Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

Last week, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing to evaluate the Department of Energy’s (DOE) implementation of programs authorized and funded under the stimulus bill. A key focus was weatherization program.  Tina Ramos, a CAP special assistant for energy policy, has the story.

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The United States created the solar cell industry and literally launched it into space 50 years ago.   Solar PV is going to be one of the largest job-creating industries of the century, projected to grow “from a $20 billion industry in 2007 to $74 billion by 2017” (see “Invented here, sold there”).

But thanks to conservative opposition to clean energy from Reagan to the Gingrich Congress to Cheney/Bush, the U.S. share of the PV market has plummeted.  By 2008, America had under 6% (!) of the world market (see AllBusiness’s “United States is a bit player in global solar industry“).

Now the Department of Energy is taking steps to improve the domestic manufacturing base, as guest blogger Jacob Abraham, an intern with CAP’s Energy Opportunity team, reports.

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Yesterday President Obama announced details of his proposed $6 billion energy efficiency rebate program called the HOME STAR program at Savannah Technical College in Georgia.  Tina Ramos, a Special Assistant for Energy Policy at CAP, has the details.

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Andrew Jakabovics, the Associate Director for Housing and Economics at American Progress, has put together a nifty graphic and article about how the Federal Housing Administration can salvage some value from foreclosed homes, while simultaneously stimulating the energy efficiency market and revitalizing neighborhoods.

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What do you think of the sustainability efforts of the retail giant? Our guest blogger is Sarah Collins, intern with CAP’s Energy Opportunity team at the Center for American Progress.

In 2009, Wal-Mart received the Aspen Institute Energy and Environment award for Corporate Energy Efficiency.  To build on this success, Wal-Mart just announced its new sustainability goal: to eliminate 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gases from the supply chain by 2015.  This amount, roughly equivalent to the company’s total corporate emissions last year, is “the equivalent of taking more than 3.8 million cars off the road for a year.”  Efforts to reach this goal involved extensive collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund, ClearCarbon Inc., the Carbon Disclosure Project, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and the University of Arkansas’ Applied Sustainability Center.

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The HOME STAR program is a new initiative to create jobs in the construction industry and make it easy for every American homeowner to quickly and immediately cut their rising monthly energy bills by improving the energy efficiency of their homes. HOME STAR will empower homeowners to seize control of skyrocketing energy costs, create good living-wage jobs, and drive economic recovery in the United States.

CAP’s Bracken Hendricks and Tom Kenworthy explain HOME STAR in this repost.

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Guest blogger John Atcheson just retired from a long career in government service, most recently as a Senior Analyst working for the DOE on weatherization. His job consisted primarily of  analyzing innovative policies to increase the effectiveness of the Weatherization and State Grant Programs.

Yesterday, the NY Times ran a story on a report by DOE’s Inspector General pointing to problems in the implementation of the scaled up the Weatherization Assistance Program under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  To be sure, the implementation has not been as fast as some expected. And as usual, “bureaucrats” received the brunt of the blame.

But the bottom line is that the program has moved with speed and is poised to move much faster from this point forward.  Since it’s Winter Olympics time, let me offer an analogy:  The NYT is reporting on the pace of ascending the mountain on the ski lift, while ignoring the pace at which the skiers will descend – and the benefits that will accrue.

Here are the facts.

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Today’s guest blogger is Tom Kenworthy, Senior Fellow at American Progress.

Last month, an NREL study showed that America could generate 20% percent of its power just with wind by 2024.  That would require about 300,000 MW or 300 GW.  The ultimate potential is much, much higher — 30 times higher (!) — as Tom Kenworthy, CAP’s Senior Fellow based in Colorado, explains.

Thanks to improvements in wind turbines over the last decade and a half, the United States has the potential to generate more than three times as much electricity from wind as previously thought, according to a new analysis from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

The assessment of onshore wind energy potential found that the U.S. could produce almost 37 million gigawatt-hours yearly. According to the American Wind Energy Association, that’s nine times our current annual electricity consumption.

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French energy giant Areva has bought U.S.-based Ausra in order “to become a world leader in concentrated solar thermal” power (CSP).  And so the race is on for market share in “The Technology that will Save Humanity.”

