Climate Change Conversations with ExxonMobil, Part 2: He Said, She Said

This post is Part Two (of two) detailing a recent conference call discussing climate change policies between bloggers (including myself), and Ken Cohen, Vice President of Public Affairs for ExxonMobil (a full list of participating blogs and bloggers can be found at the end of this post).

Part One unwrapped the significance of the simple fact that this conversation even occured. Part Two will deal with the details of who exactly said what. Here goes...

Let me begin by saying that Mr. Cohen is clearly quite good at his job. As any good PR representative will do, Mr. Cohen was careful not to say anything of too much substance, nor to endorse any specific policy position.

However, Cohen did outline the following principles which Exxon apparently uses to analyze and compare various climate policy options. According to ExxonMobil, good climate change policy proposals should:

Maximize the use of market forces.

Ensure a uniform and predictable cost of reducing CO2.

Promote global participation.

Minimize complexity and administrative costs.

Provide transparency to companies and consumers.

Adjust to new developments in climate science and the impacts of policies

Cap and Trade?

When Tom Yulsman, of Prometheus: the Science Policy Weblog, pointed out that a cap and trade program is a market based policy mechanism and asked Mr. Cohen if Exxon would support a cap and trade program or something like it, Mr Cohen responded that Exxon is very familiar with and operates very well in the downstream cap and trade system implemented in Western Europe. He said that cap and trade systems do indeed utilize market forces, but was careful to point out that "the devil is in the details."

Cohen referred back to the above policy guidelines, asking:

"Does it impose even costs for carbon across the economy?

Is it a downstream or upstream cap?

Whichever we adopt, we can't lose site of the very global nature of the problem. If we focus on Western Europe and North America to the exclusion of very large developing economies in Asia, we're not addressing the problem. That's not to say we don't need to take action here, but the type of action we take needs to encourage the developing world to join us.

Does it minimize complexity to minimize administrative costs?

Does it provide transparency to companies and consumers?

Does it adjust to new developments in science and the economic impacts of policies? That is, is 550 parts per million the right target? It may turn out to be lower, or hopefully, will be higher, we just don't know."

So, the short answer, does ExxonMobil support a downstream cap and trade policy? "The answer is a definite maybe," says Cohen.


Carbon Tax?

Susan Smith, Law Professor at Willamette University and proprietor of the Environmental Law Professor Blog then pointed out that it looks like a carbon tax best fits the guidelines outlined by Exxon. Mr. Cohen responded that, "Most economists who have looked at this issue would come away saying a carbon tax makes the most sense. It’s the most efficient policy, the most sector-neutral," Mr Cohen said. " It doesn’t favor or disfavor one part of the economy over another."

When asked specifically if Exxon would support a carbon tax proposal, Mr. Cohen half joked, "If Exxon came out in favor of carbon tax today, many people would react by saying 'if Exxon is in favor, there must be something wrong with it.'" (Probably not entirely off the mark!).

Cohen went on to say:

"As far as policy options go, there are standards (like CAFE, efficiency standards, etc.), there are downstream and upstream cap and trade, and there's carbon taxes.

We look seriously at carbon tax proposals, but again, the devil is in the details. Remember that it is a regressive tax, so do we make it revenue neutral - that is, do we take out another regressive tax like the income tax? Does it apply across the whole economy, or just to one or two sectors?

In theory, it looks good, but the devil's in the details."

I asked Mr Cohen to respond to the USCAP announcement calling for immediate action addressing climate change, and asked him if Exxon would consider joining the partnership. Mr Cohen said:

"We're part of several discussion groups that look like USCAP. Their proposal is going to be one of many - at last count there are seven bills of substance under consideration - and there are now various groups coming forward with proposals. Groups we are involved in will be making proposals soon. This is all part of a healthy dialogue and process."

I then asked if they would support policies aimed at achieving the science-based goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 80% by 2050 (as the USCAP proposal does), to which Mr Cohen responded:

"As far as a specific number, 80%, for example, the question is what is the cost? Is it feasible? That gets at the political reality of making it happen."

To me this is NOT the right question. The question is a) what do we NEED to do to avoid dangerous climate change, based on the science of what it will take to stabilize atmospheric CO2 levels at 450-550 parts per million? and b) how much will it cost NOT to achieve this target? Only then can we ask what will it cost to get to 450-550 ppm. The question, 'how much will it cost,' has no meaning if not considered in the context of how much it will cost to do nothing.

As with any economic question, it's a matter of opportunity costs, and if the Stern Review is even close to accurate, the cost of doing nothing is far too high!


Investing in Alternatives, and Making Environmentally Responsible Decisions Pay

Maria Surma Manka of Green Options brought up the fact that most of Exxon's competitors, including BP, Shell and Chevron, are investing in alternative fuels and energy sources, from wind and solar power to biodiesel and ethanol. Maria implied that perhaps Exxon was not remaining competitive in a shifting energy marketplace and asked Mr. Cohen what steps the company was doing to show it's investors that Exxon was diversifying it's portfolio.

Mr Cohen responded by pointing out that, first of all, ExxonMobil was one of the world's largest purchasers of biofuels. Exxon's basic gasoline is an E3 to E10 blend, Mr Cohen said (that is, it contains 3% to 10% ethanol by volume). He also pointed out that Exxon is funding cellulosic ethanol research at Stanford University and elsewhere.

As far as Exxon not investing in wind and solar, as some of it's competitors have, Mr Cohen unapologetically responded that this is "simply a business decision. We are looking for technologies that will stand on their own as cost effective."

"We are a research company," Mr Cohen said, "with over 2,000 Ph.D.s on staff. That's how we differentiate ourselves from our competitors. We wish the competition luck with their investments, but when we find a proposal that looks like we can get in there and make money doing it, we'll do it."

This was one of several times Mr Cohen asserted that Exxon had analyzed alternative energy projects and simply found them unprofitable. He also reiterated at least twice that Exxon was looking for investments that "stood on their own two feet."

I pressed Mr Cohen on this issue, arguing that I wasn't sure how to make sense of what it meant to talk about technologies 'standing on their own two feet' in an industry, like the energy industry, as highly influenced by subsidies, environmental regulations, and other public policies that affect how the market works. I asked Mr. Cohen if Exxon was truly looking for technologies that stand on their own in an absolute free market/no government intervention sense, or if they were looking for projects that are profitable given the existing public policy and market environment?

To this, Mr Cohen replied that they were looking at the policy environment as well, but went on to say:

"First, you have to differentiate between policies that have a good environmental outcome as their goal, and ones that simply support a product for the product's sake.

Ethanol is a good example: the average rack price for ethanol was more than $3 per gallon last year, while the price for gasoline was $1.90. If customers had to pay the true price of ethanol, no one would buy it. And what is the goal of this subsidy? What does it achieve?

What you want are policies designed with a valid environmental aim that use the power of the marketplace to spread evenly across the market."

Now that is exactly what I've been saying all along!

I'd love to sit here today and rant about Exxon needing to put the environment first and profit second in their business practices, or at least to ask the company to adopt a 'triple bottom line' approach - weighing environmental and social value equally with monetary value in their business decisions.

But in reality, I have to recognize that that Exxon is a publicly traded corporation, and as such, they have a responsibility to their investors to maximize the return on their investment, and that the company will attempt to do so as best as possible, given existing market and policy forces. Exxon's whole purpose is to make money, and to that end, it is very successful.

Given that, the single best way to affect the company's actions is to enact public policy that changes those market forces so that doing the environmentally sound thing is also simultaneously the profitable thing. Or perhaps I should put that the other way around: with the right policies in place, doing the profitable thing will (from a businesses point of view) also incidentally be the environmentally responsible thing to do.

Until we enact policies that bring together market prices and true environmental (and societal) costs, we will constantly be fighting against market forces, a hopelessly uphill battle (if not a losing proposition from the get go). If, instead, we get market forces to work with us, a sustainable business will be the only profitable business.

This should be our public policy goal, and carbon taxes or cap and trade programs are one step towards that goal.

This is something that is apparently not lost on Rex Tillerson, the new CEO of ExxonMobil. In a speech before the Boston CEO Club in November, 2006 (the speech was included in our background materials before the conference call), Tillerson had this to say about public policy:

"Policies that promote stable tax, regulatory and legal frameworks over the long-term encourage the investments needed to not only meet current ends, but also the technological advances to meet future needs while reducing environmental impacts."

Well said, Mr. Tillerson. Now I hope you don't mind when we enact a carbon cap and trade system and give you the long-term policy framework that will make investments in low-carbon products the only profitable option for your company!

As Mr. Tillerson, Mr. Cohen, and I all seem to agree, the beauty of the market is that businesses do an excellent job of finding ways to make a profit within given market forces, and those forces are shaped by public policies that create the tax, regulatory and legal environment in which the market functions. (Wow, now I've agreed with both President Bush and ExxonMobil in the span of five day ... yikes!)

Implementing a carbon cap or tax will send long-term, stable price signals to companies that reducing their carbon emissions is the profitable thing to do.

Until we use policies to break down the false dichotomy between a profitable business venture and an environmentally responsible one, we can hardly fault a company like Exxon for doing their job and making money, often at the expense of the environment. We can appeal to their good nature, for what little good that will do, or we can organize boycotts or bad PR to put some economic pressure on their bottom line, but those efforts only have success in very limited cases, and even then are very tough battles which generally affect only one company at a time.

What will bring about lasting and widespread change in corporate actions and put us on the path to a sustainable economy - in both the environmental and economical sense of the word - are smart public policies that use, as Mr Cohen put it, "the power of the marketplace" to ensure that making a smart investment means making an environmentally responsible investment.

Until then, we will be fighting a constantly uphill battle, one, I would argue, that is ultimately fated to fail.


[In closing, I'd like to thank Mr Cohen for taking some of his time to speak with me and my fellow bloggers, as well as Pam Franklin and David Wescott of APCO Worldwide for organizing the conference call. It truly was an interesting and unique opportunity.]

Participants in ExxonMobil Conference Call (and their Blogs):

Yours truly (of course)

Tom Yulsman,Prometheus: the Science Policy Weblog

Susan Smith, Environmental Law Prof Blog

Stuart Staniford, The Oil Drum

Maria Surma Manka, Green Options

Ken Cohen, Vice President of Public Affairs, ExxonMobil

Pam Franklin, Online Marketing Strategist, APCO Worldwide

Read more!

Climate Change Conversations with ExxonMobil, Part 1: Reaching a Tipping Point?

A strange thing happened to me last Friday: I participated in a conference call that put humble bloggers like yours truly in a conversation with Ken Cohen, the Vice President of Public Affairs for ExxonMobil, the largest publicly traded corporation in the world.

The topic of the day? ExxonMobil's position on climate change and public policy solutions, which the oil giant's VP for Public Affairs apparently felt it necessary to take an hour and fifteen minutes of his busy schedule to clarify for the members of the blogosphere (a full list of participating bloggers can be found at the end of this post).

And what is Exxon's postition on climate change these days?

"We believe climate change is a serious issue and that action must be taken,” Cohen said during the conference call.

Mr. Cohen even came suprisingly close to endorsing a particularly policy approach - the carbon tax - over another - the cap and trade approach currently favored by most policy proposals (including several bills currently introduced to the 110th Congress, as well as the proposals of the United States Climate Action Partnership, USCAP, and it's industry and environmental member organizations).

"Most economists who have looked at this issue would come away saying a carbon tax makes the most sense," Cohen said. "It’s the most efficient policy, the most sector-neutral. It doesn’t favor or disfavor one part of the economy over another."

That's right, Exxon now seems to be singing a different tune on climate change than they have been as recently as several months ago.

Mr. Cohen argued repeatedly that this was not, in fact, a new position, but rather that Exxon's position on climate change has been consistently misunderstood. Cohen maintained that Exxon's opposition to the Kyoto protocol specifically has been mistakenly equated to an opposition to any action seeking to address climate change.

However, it seems to me that even if this is the case, Exxon has had ten years since the Kyoto Protocal was negotiated to clarify it's position on climate change, and considering that the world's largest publicly traded company certainly has access to the best PR firms in the world, either they did a very poor job of correcting this misunderstanding, or they didn't consider it important enough to correct.

Either way then, it is still quite significant that Exxon is now taking this opportunity to publicly clarify its position on climate change, and to bloggers at that.

I'll get into the details of Friday morning's discussion with Mr Cohen in a post to follow sometime tomorrow, but first it's worth taking a moment to unwrap the significance of the simple fact that this conversation even occured...


A Tipping Point?

The fact that ExxonMobil spent an hour and fifteen minutes discussing climate change mitigation solutions with a group of bloggers is a clear sign of a rapidly shifting political landscape.

In 2005, ExxonMobil gave $5.7 million to 39 groups that, according to a 2006 British Royal Society report, 'misrepresent the science of climate change,' including the American Enterprise Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The British Royal Society report was echoed by a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists released earlier this month, which further details Exxon's funding of organizations employing tobacco lobby-style tactics to spread disinformation and confusion regarding climate change science or solutions. According to the report, ExxonMobil has funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.

(To be fair, Mr. Cohen also pointed out that Exxon has funded a variety of organizations, including those engaged in research into climate change mitigation technologies, including Stanford University's Global Climate and Energy Project, the US EPA's "Smartway" Transport Partnership and others).

In the first quarter of 2006, ExxonMobil quietly issued their latest policy and science research funding figures, showing that they had now stopped funding these organizations, a decision Cohen said was reached sometime in 2005, but not publicly announced at the time (a major PR mistake if you ask me!).

In the beginning of 2007, ExxonMobil is now saying that they they "believe climate change is a serious issue and that action must be taken."

After Friday morning's conversation, I'm not at all convinced that ExxonMobil will become a valuable ally in the push to enact comprehensive climate change mitigation policies. But the simple fact that they are apparently no longer actively standing in the way of action is a huge step forward, in my opinion.

It is a sign that ExxonMobil now clearly understands that a position of denial concerning global warming is simply an untenable position. They've apparently seen the writing on the wall: climate change policies are inevitable.

Be it this year, the next, or even the one after that, the United States will soon join most of the rest of the world and enter into a new carbon constrained age by enacting policies capping or taxing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. Exxon now knows that the policy debates occuring today are not to be trifled with and that they had better attempt to get their input in and shape the policies to their benefit.

And Exxon's new-found interest in climate change policy solutions isn't the only sign of a shifting policital landscape.

Last Monday, the heads of 10 major U.S. corporations teamed up with four leading environmental organizations to form the United States Climate Action Partnership, calling on Congress and the president to support mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions "at the earliest practicable date." The group included the chief executives of Exxon's competitor, BP America, as well as GE, Duke Energy, DuPont, PG&E, Alcoa and others [full list on the USCAP website].

The corporations have joined together with Environmental Defense, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and the World Resources Institute. USCAP has put forward a series of policy recommendations designed to cut U.S. annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 10 to 30 percent below today's levels in just 15 years, with the ultimate goal of a 60-90% reduction over today's emissions levels by 2050 (this is based on the scientific consensus that we must stabilizeatmospheric CO2 levels at 450-550 parts per million to avoide global temperature increases in excess of 2 degress C (3-4 degrees F) and the dangerous climate change that will result).

Then, on Tuesday, President Bush issued his State of the Union address, in which he finally acknowledged, "the serious challenge of global climate change."

Sure, it was just a throw away line in his speech (although it did elicit a spontaneous standing ovation from many in the audience, which in turn elicited a priceless smirk on President Bush's face). Just like Exxon deserves little praise for it's new position on climate change, the president deserves little credit for including this one line in the address (why should we praise them for finally admitting what practically everyone else has been saying for years? Actions speak much louder than words Mr President - and Mr. Cohen).

However, both subtle shifts in position are significant indications that we are now reaching a tipping point on the path to climate change action.

As Tom Yulsman of Prometheus: the Science Technology Weblog, another participant in the conference call, writes:

An earthquake occurs when enough strain builds up along a fault line, causing the ground on opposites sides to suddenly break free and shift violently. In the past few years, we’ve witnessed a steady build up of strain along the fault line marking the divide between the science of global warming on one side, and public, corporate and political perceptions on the other. The scientific evidence clearly linking human activities to a warming climate has been pulling hard on the fault for years, causing some creep but no major release.

Over the past year, we have seen that faultline strain more and more, and now, perhaps, we are seeing the first signs of tremors.

Is a true earthquake soon to come?


A New Media Age

The fact that Exxon had this conversation with bloggers and not the mainstream press is also significant (as of yet, I have not seen any mainstream press focused on clarifying Exxon's climate change position).

Perhaps Time Magazine was right when they selected 'You' as the 2006 Person of the Year, citing the growing influence of web-based, people-powered media like blogging!

You know we live in a new and decidedly more democratic age of media and communication when an executive of the world's largest company sees fit to not only take notice of the blogosphere, but also actively seek out bloggers to talk to (representatives of APCO Worldwide, a global PR firm, set up Friday's conference call and contaced the bloggers who participated in the call).

If this is a tale of David and Goliath, than perhaps we haven't yet slain the giant, but we've certainly made him take notice of our little slingshot. Our blogs have now given us a big enough megaphone that, collectively, we can bend the ear of the world's largest companies, a not unsignificant change from a short three or four years ago.


Participants in ExxonMobil Conference Call (and their Blogs):

Yours truly (of course)

Tom Yulsman, Prometheus: the Science Policy Weblog

Susan Smith, Environmental Law Prof Blog

Stuart Staniford, The Oil Drum

Maria Surma Manka, Green Options

Ken Cohen, Vice President of Public Affairs, ExxonMobil

Pam Franklin, Online Marketing Strategist, APCO Worldwide

Stay tuned for Part Two, where we'll get into the details of 'he said, she said'...

Read more!

News From My Backyard: Legislative Proposals Could Make Oregon Leader on Clean Energy and Climate Change

Legislative proposals would increase the use of renewable energy, biofuels and efficiency

[From the Salem Statesman Journal:]

Oregon is poised to be a national leader in renewable energy and responder to climate change if the legislature acts on a series of biofuel, tax credit and renewable energy proposals this session, program proponents said Wednesday.

In addition to his five energy legislative proposals, Gov. Ted Kulongoski is backing a proposal that would force utilities to increase energy efficiency, increase their reliance on renewable energy and limit greenhouse gas emissions.

[Oregon drivers could see more highway signs for alternative fuels, if legislation enacting a biofuels standard is passed this session. Rising Phoenix Biofuels, in Southern Oregon, serves only biofuels. The state is poised to be a leader in renewable energy.]

