Washington County, Iowa, is populated by Mennonite and Amish farmers who raise hogs and cows, the kind of place where Donald Trump took more than 56 percent of the vote in last year’s election.
It is also a hotbed of something Trump voters aren’t usually enthused about: solar power. The local utility, Farmers Electric Cooperative, keeps selling out of it. Every time that Warren McKenna, the general manger, makes a new offering of shares in what he calls a “socialized garden,” they get snapped up.
Washington County isn’t the only deep-red community with a strong demand for solar. The community solar array is almost fully booked at Bandera Electric Cooperative, in the heart of Texas Hill Country, an area dominated by ranchers who voted for Trump by a margin of nearly 80 percent. The same goes for the San Miguel Power Association, which serves a swath of southwest Colorado made up mostly of Trump-aligned ranchers, miners and drillers.
What’s going on here?
In a strange turn of events, some of the most rural and conservative parts of the country are where solar adoption is growing the fastest, brought about by a liberal-sounding sales structure called community solar. Rural electric cooperatives love it, which is ironic. These small utilities fought for years against being lumped into state renewable energy portfolios, but now realize that solar could aid in their stability — and even their survival.
The idea behind community solar is simple: Build a large solar array and sell or lease shares of it to members of the community. Count the electricity it creates against the subscribers’ monthly power bills.
“It wasn’t an issue of whether it was green or not,” said a hog farmer outside Kalona, Iowa, who signed up for two shares of community solar but didn’t want to weigh in on the political question or let a big-city reporter use his name. “It just made economic sense.”
The solar cognoscenti usually talk about community solar as a tool for the city the suburbs. It could help the poor trim their power bills, or allow apartment dwellers to participate in clean energy. But city-based utilities and their regulators have been slow off the mark. Only 13 community-solar programs exist at investor-owned utilities and 22 at municipal utilities, according to data from the Smart Electric Power Alliance. Continue reading “In Red States, Solar Flares and Wind Rises”
Month: September 2017
Wasted!: Anthony Bourdain Movie on Food Waste
Not more than a decade ago, the push to end food waste was not an issue many people followed. The focus on wasted food came primarily from think tanks and activists. Momentum has grown behind the movement though, and today the hundreds of millions of tons of food wasted around the world have a much brighter spotlight on them. That spotlight is thanks, in part, to some of the biggest names in the food world—people like Dan Barber, Massimo Bottura and Anthony Bourdain among others—who helped bring the public’s attention to the problem. And the issue’s march into the mainstream continues today with the release of the trailer for Wasted! The Story of Food Waste, a documentary featuring all three of those chefs that had a successful premiere at the Tribeca Film Festivalthis spring,.
Besides the trailer, which you can see below, Zero Point Zero, the company that made the film with help from the Rockefeller Foundation, also announced a release date. Wasted! will appear in select cities as well as video on demand services on October 13.
In the trailer, Bourdain, who helped produce the film, says he was circumspect about the project when he first heard about it. “I hated it,” he says. “It’s so serious.”
Continue reading “Wasted!: Anthony Bourdain Movie on Food Waste”
Florida: Is the Party Over?
Will Irma be the last straw? or will it take a few more, larger storms of the future?
Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker:
Harvey was less lethal than Katrina; as of this writing, forty-six storm-related deaths have been confirmed. But in financial terms the storm’s costs are likely to be as high or even higher. One estimate put the price of repairing homes, roads, businesses, and the petrochemical plants that line the Houston Ship Channel at a hundred and ninety billion dollars. And that estimate was made before storm-damaged plants started to explode.
As misguided as the Bush Administration was about climate change, Donald Trump has taken willful ignorance to a whole new level. The President has called climate change an “expensive hoax” dreamed up by the Chinese. After much posturing, he announced in June that he was withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord. With less fanfare, he has rolled back Obama Administration regulations limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from both old and new power plants and from oil and gas wells. (Regarding the wells, a federal appeals court recently ruled against the White House, saying that it could not simply suspend the regulations.) Trump also revoked a 2013 executive order directing federal agencies to prepare for the impacts of warming and tossed out a plan, issued the same year, that outlined steps that the U.S. would take to combat climate change.
