Archive for the ‘PV & Earth Sustainability’ Category

A good piece in the New York times today answers the question by starting with “. . . . now that nearly every other nation accepts climate change as a pressing problem, America has turned agnostic on the issue.” Every other nation in the world is experiencing significant climate change effects, recognize the urgency of the situation and have CO2 reduction programs in place.

China and India in particular, as a result of disastrous and escalating weather calamities over the last 20 years, are taking action as they are financially pressed to keep rebuilding after each episode. As Bill McKibben wrote in Eaarth, we are fast approaching a point where even the most developed economies won’t have the financial resources to keep rebuilding. A recent example was the squabbling on Capitol Hill about providing FEMA enough budget to clean up after TS Lee and hurricane Irene on the heels of the most expensive weather disaster season in the history of the United States.

As Bill Clinton said, “It makes us look like a joke” when asked about both Democrats and Republicans non-action and denial on the global warming issue.

Create jobs, tax revenue and create a better world - why is this so hard?

My wife and I have been working on making our daily lives more sustainable every year.  With the world in ecological overshoot and the effects of over-population

The Offending License Plate

and resource depletion showing up day–to-day (climate change-induced weather events, food price spikes, environmental pollution, energy cost hikes, etc.), we have been instituting lifestyle changes some of which include:

• buying carbon offsets when traveling;
• supporting companies that have true sustainability practices;
• buying local food from sustainable agriculture;
• increasing our home’s energy efficiency – new windows, insulation, lighting motion detectors, low flow shower heads, CFL light bulbs, a new high efficiency gas burner, cellulose attic insulation, purchasing a clean energy blend that is mostly wind from our local utility and many other efficiency upgrades (our home is in the woods otherwise we would have a PV system also);
• and driving a hybrid.

The car is a 2006 Ford Escape Hybrid with a license plate that reads “CO2LESS” (we buy carbon offsets for the gas engine use).  Anyone that knows me knows that having vanity plates is not something I would normally do, but I feel strongly about the immediacy of sustainability issues we are facing as a global society, especially C0₂ emissions-induced climate change.

Imagine my dismay as I was approached recently in a Washington D.C. parking lot by a man who pointed at my license plate proclaiming, ‘You liberal elites are killing our country. There is no such thing as climate change and this is a strategy you people are using to corner wealth from the American taxpayer! “

I was too stunned to reply, and he wasn’t the least bit interested in a rebuttal.

According to Wikipedia the term Liberal Elite is a “political phrase to describe affluent, politically liberal-leaning people. It is commonly used with the pejorative implication that the people who claim to support the rights of the working class are themselves members of the upper class, or upper middle class, and are therefore out of touch with the real needs of the people they claim to support and protect . . . .  As a polemical term it has been used to refer to political positions as diverse as secularism, environmentalism, feminism, and other positions associated with the left.”

This definition is not at all a fit with my history in any sense.

Labels and discord like this do nothing to solve the very real climate change problem, which is a result of burning fossil fuel and making bad land use decisions (deforestation, biological decomposition, and over-farming) worldwide. The myriad effects of climate change on populations have no class distinctions. The resulting disruptions to farming, depletion of water resources, and reduction of quality of life is already exceeding expectations in many developing nations where poverty is the norm and coping with rapidly changing climate patterns is exacerbating survival living.  With the U.S. accounting for a large portion of cumulative atmospheric C0₂ over the last 100 years, we are clearly all “elites” in the minds of people in emerging nations as they struggle for basic survival in this new ecological overshoot era.

The Relationships of Fossil Fuel and Land Use and C02 Accumulation Source: Arctic Climate Impact Assessment

My work in the solar energy industry overlaps regularly with sustainability and climate change thought leaders, and as a result, I have a good understanding of the complex and often conflicting facts. These facts are often brushed aside and obfuscated with generalities by the minority of climate change and environmental deniers. Beyond the detailed knowledge I have attained over the last 15 years, I rely on a few simple premises:

1. We use science every day to support our shared and safe human existence.
2. For every action there is a reaction (equal and opposite).
3. The C0₂ accumulation graph at left (click to enlarge) coincides with the discovery and burning of fossil fuels.
4. Detailed science and research shows no prior warming in such a condensed period.

