Green energy may take big strides in 2011

Extracting energy from waste and significant moves by BP, Shell and Chevron into renewables will be among the big green stories for 2011, says a Seattle-based investment bank.

Cascadia Capital LLC also said in its annual clean-tech forecast that Congress will discard a cap-and-trade proposal on pollutants and that high oil prices will generate increased investment in natural gas, which has seen resurgence from new techniques unleashing major reserves.

“Energy policy and sustainable technologies continue to draw significant debate from consumers, pundits, politicians and investors around the world,” said Michael Butler, Cascadia chairman and CEO, in a statement. “In 2011, the energy landscape will be marked by significant investment activity from oil companies, M&A (mergers and acquisitions) of renewable energy companies, and the introduction of new technologies for transforming waste to energy. These markets will continue to draw a great deal of attention as oil prices continue to rise and the formation of a national energy policy is thrust back into the spotlight.”

In the newspaper business, where I spent 24 years of my life before this assignment, we'd all be rushing around about this time of year to get two things together.

One would be a summary of the year's top stories. The other would be a story that focused on what was expected to happen in the new year, much like what Cascadia has done here.

Every reporter was expected to collect and report on everything on his or her beat, or subjects covered. Most of us hated the task, grumbling the entire time. Our point? We'd already been covered those topics. "It's old news," we'd say. And the forecasts? We believed they were usually too general and be of little use, much like picking the Superbowl lineup a year in advance.

Our wrap stories would run on A1 during the holidays -- traditionally a time when news slows to a near stop. We'd recycle the best photos and frequently get the photogs to work up photo pages inside.

Of course, now I look upon it all fondly. And to an editor, tying up loose ends and looking ahead make sense. Back when I worked at the now deceased Anchorage Times in the early 1990s, I'd come up with the big fisheries story that would include a forecast of the salmon runs and the crab catch in the Bering Sea. Those were the big money stories and of interest to me since my grandfather, Lowell Wakefield, was one of the industry's pioneers.

At the Skagit Valley Herald, overlooking the tree-studded Puget Sound, my big stories would be farming, timber and the environment's battle with sprawl. When I went into editing full time and overseeing reporters, my subjects expanded to include crime, health care and in the Tri-Cities, the lovable Hanford nuclear site.

Now my scope has narrowed again, and I write mostly about green energy, tossing in somewhat relevant personal observations every now and then. And the traditions of my past encourage me again to cite my big stories and issue a forecast.

For the San Joaquin Valley, the top green news, at least from my perspective, has got to be energy efficiency. The Valley received a bundle from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, and while much of it remains unspent, the allocations will prove invaluable in reducing energy costs to jurisdictions.

Here at the SJVCEO, we've had significant delay getting Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant money spent for the 39 cities and counties our nonprofit represents. Most of the hurdles are bureaucratic and require seemingly endless administrative solutions and reports.

However, looking into my crystal ball I see our fortunes changing early next year. I see work getting done and that money getting spent.

In other green Valley news, 2010 was big in getting wind and solar projects moving forward. The golden eagle has slowed wind projects and tortoises messed with some solar efforts, but we expect some to soldier on and connect with the grid. Perhaps waste-to-energy projects at dairies and other biomass efforts will get the green light.

I'd like to say I had a clue about green jobs, but I don't. Like many across the country, I experienced an economy-related layoff. I watch as my beloved newspaper industry continues to contract. I would like to see green energy innovation provide a bright spot.

Will it happen in 2011? One can hope.

Making Our Way To Energy Storage: Jimmy Buffett, The Holy Grail and The Manhattan Project

By Rick Phelps




"cliches. Good ways to say what you mean...mean what you say."


--Jimmy Buffett, 1975

I hadn't thought about the Holy Grail since an old Indiana Jones movie and was a little surprised when someone said that it was becoming a cliche to refer to energy storage as the Holy Grail of renewable energy. My mind immediately recalled the lyrics of an old Buffett song and I realized Jimmy may have it right: say what you mean...mean what you say. When it comes to the future, energy storage IS the Holy Grail. Without storage, flexibility is lost and progress stalls.


But what is energy storage? Storage includes batteries large and small, compressed air, pumped water systems, fly wheels and a host of other ideas, both new and old. All generally work, but the limiting criteria are cost and scale. The cost question is whether it costs less to store a kilowatt than it does to generate it. The scale issue relates to the application, but generally refers to the amount of energy needed to be stored. For example, large lead-acid batteries might work fine for a home with a 4-kilowatt load, but not so well for a utility-sized wind project with a capacity of 25 megawatts.


To put the energy-storage issue in perspective, think about its impact on remote communities in the Eastern Sierra. Electricity could be stored locally and additional distribution lines - at a cost of millions - would be unnecessary.


Private-sector companies, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are making progress on energy-storage cost and scale, but there are not yet any major breakthroughs, and the need for more storage in renewable energy continues to grow.


The quest for this Holy Grail is critical for at least three compelling reasons.


First, two major forms of renewable energy - wind and solar - are intermittent and not necessarily generated at the same time there is electricity demand. Often the actual capacities of wind and solar projects are less than 50 percent of stated capacity and said capacity needs to be backed up from conventional sources such as natural gas or coal. If the energy generated could be stored economically for later use, the renewable projects would be more economically viable as they always "sell" their capacity, and might be able to reduce their invested capital with a more efficient operation. Plus, the land use footprint for wind and solar might be lessened.


