Carbonless Paper

100 Gigawatts of Wind and We’re Just Getting Started

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 10:21:53 -0500

johnnyapple@mac.com

During the past ten years electricity generated by wind has increased more than twelvefold globally from less than 7.5 GW in 1997 to more than 100 GW as of April 2008. That’s a lot but not nearly enough. By 2012 it is expected to increase further to more than 240 GW and by 2020 the EAWA estimates that global capacity will reach 1,000 GW. Terawatt by 2020 ought to be the industry slogan. So how did we go from an impractical pipe dream a decade ago to the fastest growing energy segment?

Once early obstacles relating to generator reliability and blade design were overcome, wind turbines became economically feasible and the industry took off. Once wind energy became competitive with traditional fossil fuel power plants it was kind of a no-brainer. In fact, a recent study by the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) shows that adding 5.1 GW of wind turbines costs moderately more up front but when fuel prices are factored in (and these were 2007 fuel prices) wind farms became more cost effective in just under 3 years. Wind turbines have a life rating of about 25 years so over the serviceable lifetime the wind farm saves tens of billions of dollars in fuel costs. After factoring manufacturing, transportation and construction a typical turbine is carbon neutral in just 9 months. Assuming a 25 year service life that makes wind energy 97% clean.

Commercial wind turbines have also become a lot larger than they were ten years ago. The largest have a blade of over 400 feet in diameter and a total height of over 650 feet. Such large towers are capable of generating 6 MW of electricity. That’s enough to power about 3,000 U.S. households. More common sizes are in the 1 to 3 MW range. It’s also good economics for many farmers who are able to lease a half acre of land to the turbine owner for $3,000 to $5,000 per year. That same half acre would typically yield less than $200 in crops. Understandably, farmers like wind farms, and heck, they even look cool.

There has been valid concerns regarding blade strikes killing birds and bats but recent studies show this to be a very limited problem. In particular, the huge turbines being installed today are much further above the ground. In addition the density of blades and rotation speed are less. The Altamont Pass Wind Farm near Livermore, California was built in the early 1980’s and has had as many as 6,000 smaller wind turbines. This is a dangerous place for migrating birds. These are now being replaced by much larger and more efficient towers. The bird strike rate in a recent study in Minnesota determined a strike rate of one to two per year per turbine. Far more birds are killed by automobiles, aircraft and plate glass windows. Every environment and migration pattern should be evaluated before large scale installations occur but I’m convinced it isn’t a significant problem. I honestly believe that we’ll kill a lot more birds and other wildlife by not taking advantage of clean wind energy.

The U.S. is behind many of it’s European friends in wind energy production but making significant improvements. Texas, California, Minnesota and Iowa are currently the biggest producers. Texas is the green star state in recent years with about 4.4 GW online today and at least that much more planned for the next few years. If turbine manufacturers can catch up with demand the U.S. will soon become the leader in wind energy production. That is fitting since we’re by far the world’s largest energy consumer.

A remaining challenge for the wind energy industry is the simple fact the energy production is not constant. Of course, wind speeds vary by time of day and time of year. There is some interesting research being done for efficient ways to store excess energy to be retrieved during peek loads and low wind conditions. I’ll have more to say about that in an upcoming story.

Happy Earth Day - and congratulations world on our first 100 gigawatts of wind power.

