Letter to California's Governor Brown

           It looks to me like a crisis is coming upon the State with regard to the continued expansion of small scale PV energy industry.  The problem is that the major utilities (particularly PG&E) have made it abundantly clear that they intend to stop accepting new electricity produced under the net metering agreements as soon as the total production in their service areas hits the mandated 5% of their peak demand.  The installed base is now more than 3% and rising rapidly as the economics of distributed small scale power has improved in the past few years.   I predict that if the current trends continue, the 5% limit will be reached within two years – stopping further installation of renewable energy systems that are designed to offset the power on a meter-by-meter basis (residential, small commercial, agricultural, etc.). Therefore, just about the time when raising power costs and lowering PV system costs will make distributed power generating systems affordable without government subsidies, the ability to install the systems will be curtailed by the utility companies.

            The small scale renewable industry is just starting to bloom, creating new jobs, creating new investments and finally moving toward reducing our dependence upon non-renewable energy sources.  In two or three years, the economics for renewable energy systems will change to make them not only affordable, but will produce a net positive rate of return - without subsidies, incentives or pollution.

            It appears that the goal of the utility companies is to own and control the sources of electricity on the grid rather than allow its small users to be producers.  The plethora of proposals for very large scale solar power plants in California makes it clear that they intend to purchase most of their solar produced energy from huge installations covering large tracts of desert land, causing extreme and largely unknown environmental impacts to these important ecological systems and the local communities.

            There are many down sides to the very large installations.  They will be heavily subsidized by taxes and by being given the use of “free” public land (mostly BLM land).  The installations will create short term bursts of employment during the installation process (seriously straining the community resources in the proposed remote areas), but will require a very small staff for maintenance and operations.  The result is likely to be the creation of what amount to desert ghost towns following a building boom.  In addition, several of the proposed systems are owned by foreign investors; Americans don’t even get the benefit of our tax subsidies or land donations. 

            On the other hand, distributed small scale systems are largely environmentally benign because they are placed on land that has already been taken out of service (roof tops, parking lots, alongside roadways, etc.).  The investment money largely comes from individuals and small businesses rather than large, often foreign, investors.  In addition, there is becoming a new, large, labor base to provide sales, installation and maintenance of these distributed systems.  

            Without government intervention, the current trend toward the installation of residential and small commercial renewable energy systems will come to a quick halt.  I strongly recommend and request that the State mandate the acceptance of small scale renewable electric production onto the grid without having to meet the stringent regulatory requirements applicable to large scale power plants.  The power doesn’t necessarily need to be purchased using the “net metering” model, but it needs to be purchased at a fair price (as a minimum, it should equal the wholesale cost for identical power when the power is produced).  

            The current state of uncertainty with regards to what will happen once the 5% limit has been reached is stifling grown and continued investment in renewable energy at the “grass roots” level.

Letter to Yolo County Planning Commission

I following material is the body of a letter that I sent to the Yolo County Planning Commission based upon issues that came up during a Planning Commission meeting concerning recommendations to the County Board of Supervisors concerning developing a plan to meet the State of California's green house gas requirements.

- Should zoning requirements be based upon Kilowatts or acres?

There was a discussion about whether to provide zoning regulations based upon kilowatts or land area.  Since the ordnance seems to be focusing on land-use, I suggest it be based upon land area.  The problem with basing it upon kilowatt outputs is that the efficiency of various technologies varies greatly, and is likely to shift in the near future.  With current technologies, the amount of land required to produce a given amount of power can vary by a factor of ten (e.g., from one acre to ten acres, depending upon the technology used).  This means that the amount of area required to operate a 1 hp pump is about 3 - 40”x67” poly-crystalline silicon PV modules (“panels”).    This is about 55 square feet.  Using other technologies, it could be as large as 100 square feet, or as small as 10 square feet.

 

Not only does the area required to capture the energy vary greatly, but the on-site infrastructure required to support various technologies can use more or less area.  PV systems may only require inverters and switch boards – a small contribution to the required foot print.  However, some technologies, such as the trough systems that focus light on pipes containing a heat transfer fluid that then boils water creating steam to turn a turbine, may require a large power plant and hot fluid storage tanks to make use of the energy.  

