Is an Energy Transformation Afoot?

SunEdison

Almost immediately after we empowered Boulder to form a utility, a spate of articles appeared in the national press talking about the relative costs of coal and renewables, and the trends in those costs.  There was Krugman’s Here Comes Solar Energy Op-Ed in the NY Times, making the case that solar PV is already cheaper than coal-fired power once you remove all the subsidies we provide to both of them, and calling for the Feds to fix regulation to make that clear.  Boulder’s own RMI had a bit of commentary on Krugman’s opinion: it’d be nice if Federal regulations were saner, but even without that fix, it makes sense to build this stuff now, and will only make more sense as time goes on and the balance of system costs (which currently make up 50% or more of the cost of a PV installation) are reduced through best practices, standardization and mass production.

From the industry side, GE’s Jeff Immelt also said that federal regulation was a little beside the point now… and that even without government support GE was going all-in, expecting something like 200GW of solar to be built in China and India by the end of the decade.  That’d be a non-trivial amount of generation, on the order of 10 Three Gorges dams, or as much power as the entire US nuclear generation fleet.  Meanwhile NRG Energy, a nationwide and largely traditional fossil-fuel based independent power producer is planning to spend the overwhelming majority of its capital investment funds over the next few years on solar, mostly small utility projects (20-100MW) and distributed rooftop generation.

In the same vein, Xcel Energy’s recently filed 2011 Electric Resource Plan foresees essentially no new generation facilities being built until close to the end of the decade.  Some of this is attributable to the soft economy, but many people are saying it’s just as much a consequence of energy efficiency, demand side management, and increasing distributed (behind-the-meter) generation coming on line.  Unfortunately, Xcel added a gigawatt of coal generation to its grid last year, and this lack of demand for more energy means the company is now walking away from the transmission lines that would have enabled large-scale solar-thermal with storage in the San Luis Valley.  This means that the only way to shift Xcel’s power mix in the near future will be to accelerate the retirement of existing coal-fired generation, making room for more efficiency, wind, and solar.

The optimistic narrative that falls out of the articles above — that our energy systems are undergoing a transformation — seems plausible, and I hope that it’s true.  Certainly it’s the one that the Boulder Light and Power effort is going to be built around.  It’s comforting to see that we’re not alone on the world stage, and less daunting to imagine our job as facilitating an ongoing transformation, rather than starting one from scratch.

The Ally From Hell

The Atlantic Monthly looks at Pakistan, America’s “Ally From Hell”.  Following the raid to kill bin Laden in Abbottabad, and in the shadow of our ongoing drone war in the northern tribal regions, Pakistan has become (somewhat understandably) paranoid that we’re intent on denuking them in the event of a crisis of state.  So they’ve taken to driving around assembled tactical nuclear weapons in unmarked, unescorted, unarmored cargo vans.  The ISI takes US money, and funds various paramilitary groups which it doesn’t actually control, some of which are anti-American and end up killing US troops and disrupting our supply channels.  Both sides turn a blind eye to the mess because they can’t do without each other.  What a clusterf*ck.

Is Keystone XL Really Game over? | RealClimate

RealClimate looks at Hansen and McKibben’s statements that the Keystone XL is essentially “game over” for the climate.  All that really matters in the big picture is the absolute amount of carbon we release.  How fast or slow we do it is of little consequence, because the effects last on the order of 10,000 years.  If we’re aiming for 2°C of warming, or 450ppm CO2, and we assume that all of the world’s conventional oil and natural gas reserves are going to get burnt because they’re just too convenient, then we’re left with another 260 gigatonnes (GT) of carbon that can be released cumulatively from other sources.  The Athabasca oil sands in total contain 230 GT (close enough to call it game ending) but not all of that will be producible economically.  Even if we decide to go ahead, only a fraction of that will end up in the atmosphere.  The Gillette coalfield in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin on the other hand contains about 70 GT of carbon in total, maybe half of that eventually being exploitable.  Globally there are only 2 large tar sands deposits (the other being in Venezuela), but there’s a pretty large amount of coal… something like 800 GT of carbon equivalent appears to be economically accessible, and that’s far more than enough to fry us.  So the Keystone XL pipeline and the tar sands in general are certainly significant battles, unlocking vast amounts of carbon, but in isolation, they’re not enough to end us.  But then of course, they don’t exist in isolation.  Going ahead on these non-traditional fossil fuel projects means we at some level intend to just Burn It All.

