Louis Bergeron : A Practical Vision for Global Sustainable Energy

L.A. Cicero Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering At Stanford University. Photo from L.A. Cicero.
It will take concerted effort:
A practical vision for alternative energy

By Louis Bergeron / Stanford Report / April 7, 2011

A new study -- co-authored by Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson and UC-Davis researcher Mark A. Delucchi -- analyzing what is needed to convert the world's energy supplies to clean and sustainable sources says that it can be done with today's technology at costs roughly comparable to conventional energy.

If someone told you there was a way you could save 2.5 million to 3 million lives a year and simultaneously halt global warming, reduce air and water pollution and develop secure, reliable energy sources -- nearly all with existing technology and at costs comparable with what we spend on energy today -- why wouldn't you do it?

According to a new study coauthored by Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson, we could accomplish all that by converting the world to clean, renewable energy sources and forgoing fossil fuels.

"Based on our findings, there are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources," said Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering. "It is a question of whether we have the societal and political will."

He and Mark Delucchi, of the University of California-Davis, have written a two-part paper in Energy Policy in which they assess the costs, technology, and material requirements of converting the planet, using a plan they developed.

The world they envision would run largely on electricity. Their plan calls for using wind, water and solar energy to generate power, with wind and solar power contributing 90 percent of the needed energy.

Geothermal and hydroelectric sources would each contribute about 4 percent in their plan (70 percent of the hydroelectric is already in place), with the remaining 2 percent from wave and tidal power.

Vehicles, ships and trains would be powered by electricity and hydrogen fuel cells. Aircraft would run on liquid hydrogen. Homes would be cooled and warmed with electric heaters -- no more natural gas or coal -- and water would be preheated by the sun.

Commercial processes would be powered by electricity and hydrogen. In all cases, the hydrogen would be produced from electricity. Thus, wind, water, and sun would power the world.

The researchers approached the conversion with the goal that by 2030, all new energy generation would come from wind, water, and solar, and by 2050, all preexisting energy production would be converted as well.

"There are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources," said Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering.

"We wanted to quantify what is necessary in order to replace all the current energy infrastructure -- for all purposes -- with a really clean and sustainable energy infrastructure within 20 to 40 years," said Jacobson.

One of the benefits of the plan is that it results in a 30 percent reduction in world energy demand since it involves converting combustion processes to electrical or hydrogen fuel cell processes. Electricity is much more efficient than combustion.

That reduction in the amount of power needed, along with the millions of lives saved by the reduction in air pollution from elimination of fossil fuels, would help keep the costs of the conversion down.

"When you actually account for all the costs to society -- including medical costs – of the current fuel structure, the costs of our plan are relatively similar to what we have today," Jacobson said.

One of the biggest hurdles with wind and solar energy is that both can be highly variable, which has raised doubts about whether either source is reliable enough to provide "base load" energy, the minimum amount of energy that must be available to customers at any given hour of the day.

Jacobson said that the variability can be overcome.

"The most important thing is to combine renewable energy sources into a bundle," he said. "If you combine them as one commodity and use hydroelectric to fill in gaps, it is a lot easier to match demand."

Wind and solar are complementary, Jacobson said, as wind often peaks at night and sunlight peaks during the day. Using hydroelectric power to fill in the gaps, as it does in our current infrastructure, allows demand to be precisely met by supply in most cases. Other renewable sources such as geothermal and tidal power can also be used to supplement the power from wind and solar sources.

"One of the most promising methods of insuring that supply matches demand is using long-distance transmission to connect widely dispersed sites," said Delucchi. Even if conditions are poor for wind or solar energy generation in one area on a given day, a few hundred miles away the winds could be blowing steadily and the sun shining.

"With a system that is 100 percent wind, water and solar, you can't use normal methods for matching supply and demand. You have to have what people call a supergrid, with long-distance transmission and really good management," he said.

Another method of meeting demand could entail building a bigger renewable-energy infrastructure to match peak hourly demand and use the off-hours excess electricity to produce hydrogen for the industrial and transportation sectors.

Using pricing to control peak demands, a tool that is used today, would also help.

Jacobson and Delucchi assessed whether their plan might run into problems with the amounts of material needed to build all the turbines, solar collectors and other devices.

They found that even materials such as platinum and the rare earth metals, the most obvious potential supply bottlenecks, are available in sufficient amounts. And recycling could effectively extend the supply.

"For solar cells there are different materials, but there are so many choices that if one becomes short, you can switch," Jacobson said. "Major materials for wind energy are concrete and steel and there is no shortage of those."

