Sep 08 2011

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

Dear NEXT100 reader:

Starting today, new content on NEXT100 is moving to www.pgecurrents.com/next100. Please bookmark your browsers accordingly.

NEXT100 is now in its fourth year of covering the intersection of the clean energy business and the environment. Its mission—to explain important trends in green technology, policy, and the Earth’s climate that will most impact the energy industry and PG&E’s customers over the next 100 years—becomes more timely and relevant every day.

Some months ago, PG&E launched a companion site, www.pgecurrents.com, to report in depth on all facets of news about the utility. Rather than maintain two separate sites, we have decided to integrate them without changing their complementary missions. Readers will benefit from having a wider variety of content available at one location, while we take advantage of production efficiencies.

NEXT100 will continue to offer a lively mix of content that reflects PG&E’s broad commitment to the environment without always showcasing the utility. Until the integration is complete, archived stories will remain searchable on www.NEXT100.com.

Thanks for your continued support,

Jonathan Marshall
Editor

Sep 07 2011

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

As the Earth warms and the world’s population grows, competition for dwindling supplies of fresh water will intensify. As the biggest industrial user of water, the energy sector can either fight to maintain its share, or learn to conserve.

The stakes are high. As Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, put it, “water is the new oil.

Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Coal plant - Wikipedia Commons

For utilities especially, water is precious. They use it most of all to cool steam generators that may be driven by coal, natural gas, nuclear or even solar energy.

In 2008, at least one nuclear reactor, in Alabama, shut down briefly because water supplies dried up during the great Southeast drought that summer. Reactors in Western Europe shut down during the 2006 heat wave and were threatened by a sharp drop in river levels again this year.

Most climate models predict that the drought-stricken Southwestern United States will grow even drier and hotter--like Texas--as global warming progresses. That will harm the energy sector along with agriculture, tourism and recreation, and many other kinds of industry.

"The competition between water and energy needs represents a critical business, security, and environmental issue, but it has not yet received the attention that it deserves," said Diana Glassman, co-author of a report by the World Policy Institute and EBG Capital on “The Water-Energy Nexus.”

"Energy production consumes significant amounts of water, and vice versa. In a world where water scarcity is a major and growing challenge, water deserves a place on the energy agenda alongside cost, carbon and security considerations."

The report notes that coal- and oil-fired power plants use twice as much water as natural gas-fired plants. Nuclear plants use three times as much.

Some of the biggest water hogs are oil extractors, according to the report. Mining the thick tar sands of Canada may require 20 times more water than conventional oil drilling. In parts of parched south and west Texas, natural gas fracking may be curtailed due to lack of water.

Renewable energy isn’t exempt from this problem. Although wind and solar photovoltaic plants use little or no water, water-cooled solar thermal plants use five times as much as gas-fired plants. (Some solar thermal producers, like BrightSource Energy, have switched to air cooling to save water at their desert sites, despite the loss of some generating efficiency.)

And biofuels fermented from soybeans or corn “can consume thousands of times more water than traditional oil drilling, primarily through irrigation,” according to the World Resources Institute.

The best solutions—because they carry so many benefits—are programs to conserve energy and water consumption. Water-related users in California account for about 19 percent of the state’s electricity consumption, so every gallon saved through drip irrigation or improved industrial processes saves energy. Similarly, every kilowatt-hour saved means less need to build or operate power plants that use precious water.

PG&E and other utilities are also installing new air or "dry" cooling systems on their power plants that save more than 90 percent of the water required by traditional "wet" cooling.

Last but not least, wind and solar photovoltaic plants will help out as they replace traditional fossil generation. A thousand megawatts of wind power can save 1.3 billion gallons of water annually, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Tomorrow: What PG&E is doing to save water.

Sep 06 2011

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

“The sun is shining on Pennsylvania solar power production,” read the lead of a story in Monday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It reported that the state’s solar capacity “for the first time tops 100,000 megawatts, producing enough electricity to power more than 12,600 homes.”

I was sure impressed by that first number. It’s almost identical to the entire capacity of the nuclear power industry in the United States!

Solar in Pennsylvania--USDA

If that seemed a bit improbable, so did the following statistic—that all that power would light only a few thousand homes. They must have some pretty big air conditioners and refrigerators in Pennsylvania.

The story’s errors—since corrected—reflect the fact that many people, including news editors, don’t have a clue about units or magnitudes of energy. A recent survey of global utility customers by IBM found that 30 percent had no clue to the meaning of “dollar per kwh (kilowatt-hour)” or the local currency equivalent, even though electric bills are a large and recurring consumer charge.

