries were also the top three consumers of coal in the same order. In China and the US, consumption and production were almost exactly balanced. India, despite its domestic production, imported about 8% of the coal it burned. Production in China (2620 million short tons) and the US (1161 million short tons) dwarfed the rest of the world: #3 India produced only 498 million short tons.

These countries aren’t going to run out of coal anytime soon. The US has the world’s largest known reserves: more than 200 years supply at current extraction rates. China has fifty years worth of known reserves; India actually has more coal in the ground than China so there is a huge potential for increased coal consumption in that energy-starved nation. Russia, which is currently only the #6 producer, has reserves second only to the US. South Africa and Australia also have significant reserves; the rest of the world doesn’t have much.

If the US were to drastically decrease its use of coal, our electric grid would literally blow a fuse and refuse to operate (except in a few lucky places like Vermont with hydro and nuclear power and the North West with its raging rivers). Not only would we have to vastly increase our use of imported oil (and remissions to the Middle East) but we’d also cede all remaining domestic manufacturing to China which would have an increasing energy cost advantage. This a prescription for economic suicide and it won’t happen no matter how many rostrums Al Gore stands at with his hand over his heart, wouldn’t happen even if he were president. Even atmospheric CO2 wouldn’t be reduced much as even more coal would be burned in China and India to manufacture goods to sell to the abstainers.

Are China and India going to foreswear use of their coal reserves? Are you kidding? What’s going to happen to all the coal in Russia when their oil reserves run low?

This is the real dilemma behind all the diplomatic hot air on global warming. Europe, with much of its coal depleted, can posture on the sidelines but, assuming that the increase in atmospheric CO2 needs to be stopped or reversed, the “problem” of awakening giants with huge coal reserves needs to be addressed.

One possible solution is that the developed nations put huge tariffs on goods from countries which burn coal, essentially stopping their economic development until they clean up their act. It’s probably a good thing this is unlikely since it would throttle world trade, further enrich the oil nations, and possibly lead to a worldwide depression.

A better solution  would be to figure out quickly how to sequester the CO2 from burning coal. Very little investment is being made in that technology despite the huge potential it has for reducing emissions. There’s no question that whatever solu