Tag: "renewables"

The Global Solar Flight that Will Take Over a Year

Apparently, the Solar Impulse 2 has been grounded till next year due to battery problems. The plane’s batteries, which provide power for night flying, overheated during its recent five-day flight from Japan to Hawaii. The Solar Impulse 2 flight started in March of this year plans to resume by April of 2016. The Solar Impulse 2 has also made numerous stops on its global flight.

Solar Impulse 2:

  • Made of carbon fiber.
  • Has 17,248 solar cells with four motors.
  • Flies between 30 and 40 mph.
  • Seats one person as pilot.

Solar Impulse Chairman Bertrand Piccard sees the high-tech plane as proving the potential of renewable energy and clean technology, he also believes that the solar plane could spark increased interest in technologies such as LED lights and electric cars, as well as lightweight vehicles.

This was my vision when I created that project — it was to have an airplane that can fly with no fuel. This is fantastic, to prove that clean technology can achieve [the] impossible.

However, since WWII, planes have been making non-stop global flights in under 4 days, compared to this current flight that has numerous stops and will take over a year to complete.

Economic Repercussions of the Renewable Fuel Standard

American Petroleum Institute’s Renewable Fuel Standard Facts:

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 included an expanded Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which the EPA used to develop a final rule effective July 1, 2010. To comply with the Standard, biofuel producers and importers must blend increasing amounts of biofuels into gasoline and diesel.

However, there have been problems with the government’s original predictions regarding the supply and demand of gasoline; U.S. gasoline demand has dropped while supply has increased due to the shale and natural gas revolution in North America. Also, cellulosic technologies have not developed as quickly as expected and there are no commercial plants to date. The EPA rushed through approval of an up to 15 percent ethanol blend (E15) without adequate testing, leading to compatibility problems with E15, poor consumer acceptance and significant infrastructure and cost challenges. EPA proposed to address the problem, but has been incapable of finalizing its rule.

A study by NERA Economic Consulting (NERA) buttresses the argument that the RFS is irretrievably broken saying that, RFS ethanol mandates could:

  • Lead to fuel supply disruptions that ripple adversely through the economy.
  • Cause the cost of diesel to rise 300 percent and the cost of gasoline to rise 30 percent.
  • Decrease U.S. GDP by $770 billion.
  • Reduce worker pay $580 billion.

Energy Benefits from Humidity

Outside of greenhouses, there are very few upsides to humidity. It wrecks your hair, fogs up your car windows ― and according to new research, may be able to power a variety of small gadgets.

Scientists at Columbia University have developed a device that harnesses the change in size of bacterial spores as they absorb and release moisture and converts that into electricity.

Albert Schenning, a materials scientist at the Eindhoven University of Technology said:

This is one of the first experiments to show that humidity can be a source of fuel.

While the technology has so far only been used for fun experiments, like rotating a small, Ferris wheel-like device and power a toy car, they prove that a common inconvenience like humidity can be used to generate electricity.

So far, it seems that the technology will only be useful for power small devices that don’t require a lot of power, according to the scientists. But the new technology could provide a new source of very low cost energy.

U.S. 100 Percent Renewable Energy Plan Lacks Price Tag

Engineers from Stanford and U.C. Berkeley have developed a state-by-state plan to convert the United States to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. The plan aims to:

Eliminate air pollution mortality, create jobs and stabilize energy prices.

The researchers behind the plan, referred to as “The Solutions Project,” examined the amount and source of energy consumed by the residential, commercial, industrial and transportation sectors in each state. Though the plans calls for aggressive changes to infrastructure and energy consumption methods, Jacobson and Delucchi ― the engineers behind the project ― claim the conversion is technically and economically possible with technology that already exists.

Jacobson and Delucchi claim replacing all fuel usage with electricity through their plan would yield significant energy savings, reducing total end-use power demand by 39 percent by 2050.

Though a neat concept, the lack of a visible price tag is worrisome. The engineers admit that the up-front costs of conversion would be steep, but doesn’t seem to offer a comprehensive cost for the project, either by state or as a whole.

 

A Bumpy Ride for Germany’s Green Energy

The aim of the German Energiewende (also known as Germany’s Energy Transition) is to decarbonize the energy supply by increasing access to renewable energy and improving energy efficiency. A key part of the Energiewende is the outright rejection of nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels and the complete shutdown of nuclear facilities by 2022. The German government has also taken a stand against carbon capture and storage, calling it expensive and unsafe. The strategy focuses instead on wind, biomass (using landfill gas and agricultural waste products), hydropower, solar power, geothermal and ocean power.

So, how does Germany expect to transition to renewable energy so quickly?