As it happens, the Post-Gazette story overstated Pennsylvania’s solar capacity by a factor of a thousand. That’s like saying my home is worth a few hundred million dollars. I don’t think so.

The total installed solar capacity nationwide is only a little over 2,100 megawatts, as far as I can tell from 2010 data released by the Solar Electric Power Association.

California accounts for a little over half the nation's solar capacity, but its share of total solar generation in 2010 was closer to two-thirds, thanks to abundant sunlight. Pennsylvania, by contrast, accounted for only about six percent of solar generation, hardly enough to justify the Post-Gazette’s opening boast.

In fact, the solar industry as a whole has good reason not to boast just yet, despite its impressive growth and rapid technological advance. If my math is correct, it accounted for just 0.03 percent of total electricity generated in the United States last year (1.3 billion kilowatt-hours out of 4,120 billion kWh).

One reason that fraction is so tiny is that solar generators manage to actually deliver only a small portion—typically a fifth—of their rated output. They produce nothing at night and little or nothing when clouds pass overhead, unless they come with expensive storage options.

Still, solar is undeniably clean, renewable and (usually) available during the day when customers are using their computers, air conditioners and office lights. I look forward to the day when the Post-Gazette’s original lead is finally correct.

Sep 02 2011

Posted by: Christine Cordner

Several stories on the science and politics of global warming caught our attention this week:

http://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view;_ylt=A2KJkeuEh15ObT4A_1KJzbkF;_ylu=X3oDMTBlMTQ4cGxyBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDaW1n?back=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.search.yahoo.com%2Fsearch%2Fimages%3Fp%3Dgeese%2Bmigrate%26ei%3DUTF-8%26vm%3Dr%26fr%3Dyfp-t-701%26fr2%3Dtab-web%26bIncreased depression, anxiety, substance abuse, suicide and self-harm could be more prevalent in a world of greater natural disasters due to climate change, according to a study by the Climate Institute that looked at recent events in Australia. Following a severe weather event, as many as one in five in a community will suffer extreme stress, emotional injury and despair, it noted, and the longer-term impacts lower the quality of life.

Climate change appears to be forcing many of the world's creatures to migrate to more favorable locales up to three times faster than previously believed, according to a study published in the journal Science. The study contributes to a better understanding of the larger issue raised by scientists who have suggested that some species are at risk for extinction due to climate changes.

Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania researcher who’s been a target of climate-change skeptics, was once again cleared of wrongdoing surrounding hacked e-mails. The National Science Foundation closed its inquiry after finding "no evidence of research misconduct." Climate-change doubters used the e-mails as evidence that researchers conspired to quash studies questioning the link between human activity and warming, a claim cited by U.S. politicians such as Texas Governor Rick Perry to question the validity of data on climate change.

Sep 01 2011

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

Splitting atoms is a proven way to generate energy. Now scientists are working hard on ways to split water molecules to release hydrogen—which someday could be a tremendous way to store clean energy.

Hydrogen is the ideal feedstock for fuel cells, which quietly generate electricity with only water and heat as byproducts. They can also be fed with natural gas or other fuels, but those release CO2, a greenhouse pollutant.

Catalysts - Argonne National Laboratory

Unlike nuclear energy, splitting water requires more useful energy than it produces. But if the cost and net energy requirement could be reduced enough to drive hydrogen production from sunlight or surplus windpower, the potential benefits of a clean “hydrogen economy” might be immense. Clean vehicles could run on hydrogen instead of gasoline, and large businesses could generate clean power on site with fuel cells.

The key is finding the right chemical shortcut—or catalyst—to split H2O efficiently. Many traditional catalysts are based on platinum—which is called a “precious metal” for a reason. Last I checked, it was selling for about $1,850 an ounce.

But a group of Kentucky scientists just reported in Physical Review B that their computer simulations indicate that a relatively simple alloy of antimony and gallium nitride could be just the trick. When immersed in water, the energy from sunlight alone should break apart the bonds of water molecules and cause hydrogen and oxygen to bubble up.

"Hydrogen production now involves a large amount of CO2 emissions," said one researcher. "Once this alloy material is widely available, it could conceivably be used to make zero-emissions fuel for powering homes and cars and to heat homes."

Just three weeks ago, a team of scientists in Quebec reported excellent results with a cheap iron-based catalyst that could rival platinum in efficiency. At about the same time, scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory reported synthesizing an inexpensive catalyst based on nickel, which splits water about a hundred times faster than the previous record holder. (Unfortunately, it needs a lot of energy, so it’s not yet market-ready.)

