Wisconsin Libertarians Open New Front in Solar Rooftop Push
September 7, 2013
The Green-Tea heresy keeps spreading among the hardest of Hard Right groups.
OK, they’ve been a little slow on the uptake – the obvious advantages that renewable energy offers in decentralizing economic and political power have been pretty clear to a lot of us for, oh, 3 decades or so. But better late than never. This is a problem for the Koch Brothers, who’ve up to now been able to convince the Fox News/Glenn Beck crowd that their interests are identical to Exxon’s.
Utilities are starting to get panicky about this unruly mob of solar energy activists, as well they should be. The creative solution on their part would, of course, be to leverage their expertise and influence to get out in front and pioneer a new regulatory and distribution model that makes renewable energy the ultimate centerpiece. Whether they can break through their own encrusted habits and modes of thinking is the question. But if the Tea Party can do it, who knows?
A group of conservative Tea Party activists in Atlanta turned heads this summer when they announced a partnership with the local Sierra Club chapter to help pressure Georgia’s largest electric utility to boost its investment in solar power.
Six weeks later, solar power picked up another unexpected supporter in Wisconsin, where on Aug. 20 the state’s Libertarian Party endorsed a clean energy group’s proposal to let customers lease solar panels and other small renewable generators.
“Most of us don’t trust the environmental movement because they’ve cried wolf forever and ever. There are all kinds of philosophical disagreements, but at the end of the day this was pretty much a no-brainer,” said Paul Ehlers, state party chair.
The proposal they endorsed would clarify state law to allow leasing and other types of third-party ownership for solar panels, wind turbines and other generators, in which neither the electric customer nor their local utility owns the system.
The Libertarian Party has no elected state legislators in Wisconsin, but it does have influence with a certain subset of the Republican Party, which currently controls the state’s government. The Libertarians’ stamp of approval could help change the long-polarized debate about distributed generation in the state.
“We have some credibility now. We can talk to Republican legislators in a way we couldn’t in the past,” said Michael Vickerman, program and policy director for RENEW Wisconsin, which is leading the Clean Energy Choice campaign.
The Weekend Wonk: Kevin Trenberth on Climate Sensitivity
September 7, 2013
Dr. Kevin Trenberth has done some significant work recently on the movement of heat into the deeper ocean during the last decade or so. I had a conversation with him on the meaning of climate sensitivity last may, some of which appeared in my most recent video this past week.
Estimated ocean heat content by depth.
When discussing global warming, the public eye is mostly directed to global average surface air temperatures, but that’s just one slice of the climate pie. If you haven’t noticed, the ocean is awfully big, and it holds a great deal more heat energy than the atmosphere. In fact, about 90 percent of the energy that’s been added to the climate system by human activities has gone into the ocean.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to monitor that. There are a multitude of measuring stations for surface air temperatures, but our presence in the ocean is limited. With the advent of the Argo array—a fleet of autonomous, drifting floats that measure ocean temperatures—in the early 2000s, our data improved drastically. Still, the uncertainty has historically been greater for deeper waters.
Colorado Latest Battle Ground as Utilities Realize Solar Energy’s Threat to their Survival
September 7, 2013
More in the continuing series on emerging impacts of distributed energy technology on the electric utility business model. In recent weeks I’ve pointed to press items from Georgia and Arizona on how solar photovoltaics could make our giant electric utilities go the way of typewriters and buggy whips.
The problem, said David Eves, chief executive officer of Xcel’s Colorado subsidiary, is that the benefits of rooftop solar do not cover the program’s costs.
“This is not about putting the brakes on solar,” Eves said. “It’s about having an honest discussion about costs and benefits.”
If changes aren’t made, however, Xcel said it wants to cut back its Solar Reward program to 6 megawatts of new solar arrays from a planned 36 megawatts.
It’s not just a Colorado fight — the battle is being waged at utility commissions from Georgia to Louisiana to California.
“We see utilities in state after state fighting,” said Carrie Hitt, vice president for state affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group.
Because rooftop solar cuts demand and puts kilowatt-hours on the grid, it undermines the utility’s business model, Hitt said.
“Rooftop solar doesn’t amount to a lot now,” she said. “They are worried about the future.”
Xcel is proposing cutting from 3 cents to a fraction of a penny a 10-year incentive that it offers for every kilowatt-hour a new installation in the Solar Rewards program produces.
The main battleground, however, is the price homeowners with rooftop solar get for putting kilowatt-hours onto the system — the so-called net-metering credit.
Xcel customers get a credit for each kilowatt-hour they put on the grid equal to what a residential customer is charged for a kilowatt-hour — 10.5 cents.
How Climate Change Primed Syria for War
September 5, 2013
Every presentation I give nowadays, I have several slides relating to the extreme events in summer 2010 – the “1000 year heat wave” in Russia and the simultaneous catastrophic flooding in Pakistan. These events have since been shown to be connected by a “blocking event” – a wave in the jet stream that got stuck in place for an extended period in July 2010, diverting moisture from Russia, and sending it plunging toward Pakistan.
In July over Europe and Asia, the jet stream has two branches: a strong southern “subtropical” jet that blows across southern Europe, and a weaker “polar” jet that blows across northern Europe. The polar jet stream carries along the extratropical cyclones (lows) that bring the mid-latitudes most of their precipitation. The polar jet stream also acts as the boundary between cold, Arctic air, and warm tropical air. If the polar jet stream shifts to the north of its usual location, areas just to its south will be much hotter and drier than normal. In July 2010, a remarkably strong polar jet stream developed over northern Europe. This jet curved far to the north of Moscow, then plunged southwards towards Pakistan. This allowed hot air to surge northwards over most of European Russia, and prevented rain-bearing low pressure systems from traveling over the region. These rain-bearing low pressure systems passed far to the north of European Russia, then dove unusually far to the south, into northern Pakistan. The heavy rains from these lows combined with Pakistan’s usual summer monsoon rains to trigger Pakistan’s most devastating floods in history.
Figure 1. Winds of the jet stream at an altitude of 300 millibars (roughly 30,000 feet high). Left: Average July winds from the period 1968 – 1996 show that a two-branch jet stream typically occurs over Europe and Asia–a northern “polar” jet stream, and a more southerly “subtropical” jet stream. Right: the jet stream pattern in July 2010 was highly unusual, with a very strong polar jet looping far to the north of Russia, then diving southwards towards Pakistan. Image credit: NOAA/ESRL.
The unusual jet stream pattern that led to the 2010 Russian heat wave and Pakistani floods began during the last week of June, and remained locked in place all of July and for the first half of August. Long-lived “blocking” episodes like this are usually caused by unusual sea surface temperature patterns, according to recent research done using climate models. For example, Feudale and Shukla (2010) found that during the summer of 2003, exceptionally high sea surface temperatures of 4°C (7°F) above average over the Mediterranean Sea, combined with unusually warm SSTs in the northern portion of the North Atlantic Ocean near the Arctic, combined to shift the jet stream to the north over Western Europe and create the heat wave of 2003. I expect that the current SST pattern over the ocean regions surrounding Europe played a key role in shifting the jet stream to create the heat wave of 2010…Human-caused climate change also may have played a role; using climate models, Stottet al. (2004) found it very likely (>90% chance) that human-caused climate change has at least doubled the risk of severe heat waves like the great 2003 European heat wave.
I point out to my audiences that decades ago, when disasters such as this hit third world countries, our general reaction in the west was to be grateful that we lived in so friendly and temperate an environment, general sympathy for the suffering poor people in that far off place, and perhaps a gift to the Red Cross or other agency in the hope that relief supplies might get to those in need. (the video below was produced in 2010 immediately in the aftermath of the Russia/Pakistan event)
Times have changed, however. Some of the countries that are vulnerable to events such as summer 2010 are now armed with weapons of mass destruction. And they harbor political factions who do not share western, secular, democratic values.
Following the drought disaster, Russia, one of the world’s leading grain exporters, banned grain exports. In august, 2010, the Washington Post reported:
In Egypt — one of the biggest importers of wheat and a nation that experienced deadly violence in bread lines two years ago — the government assured the public that it has a four-month supply of wheat and urged Russia to honor contracts it signed before the ban.
Grain harvests around the world have been devastated by unusual weather this year.
Heavy rain destroyed much of Canada’s wheat crop, and the country is forecasting a 35 percent drop in production. In China, the world’s most populous nation, the worst flooding in more than a decade is predicted to cut rice production by 5 to 7 percent. China produces about one-third of the world’s rice.
Rising prices for stable foods continued into the following year, and NPR reported in January 2011:
Political unrest has broken out in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and other Arab countries. Social media and governmental policies are getting most of the credit for spurring the turmoil, but there’s another factor at play.
Many of the people protesting are also angry about dramatic price hikes for basic foodstuffs, such as rice, cereals, cooking oil and sugar.
The advent of of the unrest now referred to as “Arab Spring” coincided with rising grain prices and food rioting across the region. On December 17, 2010, a vegetable vendor in Tunisia set himself afire. That event was a spark that ignited unrest that has toppled regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Unrest continues in those countries.
New Video: There is No Pause in Global Warming
September 4, 2013
Climate denier and frequent Fox News talking head Chris Horner of the tobacco and Oil funded Competitive Enterprise Institute used to have a favorite laugh line in regard to global temperature – “How do you measure the temperature of a planet? Where do you stick the thermometer?”
Actually, the planet has a very sensitive thermometer that has reliably continued to show the heat buildup, even in a decade of slower surface temp rise – and that’s the ocean.
Part of the “This is Not Cool” series for the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, this new video includes interviews with an all star team including Dr. Kevin Trenberth, Dr. Jerry Meehl, oceanographer Josh Willis, and others. There will likely be a second video on this topic soon, as boiling down the issue of climate sensitivity is more than one can do in a 6 minute time slot, and I still have a number of interviews that did not make it into this one.
