Peter Fairley

Cap and Trade Hopefulness @ Kiplinger Energy Confab

Pragmatism has been a nearly unanimous message at the McCormick Energy Conference, a gathering for working reporters this week organized by Ohio State University’s Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism (and largely funded by the McCormick Foundation). We need a price on carbon to drive the rethinking of energy in the U.S., and the cap-and-trade system built into energy legislation under consideration in Congress is the best hope to get that price in place.

At least that’s what the speakers argued. I remain concerned by the threat of enduring low carbon prices. Continue reading “Cap and Trade Hopefulness @ Kiplinger Energy Confab”

September 22, 2009October 14, 2009 by pfairley

China’s Grid-Limited Wind Energy Potential

China’s wind power industry barely noticed the international financing crisis, doubling installations in 2008 for the fifth year in a row. Readers of Carbon-Nation shouldn’t be surprised, as we have already documented the state and market share-driven industry’s insensitivity to quaint financial targets such as profitability. What may ultimately check China’s seemingly unstoppable wind power surge is the capacity of its power grids to absorb the resulting energy.

That conclusion emerges when one examines a report in Science last week by researchers at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Beijing’s Tsinghua University, which combines meteorological and engineering models to predict that wind farms could meet all new electricity demand in China through 2030 at reasonably low cost. My coverage of the report, published yesterday by MIT’s Technology Review.com, concludes that China’s grid is the key hurdle to realizing this bold prediction, noting hopefully that China is already leading the world in the development of high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission technology — the sort needed to share variable renewable energy sources such as wind power on a trans-continental scale, thereby minimizing the power supply’s vulnerability to regional weather patterns.

Analysts, however, doubt that China can build such renewables-ready supergrids fast enough to replace anticipated additions of coal and nuclear power, as projected by the Harvard-Tsinghua report. Caitlin Pollock, who prepares Asia wind market forecasts for Cambridge, MA-based consutancy Emerging Energy Research, says grid challenges make the growth level proposed “unfeasible and unlikely.” She notes that grid integration already lags wind-farm installation: “While China’s wind market has indeed doubled for the past two years, approximately 30% of this new capacity remained unconnected to the grid at the end of each year.” Continue reading “China’s Grid-Limited Wind Energy Potential”

September 15, 2009October 10, 2009 by pfairley

Local Qualms Kill Ohio CCS Effort

Columbus-based sci-tech research group Battelle is pulling out of a $92.8 million project to test carbon capture and storage (CCS) in Ohio — one of seven regional sequestration tests underpinning the U.S. Department of Energy’s program to kick the wheels on CCS. A Battelle spokeswoman cited “business considerations” in a terse statement on Friday announcing the decision, but Ohio newspapers highlighted local fears that injecting CO2 underground would spark seismic tremors, disrupt underground water supplies, and depress property values.

The setback offers further evidence of the strong Not Under My Back Yard backlash elicited by CCS proposals. Earlier this month Energywise reported that similar concerns are blocking European power giant Vattenfall’s plan to sequester CO2 from its innovative oxyfuel coal-fired power plant in Schwarze Pumpe, Germany. Burial of the CO2 is on hold until at least next spring. Continue reading “Local Qualms Kill Ohio CCS Effort”

August 26, 2009May 24, 2010 by pfairley

Schwarze Pumpe Hits a Bump

Local concerns about the safety of carbon sequestration are blocking European power giant Vattenfall’s plan to close the loop on greenhouse gas emissions from its coal-fired carbon capture and storage (CCS) pilot plant in Schwarze Pumpe, Germany. The ‘oxyfuel’ plant has been burning coal in pure oxygen since starting up last fall, making its CO2 exhaust easy to capture. But burial of the CO2, set to begin this spring, is now on hold according to the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper. Staffan Gortz, Vattenfall’s CCS spokesperson, told the paper that, “people are very, very skeptical.” Continue reading “Schwarze Pumpe Hits a Bump”

August 5, 2009May 24, 2010 by pfairley

Winged Creatures Should Fear CO2, Not Wind Turbines

Benjamin Sovacool agrees that wind turbines kill birds and bats, but this University of Singapore public policy professor makes a convincing case that this fact desperately needs context. Reviewing avian mortality from power generation in the June issue of Energy Policy, Sovacool shows that — gigawatt-hour for gigawatt-hour — it is fossil-fired power by a longshot that will ground winged creatures.

Sovacool’s analysis estimates avian deaths throughout the fuel cycle for coal, oil and natural-gas fired power generation:

Coal mining = 0.02 deaths per gigawatt-hour (GWh). For example, habitat destruction by mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia has killed approximately 191,722 Cerulean Warblers.
Plant operations = 0.07 bird deaths/GWh. Electrocution at one well-observed power plant in Spain killed 467 birds over two years.
Acid rain = 0.05 deaths/GWh. Cornell’s Laboratory of Ornithology estimated in 2002 that acid rain reduced the U.S. wood thrush population by 2–5%.
Mercury emissions = 0.06 deaths/GWh. Impacts include hampered reproduction and survival, observed in everything from albatross and woodstorks to bald eagles. Continue reading “Winged Creatures Should Fear CO2, Not Wind Turbines”

May 28, 2009May 28, 2009 by pfairley

Obama Ratchets Up CAFE to Match California’s Standards

President Obama gathered auto executives, auto workers, environmentalists, and top federal and California officials at the White House this week to unveil a new consensus on fuel economy standards. His plan will harmonize the federal government’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards (better know as CAFE) with tougher tailpipe standards for CO2 poised to take effect in California and 17 other states.

Obama traded up, according to close Detroit observer Jim Motavalli, who writes in the New York Times’ Wheels blog that the new-and-improved CAFE is “roughly equivalent to those proposed under California’s tailpipe greenhouse-gas program.” As Motavalli and others noted, automakers had no choice but to join Obama and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s march to higher efficiency, with the feds holding their much-tightened purse-strings.

CAFE will start rising in 2012 and reach 39 miles per gallon for cars and 30 mpg for trucks by 2016, with a fleetwide average of 35.5 mpg. That’s quite a jump from the current standards of 27.5 mpg for cars and 23.1 for trucks. It’s quite an acceleration from the CAFE boost approved by Congress and President Bush in 2007, which would have not have reached a combined average of 35 mpg until 2020.

This is very good news for technology developers. As your author documented in early 2008, the 2007 upgrade would have required minimal implementation of next-generation technologies — such as advanced electric drivetrains and light-weight composite parts — that will be required to put personal transport on a path to sustainability.

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This post was created for Energywise, IEEE Spectrum’s blog on green power, cars and climate

May 20, 2009May 21, 2009 by pfairley

Why New Nuclear Depends on Loan Guarantees

Constellation Energy and Electricité de France boasted this week that they are closer to winning federal loan guarantees for a new reactor they want to build at Constellation’s Calvert Cliffs power station in Maryland. The $18.5 billion pool of funding they’re vying for will be critical to jump-starting the stalled U.S. nuclear industry. Construction problems in Finland and France with the reactor design slated for Calvert Cliffs — the EPR from Paris-based nuclear technology and services giant Areva — show why.

Bad news flows in constantly from Olkiluoto, the site on Finland’s coast where Areva is three years behind schedule on an EPR it is building for a Finnish utility — the first of the 1,600-megawatt reactors. Continue reading “Why New Nuclear Depends on Loan Guarantees”

May 19, 2009August 26, 2009 by pfairley