Different technologies have different land use and environmental impacts.  It is my suggestion that if “land use” is the item being regulated, then the criteria should be based upon land use.  If the item to be regulated is “power,” then power should be used as the criteria.   Otherwise some technologies will be unfairly penalized, or promoted.

- Achieving the 2020 emissions reduction target:

I think there is an additional opportunity to use solar to achieve the 2020 emissions reduction target.  The presentation lists irrigation return pumps as a likely use of solar energy.  I predict that irrigation water pumping from wells will also become very important in the near future as the price of energy goes up and the price of solar modules continues to decline.

For a typical field irrigated from March to October using a 60 hp pump, it takes about 100 standard sized PV panels (about 2000 square feet) to off-set the cost of electricity if used in a net metering mode.  At the current cost of utility power and PV systems, it requires incentives or tax breaks amounting to about 35% of the initial cost of the installation to achieve a seven year payback (about 10% Return on Investment - ROI).  However, assuming power costs continue to rise at the historical level of about 7% a year, coupled with a continued projected decrease in PV system cost, in about four years there will no longer be a need for such government incentives.  At that point in time PV will be provide an approximately 10% ROI on their own.  I think it is reasonable to assume that from that point forward, PV will begin to off-set a significant portion of the power used for pumping – even in a deep well application.

It is my suggestion that additional uses for PV power be included in planning considerations if that would result in regulations or standards promoting these types of applications. 

-Community Choice Aggregation Program.

I have no specific problem with the idea of Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) programs, but I do not believe that it should be the first, or even the foremost, choice for meeting the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions target. 

The inevitable outcome of all, or even a majority, of the 58 counties entering into these types of contracts to meet their GHG targets is that the price of “green” power will skyrocket, and the creation of many extremely large (in the order of ten square miles or more) solar facilities to meet the demand.  The result will be high power costs and very large negative environmental impacts caused by the centralized power plants.  Examples include the permitted and proposed solar power plants near Blythe, Calico and in Imperial Valley.  Each of these plants is over ten square miles in extent.  The areas where these plants are located will be graded and rocked, and periodically sprayed with herbicides to prevent vegetation from growing.  They will be very large, bare fields devoid of all wildlife and vegetation.  There are more than a dozen such plants in the permitting stages in California at this time, and they will proliferate as the price of renewable energy increases because of the demands of similar CCA programs that are designed to assist counties to meet their GH Gas emission budgets.  It is quite possible that similar systems will be proposed for Yolo County. 

I think it is much better to instead focus on renewable energy opportunities at the local level, produced where the power is needed.  Once all of the feasible local energy production/reduction options have been met, then it might be necessary to include the very large, environmental damaging, systems into the mix. However, it is my opinion that the need will not come if counties such as Yolo actively promote the creation of small, local options. 

My suggestion is to focus on the “low hanging fruit” of locally produced power used where produced first, rather than invest in CCA options that will undoubtedly become expensive and environmental damaging as the State wide use grows.   The CCA approach might need to be in the mix of options while the transition to local power occurs, but it should not be considered the final or even desirable long term solution. 

- Locally produced power

Yolo County has a plethora of opportunities to produce power that is produced where used, eliminating or minimizing land use impacts and modifications to the power distribution grid.

Residential, commercial and agricultural installations

Examples of opportunities of environmental neutral opportunities abound.  For example, almost all of the homes in Yolo County can be self sufficient given the current costs of electricity and PV systems, paying their owners back the installation cost in about six years.  The same or similar payback and return is possible for many commercial and agricultural applications.   As the price of power increases, and the cost of PV systems decreases, it is only a three or four years before they are economically viable without any subsides or tax incentives.  At that point in time, it will be highly feasible and cost effective to replace nearly all electricity used within Yolo County with renewable sources, funded in part or wholly by the user of the power (homeowners, farmers, business owners, etc.).  

Transportation

As the prices of utility power goes up, and the cost of PV systems goes down, it will become feasible to power vehicles on PV produced electricity.  The new generation of electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles will allow a transition to renewable energy created within the County.  Most, or all, of this power offset can be accomplished with PV systems located where they do little or no damage to the environment through land use degradation by placing the collectors on roof tops, over parking lots, in unused areas within agricultural areas and other locations that have already been taken out of use.  There is currently no need to take land out of production or change the land use if the generation facilities are carefully sited and installed. 

