There’s a lot to ponder in this table. It strikes me as an important document – a compilation of one of humanity’s most tragic miscommunications.
You can click on it to make it bigger – large enough that you could embed it in a PowerPoint slide to discuss with your students or peers, if you so opted.
The U.S. unit of Rabobank Groep, the world’s biggest agricultural lender, created a fund to finance $50 million in residential rooftop solar-power systems installations by Sungevity Inc.
Sungevity is pursuing more than $175 million in projects, the Oakland, California-based company said in a statement. The fund announced today will finance solar systems on over 1,000 homes.
“Next year will be a big year for us after a banner year this year,” said Sungevity founder Danny Kennedy in an interview today. “We’ll continue to raise more funds through 2012.”
Residential solar energy is a “promising market opportunity and we are pleased to support its adoption in California and elsewhere in the U.S. through our new fund with Sungevity,” said Gianluca Signorelli, vice president at Rabobank N.A., in the statement.
Sungevity currently operates in Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York and has leased more than 3,000 systems.
“It’s an incredible time to be in solar as it grows and becomes more affordable,” said Kennedy, whose company has tripled its staff over the last year to more than 300.
According to the best polling data – Sungevity’s pitch is on target for consumers who are more interested in saving money than saving the planet.
I reported last week on research at the University of Illinois to pull CO2 out of air and produce useable fuels in a photosynthesis-like process.
Similar research is ongoing at Princeton – according to Yale Environment 360:
A novel experiment is taking place in the Princeton University lab of chemist Andrew Bocarsly. Like a battery, the experimental device has two poles of charged materials resting in a bath of chemical-laced water. A small tube bubbles carbon dioxide into the device, called a cell. The CO2 interacts with the charged metal coating one of the poles and, with the help of a special catalyst, begins to form bigger molecules that combine carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms.
These bigger molecules have a more common name: hydrocarbons, the molecules that make up the fuels that power the modern world — coal, natural gas and oil. And what Bocarsly and his colleagues have done is essentially reverse combustion: they have taken the byproduct of burning fossil fuels — CO2, the greenhouse gas most responsible for climate change — and transformed it back into a fuel suitable for burning.
“The dominant thinking 10 years ago was that we should bury the CO2,” Bocarsly says. “If you could efficiently convert CO2 into something that was useful you wouldn’t have to spend all that money and energy to put it into the ground. You could sort of recycle it.”
Last Week’s Offshore Wind Conference in Baltimore was aimed at raising awareness of the potential for Offshore Wind energy, in the Atlantic, and beyond.
While the TeaParty throws in the towel, Renewable Energy keeps right on cooking.
Solar Buckshot, aka Top 10 Reasons Why Solar Energy Will Win
10. A job is a job is a job.
With all this talk about green jobs, clean jobs, and other kinds of jobs — how about we just call it a job? A job that puts food on the table, pays the bills, keeps the kids in clothes, and affords the occasional family night out. And, if you subscribe to the belief that all is lost due to the Chinese PV manufacturing juggernaut, keep in mind that you can’t export the thousands of business development, sales, design, engineering, installation, and service jobs we’re going to need every year.
But opinion only matters if the data supports it. Solar is one of the only industries adding private sector jobs in our struggling economy — with 6.8 percent growth from August 2010 to August 2011, when overall U.S. job growth was only 0.7 percent and when fossil fuel generators actually cut jobs by 2 percent. It’s estimated the United States already has over 90,000 direct and indirect jobs in the manufacturing and installation of solar panels. That’s more than in either steel production or coal mining (not including transportation and power plant employment).
9. Fastest growing sector of the economy.
Growth is a good for everyone. U.S. solar photovoltaic installation increased by an impressive average annual rate of 64 percent between 2005 and 2010, with over 70 percent of the value of solar products and installations produced here at home. Solar is already up and delivering in 21 states, representing two-thirds of America’s population.
8. The voters are ahead of the politicians and the media.
Despite what you hear from political ideologues and read about in the news, Americans want more homegrown, renewable, clean energy. They want it not only because it will make the air they breathe cleaner, but because they know that competition for their money is a good thing and that economic growth will come with the continued growth of a homegrown industry. Americans are also tired of borrowing money from China to pay for energy we import from many countries that are not our friends.