He said he would work with other Western states to discuss a regional program called cap-and-trade, but an initial program just within Oregon also is viable, said David Stewart-Smith, the chairman of the governor's task force on this program.

Stewart-Smith made his formal recommendation to the governor as part of a discussion on the next steps the state should take to address global warming and move toward energy independence.

Stewart-Smith said the program would reduce the average cost to utility customers, but only if energy conservation measures were also adopted.

The cap-and-trade program is only one piece of the governor's plan to reduce greenhouse gases within the state -- which would help halt, or even reverse, the global warming trend.

Among the state's goals are:

By 2010, arrest growth of greenhouse gas emissions.

By 2020, reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 10 percent below 1990 levels.

By 2050, reduce greenhouse gases to 75 percent below 1990 levels.

Oregon State University professor Jane Lubchenco, who was chairwoman of the governor's advisory group on global warming, said that it is urgent that global-warming policies are enacted now. She said that conclusive evidence shows that climate change is real and it's happening even faster and with more detrimental consequences than originally predicted.

Lubchenco said that Oregon's leadership -- in concert with actions in California and other states -- could force federal dialogue on global-warming policies.

"If we enact our priorities this session, we will create a sustainable economy and a sustainable environment for future generations," Kulongoski said. "We can't wait any longer."

"Global-warming pollution takes awhile to have an effect on temperature, and temperature takes awhile to have an effect on snow levels and the sea," said Jeremiah Baumann of the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group. "Even if we could stop all global-warming pollution now, the Earth would continue to warm. It's good news for the country -- and the planet really -- that Oregon is ready to take a leadership role."

Just an hour after the governor's remarks on climate change, the House Committee on Energy and the Environment began hearings on biofuels legislation. The package of proposals includes a requirement that biodiesel and ethanol are ingredients of fuels sold in Oregon, expansion of property tax incentives for biofuel production facilities and creation of an income tax incentive for consumer use of biofuel.

The biofuels package is one of the pieces of the governor's climate change initiative, but it also is touted as a key to economic development and energy independence for Oregon.

It's the third legislative session for some of these proposals.

Jeff Kropf, a former Republican legislator and grass seed farmer from Sublimity, testified in front of the committee Tuesday. He proposed similar legislation last session with Rep. Jackie Dingfelder, D-Portland, who supports the biofuels package this year.

Kropf said that promoting the biofuel industry in Oregon is also good for air quality. Burning biodiesel instead of regular diesel reduces particulates in the air, and both biodiesel and ethanol reduce carbon emissions, said Andrew Ginsburg of the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

Summary of the Governor's Legislative Proposals:

Senate Bill 232: Authorizes state agencies to develop renewable energy on state forests, campuses and other state lands. This bill will help achieve the governor's goal for state agencies to meet 100 percent of their electricity needs from renewables by 2010.

House Bill 2211: The Business Energy Tax Credit is amended to provide greater incentives for renewable energy -- including increasing credit for renewable energy systems installed by businesses from 35 percent to 50 percent and increases the project cost limit from $10 million to $20 million; and providing that the costs of constructing facilities to manufacture renewable energy systems and components are eligible for the increased tax credit for renewable energy.

House Bill 2212: Changes to the Residential Energy Tax Credit to allow use of the credit for more than one qualifying item in the same year, e.g. for a solar water heater and for a solar electric system; and increases the maximum tax credit for fuel cells and for wind generation from $1,500 to $6,000 over four years.

House Bill 2210: Biofuels Fuels Package expands property tax incentives for biofuel and certain fuel additive production facilities; establishes a new tax credit for producers and collectors of biofuel raw materials; establishes a Renewable Fuel Standard for biodiesel and ethanol based on in-state production; provides that the existing mandate on state agencies to use ethanol also applies to biodiesel; creates an income tax incentive for consumer use of biofuel.

House Bill 2209: Establishes a Renewable Portfolio Standard for electricity. The bill requires that 25 percent of Oregon's electric load come from new renewable energy by 2025.

Well, I've been meaning to write a summary of the renewable energy and biofuels legislation introduced this session in the Oregon Legislature, but I guess this article basically does it for me. There's a lot going on in Salem this session to pay attention to, and environmental and renewable energy advocates have been racking up the miles between Portland and Salem these past three weeks since the session commenced (hopefully they're carpooling ... in hybrids!).

If you are an Oregon citizen, I'd encourage you to contact your state representatives to let them know you support the full range of the Governor's renewable energy proposals and expect them to support them as well. Committee hearings are underway currently on a number of the bills (the biofuels bill looks like it will move first) so it would be fine timing to call or write your reps.

Expect more details on the Renewable Energy Standard bill, which I'm pretty closely involved in, soon. Unlike the other bills (all of which are much less complicated), the RES bill hasn't come out of legislative council yet (they're the ones that make the bill proposal into legalese!), and will likely undergoe one more round of revision before being introduced into the Senate (most likely in the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee, chaired by Senator Brad Avakian). The current HB 2209 described above is simply a placeholder bill number awaiting the real bill sometime very soon (next week perhaps).

Read more!

Eye On China: China One-ups President Bush

China Shoots for 25% Biofuels by 2020

[From Green Car Congress:]

The Chinese government plans to use liquid biofuels produced in rural areas to cut the country’s consumption of petroleum products by 10 million tons [roughly 72 million barrels], or more than 25%, by 2020.

China is the world’s third largest oil importer after the United State and Japan, and imported a record-high 36.38 million tons (about 267 million barrels) of refined oil products last year, 15.7% up on 2005, to fuel an estimated annual economic growth of 10.7% percent.

[Will China imitate the United States and turn to its cornfields to meet it's biofuels targets, or will they adopt a more sustainable (environmentally and economically) biofuel?]

In his State of the Union Address this week, US President George Bush unveiled his Twenty in Ten goal—a reduction in gasoline consumption of 20% in 10 years through the use of biofuels (15%) and increased fuel efficiency (5%).

China's one-uped you Mr. President! Mr. Bush's 20 in 10 proposal calls for biofuels to displace 15% of gasoline by 2017, while this Chinese proposal calls for biofuels to replace 25% of total national petroleum consumption.

On an absolute basis, the President's proposal does take the cake, calling for 35 billion gallons of biofuels by 2017, as compared to roughly 72 million barrels of oil equivalent, or nearly six billion gallons of ethanol.

Still, these are ambitious goals for China, and will help take a large chunk out of their growing oil consumption, if they can produce that much biofuel, that is (six billion gallons should be pretty achievable though).

I'm assume that China is calling for a 25% reduction over demand in 2020, not a 25% reduction over current demand, which would be much more ambitious. The president's proposal calls for a 20% reduction in gasoline consumption over forecasted demand in 2017, not a 20% reduction over current demand levels. While this amounts to a larger number in absolute terms, it means the US gasoline consumption, let alone petroleum energy consumption, may continue to increase in the future.

Read more!

Largest Youth Mobilization on Global Warming: Events on 575 Campuses and Schools

An Inconvenient Truth Screenings Will Anchor Week of Action, JAN. 29 - FEB. 2

[From It's Getting Hot in Hear: Dispatches from the Global Youth Climate Movement:]

In the largest mobilization in the history of the youth global warming movement, students are rising up to demand immediate action to end our addiction to fossil fuels. Students on over 575 college and high school campuses across the United States and Canada are urging their campus administrators to enact clean energy policies as a key solution to the impending climate crisis. The demands are part of Rising to the Climate Challenge: Visions of Our Future, a week-long series of actions coordinated by the Campus Climate Challenge. “The Challenge” unites young people to win 100% clean energy policies at their schools.

Anchoring the week of action are hundreds of screenings of the Oscar-nominated documentary An Inconvenient Truth. In partnership with The 11th Hour Project and Truth on Campus, the Challenge is making copies of the DVD and public screening licenses available to college and high school campuses across the U.S. and Canada.

In addition to the film screenings, students are organizing rallies, educational forums and requesting meetings with members of Congress to urge that the U. S. take a leading role in reducing greenhouses gases. Events are planned in 49 states and 8 Canadian provinces.

Events include:

• Students at Rutgers University have collected 200 invitations sent to Rep. Frank Pallone D-NJ to at a screening and discussion of An Inconvenient Truth. The screening will also kick-off a campus-wide dorm competition to save energy.
• Students from Ivy League universities are joining together to call for their campuses to go climate neutral.
• January 30: Billionaires for Coal will be rallying outside the New York headquarters of Merrill Lynch to protest its investment in TXU, a company proposing to build 11 new coal power plants in Texas.
• January 31: West Virginia elementary school students will be presenting letters to Governor Manchin urging him to build them a new school away from the coal silo that sits 150 feet from their current school.

For a complete list of events during the week of action, please visit http://www.climatechallenge.org/woa.

“Students recognize that climate change is the most critical issue facing their generation. Throughout the Week of Action they are demanding less talk and more action to end our addiction to fossil fuels,” said Michael Crawford, communications director for the Campus Climate Challenge. “Beginning with their college campuses and extending to the halls of Congress, young people are sounding the alarm about global warming and providing real solutions that move us towards a clean energy future.”

“At American University, we have already held a successful student referendum to move the university towards wind-generated energy,” says student Claire Roby. “But that’s not enough. We are joining with students from around the country during the week of action to demand real solutions to stop global warming.”

“There is a growing sense of urgency about global warming among young people because we are the generation that will be most affected.,” says Andrew Nazdin, a freshman at the University of Maryland. “The week of action is a way for students to demand real solutions to end our addiction to fossil fuels.”

The Campus Climate Challenge, a project of the Energy Action Coalition, unites young people to organize on college campuses and high schools to win 100% clean energy policies at their schools. Energy Action Coalition is a network of 41 organizations from across the United States and Canada, founded and led by youth to help support and strengthen the student and youth clean energy movement in the United States and Canada.

Energy Action Coalition partners are: Americans for Informed Democracy, Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, Black Mesa Water Coalition, Brower New Leaders Initiative, California Student Sustainability Coalition, Campus Progress, Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Clean Air Cool Planet, Climate Crisis Coalition, ConnPIRG, CoPIRG, Dakota Resource Council, Earth Day Network, Energy Justice Network, Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative, Global Exchange, Greenpeace Student Network, Indigenous Environmental Network, INPIRG, Kids Against Pollution, League of Conservation Voters Education Fund: Project Democracy, League of Young Voters, MarylandPIRG, MASSPIRG, MoPIRG, National Association of Environmental Law Societies, National Wildlife Federation’s Campus Ecology Program, NJPIRG, OhioPIRG, OSPIRG, Rainforest Action Network, Restoring Eden, Sierra Student Coalition, Sierra Youth Coalition, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, Student Environmental Action Coalition, Students United for a Responsible Global Environment, Sustainable Endowments Institute, SustainUS, Utah Clean Energy, WashPIRG, WISPIRG, Young People For and Youth Environmental Network.

Truthoncampus.org is helping colleges, universities and high schools across the country increase the positive outcomes from their screenings of “An inconvenient Truth.” Coordination is being led by Better Days Alliance, a Connecticut-based 501(c)(3) organization with support from Aveda, Annie’s Homegrown, Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Clif Bar, Stonyfield Farm and the 11th Hour Project.

This is great! I'm actually speaking at an event at a Beaverton, OR Middle School that's part of this Week of Action and doubles as a kick off event for the Focus the Nation on Climate Change movement.

I strongly feel that the voice of people of my generation must be heard on this critial issue. Whatever we're dubbed (Gen Y, Gen Next, or whatever else), this generation of young people coming to age in the beginning of the 21st century will ultimetly be the ones who will live first hand with the consequences of the actions, or inactions, of our elected leaders today.

It is up to us to decide what kind of future we wish to live in, and to fight to ensure that that future is realized.

If we don't make our voices heard, and demand represenation as a constituency deeply invested in the outcome of the current debates on climate change legislation, we will have noone to blame but ourselves if things don't go our way.

I love to see these events going on at campuses and schools across the country. They will hopefully help us find our voice. I hope that in addition to leveraging their own campus communities, the people gathering at these events also look outward to the larger political landscape. We are at a momentous point in history today wherein we will craft the policies that shape the future we will inherit, and if we gather our voices into one, we have the power to shift the political landscape.

Let's not forget the power of student movements of the past. It was organized and consistent pressure from student activists across the country that was crucial to the passage and ratification of the 26th Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1971, which extended the right to vote to 18, 19 and 20 year olds. If student activism can change the Constitution of the United States, it can shift the politics of global warming.

I am currently kicking around ideas for ways I can help organize this growing youth climate change movement into focused political pressure on key committee members who will debate the seven or so climate change bills currently introduced in the House and Senate. Any ideas about how to go about that, or contacts you might have for campus activists, organizers, professors, etc. who might be interested in getting involved, please send them my way (you can find my email info in the sidebar for this blog).

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Evangelicals and Scientists Start Climate Campaign

[I guess I missed this one last week... From MSNBC, January 17th:]

Saying they share a moral purpose, a group of evangelicals and scientists committed themselves Wednesday to work together to convince the nation’s leaders that global warming is real.

The Rev. Rich Cizik, public policy director for the National Association of Evangelicals (pictured above left), and Nobel-laureate Eric Chivian, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, were among 28 signers of a statement that demands urgent changes in values, lifestyles and public policies to avert disastrous changes in climate.

“God will judge us for destroying the Creation. Therefore, we as evangelicals have a responsibility to be even more vigilant than others,” Cizik told a news conference.

“Science can be an ally in helping us understand what faith is telling us,” he said. “We will not allow the Creation to be degraded, destroyed by human folly.”

Among the project’s supporters are Edward O. Wilson, a two-time Pulitzer prize-winning scientist and author; James Hansen, a prominent NASA climatologist; and Calvin B. DeWitt, president of the Academy of Evangelical Scientists and Ethicists.

Chivian said evangelicals and scientists are not as odd a couple as they may seem.

“We discovered that we were both speaking from our hearts and our minds. We found that we really like each other,” he said.

Dissenting view

Not all evangelicals were on board.

The Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, formed by evangelicals who say scientific evidence counters claims of climate change, derided Wednesday’s announcement as “just another attempt to create the impression of growing consensus among evangelicals about global warming. There is no such growing consensus.”

The alliance charged that the National Association of Evangelicals’ board never approved the new collaboration. The NAE said its board approved a “dialogue,” but no specific actions.

The new effort represents the boldest evangelical step yet into the world of environmental activism.

To start, the coalition is meeting with congressional leaders, both Democrat and Republican, organizing a summit on environmental issues and developing public relations tools such as a “Creation Care” Bible study guide.

It also has requested a meeting with President Bush. Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, all signaled their support Wednesday for the collaboration of evangelicals and scientists.

Initiative born at retreat

Their pairing grew from a retreat last year at which all sides agreed that human behavior and public policy have put the environment at risk.

In the past, conservative Christians who embraced that cause have met significant resistance.

The Rev. Joel Hunter of Northland megachurch in Longwood, Fla., refused to become president of the Christian Coalition of America last year because he said the group would not expand its agenda to include the environment and poverty. Hunter has now endorsed the new project.


Related Posts:

Bishop of London: It's Sinful to Contribute to Climate Change - July 24th, 2006

God Is On Our Side ... or at Least 86 Evangelical Christian Leaders Are - February 11th, 2006

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Renewable Energy Industry Reacts to State of the Union

[I provide the following article, from Renewable Energy Access.com, without specific comment, except to say that my own response to the president's State of the Union address is similarly lukewarm. I will likely work on my own response to the president's address this weekend when I hopefully have some more time to write. Until then...]

Proponents of the renewable energy industry quickly reacted to U.S. President George Bush's recent State of the Union Address, specifically those portions of his plans addressing solar and wind energy, cutting U.S. gas consumption 20 percent by 2017, raising the fuel standard for renewable fuels, and increasing battery research for hybrid cars [again, for a summary of the energy proposals in the State of the Union, see this Green Car Congress post].

"These technologies will help us be better stewards of the environment, and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change," said President Bush.

Yet amid slight praise for broaching the topic of how to address climate change through the use of renewable energies, increased R&D for ethanol, and an RFS, many renewable energy advocates agree: it's not enough.

Scott Sklar, President, The Stella Group, Ltd.:
"While the President actually mentioned the word "climate change" in his State of the Union speech, the environmental groups got none of what they directly wanted towards establishing some sort of mandatory emissions caps. ... As was seen from the President's subdued delivery, focus on Iraq, and acknowledgments on the shift of power to a divided government -- all these energy proposals will be sifted, added to and modified by the Democratic Leadership in the House and Senate. The speech signifies the formal start of this process, and now the political theater and process begins."

Bill Prindle, Acting Executive Director, American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy:
"The President sets extremely ambitious goals for alternative fuels, while making tepid promises on fuel economy. While we need new clean fuels, energy efficiency is the first fuel in the race for energy security. Congress should set a stronger CAFE standard that would save at least 12 billion gallons of gasoline in 2017 and 50 billion in 2030."

Chris Flavin, President, Worldwatch Institute:
"Beyond biofuels, the array of other promising renewable energy sources -- including solar energy, wind power, and geothermal energy -- received only a mention in the president's speech, and is generally ignored in his detailed energy plan. It will therefore fall to Congress to develop the kind of solid, far-reaching national commitment to renewable resources and efficiency that will be needed to fuel a strong domestic economy and lower the consumption of oil and other fossil fuels."

Ken Bossong, Coordinator, The Sustainable Energy Network:
"Curbing gasoline use by 20 percent over the next decade is a positive goal but it is not enough. It is time to pull out all of the stops and launch an intensive national effort to significantly reduce total energy use and greatly increase the share of energy coming from renewable sources - with a goal of at least 25 percent by 2025. This would include at least a near-term doubling, if not tripling, of federal tax incentives as well as federal funding of research, development, and deployment of the full spectrum of energy efficient and renewable energy technologies -- with heavy emphasis on actual deployment."

Brent Erickson, Executive Vice President, Biotechnology Industry Organization:
"By proposing a new renewable energy standard that will require fuel blenders to use up to 35 billion gallons of renewable fuel by 2017, the President is sending a dramatically positive signal to the investment community, to farmers, to biotech companies and to gasoline refiners that our government will work with the private sector to make the biofuels sector a major contributor to our energy independence. Biotechnology is the key enabling technology that can help the United States significantly reduce its use of foreign petroleum. America could soon be producing a significant portion of its transportation fuel needs from crops and crop residues with the help of improved crop yields from agricultural biotechnology, increased ethanol production efficiency from industrial biotechnology, and the production of cellulosic biomass ethanol."