  • Germany has been focusing on increasing wind power generation since the early 1990s. In 2014, onshore wind power provided 8.6 percent of the country’s power supply.
  • By 2020, Germany plans to triple the amount of energy produced by wind (both onshore and offshore).
  • Germany is aiming to have 6.5 gigawatts of installed offshore wind power by 2020.
  • Germany expects to increase citizen ownership of renewable sources, limiting the influence of large corporations, through the use of feed-in tariffs.
  • Increase “energy cooperatives” ― community-owned renewable projects, which have already garnered more than 1.2 billion euros in investment from more than 130,000 private citizens.

One of the most key impacts of Germany’s energy transition has been the democratization of energy resources. Turning traditional consumers into additional producers of energy has meant enacting generous support subsidies for renewables. This method seemed effective and by 2012 citizens and co-ops owned 47 percent of renewables, while energy suppliers controlled 12 percent and institutional and strategic investors owned 41 percent. In Freiburg, Germany, for example, citizens of the town of about 220,000 people funded a third of the investment cost for four turbines, with the rest coming from banks loans.

In 2014, the plan seemed to be on the right track and electricity from fossil fuels (including natural gas) hit a 35-year low. However, the German energy transition has hit a few bumpy spots along the way. Offshore wind has not taken off as it was supposed to and most Germans see it as a big business scheme. At the end of 2014, only 1 gigawatt of the total 6.5 gigawatts desired had been installed, with only 923 additional megawatts under construction.

The rush into renewables was also poorly timed and coincided with increased investments into traditional energy production by utility companies. The increased generation from both renewables and fossil-fuel power plants has overwhelmed demand causing prices to fall and hurt profits. Additionally, Germany had guaranteed above-market prices for newly installed renewable energy, to incentivize investment. The surge of renewables on the market are subsidized directly by a surcharge on customers, which increases in parallel with the addition of more renewable kilowatt hours. In the end, utilities have been forced to return to coal-powered plants due to the squeeze on profits.

Lauren Aragon is a research associate at the National Center for Policy Analysis

Wrongly Justifying Electric Car Tax Breaks

Math errors. Exaggerations. Phony metrics. Trickle-down economics. The recent e-mail from JJ McCoy of the Seattle Electric Vehicle Association to the legislature has it all.

Electric car advocates in Washington State are again asking for a sales tax break on top of the existing federal tax credit they receive of $7,500. Their sales tax break costs the state about $10 million a year. To put that in context, that is about one-quarter of the Washington State Salmon Recovery Funding Board’s annual funding.

Put simply, when McCoy’s math is corrected, the environmental value of the $39 million tax break is only $2.6 million — a waste of $36.4 million — not the $18 million benefit he wrongly claimed.

As we’ve pointed out, these tax breaks go predominantly to the wealthiest 10 percent — people who are not price sensitive and would have likely purchased an electric car anyway.

Even worse, much of the argument in favor of extending the sales tax breaks is not only wrong, it contradicts other claims electric car lobbyists make.

Case in point is the e-mail sent by JJ McCoy, lobbyist for the Seattle Electric Vehicle Association and Northwest Energy Coalition. It demonstrates how far those lobbying for these wasteful and ineffective subsidies have to go to assemble an argument.

Here are the claims made by McCoy and the Seattle Electric Vehicle Association, and the reality.

Claim: If the sales tax exemption is allowed to expire, Washington’s market share for plug-in vehicles will drop 63% — that, according to a study by the Keybridge Economic Group, led by former Clinton Council of Economic Advisors Robert Westcott, PhD.

Reality: Actually, the Westcott study does not prove sales would fall this much — it simply assumes it. They write “sales in Washington are assumed to drop from 1.2 percent of total vehicle sales to just 0.5 percent of sales” [emphasis mine]. They get the 0.5 percent figure by using the Oregon level of 0.8 percent and then adjusting downward. Why? The study authors don’t explain. They simply say, “several state-specific factors have created a particularly conducive environment” in Oregon, but don’t explain what the factors are.

McCoy uses this phony math to claim the tax breaks increase sales by 2,100 cars a year. If we use the actual Oregon level as a baseline, the number is 1,111. Even this number is exaggerated. Washington’s median income is about 15 percent higher than Oregon’s, offering a much better environment for buyers with disposable income to buy expensive, luxury cars.

Even with McCoy’s completely unsupported assumption, however, his math does not add up.

Claim: Each of those 2,100 extra cars, powered by Washington’s very clean grid, will avoid nearly 5 tons of carbon emissions annually compared to the average 25 mpg gas car.

Reality: This math is completely inaccurate. Who says so? The Seattle Electric Vehicle Association itself. Its own “EVangelism” flier says electric vehicles would avoid 4.2 tons of CO2 emissions compared to a 23.6 MPG car, or 3.8 tons compared to a 25 MPG car — about 25 percent lower than what McCoy told legislators.