Still other scientists are investigating catalysts made of cobalt, manganese, and exotic metal nanoparticles. One company is already commercializing hydrogen technology using titanium dioxide and another, spun off from MIT, is commercializing a solar-powered approach using cobalt and phosphates.

Don’t get too excited. It’s a lot easier to produce journal articles and news releases than cost-effective new industrial processes. And even if hydrogen production becomes cheap, transporting and storing it remain major challenges. 

Aug 31 2011

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

A century ago, intrepid explorers ventured deep into the jungles of Africa to chart unknown lands. Today, their counterparts are exploring the unknown frontiers of biotechnology by venturing deep into . . . piles of panda poop.

Ashli Brown, a young biologist at Mississippi State University, reported this week at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society that giant pandas may hold the valuable key to converting tough fibers in wood and grasses into biofuels, avoiding the need to rely on food crops like corn or sugar cane.

Panda - Jeff Kubina

Over millions of years, pandas have evolved to dine on weeds like bamboo that the rest of us find unpalatable and indigestible. Their secret lies in the specialized bacteria in their gut that excel at breaking it down.

Brown’s team found that the intestinal microbes found in pandas are even more efficient than termites at digesting tough cellulose, thanks to highly effective enzymes that speed up chemical reactions. They are able to covert as much as 95 percent of cellulose into simple sugars that can readily be turned into ethanol or other fuels.

Her research agenda calls for isolating the most efficient bacteria, then transferring their genes into yeast, which can be used to convert waste biomass into fuel in mass quantities.

Finding enzymes that can do this trick cost-effectively is the holy grail of the biofuels industry—and one that nobody has yet accomplished.

Said Gideon Davies, a chemist at the University of York who has discovered some promising enzymes in fungi, “Cracking cellulose represents one of the principal industrial and biotechnological challenges of the 21st century.”

Maybe Brown’s team will finally pull it off.

“Who would have guessed that ‘panda poop’ might help solve one of the major hurdles to producing biofuels, which is optimizing the breakdown of the raw plant materials used to make the fuels?” Brown said. “We hope our research will help expand the use of biofuels in the future and help cut dependency on foreign oil. We also hope it will reinforce the importance of wildlife conservation.”

But Brown faces stiff competition. A Dutch technology company claims to have a powerful new enzyme cocktail ready to market. Its secret, according to a story published yesterday, is . . . elephant poop.

Aug 30 2011

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

The thickening blanket of greenhouse gases now raising the world’s temperature to feverish levels mostly originated from underground carbon in the form of oil and coal. If we could send a big portion of that carbon back where it came from, humanity might buy time to end the threat of climate change.

An experiment in Marin County could help do just that. The Marin Carbon Project is studying the potential for managing ranch soils to increase their carbon content along with their fertility, water-holding capacity and other benefits.

Ranchland - mcclouds

Healthy soil is full of organic matter, rich in carbon. That includes roots, microbes, fungus, and decomposed humus, which provides an ideal growing medium. Humus forms from the decomposition of fallen leaves, twigs and roots that create a rich topsoil.

But regular tilling exposes organic matter to microbes that release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and eventually degrade the quality of the soil. Over a period of a century, a blink of the geologic eye, tilling can slash the carbon content of soil by half, according to University of Ohio researchers.

As the Marin Carbon Project says in its mission statement,

Over the past 150 years we may have lost fifty to eighty percent of our topsoil worldwide. It is estimated that more than a third of the carbon dioxide we have added to the atmosphere during that time has come from changes in land use and poor land management. This soil-derived change in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration suggests the potential for improved land management practices to result in sequestration of significant amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the soil as organic matter.

The project is a collaboration of various academic, governmental, environmental organizations and the 539-acre Nicasio Native Grass Ranch, where the research is being conducted. The principal investigator is Whendee Silver, an environmental scientist at the University of California at Berkeley.

Her team has already completed soil surveys to determine the levels of carbon in the soil of the region. The next step is to test the effect on soil carbon, and CO2 emissions, from soil composting and from alternative plowing methods. They are experimenting with those techniques in Marin and in Browns Valley, at a site run by UC Davis in the Sierra foothills.

The plow they are testing was developed in Australia by a rancher who wanted to minimize disturbance to the topsoil. It has gathered wide acceptance in that arid country. “The resulting improvement in soil fertility . . . not only increases crop yields and food production, but also simultaneously reduces costs” and water use, according to the inventors.

Other techniques, such as cover cropping and crop rotation, can also enrich soils, benefiting agriculture as well as the global environment. A paper in Science magazine by researchers at Ohio State University estimated that such methods could effectively offset as much as 15 percent of global fossil-fuel emissions.