Climate change is happening right now. It can be viewed with fear and paralysis, or it can viewed as a great economic opportunity for all. We have the technologies, science and knowledge (if not the political and economic will power at the moment) to create sustainability solutions, and entirely new industries, as the global population continues to increase.

As many scientists around the globe have said, to do nothing is unacceptable, as the risk of being wrong is too great. If supporting the science and industry that can slow down and eventually reverse man made climate change makes me a Liberal Elitist in the minds of others then so be it!

Climate change resources:

The U.S. EPA Climate Change site presents an easily grasped, balanced presentation of the issue.

Information Visualization has a great “for and against” visualization of the climate change camps.

Carbon War Room is working on solving the problem industry by industry, by seizing on the economic opportunity: “Over 50% of the climate change challenge can be addressed today – and profitably – by existing technologies, under existing policy.”

Click for larger view

As I have wrote previously here, here and here, retail solar grid parity has been achieved in some markets with a large expansion coming the next 3 years around the globe.

A recent industry survey by Applied Materials confirms the acceleration of grid parity as the price of silicon and modules continues to drop. A great graphic set from their survey conclusions blog post can be found here.

Also, Shayle Kann at Greentech Media has a great piece about grid parity and the pitfalls in how the term is used and cloudy expectations about achieving parity at both retail and wholesale pricing levels.

Numerous solar industry analyst forecasts and media articles herald the U.S. as the next big market opportunity for global PV solar energy suppliers. Many offshore PV industry

State RPS Program Driven or ITC Driven?

companies have been setting up distribution and facilities across the country to position themselves for this growth opportunity.

At a recent Wall Street alternative energy conference, progressive utility CEO David Crane , a strong solar energy supporter, gave his view about government support for renewable energy. The federal government is too paralyzed to produce any meaningful support policy via either climate change or energy legislation, says Crane, but the renewables business will move forward strongly on the strength of state level legislation.

While the state-by-state paradigm has been credited with slow but steady solar energy growth in the U.S., the mid-term elections of 2010 resulted in new legislators in various states who have been reversing support mechanisms for clean energy and climate change mitigation.

The most recent example is New Jersey Governor Christie’s recent reduction in the state renewable portfolio standard (RPS) target (30% by 2021 now 22.5%) and language that may remove enforcement teeth for meeting the threshold by making it voluntary for utilities.  (An RPS is a requirement for utilities to produce or buy and sell a certain percentage of renewable energy to their customers.) He also withdrew New Jersey from the highly successful Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, an alliance of nine North East and mid-Atlantic states.

Seven other states have quietly reduced their RPS mandate and diminished or eliminated penalties for non-compliance by the utilities in the last few months.

Governor Christie and other detractors of RPS mandates routinely cite escalating costs to ratepayers (utility customers) for their lack of support. Christie believes the RPS is an “unreasonable transference of wealth from ratepayers at large to solar developers.” But an extensive Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory RPS report in 2010 and more recent studies show that the “cost is a fraction of a percent.” Tiny by anyone’s standard.

The trade off, producing more clean energy which reduces health care costs and environmental damage costs (compared to burning fossil fuel) while creating a high number of quality jobs (17 jobs per $1M spent vs. 5 jobs per $1M spent in oil & gas sector)  in a new economic ecosystem, for that small cost, would seem like excellent bang for the dollar spent. Am I missing something here?

Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The chart above shows the projected amount of installed capacity (in yellow at top) if current RPS programs are kept in place. Approximately 6 million tons of C0₂ would be displaced annually if achieved, along with elimination of large amounts of ground level particulate pollution.

With the rapid reduction in the installed cost of PV systems, declining RPS programs may become less important in regions where high utility cost and other factors line up to make winning project proposals that are close to retail cost grid parity (including only the federal ITC incentive) in the very near future.

Recent, high frequency, global extreme weather events are affecting crop yields and increasing negative feedback loops, not to mention causing significant loss of human life. I am deeply concerned about the near term, current generation effects of climate change. With C0₂ levels now approaching 400 parts per million (350 ppm is the generally agreed tipping point) these decisions and others like it are reckless and irresponsible in my opinion.