Bush-Cheney to Spend Final Days Curing Climate Crisis

Tue, 1 Apr 2008 17:13:51 -0500

johnnyapple@mac.com

The Carbonless Paper has obtained what is believed to be a draft of President Bush's Earth Day speech. It appears that he and Vice President Cheney plan to spend their last months in office pushing through proposals to combat global warming and the Nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.
The centerpiece of their proposal calls for lower income Americans to spend their tax rebate checks on air conditioners and a requirement for all Americans to run their air conditioning units at full blast for two hours every day with the windows wide open in order to help cool the outside, too.
To combat swelling oceans the administration will propose that all limits to whaling be eliminated because whales take up a lot of space and eat too much. A plan to restore whale populations once the oceans stop rising involves storing whale eggs in a mountainside cave in Norway.
The President will point out his own personal efforts to combat climate problems by pointing out that he has installed a lake at his Crawford ranch and that his parents installed one of those big fan things at their summer retreat in Kennebunkport, ME. In addition to those big fans they will propose that electricity-generating exercycles be installed for inmate use at Guantánamo Bay to combat climate crisis and terrorism at the same time.
The President will propose an additional $15 billion for bio fuel research with an emphasis on using livestock excrement. He admits that it will be a significant challenge to train cows to poop into gas tanks but firmly believes it is a hurdle we must overcome. It is expected that sheep will be easier to train. There are no plans to include chickens or turkeys during the research phase.
According to side notes, Mr. Bush would also like to add a healthcare package to the deal. He’s pushing for free Beano™ for all Americans with the goal of limiting methane emissions. He’s also working with leaders in Nation’s near the equator to form a plan to organize an event where all of their citizens jump into the ocean at the same time and paddle really fast to speed up the day. “Less Sun, less heat, check with Cheney on this one.”
Finally, the President will propose that all forms of birth control be “illegalized”. The theory being that humans are made up of 80% water so the more people storing water, the less water there is pouring into the ocean. A side benefit to this proposal is that the more people there are the more people there will be to pay taxes and the less each person will have to pay.

Penguins, Polar Bears and Positive Feedback Loops

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:44:36 -0500

johnnyapple@mac.com

As much as I would appreciate kind and encouraging words in the comment section below, “positive feedback” when we’re talking about the global climate crisis is not a good thing. Within the past few days a gigantic sheet of ice the size of Connecticut has begun to crumble and fall into the Antarctic Ocean. There have been many similar events during the past ten years. As each ice shelf fails the ending result is that it’s likely to magnify the problem of warmer oceans and an accelerated loss of polar ice. Positive feedback in the case of global warming is a self-feeding, self-accelerating problem.

Bright white polar ice sheets reflect 90% of the sunlight light that reaches it back into space. Open sea on the other hand absorbs 90% of that sunlight and compounds the problem of warming oceans. When ice shelves break apart they can no longer reflect the Sun’s energy but will now absorb it, warming the ocean water further thereby increasing the the likelihood of additional ice shelf failure. Every year the polar oceans will be warmer, take longer to freeze in the winter and melt more quickly in the spring. It’s a self-feeding cycle. It is no longer something we can point to as a future possibility, it is happening right now. Ice shelf failure does not directly add much to sea level rise because most of the ice mass is already a part of the global oceans. Ice shelves float.

Land based ice from Greenland is a very different story. Increased melt water in Greenland is seeping to the bedrock below, lubricating the underside of thousands year old glaciers and causing them to slide into the ocean at a much faster pace. The amount of land-based, fresh-water ice spilling off of the coast of Greenland has more than doubled in the past few years. The most recent data I’ve seen puts the volume at 52 cubic miles per year. More data could postulate this to be a natural climate cycle but I’m doubtful. I’m doubtful and concerned.

The loss of polar ice is affecting our furry friends first. Polar Bears have adapted over thousands of years to thrive in the icy conditions of northern Canada and Greenland. They have evolved to depend upon year-round arctic ice and need it for their survival. In recent years many of them, after diving in for a quick meal, are coming back to the surface to find that there’s no chunk of ice to climb onto for an after dinner nap. They swim for hours trying to find a resting place and eventually tire and drown.

On the other side of the globe our flightless friends face a similar threat. The King Penguin was nearly wiped out one hundred years ago by sailors who used their fat as heating oil. Once allowed to recover, the species thrived and is today a healthy population. Recent studies however show them to be quite vulnerable to warming ocean temperatures. In years when the water was just slightly warmer their food supplies diminished and the rate of mortality increased substantially. This now thriving species could vanish within a decade if ocean temperatures continue to rise. Nature is talking to us and it’s not a good message.

