Minnkota Power not happy about climate change

Minnkota Power, a generation/transmission cooperative serving electricity consumers in northwest Minnesota and eastern North Dakota, is not happy about climate change and they want their customers to know about it, every other month. A review of their customer newsletter, the Minnkota Messenger, indicates a consistent concern that climate change is a massive environmental sham. Some of it reads like grocery store tabloids and it’s quite interesting how much coverage they give to it, perhaps hoping that quantity will make up for quality. They might do well to read “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic.”

• Nov/Dec 2007, p6 - “A Developing Catastrophe”

• Sep/Oct 2007 - break

• Jul/Aug 2007, p9 - “Global Warming: The Rest of the Story”

• May/Jun 2007 - break

• Mar/Apr 2007 - break

• Jan/Feb 2007, p9: “Polar Bears and Climate Change”

• Nov/Dec 2006 - break

• Sep/Oct 2006, p6: “A shaky foundation”

• Jul/Aug 2006, p6: “Another Perspective: Noted scientist weighs in on climate change issue”

• May/Jun 2006, p10: “Political Science: New film puts climate change in headlines”

• Mar/Apr 2006, p10: “Myth: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate.”

• Jan/Feb 2006, p10: “An astonishing discovery: Recent finding underscores cautionary approach”

• Nov/Dec 2005 - break

• Sep/0ct 2005, p11 - “A hurricane of misinformation global warming activists turn storms into spin”

• Jul/Aug 2005, p6 - “Earth’s ever-changing climate state geologist offers his perspective”

• May/Jun 2005, p12 - “Alarmist warning; Myth: Carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere are currently at an all-time high.”

• Mar/Apr 2005, p11: “Baliunas debunks Kyoto Protocol”

• Jan/Feb 2005, p12: “Myth: Global warming caused the recent tsunami in Sumatra.”

And the list goes on…

Nuclear Revival and Leaded Gasoline

The website “Damn Interesting” has a great article on the history of Thomas Midgley and leaded gasoline, who might be considered a scientific pariah for inventing both leaded gas (health effects) and CFCs (ozone effects). In “The Ethyl Poisoned Earth” we learn that the health effects of lead were well known in the 1920’s and 1930’s, as corporate types continually lied to the public over and over and over, covered it up over and over and over, and influenced political attempts to address it over and over and over. Sound familiar? (DDT, global warming, smoking, etc)

And the Utne Reader has an article, “Atomic Dreams,” which talks about the revival of the nuclear industry in light of global warming and some arguments that it’s a necessary evil to deal with global energy needs.

Talking Jesus Is From China - Is He Made of Lead?

 

The genius that is capitalism and religion have paired up to offer the Talking Jesus doll at Wal-Mart and Target (Source). Indeed, I just heard about it on NPR…

Of course, the easy media angle is whether Jesus will out compete traditional toys, i.e. will kids play with it? Some even call it the next religious Tickle-Me-Elmo. Whatever…too easy. Softball news garbage. The next easiest controversy is whether it’s some kind of heresy to make a Jesus doll in the first place. Another whatever.

What I immediately thought of is whether Talking Jesus was made in China, whether he was made of plastic (PVC - poly-vinyl-chloride), and if he would be dogged by the lead controversy.

Wouldn’t that be fitting? It’s cheap toy crap, no matter what veil you put on it…And the religious do-gooders couldn’t think ahead of short-term cheapness.

In fact, he is made of PVC and is made in China. I can’t answer the lead question without an independent laboratory test, but it wouldn’t surprise me one bit…The toy recalls for plastic toys made in China are an obvious source to base that on (NYTimes).

Who cares about PVC? Well, to start it’s not exactly safe to produce (Building Green). And PVC can contain phlalates to make it flexible/pliable, which course aren’t very good to ingest, ala BPA plastic concerns.

This isn’t new, just newly discovered. A few years ago I bought a measuring tape at Target that was plastic and a sticker on the box, saying it contained lead and I should wash my hands after using. I returned it.

So how about it? Can someone test Jesus to see if he’s made of lead?

 

A CitizenRE Competitor (but no FREE! solar)

[Update 1/8/08: Helio Micro is now moving into the residential PPA market, creating a third residential PPA style company.  Their website is more murky than Sun Run (below), so you can't evaluate much of anything (which always causes me pause), but they just hired a finance director from SunPower (Solarbuzz article).   To my knowledge, none of the three has installed a system under this model...yet.  Remember: hype (!) = cover-up.  This will happen in California first and then trickle elsewhere - don't hold your breath.  NJ just voted to provide rebates to everyone on the waiting list, but not anyone new as they transition to a market incentive, which is good in the long run, but creates market uncertainty now (article).  So their market attractiveness to this model is on hold.]