Brian Jennings, Executive Vice President, American Coalition for Ethanol:
"President Bush's call to increase the use of renewable and alternative fuels, including ethanol, to 35 billion gallons by 2017 sends a very powerful signal that an ambitious yet attainable Renewable Fuels Standard goal is the ideal strategy to strengthen energy security and independence in the U.S. An RFS level of 35 billion gallons by 2017 is consistent with ACE's call for an RFS of 60 billion gallons by 2030, and we are pleased that this and other important aspects of ACE's legislative plan have already been included in S. 23, the Biofuels Security Act introduced in the 110th Congress by Senators Harkin and Lugar."

Scott Faber, Farm Policy Campaign Director, Environmental Defense:
"Expanding the production of ethanol will help boost the profitability of our farmers and reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy. To ensure that ethanol feed stocks are grown in ways that meet our environmental challenges, Congress should double funding for voluntary USDA conservation programs when Congress renews farm and food policies this year. ... Renewal of farm and food policies creates an opportunity to dramatically increase renewable energy development on our farms, ranches, and forest lands. The next Farm Bill should expand USDA grants and loan guarantees to develop renewable energy, and should for the first time link USDA investments in renewable energy to an index of environmental benefits."

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President Bush Issues Executive Order to Federal Agencies: Reduce Fuel Consumption, Use Biofuels and Buy Plug-in Hybrid Vehicles

[From Green Car Congress:]

The morning after his State of the Union Address [see earlier GCC post for summary of energy provisions in the State of the Union speech], President Bush issued an executive order to Federal Agencies that, among other things, requires a 2% reduction in consumption of petroleum products per year through the end of 2015 in fleets larger than 20 vehicles.

The order also specifies an increase of total fuel consumption that is non-petroleum-based by 10% and requires the use of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) when the plug-ins are commercially available at a cost reasonably comparable, on the basis of life-cycle cost, to non-PHEVs.

President Bush, speaking at DuPont 24 Jan 07, said:

"Today I signed an executive order that says we’re going to commit the government to the following things: that we’re going to purchase more hybrid and flexible-fuel vehicles that run on ethanol—because we own a lot of cars, and therefore, it’s one thing to say, this is the goal; it’s another thing to actually participate in achieving that goal, and that’s what we’re going to do.

Secondly, we're going to purchase plug-in hybrid vehicles as soon as they hit the market. I think that will give some surety to those who have invested in new technologies to know that the federal government is going to be a purchaser, when commercially available."

The Executive Order consolidates a number of pre-existing orders and adds new requirements. Other requirements in the Executive Order are:

A reduction in energy intensity of 3% annually through the end of fiscal year 2015, or 30% by the end of fiscal year 2015, relative to the baseline of the agency’s energy use in fiscal year 2003;

Ensuring that at least half of the statutorily required renewable energy consumed by the agency in a fiscal year comes from new renewable sources, and that to the extent feasible, the agency implements renewable energy generation projects on agency property for agency use;

Beginning in FY 2008, to reduce water consumption intensity, relative to the baseline of the agency’s water consumption in fiscal year 2007, through life-cycle cost-effective measures by 2% annually through the end of fiscal year 2015 or 16% by the end of fiscal year 2015;

Requiring in agency acquisitions of goods and services the use of sustainable environmental practices, including acquisition of bio-based, environmentally preferable, energy-efficient, water-efficient, and recycled-content products; and use of paper of at least 30% post-consumer fiber content;

Ensuring that the agency reduces the quantity of toxic and hazardous chemicals and materials acquired, used, or disposed of by the agency, increases diversion of solid waste as appropriate, and maintains cost-effective waste prevention and recycling programs in its facilities;

Ensuring that new construction and major renovation of agency buildings comply with the Guiding Principles for Federal Leadership in High Performance and Sustainable Buildings set forth in the Federal Leadership in High Performance and Sustainable Buildings Memorandum of Understanding,, and 15% of the existing Federal capital asset building inventory of the agency as of the end of fiscal year 2015 incorporates the sustainable practices in the Guiding Principles; and

Ensuring that the agency when acquiring an electronic product to meet its requirements, meets at least 95% of those requirements with an Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT)-registered electronic product, unless there is no EPEAT standard for such product, enables the Energy Star feature on agency computers and monitors, establishes and implements policies to extend the useful life of agency electronic equipment, and uses environmentally sound practices with respect to disposition of agency electronic equipment that has reached the end of its useful life.

The Order directs agency heads to implement within their agencies environmental management systems (EMS) at all appropriate organizational levels to ensure the use of EMS as the primary management approach for addressing environmental aspects of internal agency operations and activities, including environmental aspects of energy and transportation functions, the establishment of agency objectives and targets to ensure implementation of this order, and the collection, analysis, and reporting of information to measure performance in the implementation of this order.

The head of an agency may exempt law enforcement, protective, emergency response, or military tactical vehicle fleets of that agency from the provisions of the order.

This may be the first thing President Bush has done that I'm happy about... I'm trying to remember something else, but nothing's really coming to mind (extension of the PTC in EPAct 2005 I suppose...)

Halting the forward march of exponential growth should be our goal whenever possible when resource use is concerned. The provisions outlined in this Executive Order set the federal government on the path to reducing resource consumption in a number of areas, and I applaud President Bush for issuing this order (now there's something I never thought I'd say).

For once, at least on this small thing, the president has attempted to walk his talk.

I'm also happy to see a committmen to purchase plug-in hybrids when the become commercialized. Large fleet purchases have consitently been drivers of new technologies.

Just this once (begrudgingly), I salute you President Bush!

(I feel dirty now... I'm going to go take a shower...)

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Massachusetts (Re)Joins Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative

Mass. Power Plants to Pay Emissions Penalties

[From The Boston Globe:]

Massachusetts power plant owners will have to pay a penalty for every pound of emissions that contribute to global warming under an agreement signed by Governor Deval Patrick yesterday that is expected to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for an ambitious energy conservation and renewable energy program.

Patrick agreed to rejoin the seven-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which aims to gradually reduce the production of greenhouse gases in the Northeast. Reversing his predecessor Mitt Romney, who pulled out of the pact over concerns that the emissions fee would drive up the already-high price of electricity, Patrick predicted that electricity costs would ultimately drop because the penalties would generate up to $125 million a year to spend on conservation.

[Image: Governor Deval Patrick was applauded yesterday at a news conference at the University of Massachusetts after signing an agreement to have the state rejoin a regional initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. (Source: Boston Globe)]

"Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our time," Patrick said at a press briefing at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. "On this day, we want everyone to know that Massachusetts will not stand on the sidelines."

The new governor also announced that he would set aside $17 million to increase the purchase of renewable energy for use by state government.

Patrick's announcement puts him at the forefront of a growing movement in states and the new Congress to take stronger action against global warming, which scientists say is largely driven by human releases of carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil, gas, and other fuels.

As leader of the state with the biggest energy demand in New England, Patrick's move could influence other states as they decide how to implement the carbon dioxide fees called for in the greenhouse gas initiative. Under the agreement, Patrick could have simply given power plants permits for most of their carbon dioxide emissions, but he decided to make them purchase all the permits at a regional auction, raising more money for energy projects.

Vermont and New York have already decided to use that approach, but the four other participating New England states haven't taken a final position. Rhode Island is the only state in the region not taking part.

"What a breath of fresh air to switch from our previous governor who walked away from the climate crisis altogether," said Brian Thurber of Clean Water Action, one of many environmental groups that sang Patrick's praises yesterday. "Massachusetts is usually a regional and national leader on air pollution and energy issues. It's nice to be back in the game."

But power companies and many large electricity users, who have opposed the carbon dioxide charge, remain wary about Patrick's plan. A spokesman for Associated Industries of Massachusetts said the group knows that the new fees are inevitable, but its leaders declined Patrick's invitation to attend yesterday's announcement because they don't want to appear overly supportive.

"At this point, we're for making this thing work because we have to, but we are not for having this done the wrong way," said Robert Rio , vice president for government affairs at the association. He said any money raised from the initiative should go directly to projects that lower overall energy costs.

Under the agreement Patrick signed, Massachusetts power plants with a capacity of 25 megawatts or more would face an overall cap of 26.6 million tons of carbon dioxide released into the air in 2009, a limit that would require little, if any, immediate cuts in emissions. Plant owners, however, would have to buy credits at a regional auction for each ton of carbon dioxide they release. Though no one knows what the price will be, a credit for a ton of carbon dioxide now sells for about $4 in Europe, which already has a carbon dioxide-control system.

Money from the sale of credits -- estimated to total $25 million to $125 million a year for Massachusetts, depending on the auction price -- could be invested in such projects as installing energy-efficient streetlights or a computerized system that would allow utilities to automatically turn down major customers' air conditioning to reduce energy demand on the hottest days. Patrick estimated that the average family will initially pay about $3 a year more for electricity because of the program, but within a few years, they could be saving $70 or more due to energy conservation efforts.

States in the greenhouse gas initiative would have to gradually reduce carbon dioxide emissions starting in 2015, and by 2019, the cap will be 10 percent lower. If the cutback is achieved, that would mark a striking turnaround from current trends: Carbon dioxide emissions have been rising steadily since 2001 throughout the Northeast.

Ian Bowles , the environmental affairs secretary, said important technical issues need to be resolved before the carbon dioxide limits go into effect, but, fundamentally, he said the charge for carbon dioxide emissions will give power companies new incentive to use less coal, oil, and natural gas, and more wind, solar, and other forms of power that do not release carbon dioxide.

Bowles, however, agreed that efforts by the Northeastern states alone won't be enough to stop global warming. "The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is an important first step, but the US needs a federal policy here," he said.


More good news. Patrick is sure a nice change of pace from Romney. Maybe now the Cape Wind Project can move forward as well...

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Eye On China: China Could Become World's Largest Wind Power Producer

Report Forecasts 150,000 MW of Wind Power Installed in China by 2020

[From China View.com:]

China is expected to overtake Germany and the United States to become the world's largest wind power producer by 2020, a report forecast.

The 2006 Annual Report on China's New Energy Industry says that the 10th Five-Year Plan (2000-2005) period saw a rapid development of wind power industry, with the installed capacity rose by 30 percent on an annual average, rising from 350,000 kw in 2000 to 1.26 million kw in 2005, ranking 7th in the world.

The report quotes a prediction by the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC)that the total wind power installed capacity in China will probably reach 150 million kw in 2020, making China one of the world's major wind power markets.

As a country with long coastal lines and abundant wind power resources, China boasts of wind power resources of 3.2 billion kw, of which one billion kw can be developed, according to the report.

China has set up more than sixty wind power farms around the country, developed key technologies and trained personnel specialized in designing and operating wind power farms, making the country well prepared to large-scale development of the industry, the report says.

According to China's national development plan, the total installed capacity of wind power will reach five million kw by 2010 and 30 million kw by 2020.

During the 11th Five-Year Plan period (2006-2010), China will set up about 30 large wind power projects of 100 MW at regions with abundant wind power resources, such as eastern coastal areas, Hebei Province and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in north China.

In terms of small wind power projects, China has already developed the largest market in the world. By the end of 2005, China has installed 320,000 small wind turbine generators with a total capacity of 65,000 kw, supplying power to residents in remote areas, according to the report.


I hope for all our sakes that China develops at least that much wind power. They're going to need all of the carbon-free, renewable power they can get their hands on as they try to feed their rapidly growing economy.

I was interested to see that China has already captured the world's largest market for distributed, small-scale wind generation, with 65 MW of installed capacity already. I'm not sure where we are at in the U.S., but I would bet our small-scale wind industry is on the order of 1-5 MW of installed capacity. China is also the world's leader in solar hot water heating and is home to a rapidly growing solar photovoltaic market (both in terms of demand and manufacturing).

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Wind Power Capacity in U.S. Increased 27% in 2006

AWEA Expects Growth in 2007 to Reach an Additional 26%

[From AWEA via Renewable Energy Access.com:]

Wind power-generating capacity increased by 27 percent in 2006 and is expected to increase an additional 26 percent in 2007, proving wind is now a mainstream option for new power generation in the U.S., according to a market forecast released today by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA).

The U.S. wind energy industry installed 2,454 megawatts (MW) of new generating capacity in 2006, an investment of approximately $4 billion, billing wind as one of the largest sources of new power generation in the country -- second only to natural gas -- for the second year in a row. New wind farms boosted cumulative U.S. installed wind energy capacity by 27 percent to 11,603 MW, well above the 10,000-MW milestone reached in August 2006.

Wind power has attracted the support of state and federal government legislatures. The U.S. Congress recently extended the federal production tax credit (PTC) through December 2008 to further expand the number of wind farms throughout the U.S. Based on the success of the PTC to date, AWEA is calling for extending the provision an additional five years.

"Wind is a proven, cost-effective source of energy that also alleviates global warming and enhances our nation's energy security," said AWEA Executive Director Randall Swisher. "The industry has demonstrated a generous return on the investment of both private and public investment in wind," said Swisher. "Extending the PTC five years will significantly increase the progress America is making in expanding its use of new forms of energy when they've never been needed more."

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A New Look at Geothermal Energy's Vast Potential

MIT-led Panel Backs Geothermal as Key U.S. Energy Source

[From MIT via Renewable Energy Access.com:]

A comprehensive new MIT-led study on the potential for geothermal energy within the United States has found that mining the huge amounts of heat that reside as stored thermal energy in the Earth's hard rock crust could supply a substantial portion of the electricity the country will need in the future -- probably at competitive prices and with minimal environmental impact.

An 18-member panel led by MIT prepared the 400-plus page study, titled "The Future of Geothermal Energy." Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, it is the first study in some 30 years to take a new look at geothermal, an energy resource that has been largely ignored.

The goal of the study was to assess the feasibility, potential environmental impacts and economic viability of using enhanced geothermal system (EGS) technology to greatly increase the fraction of the U.S. geothermal resource that could be recovered commercially.

Although geothermal energy is produced commercially today and the United States is the world's biggest producer, existing U.S. plants have focused on the high-grade geothermal systems primarily located in isolated regions of the west. This new study takes a more ambitious look at this resource and evaluates its potential for much larger-scale deployment.

"We've determined that heat mining can be economical in the short term, based on a global analysis of existing geothermal systems, an assessment of the total U.S. resource and continuing improvements in deep-drilling and reservoir stimulation technology," said panel head Jefferson W. Tester, the H. P. Meissner Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT.

"EGS technology has already been proven to work in the few areas where underground heat has been successfully extracted. And further technological improvements can be expected," he said.

The expert panel offers a number of recommendations to develop geothermal as a major electricity supplier for the nation. These include more detailed and site-specific assessments of the U.S. geothermal resource and a multi-year federal commitment to demonstrate the concept in the field at commercial scale.

The new assessment of geothermal energy by energy experts, geologists, drilling specialists and others is important for several key reasons, Tester said.

First, fossil fuels -- coal, oil and natural gas -- are increasingly expensive and consumed in ever-increasing amounts. Second, oil and gas imports from foreign sources raise concerns over long-term energy security. Third, burning fossil fuels dumps carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere. Finally, heat mining has the potential to supply a significant amount of the country's electricity currently being generated by conventional fossil fuel, hydroelectric and nuclear plants.

The study shows that drilling several wells to reach hot rock and connecting them to a fractured rock region that has been stimulated to let water flow through it creates a heat-exchanger that can produce large amounts of hot water or steam to run electric generators at the surface. Unlike conventional fossil-fuel power plants that burn coal, natural gas or oil, no fuel would be required. And unlike wind and solar systems, a geothermal plant works night and day, offering a non-interruptible source of electric power.

Prof. Tester and panel member David Blackwell, professor of geophysics at Southern Methodist University in Texas, also point out that geothermal resources are available nationwide, although the highest-grade sites are in western states, where hot rocks are closer to the surface, requiring less drilling and thus lowering costs.

The panel also evaluated the environmental impacts of geothermal development, concluding that these are "markedly lower than conventional fossil-fuel and nuclear power plants."

"This environmental advantage is due to low emissions and the small overall footprint of the entire geothermal system, which results because energy capture and extraction is contained entirely underground, and the surface equipment needed for conversion to electricity is relatively compact," Tester said.

The report also notes that meeting water requirements for geothermal plants may be an issue, particularly in arid regions. Further, the potential for seismic risk needs to be carefully monitored and managed.

According to panel member M. Nafi Toksoez, professor of geophysics at MIT, "geothermal energy could play an important role in our national energy picture as a non-carbon-based energy source. It's a very large resource and has the potential to be a significant contributor to the energy needs of this country."

Toksoez added that the electricity produced annually by geothermal energy systems now in use in the United States at sites in California, Hawaii, Utah and Nevada is comparable to that produced by solar and wind power combined. And the potential is far greater still, since hot rocks below the surface are available in most parts of the United States.

Even in the most promising areas, however, drilling must reach depths of 5,000 feet or more in the West, and much deeper in the eastern United States. Still, "the possibility of drilling into these rocks, fracturing them and pumping water in to produce steam has already been shown to be feasible," Toksoez said.

Panel member Brian Anderson, an assistant professor at West Virginia University, noted that the drilling and reservoir technologies used to mine heat have many similarities to those used for extracting oil and gas. As a result, the geothermal industry today is well connected technically to two industry giants in the energy arena, oil and gas producers and electric power generators. With increasing demand for technology advances to produce oil and gas more effectively and to generate electricity with minimal carbon and other emissions, an opportunity exists to accelerate the development of EGS by increased investments by these two industries.

Government-funded research into geothermal was very active in the 1970s and early 1980s. As oil prices declined in the mid-1980s, enthusiasm for alternative energy sources waned, and funding for research on renewable energy and energy efficiency (including geothermal) was greatly reduced, making it difficult for geothermal technology to advance.

"Now that energy concerns have resurfaced, an opportunity exists for the U.S. to pursue the EGS option aggressively to meet long-term national needs," Tester observed.

Tester and colleagues emphasize that federally funded engineering research and development must still be done to lower risks and encourage investment by early adopters. Of particular importance is to demonstrate that EGS technology is scalable and transferable to sites in different geologic settings.

In its report, the panel recommends that:

More detailed and site-specific assessments of the U.S. geothermal energy resource should be conducted.

Field trials running three to five years at several sites should be done to demonstrate commercial-scale engineered geothermal systems.

The shallow, extra-hot, high-grade deposits in the west should be explored and tested first.

Other geothermal resources such as co-produced hot water associated with oil and gas production and geo-pressured resources should also be pursued as short-term options.

On a longer time scale, deeper, lower-grade geothermal deposits should be explored and tested.

Local and national policies should be enacted that encourage geothermal development.