Claim: That’s nearly 75 tons over the 15-year life of the car, and may even be more…

Reality: The Westcott study, the one McCoy cites just two paragraphs earlier, says the average lifespan of an electric vehicle is 12 years, not 15 years. Again, McCoy contradicts his own source studies to exaggerate the benefits of an EV by another 20 percent.

Using McCoy’s own calculations of 3.8 tons per year and a 12-year lifespan, the actual amount of CO2 avoided would be 45.6 tons per year (assuming the grid is 100 percent clean, which it is not). That is 40 percent less than McCoy’s exaggerated e-mail claimed.

Claim: Those avoided emissions are worth $57 million using OFM/Commerce standard methodology for valuing the Social Cost of Carbon (currently about $65 per ton).

Reality: McCoy makes numerous mistakes here.

First, the Social Cost of Carbon is not $65 per ton, it is $65 per metric ton — which reduces the cost by about ten percent (even that number is about five times higher than the EPA calculates). The cost of carbon is universally calculated in metric tons. He doesn’t seem to know the basics of carbon economics.

Second, his own math doesn’t add up to $57 million. He claims, wrongly, that the benefit would increase EV sales by 2,100 cars per year for four years — 8,400 cars. He claims, wrongly, that each car would reduce CO2 emissions by 75 tons over its lifetime. And he claims, wrongly, that each ton is valued at $65. So, the four year total should be 8,400 x 75 x $65, which equals $40,950,000, not $57 million. He’s off by another 22 percent.

But, as we’ve seen, even $40,950,000 is a significant exaggeration. Using the accurate numbers, the total is 4,444 x 45.6 x $59, which equals about $12 million — about one-fifth the amount McCoy claimed.

Again, that calculation uses McCoy’s own numbers cited elsewhere. Using his numbers, he is off by 79 percent.

But it gets much worse.

The key is not the social cost of carbon, but the amount it costs to reduce a metric ton of carbon using other approaches. For example, investing in efforts to reduce methane emissions from landfills costs about $13 per metric ton on the open market and can go down as low as $3. McCoy wants the state of Washington to spend $65 to get what it can receive for $13. If climate change is really as threatening as he and others claim, why would he be willing to waste 80 percent of the money spent to reduce carbon emissions?

Using the market price of carbon reduction, the actual carbon-reduction value of the EV sales tax break is a paltry $2.6 million over four years.

Claim: This is a surplus value of $18 million over the $39 million that HB 2087 will reduce state and local revenue by over its 4-year duration.

Reality: Using the correct calculation, it is actually a loss of $36.4 million to subsidize wealthy electric car buyers. Put another way, for every dollar the state provides subsidizing electric cars to reduce carbon, more than 93 cents is wasted. Nobody who is serious about cutting carbon emissions would advocate such a wasteful environmental policy.

A similar version of this blog post appeared at the Washington Policy Center.

Energy Security Must Include Reliable Power

A similar version of this blog post appeared in Newsmax:

Unlike populations in most other parts of the world we Americans take vital benefits of dependable electricity for granted. We simply plug into an outlet or flip on a switch and fully expect that our lights will go on, our computers will charge, our coffee will heat up, our air conditioners will function, and yes, our generous taxpayer subsidized plug-in vehicles will run again until tomorrow.

This wonderful, finely balanced round-the-clock empowerment required planning and development which didn’t occur overnight. The same will be true of future efforts to restore adequate capabilities after the Obama EPA’s Clean Power Plan takes an estimated one-third of all U.S. coal-fired plants off the grid over the next five years. This amounts to a loss of generating capacity sufficient to supply residential electricity for about 57 million people.

The North American Electric Reliability Corp, a nonprofit oversight group, emphasizes that the plan constitutes “a significant reliability challenge, given the time required for implementation.” The timeline to convert or replace a coal-fired power plant with natural gas requires years, whereby siting, permitting and development to meet EPA’s interim target would need to be completed by 2017.

Even if a state were able to submit a compliance plan by 2017 or 2018, EPA has admitted that it may take up to another year to approve it. New and upgraded natural gas plants will require additional pipeline infrastructure which may take five years or longer. More expansive transmission lines will also be required to connect that capacity to the grid, with full implementation potentially taking up to 15 years.

EPA’s latest climate alarm-premised war on coal assault calls for states to cut CO2 emissions by 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 despite satellite-recorded flat mean global temperatures over the past 18 years and counting. This federal usurpation of state responsibility dating back to the invention of the modern steam engine in the 1880s is unprecedented.

