accelerating change

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Australian solar and geothermal cheaper than coal and nuclear within 15 years

June 1, 2009 in accelerating change, energy generation, solar thermal by nils | 2 comments

According this this analysis, from New Energy World Network, within 15 years the cost of concentrating solar power will be less than the cost of “clean” coal, at least in Australia. The analysis is based on the rates of change in cost between the two energy sources. With the cost of coal increasing, relatively, and CSP decreasing, the cost lines eventually cross, leaving CSP cheaper.

In addition, the article mentions offhandedly that connecting the Queensland and South Australian electricity grids would “likely pay for itself quickly just in increased efficiencies brought to the existing grid.”

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No Manhattan Project, But Don’t Say No To Breakthrough Innovations

April 10, 2009 in accelerating change, analysis, carbon mitigation, energy efficiency, energy generation, energy storage, opinion, technology by nils | 1 comment

a polar bear and her baby

The polar bears say "keep the innovations coming - it's getting warm out here!" (image by Just Being Myself, CC 2.0 licensed)

While I agree with Joseph Romm on Climate Progress that we can’t count on a “Manhattan Project”-style endeavour to engineer our way out of the climate crisis in the short term, nonetheless, I think it’s reasonable to have a certain expectation that technology will improve over the right timescale, so we can be ready to take advantage of it.

A few weeks ago Martin Brown had a great post on his Fairsnape blog on Recession Thoughts and Tips. One of his many excellent suggestions was

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Code Changes And Incentives Are Critical For Energy Independence

March 18, 2009 in accelerating change, energy efficiency, green building by nils | 1 comment

Clovers at Blarney Castle Garden

Clovers at Blarney Castle

Patricia hit the nail on the head in her last post, No Blarney here! – Turning up the Heat:

Where are the codes and incentives?

Or rather, how do we get people to build and renovate houses to energy efficiency levels that are significantly above code?

The Architecture 2030 website has a great reference on how much beyond code you must build to achieve their interim and final energy efficiency goals. For example, in California’s we have a new 2008 version of the energy efficiency code, usually called “Title 24.” To meet the Architecture 2030 interim goal of buildings that use half as much energy as their conventional peers (the “initial 50% reduction target”), buildings in California need to be 10% more efficient than required by this new building code.

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Introducing New Silicon Valley Passive Homes Website

March 9, 2009 in accelerating change, green building, policy by nils | Add your comment

Silicon Valley From Space

Silicon Valley From Space

Over the weekend I put up what I hope will be an important resource in the goal of achieving 100% zero-net energy homes in California by 2018 – a new website for the Silicon Valley Passive House Coalition.

From the site:

SVPH is helping local municipalities to set challenging but practical goals for maximizing energy efficiency and carbon emission reduction in the local communities of the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California.

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Shiny Rocks May Be Good For Solar Energy

February 19, 2009 in accelerating change, energy generation, solar electricity by nils | 3 comments

Fools Gold

Fool's Gold (image by Clearly Ambiguous, CC 2.0 licensed)

Interesting note flying around the blogosphere yesterday (see here, here, and here, amongst many websites featuring the news) about a research project done at Berkeley. It found that, based on material cost and availability, solar photovoltaics made with iron pyrites (aka Fool’s Gold) are more likely to solve our energy crisis than PV made with silicon or CIGS thinfilms. This is due to both the cost of the raw materials and their availability – both crystalline silicon and the CIGS precursors are relatively expensive and relatively rare. Iron pyrite and its precursors are among the most common elements on earth, in contrast.

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How Big Is The Project, Really?

February 18, 2009 in accelerating change, analysis, policy by nils | Add your comment

Encina

Toledo tree (image by J. Lozano, CC 2.0 licensed)

According to John Lushetsky, program manager of the U.S., it’s a very big project:

To go from the 1 gigawatt of generation capacity that we have now [in the United States] to the 170 to 200 gigawatts called for by 2030 amounts to a 26 percent compounded annual growth rate over the next 20 years. That’s a higher sustained growth rate than any industry has ever been asked to do before

This was at a presentation Lushetsky gave in Toledo Ohio two weeks ago, as part of a day-long conference on “Empowering Solar Energy in Ohio.”

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DoE Secretary Steven Chu: We Need Nobel-Level Breakthroughs

February 13, 2009 in accelerating change, energy generation, energy storage, growth, policy, solar electricity by nils | Add your comment

Secretary of Energy Steven Chu

Secretary of Energy Steven Chu

Yesterday the New York Times published an interview (including some of the original audio) with our new Energy Secretary, Steven Chu. Among other comments, he said that to address the climate emergency, we need “Nobel-level breakthroughs” in several key areas – batteries, biofuels, and solar photovoltaics.” As an illustration, he pointed out:

The photovoltaics we have today, … without subsidy, and without even the additional cost of storage, it’s about a factor of five higher than electricity generation by gas or coal. Suppose someone comes along and invents a way of getting … solar photovoltaics at one fifth the cost, so you don’t even think about subsidies anymore. You just slap it everywhere… That, in my opinion, would take something, which I would say, is a bit of a breakthrough.”

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Old Favorites

February 12, 2009 in accelerating change, green building, growth by nils | Add your comment

Chocolate-covered Oreo Cake

Cake for our six month anniversary (image by ginnerobot, CC 2.0 license)

In honor of this blog’s six month anniversary, I’m going to relink to some of my favorite posts from the past:

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Avoiding The Cliff Ahead

January 29, 2009 in accelerating change, analysis, consumption, economy, energy efficiency, energy generation, energy storage, green building, opinion, policy, profits by nils | 1 comment

Uluwatu Temple, Bali (HDR)

A cliff in Bali (image by seanmcgrath, CC 2.0 licensed)

My green building and blogging colleague Barry Katz just had a post about James Howard Kunstler on his The Future Is Green Blog. Kunstler is one of the “dystopians” featured in a  New Yorker article last week. Kunstler is not sanguine about what the future is going to look like for us and our descendants. He thinks that not only is global warming likely to cause a disaster, but so is the current, or an upcoming, financial meltdown. Barry writes:

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Ten Energy Predictions For The Next Decade

January 5, 2009 in accelerating change, carbon mitigation, economy, energy efficiency, energy generation, energy storage, green building, integrative design, opinion, solar electricity, transportation by nils | Add your comment

Snow on the San Gabriel Mountains (photo by Jerry Thompson1)

Snow on the San Gabriel Mountains (photo by Jerry Thompson1, CC 2.0 license)

On December 30 of last year (six days ago), my wife and I were in Pasadena, CA visiting the Greene and Greene exhibit at the Huntington Library. It was one of those glorious and rare smog-free days in the LA basin. The air sparkled, you could see for miles in every direction, and mountain range after mountain range was visible – all the way out to the snow-covered San Gabriels. Nowadays, the air is only ever this clear around the Christmas holiday, when the freeway traffic is substantially reduced and a lot of factories shut down for the week. It got me thinking about how the future – say ten to twenty years hence – may be unrecognizable in both dramatic and mundane ways. For example, smog-free days may no longer be rare in LA, once the economy has shifted off fossil fuels. (I suspect the traffic will remain, unfortunately!)

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