7. It is about prices.
Solar energy is already affordable in many states and cities. A new report by Lawrence Berkeley Labs (LBL) shows how rapidly solar prices are falling. In its analysis, LBL shows that the average cost of installed solar photovoltaic was $6.20/watt for systems installed in 2010, falling 17 percent from 2009 and 43 percent below 1998. Prices fell an additional 11 percent from 2010 to the first half of 2011. Since 2008, panel prices alone have declined 61 percent, with 30 percent of this reduction happening this year. Large commercial rooftops systems are now being installed for less than $3 per watt DC — approaching the SunShot goals set by DOE only this year.
So in case you’ve missed it, “solar past does not equal solar present.” Solar is rapidly reaching the point where it competes with traditional energy on price — even without the kind of taxpayer subsidies that coal and natural gas have received for decades.
6. Follow the (private) money.
Even in a struggling economy, the clean energy industry drew a record $7.8 billion in venture capital worldwide in 2010, a 28 percent increase compared to 2009. Seventy percent of that world total was invested right here in North America. Solar alone received more than 30 percent of U.S. clean tech venture capital in the first quarter of 2011, indicating a maturing industry that is expected to continue growing.
5. Existing policies will make solar energy affordable for millions Americans by 2015.
As Emperor Hadrian of Rome said, “Brick by brick, my citizens, brick by brick.” In seven years, the solar industry has come a long way very quickly. Forty-three states have adopted a net-metering policy, which simply means that utilities don’t have to replace their antiquated software and hardware to accommodate homes and businesses that produce extra power they loan to the grid during peak times of the day. Consumers (homes and businesses) make money for every bit of excess solar production that they don’t use themselves. Instead, their utility buys it at the full retail rate. The small business owner, school, or family gets to pocket the difference.
File this under “Yet another in the rising tide of disasters that cannot be definitively linked to climate change”
Video Description:
Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) — Paul Gambles, managing partner at MBMG International, talks about the impact of heavy rains and floods on Thailand’s economy and financial markets. Thailand’s capital Bangkok was spared from the nation’s worst floods in more than five decades after water levels receded in provinces north of the capital and barriers protecting the city of 9.7 million people held. Gambles speaks from Bangkok with Rishaad Salamat on Bloomberg Television’s “On the Move Asia.”
Mr Gambles generously suggests that the disaster gives the Thai government an opportunity to cut back “populist promises” it has made.
The flood threat to Thailand’s capital appears to have eased but officials warn the crisis is not over, and say the economic cost of the disaster will likely be worse than first feared.
Military and civilian authorities have been battling to contain the most serious flooding in decades, which has left more than 300 people dead and seen tens of thousands of people seek refuge in shelters.
Three months of heavy rains have deluged about one third of Thailand’s provinces, chiefly in central and northern areas, with floods – several metres deep in places – swamping homes and businesses and shutting down industry.
For years, dreamers have imagined a smart grid where millions of electric cars would act as a giant back-up system, balancing energy supply-and-demand more cheaply and cleanly than today’s “peaker” stations, and offering a solution to renewable power’s intermitency. To skeptics, though, the idea always seemed fanciful–and not just for technology reasons. For one thing, why would anyone want to use their car to help a power company do its job?
Well, slowly, the vehicle to grid (V2G) concept seems to be becoming reality. And, the answer to the question is a good one: in return for their batteries, consumers could earn lots of cold, hard cash.
Last month, NRG Energy, a New Jersey power company, announced that it wanted to commercialize V2G technology developed by Willett Kempton, a professor at the University of Delaware. Kempton, who first proposed V2G in the mid-1990s, has been developing a pilot for three years, where seven cars feed power to the grid and consumers receive monthly payments.