A multi-year research program exploring subsurface science and geothermal drilling and energy conversion should be started, backed by constant analysis of results.

It's great to see a fresh look at geothermal energy. This often overlooked renewable already provides as much clean, renewable energy as the entire wind and solar industries combined and has the relatively unique distinction amongst renewables of offering reliable, baseload power.

The DOE's proposed 2007 budget initially axed all funding for geothermal R&D, arguing that the technology was already well established and didn't warrant future R&D efforts. This attempt was thwarted by geothermal and renewable energy advocates, and this new MIT study should explode the notion that geothermal energy has shown us all it can offer. Clearly, we've only tapped the tip of the iceberg of geothermal heat potential, and there is much more R&D needed to be done to unlock the renewable resources true potential.

The MIT study focuses on the potential of enhanced geothermal energy systems, which sounds like the Hot Dry Rock technology being pioneered by researchers at Australian National University (which I've blogged about before, here).

HDR geothermal power utilizes the hot temperatures (up to 570 C) of underground granite rock layers that are mildly radioactive (the heat source) and are trapped beneath insulating layers of low thermal conductivity sediments. As ANU's hot rock site explains:

Heat is extracted by pumping water through an engineered heat exchanger connecting two or more wells. This heat exchanger is a volume of hot dry rock with enhanced permeability. It is fabricated by hydraulic stimulation. This involves pumping high pressure water into the pre-existing fracture system that is present in all rocks to varying degrees. The high pressure water opens the stressed natural fractures ... The result is a million-fold permanent increase in permeability along the fracture systems and a heat exchanger that can be used to extract energy.

Water is then injected into a borehole and circulated through the "heat exchanger". The water is heated through contact with the rock and is then returned to the surface through another borehole where it is used to heat another liquid with a lower boiling point within in a closed loop system. This liquid is flashed into steam which is used to spin turbines and generate electricity. The water is then re-injected into the first borehole to be reheated and used again. The HDR plant thus involves two closed-loop systems, the subsurface water loop and the power plant loop that generally contains organic fluids such as refrigerants and iso-pentane.

This HDR or EGS technology differs from traditional geothermal energy systems which rely on an existing hydrothermal reservior - an underground reservior of superheated water - that can be tapped to spin turbines and generate power. HDR or EGS technologies manufacture such a reservior by enhancing the permeability of hot subterranean rock strata and injecting water into the artificial reservior to flash into steam. Being freed from a reliance on an existing hydrothermal reservior means that HDR/EGS geothermal systems can be deployed over a much greater range of the United States and the technology offers considerably larger energy potential.

In the coming and necessary transition from fossil fuel dependence to sustainable energy independence, we're going to need all of the technologies in our 'toolbox' that we can get. Hot Dry Rock/Enhanced Geothermal Systems technology has considerable potential and warrants a devoted research, development and deployment effort from public and private entities.

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EEStor - A Battery Breakthrough or Just Plain Old Hype?

[From MIT's Technology Review:]

A secretive Texas startup developing what some are calling a "game changing" energy-storage technology broke its silence this week. It announced that it has reached two production milestones and is on track to ship systems this year for use in electric vehicles.

EEStor's ambitious goal, according to patent documents, is to "replace the electrochemical battery" in almost every application, from hybrid-electric and pure-electric vehicles to laptop computers to utility-scale electricity storage.

[Image: The ZENN car will be the first commercial application of EEStor's new energy storage system. The company is expecting delivery of the systems later this year. (Credit: ZENN Cars)]

The company boldly claims that its system, a kind of battery-ultracapacitor hybrid based on barium-titanate powders, will dramatically outperform the best lithium-ion batteries on the market in terms of energy density, price, charge time, and safety. Pound for pound, it will also pack 10 times the punch of lead-acid batteries at half the cost and without the need for toxic materials or chemicals, according to the company.

The implications are enormous and, for many, unbelievable. Such a breakthrough has the potential to radically transform a transportation sector already flirting with an electric renaissance, improve the performance of intermittent energy sources such as wind and sun, and increase the efficiency and stability of power grids--all while fulfilling an oil-addicted America's quest for energy security.

The breakthrough could also pose a threat to next-generation lithium-ion makers such as Watertown, MA-based A123Systems, which is working on a plug-in hybrid storage system for General Motors, and Reno, NV-based Altair Nanotechnologies, a supplier to all-electric vehicle maker Phoenix Motorcars.

"I get a little skeptical when somebody thinks they've got a silver bullet for every application, because that's just not consistent with reality," says Andrew Burke, an expert on energy systems for transportation at University of California at Davis.

That said, Burke hopes to be proved wrong. "If [the] technology turns out to be better than I think, that doesn't make me sad: it makes me happy."

Richard Weir, EEStor's cofounder and chief executive, says he would prefer to keep a low profile and let the results of his company's innovation speak for themselves. "We're well on our way to doing everything we said," Weir told Technology Review in a rare interview. He has also worked as an electrical engineer at computing giant IBM and at Michigan-based automotive-systems leader TRW.

Much like capacitors, ultracapacitors store energy in an electrical field between two closely spaced conductors, or plates. When voltage is applied, an electric charge builds up on each plate.

Ultracapacitors have many advantages over traditional electrochemical batteries. Unlike batteries, "ultracaps" can completely absorb and release a charge at high rates and in a virtually endless cycle with little degradation.

Where they're weak, however, is with energy storage. Compared with lithium-ion batteries, high-end ultracapacitors on the market today store 25 times less energy per pound.

This is why ultracapacitors, with their ability to release quick jolts of electricity and to absorb this energy just as fast, are ideal today as a complement to batteries or fuel cells in electric-drive vehicles. The power burst that ultracaps provide can assist with stop-start acceleration, and the energy is more efficiently recaptured through regenerative braking--an area in which ultracap maker Maxwell Technologies has seen significant results.

On the other hand, EEStor's system--called an Electrical Energy Storage Unit, or EESU--is based on an ultracapacitor architecture that appears to escape the traditional limitations of such devices. The company has developed a ceramic ultracapacitor with a barium-titanate dielectric, or insulator, that can achieve an exceptionally high specific energy--that is, the amount of energy in a given unit of mass.

For example, the company's system claims a specific energy of about 280 watt hours per kilogram, compared with around 120 watt hours per kilogram for lithium-ion and 32 watt hours per kilogram for lead-acid gel batteries. This leads to new possibilities for electric vehicles and other applications, including for the military.

"It's really tuned to the electronics we attach to it," explains Weir. "We can go all the way down from pacemakers to locomotives and direct-energy weapons."

The trick is to modify the composition of the barium-titanate powders to allow for a thousandfold increase in ultracapacitor voltage--in the range of 1,200 to 3,500 volts, and possibly much higher.

EEStor claims that, using an automated production line and existing power electronics, it will initially build a 15-kilowatt-hour energy-storage system for a small electric car weighing less than 100 pounds, and with a 200-mile driving range. The vehicle, the company says, will be able to recharge in less than 10 minutes.

The company announced this week that this year it plans to begin shipping such a product to Toronto-based ZENN Motor, a maker of low-speed electric vehicles that has an exclusive license to use the EESU for small- and medium-size electric vehicles.

By some estimates, it would only require $9 worth of electricity for an EESU-powered vehicle to travel 500 miles, versus $60 worth of gasoline for a combustion-engine car.

"My understanding is that the leap from powder to product isn't the big leap," says Ian Clifford, CEO of ZENN, which is also an early investor in EEStor. "We're the first application, and that's thrilling for us. We took the initial risk because we believed in what they are doing. And energy storage is the game changer."

The key challenge, however, is to ensure that the barium-titanate powders can be made on a production line without compromising purity and stability. "Purification gives you better production stability, gives you better permittivity, and gives you the high voltages you're looking for," says Weir. "We've now got the chemicals certified and purified to the point we're looking for." (Better permittivity of the insulator improves the amount of charge that can be stored without letting the current leak across the two plates.)

EEStor announced this week that the first automated production line for its powder has performed as required and that permittivity will meet or exceed expectations. It also said that it achieved 99.9994 percent purity for its barium-nitrate powder, a crucial ingredient in the dialectric. San Antonia-based Southwest Research Institute independently confirmed the results.

In a traditional ultracap, that permittivity is given a rating of 20 to 30, while EEStor's claim is 18,500 or more--a phenomenal number by most accounts. "This is a very big step for us," says Weir. "This puts me well onto the road of meeting high-volume production."

Jim Miller, vice president of advanced transportation technologies at Maxwell Technologies and an ultracap expert who spent 18 years doing engineering work at Ford Motor, isn't so convinced.

"We're skeptical, number one, because of leakage," says Miller, explaining that high-voltage ultracaps have a tendency to self-discharge quickly. "Meaning, if you leave it parked overnight it will discharge, and you'll have to charge it back up in the morning."

He also doesn't believe that the ceramic structure--brittle by nature--will be able to handle thermal stresses that are bound to cause microfractures and, ultimately, failure. Finally, EEStor claims that its system works to specification in temperatures as low as -20 °C, revised from a previous claim of -40 °C.

"Temperature of -20 degrees C is not good enough for automotive," says Miller. "You need -40 degrees." By comparison, Altair and A123Systems claim that their lithium-ion cells can operate at -30 °C.

Burke, meanwhile, says that there's a big difference between making powder in a controlled environment and making defect-free devices in a large quantity that can survive underneath the hood of a car.

"I have no doubt you can develop that kind of [ceramic] material, and the mechanism that gives you the energy storage is clear, but the first question is whether it's truly applicable to vehicle applications," Burke says, pointing out that the technology seems more appropriate for utility-scale storage and military "ray guns," for which high voltage is an advantage.

Safety is another concern. What happens if a vehicle packed with a 3,500-volt energy system crashes?

Weir says the voltage will be stepped down with a bi-directional converter, and the whole system will be secured in a grounded metal box. It won't have a problem getting an Underwriters Laboratories safety certification, he adds. "If you drive a stake through it, we have ways of fusing this thing where all the energy is sitting there but it won't arc … It will be the safest battery the world has ever seen."

Regarding concerns about temperature, leakage, and ceramic brittleness, Weir did not reply to an e-mail asking him how EEStor overcomes such issues.

Nonetheless, the company has some solid backing. Its board has attracted Morton Topfer, former vice chairman of Dell and mentor to Michael Dell.

The company is also backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a venture-capital powerhouse that has an impressive track record: it made early and highly successful bets on Google, Amazon.com, and Sun Microsystems, among others. Whether EEStor can translate that success to the energy sector remains to be seen.

"I'm surprised that Kleiner has put money into it," says Miller.

Weir maintains that his company will meet all of its claims, and then some. "We're not trying to hype this. This is the first time we've ever talked about it. And we will continue to meet all of the production requirements."

EEStor is finally breaking a bit of the secrecy that has surrounded the development of their energy storage devices. Their claims, like any potentially revolutionary claims, are both hard to believe and very exciting. I'm not really qualified to comment on whether or not EEStor can pull off what they claim they can, but we shall all find out before too long. The first ZENN electric vehicles featuring EEStor energy storage devices will be off the production line later this year. At that point, the public will finally have a chance to take a close look at EEStor's product and see just how revolutionary it is.

I know I for one am keeping my fingers crossed...

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Eye On China: China to Spend $5.8 Billion to Triple Wind-Power Generation

Chinese government raises wind energy target to 8,000 megawatts by 2010, up from 5,000 megawatts

China, the world's biggest energy consumer after the U.S., plans to invest 45.6 billion yuan ($5.8 billion) to more than triple wind-power generation capacity by 2010, an energy industry official said.

The government raised its target for installed windpower capacity to 8,000 megawatts (MW) by 2010, up from 5,000 MW, Li Junfeng, secretary-general of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association, said today. China added 80 percent in wind-power generation capacity last year to 2,300 megawatts from 1,300 megawatts, the National Development and Reform Commission said Jan. 5.

"The government's preferential policies and companies' willingness will enable us to exceed the original target,'' Li told reporters in Beijing.

As reported previously, China's National Renewable Energy Law sets a national renewable energy target of 15% of China's energy mix by 2020 and sets in place tariffs to support renewable energy development. In order to accomplish this target, China plans to spend 1.5 trillion yuan ($193 billion) in the next 15 years to increase the use of renewable resources and cut the world's fourth-largest economy's reliance on coal and oil.

In October 2006, China also implemented a small (0.1 cents/kWh) but unprecedented dedicated renewable energy fee in all electricity rates across the country. The money raised by the small fee would be used to cover the portion of the above market costs of renewable energy development and will help the country meet its renewable energy targets.

The mix of strong public policy support and industry investment seems to be working in China, as renewable energy development, particularly wind power development, is on the rise.

Official government plans call for continued rapid development after the 8,000 MW by 2010 target, calling for 20 gigawatts (GW) by 2020. Experts within the Chinese industry believe that China's vast wind potential will allow 40 GW to be delivered within 15 years; rising to ten times this by 2050.

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Study Finds Curbing Climate Change Would Cost Just 0.6% of Global GDP

[From Green Car Congress:]

A new study released by European energy company Vattenfall concludes that curbing climate change through a sustainable reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is technically and financially feasible if existing technical solutions are applied consistently—and globally.

Vattenfall’s Global Climate Impact Abatement Map shows that the cost of stabilizing the concentration of greenhouse gases at 450 ppm by 2030 in an attempt to limit global average temperature increase to 2° C is equivalent to approximately 0.6% of the total gross world product—on condition that all the identified potential is exploited.

[Image: Vattenfall has published the results of its study using a very attractive interactive map on their website. Click the image to check out the interactive map]

The study maps total global reduction potential, analyzed by six major commercial sectors—power, transport, industry, forestry, buildings, and agriculture—and by six major world regions—Europe OECD, North America, China, other industrial countries, transition economies, and the rest of the world.

Vattenfall concluded that the transport sector, which under the business-as-usual (BAU) scenario would contribute 8.8 Gt (15%) of CO2e of the global 58.2 Gt in 2030, could reduce its emissions by 2.8 Gt. That would represent a 32% reduction in emissions compared to BAU. Transportation would then be responsible for 19.5% of the reduced 31.5 Gt of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, according to Vattenfall. (Chart at right. Click to Enlarge)

Vattenfall presented its Global Climate Impact Abatement Map at a conference in Berlin on Thursday.

Lars G Josefsson, President and CEO said:

What we are presenting in Berlin here today is an outline of a first global map for measures to curb the climate change. Now we must jointly embark on a voyage of discovery on which we gather new knowledge and new information that we can use to further refine this map. Already today, however, we can see that the active protection of the climate is not a utopia – it is possible with the technology we now have at our disposal, and this technology can also be improved. We must immediately set up a global policy framework to enable us to exploit the potential described here. One absolutely vital precondition is that we put a binding global price on the emission of greenhouse gases.

The empirical data gathered also shows that there are considerable hidden possibilities in the industrialized countries, and particularly in the energy-efficiency field, to protect the climate at a negative cost—that is, by applying measures that finance themselves in that they reduce energy costs.

On a global scale, around 7 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions could be saved annually, which corresponds to about seven times the total annual emissions in Germany. Vattenfall estimates that the average cost of avoiding emissions would be €15 per ton CO2 equivalent [~$19.50/ton USD].

The data also reveals that the potential for protecting the climate is relatively evenly distributed between the investigated sectors and geographical regions. Up to 45% of the potential was found in the industrial and energy sectors, while the developing and threshold countries (excluding China) account for more than 40% of the climate-protection potential.

According to the survey, about 40% of the measures in the industrialized countries can finance themselves.

Last week, a delegation of business leaders including Josefsson and Fulvio Conti, the CEO of Enel, another European power company, presented the global 3C (Combating Climate Change) initiative to President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso.

Josefsson suggested the outline for the 3C initiative during the 14th Session of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development in New York in May 2006. More than 15 companies worldwide [including some of the world's largest] have endorsed this initiative, demanding an integration of climate issues into the world of markets and trade: ABB; Alstom; Bayer; Deutsche Post World Net; Duke Energy; Endesa; Enel; EnBW; E.ON; Eskom; General Electric; Norske Skog; NRG Energy; PG&E Corporation; Siemens; Suez; Wallenius Lines; Vattenfall.


This is a very interesting study. I haven't had the chance to delve too deeply into its assumptions, but they look reasonable. Their conclusions are similar, although a bit more optimistic, than the Stern Review, another report on the economics of combating climate change released in October by former Chief Economist of the World Bank, Sir Nicholas Stern. That report, commissioned by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, concluded that the costs of stabilizing atmospheric CO2 levels at 450 ppm by 2050 would be approximately 1% of global GDP (note that the Stern Review assumes stabalization in 2050, 20 years after the 2030 stabilization date assumed in the Vattenfall study).

The flashy interactive Flash map they put together to present their results is excellent! This is a great example of a very interesting and informative way to present a dense amount of imformation in a user-friendly and accesible way. Having worked myself with Flash, I'm quite impressed. I'd highly recommend poking around Vattenfall's interactive map for a few minutes.

It seems to me that at this point in time, we've finally moved past trying to convince people that climate change is occuring and that it will have real consequences, for the most part anyway. The major stumbling block in the way to action addressing climate change now seems to be questions of cost. Many policymakers, particularly in the United States, are operating under what is largely a false assumption that taking action on climate change will come with an exorbitant price tag and will cripple the economy. This false dichotomy - combatting climate change or having a healthy economy - seems to be quite pervasive in the minds of policymakers and legislators in Washington DC.

It is my hope that we can break down this barrier to action soon, and studies like this help to dispell the myth that combatting climate change and having a healthy economy are mutually exclusive. There are clearly many steps that we can take to rein in greenhouse gas emissions that not only pay for themselves, but can also save us money (by saving energy or increasing the efficiency of resource use), leading to a stronger economy. These are the steps that we are simply stupid not to take, and are the ones that should be taken immediately to address climate change. The savings from these measures can then help offset the marginally higher costs of other measures that will together get us to the emissions reductions targets that will stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas levels at a reasonable cost.

I say reasonable, because there is a factor that many simply don't consider at all when talking about the supposed 'costs' of addressing climate change: the costs of inaction. As the Stern Review made clear, the longer-term costs of only a limit range of effects of unabated climate change would be at least 5% of global GDP. Considering more recent scientific evidence (for example, the risk that additional greenhouse gases will be released naturally as Arctic permafrost melts), the economic effects on human life and the environment, and approaches to modeling that ensure the impacts that affect poor people are weighted appropriately, the Review estimates that the dangers could be equivalent to 20% of global GDP or more.

