The Energy Blues

On Friday, Austin Energy set a new all time peak demand record, 2,628 megawatts (MW), "power sufficient for about 525,000 homes during very hot weather with associated air conditioning," according to Austin Energy's blog. The peak occurred between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. with the temperature at 104 degrees. The previous all-time record was set last June at 2,602 MW.

Texas also set a new all-time peak record yesterday, the fourth over the last three weeks. Peak demand for ERCOT, the electric grid for most of Texas, was 65,715 MW. The state peak occurred between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m.

AE this week announced a volume purchase of 2 MW of volume solar to be installed on public buildings at $1.85 per watt. These will be track mounted panels, 235-watt rated. AE made a similar purchase last summer for $2.98 per watt. The price has dropped almost 50 percent in one year due to improved manufacturing techniques and silicon, says AE.

Will Elliott's school house rock with solar?

Energy ... You can get it by dammin' up a river
Energy ... A windmill can make the breeze deliver
But even with millin' and dammin'
Our needs are so much more demanding
For energy ... We have to use some kind of fuel.

Carbon Stalks the Neighborhood

I asked a Grist member whom I trust to vet an idea I had for personally getting involved in my local community in regard to climate change. He didn't endorse it. So, I'll likely let it go.

It's hard to remain recumbent in the face of impending catastrophe. It's difficult to listen to intelligent, well-meaning friends speak about the banalities of daily life given what I know to be the inexorable outcomes of geophysics. It would be something akin to living in Herculaneum, amidst the bustle and pleasures of daily urban routines, with the foreknowledge of events to come.

Friends talk about raising kids up with the character and skills they'll need to fit into the world. Understandable. They're only creatures of history. Lost to so many of them is the tragedy that the world will not be fit for their kids.

Our Fate Didn't Rest with the 2010 U. S. Senate

"Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for ... what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs and by right-wing politicians and think tanks? I have a much simpler but plausible ‘conspiracy theory’: the fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: “Have they no grandchildren?"

The quote above is by Jeremy Grantham, American investor and Chairman of the Board of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo (GMO), a Boston-based asset management firm. GMO is one of the largest managers of such funds in the world, having more than US $107 billion under management as at December 2009. Grantham is regarded as a highly knowledgeable investor in various stock, bond, and commodity markets.

As I've said before here, I think that big money likes to live in a reality based world. To the list we can add Beluga Shipping which has discovered it can save $300,000 per ship by transiting its container vessels over the melting Arctic. We can add the Pentagon, which broke with the Bush administration on the factual reality of climate change and now considers it serious enough to include its main strategic planning document, the Quadrennial Defense Review.

I could pile on other institutions (the CIA, the National Academy of Sciences) and governments (Saudi Arabia and Russia, of all places) and businesses (the property insurance sector and the C. I. C. E.) and power brokers (John Doerr, Bill Gates, James Hanson), but at the end of the day, if all the evidence of the kind that I find persuasive does not start to get a wider public audience, than it is a reasonable proposition that future generations will lose the Blue Planet.

For those who believe for whatever reason that we need to move to a low-carbon energy economy, none of the above answers the question, what now? 2010 has been a miserable year for climate watchers. First Copenhagen, now the U. S. Senate. There are opinions about where to go from here. Ill link to some of the more interesting and influential ones.

Bill McKibben, "How to Create a Real Climate Change Movement"

Shapiro, et al. "What did the Climate Bill Die?"

National Journal, "Can the U. S. Keep Up in the Clean Energy Race?"

The following is extracted from a panelist editorial at the National Journal. Mr. Muro's assessment and proscription is dead-on.

Energy Innovation -- Now What?

By Mark Muro

Fellow and Director of Policy, Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings

So, the flickering chimera of a climate bill centered on a cap-and-trade system finally flickered out last week -- perhaps for a long while.

Which is really troubling. Instead of an economy-wide carbon pricing system or even a utility sector-only one, the nation will be lucky to obtain from Congress some modest oil-spill response measures, some oil industry regulatory responses, and some incentives for home energy efficiency retrofits and natural gas vehicles. No major energy efficiency standards seem in the offing. No new renewable energy standard seems on the docket. And as to any other of the dozens of powerful ways to begin accelerating the transition to a clean energy economy in which clean energy becomes cheap, well they are not here or at all forthcoming.

Meanwhile, competitors forge ahead with regulations, incentives, creative financing tools, and strategic investments designed to capture the Silicon Valley of the next, low-carbon economy.

So where do we go from here? Some alternative ways forward remain, but none with such broadly catalytic p...

So, the flickering chimera of a climate bill centered on a cap-and-trade system finally flickered out last week -- perhaps for a long while.

Which is really troubling. Instead of an economy-wide carbon pricing system or even a utility sector-only one, the nation will be lucky to obtain from Congress some modest oil-spill response measures, some oil industry regulatory responses, and some incentives for home energy efficiency retrofits and natural gas vehicles. No major energy efficiency standards seem in the offing. No new renewable energy standard seems on the docket. And as to any other of the dozens of powerful ways to begin accelerating the transition to a clean energy economy in which clean energy becomes cheap, well they are not here or at all forthcoming.

Meanwhile, competitors forge ahead with regulations, incentives, creative financing tools, and strategic investments designed to capture the Silicon Valley of the next, low-carbon economy.

So where do we go from here? Some alternative ways forward remain, but none with such broadly catalytic potential to change habits and investment calculi across the economy, and none alone likely to win the United States the clean tech race.