Then, just ten days before Harvey hit, the President rescinded a 2015 executive order requiring public-infrastructure projects in flood-prone areas to be designed with sea-level rise in mind. This move is likely to have particularly unfortunate consequences for Houston, a city with no zoning code, where thousands of buildings constructed on floodplains but lacking flood insurance are now filled with soggy debris. Last Monday, as rainfall totals in Houston were topping forty inches, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told Congress that he was planning to eliminate his department’s special envoy for climate change.
If property values start to fall, Cason said, banks could stop writing 30-year mortgages for coastal homes, shrinking the pool of able buyers and sending prices lower still. Those properties make up a quarter of the city’s tax base; if that revenue fell, the city would struggle to provide the services that make it such a desirable place to live, causing more sales and another drop in revenue.
And all of that could happen before the rising sea consumes a single home.
As President Donald Trump proposes dismantling federal programs aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions, officials and residents in South Florida are grappling with the risk that climate change could drag down housing markets. Relative sea levels in South Florida are roughly four inches higher now than in 1992. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts sea levels will rise as much as three feet in Miami by 2060. By the end of the century, according to projections by Zillow, some 934,000 existing Florida properties, worth more than $400 billion, are at risk of being submerged.
Irma Update: Thursday September 7
A Win for Climate Science: Judge Rules in Favor of NOAA Researchers
Lauren Kurtz for Climate Science Legal Defense Fund:
In January 2017, CSLDF filed a brief asking the federal District Court for the District of Columbia to protect National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) climate scientists. On August 21, the D.C. court upheld NOAA’s decision not to release its climate scientists’ research documents to the conservative group Judicial Watch.
In the case, Judicial Watch sought to use the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which allows U.S. citizens to request copies of government documents, to obtain NOAA scientists’ emails, drafts, and peer review comments related to a June 2015 paper published in Science. The study, which is also known as the “Hiatus Paper,” found that recent ocean surface temperature increases were greater than those indicated by other peer-reviewed studies, thus refuting the idea of a “pause” in global warming.
The scientists’ findings did not sit well with Judicial Watch, which doesn’t agree with the science of climate change. Judicial Watch sued for the NOAA scientist’s documents; the organization’s president claimed that the requested materials “will show that the Obama administration put politics before science to advance global warming alarmism.”
NOAA produced some of the documents Judicial Watch requested, but withheld others, arguing that the “deliberative process privilege” protected these documents. The deliberative process privilege allows for the denial of a FOIA request if it can be shown the requested government documents involve materials that are “predecisional,” meaning written as part of the decision-making process, and “deliberative,” meaning involving consultative give-and-take. The rationale for this privilege is to safeguard preliminary documents that, if released, could prevent candid collaboration and open discussions among agency employees.
NOAA argued the privilege exists to protect the sort of deliberative materials that are the heart of the scientific process. “In pursuing a research objective, scientists may begin with only a rough idea, and then develop, test, and revise that idea as data is collected and interpreted. Possible interpretations are generated and tested in part through candid debates and exchanges among peers. Indeed, the exchange and debate among peers is the mechanism that allows NOAA to ensure its scientific products are robustly developed and accurately tested.”
Continue reading “A Win for Climate Science: Judge Rules in Favor of NOAA Researchers”
This is Big. Batteries Edging Out Gas Turbines on Price.
One reason mainstream predictions for the uptake of solar energy have been historically so wrong, is that they were always predicated on the high price of solar panels for the average business or homeowner.
What was missed was that solar didn’t have to be the cheapest source of energy at the beginning, all it had to do was start beating out the most expensive sources – which in the utility world, are the “peaking” units that produce power during the highest demand hours of the year. These units, which sometimes are run only a few days, or a few hours a year, represent the highest cost part of the electric grid system.
About a decade ago, a milestone was crossed for solar energy when PV solar installations in California started beating gas turbine peaker plants on price.
Sounds wonky, but what it meant was that, now there was a clear, unsubsidized market rationale for increased deployment and production of solar panels in the largest US market – meaning economics of mass production could take over, and we would see a massive drop in the price of that tech. Which, now we have.
Similar dynamic now happening in battery storage technology.
