Archive for the ‘PV & Earth Sustainability’ Category

Eliminating Fossil Fuel Energy a Moral Imperative?

In the PV industry, we focus heavily on cost competitiveness as the story has to be interesting to the financial community. Without the investment community, we have no industry. But the health and environmental toll on the global population, especially disadvantaged communities, from the entire fossil fuel supply chain activity is staggering.

Almost everyone in the solar energy industry has a career in clean energy for this reason but the altruistic benefits of solar energy is kept at a distance in most PV industry conversations for a variety of reasons.

The title of this blog entry comes from an outstanding piece by Matthew McDermott. He asks the important question about whether focusing on financial competitiveness and grid parity is the right strategy and makes a great point about the moral imperative for rapidly transitioning to clean energy.

Yet another report out recently tackles the complex issue of fossil fuel energy subsidies as they relate to the lack of adequate renewable energy government support.

Would He Have Been Successful?

The report,  by the USC Marshall School of Business, shows that energy derived from fossil fuel gets 12X more in subsidies worldwide than sustainable energy. Anyone who has followed my blog knows that this is a topic that I believe to be the main issue limiting clean energy proliferation.

An excerpt from the report:

“Energy from fossil fuel gets 12 times more in subsidies worldwide than sustainable energy . . . . That discrepancy, as well as other barriers including high clean-tech start-up costs and low prices for products, keep green investment from booming . . . . . “

Nothing makes me more irritable than the often written sentence, “solar energy will never compete with fossil fuel generated electricity on a cost basis.”  Well no kidding.  For the past 20+ years, the PV industry has been experiencing what would be like asking Starbucks founder Howard Shultz to compete with an entrenched, highly government supported coffee café chain that has free real estate, receives regular grants, pays no income or employee taxes, and pays 50% less for its coffee beans, just as he was trying to launch his now ubiquitous company.

Of course, ending fossil fuel energy subsidies is not possible in the near term without significant economic disruption. What is needed is a long term, 50 year plus energy transition plan that has an organized phasing out of subsidies for old world technologies and support for a transition to clean energy. A 2 year energy plan that is highly influenced by the incumbent fossil fuel lobbyists is not going to create a long term plan.  The U.S. needs elected leaders who understand this situation.

But interestingly, in many regions PV solar energy will be competing with subsidized fossil fuel energy (grid parity) by 2015 even with this unbalanced subsidy situation, demonstrating the power of the technology as a major component in future energy markets.  Another interesting report on this topic here.

The longer it takes for world governments to stop incentivizing old world, high polluting, limited supply energy production, the longer it will take to transition to a clean energy economy.

While Beijing Smog is Infamous . . . .

During the lead up to the summer Olympics in Beijing, I found the hysteria and non-stop reporting about the air quality problems fairly humorous. Beijing officials where shutting down factories, closing down roads, slowing down or stopping coal burning plants and taking on other herculean tasks to rein in their infamous air pollution. What I found humorous was the finger pointing reaction by Americans to this horrible situation for athletes, spectators and the average Beijing citizen.

While the air quality in and around China is astoundingly bad (I have been there), we have similar although less acute air quality issues in our city centers especially east of the Mississippi. Take the Atlanta summer Olympics in 1996. Because of known air quality issues during the summer, officials took similar measures to clean up the air including significantly reducing car traffic and slowing down utilizes burning of fossil fuel. The result? Emergency room visits for acute respiratory illness to Atlanta’s 3 main hospitals dropped by

. . . . Atlanta & Other U.S. Cities Are Not Far Behind

as much as 70% for various types of childhood asthma and other related respiratory illness during the 3 weeks of the Olympics. Direct cause and effect couldn’t be any clearer.

But what is interesting, beyond the fact that our own government has understood this pollution problem in the U.S. in detail for a very long time, is that the EPA is now, finally, taking action to curb the ground level pollutants responsible for respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses for a large group of power plants which do not have any pollution control systems installed. (a excellent report on the number and types of power plants and their emissions here)

The Good Neighbor Rule is a solution to the national air pollution problem. This rule helps states be good neighbors by limiting pollution from power plants that crosses state lines.  It also helps reduce the incidences of neighboring cities failing to meet clean air standards.

Cleaning Up What We Breath Daily.

Best of all, this proposed rule will limit air pollution from power plants and prevent at least 23,000 heart attacks, 26,000 hospital visits and 240,000 asthma attacks in the first full year of enforcement.