The near term future of solar energy and fuel cells

I seem to have gotten all fired up about the future of solar power and hydrogen fuel cells.  It has recently come to my attention that solar power is on the verge of becoming a reality – big time.  As we know, it has been around for a long time and has slowly become accepted as a possible power source for small applications, or for people who desire to be in on the good thing early.  As usual, those early pioneers do so at an extra financial cost, but get the satisfaction of doing the right thing at the right time.  Now that is all changing.  New solar photovoltaic technologies have come out of the research labs, and are being used to make the new generation of panels.  For example, Shell solar (who are the new owners of Seimens solar) has new non-silicon, thin film panels for sale.  They claim that this new manufacturing technology decreases the manufacturing costs by a factor of ten.  (It is interesting to note that while their costs may have gone down by a factor of ten, the cost to the consumer of the panels has gone up about 20%).  Not only has the costs dropped significantly, they are about to drop much further and faster during the next year or so.  There are several new companies getting into the business this year who are intentionally planning on driving the costs, and the price to the consumer, down even more than the 10 fold decrease claimed by Shell.  I suspect that it will end up about 1/20 of today’s costs.  That means that the $40,000 for panels that I was planning to power my house will only cost $2,000 in a year or two.  At that point, it will be clearly crazy not to invest.  The reason that the price will drop like that is that they supply will be huge and the manufacturing costs very low.  Unless something completely unforeseen happens, the market will be flooded with panels in the very near future.

One of the sticking points in California will be the laws regarding selling power back to the power companies.  Right now they have to allow “net metering,” (running the electric meter backwards when producing power and forward when using it), which is a good thing – but not good enough.  A customer can reduce their power costs this way, but any extra power produced goes to the power company free of change.  When the price of panels drops to the truly affordable level, it will be important to be able to get paid for extra power.   Europe has just changed their laws to mandate this type of arrangement in anticipation of the coming solar revolution.  We need to do they same.  If I can actually turn a profit off of my solar panels, I will be much more interested in willing to maximize my investment and the amount of power I produce.  I can easily make 5-10 times the power that I can use.  I would like to do that, and sell it to the utilities.  We need to change the laws in California to mandate this type of sale to the power companies at a reasonable rate.  Small producers need to be able to get at least as much for their power as the large power plants get – maybe more because it does not deplete our natural resources.  I believe that there should be a significant cost benefit for producing non-polluting, renewable power.  It needs to be either subsidized, or at least paid for at the top of the price paid for power, rather than at they bottom, which is of course where the power companies will want to set the prices.

Once we switch to the use of a significant about of solar electricity, the issue of using hydrogen becomes much more viable.  Right now almost all hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, which is not smart and does nothing to decrease our use of petroleum.  However, if it is made from solar power, then it represents a decrease in the use of petroleum and the associated pollution.   It becomes a renewable, pollution free energy storage medium (not an energy source, but rather just a method of storing energy for mobile or night time applications).  Water to hydrogen and oxygen – back to water.  No pollution and no net use of resources, including water.

The interesting part of this whole scenario is that all of the pieces are not only in place to allow it to happen from a technological point of view, but it is actually happening right now.  Huge manufacturing facilities are being constructed all over the world to produce low cost solar panels, hydrogen fuel cell cars are cruising our highways daily, the technology for producing fuel cells and storing it is in place, the technology for using electricity to produce hydrogen has been in place for decades.  All  that has to happen is that it has to happen.

Hydrogen fuel cells seem to be the “sticking point” for some reason.  Part of the reason is the extremely high price of the membrane that is used to convert hydrogen and air to electricity.  The membrane is very inexpensive to manufacture, but is very expensive to purchase.  An almost identical membrane is used by the petroleum industry for their refining processes, and this membrane is very inexpensive.  So far the manufactures have managed to keep the prices artificially high because they have what amounts to a monopoly on the produce.   That needs to change.  The material is similar to plastic wrap with a tiny bit of platinum in it which is the catalyst that makes the process go.  Right now it is hundreds of dollars a square foot – it would be pennies a square foot.  The other reason for the high cost of fuel cells is the current manufacturing techniques are done by hand, and use expensive materials and processes.  There is no reason that this should be the case any longer.  It was the only way to do it when doing research, but now that research has been completed – it is time to switch to much, much lower manufacturing techniques.  I don’t know what the final costs will turn out to be, but I see no reason that a fuel cell power plant for an automobile should be any more expensive than a modern motor.  It should actually be less expensive because the parts are simpler and there are many less pieces.  

