Peter Fairley

BC Premier Shows the Political Climate Can Also Change

British Columbia’s generally conservative Liberal Party premier, Gordon Campbell, earned my respect this winter when he banned new coal-fired power plants from releasing CO2 — in effect mandating the use of carbon sequestration (or, as my coverage at TechReview.com indicated, driving planned coal plants to instead burn renewable wood). Now Campbell has gone much further — at least on paper.

Campbell announced this past weekend that his government will propose legislation this fall to mandate a 33% cut in greenhouse gases from current levels by 2020; a still to be announced Climate Action Team representing environmental organizations, business, science and First Nations is to set binding midterm targets for 2012 and 2016 by July 31, 2008.

Here are a few of the measures BC intends to launch over the coming year to get there:

Setting hard caps on greenhouse gases to be used in an emissions cap and trade system under development by five Western U.S. states and BC.

Requiring all provincial entities, including the power utility BC Hydro, to be carbon neutral by 2010. Government agencies must purchase carbon offsets at $25 per ton of CO2 released or otherwise find a way to make their travel carbon neutral starting this year. The offsets cash will fund projects in B.C. that enhance energy efficiency, generate renewable energy or reforestation.

Building all new government buildings to green-building certification equivalent to at least Gold level LEED certification.

Phasing in California’s strict tailpipe emission standards (still stymied by auto industry litigants in the U.S.) by 2016 and adopting California’s low carbon fuel standards.

Spending more on public transit.

“I could barely believe my ears,” is what one climate activist here in Victoria told me. Journalists like me will be busy tracking to see if Campbell and crew actually deliver on all this. But I’d say hope springs a bit more eternally this week thanks to his detailed promises.

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October 3, 2007October 22, 2007 by pfairley

Solar Thermal Power: Reliable Renewable Energy?

Solar proponents love to run the math on how much (or how little) Southwestern desert one would need to cover with solar energy installations to power the United States. David Mills, founder and chairman of Palo Alto, CA solar startup Ausra, has his own estimate: 145 kilometers. Mills’ estimate is more credible than most, and not only because he’s a former president of the International Solar Energy Society.

Mills’ company is developing a less well known variant of solar power that could actually make solar power work as a total energy solution: solar thermal power plants that turn sunlight into steam and then use that steam to produce electricity in turbines (much as a nuclear or coal-fired power plant does). See my story on the MIT Technology Review website this morning — “Storing Solar Power Efficiently” — on why such plants’ ability to store heat sets them apart from other renewable energy options such as wind power and photovoltaics (solar panels that turn light directly into electricity).

Note that the potential of solar thermal power extends beyond the U.S.: China and India have sun-baked desert regions available for large solar installations, while Europe is just a transmission line away from North Africa.

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September 27, 2007 by pfairley

Ground-breaking Report Faults Quake Planning at Yucca Mountain

To consider nuclear power as a solution to climate change one must confront the legacy of high-level radioactive waste that is building up at power plants across the U.S. and Canada. This week the Las Vegas Review-Journal showed yet again how difficult it will be for regulators to bury the high-level waste problem while ensuring that waste remains safe for millenia to come.

The Review-Journal’s story on developments at the U.S. Department of Energy’s planned waste repositor at Yucca Mountain, Nevada — “Yucca fault line might spring surprise” — reveals that the site’s initial design would place a waste handling area atop a fault line capable of producing a magnitude 6+ earthquake. No wonder that the state of Nevada is fighting to block the repository’s construction, and that even the DOE concedes the repository won’t open for another decade.

Such risks and delays are one reason why the Bush Administration is pursuing nuclear waste reprocessing, in which the components of high-level nuclear waste are separated and reused. As I revealed in my Spectrum story on France’s nuclear waste reprocessing experience — “Nuclear Wasteland” — there are serious problems with this approach as well.

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September 26, 2007October 3, 2007 by pfairley

Can Magnets Save Ethanol?

Biofuels are growing at an explosive pace. Especially in Brazil, where output of sugar-cane ethanol has increased almost 10% per year since 2000. No suprise, given the high price of oil.

Markets like this one have powerful effects. We’ve all read about the threat of rising food prices, for instance, as food crops are diverted to fuel production (though in Brazil the price of sugar has actually crashed amid the boom: see “Brazil ethanol sector fears ‘delirious’ growth”).

But the market also provides a powerful incentive to innovate. This morning MIT Technology Review is running a quick take of mine on one sign of the ethanol innovation boom: research espousing the growth-enhancing benefits of magnetic fields. See “Can Magnets Boost Ethanol Production?”

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September 21, 2007October 16, 2007 by pfairley

Rethinking Energy Deregulation’s Green Dividends

The European Commission proposed new rules today to break up Europe’s energy monopolies and I must say it makes me wonder whether they aren’t trying to fix something that isn’t broken–at least as far as the environment is concerned.

Commission President José Manuel Barroso told reporters today that: “We need a common European response to combat climate change, to achieve greater energy security and provide abundant energy at a fair price for citizens. This is only possible if we have a competitive gas and electricity market.” But that assumed connection between responding to climate change and competition is worth questioning.