Occupy Oakland’s Port Action

ZunguZungu’s account of the Occupy Oakland Port Action.  I really wonder how far this all will go.  It’s amazing how the informational connections we’ve created in the world are playing out.  How quickly things echo and get re-interpreted by new minds.  The derivative is still positive, so far as I can tell.

William Gibson on Writing Fiction

William Gibson talks about his writing, and sci-fi more generally, to the Paris Review.  I really should read one of his novels that are set in the present.  We live in a bizarrely science fiction world.  It’s the future, but not the one we were thinking of, and not everywhere yet.  Speaking about a conversation he might have had with someone back from our future, talking to his Neuromancer writing 1984 self:

You know how you wrote that the United States is gone and the Soviet Union is looming in the background like a huge piece of immobile slag? Well, you got it kind of backward.

I love that his futures are dirty and imperfect, not smooth and polished.  Hacked together from bits of the past, all piled up on each other like compost.

Xcel backing away from solar-thermal enabling San Luis Valley transmission

Xcel appears to be backing away from new transmission lines to the San Luis Valley.  This infrastructure is required to implement the several hundred megawatts of solar-thermal generation that they proposed in their 2007 resource plan.  Solar thermal is the only renewable power (other than pumped hydro, which has limited availability) for which energy storage is potentially feasible right now (e.g. using huge tanks of molten salt).  It’s interesting to contrast the utility’s statements on the San Luis Valley project with what they’re saying about the Pawnee retrofit, and what they said about the Comanche 3 plant.

Why Is This Cargo Container Emitting So Much Radiation?

In Genoa, Italy a radioactive cargo container appeared.  Nobody knew where it had come from, or where it was going, or what was in it.  It took a year to get rid of it.  It’s as if a pixel got stuck on, in the real world, not the digital world.  I have to imagine given how automated the container transshipping is in some ports, that you could almost treat the insertion of something like this as a software problem.  You just have to get a truck to pick it up without knowing who you are, or what you’ve loaded, and from there the 20 ton packet of reality moves, guided by a disembodied digital hand.

PLoS ONE: The Network of Global Corporate Control

The Network of Global Corporate Control, as revealed by a research group at ETH Zurich (kind of the Swiss MIT).  Their core finding: a densely connected “super entity” of 147 corporations, about 75% of which are financial intermediaries, has an amount of control which is ~10 times as great as their economic scale would suggest.  They are all majority owned by by other members of the super entity, and so have co-incident interests, and are likely to act as a bloc to protect themselves and each other, and to be subject to simultaneous group failure when under duress.  Not like this is a huge surprise or anything, but it’s nice to see it described in a quantitative framework.

Wall Street Isn’t Winning, It’s Cheating

Matt Taibbi blows his stack at a fellow commentator who accuses the OWS protestors of simply being envious of the rich.  He gives a litany of examples of how, in fact, the Wall St. illuminati have gotten to where they are by cheating and gaming the system, or at the very best, by being lucky.  Not through hard work or supernatural skill.  Being pissed off about that isn’t being jealous of someone else’s success.  At what point do the “deviant” and “legitimate” financial sectors simply merge, with little to nothing in the way of externally imposed rules governing what’s acceptable, and what’s not?

The capitalist network that runs the world

A team at the Swiss equivalent of MIT has revealed a dense knot of power and ownership interconnections within a particular subset of the world’s transnational corporations.  It will come as no surprise that these companies are overwhelming financial firms… but this is the first time that anyone has really been able to lay out the structure of this network of power that runs the world in detail, accounting for all of the subsidiary ownerships and mutual shareholding.  Tyler Durden would be inspired.  The research paper will be published in PLoS One here Real Soon Now.