Green Options

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For renewable energy to be competitive with coal, natural gas, nuclear, and oil, it needs to be cost effective and reliable. Energy storage is key to achieving this.

Here’s why:

Lower Cost of Renewable Energy

High prices are one of the largest barriers facing renewables. Storage can help overcome this because not all watts are created equal. During peak demand on the electric grid, electric companies will pay more for electricity. Often the additional power needs at this time are supplied by natural gas or oil, which have higher fuel costs, yet can produce electricity at a moment’s notice. The opposite is true during times of low demand, when electricity costs are lower. Solar energy tends to correspond with these price fluctuations by generating large amounts of electricity during times of peak demand.

This is because air conditioning loads are largely responsible for increased electric demand. People tend to crank up the a.c. when the sun it out. Wind energy and other renewable energy sources however don’t necessarily correspond as closely. Storage will allow these energy sources to be fed to the grid during the most lucrative times.

Despite the myriad recent examples of positive news in the alternative energy world, it’s important to remember that harmful non-renewables aren’t losing any ground. According to the US Department of Energy, 258 gigawatts of new generating capacity are needed to meet an expected 40% increase in consumption by 2030, and coal companies are stepping up to meet this need.

In the US, 17.5 gigawatts of coal-fueled generating capacity are under construction, and 7.3 more gigawatts are on the way.

My name is Rod Adams. I am addicted to my fossil fuel powered vehicles. (The accompanying photo was taken in July 1986.)

I thought it might be worth taking a few minutes to remember that people who developed internal combustion engines were not people focused on selling fossil fuels, they were people interested in solving a very real challenge - energy storage and delivery on a moving vehicle. When all factors are taken into account, fossil fuels provide a compact, lightweight form of energy that can be readily converted to power in device that is moving - sometimes very rapidly and without any connection to the earth.

There are certainly times in all of our lives when we feel like the big oil companies have us over a barrel, but their dominance came as a result of the high performance that their product gave to automobiles, trains, trucks, ships and aircraft. By many measures, their product remains the best technical choice available.

Rolls Royce and British Airways Announce Joint Research Venture

The aviation industry is facing unprecedented growth in fuel costs and growing pressure to curb emission levels. As a result, research programs, joint ventures, and public-private partnerships have all been launched to come up with new forms of jet fuel. Rolls-Royce and British Airways are the most recent companies to announce a research partnership to study the feasibility of dramatically expanding the use of the alternative fuels.

Jet fuel (kerosene) now ranks as the third-highest petroleum product in demand and its growth rate outpaces that of GDP. Kerosene is the current fuel of choice for jet fuel because It is widely available and can tolerate a wide range of temperatures. The demand for kerosene on the global market has caused its price to double in the last 12 months alone. Growth in demand for kerosene is being driven, in part, by a growing culture of mobility and its transportation fuels byproducts in the rapidly growing economies of Asia, but also because of the added pressure of American military fuel consumption in the Iraq war. As global energy consumption is predicted to grow 50 percent by 2050, the aviation industry is wising-up to the notion that fuel prices are not coming down any time soon.

T. Boone Pickens has captured America’s attention with his PickensPlan for energy. He recently testified in front of the US Senate and provided them with some excellent information about oil and gas depletion, asked repeatedly for them to continue supplying the Production Tax Credit (PTC) and described how there were perfectly located corridors in the US that were the “Saudia Arabia” of wind.

He has been running advertisements on major media outlets describing a clear challenge - America now sends $700 Billion across its borders every year to purchase oil.

Pickens has a plan to reduce that number and he intends to share the details of the plan during the coming weeks. He has been an oilman all his life; that has made him a strong believer in Peak Oil.

Click the image above to hear Richard Branson, head of Virgin Atlantic Airways, talk about his commitment to develop “clean fuels” for aviation. Back in 2006 Branson said he’d put 100% of Virgin’s future profits, or $3 billion over the next 10 years, into fighting global warming. That includes $1 billion earmarked for [...]

Billings, MT plays host to three petroleum refineries, which fuel the local economy. I was fortunate to receive an invitation from the American Petroleum Institute to come out as their guest and tour the ConocoPhillips refinery and meet a few of the local citizens to hear their thoughts on big oil.

