Peter Fairley

Naughty Editor Reveals Hidden Reports on Energy

Over the last month Carbon-Nation went quiet as its editor made noise elsewhere on the web. He should have kept you linked in. Bad editor! Here’s what you missed:

“Cheap Cashmere Sweaters”: A Connect the Dots photo feature on MSN Green tracking cashmere’s environmental footprints –carbon and otherwise– back to the desertified steppes of Central Asia. Bottom line message: The price of that cashmere sweater looks good now, but the cost to the environment will bite you in the end.

Two for IEEE Spectrum Online:

“Power Transmission Without the Power Electronics”: During their low-resolution beginnings digital music and photography delivered a jarring rendition of sounds and images. Today, digital devices used to control electricity flows are making a similar mess on power grids.

“Electric-Car Maker Touts 10-Minute Fill-Up”: Altair Nanotechnologies’ lithium ion batteries for electric vehicles charge up fast. Very fast. One of its 35 kilowatt-hour packs, capable of propelling an EV pickup truck for 160 kilometers, can fully charge in just 10 minutes-a feat that would be downright dangerous with most lithium batteries. But will such rapid-charging prove practical on the street?

And a troika for MIT’s Technology Review website:

“Prospecting for Power”: The ultra-sensitive detection of traces of helium rising from the Earth’s mantle may hold the key to sniffing out sites of hidden geothermal energy.

“Cleaner Nuclear Power?”: Senators representing several Western states are promoting thorium. They say it’s a cleaner-burning fuel for nuclear-power plants, with the potential to cut high-level nuclear-waste volumes in half. Some nuclear watchdogs agree.

“Carbon Capture Moves Ahead”: Carbon offsets marketer Blue Source is building the business case for carbon-capture and storage systems by storing CO2 in oil wells.

December 13, 2007December 13, 2007 by pfairley

IPCC Affirms the Economists: Action Needn’t Terminate Growth

We’ve all read plenty about the IPCC this year as the U.N.-organized scientific body rolled out the tomes that constitute its fourth assessment of climate change research. This weekend the IPCC delivered its summation, and the results are both disturbing and heartening.

Disturbing because it reaffirms that the climate is changing and we are the unwitting drivers. Heartening because its synthesis affirms economic research showing that action against climate change is affordable. The IPCC estimates that aggressive action to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases would, at worst, slim annual global GDP growth by 0.12%.

For a sharp précis of the report, Carbon-Nation recommends you to Joseph Romm on Climate Progress: “Absolute must-read report: IPCC says debate over, further delay fatal, action not costly”

November 18, 2007December 6, 2008 by pfairley

A LowCarb Negawatt Diet for the Planet

We could all get by with a lot less energy. According to a report out today by the Alliance to Save Energy, the Washington-based United Nations Foundation and Dow Chemical, the G8 countries such as Canada, France, Russia and the U.S. could double their current rate of efficiency improvement to 2.5% per year with investments that would pay for themselves over 3-5 years. That would eliminate the need for four-fifths of the new coal-fired power plants that the International Energy Agency estimates will be built between now and 2030.

Today on TechReview.com I profile a simple device to motivate energy efficiency that’s likely to become as common as the thermostat. It’s a glorified glow-lamp called the Joule with the potential stop blackouts and slash energy costs.

In future Carbon-Nation will bring you more energy efficiency opportunities. We’ll also try to massage energy efficiency’s achilles heel: a vicious feedback loop known by economists as the rebound effect whereby high energy prices stimulate energy efficiency improvements so effectively that they reduce demand, undercut energy prices, and stimulate new consumption that offsets the original efficiency gains. The rebound effect is just one of several reasons why potential efficiency gains such as those identified in today’s report fail to translate into longterm reductions in overall energy demand.

Is there a gadget out there to keep us from rebounding?

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November 14, 2007November 15, 2007 by pfairley

Earthzine: Widening the scope

Time to introduce to another web portal launched this month, this one called Earthzine. It’s a webzine created by dedicated volunteers involved in Earth observation offering fresh perspective on the state of the planet.

My contribution to the launch is an interview with Rob A dam, who emerged from political incarceration during Apartheid to help lead South Africa’s scientific and technological renaissance. I spoke to Adam primarily about his role in GEO, an international collaboration to foster global sharing of oceanic, terrestrial and satellite-based Earth observations. Among other things, GEO could be a critical step towards better modeling of climate change.