Thus, we shouldn't even be talking about the costs of addressing climate change, but rather the savings. Spending 0.6%, or even 1% of global GDP to combat climate change should not be viewed as a cost, but rather a savings of at least 4% of global GDP, and perhaps as much as a staggering 19% of global GDP.

The question is not "can we afford to address climate change", but rather, "can we afford not to address climate change?"

Resources:

Vattenfall Curbing Climate Change website

Vattenfall interactive climate reduction map

Vattenfall Curbing Climate Challenge - An outline of a framework leading to a low carbon emitting society report

3C—Combat Climate Change website

Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change website

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News From My Backyard: Wind Energy An Economic Wind Fall for the Pacific Northwest

[Time for a shameless plug for a fact sheet I created and just released...]

Between October 2005 and October 2006, seven new wind farms were completed in the Northwest, providing 954 megawatts (MW) of new wind power capacity – that is enough clean, renewable energy to power 238,500 average Northwestern homes. These new wind farms are bringing billions of dollars of capital investment and new economic activity to the region, according to a new fact sheet released this week by the Renewable Northwest Project.

The development of wind energy has grown over the last several years because the price of wind-generated electricity is affordable and stable over the long term. Wind farms create a variety of economic benefits including:

keeping jobs and money in our communities;

funding schools, fire districts and other essential services;

providing a new source of income for farmers and rural landowners; and

creating thousands of good-paying jobs.

Here’s what 954 megawatts of new wind power has brought to the Pacific Northwest:

$1.38 billion in new capital investment;

between $2 million and $3 million in annual royalty payments to rural landowners;

between $5.8 million and $6.8 million each year in local property tax revenues;

nearly 1,400 construction jobs during peak construction periods;

roughly 80 new permanent family-wage jobs for operation and maintenance.

The full fact sheet is available for download here, and a website with the same information can be found here. [Check out the pdf; it's the fully formatted version]

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A New Climate in Washington For Climate Change Bills

Bills on Climate Move to Spotlight in New Congress

[From the New York Times:]

The climate here has definitely changed.

Legislation to control global warming that once had a passionate but quixotic ring to it is now serious business. Congressional Democrats are increasingly determined to wrest control of the issue from the White House and impose the mandatory controls on carbon dioxide emissions that most smokestack industries have long opposed.

Four major Democratic bills have been announced, with more expected. One of these measures, or a blend of them, stands an excellent chance of passage in this Congress or the next, industry and environmental lobbyists said in interviews.

Many events have combined to create the new direction — forsythia blooming in lawmakers’ gardens in January, polar bears lacking the ice they need to hunt and Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” along with pragmatic executives seeking an idea of future costs and, especially, the arrival of a Democratic-controlled Congress. There was evidence of the changed mood all over Washington this week.

On Wednesday, leading scientists and evangelical pastors jointly declared their intention to fight the causes of climate change and the public confusion on the subject. Cheryl Johns, a professor at the Church of God Theological Seminary, called that problem “nature deficit disorder.”

Another news conference on Wednesday featured executives of the heavily regulated electric utility industry embracing Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, both Democrats. The senators were offering separate bills to add regulations, including a cap on carbon dioxide emissions.

One sign of the Democrats’ determination to move on climate bills occurred when a Democratic Congressional aide confirmed that Speaker Nancy Pelosi wanted to create a special committee on climate, apparently an end run around Representative John D. Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Mr. Dingell, through an aide, Jodi Seth, said Wednesday that such committees were “as relevant and useful as feathers on a fish.”

Mr. Dingell’s firm support of the automobile industry, a leading source of carbon dioxide emissions, and his earlier lack of enthusiasm for climate measures have made him suspect among advocates of strong climate laws.

To add excitement, the man of the moment, Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, lent his name to the best-known brand in climate-change legislation, a measure by Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut.

That means that two of the three sponsors, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, are leading presidential contenders in 2008.

Neither party is united around any one position. And for all the flurry of news conferences and proffered solutions, the big unanswered question was what will President Bush do?

A tantalizing hint came from James L. Connaughton, chairman of the president’s Council on Environmental Quality, in an interview on Tuesday.

“There are a number of pathways for getting to a shared goal, and we should explore all of them,” Mr. Connaughton said.

He added, “Part of that, by the way, is learning about some of the flaws in the design of the economywide cap-and-trade approach, which, if corrected, might make it a workable tool.”

That suggests that some version of an emissions cap may eventually win White House support. Persistent rumors that the president might support an emissions cap, circulating in Washington and Europe, were rejected Tuesday by his press secretary, Tony Snow.

But White House aides have hinted for months that Mr. Bush was planning a dramatic announcement on the subject in his annual address. Last year, the president said, “America is addicted to oil,” and stimulated a debate over dependence on foreign oil that has overlapped with environmental groups’ calls for cleaner-burning domestic fuels.

The mechanism that Mr. Snow ruled out is the basis for most of the Democratic measures, capping carbon dioxide emissions and then giving or selling to companies allowances, effectively permits to create a certain level of emissions.

Cleaner factories or utilities could then sell the allowances and gain a new revenue source. Factories with higher than allowable emissions would have to buy the permits they need.

Such a market, already in effect in Europe, in theory would set a price for a ton of carbon dioxide emissions, and the market would stimulate innovation in technologies that would reduce emissions or produce goods or power without the same high emissions common today.

Diplomats and environmental groups speculated in Washington this week that the Bush administration would look at other mandatory actions, perhaps not an emissions cap but rather expanding the decision to increase marginally fuel-economy standards for light trucks.

A similar move for passenger vehicles, coupled with a call for sharp increases in ethanol and other renewable fuels plus new money for research into clean-energy technologies would be a bouquet approach that would expand policies Mr. Bush has put forward.

European allies have been trying to nudge Mr. Bush toward their cap-and-trade model. The White House says that would shift jobs, and emissions from one country to another without slowing worldwide growth in emissions.

The president’ s opposition to mandatory caps retains strong support on Capitol Hill.

Jim Owen, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, the trade group of the utility industry, said Wednesday: “Everything is different, but it’s also the same in some ways. You still need 60 votes to get something big done in the Senate. And there are still many complex, thorny issues that stand in the way of enactment.”

The Democratic bills announced in the last two weeks cover a broad range. A proposal by Senator Jeff Bingaman, the New Mexico Democrat who is chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, would decrease the rate of emissions growth before capping emissions and would build in a “safety valve,” freeing industries from the caps in certain circumstances.

Groups like Environmental Defense say the safety valve would undermine market mechanisms.

In an interview, Mr. Bingaman said, “The way I look at it it’s a question of what we can get agreement on.”

The Lieberman-McCain approach is tougher on industry, tightening emissions controls in a stepwise fashion over time, and includes subsidies for nuclear power. An emissions cap for just utilities is the centerpiece of yet another bill, by Ms. Feinstein.

Some scientists and economists have expressed concern in recent weeks that the discussions here is overly focused on emissions caps, with too little attention on what they say is an essential need, greatly expanded government-financed research on nonpolluting energy technologies.

Richard G. Richels, a climate expert and an economist at the Electric Power Research Institute, an organization in Palo Alto, Calif., that conducts energy studies for the utility industry, said a carbon dioxide cap would mainly prompt industry to deploy existing cleaner technologies that provide gains, but fail to come close to solving the climate problem.

Mr. Richels added that it would not spur long-term investments seeking breakthroughs like new ways to store intermittent power from windmills.


Well, this flurry of activity and press attention on climate change bills caught me a little by surprise. I had assumed that this would be a lower priorty item for the new Democratic leadership, and that despite a Democrat-controlled House and Senate, we wouldn't see much action on climate change legislation this session. Maybe in '08 I thought...

Perhaps I was wrong.

I'd encourage everyone to take a look at the graphic comparing the three proposed bills (Boxer, McCain-Lieberman, and Bingaman). It quickly gets across the point that only one of them, Boxer's bill, is actually based on the science of what has to happen to avoid the most severe consequences of climate change.

Bingaman's bill is pathetically weak and doesn't even get us to a reduction over current levels, simply a stabilization of emissions levels. While that's better than nothing, if we don't stabilize emissions levels at a level that can be absorbed and sequestered by the natural climate cycle, atmospheric greenhouse gas levels will continue to arise, and we'll still be in dire straits.

The McCain-Lieberman bill probably has the most traction, and while it is better than the Bingaman bill (much better really), it still doesn't get us close enough to the 450 ppm atmospheric CO2 levels/2 degrees C temperature increase that we must achieve.

Only Boxer's bill get's us there (or close to there), and unfortunately, it is now positioned as the most 'extreme' and 'far left' of the proposed bills, which doesn't help it's chances of passing.

However, we really have no choice here. We either need a bill that gets the jobs done - i.e. does the United States' part to stabalize atmospheric CO2 levels at 450 ppm and keeps average temperature increases below 2 degrees C - or we might as well not do it. I still maintain that the worst case outcome of the 110th Congress would be the passage of a weak climate change bill. If that happens, the gathering public energy calling for action will dissipate and people will think that the problem is solved. In reality, we'll simply be delaying the brunt of climate change's effects, not preventing or mitigating them.

I would encourage everyone to write, email or call your representative - your Senators in particular - to urge them not to compromise on this issue and to only support a bill that will actually get the job done, a bill that is based on science, not political considerations.

(On that note, I was dissapointed to see that Barack Obama had endorsed the McCain-Lieberman bill, and not the Boxer bill, and as a potential 2008 Presidential candidate, I would also encourage you to write him to express your dissapointment that he did not endorse a science-based bill, and encourage him to shift his endorsement).

While I still think it is unlikely that any good, science-based climate bill will pass President Bush's desk, it now appears that the debate on climate change legislation has begun in ernest, and the bill that will eventually pass the House and Senate and the desk of our next president will be shaped in the next year or two. It's thus crucial that those of you who are concerned with the outcome of that process make your voices heard, and make sure that your representatives are supporting the right bills.

In a debate that is likely to be very complicated and will see several competing proposals, it's not simply enough to get a bill passed, we've got to make sure that the right bill passes, and that will not be easy. It is always tempting to compromise, especially on Capitol Hill, and when it comes to climate change, we can't afford to compromise.

If we pass the wrong bill, one that is not based on the science of what actually needs to happen, one that does not go far enough to rein in greenhouse gas pollution, we will soon find ourselves in a situation where we will no longer be talking about avoiding climate change, but instead about mitigating it's consequences - that is, we will be forced to figure out how to live in a world where one third to two thirds of the species we now know will have gone extinct, a world with sea levels several meters higher than today, a world where droughts, floods and hurricanes are both frequent and severe, a world were millions if not billions of people lack drinking water because the glaciers and snowpack that once fed their rivers have dissapeared...

Winston Churchill spoke these words in 1936 on the eve of World War II, and they are as relevent to the impending crisis facing our generation today as they were to the gathering storm facing our grandparents' generation:

"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences."

Today, we have already entered a period of consequences.

From reduced snowfall and retreating glaciers in the majestic Cascade mountains, to rising sea levels and eroding shores at our beloved coast, global warming is already beginning to effect the places we know and love here in the Pacific Northwest. And the story is the same throughout the world.

The debate that has apparently now begun on Capitol Hill will shape the future of the world in which we live.

For all you Baby Boomers out there, we're talking about the world in which you will retire, the world in which your children will raise your grandchildren. Will they look back in 50 years and thank you for solving the dillemma of climate change and transitioning to a sustainable energy infrastructure, or will they curse your failure to act? What kind of world do you want to leave them?

For members of my generation, this young generation coming to age in the early years of the 21st century, it is not a question of providing for our grandchildren - although that is not entirely irrelevent - but rather a question of what kind of world we want to live in ourselves, what kind of world we want to raise our children in. It is up to us to decide what kind of future we wish to live in, and to fight to ensure that that future is realized. It is we who will live tomorrow with the consequences of the actions, or inactions, of our leaders today.

What will we decide? What will we demand of our leaders? What future do we wish to inhabit?

Whether you're a Boomer, a Gen Xer, or whatever they're calling my generation these days, we must not forget: we can't afford to screw this one up!

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Senators Boxer and Bingaman Put Utilities On Notice: Utilities that Rush New Coal Plants Now Won't Get Bigger Emission Breaks Later

[The following is an open letter (published in the Dallas Morning News) from Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, and Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, the two key committees that would hear bills addressing climate change and global warming emissions:]

Many leaders of American industry are coming around to the view that global warming is occurring and that Congress will address the problem. In contrast, a few companies are considering major investments in old technologies for burning coal that would both endanger the climate and jeopardize the financial position of their investors and shareholders. As members of the U.S. Senate, we have both worked on legislation designed to combat global warming and to reduce greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide emitted from fossil fuels. Although our approaches have differed slightly, we both agree that global warming is real, that we need to act rapidly to pass legislation, and that we are committed to working together to achieve that result as soon as possible. Global warming is an enormous threat to mankind, and the United States can, and must, be a leader in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions comes from burning coal to produce electricity. While ultimately our goal should be to move toward efficient use of renewable energy sources, we recognize that currently coal is America's most abundant domestic energy source and will be a critical resource for many years to come.

Fortunately, several technologies are available and under development to facilitate our ability to continue using coal in ways that are both financially sustainable and address its climate impact. Power plants that rely on technologies such as coal gasification, for example, will ultimately allow carbon dioxide emissions to be captured and stored at a much lower cost than coal plants using old-fashioned technology.

The bills that we and our colleagues have worked on anticipate that coal-fired power plants will need to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Perhaps most important, companies building new coal-fired power plants today should acknowledge that over the 50-year lifespan of such plants, reduction of global warming emissions will become mandatory - probably sooner rather than later. Building a new coal plant without taking into account global warming is neither good for the environment nor smart financially.

We have been dismayed to watch some companies unveil plans to spend billions of dollars to build new coal-fired power plants using old technology that cannot capture global warming emissions. Apparently part of the motivation for building these plants is that the companies mistakenly believe that these new plants will garner "grandfathered" emission allowances under some future law.

Such plans assume that future legislation will freely award the majority of such allowances to the biggest emitters, and, therefore, increasing pollution through new plants will reap large sums of emission allowances. This flawed thinking will be a tragedy for the climate because of the additional carbon dioxide emissions this old technology creates.

It also is a dangerous business strategy for the utilities' investors and shareholders, who are putting money into technology that will be obsolete the very day it goes into service.

As the new Senate committee chairs engaged in the fight against global warming, we think it is important for investors to understand that there is little chance that the majority of such allowances will be allocated without cost and exclusively to large emitters of greenhouse gases.

In fact, companies that appear to be inflating their emissions right before legislation is passed are likely to find themselves in a position of having to make even larger emissions reductions than companies that do not attempt this strategy.

We do not envision that any successful legislative proposal will contain a provision that would allow those building traditional coal-fired power plants to economically benefit from coming in "under the wire" and being considered part of the emissions baseline - in fact, the opposite is likely to occur.

Any company planning to spend billions of dollars on new coal-fired power plants, and any investor in such a company, should think carefully about how to spend their funds so as to be part of the solution to climate change, not a part of the problem.

Jeff Bingaman chairs the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, and Barbara Boxer chairs the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Their e-mail addresses are Senator_ Bingaman@bingaman.senate.gov and feedback@boxer.senate.gov.


This letter was much needed! My boss, Rachel Shimshak, and allies at the National Resource Defense Council have been pushing the idea of a bipartisan letter from the key sponsors of the climate change bills in the Senate and House - i.e. Boxer, Bingaman, McCain and Lieberman - and as many others as possible putting utilities on notice that any new coal-fired power plants built in an attempt to get in 'under the wire' of upcoming climate change regulations would NOT be grandfathered into the bills (as was the case in the Clean Air Act).

Apparently, either the right people in the Senate Democratic Leadership heard the idea, or they had a similar one themselves and chose to issue this letter. It would have probably had more impact if it could have been a bipartisan letter, with more signatories, but this is still a very clear notice from the chairs of both key Senate committees that will be relevent to the upcoming debates on climate change regulation.

Thank you Senators Boxer and Bingaman.

Now if we can only ensure that Boxer's bill, or a similar one, is the one that finally moves. Bingaman's bill is pathetically lenient and won't accomplish enough to really save us from the brunt of climate change consequences. The McCain-Lieberman bill is a bit better, but is still more focused on economic and political rationale than scientific ones. When it comes to climate change, there's no point in a bill that isn't based on the science. Why try to rein in our emissions if we're not going to do it quickly enough or seriously enough to stabalize atmospheric CO2 emissions at a low enough level and avoid anything more than a 2 degree C temperature increase (and the associated consequences)?!

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News From My Backyard: PacifiCorp's Plans for New Coal Plants Rejected by Oregon Utility Commission

Regulators reject the company's argument it needs more facilities, emphasizing more conservation and renewables instead

[From the Oregonian:]

Oregon utility regulators on Tuesday turned down PacifiCorp's request to seek bids for construction of two conventional coal-fired power plants in Wyoming and Utah.

In a proposal filed last summer, PacifiCorp maintained it needed the additional resources by 2014 to meet growing demand in its six-state territory. But customer groups argued that the plants weren't needed and, if built, would harm the environment with carbon dioxide emissions, considered key contributors to global warming.

The Oregon Public Utility Commission based its rejection primarily on an independent analysis of how much electricity PacifiCorp's customers would need in six to eight years.

PacifiCorp "has significantly overestimated its resource needs," the PUC order concluded.

The PUC recommended that PacifiCorp emphasize conservation, acquisition of renewable energy and electricity purchases on wholesale markets. The alternate strategy would allow PacifiCorp to delay a commitment to coal until a cleaner technology, known as integrated gasification, could be developed and commercialized, the PUC said.

PacifiCorp has not yet decided whether it will appeal the order or submit a new plan.

Before PacifiCorp begins soliciting bids for any new power plants, it must secure the approval of regulators in each of the states where it operates. The costs to build and operate any new resources would be apportioned among all PacifiCorp customers through rate increases. The utility currently serves 1.6 million customers, primarily in Utah and Oregon.

PacifiCorp is owned by Iowa-based MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co.


This was a docket that Renewable Northwest Project (my employers) was an active intervenor in. We lobbied hard, along with our allies, the Oregon Citizen's Utility Board, Northwest Energy Coalition, OSPIRG and Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, to oppose PacifiCorp's plans for new coal plants.

If PacifiCorp had gotten its way at the Commission, the company would have solicited bids for at least two new coal-fired power plants, totalling 840-915 megawatts. The plants would have been located in the Intermountain West portion of PacifiCorp's six state service territory, which includes parts of Oregon, Washington, California, Utah, Wyoming and Idaho.