Stronger federal and state regulatory efforts will be one way forward. Here the EPA looks poised to play a significant role at the national level, but piecemeal regulations and patchwork of state efforts won’t create the sort of stable investment environment that the transition to a clean energy economy requires. Using government and especially Department of Defense procurement more strategically to increase demand for low-carbon solutions and accelerate deployment could serve as another lever too.

And now more than ever the federal government must pile onto clean tech innovation with large R&D investments. The nation badly needs a new push for energy system innovation that seeks countless efficiencies but also triples to quintuples today's anemic baseline level of federal energy innovation R&D. Expert consensus suggests that federal government should invest at least $15 billion a year in federal energy R&D. Cap-and-trade was never going to solve the nation’s and the world’s energy challenges alone. The federal government still needs to ramp up support for investment and research in new, breakthrough technologies that can radically reduce the carbon-intensiveness of the economy and make clean energy cost-competitive.

However, it bears saying right now that the demise of cap-and-trade only underscores the urgency of locating the significant, dedicated revenue streams needed for clean energy investments, research, deployment, and transition costs if the U.S. is not to miss out on the clean energy economy entirely.

Some will most regret the loss of the best chance we may have had for several years to raise the price of carbon emissions and so stimulate new and cleaner behavior across the economy. However, at least equal to that disappointment is the loss of a top candidate for generating the needed innovation revenue—tens of billions of necessary investment money. And the longer term costs to national prosperity of this dithering on climate, energy, and innovation matters—while other countries rack up first-mover advantages in technology after technology—are likely as grave as yet unknown.

Don't you Know, Talking About a Revolution Sounds. . . .

This from Bill McKibben today, via TomDispatch:

McKibben asks us to "Try to fit these facts together:"

* According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the planet has just come through the warmest decade, the warmest 12 months, the warmest six months, and the warmest April, May, and June on record.

* A “staggering” new study from Canadian researchers has shown that warmer seawater has reduced phytoplankton, the base of the marine food chain, by 40% since 1950.

* Nine nations have so far set their all-time temperature records in 2010, including Russia (111 degrees), Niger (118), Sudan (121), Saudi Arabia and Iraq (126 apiece), and Pakistan, which also set the new all-time Asia record in May: a hair under 130 degrees. I can turn my oven to 130 degrees.

* And then, in late July, the U.S. Senate decided to do exactly nothing about climate change. They didn’t do less than they could have -- they did nothing, preserving a perfect two-decade bipartisan record of no action. Senate majority leader Harry Reid decided not even to schedule a vote on legislation that would have capped carbon emissions.

Well, the point is obvious. So, then what? McKibben continues:

"I wrote the first book for a general audience on global warming back in 1989, and I’ve spent the subsequent 21 years working on the issue. I’m a mild-mannered guy, a Methodist Sunday School teacher. Not quick to anger. So what I want to say is: this is fucked up. The time has come to get mad, and then to get busy."

I highly recommend McKibben's piece today It's a launching point for action. It raises questions for me. Will getting mad get 60 votes in the Senate? Who will respond to McKibben's facts or his anger? Or mine? How torqued up do we need to get? How busy? It's time to think seriously about how social change works in America, not in the abstract, but in the world as it really is. This is not Rachel Carson's America (and Bill McKibben is not Rachel Carson). The media landscape that amplified the groundswell of concern over pesticides and swamped the efforts of the chemical industry to discredit Carson and silence her message is no longer in place. Public trust in the integrity of journalism is at an all time low. More Americans get there "news" from Fox cable and neo-con radio, which get their programing scripted through conservative opposition research. Where does plain speech and passion get you in this landscape?

In sum, do we even have a path to affect change through consciousness raising in time? Time is the key element. I'm skeptical. If we do, fine. But if we movement build, as seems to be McKibben's ralling cry now, what is the probability of success? Is climate like past environmental fights? Is it like past progressive fights? Does it lie within the American Experience, or is it a-historical, outside any generation's experiences? Do we necessarily have to have the public on board before the federal government acts? American history isn't an unbroken narrative of Constitutional decorum. We've had command economic moments in American history. We've had Executives defy the Courts and the Congress, and the courts and the congress deferred/caved when Executive said that national security was at stake.

You can almost here Ricardo Montalban, "Time is a luxury you don't have, Bill."

Lighter Elements

1) Structuralists Get No Love

When the economy goes South, so does concern for climate change. A University of California Study notes that Google Searches for terms like “climate change” rise and fall with the business cycle. And, “When the Economy Falters, the Pews Fill,” so says another economist with spreadsheets to make his case. All this new data to recapitulate Dr. Abraham Maslow's “Theory of Human Motivation,” published 1943. Oh, and old men Marx and Weber must have been on to something too.

2) Priorities in Pictures

So when unexpected danger approaches at breakneck speed, do you run or grab for your camera bag?

3) The Bard of Wascilla

Former governor, future president, Sarah Palin, made up a word this week in a tweet to her followers, "refudiate." Refudiate, which is obviously a blend of the root words refuse and ate. Ms. Palin first deleted her word about 30 mins. after first posting it. Later she did a shout out to Shakespeare and said that really it was just homage to his greatness that compelled her to do her part in keeping English a "living language." She's into linguistic organic cultivation. I can dig that. But, as Peter Sagal quipped, Sarah Palin does have one thing in common with Williams S. Just like Shakespeare, half of of America can't understand what the other half of America sees in her.