When it comes to renewable energy, Minnesota isn’t typically a headline-grabber: in 2016 it got about 18 percent of its energy from wind, good enough to rank in the top 10 states. But it’s just 28th in terms of installed solar capacity, and its relatively small size means projects within its borders rarely garner the attention that giants like California and Texas routinely get.
A new report on the future of energy in the state should turn some heads (PDF). According to the University of Minnesota’s Energy Transition Lab, starting in 2019 and for the foreseeable future, the overall cost of building grid-scale storage there will be less than that of building natural-gas plants to meet future energy demand.
Minnesota currently gets about 21 percent of its energy from renewables. That’s not bad, but current plans also call for bringing an additional 1,800 megawatts of gas-fired “peaker” plants online by 2028 to meet growing demand. As the moniker suggests, these plants are meant to spin up quickly to meet daily peaks in energy demand—something renewables tend to be bad at because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine.
Storing energy from renewables could solve that problem, but it’s traditionally been thought of as too expensive compared with other forms of energy.
The new report suggests otherwise. According to the analysis, bringing lithium-ion batteries online for grid storage would be a good way to stockpile energy for when it’s needed, and it would prove less costly than building and operating new natural-gas plants.
The finding comes at an interesting time. For one thing, the price of lithium-ion batteries continues to plummet, something that certainly has the auto industry’s attention. And grid-scale batteries, while still relatively rare, are popping up more and more these days. The Minnesota report, then, suggests that such projects may become increasingly common—and could be a powerful way to lower emissions without sending our power bills skyrocketing in the process.
Vestas began working toward combining wind power with energy storage since 2012 when it paired its 12 MW Lem Kaer wind farm in western Denmark with two lithium-ion batteries, one a 1.2 MW, 300 kWh system and the other a 400 kW, 100 kWh system.
The Danish company stepped up those efforts at its general meeting in April when it announced it wanted to focus on energy storage.
Vestas is now working with about 10 different companies to come up with an integrated wind turbine-plus-storage solution that would make wind power attractive for a wider array of use-cases by making the energy more dispatchable.
“Across a number of projects, Vestas is working with different energy storage technologies with specialized companies, including Tesla, to explore and test how wind turbines and energy storage can work together in sustainable energy solutions that can lower the cost of energy,” the company said in a statement to Bloomberg.
The partnership with Tesla is also likely to spur sales of batteries and improve economies of scale for manufacturers like Tesla. And it’s not the first time the electric car manufacturer is pairing its battery packs with wind. Earlier this year, wind developer Deepwater Wind announced it would pair a 144 MW offshore wind farm with a 40 MWh battery storage system from Tesla.
Vestas is the leader in wind turbine market share, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s February rankings. A total of 8.7 GW of Vestas turbines were installed in 2016, representing 16% of all onshore installations, according to BNEF. General Electric took second place in the rankings with 6.5 GW of turbines installed.
Wind Turbines Weather Harvey, while Irma will Shut Nuclear Plants
Most vulnerable point for any kind of reliable energy going forward is the antiquated US power grid.
A resilient power grid will increasingly rely on distributed power generation, less likely to be knocked out by an extreme weather event, terrorism, or the odd mechanical glitch.
Energy firm Florida Power & Light (FPL) said on Wednesday it could shut its four nuclear reactors in the path of Hurricane Irma before Saturday if the storm stayed on its current path.
“Based on the current track, we would expect severe weather in Florida starting Saturday, meaning we would potentially shut down before that point,” spokesman Peter Robbins said in an email.
The company, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Inc, is watching the weather and would adjust any plans as necessary, Robbins said.
The trajectory of Irma, a Category 5 storm with winds of 185 miles per hour (295 km per hour), is uncertain. Irma, which the U.S. National Hurricane Center said was the strongest Atlantic storm on record, was expected to pass near or just north of Puerto Rico on Wednesday before scraping the Dominican Republic on Thursday.
FPL operates the St. Lucie nuclear power plant on Hutchinson Island, a barrier island on the Atlantic about 55 miles (88 km) north of West Palm Beach. Two reactors generate 2,000 megawatts of electricity, enough power to supply more than 1 million homes.