Certainly, the EC’s proposal to take control of power transmission grids out of the big utilties’ hands seems a good bet, giving innovative new players such as wind farm developers a better chance of gaining access to the grid. In fact, the European Wind Energy Association says the EC should go farther and force utilities to sell their interest in power transmission. “Allowing power generation companies to own the transmission grid makes as much sense as allowing an airline company to own the sky,” comments EWEA CEO Christian Kjaer in a press statement issued today.

However, one of my conclusions from reporting on China and the U.S. is that the increasing drive towards deregulation–in particular the conversion of utilities from state-owned entities into profit-focused firms–can make it more difficult to drive change in energy technology. As I reported in Part II of my feature for Technology Review, China’s Coal Future, China’s move to a more open economy hampered efforts to deploy that countries first gasification coal-fired power plant.

In 1993, China’s leading power engineering firm, China Power Engineering Consulting in Beijing, began designing the country’s first gasification power plant for the monopoly utility of the era, the State Power Corporation. This demonstration plant was to be the beginning of a transition to cleaner coal technology. Instead, the plant went on a roller-coaster ride to nowhere. The project was delayed by cost concerns in the mid-1990s and then revived in the late 1990s, only to be cut adrift after 2002 by the breakup of the State Power Corporation.

Anyone who’s breathed the air in China recently knows that was an immense lost opportunity.

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September 19, 2007September 19, 2007 by pfairley

Cleaner Coal is Cheap, But So Are Renewables

When the U.S. Energy Department under an adminstration like Bush/Cheney tells you cleaning up our energy system is cheap, you know the walls are coming down. This summer Carbon-Nation made the case that Cleaning Up Coal is Cheap thanks to affordable technology for capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide. Now the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) is projecting that the cleanest energy option available — renewable energy such as biofuels and wind power — should also fit nicely in our budgets. Ironically the EIA analysis responds to a request by Republican environment critic James Inhofe, a Senator from Oklahoma.

EIA’s analysis examines how mandating 25% renewable power and fuels by 2025 would change U.S. energy consumption and economic growth (see Energy and Economic Impacts of Implementing Both a 25-Percent Renewable Portfolio Standard and a 25-Percent Renewable Fuel Standard by 2025). They conclude that such a mandate would significantly cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions: In 2030 carbon dioxide emissions would be 14% lower than 2005 levels, with emissions from electricity production specifically dropping 22%. drop in emissions from the electricity sector and a 14-percent decrease in the transportation sector.

Yet the cost is negligible: a projected GDP hit of one-eighth of one percent and a rise in expense to consumers of one-tenth of a percent. Plus EIA’s analysis assumes that the mandate would spur fairly modest improvements in energy technology, a highly conservative assumption that one can hope Will prove false.

Cause for even greater optimism: the U.S. Senate’s version of the energy bill currently being negotiated in Congress establishes a 25% renewables mandate by 2025 as a national energy goal. Renewable energy is not perfect — as our recent discussion of Wind Energy’s Problem Child in the Bay Area shows — but it sure beats the status quo.

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September 18, 2007September 18, 2007 by pfairley

SEJ 2007 at Altamont: Wind Energy’s Problem Child

I’m back from the ultimate professional recharge: the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual conference, held south of San Francisco last week on the leafy Stanford University campus. This week I’ll be giving highlights from a packed agenda exploring environmental technology, politics, culture and science.

Highpoint #1: A trip across the Bay to Altamont Pass, where cool air sucked over coastal hills by the rising heat of California’s vast Central Valley spins some 5,200 wind turbines spanning a roughly 6×8-mile area. It was at Altamont that the U.S. wind power industry took flight in the early 1980s, as developers rushed to install largely untested technology to cash in on handsome federal and state tax credits. By 1985 California 80% of the world’s wind power capacity, and much of it was at Altamont. (The turbines in the photo are circa 1984).

That early lead was handed to Europe as the U.S. fell back into reliance on imported oil and other fossil fuels. “Because of a whole raft of poor policy decisions both here and in Washington, we blew it,” says Tom Gray, a veteran of the 1980s wind boom and currently communications director for the American Wind Energy Association.

But the U.S. wind industry itself seems to be blowing another opportunity here at Altamont: the chance to clear its reputation as a bird killer. Altamont is almost certainly the world’s most deadly wind farm for birds. Collisions with wind turbine rotors and poles kill an estimated 70 golden eagles a year in an area big enough to support just one nesting pair, plus significant numbers of burrowing owls, red tailed hawks, and American kestrels. Buildings kill hundreds of times more birds than wind turbines, but the ongoing slaughter of endangered birds at Altamont remains a damaging black mark on an otherwise green industry.

This winter a lawsuit by environmental organizations and scientists required Altamont’s wind turbine operators to cut the bird kill in half by 2009 by taking down a few hundred of the most dangerous wind turbines. Unfortunately, at least from what the SEJ journalists saw on the ground, the deal isn’t being implemented. (For a detailed if pointed telling of the settlement story, see “Tilting at Windmills” by the Ecology Center in Berkeley, CA.)

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September 10, 2007March 4, 2008 by pfairley