PacifiCorp originally went to the PUC seeking approval to build or purchase four coal plants totalling up to 2,290 megawatts. The environmental community, ratepayer advocates and renewable energy advocates all closed ranks to fight off that proposal back in October and PacifiCorp came back with the more modest proposal.

However, the Oregon PUC found that even that proposal was too much - too much power and too much carbon dioxide risk.

The Commission concluded that PacifiCorp: (1) did not demonstrate the need for two large coal plants and (2) failed to prove that their need is for baseload power (PUC Staff analysis shows the need to be limited to summer peak demand periods on the east side of their system - i.e. Utah, Idaho and Wyoming). "Before acquiring new thermal base load resources, we expect the company to fully explore conservation, demand response resources, renewable resources, distributed resources, and short term purchases ," the Commission said in their Final Ruling on the docket.

The Commission also agreed with concerns about PacifiCorp's ability to sell excess coal power saying that "wholesale sales from coal plants to states adopting, or considering adoption of, constraints on greenhouse gas emissions, carry significant risk."

The Commission also agreed with arguments that PacifiCorp had failed to directly address the issue of the risk of future CO2 regulations and costs and accepted RNP's argument that the $8 per ton cost they assume for future CO2 costs is too low. The Commission did say that the issue of CO2 risk was dwarfed by "more fundamental ones related to the amount and type of resources PacifiCorp seeks in this RFP." However, they reiterated that they are opening another docket to review treatment of CO2 in utility's Independent Resource Plans (IRPs), something RNP and our allies have been urging for some time.

If utilities assume a reasonable future cost for carbon, it will (1) make coal-fired power plants look less attractive and cheap and (2) reduce the utility and it's investors and ratepayer's exposure to risk when carbon dioxide emissions are regulated, either at the state or local level.

The California Public Utility Commission went even farther and mandated that California regulated utilities could not enter into any new longterm contracts for coal-fired power plants (anything worse than a new combined cycle gas plant actually), a decision that was extended to all California utilities with the passage of California Senate Bill 1368 last year.

The Oregon, Washington and New Mexico Commissions all joined the California PUC this past December to sign a Joint Action Framework on Climate Change. The four western state utility commissions will cooperate to develop and use low-carbon technologies and renewable energy resources, while promoting energy efficiency, conservation, and demand response programs. As part of the agreement, the commissions will consider policies to encourage the development of transmission lines to provide access to sites with significant renewable energy resources.

This latest docket decision seems to be the first application of this new stance towards global warming adopted in the Joint Action Framework. As promised, the OPUC rejected PacifiCorp's high-carbon risk proposal for new coal-fired generation in favor of energy efficiency and conservation, demand response, and renewable energy.

We have hopes that the OPUC will soon join the California PUC in adopting a formal rule that will prevent Oregon's regulated utility's from entering into any new long-term coal contracts.

Tuesday's PUC decision will not necessarily prevent PacifiCorp from continuing with it's plans to construct the new coal plants. However, if it choses to go that route, the utility will have a very difficult time getting PUC approval to recover the costs of the new plants from Oregon ratepayers (something all regulated utilities must do in order to recover the costs of their investments). That would put their investors at high risk of eating the bill for the new plants, a risky decision that will hopefully mean PacifiCorp abadons its plans for new coal plants.

It's back to the drawing board for you, PacifiCorp...

Resources

"Request for Approval of Draft RFP Denied" - Oregon Public Utility Commission Final Order

Joint Action Framework on Climate Change Adopted by Four Public Utility Commissions (Press Release, 12/1/06)

Westenr Utility Commission's Joint Action Framework on Climate Change

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California Governor Orders Low Carbon Fuel Standard

Executive Order Requires 10% GHG Reduction on Lifecycle Basis by 2020

[From Green Car Congress:]

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is establishing by Executive Order a Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) that requires, as an initial goal, a 10% reduction in the greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) intensity of all passenger vehicle fuels sold in California by 2020.

The LCFS requires fuel providers—refiners, importers, and blenders of passenger vehicle fuels—to ensure that the mix of fuel they sell into the California market meets, on average, a declining standard for GHG emissions measured in CO2-equivalent gram per British Thermal Unit (BTU). All relevant greenhouse gases will be included (i.e., CO2, CH4, and N2O) and be measured on a full fuel cycle basis (i.e., upstream feedstock extraction, fuel refining, and transport to market [or well-to-pump stages]).

The LCFS is the world’s first fuel standard targeted specifically at the quantified reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, measured on a full lifecycle basis.

Governor Schwarzenegger:

"Transportation accounts for forty percent of California’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, and we rely on petroleum-based fuels for an overwhelming 96 percent of our transportation needs. This petroleum dependency contributes to climate change and leaves workers, businesses and consumers vulnerable to price shocks from an unstable global energy market. As a world leader in energy efficiency, alternative energy and reducing greenhouse gases, California’s new low carbon standard is an innovative action that will diversify our fuel supplies and establish a vibrant market for cleaner-burning fuels."

[The LCFS] is expected to replace 20% of on-road gasoline consumption with lower-carbon fuels, more than triple the size of the state’s renewable fuels market, and place more than 7 million alternative fuel or hybrid vehicles on California’s roads (20 times more than on the California roads today).

The LCFS will use market-based mechanisms that allow providers to choose how they reduce emissions while responding to consumer demand. For example, providers may purchase and blend more lower-carbon ethanol (e.g., cellulosic ethanol rather than corn ethanol) into gasoline products, purchase credits from electric utilities supplying low-carbon electrons to electric passenger vehicles, diversify into low-carbon hydrogen as a product and more, including new strategies yet to be developed.

A white paper issued in support of the LCFS by the Governor’s office notes that to achieve a 10% reduction in carbon intensity, fuel providers will need to reduce the carbon intensity associated with their fuels from about 97.4 kg of CO2-eq/MMBTU to 87.7 kg/MMBTU:

"While at this time we believe the most likely strategies are E10, E85, switching to cellulosic ethanol, plug-in hybrids, and hydrogen fuel cells, markets will determine whether that mix or others (including options such as biobutanol or biocrude) will be employed to meet the standard."

Large-scale use of lower-carbon transportation fuels is necessary to meet the AB32 requirement that GHGs generated in the state be reduced to 1990 levels by 2020. A 10% reduction in the carbon intensity of transportation fuels will contribute 13.4 million metric tons of CO2 reductions, more than half of the 24 million metric tons of CO2 reductions needed to return passenger vehicles and light trucks to 1990 levels.

[Image source: Green Car Congress]

The Governor’s Executive Order directs the Secretary for Environmental Protection to coordinate the actions of the California Energy Commission (CEC), the California Air Resources Board (ARB), the University of California and other agencies to develop the protocols for measuring the “life-cycle carbon intensity” of transportation fuels. This analysis will become part of the State Implementation Plan for alternative fuels as required by AB 1007 (Pavley, Chapter 371, 2005) and will be submitted to the California Air Resources Board for consideration as an early action item under AB 32.

The ARB will complete its review of the LCFS protocols for adoption as an early action no later than June, 2007. Upon adoption as an early action by the ARB, the regulatory process at ARB will begin to put the new standard into effect. It is expected that the regulatory process at ARB to implement the new standard will be completed no later than December, 2008.

The University of California estimates that the Governor’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions goals can increase Gross State Product by about $60 billion and create more than 20,000 new jobs.


Yet another innovative policy designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to come out of California.

I remember when Schwarzenegger was first elected and most of the world, including myself, laughed that Californians would elect the Terminator to lead the 8th largest economy in the world. Little did we know, the Governator would not only be an effective governor, but would also become the most aggressive and visible leader on climate change policy in the United States.

California's growing collection of policies designed to reduce the state's carbon emissions presents a much-needed model of what can be - and most desperately needs to be - done at a national level to combat global warming. Mr. Bush, are you paying attention?

I was surprised that the article didn't mention anything about how this policy would interact with the carbon emissions standards that are part of California's stricter auto emissions standards. I would assume that lower carbon content fuels would simply make it easier for automakers to meet the carbon emissions standards (i.e., their vehicles would not have to be quite as fuel-efficient in order to meet the carbon emissions standards). In other words, I would assume that the Low Carbon Fuel Standard and the carbon auto emissions standards are complamentary, and not additive - that is, the auto emissions standard will still be the ultimate driver of GHG reductions from the light duty vehicle fleet in California, and the new LCFS will help reach those emissions targets (shifting some of the burden from automakers to the fuel industry). Both of these policies focused on emissions from the transportation sector will help California meet the overall emissions reductions targets set by AB 32.

As a side note, because the LCFS does shift part of the burden for meeting the vehicle emissions standards from the auto industry to the fuels industry, it will probably help undercut the auto industry's legal assualt on the California Vehicle Emissions Standards (now adopted by several other states across the country).

In the end, this looks like yet another effective carbon reduction policy that we can add to our toolbox of possible policies to combat global warming. California has done the innovating. Now it's time to take these policies to Washington...

Resources:

The Role of a Low Carbon Fuel Standard in Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Protecting Our Economy (white paper)

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Nigeria Plans a Renewable Energy Future

According to RenewableEnergyAccess.com, Nigeria is planning to secure its energy future with renewable energy. The recently launched Nigerian Renewable Energy Master Plan (REMP), called "a visionary step in developing renewable energy sources in Nigeria" by the Council for Renewable Energy in Nigeria (CREN), commits Nigeria to development of renewable energy resources, all of which take advantage of Nigeria's abundant natural resources.

The new plan includes short-, medium- and long-term targets, planned activities and strategies for a comprehensive renewable energy development strategy, successful implementation of which will result in the installation of 2,945 MW of wind, solar PV, solar thermal, small-scale hydro and biomass by 2025 -- roughly equivalent to the entire capacity used in Nigeria today.

Currently, 50% of Nigeria's energy consumption is fuel wood.

[Image: Nigeria has excellent solar energy resources (Click to Enlarge)]

"The Council for Renewable Energy in Nigeria congratulates the Federal Government in creating this vision and looks forward to working with all Nigerians to put this plan into action," commended Odigha Odigha, CREN National Coordinator.

Renewable energy has the potential to contribute to a stronger economy in Nigeria: both in the 500,000 jobs targeted in the next 10 years and in addressing the estimated US$1 billion a year that Nigerian business currently loses due to an unstable power supply.

This is a bold move and a smart investment that will secure Nigeria's energy future. Many developing nations face temptation to turn to cheap - but dirty - coal-fired power plants to power their developing economy, but an early investment in clean, domestic renewable energy resources can help create a secure and sustainable energy supply for the growing nation.

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Taking Control of Your Electricity Bill - Smart Metering Programs Expanding Across U.S.

[From the New York Times:]

Ten times last year, Judi Kinch, a geologist, got e-mail messages telling her that the next afternoon any electricity used at her Chicago apartment would be particularly expensive because hot, steamy weather was increasing demand for power.

Each time, she and her husband would turn down the air-conditioners — sometimes shutting one of them off — and let the dinner dishes sit in the washer until prices fell back late at night.

Most people are not aware that electricity prices fluctuate widely throughout the day, let alone exactly how much they pay at the moment they flip a switch. But Ms. Kinch and her husband are among the 1,100 Chicago residents who belong to the Community Energy Cooperative, a pilot project to encourage energy conservation, and this puts them among the rare few who are able to save money by shifting their use of power.

Just as cellphone customers delay personal calls until they become free at night and on weekends, and just as millions of people fly at less popular times because air fares are lower, people who know the price of electricity at any given moment can cut back when prices are high and use more when prices are low. Participants in the Community Energy Cooperative program, for example, can check a Web site that tells them, hour by hour, how much their electricity costs; they get e-mail alerts when the price is set to rise above 20 cents a kilowatt-hour.

If just a fraction of all Americans had this information and could adjust their power use accordingly, the savings would be huge. Consumers would save nearly $23 billion a year if they shifted just 7 percent of their usage during peak periods to less costly times, research at Carnegie Mellon University indicates. That is the equivalent of the entire nation getting a free month of power every year.

Meters that can read prices every hour or less are widely used in factories, but are found in only a tiny number of homes, where most meters are read monthly.

The handful of people who do use hourly meters not only cut their own bills, but also help everyone else by reducing the need for expensive generating stations that run just a few days, or hours, each year. Over the long run, such savings could mean less pollution, because the dirtiest plants could be used less or not at all.

The vast majority of utility customers know only the average price of the electricity they used in any given month. But wholesale prices for electricity are set a day in advance, usually on an hour-by-hour or quarter-hour basis. Power companies and utilities are keenly aware of the pricing roller coaster, but they typically blend the numbers into a single monthly bill for their customers.

For most Chicagoans, the average summer price last year was 8.25 cents a kilowatt-hour. Although Ms. Kinch and her husband at times paid as much as 36.5 cents a kilowatt-hour — the peak price on the humid afternoon of Aug. 2 — they paid less than their neighbors over all. On 38 days, some of their power cost less than a penny a kilowatt-hour.

Other consumers who know the hourly price of their electricity have actually been able to get paid by utilities for power they did not use. In New York City last July, for instance, when there was a blackout in Queens, residents of one building on Central Park West voluntarily cut their demand as much as 42 percent and sold the capacity back into the electricity market so that it could be used where it was more needed.

Certainly, such situations are a big exception. The fact that most people have no idea how much their power costs has emerged as a sticking point in the ongoing effort to restructure the nation’s electricity business, which the federal government is moving from a system in which legal monopolies charge rates set by state regulators, toward a competitive system where the market sets the price.

But how does efficient pricing emerge in a business where access to information is so lopsided? A market, as defined by the courts, is a place where willing buyers and sellers who both have reasonable knowledge agree on a price; in the electricity markets, the advantage lies distinctly with those who make and distribute power.

Under either the traditional system of utility regulation, with prices set by government, or in the competitive business now in half the states, companies that generate and distribute power have little or no incentive to supply customers with hourly meters, which can cut into their profits.

Meters that encourage people to reduce demand at peak hours will translate to less need for power plants — particularly ones that are only called into service during streaks of hot or cold weather.

In states where rates are still regulated, utilities earn a virtually guaranteed profit on their generating stations. Even if a power plant runs only one hour a year, the utility earns a healthy return on its cost.

In a competitive market, it is the spikes in demand that cause prices to soar for brief periods. Flattening out the peaks would be disastrous for some power plant owners, which could go bankrupt if the profit they get from peak prices were to ebb significantly.

But as awareness of “smart meters” grows, so does demand for them, not only from consumers and environmental groups but also from government bodies responding to public anger over rising power prices. In Illinois, for example, the legislature passed a law in December requiring the program Ms. Kinch joined four years ago to be expanded from 1,100 customers to 110,000.

The law also required that Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago utility, hire a third party to run the program. It chose Comverge Inc., the largest provider of peak-load energy management systems in North America.

The smart metering programs are not new, but their continued rarity speaks in part to the success of power-generating companies in protecting their profit models. Some utilities did install meters in a small number of homes as early as three decades ago, pushed by the environmental movement and a spike in energy prices.

Today, the same set of circumstances seems to be prompting a revival of interest, and even the utility companies seem resigned to the eventuality of such programs. Anne R. Pramaggiore, the senior vice president for regulatory affairs at Commonwealth Edison of Chicago, said that in the past, interest in hourly meter was transitory.

“We really haven’t dealt with these issues for 30 years,” she said.

But a sustained effort to install more meters is likely now because of what Ms. Pramaggiore called a “fundamental change” in the energy markets. Rising fuel costs and environmental concerns are — once again — front and center.

When consumers know the price of their electricity in advance and can tailor their use, even minor changes in behavior can lead to lower home utility bills and less reliance on marginal power plants, said Kathleen Spees, a graduate student in engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon.

“Small reductions in demand can produce very large savings,” said Ms. Spees, who analyzed prices charged within the PJM Interconnection grid, which coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity for 51 million people from New Jersey to Illinois.

Consumers who cut back on power use at peak times can do more than just avoid high prices. They can make money, as people in the building on Central Park West learned last summer.

Peter Funk Jr., an energy partner at the law firm Duane Morris who lives in the 48-unit co-op, persuaded his neighbors three years ago to install a single meter to the Consolidated Edison system and then to operate their own internal metering system. That made the building big enough to qualify for hour-by-hour pricing.

When the next day’s prices are scheduled to soar, the building superintendent and a few residents get e-mail messages or phone calls. “We have an orderly plan all worked out to notify people” so they can reduce their power use during the designated times, Mr. Funk said.

The residents save more than just the money on power not used during peak periods, when pricing has been as high as almost 50 cents a kilowatt-hour. During the blackout in July, when parts of Queens were without electricity for up to nine days, the building cut demand as much as 42 percent and sold the unused capacity for about $3,000.

That money helps the building offer a valuable benefit: On most weekend mornings, electricity for residents is free.

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How to Live With $5.00 Gas - Japan a Model of an Energy Conscious Society

[From the New York Times:]

In many countries, higher oil prices have hurt pocketbooks and led to worries about economic slowdowns. But here in Japan, Kiminobu Kimura, an architect, says he has not felt the pinch. In fact, his monthly energy bill is lower than a year ago.

A reason is his new home fuel cell, a machine as large and quiet as a filing cabinet that sits in front of his house and turns hydrogen into electricity and cold water into hot — at a fraction of regular utility costs. But even with the futuristic device, which is available for now only in Japan, Mr. Kimura has not let up on the other shortcuts that leave him unscathed by last year’s oil squeeze.

Energy-efficient appliances abound in the many corners of his cramped home. There is the refrigerator that beeps when left open and the dishwasher that is compact enough to sit on the kitchen counter. In some homes, room heaters have a sensor that directs heat only toward occupants; there are “energy navigators” that track a home’s energy use.

And then Mr. Kimura, 48, says there are the little things that his family of four does to squeeze fuel bills, like reusing warm bath water to wash laundry and bicycling to buy groceries.

“It’s not just technology, it’s a whole mind-set,” said Hitoshi Ikuma, a specialist in energy issues at the Japan Research Institute. “Energy conservation is almost an obsession here among government, companies, regular citizens, everyone.”

Japan is the most energy-efficient developed country on earth, according to most specialists, who say it is much better prepared than the United States to prosper in an era of higher global energy prices. And if there is any lesson that Japan can offer to Americans, they say, it is that there is no one fix-all solution to living with oil above $50 a barrel.

[Image: Japanese homes use less than half the energy, on average, of an American home. Click to Enlarge. (Source: New York Times]

Rather, as Mr. Kimura shows, it is a combination of many things, from the most advanced technologies to the simplest frugality in everyday life — and an obsession with saving energy that keeps his family huddled in a single heated room during winter.