According to a news release on Renewable Energy Access, CitizenRE now has a competitor in the residential solar-leasing services industry (of which there are no documented installations as of yet). It isn’t FREE! but I predict they’ll beat CitizenRE to the punch in having actual solar installations…

Borrego Solar, a solar installer since 1980, has a partnership with Sun Run LLC and is now offering a similar solar-leasing product to CitizenRE, but they have a bit of realism embedded in their business plan. It is currently only available in Contra Costa County, California on a pilot basis (not EVERYWHERE for ANYONE!).

Essentially, they install a solar system on your home and if it offsets your electric bill 50%, you pay 50% to your electric company at their prices and 50% to Sun Run at their prices, which are either fixed or declining.

Sun Run’s website has some information about the process on their website (no contracts or clear costs persay) and there are two options:

1. Higher downpayment with a fixed 20 year solar rate

2. Lower downpayment with a higher but declining solar rate

The solar rate they give in their example, shows the higher down payment of just over $16,185 (not FREE!) and a solar rate of 13.5 cents/kilowatt-hour, which seems expensive but California has high rates (actually, even in Maryland, I pay 15 cents/kWh). It should be noted that the $16K down payment is still $20K less than buying it yourself, based on their math.

Before solar, this example home pays 26 cents/kWh to the electric company, and after, they pay 17 cents/kWh to the electric company (since they’re now in a lower rate tier with solar because they are consuming less) and 13.5 cents/kWh to SunRun at a 20-year fixed rate.

If electric rates never rose, you would break even on this investment over 20 years if you used over 23,000 kWh/yr, not counting the cost of money (that’s a lot - I use 3600 kWh in DC). So, you are really banking on electric rates rising to recoup your up-front investment on a quicker basis, and using a lot of electricity (but cut your electric bills first!).

The second option doesn’t have an example on their website, but would be something like paying $8,000 up front and your solar rate being 18 cents/kWh in year 1, and declining to 13 cents/kWh in year 20, when conventional electricity prices are presumably much higher. Ultimately, the economics are probably the same for either option for the company but gives the homeowner the option to make a choice on the amount up-front.

On it’s face, this sounds like a much more reasonable alternative to CitizenRE:

• No hype
• Actual employees
• Financial numbers that are realistic (not FREE!)
• Pilot program to prove the model
• Working with an established solar company
• Limiting the scope to states/markets that make sense

There are only a few places where some combination of electric rates, amount of sun, and solar incentives make this possible - California, New Jersey (when they aren’t running out of incentive money), maybe Arizona, Nevada, or New Mexico. Hawaii has sun and rates but not incentives. The East Coast has high rates, some programs, but less sun. Colorado’s sunny and has incentives, but the rates are a bit too low (and they may run out of $/motivation soon if they aren’t careful by growing too fast).

Like with all things, if it sounds like a silver bullet, things are almost always more complicated than they seem. I know nothing about either of these new companies, but on their face, the programs have a measure of realism to them that CitizenRE never had (note past tense).

As has been pointed out in the past, this is only “new” because it’s being done on homes, which are higher cost per amount of solar installed. Large business no-cost solar systems are a common part of the solar industry in California and New Jersey already.

This provides an interesting reference for how much CitizenRE would have to further reduce costs to get to their goal of a $500 down payment and solar across the country. Just to operate in California, they’ll have to deal with the over $15,000 they’re not getting from the customer, and in other states, the lower electric rates and solar resource. My original 3 part series on CitizenRE can be read here - “Not All That’s Renewable Is Green - Part 1 of 3″.

“They Tried to Teach My Baby Science”

From the Onion…

Solar Energy vs. Wind Energy Advertising Smackdown

Those darn Europeans! They’ve gone and created melodramatic renewable energy commercials!

Power of the Sun (Bronze Medal Clio Award Winner)

(Apparently Solon has gotten negative feedback that the batteries look too much like bombs, aka terrorism attack.)

Power of the Wind (“Golden Lion” Winner at the Cannes Advertising Festival)

(Honestly, the wind one would be a lot better if they closed with a helicoptor pan of the “wind guy” on top of a wind turbine raising his arms in victory to more strongly tie the link.)

Renewable Energy Might Not Help Global Warming

Isn’t that a loaded title? But if that’s what it takes to get your attention…

I’m going to show you a pollution policy slight of hand…How renewable energy helps global warming when there aren’t any greenhouse gas regulations, and doesn’t when there are…Impossible? Read on.

Most people think global warming is bad and most think that renewable energy is at least one solution to it. But it really depends on the regulatory framework that a government implements.