Of course, the big fossil fuel lobbying firms are mobilizing to stop this rule. Please tell EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to pass this rule by writing her here. (Sierra Club site)

PV solar energy can be a large part of the solution to the problem of ground level pollution. Its clean operation virtually eliminates SOx, NOx, mercury, low level radiation particulates and other particulates emmissions that cause an alarming number of health problems, and are a significant hidden economic cost in the form of health care costs that you pay for in higher insurance premiums and care costs that are not reflected in your utility bill.

But this is where the coal, nuclear and other industries trot out their standard “renewable energy can never be base load power” propaganda. This is a ridiculous assertion as I wrote in a previous blog. Another example of fossil fuel industry obfuscation on this point and a response in Australia can be found here from the Energy Science Coalition.

The climate change subject has become just plain weird. During the week that NASA released a report that the last 10 years have been the warmest on record (this doesn’t include 2010 which is on track to be the warmest year ever recorded), and correlates with a ramp up that started 50 years ago, the organization CO2 is Green recently released an advertising campaign that claims that CO₂ is good for the earth, makes it greener and then goes on to claim that there is no scientific proof that CO₂ is causing warming of the earth.  CO2 is Green is, of course, funded by oil and gas industry companies.

Some claims made on their website and in recent print ads in the Washington Post:

“It (CO2) is Earth’s greatest airborne fertilizer.”

“Even man-made CO2 contributes to plant growth that in turn sustains humanity and ecosystems.”

“No one wants the plant and animal kingdoms, including humanity, to be harmed if atmospheric CO2 is reduced. The current dialog in Washington needs to reflect these inalterable facts of nature. We cannot afford to make mistakes that would actually harm both the plant and animal kingdoms.”

“In fact, lowering levels of carbon dioxide would actually inhibit plant growth and food production.”

“CO2 is in our every breath, in the carbonated sodas and waters that we drink and in the dry ice that helps us keep our food cold and safe. We breathe in 385 parts per million and then exhale 40,000 parts per million with no ill effects.  We breathe the 40,000 ppm into victims needing CPR and it does not cause them to die!”

The website  also features a video snippet of time-lapsed growth of a plant in a chamber that where the level of CO₂ is claimed to be increased.

CO2 is Green clearly has no respect for the average American’s intelligence.

This type of junior misinformation needs no refuting as the level of absurdity is nothing less than laughable. The majority of Americans can see through this type blatant special interest fact warping and shear fantasy, but can our elected officials?

Clearly the Senate is having a difficult time with this ever pressing issue after shooting down the recent cap and trade legislation that passed the House back in the spring.

Where do we go from here is the question for the solar industry. A pricing mechanism on all pollutants that end up in the atmospheric garbage dump would contribute to leveling the playing field for clean energy companies especially solar.  If you want to see renewable energy succeed, putting on price on CO₂ is an important step to success.

In his excellent column, Dot Earth, New York Times writer Andrew Revkin makes a sobering point about the acceleration of coal use outside of the U.S.  Coal has had the largest growth curve of any fuel in the past decade, and the demand is close to twice that of natural gas and hydro power. It’s growing more than four times faster than oil consumption.

Demand from Asia is Driving Coal Industry Growth

Coal burning accounts for upwards of 30% of global C0₂ emissions and emits the highest amount of C0₂ per unit of fuel type.

From Mr. Revkin’s blog, where he describes hearing Gregory Boyce, the chairman and chief executive officer of the world’s biggest coal company, Peabody Energy, enthusiastically address investors at a recent conference:

“It’s stunning that any mature commodity could expand nearly 50 percent in a decade and speaks to the strong appetite for the products we fuel, as well as coal’s abundance and stable cost,” he said. Coal demand is also expected to grow faster than other fuels in coming decades.

Asia-Pacific nations are leading a historic global build-out in coal-fueled electricity generation. More than 94 gigawatts of new generation are expected to come on line in 2010, representing 375 million tonnes of coal consumption per year. If growth continues at the current pace, generators would add another 1 billion tonnes of new coal demand every three years.

In the photovoltaic energy industry, it’s difficult to get respect as base load power (amount of power required to meet minimum demands) as we are told by “fossil fuel base load experts” that solar energy is highly intermittent and not dense enough power. We are told that a coal burning plant is the only way to achieve reliable base load power and that renewable energy in general is a nice feel-good electron product but will never be a major contributor to base load stability.

PV IS a Base Load Generation Source

But fossil fuel base load power security and efficiency is complete nonsense. The modern electricity grid is based on many fossil fuel and nuclear generation plants that go down continually (either planned, because of high maintenance cycles, or unplanned breakdowns) and they are overwhelmingly intermittent. Fossil fuel generation assets are backed up by numerous standby generation assets (mostly coal burning) which are up to 20% more than normal generation capacity and are continually burning fuel but not feeding the grid. How is this efficient or base load? Fossil fuel generation base load is, in reality, many disparate, highly monitored and balanced generation resources. Sound familiar? It’s exactly what large-scale solar energy and wind generators do in orchestration with regional utilities.

Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute succinctly describes the base load myth this way:

“The manifest need for some amount of steady, reliable power is met by generating plants collectively, not individually. That is, reliability is a statistical attribute of all the plants on the grid combined. If steady 24/7 operation or operation at any desired moment were instead a required capability of each individual power plant, then the grid couldn’t meet modern needs, because no kind of power plant is perfectly reliable. For example, in the U.S. during 2003–07, coal capacity was shut down an average of 12.3% of the time (4.2% without warning); nuclear, 10.6% (2.5%); gas-fired, 11.8% (2.8%). Worldwide through 2008, nuclear units were unexpectedly unable to produce 6.4% of their energy output. This inherent intermittency of nuclear and fossil-fueled power plants requires many different plants to back each other up through the grid. This has been utility operators’ strategy for reliable supply throughout the industry’s history…

“Modern solar and wind power are more technically reliable than coal and nuclear plants; their technical failure rates are typically around 1–2%. However, they are also variable resources because their output depends on local weather, forecastable days in advance with fair accuracy and an hour ahead with impressive precision. But their inherent variability can be managed by proper resource choice, siting, and operation. Weather affects different renewable resources differently; for example, storms are good for small hydro and often for windpower, while flat calm weather is bad for them but good for solar power. Weather is also different in different places: across a few hundred miles, windpower is scarcely correlated, so weather risks can be diversified. A Stanford study found that properly interconnecting at least ten windfarms can enable an average of one-third of their output to provide firm baseload power. Similarly, within each of the three power pools from Texas to the Canadian border, combining uncorrelated windfarm sites can reduce required wind capacity by more than half for the same firm output, thereby yielding fewer needed turbines, far fewer zero-output hours, and easier integration …

“To cope with nuclear or fossil-fueled plants’ large-scale intermittency, utilities must install a ~15–20% “reserve margin” of extra capacity, some of which must be continuously fueled, spinning ready for instant use. This is as much a cost of “firming and integration” as is the corresponding cost for firming and integrating windpower or photovoltaic power so it’s dispatchable at any time. Such costs should be properly counted and compared for all generating resources. Such a comparison generally favors a diversified portfolio of many small units that fail at different times, for different reasons, and probably only a few at a time: diversity provides reliability even if individual units are not so dependable.”

Base load is all about combining sources, monitoring, and backing up appropriately to keep the grid stable. It does not favor fossil fuel generation, it favors smart handling of intermittent generation assets, of all types. The chorus of ‘solar energy is too intermittent’ needs to be corrected continually until the reality is changed.

Today, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) announced that April 2010 was the warmest on record on a global basis. April 2010 was the 302nd consecutive month that registered average global surface (land & ocean) temperature above the 20th century average. The global surface temperature during January-April 2010 ranked as the third warmest on record, behind 2007 (warmest) and 2002 (second warmest). NCDC’s monthly Global State of the Climate tracks temperature anomalies both globally in local regions. “Temperature anomaly” refers to the difference from average, and produces an accurate record of real trends and not localized events.

In my view, this latest report from NCDC is just another strong indication of climate change as a result of manmade CO₂ and other greenhouse trapping gases. Interestingly, the warming trend in the graphic at right mirrors the original global climate change modeling first begun back in the late 1960′s. This modeling was made possible by a first-of-its-kind general circulation climate model that combined both oceanic and atmospheric processes. Created by NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, it is the modeling standard throughout the world today.

Ironically, part of the solution to climate change was articulated earlier this week.  The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasted that solar electricity could represent 20-25% of global electricity production with the use of solar Photovoltaic (PV) and Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technologies. The IEA’s Solar Energy Roadmap estimates that by 2050, PV will provide around 11% of global electricity production and avoid 2.3 gigatonnes of CO₂ emissions per year. And this statistic can be accelerated with increased support from governments and finance institutions globally.  PV technology is mature, but does the world have the political and financial will to follow through?

The PV Advocate

Environment America Research & Policy Center has recently published an excellent read entitled, “Building a Solar Future: Repowering America’s Homes, Businesses and Industry with Solar Energy.” The whitepaper first covers various technology and product types available and then reviews broad applications including homes, factories, farms, transportation and many others. It finishes with a roadmap to deployment and the challenges to establishing widespread solar energy.

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