CSP is the most scalable and affordable baseload (or, even better, load-following) low-carbon supply technology — when used with low-cost, high-efficiency thermal storage.  CSP can also share its steam turbine with biomass, a strategy the Chinese are pursuing, or with natural gas (see “Hybrid solar/gas plants provide low-cost, low-carbon power when needed“).

The Oil Drum wonders if Areva is “losing faith in the oft-predicted but unrealised ‘nuclear renaissance’.”   Certainly, Areva’s best-known product is pricing itself out of the market (see Areva has acknowledged that the cost of a new reactor today would be as much as 6 billion euros, or $8 billion, double the price offered to the Finns).

CSP, on the other hand, has just started down the experience curve and is poised to be one of the major winners in the low-carbon economy.  Indeed, Bloomberg/BusinessWeek [another corporate merger?] reports:

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So I listened to Bill Gates’ TED Speech a few hours after he gave it in Long Beach, CA.  Let’s just call that an IT miracle.

It wasn’t 80% crap like his recent piece on energy.

Quite the reverse, it was more like a miraculous ice cream cone made up of 80% homemade chocolate-chocolate chip ice cream and only 20% bat guano.  Curiously, the guano kind of stands out when you lick it, and that’s what people talk about.

Since TED is all hush-hush, most people get only the snippets the media shares, such as HuffPost’s headline:  “Bill Gates’ TED Speech 2010: ‘We Need Energy Miracles’.”  Mongabay.com reported:

Gates said the world needs to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2050 and suggested researchers spent the next 20 years developing new technologies and the follow 20 years implementing them.

But I’ve got the scoop for you — and I’ll post the transcript when I get it.

Yes, Bill Gates keeps diminishing the value of aggressive action now, which is just plain suicidal.  We need both massive technology deployment now and much more innovation.  But the former is the sine qua non for having any chance to preserve a livable climate.  Ironically, the former is also the key to the latter, something Gates himself used to argue.  Strangely, Gates strongly praises Gore’s book even though its main thrust is directly at odds with Gates’.

This post will:

1. Look at what’s good in the speech.
2. Explain why “Energy Miracles” are widely overrated as a strategy for preserving a livable climate.
3. Explain why tech deployment is the key to the kind of innovation Gates wishes for.
4. Raise the issue some technologists have raised with me:  Is Gates is a hypocrite?

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I am recycling RecycleBank’s 10 romantic ways to green your Valentine’s Day:

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Environmental Defense Fund has been working on fleet efficiency because:

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Our favorite climate de-crocker, Peter Sinclair has now started putting together videos on clean energy solutions:

Plug ins are indeed a core climate (and peak oil) solution.  If you want to know more, here’s where to start:

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Guest blogger Jake Caldwell is the Director for Agriculture, Trade and Energy Policy at American Progress.

The United States must reduce our dependence on oil – one fifth of which comes from nations that are “dangerous or unstable” for travelers according to the State Department. Surface transportation is responsible for 65 percent of our oil use, so using less in cars and trucks provides the biggest opportunity for reductions. There are a number of important measures to reduce oil use, including significantly more efficient fuel economy standards, investments in public transportation and high speed rail, and the production and use of alternative fuels, including natural gas and advanced biofuels. Each of these steps can increase energy independence by reducing oil use by millions of barrels.

Advanced, cellulosic biofuels — made from agricultural waste, wood chips, or low input crops such as switchgrass — hold great promise to reduce oil use and greenhouse gas pollution. Advanced biofuels that deliver measurable life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions, minimize the use of food based feedstocks and, minimize public health and environmental impacts should be encouraged. But, in order to capture the promise of advanced biofuels, we must also make the short term investments in the infrastructure for the current generation of biofuels.

On Wednesday, President Obama announced three key initiatives to build this infrastructure so that we can increase biofuel production, improve nationwide efforts in the development of biofuels, and lessen our dependence on oil.

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The Denver Federal Center, pictured above, is already working to improve its energy efficiency by installing 35 acres of roof-mounted solar panels, enough to supply all of its electricity needs.  Our guest blogger is Sean Pool, Special Assistant for the Energy Policy team at American Progress.

While a comprehensive clean energy air, clean energy jobs bill languishes in the Senate, the President is wielding his executive powers now to green the government itself, creating jobs and spurring investments in new technologies.

Yesterday the president announced that the nation’s largest consumer of energy –the Federal Government– will cut its emissions of global warming pollution by 28 percent by 2020.