Out of the three refineries located in Billings, one has a very unique story and position in the world of refining. The ConocoPhillips refinery is the first Energy Star certified refinery in the world (two years in a row). Not bad for an industry that is not highly regarded in public opinion given the current prices we are paying at the pump, but sustainability and environmental factors actually rank very high on the list of priorities for this tightly run operation.

Not only is ConocoPhillips the most energy efficient and least polluting out of the three, it was also the first to form a Citizen’s Advisory Council comprised of community members unafraid to speak up about their concerns with having a refinery located in town - the most prevalent, of course, being air quality control.

Stepping off of the plane (from LA granted), the air in Montana is crisp and clear, which is amazing given the fact that there are three refineries that are emitting sulfur and CO2 among other elements into the air. However, even walking around the Conoco plant, it was hard to smell any evidence of “refining” going on. The community members that I got to speak with (including Stella of local Stella’s Kitchen and Bakery fame) excessively praised the efforts of the Conoco team for this reason and for the EPA air quality reports (which I’ll post on later) showing ConocoPhillips leading the pack in terms of lowest amounts of Sulfur Dioxide and other irritants.

Utah has been a second home to me for nearly 20 years. In fact, as I write this, I am looking forward to spending a week at our house near Park City for the upcoming holiday. The state has also long been home to silver mines that continue to taint the local water supplies and force residents to install double osmosis filtering systems just to have potable water.

Public lands within the Utah region and elsewhere have been a longtime target for oil drilling and government granted leases but always with the understand that wilderness and public lands in close proximity to national parks were typically off limits. That is, until the Bush administration decided to green light drilling near national parks in Moab, Utah in 2002. Although park scientists protested that the national parks could take decades to recover from the shock waves caused by local oil derricks, the administration claimed that parks would “barely notice changes,” according to a New York Times article published on February 8, 2002.

In February of this year, proposed oil drilling in the Great Salt Lake region was met with great resistance from residents and local and national environmental groups, such as The Friends of the Great Salt Lake and the Wilderness Conservancy who at the time I wrote this had received nearly 10,000 signatures in protest of the drilling from around the world.

Editor’s Note: Today we are happy to bring to you a guest post from Sean Casten, CEO and President of Recycled Energy Development.

Americans have a habit of framing our scientific history as a series of Great Inventors, from Eli Whitney to Thomas Edison to Afrika Bambaataa. The history books say each was prodded by Adam Smith’s invisible hand to come up with the great technological advances that have made our country a home of innovation.

There’s a problem with this mythology: sometimes there’s no invisible hand. Sometimes short-sighted government regulations give preference to bad technologies over good ones — stifling innovation and blinding us to our own ability to make progress.

Nowhere is this mythology more evident than in our energy system, the most heavily regulated and subsidized industry in the country. A host of bad regulations have made this system grossly inefficient, contributing both to global warming and to high power costs.

Solar energy currently generates .1% of the electricity used in the U.S. According to a study released today, this will change rapidly as the cost of electricity increases and the cost of solar energy drops.

The Utility Solar Assessment Study produced by Clean Edge and Co-op America finds that solar energy is already reaching cost parity with conventional sources in some areas of the U.S. where electric rates are highest. By 2015, this will be achieved in many more areas, including Boston, San Diego, and New York. By 2025, cost parity will be achieved throughout the U.S.

The implications of this are huge. The U.S. solar photovoltaic market now relies heavily on state incentives to lower the cost of solar energy. Many people utilize solar energy because it is “the right thing to do” or businesses like the positive publicity solar brings.

There was a time when commercial shipping was an emissions free transportation mode that required little or no fuel. Inventors, craftsmen, and engineers all worked to refine the hulls, sails and control systems and skilled people spent their entire careers figuring out weather patterns, determining efficient loading schemes, and recognizing opportunities for transporting goods with a long shelf life. When things went well, owning sailing ships was a lucrative investment.

Of course, there were some limitations of that technology that encouraged a number of very smart, number crunching businessmen and engineers to look for a better way. Sailing ship limitations included time consuming voyages, space and weight constraints, inability to maintain a schedule, dependence on poorly paid or forced labor, vulnerability to numerous natural hazards, and a high mortality rate caused by lack of good nutrition and clean water.