NRG’s service, called eV2g, will consist of two elements: a bidirectional power unit, allowing power to go back and forth between batteries and grid, and an application where users can designate times when they need the car, and times when they are happy for NRG to take a battery over. “It allows the end-user to say ‘I need my car fully-charged at this time, but I can make my car available on the grid at 3 o’clock in the afternoon when prices are high,'” says Denise Wilson, president of NRG’s alternative energy services.
Before you get your hopes up too soon, though, it is likely to be two years before eV2g is offered to consumers. Among the issues NRG still has to decide on: how the customer-company communication will work; whether the application will be in cars, or on a handheld device (or both); and how much users might get paid. Wilson mentions figures of $500 to $1,000 per month–though it is unclear how many batteries would need to be aggregated before companies, like NRG, might start paying out.
Kempton has said he sees groups of 100 cars generating $25 to 35 per megawatt-hour, or 30 cents per car, per plugged-in hour. Others have forecast a return of $7 to 10 a day. Either way, NRG wants eV2g ready in time for an expected surge of about 150,000 new EVs by 2013.
Continue reading “The CashBack Car: Utility will Pay Big for Vehicle-to-Grid Power”
In a ClimateCrocks exclusive, an equal opportunity exploding head news item.
Fittingly, the video above has no sound.
Chevron Corp. (CVX), the second-largest U.S. oil company, began extracting crude from a southern California field using steam produced by a 29-megawatt solar- thermal power plant.
BrightSource Energy Inc.’s system uses mirrors to focus sunlight on a boiler at Chevron’s Coalinga, California, enhanced oil recovery project, the solar company said in a statement after extraction began today.
Solar-thermal technology companies such as BrightSource are targeting industrial users in the oil-recovery and food- processing industries as customers as well as power generation.
Chevron is using the power of the sun to increase crude production at the one of the oldest oil fields in the United States. If the demonstration project is successful, solar could eventually replace natural gas as the go-to fuel used in enhance oil recovery projects around the world.
The 29-megawatt thermal solar-to-steam facility officially launched Monday at the Chevron’s Coalinga Oil Field in the San Joaquin Valley. The field began operations in the 1890s and contains heavy crude oil, which is more difficult to extract than lighter grades. Traditionally, the oil industry will use steam generated by burning natural gas to heat the crude, which reduces its viscosity and makes the oil easier to produce. The traditional process works. It’s also extremely energy intensive, which means it’s expensive and significantly increases the carbon footprint of an operation.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse points out the obvious. Everyone on the planet with functioning brain cells gets climate change, and yet Washington has become paralyzed on the issue. Excerpts from the video transcript:
They are propagating two big lies. One is that environmental regulations are a burden to the economy and we need to lift those burdens to spur our economic recovery. The second is the jury is still out on climate changes caused by carbon pollution, so we don’t need to worry about it or even take precautions.
For instance, before the 1990 acid rain rules went into effect, Peabody Coal estimated that compliance would cost $3.9 billion. The Edison Electric Institute chimed in and estimated that compliance would cost $4 to $5 billion. Well, in fact, the Energy Information Administration calculated the program actually cost $836 million, about one-sixth of the Edison Electric Institute estimate.
When polluters were required to phase out the chemicals they were emitting that were literally burning a hole through our Earth’s atmosphere, they warned that it would create “severe economic and social disruption” due to “shutdowns of refrigeration equipment in supermarkets, office buildings, hotels, and hospitals.” Well, in fact, the phaseout happened 4 years to 6 years faster than predicted; it cost 30 percent less than predicted; and the American refrigeration industry innovated and created new export markets for its environmentally friendly products.
Continue reading “Why is Washington Completely out of Touch on Climate?”
Lovins will be a keynote speaker for this year’s Bioneers conference, saturday. The main event is held in San Rafael, CA, but broadcasts a number of the key speakers to satellite locations around the country.
I gave a well attended presentation at the Traverse City Michigan location on Friday, and hope to watch some of the national speakers on saturday. I almost always hear something that surprises, delights, and/or informs me, often from a speaker I had not heard before.
Lovins talk will be kind of a launch pad for his new book, Reinventing Fire. If you’ve seen Lovins talk in the last few years, the first half of the video above will be review – in the second half he has some more recent information, especially on electrical production.