Jacobson and Delucchi calculated the number of wind turbines needed to implement their plan, as well as the number of solar plants, rooftop photovoltaic cells, geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal. and wave-energy installations.

They found that to power 100 percent of the world for all purposes from wind, water, and solar resources, the footprint needed is about 0.4 percent of the world's land (mostly solar footprint) and the spacing between installations is another 0.6 percent of the world's land (mostly wind-turbine spacing), Jacobson said.

One of the criticisms of wind power is that wind farms require large amounts of land, due to the spacing required between the windmills to prevent interference of turbulence from one turbine on another.

"Most of the land between wind turbines is available for other uses, such as pasture or farming," Jacobson said. "The actual footprint required by wind turbines to power half the world's energy is less than the area of Manhattan." If half the wind farms were located offshore, a single Manhattan would suffice.

Jacobson said that about 1 percent of the wind turbines required are already in place, and a lesser percentage for solar power.

"This really involves a large scale transformation," he said. "It would require an effort comparable to the Apollo moon project or constructing the interstate highway system."

"But it is possible, without even having to go to new technologies," Jacobson said. "We really need to just decide collectively that this is the direction we want to head as a society."

[Mark Z. Jacobson is the director of Stanford's Atmosphere/Energy Program and a senior fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy. This article was originally published by the Stanford University News on January 26, 2011.]

Professor Mark Z. Jacobson:
Global clean energy is within reach:



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Grownup Talk for Obama : Not such Simple Arithmetic

Hard choices are upon us. The political costs of candor will be high. The political costs of a lack of candor will be higher...

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / September 14, 2009

My favorite thing about Obama is that he sounds like a grownup talking to grownups. Most of the time.

But when he fails that aspiration, he fails big time.

In the primary (and, yes, I pointed it out at the time even though I was supporting Obama), Clinton said that the only way to get a handle on health care costs is to get everybody in the pool with a mandate. Obama said no, he could support a mandate only for children and adults should have the right to go naked.

The problem with his argument, which Clinton pointed out, is that the choice to go naked is just a way to game the system at the expense of us all, because we are not as a matter of political reality going to let people die in a highly visible way. The only reason we let people die now is because they can’t get treated AFTER they are stabilized in the emergency room. We Americans have that much understanding of health care as a test of national character, but we lack the attention span to follow the chronic as well as the acute.

The next failure is this. Everybody knows that we must either cut spending or raise taxes to get out of the ditch the Reagan Revolution put us in. But the truth is we have to do both.

Taxing the top 5% at 100% would not save us.

The only budget items that can be cut and have an impact are Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and Defense. We could literally chop the entire rest of the budget and that would not save us.

The Obamites tell us, probably correctly, that the next economic wave will be clean energy. They have not, however, been able to pass the policies that could put us on top of that wave. While Europe is better positioned than we are, the leader of innovation in the face of American default is becoming... China, our principal creditor.

Did we reply with a carbon tax to move away from waste and fire up creativity? No, we have cap and trade pending, which would better be labeled smoke and mirrors, since in practice it manages to lack both carrot and stick. This was a case where we could have learned from the European mistake but instead chose to repeat it.

Hard choices are upon us. The political costs of candor will be high.

The political costs of a lack of candor will be higher and they will be insignificant compared to the economic costs.

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Austin's Lloyd Doggett and the Sorta Clean Energy Act

After working hard to reform it, U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D,TX) finally voted for the energy bill. Here he speaks at the Austin Global Warming Press conference in June, 2008.
The special interests' 'Clean Energy' bill passes the House

Austin's own Lloyd Doggett led the fight to strengthen the bill... No one except Doggett can say what pressure he was subjected to on Thursday and Friday as the votes were being tallied in back rooms...

By Alyssa Burgin / The Rag Blog / June 28, 2009

It's over in the House.

The dog-pile of special interests, climbing all over each other to see whose cause benefited most, ended Friday, June 26, with a vote in the U.S. House on the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACESA), which started life as the principled Waxman-Markey bill. What came out of the process is a veritable "Christmas tree" of giveaways, exemptions, federally-funded studies that lead to dead-ends, and lowered expectations. Gucci-gulch regulars connected to fossil fuels and big agriculture can rejoice, and afford a few more pairs of alligator shoes.

