The producers of a television show called “Going Green” interviewed me yesterday to determine if they would like to feature me on an upcoming program. As part of the conversation, the associate producer asked me what areas of education are most required to get people up to speed in this area.

“It depends on what ‘people’ you mean,” I explained. “There are several diffferent constituencies that have markedly different needs with respect to knowledge.”

In discussing renewables, I’m amazed how people conflate the many different groups (consumers, corporations, utilities, government agencies, etc.) that, in fact, have completely dissimilar needs for information.  I gave the interviewer a few good examples off the top of my head, but after I hung up the phone, I realized that it might be a good idea to list the various segments and the topics which, in an ideal world, each would understand.  Here’s the list I put together:

Consumers

• “Electric vehicle 101.” Pure EVs vs. plug-in hybrids. Trade-offs between EVs and internal combustion engines, for a each family’s unique driving habits. Considering NEVs (neighborhood EV), given the local driving conditions and traffic laws. State and federal incentives.
• Recycling
• Energy-efficient lighting, HVAC, and appliances

Corporate America

• Intelligent building management. Light harvesting, integrated energy management.
• Demand response, i.e., managing consumption of electricity in response to supply conditions, e.g., reducing consumption at critical times or in response to market prices
• Incentives for carpooling and mass transit
• E-commuting
• High-efficiency vehicles (preferably electric transportation) on campus and in corporate fleets

Government Policy Makers

• MSEV (medium-speed EVs) laws that foster use
• Encouraging mass transit, bicycling, etc.
• Eco-friendly community planning
• Making use of the research performed by NGOs (e.g., World Resources Institute, Wilderness Society, etc.)
• Incentives to consumers and businesses to reduce carbon footprint
• Creating corridors for power transmission, using eminent domain law as necessary
• Allocating stimulus money to organizations with demonstrable capability to deliver transformative change in energy generation and consumption
• Stipulations to power utilities to increase purchase of energy from renewable sources
• CAFE standards that drive increases in overall fuel efficiency
• Intelligent placement of charging stations
• Alternative fuelled vehicles in the government fleets
• Laws mandating sustainable agricultural practices
• “Internalizing the externalities,” i.e., forcing everyone to pay the complete costs of generating and consuming energy
• Changing subsidies to create a level playing field for renewable energy

Power Utilities

• Smart grid, i.e., delivering electricity from suppliers to consumers using two-way digital technology
• Time of use metering, encouraging off-peak consumption (e.g., charging EVs at night)
• Building out the grid in sync with increased demand for electric transportation
• Efficient, long-distance power transmission using HVDC (high-voltage direct current)
• Vehicle-to-grid (V2G), using energy stored in EV batteries to enhance delivery of electric power

Renewable Energy and Electric Transportation Companies

• Making use of market research to gauge demand, establish the most appeal product/service features, set maximum set price points, develop effective positioning and branding, etc.
• Writing clear and compelling business plans
• Raising investment capital
• Protecting intellectual property
• Using public relations to generate large volumes of positive publicity

It sure will be a great day on Planet Earth when the majority of folks at all of these levels get their wits wrapped around each of the major issues.

I’m back on the East Coast for a few days.  When I come here I normally stay with my parents (they’re in their mid-late 80s) at their home in Philadelphia — which happens to be an apartment in a very nice retirement community.  As it often does, the conversation this evening turned to politics.  But unlike many political discussions between parents and their children, it was not at all rancorous.   Through our talks, we try to understand why the US as a nation is having so much difficulty in gaining traction in solving its most obvious problems: wars, healthcare, financial reform — and, of course, creating a level playing field for renewable energy.

I pointed out that each of these is rooted in what I label generally as corruption, which I define as the supremacy of money and power over common sense and decency in creating and enforcing our laws.  I acknowledged that corruption is a harsh word, and that it applies more accurately in some cases than in others.  But I do think that if our leaders were kind and sensible people, uninfluenced by the power of money, we would have immediate workable answers for these and many other pressing issues.

Since we’ve so often discussed this idea of corruption as it applies to energy policy, and since healthcare is so omnipresent in a retirement community, let me use this latter as an example.  The 94-year-old lady living across the beautifully carpeted hallway from my parents’ place recently had a knee replacement, which was, of course, 100% paid for by Medicare.  We encountered her in the hallway; she still struggles to walk — which shouldn’t come as a surprise considering her age — and so they’re in the process of scheduling a second such operation.