Another positive feedback problem is the thawing of permafrost. The permanently frozen soils in Alaska and Siberia have been storing organic material for thousands of years. As the soil thaws that organic material decays, thereby releasing additional CO2 which contributes to more warming which leads to more thawing. That’s a positive feedback loop with a negative consequence. A solemn irony of permafrost loss is that it could lead to structural problems on the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline. Much of the pipeline’s foundation depends on the frozen soil for support.

There is a serious risk that at some point the cycle becomes unstoppable. Some believe we are already at or nearly reaching that point. I don’t know if we are or not but I firmly believe that the time to start taking this matter seriously has already past. That’s why I talk about irrigating 150,000 square miles of desert and keep a strait face. Technology largely got us into this mess and I believe technology is going to have to get us out. We have the know-how and money right now to be doing a much better job of caring for our planet. We need more folks like John Doerr and Al Gore leading the charge. We also need elected officials willing to do more than simply acknowledge the problem while shying away from passing laws to make real change happen.

Sand, Salt and Survival

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:53:33 -0500

johnnyapple@mac.com

Around the world tropical rain forest is being destroyed in the interest of expanding agriculture and our ever growing need for lumber. Compounding the problem is the fact that nature, with plenty of help from humans, is rapidly expanding the earth’s deserts. The massive loss of plant life reduces the planet’s natural ability to absorb CO2 -- not to mention the huge amount of CO2 released in the process of clearing that land.

One of many things that can be done is to reclaim desert. Can we call it de-desertification? Libya recently completed the Great Man-Made River Project which extracts approximated 2 1/2 cubic kilometers of fresh water per year from The Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System. Most of the water is pumped to supply water for the northern costal cities of Libya. Some of it is used locally to irrigate the desert for agricultural use. The crop circles (pictured above) are 250 acres each. I count about 200 of them for a total of about 50,000 acres or 78 square miles. At the current rate of extraction it is estimated to contain 65,000 year supply of water, so there is room to expand the project.

Not all desert regions are quite so fortunate and suffer from limited or no available ground water. Desalination is another possible solution. Currently the world’s largest desalination facility in the United Arab Emirates has a capacity of 300 million cubic meters per year. That is enough to irrigate about 100,000 acres of crop land at an annual rate of 30 inches. Let’s consider the possibility of building 1,000 of these facilities. What are the pros and cons?

These projects can and should be scattered throughout the planet at locations where they are most likely to succeed. To get a sense of the scale I’m talking about, 1,000 plants of that capacity could irrigate a 25 mile wide patch of land stretching from Gambia all the way to the Nile River. That’s the entire western and northern coasts of the Sahara Desert. That sounds like a lot of desalination plants and it is. There are currently 13,000 in operation worldwide and the majority of them have much smaller capacities. For comparison however, there are 50,000 active coal fired power plants worldwide and 20,000 more needed in the next 20 years to meet growing energy needs.

Of course, irrigating deserts with purified sea water has it’s own problems. I’ll cover each of these problems in more detain in future entries. For now I will list them and present some generalized possible solutions. One problem is not sucking the oceans dry. If my idea were implemented it would not even come close to keeping up with annual sea level rise.

The first is the cost to build them. The cost to build 1,000 large scale plants and the infrastructure to support them would likely exceed $500 billion. That’s a lot of money, about what it costs to conduct an unpopular war for a few years. If this were a 20 year project the annual need would be about $25 billion. On a global scale that really isn’t a lot of money and there are logical and fair methods to make it possible. One commonly suggested method to pay for developing solutions like this is trading carbon credits. We must also consider that the crop value, based on average dollar yield per acre in the U.S., would be in excess of $100 billion per year. All of those crops need to be harvested, processed and transported, adding to the economic value. These large scale projects could provide a great deal of economic growth to areas of the wold that need it the most.

The next problem is that desalination requires a lot of energy. I think the obvious solution is to power these project entirely by solar and wind farms. With fossil fuel energy costs soaring, the cost of renewable energy is becoming more attractive. And, let’s face it, deserts have a lot of sun and a lot of wind.