The American people on the other hand, should be wary. Yes, it's possible, in the abstract, that the bill will be strengthened in the Senate -- the house leadership's promise to representatives who were reluctant to sign on because they feared the bill was too weak. It's also possible the sun will rise in the West, in the abstract, and that clean coal, a concept not only pushed but well-funded in ACESA, will make the air around coal plants refreshingly minty. Truth is, the bill faces an uphill struggle in the Senate, and the opposition has declared that the percentage of carbon emissions cuts, already well below the minimum scientists say is needed to stand a chance of banishing climate change, must go lower still.

Austin's own Lloyd Doggett led the fight to strengthen the bill in the House. His strategy, made known to a group of environmentalists who met with him three weeks ago in Schulenburg, was to hold out for a full debate -- to delay the vote as long as possible, hoping that if the advocates of the present bill didn't have the votes, they would be forced to include safeguards which he thought were necessary.

Doggett had written his own bill -- the Safe Markets Act of 2009. In it, he made sure to address the blossoming derivatives market that he thought would emerge from the ACES bill -- unregulated and on a clear-cut path to disaster. He also found fault with renewable energy standards, which he saw as too open to substitution with less-costly, less-effective means, at the whim of American governors. But primarily, he found the bill too weak to fulfill the minimum requirements that have been telegraphed to the United States as being necessary to hammer out an agreement in the U.N. Climate Change Conference to take place in Copenhagen later this year.

It wasn't unreasonable for Doggett to assume that his opposition could make a crucial difference. After all -- it was the holding-out of petroleum industry patron Gene Green of Baytown that resulted in so many provisions being inserted that would favor oil-and-gas, so why couldn't one courageous environmentalist have the same effect?

But it was not to be. No one except Lloyd Doggett can say what pressure he was subjected to on Thursday and Friday as the votes were being tallied in back rooms, but everyone has seen the outcome. After giving an inspiring speech earlier about his "no" vote on the bill, he later changed his vote and weighed in with the Democratic majority, as a critical part of the 219-to-212 victory. It is known that his office was bombarded with phone calls, some of which apparently placed him in the same category as the climate deniers who made such fools of themselves before the camera on Friday.

A last-minute "manager's mark-up" of the bill inserted a few, a very few, of the provisions that Doggett and others were pushing, but that would not have been enough to convince him to change his mind. It's hard to imagine what kind of arm-twisting went on, but judging from the tired visage he presented on CSPAN late in the afternoon, it must have been substantial.

Perhaps this bill is a critical first step in the campaign to regulate greenhouse gases in the United States, and put this nation back in the global fight for a solution to climate change, but much more will have to be done to make certain that special interests do not eviscerate the provisions any further. And even then, the people of this nation will have to stand strong for real change, real efforts to rein in corporate interests, and real teeth in enforcement of the rules laid down.

Otherwise...

It's over.

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Coal: Not Quite As Dirty Once You Burn It

What Is this "Clean Coal" Obama and McCain Support?
By Tara DePorte / October 31, 2008.

A look at whether "clean coal" is actually clean, how the technology works, and whether it is a climate crisis cure.

Both Presidential Candidates Obama and McCain have emphasized the need for Energy Reform as we face climate change, a sinking economy, and rising fuel costs. In a country where 85% of energy demands are from fossil fuels (oil, coal and gas), coal and "clean coal" are making a rhetoric comeback this election. However, the burning of coal has proven one of the leading human-based causes of global climate change due to resulting carbon dioxide emissions, let alone a diversity of air pollutants.

The Obama Energy Plan proposes to "develop and deploy clean coal technology." McCain's energy plan, "The Lexington Project," commits to "$2 billion annually to advancing clean coal technologies." As the candidates talk about "clean coal," alternative energy, and energy independence, what's the science behind the plans? In this article we'll look into one of the more environmentally controversial options that has been put forth by the two candidates and try to help you decide how much of our nation's energy plan we wanted devoted to "clean coal".

Coal and its byproducts are everywhere -- in plastics, tar, fertilizer, steel and as the energy source for major industries such as paper and cement. In the U.S., however, over 90% of coal is used for electricity generation, resulting in 83% of carbon dioxide emission from the power sector. Coal is burned in power plants to create steam, thereby powering turbines and generating both electricity and a diversity of harmful air pollutants. No matter how you look at it, there isn't much clean about coal. The extraction and burning of coal is considered the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, including oil and gas. So, what is this new, innovative and so-called "clean coal"?

Unfortunately, no one has discovered a new form of coal -- the black rock composed of carbon or hydrocarbons that is intensively mined throughout the world. The dangerous misnomers "clean coal" or "clean coal technology" are not about finding a cleaner form of fuel, instead they describe the reduction of air pollution from coal-burning power plants. For instance, some "clean coal technology" works to boost power plant efficiency in converting coal to energy, others physically filter emissions before release, and others are being developed to capture emissions upon release from the plants.