It’s no surprise that the initial line of denialist attack on the forthcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), first installment due out later this month, will be the issue of “climate sensitivity”, that is, how much warming can we expect from a given level of greenhouse forcing. A number of high profile media spots have lately raised the question about whether scientists will be slightly lowering the estimates from the canonical 3° C plus or minus 1.5° or so, to maybe 2.5C or thereabouts. It’s a distinction without a difference is the first response – but even to get to that first response you have to understand something even more fundamental – a slightly lower rate of surface temperature rise over the last decade or so does not change the fact that the planet continues to gather heat. That heat is going somewhere, and has an effect on the system – surface thermometers are only one indicator of a relatively small portion of that heat imbalance.
For more maniacal viewers, I’ll also be posting some of the original skype interviews in complete form in coming days and weeks.
Lumbering Toward a New Grid
September 4, 2013
Traditional Utility generation – the hub-and-spoke model, with a big power plant servicing many small users, is on the way out, as new technologies and transmission options become available – typically in patchwork fashion, around the country. Because we have no national plan for rethinking our aging grid infrastructure, and because the sclerotic congress seems content to allow America’s electric grid to lapse into third world status, corporations and state authorities have been building new connectivity piecemeal, with disruptive results.
The stories illustrate how cheap renewable energy is steadily blowing away competition and blowing up old business models when it comes online.
The U.S. grid is actually three grids: power generated in the east can’t really move to the west; power generated in the west can’t really move to the east. And Texas – in true Texas fashion – is an electrical state unto itself.
This Balkanized power grid, however, appears to be on the verge of breaking open, with the result that at least some electrons will be free to flow as the market dictates. And that could have particularly positive implications for generators of renewable power.
“This is a ground-breaking project,” said Russ Stidolph, senior vice president and chief financial officer of Tres Amigas, a company that aims to unite the three grids. The project, which has the same name, will be constructed near Clovis, New Mexico, where the interconnections come close to converging.
The developers are seeking $550 million to fund the first phase, which Stidolph said the company expects to begin building by the end of December. The first phase would allow 750 megawatts to move between the eastern and western grids (by way of comparison, the average coal-fired power plant in the U.S. can generate about 550 megawatts). The Tres Amigas developers envision a second phase that would establish a connection between the eastern grid and the Texas grid, allowing for the movement of 1,500 megawatts.
“There’s significant demand for transfer among the three grids,” Stidolph said. His company envisions an interconnection that continues to grow along with demand for the capacity to move electricity from one grid to another.
Power moving across longer distances
The power transmission system in the U.S. was built to accommodate a very local electricity market, in which power was sold to customers located nearby. Tres Amigas will help to enlarge the electricity market, which should help to make power more reliable and cheaper, and to enhance the movement of renewable energy.
“We think this holds great promise for delivering some of the best winds in the country to other parts of the country,” said Pat Pelstring, president and chief operating officer of National Renewable Solutions, a Wayzata, Minnesota-based developer of wind farms.
Pelstring’s company is developing a wind farm in New Mexico, close by the planned interconnect. He expects by the end of this year to complete the first phase, which will generate 20 megawatts. But National Energy Solutions is leasing 86,000 acres that straddle the border between New Mexico and Texas, where Pelstring thinks he can generate between 500 and 600 megawatts of power. Then, at least theoretically, he could send it almost anywhere in the country.
Meanwhile, in Texas, new transmission is beginning to bring huge new wind resources from remote West Texas to cities in the east – creating disruptive new realities for utilities.
Read the rest of this entry »
We live with an anti-science movement that includes more than just climate denial, and crosses sociological and political boundaries – perhaps as an outgrowth of general disenchantment with things “modern”, and the realization that the “City of Tomorrow” visions of world’s fairs and Disney installations have not played out as planned.
Recent news items tell us of an outbreak of measles, rare in the US with the advent of effective vaccine prevention programs. The outbreak occurred in the congregation of a right wing mega-church in Texas, where the television evangelist Pastor had railed against “all of these shots” for innocent babies. While its easy to snicker at the southern creationist crowd, the problem exists among the Silicon Forest elite as well as the granola and sandal crowd.
As school begins in Seattle this week, it’s worth revisiting a disturbing fact: The Pacific Northwest is the nation’s hot spot for anti-vaccination free-riders.
Washington ranks seventh, at 4.6 percent, in the percentage of kindergartners whose parents last year demanded exemptions from mandatory vaccinations, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Oregon (6.4 percent) has the nation’s worst rate, followed closely by Idaho (5.9 percent) and Alaska (5.6 percent).
Call it a frontier mentality, or counterculturalism, or whatever. It is based on unfounded fear, not science.
The anti-vaccination craze was fueled by a 1998 study in the British medical journal The Lancet, which suggested a link between the vaccinations for measles, mumps and rubella (the M.M.R. immunization) and autism. The study was retracted, subsequent research has disproved the link and, in 2010, Britain’s General Medical Council barred the researcher, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, from practicing medicine.