One of the most popular is called “cap and trade,” which was wildly successful at reducing sulfur dioxide from coal power plants, i.e. acid rain. Essentially the government tells industry the total amount of carbon emissions in tons that they can emit and allocates a proportional amount to each power plant as “emission permits,” either through historical generation data, an auction, or some other method. If you emit 100 tons in a year, you have to have 100 tons of permits at the end of the year. If you were allocated 75 tons of permits, you have to either reduce your emissions 25 tons by adding new technology or buying permits from someone else who reduced theirs. If you don’t, there’s a penalty, usually a fine. And the cap theoretically goes down every so often, leaving less emissions permits. Those that want to innovate can and those that don’t, don’t have to. It’s not free - industry still has to pay for the reductions somehow - but it allows the cheapest options to oversave and sell their permits to the more expensive options. Making your plant more efficient, using renewable energy, or if allowed, preserving forest in Costa Rica could all be options with different costs. Genius.

But here’s the catch with renewable energy (or energy efficiency for that matter) - under a traditional cap and trade system, the carbon emissions are the same regardless of whether there were 0 wind turbines or 5000. The emissions are capped and the carbon savings are resold as permits to someone else so they can emit their carbon. One of the big questions, is who should own the permits, the wind facility or the coal plant? But that’s a policy decision, not a technical one. Of course, you get more energy to work with (extra electricity, natural gas, or whatever) that was freed up by the carbon-free wind turbine, but the emissions will still happen. Under a cap and trade system, renewable energy makes us more carbon efficient but doesn’t reduce carbon more than would have already happened.

In a carbon-only regulatory framework, if wind energy is a cheap carbon-saving option, it will still happen, bringing all those lovely value-added economic development benefits. But you’ve probably heard of these state requirements that 10% of electricity be from renewable sources in various places - renewable portfolio standards (RPS). This is a totally separate requirement from a carbon one, at this point. There’s almost always a similar permit trading mechanism (they call them credits though) - someone can overgenerate their renewable energy sell it to someone who undergenerated. Wind energy that is the cheapest renewable resource would get installed.

If a wind turbines constructed for an RPS can count toward a carbon-cap and trade, the result is the same amount of emissions regardless - the “cap” is the limit. The usually set by some compromise between politics and science and will lower the levels of emissions in a predictable pattern over time. This effectively sets the carbon permit prices at the incremental cost of the wind energy over the wholesale cost for the RPS portion of the carbon reductions.

But if they don’t count and an RPS is over and above the cap and trade limit, those additional wind turbines are saving carbon - cap + RPS. You would have wind turbines being built, some of which are saving carbon and some of which aren’t, depending on where the “permits/credits” are applied.

That’s the nutshell version. There are a lot of legal frameworks that have to get developed to figure out who owns what under what regulatory regime. I’ve heard of an idea in Britain to create a cap and trade system for the average consumer…You get an electronic card and have to use it to deduct carbon from your carbon account when you buy gas, use electricity, etc. If you run out, buy more from the “market” or do without. This seems awfully complicated for the average consumer and would probably make them resent global warming more than their concern cares for it, if not for the very visible costs it creates (if it happens at the industry level and prices rise, it’s more hidden and can be blamed on other things like weather, market speculation, etc).

Does this mean we shouldn’t install wind turbines? No. Under a cap and trade, they would make us more electricity efficient - we’d get more electricity for the same amount of carbon, which is a good thing. Think of them as one of many options for allowing more electricity for the same carbon. But the level of carbon wouldn’t actually be reduced any more than normal. Of course, there could be a day shortly where wind energy is implemented because it’s cheaper and provides a nice portfolio diversification for electricity generation that provides a measure of risk management. That’s what we ultimately want in the end.

Resource: Implications of Carbon Regulation for Green Power Markets (National Renewable Energy Lab, 2007)

My Cat Meowed About Global Warming On NPR

It’s not often you get on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” and it’s probably even less often that your cats do too…

NPR is running a series called “Climate Connections” and this particular story was about trying to find the United States’ biggest greenhouse gas polluter. I signed up for a voluntary government greenhouse gas tracking program a few years back (”Count Me In” is a story I wrote about it for Grist.org), which led the NPR reporter to me since I was one of 2-3 regular people in the whole country who signed up with the likes of Ford, Pepco, BP, and IBM.

The best part about the story is that my cats were mentioned and one of them even meows for the story…

Click Here (listen around the 1:40 mark)

What’s kind of ironic about the voluntary greenhouse gas tracking system is that the government hasn’t signed up to report its emissions. If George Bush would like to start, I can help them calculate the White House’s emissions, and maybe they can challenge Al Gore to a climate reduction contest…

Gas Prices Too High? Pay Yourself 14 cents per mile to walk…

It’s interesting to hear people complain about gas prices…

Greenbelt (Maryland) is about 14 miles from downtown DC.