Meanwhile, our nation has millions of people 60 years younger who happen to be uninsured and face untended illness or financial ruination — or both — because they can’t get health insurance.

While my heart goes out to the old lady, I point out a simple, if ugly truth: the only reason she’s receiving serial knee replacements is that they are profitable. She’s thin as a toothpick, horribly frail, and quite obviously has no prognosis under which she’ll ever be able to walk more than a few slow steps without terrible pain — regardless of how many times her knee is replaced.  Yet I caution you not to expect a change in healthcare legislation that might damage the profit stream generated by those surgeries she’ll be receiving — even if making such a change would free up huge amounts of cash that would more than pay the cost of insuring those who presently can’t find coverage.  The power of that money is so intense that such change simply will not happen — regardless of how compelling the argument — or how enormous the benefit to the public.

Do you have a better word to describe such a system than corrupt?  Can you introduce me to one honest, reasonably intelligent person who thinks that spending a fortune on knee replacements for 94-year-olds is a good, fair-minded idea while others who happen not to be able to get health insurance face catastrophic health conditions to which their pitiable complaints will be turned a deaf ear?

I know that the vast majority of the many millions of people working in healthcare are honest, decent, and incredibly talented.  I know dozens of them personally, and I respect them deeply.  But the fact remains that the medical industry is in place to make money.  And if you happen to be one of the lucky ones (like our friend above) who benefits from that profit motive, I urge you to consider it a bonus for which you should be profoundly thankful — because not everyone is so lucky.

So as not to ignore the energy industry entirely in this post, it’s clear that a similar argument could be made here.  As I’ve pointed out, the oil industry alone employs seven lobbyists for each of the 535 members of Congress.  Do you think Big Oil would be spending those hundreds of millions of dollars if they weren’t buying something of far greater value in exchange ? Sorry to appear cynical, but I’m convinced that the level playing field we’ve discussed here so frequently will come about when and only when we’ve found a way to disconnect our lawmakers from the powerful interests that buy their votes.

Corporate lobbying is an institution that is causing more harm to more innocent people with each passing month.  What’s the matter with simply abolishing it?  The framers of the Constitution wisely built in the right of the people to redress their government, but I think it’s pretty clear that they didn’t intend this patent dishonesty that’s ripping our civilization and its people slowly and painfully apart.  What’s the harm in simply saying that money should not buy legislative influence?

I wrote not too long ago about the huge, long-term role that the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), as part of the Department of Energy, plays in supporting the development of clean energy technologies.  Their work with solar energy leader Solyndra is a perfect example of a case in which this public support made it possible for a private company to raise critically important addition capital, by preventing their initial private investors from getting scared away.  At a certain point, new (very large) rounds of cash were required to get the company to its next level.   As I recall, NREL supported this effort to the tune of over $700 million — and this robust commitment showed investors that they weren’t alone in their belief that the company was on the right track. 

But not every company that asks for money receives any at all — let alone $700 million.  So exactly how does this process work?  How fair is it? What criteria are most important?  What types of companies are favored over others, and why?  Are more mature renewables technologies, like photovoltaics (in which Solyndra plays), favored over newer ideas?  (Solyndra has a very well proven breakthrough in deployment of CIGS (copper indium gallium (di) selenide), generating a significant leap in PV efficiencies and reduction in costs).

Unfortunately, it’s not clear.  I suppose it’s not supposed to be.  Take solar thermal/CSP (concentrated solar power) as an example of a new technology.  Technologies like PV and wind have a several-decade head-start over CSP.  When I interviewed industry leader Ausra’s founder Dr. David Mills for my book on renewables, he told me that Ausra had gotten to the second round in one of these mega-contests in which the DoE selects its favorites to back, but that they didn’t make the finals.  When I asked if he resented their decision, he — perhaps simply out of good sportsmanship and professional courtesy — said that he didn’t, and told me that he’ll simply try again another time.

I can’t count all the people who have asked us for our insights at 2GreenEnergy on this matter — and I regret that all I can turn up are anecdotal incidents like these.  I ask readers to share their own experiences with this process so that all my learn.  Thanks.

Reader Kate apparently thinks I’m hypocritical.  She writes:

Living in Santa Ynez must be really tough, getting around and all with those Bently’s and top-shelf jags/mercs and 6-digit priced horses. Pontificate on in the valley of the ultra rich.

How charming, Kate!  :)  Let me make two quick points:

1) I drive a 16 year old car with 212K miles on it.  (I’ve sworn that my next car will be an EV.)  It’s likely that your refrigerator is worth more than my car. 