It also operates Turkey Point nuclear power station on Biscayne Bay, about 24 miles south of Miami. That has two reactors that generate about 1,600 megawatts of electricity, or enough for about 900,000 homes.
Robbins said the plants were designed to withstand extreme natural events including hurricanes and serious floods.
Wind farms are generally engineered to withstand up to Category 3 hurricane-strength winds. Even though Hurricane Harvey struck the Texas coast as a Category 4, no wind turbines were destroyed by the storm’s winds. Why not? In coastal Texas, there are just over 2,000 megawatts of wind power capacity already installed. However, three projects representing 389 megawatts faced the worst of Hurricane Harvey – Harbor Wind (9 MW) on the north side of Corpus Christi, and the Papalote Creek I/II sites (380 MW, total) in San Patricio county. Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas as a Category 4 storm, with winds exceeding 130 miles per hour. It took six hours for Harvey to move 30 miles across Corpus Christi and Arkansas Pass, pummeling the area with Category 3 and Category 4 winds.
Continue reading “Wind Turbines Weather Harvey, while Irma will Shut Nuclear Plants”
New Video: The Path Post-Paris
Experts outline the increasing momentum that the renewable economy is gaining, despite Republican efforts to deny climate science and keep the US from leading the greatest industrial revolution of the new century.
I spoke to veteran journalist Keith Schneider, one of the sharpest and most perceptive observers of the renewable scene globally, as well as Dan Kammen of the University of California, Berkeley, and Andy Hoffman at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.
Garrison Keillor on Red States, Blue States, and Disasters
Garrison Keillor in the Washington Post:
The Republic of Texas believes in self-reliance and is suspicious of Washington sticking its big nose in your business. “Government is not the answer. You are not doing anyone a favor by creating dependency, destroying individual responsibility.” So said Sen. Ted Cruz (R), though not last week. Sunday on Fox News, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said Texas would need upward of $150 billion in federal aid for damage inflicted by Harvey. The stories out of Houston have all been about neighborliness and helping hands and people donating to relief funds, but you don’t raise $150 billion by holding bake sales. This is almost as much as the annual budget of the U.S. Army. I’m just saying.
I’m all in favor of pouring money into Texas, but I am a bleeding-heart liberal who favors single-payer health care. How is being struck by a hurricane so different from being hit by cancer? I’m only asking.
Houstonians chose to settle on a swampy flood plain barely 50 feet above sea level. The risks of doing so are fairly clear. If you chose to live in a tree and the branch your hammock was attached to fell down, you wouldn’t ask for a government subsidy to hang your hammock in a different tree.
President Ronald Reagan said that government isn’t the answer, it is the problem, and conservatives have found that line very resonant over the years. In Cruz’s run for president last year, he called for the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service. He did not mention this last week. It would be hard to raise an extra $150 billion without the progressive income tax unless you could persuade Mexico to foot the bill.
Similarly, if a desert state such as Arizona expects the feds to solve its water shortage, as Sen. Jeff Flake (R) suggested recently, by guaranteeing Arizona first dibs on Lake Mead, this strikes me as a departure from conservative principles. Lake Mead, and Boulder Dam, which created it, were not built by Lake Mead Inc., but by the federal government. The residents of Phoenix decided freely to settle in an arid valley, and they have used federal water supplies to keep their lawns green. Why should we Minnesotans, who chose to live near water, subsidize golf courses on the desert? You like sunshine? Fine. Take responsibility for your decision and work out a deal with Perrier to keep yourselves hydrated.
Arizona is populated by folks who dread winter and hate having to shovel snow. In Minnesota, we recognize that snow is a form of water and that it’s snowmelt that replenishes the aquifers. So we make a rational decision to live here. A warm, dry winter is a sort of disaster for us, but we don’t apply to Washington for hankies. If we made a decision to live underwater on a coral reef off Hawaii, we wouldn’t expect the feds to provide us with Aqua-Lungs. If we chose to fly to the moon and play among the stars and spend spring on Jupiter and Mars and we got lost out there, we wouldn’t expect NASA to come rescue us. Get my drift here?
Continue reading “Garrison Keillor on Red States, Blue States, and Disasters”
Irma update for September 6
Video of Hurricane in action below