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This slideshow features highlights of some of greenest cars at this year’s Detroit Auto Show.  This is a CAP repost.

Visitors have streamed through the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, MI over the past two weeks to look at innovative new designs from the industry.  And this year’s batch is the greenest yet.

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Four decades ago, when Sid Erwin began his career as an inspector at the Idaho Power Company, a string of new hydroelectric plants was pumping out power faster than locals could buy it. Soon enough, Mr. Erwin recalls, the utility began sending representatives to rural areas, urging farmers to use more electricity when irrigating their crops.

These days, Idaho’s farmers are being paid to stop using power.

Sitting at a cluttered kitchen table in his home, Mr. Erwin — now a farmer himself — waved a bill showing that last July he received a credit of more than $700 from Idaho Power for turning off his power-guzzling pumps on some summer afternoons.

“It’s a total turnabout,” says Mr. Erwin, who lives in Bruneau, about 60 miles southeast of here. “I’m almost 70 years old and this has been a lifelong education to me.”

As saving energy becomes a rallying cry for utilities and the government, Idaho Power is in the vanguard. Since 2004, it has been paying farmers like Mr. Erwin to cut power useat crucial times, resulting in drop-offs of as much as 5.6 percent of peak power demand….

Other efficiency initiatives by the utility, including one promoting attic insulation, have saved about 500,000 megawatt-hours of power since 2002, according to the company — roughly equal to the amount used by 5,000 gadget-filled homes over eight years.

So begins the NYT story, “Why Is a Utility Paying Customers?“  While the world’s richest man has been educating himself on energy and then dissing insulation (!) and efficiency as a core solution to our energy and climate problems, even the reddest of red states is starting to catch on that the cheapest and greenest kilowatt-hour is the one you don’t use.

Efficiency doesn’t require siting and building new power plants  and transmission, it doesn’t require waiting decades for breakthrough technology, it saves huge amounts of money for consumers and the utility, and it is a proven, scalable strategy:

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Billionaires say the darndest things!  The above screen shot of a nonsensical Bill Gates piece dissing energy efficiency came from his website, The Gates Notes, which turned into a HuffPost piece, and then Yahoo News.

Yes, even the very rich are very confused about energy efficiency, renewable energy, climate policy, and global warming — mainly because they keep bad company (see “Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’, Part 2: Who else have Nathan Myhrvold and the Groupthinkers at Intellectual Ventures duped and confused? Would you believe Bill Gates and Warren Buffett?“):

• The Gates’ Foundation mostly ignores global warming (see here)
• Warren Buffett are so wrong — and outspoken — about cap and trade (see here)
• Gates and Buffett visited the Athabasca tar sands — the biggest global warming crime ever — to satisfy “their own curiosity” but also “with investment in mind” (see here).

Now Gates has launched an amazing series of myth-filled missives and misfires this month, many of which channel Bjorn Lomborg (aka the Danish delayer) in their disdain of near-term climate action and embrace of, yes, geo-engineering.  If you have the stomach for a rambling discourse mostly dissing renewable energy, clearly inspired by the uber-confused Myhrvold, start with his “Podcast Series: Energy and Climate Change” here.

You’ll learn that wind power is competitive only because of subsidies — nary a mention of the massive subsidies for nuclear, a Gates favorite, or fossil fuels, let alone the devastating climate impacts of continued use of fossil fuels.  In his discussion of renewables, you’ll learn that “solar is the cutest of all these things” — yes, “cutest.”

You’ll learn “the biggest issue that is often missed is the storage issue.”  Apparently absent Gates’ genius, none of us have ever thought about the issue of storage.  Gates seems unaware of the major advances occurring in storage (see “The Holy Grail of clean energy economy is in sight: Affordable storage for wind and solar“), which is probably why he worries about it so much, saying that the biggest problem is the “seven-day periods with no sun” and “seven-day periods with no wind,” which lead him to ask, “In the 1% case are people willing to freeze to death“?  Yes, apparently 1% of the time the country is without any wind or sun for 7 straight days.  Seriously, listen to the podcast (this is at the end of the first one).

Oh, but nuclear is great — “it’s as good as renewable.”

Now apparently someone told Gates that attacking insulation (!!!) looked stupid, because a few days later someone rewrote the above headline, adding a “just” after “not” at his website and HuffPost — though he missed here.  But even the rewritten piece is laughable:

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