energy independence

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Amory Lovins Named A World’s Best Leader By U.S. News

November 25, 2008 in business benefits, energy efficiency, integrative design, policy by nils | Add your comment

Amory Lovins
Amory Lovins

Amory Lovins is one of my true heros, and I'm thrilled to hear that U.S New has named him one of World's Best Leaders in their report this week. Lovins has inspired multitudes (and this blog) with his vision of "getting off oil at a profit" and "drilling for negabarrels under Detroit." The Rocky Mountain Institute, a "think and do" tank that he founded 26 years ago, takes this vision and makes it happen for Fortune 1000 companies, the military, and governments around the world (including Portola Valley, just up the street from me, where he spoke a few weeks ago).

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Watch Out For Unintended Consequences

November 17, 2008 in carbon mitigation, energy generation, policy by nils | Add your comment

Mojave Desert scene in Joshua Tree National Park.

Image via Wikipedia

In their editorial Green Energy vs. Actual "Green" Energy Basin and Range Watch point out that there are lots of opportunities for making a big mess of the environment while trying to save it. The focus of this site is the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts in Nevada and California, the targets of many new solar projects. "There are over one million acres of public land in the six states that are being considered for sacrifice."

Most of these projects require a lot of water, and all require "clear cutting" the desert to prevent weeds and pests.

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Economic Stimulus Via Renewable Energy Transmission Grid

November 9, 2008 in economy, policy by nils | Add your comment

Arizona sunset

Arizona sunset

Al Gore and I are in agreement that Obama can kill two birds with one stone by structuring his economic stimulus plan around improving the U.S.'s energy posture - which everyone agrees we need to do, both to achieve energy independence and to mitigate climate change. In his op-ed in today's New York Times he said:

Here’s what we can do — now: we can make an immediate and large strategic investment to put people to work replacing 19th-century energy technologies that depend on dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.

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Obama’s Green Opportunity

November 7, 2008 in investing, jobs, policy by nils | Add your comment

US Senator Barack Obama campaigning in New Ham...

Image via Wikipedia

On Wednesday, the Freakonomics blog asked:

If you had a seat at one of the tables where Obama will be meeting over the next days and weeks, what would be some of your suggestions for how he should shape his administration, address the economic mess, consider the energy future, engage the global community, and so on and so forth?

My suggestions for the president-elect:

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DoE Solar Energy Report On Market Penetration Outlook for Solar PV

September 30, 2008 in analysis, energy generation, solar electricity by nils | 2 comments

A laundromat in California with solar collecto...

A laundromat in California with rooftop solar collectors (Image via Wikipedia)

As we contemplate the future of energy, and the combination of utility-level and distributed energy, and of different types - solar PV, solar thermal (heat your own hot water for showers), wind, etc., one question I have asked myself is how much energy can realistically be produced by the solar collectors on the roofs of our houses and office buildings in the U.S.?

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Running Gore’s Numbers: An Edifying, If Simplistic, Analysis

September 4, 2008 in analysis, solar electricity by nils | 1 comment

Photo: Bill Gantz

Photo: Bill Gantz (Creative Commons License: Some Rights Reserved)

In his galvanizing speech a few weeks ago Academy Award and Nobel Prize-winner Al Gore exhorted the United States to "produce all electricity from “carbon-free sources” by 2018." This is a pretty abstract goal, in those terms - Gore (appropriately) didn't go into great detail about how this should be done or even what it means in specific practical steps. Depending on your point of view and background knowledge about energy, the goal may seem easy or incredibly difficult, or even impossible, especially without further analysis.

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Some Experts Say “Moore’s Law Does Not Apply To Solar PV” – Kurzweil (and Page) Disagree

August 15, 2008 in accelerating change, solar electricity by nils | 6 comments

Exponential growth of computing. 20th to 21st ...Image via Wikipedia

In his call to action two weeks ago, Al Gore compared the future development of solar electricity sources to the development of the semiconductor industry. His implication was that Moore's Law, which reliably predicted that the price/performance of semiconductors doubled every 18 months, would also apply to photovoltaics.

ComputerWorld, in an article two weeks ago, assesses this comparison as flawed. (As did Harry Gray of Cal Tech, as I reported earlier today.)

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Efficiency profitable for energy-independent Denmark

August 11, 2008 in energy efficiency, jobs, policy, profits by nils | Add your comment

Thomas Friedman's OpEd on Sunday describes how Denmark has achieved energy independence, and illustrates the numerous benefits for the country, including a very low unemployment rate and a large new export market.

When the 1973 oil shock hit, Denmark got 99 percent of its energy from the Middle East. Now they get zero. The country has combined massive energy efficiency programs, such as using waste heat from power plants to heat homes (known as "cogeneration"), with alternative energy sources like windmills (20% of their energy comes from the wind now), effective use of their own petroleum resources in the North Sea, and incentives for lowering energy use via high taxes on gasoline.

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About Keeping The Lights On

August 7, 2008 in Uncategorized by admin | 2 comments

Keeping The Lights On is devoted to news, opinion, and information about "busting barriers" to profitable applications of energy efficiency and alternative renewable energy sources. The barriers to using energy more efficiently arise in several ways:

  • Conflicting incentives result in short-term decisions that have significant long-term costs
  • "Traditional" design practices that optimize subsystems instead of whole systems
  • The assumption saving energy is costly and not profitable
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