2) It’s true that there are some rich people around here.  But I believe the quest for renewables is a good deal for everyone at every socio-economic level.  It nauseates me when I read propaganda that clean energy will put more people out of work in an already-tough financial climate.  While it’s true that we’ll someday have a world without coal-miners, the net benefit in jobs in deploying renewable energy solutions and building clean transportation will be enormous.

Re: my piece on changing attitudes to electric vehicles, guest blogger Arlene Allen writes:

I’ll roll with you on shifts in attitude. They are, however, notoriously difficult to predict. I don’t particularly give such a shift good odds when it comes to cars….I’m not yet a believer that people will come to embrace the little ducklings of our industry such as the original Insight, the Smart, i MiEV, etc. And even if such an event happens, there will be a general disgust rather than embrace…

You bring up a good point when you mention “disgust.”  I notice that some people sneer at drivers of clean little cars  — as if those of us who care about our world and the well-being of those around us are weak, pathetic, bleeding hearts.  It’s an interesting phenomenon.  And it will be more interesting to see how — or if — this dynamic changes over time. 

But speaking of dynamics, one thing that is evident to anyone who’s every driven an i-MiEV or a Mini E is that they perform like little rocketships.   The Mini E has a 200 HP motor (about the size of a basketball).  With maximum torque at zero RPM, the G-force when you hit the accelerator from a dead stop is absolutely ridiculous.  In my test-drives of both cars, I notice that this creates a kind of fun little dynamic in the minds of both drivers when my little EV blasts past a Corvette or a Porsche.

2GreenEnergy associate Bruce Allen supports oil drilling off the coast of California as a means of cleaning up the huge amount of crude and methane that are poured into the ocean every day. But of course, this idea is counter-intuitive, insofar as most environmentalists work against the idea of any and all drilling.

Bruce is one of the world’s leading experts on this matter, as has spent a great deal of time in Washington DC, testifying in front of Congress, and speaking to large groups of interested people. Here’s a clip.

I was just editing my book’s chapter on media, which features an interview with Sustainable Business’s Rona Fried, which made me think about sustainable agriculture — one of her favorite subjects. No sooner had a saved the file did I note an email from another person I respect greatly, Tom Blakeslee, discussing the same subject.

Tom writes:

I’m flying to Denver Saturday to be with Abe Collins, who is starting a company to sequester carbon by rehabilitating degraded land by grazing cattle on it. Here is the site of a charity spreading the word about the method, called holistic management. It turns out that undoing the damage man has done to the land is by far the cheapest way to sequester carbon quickly. The carbon is in the biotic community that we have poisoned with nitrogen fertilizers and other bad farming methods, particularly since the “green revolution.” They have a 3-D computerized way to guide people through the process created by Alan Savory, whose son is on the staff.

This is quite powerful stuff; I urge everyone to come up to speed on the latest technologies here. Here’s Tom’s latest column on the subject.

If there is contract enforcement and money to do a Green Energy project in Turkey or Mali, it makes good financial sense to do it. Of course, as an American, it is more than embarrassing to have a government reluctant to act, and a system with disincentives in its corporate tax structure and patent laws. The patent law issue is separate, but it makes a lot of sense to get that law changed to promote innovation without hindrance. And the government should not use corporations to raise revenue. Corporations should simply pay those fees which compensates public action on their behalf, including infrastructure, security (including courts), and whatever environmental cleanup costs there are, if any. But these are political matters, which should not be relevant to immediate business decisions. But the current situation in the USA is that the most rational business decisions will be about projects in Turkey or Mali.

In addition to my work at 2GreenEnergy, I’m a partner in two companies related to electric vehicles. One is the largest website on Earth dedicated to EVs — an 11-year-old website with 225,000 unique vistors a month — EVWorld.com. I’ve very proud of the work that Bill Moore, my fine friend, has done through the years in forwarding the cause of clean transportation.

Another partnership of which I’m happy to be a part is its subsidiary, EV World Associates. I’m trying to create a video to tell our story there, the first vesrion of which you can see below. You’ll see at a glance that the images are too low-res and that it needs help in a million different directions. But I think that the basic message is clear: we’re here to serve.

In recent times, there has been a lot of attention being given to usage of green and clean energy. The governments of different nations are bent upon adoption of green and less polluting energy options. The International Energy Agency (IEA), the European Commission (EC) and other national governments back up the economic models of energy policy decisions. In the process, they tend to ignore the risks involved such as fuel price risk, supply risk and political risk.