Then we’ve got to figure out what to do with all of the removed salt. It came from the sea so pumping it back in shouldn’t be a problem, right? It is however because currently it’s being returned to the sea at high concentrations in a very small area. The salt return systems need to spread out the discharge over much larger areas. Some of the excess salt could also be stored on land in areas where geologically there is no chance of contaminating ground water supplies. I’m not sure of the feasibility of that solution and will look into it in much more detail soon.

The bottom line is this. Not only do we need to reduce the amount of CO2 we’re producing but we’ve also got to find ways to remove some of the excess we’ve already released. This is a big problem and it requires big solutions -- many of them. Let’s talk about it, share ideas and start taking action.

iFund's John Doerr, Green is the New Money

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 08:24:03 -0500

johnnyapple@mac.com

Venture capital guru John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is famous for recognizing and funding some of the most promising new technologies. In addition to the recently announced $100 million iFund, John has been a key player in funding start-ups such as Compaq, Netscape, Intuit, Amazon and Google, just to name a few.

Another high tech market where he
sees enormous potential is green
technology. In addition to seeing the
investment potential, John is
personally passionate about the
subject. He and his partners have
been pumping hundreds of millions
of dollars into green tech start-ups,
bravo! TED 2007 - "Not Enough" is
a recent talk by John about green
tech. There are links to more talks
on his profile page at KPCB.

John likes to follow up Alan Kay's quote "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" with his own realization, "the second best way is to fund it." Wow, a guy with lots of cash and lots of influence is beating the drum for a cleaner world. Isn’t that refreshing?

One developing green technology that I'm particularly interested in is biofuels. Some would argue that it still involves burning fuel for energy -- that is true but let me explain my position. Biofuel developed from land based crops have come under recent scrutiny, and for good reason. The vast amount of agricultural land needed to develop a meaningful volume diminishes the overall environmental benefit and diverts land use from growing food, to growing fuel. Other research involves the use of organic waste such as wood chips and livestock excrement. This wouldn’t involve any additional crop land and is worth looking into.

Some recent and very promising research involves developing biofuels from algae. The yield per acre is 30 times that of land based crops and algae can thrive in harsh conditions. One logical application is to feed energy plant smoke stack emissions through algae ponds to absorb carbon dioxide, thereby significantly reducing the CO2 output of that plant. A carbon tax on coal burning energy plants, for example, would provide the incentive necessary to encourage the installation of such systems.

The combined CO2 emissions of the coal power plants and the burning of biofuel is cut nearly in half. That's a huge amount. The venture capital side of the coin is to fund and develop these technologies to make money and create jobs. If there's nothing to gain, this stuff can't get off the ground. The United States private sector has plenty of cash to fund the research if there's a reward at the end. That, plus certain necessary regulations by the government, is what it is going to take. Another benefit to the U.S. being a leader in developing this technology is that we'd be more likely to agree to international mandates (Kyoto Protocol for example), because we'd be positioned to benefit from large export potentials.

I see the best use initially for biofuels in commercial transportation such as diesel trains, tractor trailers and jets as well as a replacement for home heating oils. As the technology improves and the cost moderates, hybrid electric bio diesel automobiles become a more attractive option.

We need the economic incentives in place, in both private and public sectors, for this industry to truly blossom. My first entry opened with a few words on John Doerr. I think he’s got the right idea. In today’s world, developing the technology for clean and renewable energy needs to be a business, and a profitable one. The United States accounts for more than 22% of the worlds annual CO2 emissions. Per capita, our output is more than three times that of our European Union counterparts. As a leading polluter, it’s only natural that we take the lead in researching and funding solutions for this serious environmental problem.

Biofuels are just one of many solutions. I’ll be looking into others in the weeks and months ahead and would appreciate your feedback and links to more information. I hope to spark some polite debate, share information and critique each others opinions. This is an important discussion, so let’s talk about it.