Front page of the Business section of the New York Times today notes that old incandescent bulbs aren't fading away; they're. . . evolving.
Why is that? Pressure from CFLs is one piece. But the real push came from the Big Bad Gummint, in the Federal Energy Bill of 2007.
The feds set energy efficiency standards that appeared to make the demise of the incandescent bulb inevitable--starting in 2012, tightening the final screws in 2014. Two years later (and three years early), there's an incandescent bulb on the market that already meets the standard.
This is interesting in that it belies the constant yammering on the right that gummint has no place “interfering in the market.”
Okay, so what what you want is the withdrawal of all subsidies, giveaways, and tax incentives given to the hydrocarbon industries, right?
Hello? Hello? He hung up. I wonder why he hung up.
It's a weird kind of adolescent-doesn't-want-to-clean-her-room argument: “I'll do it as soon as you stop telling me to do it--in my own way, in my own time!”
But when you come back the next day, the pile of damp towels on the floor is even higher.
I don't think regulation is The Answer. But when they talk about “market forces,” a key part of what that means is action to define, and consistently enforce, the parameters of what is and is not acceptable, in both commercial and environmental terms.
I had thought the 2007 bill banned incandescents (and I thought that was the way to go; I stand corrected). Turns out, instead, the bill did what the free marketeers always say they want: set the bar and let the market compete to produce cost-effective solutions.
It has started to do so. Doubtless, we will now begin to see Republicans, en masse, lauding freemarket greentech solutions.
Hello? Hello. . . ?
In other news: I wonder how this happened. It's a mystery. . .
Showing posts with label global climate change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label global climate change. Show all posts
Monday, July 6, 2009
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Bigger Better Power Grid? Maybe Not
The US electricity grid has been attracting a lot of attention lately—and even some new funding, including some folded into the recent federal stimulus bill. Why not? It's old, it's creaky, it's unreliable; it's been suffering from insufficient investment for a couple of decades now.
Particularly if we are going to make increased use of alternative fuels and renewable energy sources—like wind and solar—it makes sense that we should be upgrading the ability of the national system to store energy, to move it around efficiently, to enhance real-time communication and meaningful data sharing, between both utilities themselves and between utilities and their customers. The grid needs to be bigger, stronger, and smarter.
Or does it?
Let's start with “bigger.”
I worked in data communications for most of the 1980s, which was a lot like working for a power company. Most of what I did had to do with installing or maintaining terminals that were hardwired to centralized mainframe—Big Iron—computers. When you needed computing power, you plugged in to this utility—and hoped that the system was up, that there weren't too many other users, that no one was doing anything computationally intensive.
Then came the IBM PC, in 1981, and the first Apple Mac, in 1984. Pretty soon, you had more computing power on your desk (in your cell phone, in your watch) than it had taken us to reach the moon.
The build-out of global computer and communication networks has added a huge degree of resilience to our access to computing power. I'm not connected to one machine by one wire. While network problems occur all the time, they are largely invisible to us. The broadband connections that we use are dynamic and, for the most part, “self-healing.” If I have problems with my computer. . . well, we have more computers than people in my house—or there's my office, or the library, or Kinkos.
Mainframe computing hasn't quite died. But it has certainly diminished in importance.
So why should I get my power from a central location?
I would suggest that this has more to do with “installed base,” entrenched interests, and habit, than it does with an objective assessment of how best to provide electricity to the country.
We're told we need a bigger, newer, “reinforced” power grid to do things like move wind energy from the plains and solar energy from the deserts to cities on the coasts. I'm not sure about that. Distributed power production has many of the same benefits inherent in distributed computing. We might do better to have power markets and collectives than to rely on the benevolence of industrial conglomerates (recall Enron and Grandma Millie).
I'd like to see solar shingles—or thin film photovoltaics—as the only thing we ever put on southern facing roofs, going forward; retrofitting, certainly for government buildings, would also make a fine jobs program. For residential power, coastal areas could supplement this with offshore wind and wave energy. Cheap availability of wind power in the middle of the country might be just the incentive we need to revive American industry.
A smarter grid does make sense to me (or a smarter network of smaller power networks, loosely interconnected). Every building ought to be producing, as well as using, energy. A number of systems have been developed to use the batteries in electric cars for energy storage and load balancing. In a system designed at MIT, for example, your car would make ongoing calculations about when to enter the electricity market, as either a buyer or a seller.
It has been said that we are asking a 19th century power grid to deal with 21st century problems, and that the answer is to upgrade this older technology.
Perhaps we should instead adopt, or develop, 21st century solutions.
Particularly if we are going to make increased use of alternative fuels and renewable energy sources—like wind and solar—it makes sense that we should be upgrading the ability of the national system to store energy, to move it around efficiently, to enhance real-time communication and meaningful data sharing, between both utilities themselves and between utilities and their customers. The grid needs to be bigger, stronger, and smarter.