With each of these much less-than-perfect technologies, there's a diversity of research and development, money and time, and effectiveness in curbing coal's environmental and health impacts. Below you will find a sampling of "clean coal technologies" and some insights into their pros and cons:



Cleaning up the power plants: Scrubber and Increased Efficiency: Since the 80's, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has been working to decrease particulate emissions, mercury, sulfur and nitrogen from coal-burning plants -- all materials that contribute greatly to air and water pollution. "Scrubbers" are brushes and filters that are installed in smoke flues of coal-burning facilities, which physically remove some emissions' components. The reduction of these emissions has shown some success due to increased scrubber technology, where smoke stacks have increased cleaning or screening mechanisms on them, and some other "clean coal technology" methods. Unfortunately, greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide have proven to be more difficult, energy and cost intensive to reduce at the source.

Gasification: Integrated gasification combined cycle or IGCC gets to the coal before it's burned. According to the DOE, the process uses steam and hot pressurized air or oxygen to force coal particles apart, thereby resulting in carbon monoxide and hydrogen. This mix is cleaned and burned to make electricity with subsequent heat being used for powering steam turbines. Some good things about IGCC are that there is a biproduct of hydrogen that can be used in developing hydrogen fuel cells. Additionally, the process of gasification can also be used for biomass and other "renewables" technology. Alternatively, gasification technology is still quite expensive and not considered economically viable on mass scales.

Carbon sequestration or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS): The basics of CCS are to capture carbon out of the air and to put it somewhere else. The methodology behind, and storage sites, vary and include underground storage, ocean storage, creating carbonate rock out of the carbon dioxide and others.

In a 2008 interview with Klaus Lackner, Columbia University Ewing-Worzel Professor of Geophysics and one of the foremost CCS scientists remarked, "The challenge is capture, not storage." He continued, "Our goal is to take a process that takes 100,000 years and compress it into 30 minutes." One of the good things about CCS is that it can help clean up the mess that we've gotten ourselves into in terms of carbon emissions already in the air. Many do question the long-term effectiveness and safety of storing this carbon in systems that aren't used to having it there. Furthermore, although leaps and bounds have been made in past years in capturing CO2 from the air, the process is still costly and many estimate that the technology will not be ready for large-scale capture for many years to come.

With goals of zero-emissions coal power plants, the U.S. has spent over $2.5 billion since 2001 in research and development for "clean coal technology." Unfortunately, none of the options on the table actually help coal--as a whole--become any cleaner. A misnomer at best, "clean coal technology" is key to the cleanup of existing coal-powered facilities, but it's a long shot from the clean energy bill of health. There are some promising technologies being tested and applied within the "clean coal technology" umbrella, such as those addressing "end of the pipe" issues with the burning of the most abundant of fossil fuels.

However, few address the issues of coal extraction and its' environmental and health impacts and none are currently viable at a mass scale. Perhaps if the Presidential Candidates start referring to it as "not quite as dirty once you burn it coal technology," voters would have a better idea of what to expect in the upcoming new energy plans.

Source / Alternet

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

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Chasing The Clean Coal Dragon : A DNC Lobby Adventure

'Clean coal' is in an experimental stage and at best hypothetical
August 26, 2008

DENVER -- Greetings from from the Mile High City! It's a beautiful day here in Denver. The DNC is in full swing, and excitement is in the air...

... and the dirty energy lobbyists are walking the streets. Literally.

For those of you who haven't heard of them, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) is a coal industry front group. They're the ones with the pretty ads on CNN. They even brought you the Democratic debate at the end of January.

They virtually greet Denver visitors with a series of ads at the airport, and they're rolling around town with their mobile billboard.

We've even heard that they're handing out pieces of "coal"... painted green.

If you're easily convinced by such silly swag, I have a bridge to sell you.

You see, here's the background story. When coal industry lobbyists say "clean coal", they're mainly talking about carbon capture and storage (CCS), which, in reality, is only in the experimental stages, and a hypothetical success at best:

A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called The Future of Coal, published last year, suggests that the first commercial CCS plants won't be on stream until 2030 at the earliest. Thomas Kuhn of the Edison Electric Institute, which represents most US power generators, half of whose fuel is coal, takes a similar line. In September [2007], he told a House Select Committee that commercial deployment of CCS for emissions from large coal-burning power stations will require 25 years of R&D and cost about $20 billion.