A “finishing rule” expected to be issued in June or July will require states to meet agency carbon-reduction targets by reorganizing their “production, distribution, and use of electricity.” In complying, 39 states must achieve more than 50 percent of EPA’s reduction targets by 2020.

Not only are EPA’s mandates unfeasible, they also demand that states operate “outside the fence line” to force shut-downs of coal (and eventually natural gas), establish minimum quotas for renewables (wind and solar), and impose energy conservation mandates. Never mind here that last year the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s claim of authority over “demand response” of the national energy grid.

Even liberal Harvard constitutional authority Larry Tribe has observed being stunned at this effort to nationalize U.S. electricity generation by coercing states to pass new laws or rush through new compliance rules that exceed EPA’s legal jurisdiction. President Obama is clearly eager for such policy changes to be quickly put into effect which a future Republican president can’t reverse. This will also provide bragging rights for a climate initiative he can announce at the Paris climate conference later this year.

Fortunately, while states are invited to draw up implementation plans for EPA approval, they really have no legal obligation to do so. And while EPA can attempt to commandeer a federal plan if states resist, there are good incentives for them to band together in calling EPA’s bluff — reasons which can otherwise bear dangerous and costly consequences.

An April 7 Washington, D.C., power outage caused by a mechanical failure and fire at a transfer station temporarily disrupted electricity to the White house, Capitol, government agencies (yes, including the Energy Department), businesses/residents, and street lights. While relatively minor, it most likely could have been avoided if a 60-year-old coal-fired plant called the Potomac River Generating Station in Alexandria, Va., which provided backup capacity to balance the grid, hadn’t been shuttered.

It was one of 188 plant closures credited to former New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s activist “Beyond Coal” campaign which he has supported with $80 million in donations to the anti-fossil Sierra Club.

A far more damaging 2003 Northeast blackout resulted in costs of about $13 billion. Referring to the Clean Power Plan, the New York Independent Systems Operator (NYISO) now reports that EPA’s “inherently unreasonable” reductions “cannot be sustained while maintaining reliable electric service to New York City.” NYISO further projects unacceptable plan consequences which “no amount of flexibility can fix.”

States should collectively heed this reality. Rather than accept EPA’s dirty work, it’s imperative that federal hijacking of state sovereignty be resoundingly rejected.

Google Flies a Kite for Wind Energy

Austin’s 2015 South by South West Festival featured music, expos, and giant, airborne wind turbines. During the Interactive portion of the festival, Astro Teller, the head of Google X, accounted Google’s intention to begin launching is 84-foot airborne wind turbines:

There is an enormous benefit to going up higher. If this works as designed it would meaningfully speed up the global move to renewable energy.

Known as Project Makani, Google has seen success with its smaller, 28-foot models so far. It will begin launching its 84-foot, full-scale models next month.

The turbines represent a significant improvement over traditional turbines. Their tethers allow them to fly as high as 1,400 feet, nearly double the height of the largest wind turbines. At the higher altitudes, wind speed is faster and more consistent, allowing them to generate more energy.

Governor Walker to Eliminate Unnecessary Renewable Energy Funding

The governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, is planning to eliminate the funding to the University of Wisconsin-Madison renewable energy research center.

Cutting state government funding of renewable energy is generally a good idea for several reasons. First, government involvement and interference in a market, in this case the energy market, leads to unnecessary problems and inefficiencies within that market. Second, if now is the right time to push renewable energy, then the private sector would be the one that is already funding these projects, not the state government. Finally, this is the taxpayer’s money that we are talking about here. Did a majority of Wisconsinites vote in favor of millions on renewable energy research?

In the future, when the private sector indicates which and when renewable energies are needed, we can then take another look at the university’s research center:

The research program, founded in 2009, is charged with developing technologies to convert wood chips, corn stalks and native grasses to homegrown sources of power. Along with wind, solar and hydroelectric power, bioenergy is seen as a long-term option to reduce the state’s reliance on coal, oil and natural gas.

Until that time, we will have little need to reduce our need on coal, oil and natural gas. There is an abundance of those resources out there and new technologies and findings are ever increasing that abundance.

The Wind Beneath the Waves

The $2.6 billion off shore Cape Wind project failed to meet deadlines to secure financing and to begin construction and the heavily subsidized wind farm is now going to “sink below the waves.” The millions in taxpayer subsidies already prove that this thing should not float. While other off shore wind farms are planned, falling natural gas prices are reducing the urgency to find other sources of energy.

Heavy investments by government and others into renewable energies are really counterproductive. Aggressively introducing theses sources of energy into the energy market is extremely costly to all those involved, especially the taxpayers. The energy market will openly bring in energy sources such as wind and solar, when it is ready to bring them in (if ever). So far, there has been no reason for the energy market to move away from oil, natural gas and coal.