Or does it?
Let's start with “bigger.”
I worked in data communications for most of the 1980s, which was a lot like working for a power company. Most of what I did had to do with installing or maintaining terminals that were hardwired to centralized mainframe—Big Iron—computers. When you needed computing power, you plugged in to this utility—and hoped that the system was up, that there weren't too many other users, that no one was doing anything computationally intensive.
Then came the IBM PC, in 1981, and the first Apple Mac, in 1984. Pretty soon, you had more computing power on your desk (in your cell phone, in your watch) than it had taken us to reach the moon.
The build-out of global computer and communication networks has added a huge degree of resilience to our access to computing power. I'm not connected to one machine by one wire. While network problems occur all the time, they are largely invisible to us. The broadband connections that we use are dynamic and, for the most part, “self-healing.” If I have problems with my computer. . . well, we have more computers than people in my house—or there's my office, or the library, or Kinkos.
Mainframe computing hasn't quite died. But it has certainly diminished in importance.
So why should I get my power from a central location?
I would suggest that this has more to do with “installed base,” entrenched interests, and habit, than it does with an objective assessment of how best to provide electricity to the country.
We're told we need a bigger, newer, “reinforced” power grid to do things like move wind energy from the plains and solar energy from the deserts to cities on the coasts. I'm not sure about that. Distributed power production has many of the same benefits inherent in distributed computing. We might do better to have power markets and collectives than to rely on the benevolence of industrial conglomerates (recall Enron and Grandma Millie).
I'd like to see solar shingles—or thin film photovoltaics—as the only thing we ever put on southern facing roofs, going forward; retrofitting, certainly for government buildings, would also make a fine jobs program. For residential power, coastal areas could supplement this with offshore wind and wave energy. Cheap availability of wind power in the middle of the country might be just the incentive we need to revive American industry.
A smarter grid does make sense to me (or a smarter network of smaller power networks, loosely interconnected). Every building ought to be producing, as well as using, energy. A number of systems have been developed to use the batteries in electric cars for energy storage and load balancing. In a system designed at MIT, for example, your car would make ongoing calculations about when to enter the electricity market, as either a buyer or a seller.
It has been said that we are asking a 19th century power grid to deal with 21st century problems, and that the answer is to upgrade this older technology.
Perhaps we should instead adopt, or develop, 21st century solutions.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Can We Just Bury the Carbon Problem?
According to the New York Times, SCS Energy, of Concord, MA is looking to build a coal-fired power plant—in lovely Linden, New Jersey, famously part of the early beats of the Soprano’s title sequence—with the CO2 it emits to be piped out into the ocean, and sequestered beneath the seabed, about a hundred miles off the coast of Atlantic City.
This isn’t so much the stuff of nightmares to me as it is cause for dyspepsia, another irritating, and diversionary, sideshow. Is carbon capture and sequestration possible? I don’t know. It’s being explored in a variety of places, from a variety of angles. For the most part, the research is genuine and the intentions sincere—the article notes that the one seabed project extant has been running for the past thirteen years, 155 miles off the cost of Norway.
The rhetorical use of carbon sequestration, however, strikes me (as almost always) as A Clarion Call to Inaction! of the “Don’t worry, we’ll just. . .” variety. No need to change our lifestyles or our mindsets. More digging (drill, baby, drill!), more burning (burn, baby, burn!), and we’ll all be just fine.
I can’t recall the name of the former US Congressman who died in the last six months or so, famous for saying (surely not uniquely) that “most problems started out as clever solutions of one sort or another.”
Carbon sequestration falls into that category, as far as I’m concerned.
I’m not a geologist, so I can’t render a professional judgment of the odds that sequestered CO2 might belch up out of the ocean or other subterranean repositories. But it seems to me like a shaky bet to make in order to extend the life of a fundamentally bad system.
Putting aside what happens when you burn it, there’s just no such thing as “clean coal,” from mountaintop removal mining, to transportation, to coal ash sludge repositories. Oil and gas have their own, rather similar, filthy problems, even before you get to greenhouse gases. As to the “greening” of nukes: fifty years in, we still have no permanent nuclear waste storage solution, and the US is littered with radioactive patches, both military and civilian; the stopgap measure has been to store most waste on-site at generating facilities.
The Times ran another piece (8 April ’09), “Not So Green After All: Alternative Fuel Still a Dalliance for Oil Giants,” which makes an apt bookend to the carbon sequestration piece.
Both articles highlight a trend of longstanding that’s particularly galling because it’s been particularly successful: after fighting the idea of climate change in the eighties and nineties (a misuse of the spirit of the Fairness Doctrine as egregious as that of the tobacco industry), what Old Order Energy Producers have switched to, in the current decade, is the strategy of saying publicly, often, and in dulcet tones that they understand the problem and they’re definitely going to do something about it.