[...]

The most detailed published assessment [pdf], by Peter Viebahn of the German Aerospace Center in Stuttgart, estimates that at best CCS will reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power stations by little more than two-thirds. That compares with life-cycle emissions for most renewable energy technologies that are 1 to 4 per cent of those from burning coal.

We are unlikely to give up burning coal any time soon, and CCS could eventually have an important part to play by allowing coal to be used without doing unacceptable damage to the global climate. But that isn't going to happen tomorrow. And as to the dream of coal becoming a zero-emissions source of power - forget it.

So, it's fitting that the ACCCE is handing out bits of fictitious fuel. Although we still haven't scored any, Devilstower and I had a chance to chat with several of the ACCCE representatives.

What we learned in our hour-long interview can, unfortunately, be easily condensed into a few paragraphs. I'll let Devilstower take over from here.

Thanks, Page. Our interview rambled over several topics, and there's no doubt that the coal lobbyists are personable guys who know how to make their argument -- after all, that's their job. But when it comes to a few areas, their answers are a lot less than satisfying. (note: while I've tagged my bits and those from Page, I've lumped all the clean coal lobbyists together as "CC," not out of disrespect, but because I can't distinguish their voices on my high quality $9 recorder).

DT: Let's go back to that sign in the airport, which says that "the next president" can count on clean coal to protect the environment and keep the economy strong. But is the next president going to be able to count on clean coal in the next four or even eight years?

CC: We're going to be closer, yes.

DT: But being closer doesn't really help the next president protect the environment or the economy.

CC: We never said that. This is not an answer for the very next president.

DT: That's what the sign says.

CC: It's certainly an issue for whoever is the next president to start working on it.

Page: But you're saying our next president won't have to choose between a clean environment and the economy. That's a huge statement. And very clever.

CC: The issue is simply this. In this country, you could stop using coal tomorrow, but it won't make a dent in global CO2 and it'll greatly raise energy prices. You'll have to build nuclear plants, which will take years, or use natural gas, which would be very costly.

If you stopped using coal tomorrow, this country would shut down.

DT: I don't think anyone's proposing that we turn all the plants off overnight, but that existing 51% of our electrical grid that you're talking about is not "clean coal." It's coal, but it's not clean.

CC: It has to start somewhere.

And that's where the argument becomes circular. Clean Coal would be a great boon to the country if it existed, but it doesn't. Clean coal is a hypothetical fuel, something that might be possible, in a decade or two, with the investment of several billion dollars.

So, while the clean coal lobby presses the idea of their fuel as an inexpensive solution to both maintaining a strong economy and protecting the environment, what they're really pushing is a choice. We can choose to invest our funds in sources of clean electricity that exist right now, today, or we can invest in carbon capture in the hopes that someday, decades from now, it might work. The proposal really ends up having all the downside of investing in fusion (the power source of the future, and always will be) and little of fusion's upside (low overall environmental impact).

The question we're left with is how we handle the power sources we have today, the ones that are powered by not-clean-coal. And the clean coal they talk about is one alternative that's not on the table.

When we got around to talking about the fate of existing plants, we got closer to the real agenda of the clean coal lobby.

CC: Kansas is a prime example. The big story missed in that whole fiasco was that when that plant was cancelled, six wind projects went with it, because the wind developers were going to use the transmission infrastructure from that coal plant.

And that kept the old plants in service, because they can't take them off line to build a new plant with modern technology. When that got stopped, it insured one thing—that the old plants continued to chug along. They had to to keep the lights on.

Page: So you're saying that it's the environmentalists' fault, basically?

CC: Are we saying it's anybody's fault? Absolutely not.

Page: But the Sierra Club's opposition means that people are going to go without electricity or be stuck with old plants?

CC: There needs to be a give and take. When your policy says "no, not under any circumstances," that obviously becomes very contentious.

Page: So Kathleen Sebelius was a real inhibitor to any progress? That's the issue here?

CC: No, not at all, but that's only one instance. We can pick incidents all over the United States right now where they put up legal challenges.

And now we're back to another circular argument: we can't eliminate old coal plants, because there's opposition to building new coal plants. The assumption here is that only coal can replace coal, and while these new plants are certainly cleaner than those they replace in the sense of lowering many other emissions, they make no effort at carbon capture. None. The proposed new plants are not clean coal plants.

The real goal is to promote the building of new plants, clean or not. What they're handing out is a perfect example of what they're doing: plain old coal, with a coat of green paint.

Source / Plutoniam Page and Devilstower / Daily Kos

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