Adam made two noteworthy observations on the energy challenge. One was the fact that coal has lost some of its shine even in South Africa, which needs energy to meet its development goals. Some of the many new coal-fired power projects in the offing there are being converted to nuclear projects (which he oversees as CEO of the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation). Adam explains that South Africa wants to pull its weight in the fight against climate change, but also that its leadership recognized that at some point in the future even this developing nation would have to pay the full price of coal — including its environmental costs. The net result, says Adam, is “a profound effect on the thinking on energy production and energy generation in South Africa.”

More profound to me was another comment by Adam, this time on the value of better modeling of weather and climate for renewable energy. Why? Because most renewable energy, as he points out, depends on the weather. How do you project where to put a wind farm or how much energy a solar park will produce if historic patterns of wind flow and cloud cover no longer hold? “The biggest challenge for renewables,” says Adam, “is climate change.”

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November 12, 2007December 9, 2008 by pfairley

Who Killed the EV Part II: Can California’s ZEV rules deliver an energy revolution?

The award-winning 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? chronicles the controversial history of California’s Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate. As the movie tells it, the rules prompted major automakers to produce pathbreaking EVs until 2003, when the automakers got the upper hand and crushed both the EVs and the ZEV mandate itself.

In fact, as I show in the November issue of IEEE Spectrum, the program is back and entrepreneurs, car companies and interest groups are scrambling to exploit its incentives to favor their respective automotive visions (see “California to Rule On Fate of EVs”). Far from a failure, the ZEV program’s prodding exposed automakers to the potential of electric propulsion — insights that Toyota applied in its market-leading Prius hybrid — and it may well accelerate the arrival of further innovations.

The ZEV program shows that mandating innovation is a messy process full of unintended consequences. But it may be just what we need to drive adoption of the technologies currently available to slow the growth of greenhouse gases. In his provocatively titled book Sustainable Fossil Fuels Canadian energy economist Mark Jaccard identifies the ZEV program as the forerunner of the renewable portfolio standards adopted by the EU and many U.S. states that are helping to drive installation of wind turbines, large-scale experimentation with new forms of solar power, small-scale hydropower and other renewable sources of electricity. (This summer Congress rejected a proposal to require 10% renewable energy across the U.S. by 2020.)

Jaccard believes that “niche market regulations” such as the ZEV mandate and renewable portfolio standards will be key policy tools to force real change, second only to a cap-and-trade program regulating CO2 emissions (Jaccard would prefer energy taxes to both, but believes they are not politically feasible). In other words, targeted programs like the ZEV mandate that force major industries to try new approaches may be just the thing to deliver meaningful change in the way we use energy.

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October 31, 2007November 2, 2007 by pfairley

Buckle Down: Climate solutions won’t come at the push of a button

The message of the day seems to be Get real: Reversing, stopping or even just slowing climate change is going to take a little more effort than some newcomers to the problem hoped.

Kicking it off was the report one week ago that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 grew 35% faster than expected since 2000. Climate trackers at the University of East Anglia estimate that Earth’s plants and oceans scrubbed 18% less CO2 from the air, largely due to stronger winds in Antarctica’s Southern Ocean that bring deep CO2 up and thus prevent more CO2 from being absorbed. Greater than expected CO2 releases from the boom in coal-fired power generation and a dearth of technological advances contributed the balance of the CO2 speed-up.

I’m throwing a little more warm water on our melting optimism today with a story on the newly relaunched web portal MSN Green. “Does Daylight Saving Time Really Save Money?” is really an accounting of the energy savings Congress promised when it extended DST by three weeks in March and one week in the fall (this week in fact). When Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, it predicted that springing forward earlier and falling back later would trim the use of lighting, saving the equivalent of 100,000 barrels of oil per day. Extending DST probably did just the opposite, boosting energy use by giving us all more time to consume.

The shortfall is grave given that extended DST was one of the only energy efficiency measures in the 2005 law, which focused mostly on boosting fossil fuel production and nuclear power. Remember Vice President Dick Cheney’s famous comment dissing energy efficiency as a “lifestyle choice”? Well, Congress went along for the ride.

The take home message is not that a smarter, climate-friendly energy system is impossible. Rather, we need to get beyond hopeful quick fixes such as DST and begin implement the real solutions that those East Anglia researchers found to be under-exploited — from true energy efficiency measures such as hybrid vehicles to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power and even smarter use of fossil fuels whereby CO2 is captured and stored away underground. Let’s get real.

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October 30, 2007July 3, 2019 by pfairley

European Wind Power Meets European Humour

Time for Carbon-Nation to take a walk on the wilder side. In all seriousness, I’m curious what you make of this ad for German wind farm and solar power developer Epuron. What does it say about the image of wind power? To my mind it speaks to a greater awareness of renewable energy in Europe, since its deadpan delivery would seem to assume that European audiences need no introduction to the technology.

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October 25, 2007October 25, 2007 by pfairley