If someone gets 25 miles per gallon, it takes 1.12 gallons of gas and at $3.50/gallon, that’s $3.92.

If someone walks or bikes those 28 miles, they’re paying themselves 14 cents/mile versus gas. How many people would walk a mile for 14 cents? Anyone? What if gas cost $7/gallon, would you take 28 cents/mile to walk? I didn’t think so.

How many people waste $3.92 everyday on bottled water or coffee?

If someone takes the Metro it costs $6.20 round-trip.

The whole gas system is like one big drug addiction. I hope that gas prices keep on rising…otherwise there’s no reason to quit and changing over the next 5-10 years is a lot less painful than going cold turkey when the entire society is involved. And burning gas is such a poor use - plastics, drugs, fertilizers, and basically everything else that makes life convenient comes from oil.

Does your Toyota Prius subsidize my Chevy Tahoe?

This isn’t exactly news, since I’ve seen the idea published before, but it surely bares repeating…here’s the logic:

1. In the United States, all car companies have to achieve a “fleet” miles-per-gallon average for vehicles weighing less than 8,500 pounds, called the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. For reference, the Chevy Tahoe is less than 8,500 lbs, while the Ford Excursion is not.

2. Cars and trucks are treated separately and have different standards - 27.5 mpg for cars and 20.7 for “trucks.” Trucks are defined as anything where the seats can be folded or removed to create a flat cargo space, so a minivan and some station wagons are actually trucks. The truck standard is going up over the next few years to 23.5 mpg by 2010 (Source).

3. If you buy a more efficient car or truck that exceeds the standard, it saves you some money (bravo) and personal carbon dioxide emissions (hurrah), but it also helps the manufacturer sell a less-efficient car without penalty, i.e. not global carbon dioxide emissions. CAFE is a “teeter-totter” policy - they have to meet an average and anything above the average helps anything below the average. So at a societal level, your choice doesn’t save any gas to the world, just you personally, since the less efficient car will make-up for what you save. Ultimately this was a political compromise so that it was a company-wide average and not a prescription for each car.

4. So to answer the question, your Toyota Prius does not subsidize my Chevy Tahoe (I don’t actually own one) because cars and trucks are treated separately and only within the same company. Almost all (if not all) of Toyota’s cars exceed the standard already so your Prius doesn’t really subsidize their other cars to much extent. But your Chevy Aveo does subsidize a Chevy Corvette, and so on.

But wait, there’s more!

5. Auto manufacturers get a CAFE credit of 1.25 if the vehicle is “alternative-fuel capable.” As far as I can tell, a 20 mpg gas-only car is rated at 25 mpg as an E85-gas car (a 1.25 credit). (There are some natural gas vehicles, but this largely means E85 vehicles, of which there are millions.) Honestly, this is a big loophole because although they make the E85 cars, they have done relatively little to make sure there is E85 fuel available for them to use. Some say the loophole should just be cut off, but that would largely strand the only alternative to gasoline available to retail consumers. Minnesota has over 300 E85 stations (www.cleanairchoice.org) and it’s an interesting market experiment to try to sell something other than gas to the average person. A better alternative would be for the auto manufacturers to get the credit, only after they can verify that fuel has been offset. This would obviously be complicated. Related to alternative fuel vehicles, hybrid vehicles don’t qualify under the definition, so the manufacturers don’t get extra mileage credit for their use (just the actual mileage rating).

And one more time!

6. The Toyota Prius is the poster-child for fuel activism right? But here’s an interesting conundrum…Society saves more gas by someone making the choice of a slightly more efficient SUV or minivan than they do a really more efficient Prius. Here’s how…The average consumer driving a Prius at 50 mpg isn’t likely to switch from a Tahoe at 15 mpg. More than likely, the new Prius owner drove a Camry, Corolla, Civic, etc at 30 mpg average. Similarly, the Tahoe driver isn’t jumping the SUV ship. But getting that Tahoe driver into a more efficient SUV, or making SUVs into hybrid vehicles, is just as good as making small cars into hybrid vehicles. Watching the math…

10,000 miles of driving per year

Civic @ 30 mpg to a new Prius @ 45 mpg (+15 mpg) saves 111 gallons of gas per year

Minivan @ 20 mpg to a more efficient minivan@ 25 mpg (+5 mpg) saves 100 gallons of gas per year

The lesson? We need to focus on bringing up the inefficient rear as much or more than we work on pushing the high mileage edge.