Whenever I speak on renewable energy, I’m careful to leave my audience with a sense of the “tough realities.”  We all want simple answers to our questions, but in the case of clean energy, none exist.

There are dozens of different flavors of solar, wind, biomass, hydro, and geothermal, each improving in terms of cost and efficiency, but at different rates.  There are economic issues, as none of these flavors can compete with the dirtiest form of coal, if we don’t take into account the “externalities” like lung disease and environmental damage.  And Lord knows there are political issues, where we have serious candidates for president of the U.S. who, if elected, boldly pledge to dismantle our Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy.  If this occurs, it would effectively end the efforts of the largest economy on Earth to migrate away from fossil fuels and nuclear. 

Here’s another in a series of infographics that attempts to put all this into perspective. Hope you enjoy.

Related posts:

When we think of wind energy, we generally think of those multi-megawatt farms in western Texas, the plains states, and California.  Conversely, when we think of solar PV, we normally conjure images of “distributed generation” — “DG” for short — rooftop mounts on thousands of geographically dispersed homes and commercial buildings.

Increasingly, however, wind is sporting a DG face, with smaller turbines appropriate for “campus” settings: schools, cities, counties, farms, factories, communities, and other large power users who want to stabilize their energy costs.

My colleague Jim Boyden acts as an advisor to a company called Continental Wind Power, which offers a range of campus wind solutions.  Considering that an incremental 8 gigawatts of new capacity will be installed in the U.S. alone this year, this may not be a bad place to be.

Related posts:

The answer, generally, is that only a very small minority of people have gotten the  message that what they’re doing matters.  Almost no one thinks before turning on a light:  “I can flip this switch if it’s really too dark to see, and it’s OK to spend that energy if I need to.  But if I don’t need to, I shouldn’t, because the world will be a slightly better place if I don’t.”   Or: “I could open this (petroleum-derived) plastic container of creamer for my coffee, but isn’t there an open jug of milk within easy reach?”  Or: “Walk or ride?” “Bike or car?” — or the dozens of other choices we make on a  minute-to-minute basis.  Very few people have gotten the message that their personal decisions to use energy actually matter — that they come at a cost to all of us — and worse, that this cost is far higher than we had previously imagined.

Perhaps we can liken this behavioral issue to littering.  The reason most of us don’t throw trash from our car windows is not that we’ll personally see that rubbish later on, but that doing so would tarnish and degrade the space in which we all must live.   We’ve processed the idea that littering is simply an unacceptable form of slob-like behavior, and we conceive ourselves to be better people than that.

The societal issues around wasting energy take the exact same form. We shouldn’t waste the HVAC (even in a hotel, where we’re not paying for it), or buy unnecessarily large and heavy cars, because doing so actively damages the quality of our living space.

People say there is a limit to what we can do with efficiency, which, of course, is true.  But I wonder if we haven’t misestimated that limit.  What happens when people 90+% of our population gains the same level of understanding and concern for energy consumption as they have for the concept of littering?  In other words, what happens when it becomes cool to be green? It’s hard for anyone to predict with any real accuracy, but the potential consequences are huge.

A quick story, if I may.  My wife and her friends are into wine, and so I see stuff for the modern wine connoisseur that suggests that we’re quite a long way from this type of consciousness.  I see disposable plastic bubblewrap for transporting opened and recorked bottles.  What’s the matter with a towel?  I see mini-refrigerators to hold literally one bottle of wine, and to maintain it at the precise correct temperature — a device one plugs in, with its own little refrigerant compressor, chugging along, drawing current (and making noise) for those who want their Chardonnay at 37 degrees F, not the 34 that they’d be forced to suffer if they put the bottle in the main kitchen refrigerator.

I understand that “living large” in energy consumption has been the chic thing to do over the past decades, but perhaps this is merely a matter of a lack of public education.  What happens when people think through the consequences of what they’re doing, and realize that a great deal of their behavior is really the equivalent of littering?

To make this happen, of course, we’ll have to contend with the wizards of mass marketing and the billions of dollars they spend every day convincing consumers that they need that new electric dog-polisher or whatever.  But I predict we’ll eventually see through this foolishness.  There’s a new living large; it’s called living small, and it’s a Christmas present truly worth giving.

Related posts:

Frequent commenter Glenn Doty writes:

What would really be nice is an infographic comparing the cost of mitigating CO2 with various alternatives… just to put the different alternatives into proper perspective.

For instance, how much more does it cost to abate CO2 emissions by setting up a rooftop solar panel in NJ as compared to installing additional insulation in an office building in Texas or setting up a wind farm in the Dakotas?

This would be extremely instructional to your readers in terms of what policies would make more sense… and it would be fun to look at how you graph the negative CO2 abatement value of EV’s.

I respond:

Ha! I was reading along here, wondering when you were going to make your point about EVs, and lo! (a good word for the season), there it was.