In support of countries planning on participating in the United Nations Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) program, NASA’s JPL has produced the first accurate carbon inventory map for Earth’s tropical forests in 75 countries.

Source: NASA JPL

The map, devised from highly accurate terrestrial and space-based measurements (over 3 million data points) shows the amount, location and distribution of tropical forest carbon storage. Most of that carbon is stored in the extensive forests of Latin America (49%).

“This is a benchmark map that can be used as a basis for comparison in the future when the forest cover and its carbon stock change,” said Sassan Saatchi of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who led the research. “The map shows not only the amount of carbon stored in the forest, but also the accuracy of the estimate.”

Stunningly, 15 to 20 percent of global carbon emissions are as a result of deforestation and forest degradation. The majority comes from tropical forests because they store vast amounts of carbon in the above ground wood and in the roots. A large amount of carbon is released into the atmosphere when trees are removed, burned or left to decompose. The UN REDD program is designed to assist and reward countries for conservation and management of their tropical forests by placing a financial value on the stored carbon.

About 10 billion tons of carbon is released annually from both forest burning and land use changes in the 75 countries. In total these countries’ forests hold about 247 billion tons of carbon.

This much-debated sequence of why our earth is warming at an unprecedented rate has been hotly contested because of the complexity of the topic and the lack of hard, quantifiable data.

At last we have two long-term research reports that provide the beginnings of definitive data, and build on previous work on the subject of extreme precipitation events which have been steadily increasing in the last 10 years globally.

The first is a joint research report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Caltech which looked the hypothesis

Flooding at Unprecented Rates

that a warming atmosphere, which holds more moisture, will lead to an increase in severe rainfall events globally  The report is published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . The research and simulation conducted in this report led to a conclusion that extreme rainfall events will increase 6% for every 1.8 degree (F) rise in temperature.  The forecast for temperature increase is 3 – 11 degrees by 2100 according a number of research groups under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change umbrella.

The second report, in the Journal of Nature, examines a particular extreme rainfall event in the United Kingdom in 2000 and whether human induced greenhouse gas accumulation contributed to this event.

The study, led by Oxford University, ran thousands of simulations.  From the report abstract: “We generate several thousand seasonal-forecast-resolution climate model simulations of autumn 2000 weather, both under realistic conditions, and under conditions as they might have been had these greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting large-scale warming never occurred. Results are fed into a precipitation-runoff model that is used to simulate severe daily river runoff events in England and Wales (proxy indicators of flood events). The precise magnitude of the anthropogenic contribution remains uncertain, but in nine out of ten cases our model results indicate that twentieth-century anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions increased the risk of floods occurring in England and Wales in autumn 2000 by more than 20%, and in two out of three cases by more than 90%.”

Don't Let a Few Facts Get in the Way of Your Point of View

With all the junk science being foisted on the electorate, these types of definitive studies go a long way toward disarming the small number of climate deniers who have effectively leveraged the press and new media. (For a great non-partisan organization that seeks to preserve scientific integrity, see Union of Concerned Scientists.)

As an example of “knowledge is power” provided by these studies, Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA), Ranking Member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, has gone on the offensive, requesting a committee hearing from committee chair Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) to discuss recent major studies linking severe weather events to man-made global warming.  Rep. Upton believes that global warming is not man-made and the science is flawed. He is currently seeking to strip the EPA’s authority (confirmed by the Supreme Court ruling in 2007) to regulate C0₂ emissions.

Impressive visualization from NASA which demonstrates Earth the warming trends. Each year, scientists at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies analyze global temperature data. The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, in the surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

The visualization below seems to line up with the discovery and burning of fossil fuels as described in the Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. Also seems to show acceleration of feedback loops in the Arctic due to lower albedo in the last 10 years.

Original NASA file and archives can be found here.

How Could This Be Objectionable?

On the heels of recent large solar project development approvals on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land and other large land tracts, strong opposition has sprung up from local communities based on environmental concerns.  The renewable energy industry has experienced this green vs. green before—remember the high profile example of opposition to the offshore Cape Wind project by the otherwise pro-environment Kennedy clan on Cape Cod?  It seems that the scale of opposition to solar energy projects on these seemingly benign desert lands has been surprising to the solar industry.

An excellent piece distributed by Reuters gives the reader a good overview of the forces that opposing each other that should otherwise be on the same side of the table.  Local communities are concerned that desert vegetation and small animals will be disturbed, among other concerns. CSP and other solar thermal technologies create water use issues. Other issues include the distortion of the “viewshed” – large transmission towers blocking views and disrupting the natural landscape. Most solar project developers went in with good environmental intentions built into their project plans, including large property set-asides for nature preserves, land access for grazing right under the arrays, and other nods to minimal impact.

Sometimes the opposition has a strong case for protecting endangered species and vegetation but many times they are simply playing up fears.  A recent op-ed piece in San Diego makes the statement that when the desert floor is disturbed it releases more C0₂ than the solar array can ever save. A quick bit of research shows the audacity and absurdity of that argument.

This Type of Energy Generation Land Use?

Unfortunately, these objections increase costs to solar project developers due to legal fees, time delays, and additional impact studies to name a few. At some point the project becomes uneconomical and the solar project development team either folds, or sells it to another developer.  This is the outcome the environmental opposition is looking to achieve.  At the end of the day, our society is going to have to learn to balance the consequences of different types of energy production.  I would make the argument that solar on desert lands, if done properly,

Or This?

has a minimal environmental footprint compared to blowing off the tops of mountains in West Virginia to mine coal or fracking large swaths of subterranean deposits for natural gas which permanently fouls the ground water.

Among many people in the solar PV industry, there has been a persistent debate about whether PV should be deployed widely on roofs, over parking lots, or on brownfields in urban and suburban regions rather than in large utility scale deployments far away from the grid and the energy consumer.  This type of distributed solar generation is unique to modular PV and enables placement of generation close to the point of use with minimal transmission loss.  But while both utility scale and distributed PV deployment types have significant and high-value applications, both have tradeoffs in cost and economics. More on these tradeoffs in a subsequent post.

The 1960’s through mid 1970’s was a time of extraordinary environmental awareness. Denis Hayes led the Earth Day movement, and proved that the electorate would remove politicians who were oblivious to environmental degradation from industry. Paul Erhlich wrote his prescient book, “The Population Bomb” which predicted population expansion overwhelming civilization supporting systems. A group of system analysts from MIT researched and wrote, “Limits To Growth” which accurately modeled a rapidly rising global population against earths finite resources.  The Vietnam peace movement embraced the environmental movement and the impact on popular culture was immediate. While Joni Mitchell was singing about our ravaging of the environment, technology solutions were able to delay serious earth sustainability issues masking the reality of the problems to come.

The delay was approximately 40 years. In 2009, the 6.8 billion human inhabitants of Earth went into “ecological overshoot.” This means that the human species consumed natural resources faster than they could be replenished. In that year, we devoured the resources on the order of 1.4 Earths.

They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum

Red line = population/economy - Blue Line = resource carrying capacity

The impact of our over-consumption of renewable and non-renewable resources affects all aspects of Earth sustainability including climate change, pollution throughout the ground level ecosystem (air, land, water, oceans), forest and vegetation loss, mineral depletion of farmland soil, water shortages and hyper-accelerated biodiversity decline, to name a few.  The more we continue to grow the population using old world infrastructure and methodologies, the less sustainable Earth becomes. At a forecasted population of 9.2B inhabitants by 2075, earth sustainability becomes dire.

While we are all busy living our day to day lives, it’s not easy to recognize these problems in their totality. When we do, we believe it’s happening slowly and some new technology will fix it.  Even though I live in the renewable energy world day in day out and read about various instances and consequences of climate change, raw material shortages and other issues each in isolation, I was still not able to see the big picture all tied together.

An important new book out by Bill McKibben called “Eaarth, Making a Life on a Tough New Planet” puts it all together. Anyone who reads this book will come away with a sense of urgency to plan for the immediate future on an “Eaarth” that is more difficult, costly and is deteriorating further, than the Earth we knew. Eaarth is Mr. McKibben’s name for a new global environment in ecological overshoot while climate change is accelerating with severe consequences for the global standard of living. Eaarth is a result of human activity that has irrevocably changed the natural cycles which have supported our civilizations for thousands of years.