Japan tops most global comparisons of energy efficiency in wealthy nations. Its population and economy are each about 40 percent as large as that of the United States, yet in 2004 it consumed less than a quarter as much energy as America did, according to the International Energy Agency, which is based in Paris.

Japan’s obsession with conservation stems from an acute sense of insecurity in a resource-poor nation that imports most its energy from the volatile Middle East, a fact driven home here by the 1970s shocks. The guiding hand of government has also played a role, forcing households and companies to conserve by raising the cost of gasoline and electricity far above global levels. Taxes and price controls make a gallon of gasoline in Japan currently cost about $5.20, twice America’s more market-based prices.

The government in turn has used these tax revenues to help Japan seize the lead in renewable energies like solar power, and more recently home fuel cells. One way has been a subsidy of about $51,000 for each home fuel cell. This allowed Mr. Kimura to buy his cell last year for about $9,000, far below production cost. His cell, which generates one kilowatt per hour, provides just under half of his household’s electricity, and has cut his electricity bill by the same amount, he said.

The device works by converting natural gas into hydrogen, which the fuel cell then uses to generate electricity. Heat released by the process is used to warm water.

[Image: Kiminobu Kimura of Tokyo uses a home fuel cell, a machine that resembles a filing cabinet and sits in front of his house. (Source: New York Times]

The first two fuel cells were installed in the prime minister’s residence in April 2005. Since then, some 1,300 have been sold, according to the trade ministry. The ministry forecasts that as sales pick up, production cost will fall to about $5,000 by decade’s end. Experts say that Japan is far more willing to embrace new technologies than the United States, where opposition to hydrogen storage tanks in Tarrytown, N.Y., forced General Motors to scrap an experimental filling station for fuel-cell cars last year.

Higher energy prices have also created strong domestic demand in Japan for more conventional and new energy-saving products of all sorts. That has spurred the invention and development of things like low-energy washing machines and televisions and high-mileage cars and hybrid vehicles, experts say. Japanese factories also learned how to cut energy use and become among the most efficient in the world.

Companies like Mitsubishi Heavy Industries are now reaping the benefits in booming overseas sales of their highly efficient electric turbines, steel blast furnaces and other industrial machinery, particularly in the United States. The environment ministry forecasts that exports will help turn energy conservation into a $7.9 billion industry in Japan by 2020, about 10 times its size in 2000.

“Japan has taught itself how to survive with energy prices that are twice as high as everywhere else,” said Kouichi Iwama, an economics professor at Wako University who advises the Japanese Parliament on energy policy.

But with a few exceptions like cars, many of Japan’s efficient consumer products have yet to make their way overseas, according to corporate executives. Partly, that is because while more energy-efficient, they are also more expensive. But another reason is that many appliances here are designed for Japan’s conservation-conscious lifestyle, which includes things like smaller homes and a lack of central heating.

Mr. Kimura says he, his wife, and two teenage children all take turns bathing in the same water, a common practice here. Afterward, the still-warm water is sucked through a rubber tube into the nearby washing machine to clean clothes. Wet laundry is hung outside to dry or under a heat lamp in the bathroom.

“In Japan, it’s natural to think about saving energy,” Mr. Kimura explains. “We learned not to waste from our parents, who had learned it from the hardship of the war and after,” he said.

The different approach is also apparent in the layout of Mr. Kimura’s home, which at 1,188 square feet is about the average size of a house in Japan but only about half as big as the average American one. The rooms are also small, making them easier to heat or cool. The largest is the living room, which is about the size of an American bedroom.

During winter, the entire family, including the miniature dachshund, gathers here, which is often the only room heated. Like most Japanese homes, Mr. Kimura’s does not have central heating. The hallways, stairwell and bathrooms are left cold. The three bedrooms have wall-mounted heaters, which are used only when the rooms are occupied, and switched off at night.

The living room is kept toasty by hot water running through pipes under the floor. Mr. Kimura says such ambient heat saves money. He says the energy bill for his home is about 20,000 yen ($168) a month. Central heating alone would easily double or triple his energy bill, he says.

“Central heating is just too extravagant,” says Mr. Kimura, who is solidly middle class.

The government has tried to foster a culture of conservation with regular campaigns like this winter’s Warm Biz, a call to businesspeople to don sweaters and long johns under their gray suits so that office thermostats could be set lower. It has also encouraged development of energy-saving appliances with its Top Runner program, which has set goals for reducing energy use.

Products that meet the goals are awarded a green sticker, while those that fail get an orange sticker. Japan’s trade and industry ministry says consumers heed the stickers, pushing manufacturers to raise the energy efficiency. The average air-conditioner now uses two-thirds less electricity than in 1997, and the average freezer 23 percent less, the ministry said.

The savings add up. The average household here used 4,177 kilowatt- hours of electricity in 2001, the most recent figure, according to the Jyukankyo Research Institute in Tokyo. In the same year, the average American household consumed more than twice that, or 10,655 kilowatt hours, according to the Energy Department.

“The Japanese use less energy, there’s no doubt about that,” said Alan K. Meier, a scientist specializing in energy efficiency at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. “Some of it is more efficient appliances, but these are only part of a different lifestyle and one that’s more energy-conscious.”

Read more!

News From My Backyard: Global Warming Will Drive Dramatic Changes in the Pacific Northwest's Climate

Northwest's Weather Forecast Calls for Dramatic Change in Coming Decades

[From the Oregonian:}

Fine wine, abundant electricity, wild salmon -- the things Oregonians take for granted. But keeping them will be harder than ever because we plan and build our lives in the belief that Northwest weather will always be Northwest weather.

It's not so, researchers are finding. We should expect hotter, drier heat waves, heavier rains and quicker snowmelt. The Northwest, a natural target of major storms, will feel it in ways other regions will not.

It particularly challenges public agencies and private businesses, which now must expect climate curveballs, such as the record-setting November deluge -- Portland's wettest month since 1938, Seattle's wettest in 115 years.

Warmer summers already have altered the taste of Oregon's signature pinot noir wines, and vintners are shifting their vines uphill to keep them cool. But that will not be enough. By the end of the century, the iconic grape of the state's $1 billion wine industry will grow better along Washington's Puget Sound than it does in the Willamette Valley.

[Mt Hood's once extensive glaciers and the extent of remaining summer snowpack have retreated significantly in just the past two decades, as documented by these photos from Gary Braasch (image source: WorldViewOfGlobalWarming.com)]

Volcanic debris once locked in place by Mount Hood's ice, now exposed by melting glaciers, ripped away miles of Oregon 35 during the November storm. Crews hurriedly pieced it back together at a cost of $10 million, just in time for ski season, but only a far more costly fix will fortify the road against escalating floods bearing yet more boulders.

"We have to ask, 'Do we want to spend hundreds of millions rebuilding things the way they are?' " says Gail Achterman, a member of the state highway commission and director of the Institute for Natural Resources at Oregon State University. "These events are not going to stop happening, and every climate model suggests they're going to happen more often."

It's impossible to blame a single storm on global warming. But research shows the November blast was a preview of events we will see more often: heavier rain earlier in the winter; rain falling in place of snow, even in the mountains; all that extra rain rushing downstream in floods.

The trouble, scientists say, is that society does not view climate as something that substantially shifts.

"Our vulnerability to climate is based on the expectation that climate is predictable," says Nathan Mantua, a research scientist at the University of Washington's Climate Impacts Group. "We in our minds are driving on cruise control thinking the road's going to stay straight. We don't realize it can change drastically."


Wild Extremes

Instruments track nearly every snowflake and raindrop falling across the West, all so federal forecasters can tell us how much water will flow to our farm fields and faucets each year. But their forecasts, vital to the region's farmers and water managers, are drifting off the mark.

"In the early '80s, the skill really began to drop off," says Tom Pagano, a water supply forecaster with the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service in Portland who documented the trend.

The climate's to blame. In a way forecasters had never seen, it's veering wildly between wet and dry and cool and hot.

Weather is so complex it's impossible to identify warming as the cause. But the swings complicate life in a region already changing as it warms.

Rising temperatures are a certainty for the Northwest and already have begun to shift snow and runoff patterns vital to salmon migration and hydroelectric power. It is less clear how mounting greenhouse gases will affect rainfall and other weather patterns.

But climate projections show higher temperatures intensifying droughts and storms in the Northwest -- a kind of climatic bull's-eye.

Here's how: Evaporation off a warmer ocean injects more water into the air, which absorbs ever more water as it warms. That fuels stronger storms that carry bigger buckets of rain and snow onto land, according to studies by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Average annual precipitation has risen across much of the region since 1920, University of Washington studies show.

The storms are expected to collide more directly with the Cascade Range, which may wring yet more moisture from the clouds, says Eric Salathe, a Climate Impacts Group research scientist.

Already, he says, winter storms arrive earlier. December once was the rainiest month in much of the Northwest, now it's November, data show. Last month, almost 50 inches fell in Oregon's Coast Range west of Salem, beating a December 1996 record that was thought to be unbreakable.

Even without wetter storms, the Northwest still will see more rain. That's because the predicted warming of one quarter to 1 degree per decade this century will turn much of the Northwest's snow to rain. Snow accumulation in the mountains at the end of each winter has declined about 25 percent since about 1920, according to Phil Mote, Washington state's official climatologist.

It'll get worse: By the 2090s, the Northwest's mountain snows will melt almost three months sooner than they do now, UW projections show.

Problem: As more rain falls, the same rivers and streams are left to drain an overwhelming amount of runoff.

Outcome: flooding.

The west side of the Cascades, where a slight rise in winter temperatures will turn a lot of snow to rain, is especially vulnerable, says Alan Hamlet, a UW research scientist.

"That's the area we should really worry about, where risks have already gone up and where they will probably continue to go up," he says.

Complicating the picture is that shrinking snows expose more ground, which absorbs heat and warms the air more, according to studies by Purdue University's Climate Change Research Center.

The unlikely flip side of this waterlogged scenario is an increasingly parched summer. That's because rainwater vanishes quickly compared with snowmelt, which will be in shorter supply. Hotter days will only accelerate the drying.

Already, 10 percent of the Columbia River's flow at Bonneville Dam has shifted from spring and summer months to fall and winter months since 1929, says Kyle Dittmer, a hydrologist and meteorologist with the Columbia Intertribal Fish Commission.

That leaves less water in hotter months, when it's needed to cool streams for salmon and to spin turbines for electricity.


The number of extremely hot days in the Northwest will double by the end of this century, the Purdue studies found. The trend has already appeared: Examination of temperature records from 1960 to 1996 by the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University showed increases in extremely hot days across the Northwest.


From pinot noir to syrah

That's a challenge if you grow a certain grape for a certain kind of wine.

Oregon vineyards made their reputation with pinot noir, sensitive to heat. The weather must match the grape's preferences precisely for an award-winning wine to emerge.

"The cool climate is what we've hung our hat on here," says Harry Peterson-Nedry, founder and managing partner of Chehalem, a leading winery based in Newberg.

But growing seasons have turned warmer in only the 30 or so years since Oregon wines took off. So far that has been good, producing superior vintages grown in the ideal window of temperatures for pinot noir.

"We have moved to the middle of the window," Peterson-Nedry says. "But the problem is, we're not going to stop there. If we could stop it there, we would."

When researchers plotted places that will remain cool enough for Oregon's iconic grape by the end of this century, they were left mainly with a narrow strip along the coast and land to the north around Puget Sound.


The shift may present other opportunities, however: The Willamette Valley could become more hospitable to grapes California is known for today. Some wineries already are experimenting with warmer-weather grapes such as syrah, staple of France's hot Rhone Valley and abundant in California.

"That's with the anticipation they're going to be planting and harvesting those varieties here someday," Peterson-Nedry says.


Planning for uncertainty

On the east slope of Mount Hood, highway engineers expect more destructive floods to tear into Oregon 35. It's happened five times in the past eight years. Glaciers are melting faster, exposing even more unstable debris to future, wetter storms.

The same thing happened at Mount Rainier National Park, shut down by the record November rains. Geologists say the retreating glaciers have released so much extra sediment into river channels that streams flow dangerously high -- dooming roads tourists have driven for nearly a century.

Crews on Mount Hood installed larger culverts to shunt more water under Oregon 35 in a furious push to reopen the road, vital to the ski industry. But the Oregon Department of Transportation admits they will not withstand another deluge.

The agency lacks the money for a bigger fix, which could involve larger bridges over the unpredictable White River and cost more than $70 million. The state hopes to persuade federal authorities to foot the bill, arguing that such a big price tag will save money in the long run by avoiding repeated repairs.

The rule of thumb for the Federal Highway Administration is to balance those costs over the next 20 years, says David Cox, division administrator for Oregon. "We look at a much shorter horizon than you would think," he says.

But the implications of global warming do not end in 20 years. By then, the climate may be changing even faster and in more unexpected ways, researchers say.

Although scientists are a conservative bunch, some worry we have underestimated how sensitive the climate is. Change feeds on itself. This month, new findings showed the Arctic may lose its summer ice by 2040.

That exposes more water, which absorbs more sunlight, which warms an ocean already heating rapidly.

"Things are happening now almost faster than we can predict them," says Richard Gammon, a UW chemistry and oceanography professor. "Right now, the scientists are more alarmed than the general public."

Read more!

News From My Backyard: In Oregon, It's Jobs and the Environment

Oregon Business Leaders Embrace a Plan to Build on Oregon's Expertise in Sustainability

[From the Oregonian:]

The headlines from today's Oregon Leadership Summit will surely focus on proposals by business and political leaders to overhaul the health care system and strengthen schools and universities.

Those are vital issues, and the summit will provide useful advice to the Legislature, which opens its 2007 session Monday. Yet today's summit is significant for another reason: It signals a new chapter in Oregon's history of economic and environmental conflict. The choices always have seemed stark: jobs or the environment, cheap power or salmon, loggers or the spotted owl.

However, at today's summit, the state's top business and government leaders will rally around a new economic strategy of building on and selling Oregon's history and expertise in sustainability.

Sustainability is a broad concept that has steadily gained traction over the last decade. It refers to development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The business leaders who wrote the "Policy Playbook" for today's summit are right: In a world hungry for ideas and innovation on sustainable practices, Oregon has a competitive advantage.

Consider a list of the modern roots of sustainability in Oregon: forest practices rules, land-use planning, solid waste recycling, wetlands protection, greenspace investment, support for light rail and bicycle transportation. Every one of these hard-won policies has been attacked at one time or another as "job killers," deterrents to doing business in Oregon.

Yet today the state's most knowledgeable business leaders will discuss how these very policies are now key to building a vibrant future economy in Oregon.

The opportunity is there. The world is searching for innovation in energy efficiency, alternative fuels, recycling, green buildings, alternative transportation and land use. There is real money to be made, big markets to supply, countless jobs to create in the search for sustainability.

There is also enormous benefit in strengthening Oregon's reputation as the place where sustainability is understood and valued. Smart, ambitious, innovative people are looking for the right place to start businesses, or work for them, that focus on sustainability.

Oregon is that place. Already, the state is home to many businesses with a deep expertise in and commitment to sustainable business practice. Nike, Hewlett-Packard and Intel, three of its largest employers, are ranked among the 100 most sustainable corporations in the world. Portland, meanwhile, is ranked first in urban sustainability in annual rankings of the nation's 50 largest cities.

But Oregon has more work to do. It's crucial that the state improve and strengthen its land-use system and resolve questions raised by Measure 37. The business leaders also suggest that elected officials take fresh looks at the state's energy policy, and water and wastewater policies, with stronger commitments to efficiency.

Of course, there's much more to do to position Oregon as a global leader in sustainability. And of course there will continue to be tensions between economic growth and the environment. But Oregon has spent a century grappling with the big questions of how to build an economy while preserving quality of life. In a time when everyone is pursuing sustainability, we've got a head start.

Read more!

Clean Energy's Big Year: Clean Energy's Stock On the Rise in 2006

It’s been a landmark year for clean energy, as solar and wind power blew past the records, despite supply shortages.

Michael Rogol, managing director for Photon Consulting, in October estimated that global solar industry sales would reach $19 billion this year. That expectation was raised from $16 billion in March, and represents a 58 percent increase from 2005.

Global numbers for wind power aren’t out yet, but at least two groups are predicting a record year.

The American Wind Energy Association estimates the wind industry will have installed a record 2.75 gigawatts of generating capacity this year, enough electricity to power the state of Rhode Island. The association in August said total U.S. wind energy installations surpassed 10 gigawatts, and the world’s largest wind farm, a 735-megawatt project in Texas, was also completed in the third quarter of 2006.

The British Wind Energy Association said the UK also had a record-breaking year. Wind power commissions grew 50 percent to 630 megawatts. Some 625-megawatts-worth of projects are under construction in the UK, and another 2,120 megawatts (2.12 gigawatts) have been approved.

Clean energy made plenty of news this year:

Confidence in Clean

Institutional investors were generous. Research firm New Energy Finance expects the renewable energy and low-carbon technology industries to set a record of $70.9 billion in investment this year, a 43-percent increase from 2005.

Of that amount, New Energy Finance expects venture capital and private equity investment to top $7 billion in 2006, a 167-percent increase from last year.

Numbers varied. According to a study by Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst & Young, $761.4 million of venture capital was invested on a worldwide basis through the beginning of December, up 50 percent from $504.1 million invested during the first three quarters of 2005. In the United States alone, $585.6 million was invested in 60 cleantech companies during the first three quarters of 2006.

According to the Cleantech Venture Network, North America numbers were higher. Venture investment rose from $514 million in the first quarter to $843 million in the second quarter and $933 million in the third quarter, according to the Cleantech Venture Network. In Europe, investment grew in the first two quarters, reaching $268 million in the second quarter, then fell to $144 million in the third quarter.

Either way, it’s clear private investment is growing. Among other announcements, Virgin’s flamboyant Richard Branson said he would invest $3 billion in renewable energy technologies over the next 10 years, ethanol company Altra raised $120 million, and venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers said it would double their commitment to green technology, to $200 million.

Notable IPO

IPOs were also notable. According to New Energy Finance, money raised in clean-energy-related IPOs more than doubled, reaching $10.3 billion in 2006, up from $4.3 billion in 2005 and $0.7 billion in 2004.

After a stock dip starting in May, clean-energy stock values are back up more than 30 percent from the start of the year, according to the WilderHill New Energy Global Innovation Index, which launched in January to track clean-energy stocks globally.