Second, if renewable energy is more efficient due to effective storage, there would be less need to ensure that conventional generation capacity is available as backup. Fewer conventional power plants will need to be built and transmission capacity might be reduced if large electricity imports were not necessary to meet the demands of a high-renewable region if production was not up to capacity.


Third, energy storage can be used to make the grid more efficient and optimize transmission and distribution capacity. This gets complicated, but the easiest way to explain it is that if inputs into the grid are predictable, it's a lot easier and economic to manage. In that way, the grid and storage become a lot like our own financial budget - when we know what's coming in, it's a lot easier to manage what goes out.



If energy storage is truly the Holy Grail, where are the speeches demanding that we triple our capacity by 2020, or that the United States become the energy-storage technology center for the world? You don't hear those speeches because energy storage is pretty dull stuff and certainly neither sexy nor photogenic, but if we were to solve the problem, storage would indeed be the Holy Grail, which brings us to The Manhattan Project.


To the baby boom generation, The Manhattan Project is well known, but to those lucky enough to be younger, it's a little more obscure and even ancient history. The Manhattan Project had its start in 1939 when Albert Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt warning him that the Germans were likely to develop a nuclear weapon with great destructive power, and the United States should counter the German effort with its own initiative. President Roosevelt accepted this challenge and committed the government to this endeavor, and by 1942 The Manhattan Project was well under way.


The Project culminated with the successful test of the first nuclear weapon in July 1945 and, following the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the end of World War II. Over 125,000 scientists and staff at no fewer than 30 sites around the country had fathered this technology and spent $22 billion in today's dollars. Solutions were found to problems thought at the time to be unsolvable.


The Manhattan Project is symbolic of what can be accomplished with an all-out effort and many, including Bill Gates, have called for a "Manhattan Project" in renewable energy, regardless of cost or risk. This seems a worthy idea, but wouldn't it make more sense to first solve the "critical-path" issue of energy storage? Otherwise, what are we going to do with all that renewable energy once we have it?

Rick Phelps is Executive Director of the High Sierra Energy Foundation. The views expressed in this column are those of the author.

The Coolest School in the nation

Vermont's Green Mountain College nabbed the top spot in Sierra magazine's fourth annual Coolest Schools environmental sustainability ranking, while two California schools, Stanford placed fifth and University of California Irvine sixth.

Green Mountain -- a school of about 900 students -- was one my colleague suggested and recommended to his daughter, who ultimately chose the University of Oregon, which didn't crack the top 100.

The University of California Merced placed 39th. Other California schools included UC Santa Cruz at No. 11, UC Davis No. 16, UCLA No. 25, Pomona College No. 31, UC Berkeley No. 32 and UC Santa Barbara 44.

The rankings were based on responses to an 11-page questionnaire and how colleges measured up in terms of commitment to sustainability. Energy supply carried the most significance, followed by efficiency, food, academics, purchasing, transportation, waste management, administration, financial investments and a catchall section titled "other initiatives."

Where appropriate, standards like the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED certification were used, the magazine said.

The Coolest Schools list is the cover story for the September/October issue of Sierra magazine, a publication of the Sierra Club.

"Green Mountain College excels in most categories, and it's the MVP when it comes to creativity. The campus gets power and heat from biomass and biogas (a.k.a. cow power)," the magazine said.

Green Mountain has a new combined heat and power biomass plant and participates in Central Vermont Public Service's Cow Power program, which converts cow manure on Vermont farms to methane gas, the school said in a statement. The new plant will use local wood chips to provide 85 percent of the school's heat and generate 20 percent of its electricity.

"Green Mountain established its environmental liberal arts mission in 1995, so we are an 'early adapter' in responding to the social and environmental challenges of our times," said Green Mountain President Paul J. Fonteyn. "Through our Environmental Liberal Arts program, we've sought to provide an education that emphasizes sustainability across all disciplines. This recognition is a testament to all the hard work of a whole generation of students, faculty and staff."

Avital Binshtock and Kyle Boelte wrote in a post on sierraclub.org that the magazine shifted priorities in this year's survey after consulting the Club's conservation experts, "who encouraged us to give more weight to each school's energy supply."

That adjustment meant this year's top 20 includes nine newcomers and elevated Green Mountain, which placed 35th last year. No school scored a perfect 100 score. Green Mountain came closest with 88.6.

"Although we worked hard to apply rigorous, objective standards when evaluating the questionnaires, a certain amount of subjectivity was inevitable, and we hope that readers (and the growing legion of college sustainability officers) will bear that in mind," wrote Binshtock and Boelte. "The point, after all, is to create competition, to generate awareness and to celebrate that so many colleges even have a sustainability officer."

Through this project and several other initiatives, Green Mountain officials said they expect to be the first college in the country to reach carbon neutrality after having reduced carbon emissions by more than half. The college also received a score of 98 out of a perfect 99 in the Princeton Review's annual college "green" rankings and its Students for Academic and Green Engagement, or SAGE, Hall was designated as LEED gold certified building by the U.S. Green Building Council.

The Princeton Review gave UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and UC Santa Barbara honor roll status in its green rankings for schools that achieve perfect ratings.