Wind energy, being a “less polluting” way of generating energy, has been given a lot of importance. Wind energy is supposed to be economically viable, a clean source of energy and saves people from the pollution caused by using other non renewable sources of energy. Well, it is difficult to say that how much it fulfills the purpose in a real sense with the kind of initial investment it needs to build a wind energy farm. Rough estimates figure that raw materials requirements (e.g. iron and concrete) of a wind farm are around ten times bigger than a comparable nuclear plant.

Governments have spent billions of dollars investing in wind energy projects and will continue to do the same. The companies working on wind energy projects make false promises, present false proposals and commitments of generation of clean energy and governments believe them. In return, the companies are gaining lavish subsidies and lucrative funds out of these projects. Governments, on the other side, are busy displaying to the people of their respective nations, that how much concerned they are for the environment and the public. In the entire episode, the true objectives are lost.

Out of the funds being deployed for green energy this year, the US government has invested 42 percent in wind energy. But the truth is that currently wind energy meets only 3 percent of the total energy requirements of US. Government has invested too much in wind technology and is unable to generate expected results, which in turn is raising the operating costs of such projects. The situation calls for an extensive research before setting up a wind farm as it has to be an area where winds flow in abundance at a speed enough to spin the blades of wind mills to generate energy.

It is not just about the kind of investment made in this field but beyond that as well. There are various factors which prove that wind energy is not a feasible option to be the future energy. For starters, one such variable is capacity factor, the ratio of the actual output generated by a power plant over a period of time and full capacity for the given time period. It refers to the time a plant is in operation as compared to the time it is offline. A typical wind turbine has a capacity factor of 20-40 percent which is the lowest among other power plants. The capacity factor for wind turbines does not include inspection or maintenance. In addition to this, turbines also have a cut-in and cut-out point, which means that mere blowing of the wind is not enough to generated energy. It has to blow at a speed, capable of producing energy economically or it will shut down automatically.

Size of the wind farms is another drawback of this energy technology. In order to make commercial farms viable, a certain number of turbines are required. The largest turbine stands up to 125 meters with a blade span of 45 meters. It makes quite an impact on the surrounding landscape as well. Turbines require a very strong foundation; hence they require tons of steel and concrete to be fixed into the ground to support the wind mill. The large areas with trees and green spaces have to be cleared for the installation of turbines. Accordingly, construction of wind farms also affects the ecological balance. It requires the installation of the structure itself with transformers and power lines throughout the area to carry the power to the grid.

Transmission losses can also be a problem. For ensuring proper transmission, large power transformers have to be installed. The output power could be varying and is not a steady source. In such cases, wind farm has to be near high power lines. And for a relief, the cost of long distance power transmission is not that high these days.

Another problem is that it is important to connect wind farms across the country in order to remove all natural variations of wind activity. As wind farms work on the basis of wind they receive, if one wind farm does not have enough wind blowing, the other may have it, as wind may be blowing somewhere else. It may seem to be quite simple to understand but it is equally difficult to implement. Each wind turbine of 1 MW or higher capacity requires about 65 acres of land on an average basis. Wind farms have to be at different locations as there are certain dangers involved with it such as windstorms, hurricanes, severe lightning. The difficult part is to connect these isolated wind farms. It can be estimated by the above facts that how difficult it will be to connect them.

Some researchers believe and have proved that such energy forms cost more than the conventional sources of energy generation. Also there are hidden costs involved in the form of down-time, maintenance, installation, expense of maintaining the areas around the wind farms so that the efficiency stays in the maximum form. It is debated upon, that the cost of wind power today is near about to be twice the cost of a coal powered plant. It is not quite evident as generous government subsidies overshadow the real truth. The subsidies are subtracted from the actual cost of wind power which shows that they are cheaper to implement and run.

Wind energy, which is known as a non-polluting energy source does create noise pollution. It affects the wildlife around the wind farm. A study revealed that the noise generated by wind farms can cause significant health problems for the people working there and even for those who live near wind farms.

Various studies also revealed that wind turbines are fatal for birds when the rotating blades of the turbines happened to kill them. A study published in the year 2001 by the US National Wind Coordinating Committee (NWCC) estimated that the about 15,000 wind turbines which were operating in the US at that time killed around 33,000 birds annually. It means about 2.2 birds per turbine per year. Although the figures could vary greatly from one location to other, still it could clearly reveal the impact on wildlife.