Although the Marin Carbon Project has yet to confirm such results, Silver recently told Discover magazine that preliminary findings are highly encouraging. She estimates that California’s 28 million acres of grazing land could be upgraded to absorb 40 percent of one year's entire CO2 output of the state’s electric power plants.

Aug 29 2011

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

The Great State of Texas has been cursed this summer by record temperatures and the worst drought in its history, despite the prayers of its governor. But it’s been blessed in at least one way: the winds have kept on blowing, spinning turbines that have kept air conditioners humming in the face of record power demand.

Texas was once a poster child for what can go wrong with fickle wind power. Back in February 2008, a cold front stalled the turbines in West Texas, slashing their output by about 1,600 megawatts and forcing an emergency curtailment of power to many large customers.

Texas wind turbines--Biggunben

This August, however, as wind speeds in West Texas dropped with the afternoon heat, new coastal turbines picked up the slack, according to Climate Wire.

Wind power also came to the rescue this February when coal and natural gas plants shut down due to freezing weather, making up for the February debacle three years ago.

All this just goes to show the value of diversity in energy supply.

Whether planning an investment portfolio, seeking qualified job candidates or spicing up your romantic life, diversity is usually a good thing. The same holds for building an energy portfolio. PG&E buys or generates power from diverse sources to protect customers against unforeseen changes in fuel prices, weather conditions, accidents and other risks.

Another reason is that diverse energy resources often complement each other well. Wind and solar power, for example, tend to peak at very different times of the day, so combining the two makes power available more often. And natural gas-fired generators complement them both by ramping up or down depending on the intermittent output of these renewable resources.

The case of wind power shows that diversity is valuable even within a single energy sector. The more you disperse its production, the more you smooth total output and the less you need to resort to costly backup power. As the International Energy Agency put it, “the size of swings in output from wind farms and the volatility of average output are significantly reduced through geographical aggregation.”

Dispersing wind power isn't trivial. It requires investing in a big transmission grid—and even then utilities and grid operators may find themselves on occasion stuck with too little or even too much wind.

But as Michael Goggin, manager of transmission policy for the American Wind Energy Association, told Climate Wire, this year’s experience in Texas shows that “a diverse portfolio of resources is an important part of having a reliable power system. Wind has demonstrated it is an integral part of a reliable energy system and has been instrumental in keeping the lights on.”

Aug 26 2011

Posted by: Christine Cordner

Several stories on the science and politics of global warming caught our attention this week:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/SeaIce/images/sea_ice_polar_bear.jpgGlobal climate fluctuations are playing a role in violent conflicts, according to a new study that has linked the hot, drier weather brought by the El Niño climate pattern with conflicts in the affected countries. Using data from 1950 to 2004, the researchers concluded that the likelihood of new conflicts arising in these countries, mostly located in the tropics, doubles during El Niño years as compared with wetter, cooler years.

Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has receded dramatically during this summer, opening up two new shipping lanes – the Canadian Northwest Passage and Russia’s Northern Sea Route, according to a new report from the European Space Agency. The summer of 2007 recorded the lowest amount of sea ice since satellite observations began in 1979.

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) recently voted to reaffirm its carbon cap-and-trade program, a decision that puts the nation's first state-level economy-wide program on track for 2013 when it goes into effect for power generators and other greenhouse gas emitters. The move comes after CARB delayed its start date from 2012 to allow more time to work out the program's finer details such as how to allocate allowances to emitters. 

 

Aug 26 2011

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

Pressure of work sometimes keeps me from getting to items longer than I would like. Here’s one story on a remarkable form of solar power that’s been sitting in my in-box for nearly 300 years. But I think you’ll agree it hasn’t gone stale.

Gulliver's Travels

It concerns an unkempt inventor—“with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places”—who has devised a way of “extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers.” In short, a novel kind of hybrid solar-biomass power.

That’s not all. He reportedly stores the sunbeams in hermetically sealed phials, from which they can be released “to warm the air in raw inclement summers,” like those here in San Francisco. Such a thermal energy storage scheme might well be eligible for incentive payments from PG&E under the California Solar Initiative.

Unfortunately, this inventor, though a member in good standing of the grand academy of Lagado, is in dire need of R&D funding or venture capital. The high price of cucumber feedstocks has left him strapped. He says he needs enough money to cover eight more years of research, after which “he should be able to supply the governor’s gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate.”

Any angel investors reading this may contact the inventor through the noted surgeon and ship captain Lemuel Gulliver, who first reported these remarkable scientific advances in his famous 1726 memoir (published with the help of the Irish writer Jonathan Swift), Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts.

It’s still in print by Signet Classics, and available online. Check it out.

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