Seriously, please send me a high-level treatment of your reasoning.

At a minimum, there are two things I don’t get.

1) What’s the matter with this reasoning: There are many different reasons that we need to knock off our addiction to oil, of which climate change is only one. What about the financial and human cost of war? What about national security and empowering terrorists?

2) And where’s the flaw here: While the short-term impact of a few EVs may be debatable (most don’t see it that way, but whatever), the evolution to EVs is paralleling the medium-term evolution to renewables, smart-grid, and storage, which will have an enormous impact. Are we to suppose we’ll be burning coal and driving Hummers in the year 2050? Of course not. Then why not phase in electric transportation, let it scale, let the costs come down and the value to the consumer increase, as we use technology to integrate more renewables in parallel?  Solar’s going to be $1/Watt soon, and the levelized cost of a number of other forms of clean energy is also falling. The opposite is the case with oil, where the costs, both financial and ecological, of extracting and refining shale oil are huge and growing.

As always, thanks for your thoughts.

Related posts:

Let me take this opportunity to ask you for suggestions. I’ll have plenty of time between conferences and strolls up the Champs Elysees. If you have any connections to people who are in the process of making a difference in the deployment of renewables in Europe, please let me know, and I’ll try to arrange to meet them.

I plan to start in Paris, then head east and south, winding up in Rome.  Having said that, detours are always possible.  I’d like to speak with entrepreneurs, investors, leaders in government, executives in the energy and automotive industries, top consultants and industry analysts, as well as those directly related to finance and the economy.  Tres bien.

Related posts:

Global nuclear capacity has remained flat in growth in the last decade, the worldwide operational installed capacity increased insignificantly from 370 GWe at the end of 2005 to 375 GWe at the end of 2010. Nuclear capacity in the OECD countries peaked in 2006 at 2,259 TWh and declined to 2,136 TWh in 2009. A severe earth quake and tsunami in March 2011 that ravaged the pacific coast of northern Japan resulted in devastating incident in Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Following this incidence several countries have announced safety reviews of their nuclear power programmes. Many countries have cancelled nuclear power plans and some are considering closing current plants. While this nuclear meltdown is happening, the global growth in energy from solar, wind, biomass, geothermal and other renewable sources has been 30-40 percent per annum of recent. Currently global growth in deployment of solar PV is the highest standing at 60 percent, this is followed by wind power at 27 percent, then biofuel at 18 percent and then biomass at 7 percent. These trends predict the world will be a nuclear free world.

Related posts:

Renewable Energy World’s Steve Leone published an article today on solar and its attempts to go mainstream, in which he mentions a great number of developments that will ultimately make solar far more appealing to consumers than it is currently. Some of these notions include transparent PV on windows, as well as PV roof shingles and other forms of building-integrated solar.

It was good to see he noted the role of electric transportation in the equation. I.e., there is clearly a growing number of people who want to control the source of electricity that charges their cars – and what better way to do that than to install that source on their roofs?

If we still have a civilization here in 2050, we will have “gotten there.” The questions are how much damage we will have done, and who’s going to get rich in the process.

Related posts:

Think we advocates of renewables in the U.S. have trouble? Our friends in the U.K. are running into a buzzsaw of misinformation, like the report “Renewable Energy: Vision or Mirage”, published today by the Adam Smith Institute and Scientific Alliance. The report includes:

“Wind does little to reduce carbon emissions.”

and

“Nuclear and gas are the most viable energy sources for the near future.”

What a remarkable thing to say, when the U.K. has already installed enough wind turbines to provide clean electricity to more than 3.2 million homes, according to RenewableUK, the trade association representing the wind, wave, and tidal energy industries.  RenewableUK also makes the point that I always do about nuclear: even if you consider it safe, it takes a minimum of eight years to permit and build a reactor, and the cost overruns are legendary.  Referring to it as “viable” seems ridiculous.

Related posts:

The use of off-peak power is directly relevant to the case for EVs. If we’re curtailing off-peak wind in the middle of nowhere, that’s one thing, but if we’re dumping power near population centers, that’s another.

On a related matter: wasn’t there a study from some government lab (Lawrence Berkeley? Argonne?) a couple of years ago that concluded that charging EVs would be very inexpensive since most of the extra generation would come from running gas turbines longer and it would make better use of the transmission and distribution infrastructure? I can’t find that either.

Thanks.

Related posts:

The press is reacting to the recent price drops in solar equipment as though they are the result of temporary oversupply or of a trade war. This masks what is really going on: a long-term, consistent drop in clean energy technology costs, resulting from decades of hard work by tens of thousands of researchers, engineers, technicians and people in operations and procurement. And it is not going to stop: In the next few years the mainstream world is going to wake up to wind cheaper than gas, and rooftop solar power cheaper than daytime electricity. Add in the same sort of deep long-term price drops for power storage, demand management, LED lighting and so on – and we are clearly talking about a whole new game.

Related posts: