energy efficiency

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!)

Like LA’s typical skies, the energy future is murky in the short term - this year and 2010 - and I’ll leave those predictions to others. But the big trends - sustainability, carbon fighting, and technological breakthroughs - enable us to make better sense of the mid- and long-term. Therefore, In the spirit of the New Year, the incoming administration, and the tipping point that the world has come to about climate change and sustainability, here are ten things I believe are very likely to happen in the next ten years.

1. Residential solar PV will be cost effective in most U.S. locations (via a combination of price reduction, new design thinking, much more efficient homes, and a carbon tax on fossil fuels).
2. Home energy storage - via batteries, hydrogen reforming, fuel cells, or other technology - will be available and installed in 10% of new homes in California, for when the sun don’t shine.
3. More than 10% of new homes in California will be zero-net energy.
4. 50% of new residential construction in California will be zero-net energy “ready.”
5. The current LEED standards will be considered obsolete.
6. More than 20% of peak grid electricity will come from excess capacity from residential solar PV.
7. There will be general consensus that efficiency and frugality alone will not provide enough CO2 mitigation to prevent major climate change - we will need a technological solution to actually reducing atmospheric CO2 or artificially cooling the earth.
8. There will be a mid-priced carbon fiber, plugin hybrid passenger car in production that gets more than 75 miles per gallon. The company making it will be the “next GM.”
9. 10% of the cars on the road will be powered by 100% renewable energy and will be essentially non-polluting.
10. New technologies for capturing carbon from the atmosphere will be available, powered by excess solar capacity.

What do you think? Am I off base here? Too optimistic? Too pessimistic? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear your thoughts, challenges, and predictions for 2018.

Zero-net Energy Series Coming Up

Over the next few weeks, I will be publishing a series on “zero-net energy” residences (related to predictions 1-6 above). This area is about to explode. We already have all the technology, and some people have the experience, to build “zero-net energy ready” houses cost effectively. And although there’s currently a premium to get to zero-net energy, over the next ten years this premium will go to zero, and probably it will be cost-effective to get to positive-net energy - where the house is generating more energy than it needs! Talk about a world-changing situation - it really is possible to have energy too cheap to meter, but it’s going to come off our roofs, not from a nuclear plant or one of those imaginary fusion reactors.

Santa and His Sleigh, Compressing Space and Time

In the last week or two I came across a number of interesting energy-related resources, blogs, websites, and talks that I wanted to share.

• I was happy to run across Barry Katz’s new blog, The Future Is Green, because Barry, a home builder, is where all home builders need to get in the next 5-10 years. He’s committed to building zero-net energy homes and remodels. His web site has examples of the some of the work he’s done so far.
  

  In fact, the homebuilding industry can do something that not even hybrid cars can do. It is entirely possible, using currently available technology and materials, to build homes that consume zero-net energy. And not only zero net energy, but energy positive enough to recharge our plug-in hybrids. Such houses exist already. If we can build one, we can build many. (From Barry’s post, What We Need Now.)

  Barry’s also writing a book on green remodels, which should be useful for people like me who live in a house that’s already been built.

• Saul Griffith, of Makani Power, calculated his current carbon footprint, and then his “allocated” carbon footprint as a global citizen. In this talk at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference earlier this year, he walks through those numbers - which are both scary and heartening. His calculations suggest that we need to throttle our energy usage at about 15 terawatts (TW) for the entire earth. As he puts it:

My life today is 18 horsepower, my new life should be three horsepower

I found the section on the energy available for us to use - the total solar flux, the tidal power of gravity, nuclear, and geothermal - extremely interesting (about 30:30 into the recording).

There are only four sources of energy - sun (85,000 TW), gravity (tidal - 3.7 TW), geothermal (constant flux of 32 TW), nuclear. All photosynthesis is 90 TW, which is the major argument against biofuels.

• Science Daily reports on some research by Larry Silverberg, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University, regarding Santa Claus’s ability to “travel around the world in just one night on his reindeer-pulled sleigh and deliver toys to all the children.”

“He understands that space stretches, he understands that you can stretch time, compress space and therefore he can, in a sense, actually have six Santa months to deliver the presents,” Silverberg told Reuters.

I hope you enjoy these links - let me know your thoughts, especially about the Griffiths talk if you have a chance to listen to it on your iPod - or on your computer at work.

Blaze (image by Nicholas T, CC 2.0 license)

Oh Snap! Now some German scientists have (in effect) taken a swing at Stanford professor Mark Z. Jacobson, who concluded in a recent paper that biofuels are a bad policy direction (see summary post here).

In their paper Sustainable global energy supply based on lignocellulosic biomass from afforestation of degraded areas, Prof. Jürgen O. Metzger from Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in Germany and Prof. Aloys Huettermann from the University of Goettingen in Germany say that growing and using biofuels for all the earth’s energy needs is not only possible without jeopardizing the global food supply, but also economically feasible.

Their key discovery is that by reforesting land that has been “degraded by human use in historical times”, they found:

… the global energy demand projected by the International Energy Agency in the Reference Scenario for the year 2030 could be provided sustainably and economically primarily from lignocellulosic biomass grown on areas which have been degraded by human activities in historical times.

(H/T to Science Daily for the link.)

Available: Home with free electric (photo by Kainet, CC 2.0 Sharealike license)

From MIT’s Technology Review comes this column from Kevin Bullis, about a recent report from Deutsche Bank on the economic benefits of investing in new energy projects:

It argues that it’s possible to address challenges related to climate change, energy security, and the financial crisis at the same time by investing in four specific areas: energy-efficient buildings, electric power grids, renewable power, and public transportation. The report cites figures that suggest investing in these areas creates more jobs than investing in conventional energy sources because much of the old energy infrastructure is already in place. It says that “a $100 billion investment in energy and efficiency would result in 2 million new jobs, whereas a similar investment in old energy [such as coal or natural gas] would only create around 540,000 jobs.”

Of course, Obama has already pledged to do something along these lines, and the blogosphere (including me, here) has chimed in as well. But the imprimatur of Deutsche Bank adds some gravitas to the proposal.

If you want to read the report yourself, it’s here.

A snowy egret in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

On one of the bulletin boards I monitor, David Hodgson asked “What strategic opportunities do you think the incoming Obama administration will provide for the ‘GreenMBA?’”

The intersection between the unfolding economic and ecological crisis places a program such as the GreenMBA [at Dominican University in San Rafael, California] at the heart of the changes occurring in the world. The Obama administration has signaled that the idea of a Green New Deal is a way to simultaneously address both of these issues.

What opportunities do you think this will this provide, and how can we best strategically place ourselves to take advantage of them?

I took up the challenge with a short answer as well (reprinted below, slightly edited). I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this topic as well. I said:

I’ve explored some ideas in some recent posts here (e.g., Economic Stimulus Via Renewable Energy Transmission Grid, for example).

Basically, I’m coming from the perspective that the transition to green energy (including efficiency) will be profitable both for businesses and for consumers, but there are barriers to achieving those profits. The barriers range from perverse incentives, to misaligned interests, to subsidies for the wrong things, to just plain old psychological barriers (”isn’t it more expensive to be more efficient?”). So the “Green New Deal” is less about government investment in businesses than in government incentives to guide or “nudge” businesses to do the right thing.

For example, in the current credit crunch, many of the green energy projects we were so excited about earlier this year are now on hold due to uncertainties about the availability of credit and customers. This is a perfect opportunity for the Feds to step in and guarantee loans and credit for these projects so they can continue - it’s low risk, and helps keep the wheels turning on the transition that we have to make. I guess one way to think about this is that Obama needs to “bailout” the green energy projects (which actually will be profitable and must be done) as much as he needs to help the automakers (which may never be profitable again and are taking us the wrong direction anyway).

With Obama’s commitment on Saturday to a huge stimulus packaged organized around sustainability, green energy, etc., it’s now time for us (the Green MBA types) to create the opportunities. Obama wants this stimulus to be “market-based” - focused more on breaking down existing barriers to realizing the profits that sustainability and conservation and new technologies will drive than on simply throwing money at inefficient industries to keep them afloat (Big Auto bailout, anyone?).

What do you think should be done with Obama’s $150 stimulus to the green economy and sustainable energy?

By the way, David’s own suggestions for Obama (eight of them) are here, on his blog Free Range Ape, including:

2. Give the Ecosystem a Cabinet Voice. Appoint a secretary of the environment. The environment needs to have a voice at the table that is equal to that of the treasury. It is, after all, a consideration that really needs to be present in the discussion of all things. And it is needed to help drive many of these issues.

and

7. Shift from a payroll tax to a carbon tax. My sense of the debate is that carbon taxes are a more effective policy solution than a cap + trade mechanism. Offsetting the carbon tax with a reduction of payroll taxes does two things. It reduces the cost of employment of an individual, thus helping us get the US working again, whilse decarbonizing our economy quickly.