According to New Energy Finance, solar companies raised the most on the public markets, raising $4.4 billion, more than double the $1.7 billion raised in 2005 (see Trina Solar Has Rollercoaster IPO, IPO Watch: Hot, Crude, and Hertz, Chinese Solar Firm IPOs, Big Deals: IPOs).

Biofuels raised the second-most, raising $2.5 billion, more than 10 times the amount raised last year (see Ethanol Firm Plans $300M IPO, High on Ethanol). Wind IPOs raised $1.2 billion, compared with $1.1 billion last year.

Solar Silicon Shortage

While demand for solar continued to grow rapidly this year, the industry was constrained by a supply shortage of silicon, the material that turns sunlight into electricity in most solar panels. The shortage boosted prices and led solar manufacturers to strike long-term deals with silicon producers, which began installing new plants.

The shortage also sparked new interest in silicon technologies, as well as in silicon-efficient technologies like thin-film solar, a solar technology that uses little to no silicon, and concentrator technologies, which use mirrors and lenses to concentrate the sun into smaller solar cells (see Solar’s Going Thin).

Predictions about when the shortage will end vary from between 2007 and 2012. An ease in supply is likely to bring lower prices, and manufacturers have been investing in technology to hone their competitive edge once the shortage ends. Others have been looking at expanding into other solar services, such as installation and distribution.

Ethanol Grows

Ethanol production grew as new plants came online. According to New Energy Finance as of September, 36 new commercial ethanol plants were financed worldwide in 2006, compared with 25 in 2005 and seven in 2004.

Ethanol from materials like corn stover, wood chips, and switchgrass, got a boost from high oil prices and government backing. Ethanol benefited from a mention from U.S. President Bush in February, a U.S. goal set last year to replace 30 percent of its transportation fuel with biofuel by 2030, and a declaration from Brazil’s government that it would reach energy independence through the alcoholic fuel this year (see The Fuel of the Future?).

A number of ethanol startups raised funding, including Mascoma, Iogen, and GreenShift. And cellulosic-ethanol companies announced a series of milestones, such as the first cellulosic plant in China and the world’s first “commercial-scale demonstration plant” (in other words, a plant that produces more than 1 million gallons per year).

Electric Cars Make Comeback

Electric cars enthusiasts had a great year, as startups came up with high-end electric sports cars like Tesla Motors’ Roadster and Venturi’s Fetish (see Green Machines Get Mean [and this previous Watthead post). Forget slow-moving, short-range neighborhood vehicles; these are meant to appeal to the mainstream, even if only the top echelon of earners can afford to actually buy one.

Plug-in hybrids are a mid-step between hybrids and electric cars, as they are hybrids with a plug so their owners can recharge at their wall outlets and reach up to 100 miles per gallon. Startups like EnergyCS and Hymotion started converting hybrids into plug-ins, and at the LA Auto Show, GM announced it would make a production version—but gave no timeline. (See GM, Nissan, Toyota Plugging In, US Could Plug In Most Cars, Plug-In Hybrids Get Pledges, Plug-In Hybrids Gets 100 MPG).

In the meantime, car manufacturers’ design teams won bragging rights at the LA Auto Show for coming up with the greenest concepts they could render.

Read more!

News From My Backyard: Propelled By Voters, Wind Power Picks Up Speed in Washington State

[From the Puget Sound Business Journal:]

When Columbia County resident Tanya Patton wants to get a library book for herself or one of the four children she home-schools, she has to visit the nearby Dayton Library during the 21 hours the library is open during the week. Even with limited hours, keeping the library going has required endless rounds of bake sales, book sales, raffles and other fundraisers from Patton and other supporters.

But the library soon will get significantly more funding, thanks to a boost in the county's property tax revenue generated by the new Hopkins Ridge wind farm [pictured above]. Patton led a campaign to form a new county library district that will share resources with the city library, which may allow the library to extend its operating hours or put its catalog online for the first time.

Across large swaths of Eastern Washington, wind farms are generating tax revenues as well as electricity, pumping additional money into county coffers. As more wind farms are built, their construction and the taxes they generate may have a profound impact on the economic landscape of rural counties.

Three new wind farms -- Hopkins Ridge in Columbia County and Wild Horse and Big Horn in Klickitat County -- were completed in Eastern Washington within the past year, bringing the state's total to six.

Those three facilities more than double the state's wind-energy production, generating enough power to serve three-quarters of the households in Seattle. They will also generate about $3.6 million a year in property taxes during their first 10 years in operation, according to Renewable Northwest Project, a Portland-based coalition of environmental and consumer groups and energy companies.

And the wind-energy trend is gaining speed, thanks in part to Initiative 937, which will require large utilities to increase the renewable power they generate. Another half-dozen wind farms are under construction, ready to break ground or in the permitting process.

Others may follow, since significantly more wind power will likely be required to meet the goals of I-937. The Democratic Congress also appears poised to extend the production tax credit that makes wind power competitive with energy from other sources.

But the industry faces significant challenges, including a lack of transmission capacity to carry power from Eastern Washington or even Montana and Idaho, the areas with the highest potential to generate power, to Western Washington, the area of highest power demand.

The industry, and individual wind-power developers, also have plenty of critics. Some residents of Eastern Washington consider wind farms visual blight. David Bowen, chair of the Kittitas County Commission, said he's gone to public meetings about proposed wind farms and heard residents say that constructing the projects would mean reducing the quality of life in Kittitas to serve the Puget Sound area's energy needs.

Audubon Washington supports wind-energy development, but the organization also wants the state to study wind-farm siting to reduce impacts on wildlife. Audubon Washington and other groups say proposed wind-farm projects need to be evaluated to ensure they won't kill large numbers of birds and bats.

For better or worse, construction of wind farms seems likely to continue for several reasons. While the Northwest's massive hydroelectric dams have provided cheap and abundant electricity for decades, much of that power is spoken for, and new electricity sources must be found to accommodate growth. Concerns over global warming and pollution make renewable power sources such as wind farms more appealing than such options as coal-fired power plants. Some utilities, such as Bellevue-based Puget Sound Energy, the owner of the new Hopkins Ridge and Wild Horse projects, are embracing wind energy. And many customers and lawmakers support renewable power for reasons such as environmental and energy-security concerns.

Voter support for renewable energy was evident with the November passage of I-937 [see previous post], which requires large electric utilities to get 15 percent of power from renewable sources -- other than existing hydroelectric dams -- by the year 2020. Wind energy will likely make up a significant chunk of that.

Although some of the 15 percent will come from solar, biomass or biogas and other sources, wind energy will be a substantial part because wind power is cheaper to produce than solar. Today, only about 1.3 percent of the state's electricity comes from wind. Some of the wind energy produced in Washington, such as electricity from the Big Horn project in Klickitat County, is sold to other states such as California.

The three new wind projects completed within the last year represent significant chunks of capital. According to Renewable Northwest Project, they represent $840 million in total project investment and capital costs, about 743 short-term construction jobs and 39 to 50 permanent jobs. In addition to the roughly $3.6 million the projects will generate in annual property taxes over the first 10 years, the turbine owners are paying landowners between $1.2 million and $1.85 million in royalties. A landowner can get between $2,000 and $5,000 per turbine per year.

Some of the economic effects are being felt even before the property tax revenue is being collected. While Hopkins Ridge was being built, workers bought goods and services in the surrounding community, said Jennie Dickinson, executive director of the Dayton Chamber of Commerce.

"The hotels were full of workers, and the state of Washington has a lodging tax that can be used for tourism promotion," Dickinson said.

Read more!

Cobasys and A123Systems Partner to Bring Lithium Ion Batteries Into the Automotive World

[From Green Car Congress:]

Cobasys and A123Systems have signed a memorandum of understanding to enter into a partnership to develop, manufacture, sell, and service lithium-ion energy storage systems for hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) applications.

The scope of the agreement will include joint development, marketing and supply of A123Systems nanophosphate lithium batteries and Cobasys systems integration and manufacturing of battery systems for HEV markets. Cobasys manufactures NiMH batteries, and is currently the battery supplier for the GM Saturn VUE and Aura Green Line hybrids. (see earlier GCC post.)

To support customer programs in transportation markets, Cobasys will act as the tier one supplier providing the technical assistance and expertise for the design and development of battery system products including: packaging, thermal management, wiring, electronics and control algorithms.

Cobasys will help develop the requirements and specifications to meet the integration needs of customers and partners and will provide the validation testing of fully integrated lithium battery systems. A123Systems will manufacture and supply its automotive-class nanophosphate lithium ion cells and technology.

Thomas S. Neslage, Cobasys President & CEO:

"The agreement to unite Cobasys system expertise with A123Systems lithium technology further exemplifies our vision to be recognized as the world’s most admired energy storage integration solutions company."

David Vieau, A123Systems President and CEO:

"We look forward to working with Cobasys to introduce lithium ion into the automotive market. This partnership will provide the market with game changing performance to further accelerate the adoption of hybrid electric vehicles."

Cobasys designs, manufactures and integrates advanced battery system solutions for transportation markets, including Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV), Electric Vehicles (EV) and 36/42 Volt applications and to stationary markets, including Back-Up power supply systems for Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), Telecom and Distributed Generation markets. Cobasys is a joint venture between Chevron Technology Ventures LLC, a subsidiary of Chevron Corporation and Energy Conversion Devices, Inc.

In December, the United States Advanced Battery Consortium (USABC), an organization composed of DaimlerChrysler Corporation, Ford Motor Company and General Motors Corporation, awarded a $15-million battery technology development contract to A123Systems. (see earlier GCC post.) The company, which supplies li-ion packs to Black & Decker for power tools, is also working with GE Global Research, Ballard Power Systems, and the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to develop a lightweight, battery-dominant zero-emissions hybrid fuel-cell bus. (see earlier GCC post.)

Two plug-in hybrid conversions companies—HyMotion (see earlier GCC post.) and Hybrids Plus (see earlier GCC post.)—also use A123Systems li-ion cells in their PHEV battery systems.


While the conspiracy theorists have run amok over at Green Car Congress (citing Cobasys's domination of the NiMH battery market and it's big oil owners), I see this as a positive development. This parternship should lead to the establishment of a more robust supply and marketing chain, help lead to the mass production of Li-ion batteries (which will in turn mean reduced costs) and begin what many see as an inevitable transition from NiMH to Li-ion batteries for automotive applications (HEVs, PHEVs and EVs).

I would bet that 2007 will see many major automakers begin to put Li-ion batteries into their hybrid vehicle designs for release in the next few model years. Other Li-ion battery manufacturers are beginning to ink deals with major auto manufacturers, and I imagine 2007 will see even more, as this trend builds. As I reported back in September, Johnson Controls-Saft Advanced Power Solutions (JCS) joint venture signed a letter of intent with a major vehicle manufacturer to supply lithium-ion hybrid vehicle batteries, for example.

Lithium ion batteries have had problems with safety, with cold starts and with charge times that have made them a second-choice to Nickel-Metal-Hydride (NiMH) batteries for hybrid applications, up to this point. However, A123, JCS and other Li-ion manufacturers have made significant progress in these areas and Li-ion batteries offer these inherit advantages:

superior power and energy densities to NiMH, and thus lighter weight;

lower volume-production costs (although slightly higher low volume production costs);

low self-discharge rate and significantly higher coulombic efficiency than NiMH (~100% for Li Ion and <66% for NiMH) - coulombic efficiency refers to the portion of energy recovered from the battery that is initially used to charge the battery (i.e., energy out divided by energy in).

does not suffer from the 'memory effect' (NiMH suffer from minor memory effect, although not as bad as Ni Cadmium batteries)

These characteristics make Li Ion batteries the presumed long-term replacement for NiMH (although carbon-nanotube ultracapacitors could give Li Ion a run for its money eventually) and it looks like the time is nearing when Li Ion batteries begin to replace NiMH for use in automotive applications.

It's also worth noting that it seems like the large majority of hybrid and electric concept cars unveiled in the past year have featured lithium ion battery packs (see for example: the Ford Reflex hybrid, Subaru's B5-TPH hybrid and R1e urban electric car, and Mitsubishi's Concept-CT hybrid all shown at the Detroit Auto Show plus Mitsu's Concept-EZ electric vehicle, Volvo's 3CC hybrid, Nissan's planned light-weight EV, and of course the smokin' Tesla Roadster to name a few (dozen)).

Read more!

News From My Backyard: Coal's Future in Washington State Fueling Energy Debate

[From the Seattle Times:]

On the outskirts of Centralia, the state's only coal-fired power plant stands like a factory from another world, shining bright around the clock, steam and smoke pouring forth as it generates enough electricity to light all of Seattle.

But that power comes at a price — pollution.

Until new equipment went in about five years ago, the plant was blamed for much of the haze that obscured views of Mount Rainier. Today, the 470-foot-tall smokestack remains the state's largest single source of poisonous mercury.

But efforts to crack down on that mercury pollution may ensure the Centralia plant remains a rarity in Washington as a power plant fed by coal.

Even as some states go on a building binge of coal-fired power plants, Washington is considering hefty restrictions that would do the opposite, essentially allowing just one new coal plant to be built. It's part of an emerging schism over coal as a future source of energy, pitting those who see it as reliable and cheap against those who consider it the dirtiest way to make electricity.

On one side is Texas, where a Dallas energy company wants to build 11 new coal power plants. On the opposite end is California, which wants to bar the use of most coal power to fight global warming.

Washington voters in November endorsed a shift toward cleaner energy [see previous post]. They approved an initiative requiring major utilities to get 15 percent of electricity from renewable sources like wind by 2020.

Now, if Washington makes proposed restrictions on mercury emissions a reality, it will be further allied with the California camp. But that may hinge on the outcome of a debate between a huge state agency and the leader of a much smaller one.

Plans to cap mercury

The latest attempts to limit mercury, a potent poison that can hurt development of children's brains, began with a federal rule issued in 2005 that set a 2018 deadline for cutting emissions.

But, like at least 15 other states, Washington is drafting an even tougher standard. In its case, the deadline would be 2013.

The state also would block coal plants in Washington from participating in a federal program that lets some plants keep puffing out more mercury through a "cap-and-trade" program. That gives companies an "allowance" of mercury to emit every year. If a company doesn't use all its allowance, it can sell the remainder to another power plant so it can emit more mercury.

That has the large state Department of Ecology, which is charged with protecting the environment, at odds with the chairman of a state board called the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, which oversees permits for new power plants.

For Ecology, the issue is relatively simple: "We were really driven to act on this because of our concern about mercury," said Sarah Rees, an Ecology manager working on the new mercury limits.

The cap-and-trade system would allow some plants to pay to keep pumping out more mercury, and people living nearby could suffer, Rees said. It also delays cuts in the pollution.

For Jim Luce, chair of the Energy Facility council, as well as several power companies, that would limit options in the search for new electricity.

Luce said he favors a regional trading system with Oregon, but he doesn't like the nationwide program.

If power companies can't use a cap-and-trade system at all to buy the right to more emissions, the mercury limits would effectively mean only one more coal plant could be built in Washington, Luce warned.

"Look at the projections for resources that are going to be needed for the Northwest. Where's it all going to come from?" he said.

More plants coming?

The Centralia plant would benefit from being the first plant in the state, by getting most of the state's mercury allowance.

But meeting the new limits by 2013 could be nearly impossible because the technology hasn't been developed yet, said Richard DeBolt, a Republican state representative who works as a spokesman for the Centralia plant, owned by Canadian-based TransAlta.

"If they would support extending it until 2018, then we would be fine," DeBolt said.

Although the coal mine next to the plant shut down this month, TransAlta plans to keep running the power plant with coal shipped in from Wyoming and Montana.

Ecology officials are optimistic that such mercury-cleaning technology will be available by 2013, but they say the proposed rule allows some latitude if it isn't.

Right now, the leading candidate to use the rest of the mercury allowance is Energy Northwest, a consortium of public-utility districts that has applied to build a power plant in Kalama, Cowlitz County, along the Columbia River near Portland, fueled by coal or sludge left over from refining oil.

But a company called United Power is also considering a coal-powered plant in Wallula, in Walla Walla County in southeastern Washington.

If the state pursues the tighter limits on mercury, one of those companies may lose out.

Yet there's little agreement on how many coal plants the region really needs.

The Northwest Power and Conservation Council, a federal agency that plans for the region's electricity needs, predicts that in the next two decades only one more small coal plant of between 400 and 425 megawatts is warranted in all of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana.

Puget Sound Energy, however, has said it could need to make as much as 675 megawatts of coal power in that time just for Western Washington.

Then there are environmentalists who even question the need for the Kalama plant, particularly with the initiative passed by state voters that dictates that major utilities get more power from renewable sources.

"We really don't see any need for coal development in the Northwest, period," said Marc Krasnowsky, spokesman for the NW Energy Coalition, an environmental group.


I definitely agree with my friends at the NW Energy Coalition that there is no need for new coal-fired power plants in the Northwest. We have an abundant supply of homegrown, renewable energy resources in the Pacific Northwest that are still largely untapped, and we can meet our growing needs without relying on dirty, imported, non-renewable coal. As this article points out, the coal mine at the Centralia plant is now tapped out and closed last month, meaning that all coal used to generate electricity in or for the Northwest is imported from outside of the region. That equates to hundreds of millions of dollars annually flowing out of the region's economy to pay for fuel imports. In contrast, tapping our homegrown renewable resources actually strengthens the region's economy by creating thousands of jobs, and millions of dollars of new income and tax revenue for communities across the Northwest.

I also agree with the Washington Department of Ecology's stance regarding Washington's participating in the national cap and trade program. I believe that cap and trade programs make great sense for pollutants when it is not particularly important how localized those emissions are. For example, a ton of carbon dioxide emitted at Centralia has the same impact both locally and globally as a ton of CO2 emitted in New York, or California, or Virginia. But for emissions of pollutants like mercury, or benzene or other potent toxics, it's another story altogether. A cap and trade program only ensures that total emissions are reduced, but does not do anything to ensure that local emissions levels go down. In fact, by puchasing permits from other polluters, a power plant or other emissions source in one area may actually be able to increase emissions, to the detriment of local residents.

In short, it doesn't make sense for the people living around the Centralia coal-fired power plant to simply accept the fact that emissions levels of toxic mercury in their area can remain at dangerous levels because a power plant in New Mexico or Florida reduced their emissions and sold permits under the cap and trade program to the Centralia plant. (This kind of regulatory strategy leads to problems like the dangerously high levels of benzene emissions in and around Northwest cities).

Setting stricter, local standards for emissions of toxics like Mercury, like the Washington Department of Ecology is planning, are much more appropriate and help ensure a healthy environment for everyone.

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