Hey, farmer, farmer, put away that D.D.T., now

Some main points from Eaarth:

• The U.S. and most of developed world’s economies are based on hyper-growth year in and year out which creates ecological overshoot. A new economic model based on sustainability is required.
• Our entire economy is based on fossil fuel, which is now scarce and expensive both in cost and environmental degradation
• Scientists believed that climate change issues would be problematic by the end of this century but the disruptions of the natural cycles are here now (erratic weather and major flood events, acidification of the oceans, desertification etc.).
• Negative feedback loops, both environmental and economic, are accelerating with no new scientific basis for forecasting their impact or extent. We are participating in a grand experiment and have no idea of the outcomes.
• Technology will not be able to fix the problem but can help with a soft landing by using technologies such as solar.
• The costs to repair, rebuild and prepare is way beyond the global economy’s capabilities or resources.
• Basic needs such as food, water and shelter are and will become increasingly difficult to  procure.
• Poorer countries are suffering now from climate change and will suffer more in the near future.
• Abundant low cost fossil fuel allowed for complexity in life and separation from community.  Life will have to become simpler, with more community cooperation and return to localized economies for agriculture, energy production, goods production, transportation etc.
• We missed the opportunity to head this Eaarth off 40 – 50 years ago; now we must prepare and plan for a “soft landing” (vs. mayhem) to minimize the pain and suffering for a global population that will approach 9B in this century.

As I write this, it feels over the top and surreal. But this is the reality of our collective lack of recognition of the Earth’s capabilities to support the population at sustainable levels. The system is well beyond its limit, as predicted in “Limits to Growth”.  And the global reaction to our tough new life on the new planet Eaarth is already underway:

• As average sea levels have already risen about average 6” globally, low lying island nations are negotiating for homelands in other countries to move their populations.
• Rapidly melting glaciers are creating near term flooding and long term, permanent water shortages in the Andean and Himalayan regions. Less snow and rapid snow melt is immediate problem in Colorado now.
• Tribal communities who depend on small local farms can no longer predict weather for planting cycles, and starvation is being held off only by the import of food by relief agencies.
• India is building a fence between its eastern border and low-lying Bangladesh to keep terrorists, smugglers and “infiltrators” like climate change refugees out.

Don’t it always seem to go that we don’t know what we’ve got ‘til its gone

It’s difficult to see how the current political environment on Capitol Hill will lead the world in the right direction toward a more sustainable society anytime soon. And Mr. McKibben’s assertion that we will have to be more localized in our governing and community is already happening: States are enacting climate change legislation and supporting local distributed clean energy generation. Small & local farming is storming back, and local coop growth is exploding.  As Arianna Huffington recently wrote, elections are won by candidates who put a finger up to see which way the wind is blowing (see: John McCain in the last election). We as an electorate need to change the direction of the wind now, so that we elect officials at all levels of government who recognize the need for preparation to achieve a soft landing in the coming decades. And do it with urgency.

China Makes Solar News at Climate Talks

Right after I posted the preceding blog about the difficulties in forecasting the global PV industry, China announced a large solar deployment plan at the COP 16 climate talks in Cancun, Mexico. While not on the scale of Germany over the last five years, this latest announcement from China will clearly have a positive impact on the supply demand situation if in fact Beijing follows though and is not just hand waving.

The December 3^rd announcement outlines China’s plan to install a minimum of 1,000 megawatts (MW) of solar energy capacity per year starting in 2013.  For comparison, one average coal burning plant has about 500MW capacity.

The announcement went on to describe 13 industry zones and that Beijing will pay up to half the price of equipment for solar PV projects. In addition, a subsidy of 4 to 6 yuan (60 to 90 U.S. cents) per watt of generating capacity will be rewarded to project owners.

As I noted in my 10/15/10 blog piece, this will almost certainly increase WTO violation allegations from the U.S. government and others.  But it will be a very long time before a WTO court can rule on these assertions.  Meanwhile, our U.S. government continues to dither on long-term PV manufacturing and project support while we concede further clean tech competitiveness and leadership.