They're banking (not without evidence) that when we wake up from our naps, we won't remember that we were promised ice cream--or, at any rate, we won't be so exercised about it.
Semi-Privately, of course, they lobby on against any kind of change, muddying the water.
This isn’t so much the stuff of nightmares to me as it is cause for dyspepsia, another irritating, and diversionary, sideshow. Is carbon capture and sequestration possible? I don’t know. It’s being explored in a variety of places, from a variety of angles. For the most part, the research is genuine and the intentions sincere—the article notes that the one seabed project extant has been running for the past thirteen years, 155 miles off the cost of Norway.
The rhetorical use of carbon sequestration, however, strikes me (as almost always) as A Clarion Call to Inaction! of the “Don’t worry, we’ll just. . .” variety. No need to change our lifestyles or our mindsets. More digging (drill, baby, drill!), more burning (burn, baby, burn!), and we’ll all be just fine.
I can’t recall the name of the former US Congressman who died in the last six months or so, famous for saying (surely not uniquely) that “most problems started out as clever solutions of one sort or another.”
Carbon sequestration falls into that category, as far as I’m concerned.
I’m not a geologist, so I can’t render a professional judgment of the odds that sequestered CO2 might belch up out of the ocean or other subterranean repositories. But it seems to me like a shaky bet to make in order to extend the life of a fundamentally bad system.
Putting aside what happens when you burn it, there’s just no such thing as “clean coal,” from mountaintop removal mining, to transportation, to coal ash sludge repositories. Oil and gas have their own, rather similar, filthy problems, even before you get to greenhouse gases. As to the “greening” of nukes: fifty years in, we still have no permanent nuclear waste storage solution, and the US is littered with radioactive patches, both military and civilian; the stopgap measure has been to store most waste on-site at generating facilities.
The Times ran another piece (8 April ’09), “Not So Green After All: Alternative Fuel Still a Dalliance for Oil Giants,” which makes an apt bookend to the carbon sequestration piece.
Both articles highlight a trend of longstanding that’s particularly galling because it’s been particularly successful: after fighting the idea of climate change in the eighties and nineties (a misuse of the spirit of the Fairness Doctrine as egregious as that of the tobacco industry), what Old Order Energy Producers have switched to, in the current decade, is the strategy of saying publicly, often, and in dulcet tones that they understand the problem and they’re definitely going to do something about it.
They're banking (not without evidence) that when we wake up from our naps, we won't remember that we were promised ice cream--or, at any rate, we won't be so exercised about it.
Semi-Privately, of course, they lobby on against any kind of change, muddying the water.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
The Bizarre and Depressing Politics of Energy Production
Another nail in the coffin of John McCain the Maverick Truth Teller; the will or capacity of the Democrats to stand up for principle was cremated long ago, a thin envelope of ash on the national mantelpiece.
The reasons for these shifts are not obscure: a majority of Americans turned on a dime as the price of gasoline soared and now (sorta) favor drilling. While we might see the political reaction to this as “responsiveness to the electorate,” however destructive the result, it’s worth noting that the fact that a majority of Americans also favor universal healthcare has not made politicians snap to in quite the same way.
Could this be because when you do what the energy companies want on drilling, you get money, and when you do what the people want on healthcare, you lose money from the insurance, pharmaceutical, and healthcare companies?
It’s almost not worth rehearsing the reasons increased domestic drilling won’t meaningfully impact the price of oil or gasoline (certainly not quickly, likely not ever): it would take a decade, under the best of circumstances, to bring new sources on line; the amount, in relation both to domestic and to (growing) global demand would be trivial.
The arguments for not drilling are also not terribly new or different: despoiling coasts BAD (including the economic danger to fishing and tourist industries); extending and increasing the use of fossil fuels STUPID (if your basement is flooding, it doesn’t make sense to run down there and see how many more spigots you can open).
I apologize for attempting to look at these things with a modicum of logic; I know that’s not cool. The Republicans have built a substantial industry, going back three decades now, of responding to conservation (and other) issues not with measured rational responses but with ridicule. This is the Bully in the High School Cafeteria political strategy.
Jimmy Carter is arguing that we save energy?
Nice sweater Poindexter!
Logging is endangering ecosystems?
Namby Pamby lefties favor owls over jobs!
Obama suggests efficiency measures?
Here’s Obama’s energy policy: a tire gauge!
I’m not much of a (lesser of the two evils) Obama fan; he’s begun to hedge on drilling as well. But it seems (again, I apologize) logical to me, that we would do better to rely on measures that we can take today, on our own, and at no significant net cost, rather than trusting that feeding more of our environment to ExxonMobil and friends will help us on the energy front.
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