Storage of enough hydrogen to be practical in a car is a slight problem.  If they use standard pressure vessels (5,000 psi bottles) they are limited to about 100 miles range while being able to “hide” the bottles from view.  However, a few years ago they came out with a new design that allows the use of up to 15,000 psi – potentially tripling the range to a usable 300 miles.  My guess is that there is room to improve vehicle efficiency (road friction, regenerative braking, etc) and layout of bottles within the vehicle to increase this a bit more.  In any case, 300 miles seems to be enough to make it a viable energy source.

There is a question about lack of infrastructure for hydrogen.  This is a red herring.   We currently have an infrastructure that is perfectly capable of providing the needed hydrogen and bootstrapping the supply to meet an increase in demand.    All towns of reasonable size have welding supply houses that provide various types of specialty gases, including hydrogen.  If you want hydrogen today, all you have to do is go purchase it.  This would clearly not work for a vast number of vehicles, but it will take a bit of time before there are vast numbers of vehicles.  As the numbers of fuel cell vehicles grows, the infrastructure will grow with it, there will never be a lack of infrastructure.  At some point I expect to see tube trailers being used to transport hydrogen from the manufacturing facility to the distribution point (similarly to what we do now with gasoline).  As the need goes up, I expect to see service stations making their own supply of hydrogen from electricity.  If by that time the photovoltaic supply has grown enough to be providing net power to the grid, then this electricity created hydrogen will be from the sun and be pollution free.  I would expect that in addition to this on the spot made hydrogen, there will be others who make solar hydrogen as an additional income from their parking lots and unused farm land.  The point is that the infrastructure is here right now, and will easily grow to meet the demand as the demand grows.  I personally like the idea of using my rooftop solar collectors on my house to make hydrogen to power my own car.  There is enough power available on my roofs to power my house, irrigate my fields, power my car, and sell a little to the power companies.  All that it takes is cheap enough solar panels and the right types of laws to support this sort of thing.

I find all of the quite exciting, and interesting.  We are on the verge of a possible transformation of our power system.  However, when this transition happens there will be some who fear great financial loss (such as the oil industry).  I wonder if they will have enough wisdom to allow and support the change, or if they and politicians attempt to scuttle the whole thing.  It is there for the taking, but those that fear losing will likely fight very hard to maintain the status quo.   In addition, they will likely do things like try to pump as much oil out of Alaska as possible so they can make their fortunes before the demand for oil drops to the point that it is obviously not needed.  They will want to get their money while the getting is good.

We are in for an interesting few years as the world adjusts to a new paradigm in energy production and use.

An Inconvient Truth

I went to see the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” the other evening in San Jose. It was an odd experience. The first thing that I noticed is that it was pretty easy to find a place to sit with less then 20 people in the theater.  To be fair, I didn’t see any more people going to the other shows in the six-plex, Maybe it just wasn’t a movie night.

The movie itself was very different from anything I have ever seen.  It was in the format of a slide show presentation in a hall.  Gore was on the stage presenting “his slideshow” and an audience was watching.  It was kind of like a video of a presentation.  There was more to it than that, often we would be shown clips of various places around the world to illustrate his point.  These filled the screen, and were therefore different from what a person would experience in the audience of his talk.  However, basically it was a lecture by Gore on the threat of global warming.  

I already was aware of almost all of the things that he presented, but I may be unusually interested in the topic so have made the effort to educate myself on the topic before seeing the movie.  Even with these things he did a nice job of explaining them, and illustrated them in new ways.  For me it only brought a couple of new items, but there would probably be much more for folks who have not spent much time thinking about the problem.  I think he did a good job of cutting through the controversy to the heart of the matter – we are causing the earth to enter an era of heating that is unprecedented in our knowledge of the past many millions of years.  We have already driven the CO2 concentration higher than it has been at any time in the past 600,000 years, which includes six ice ages and huge fluctuations in CO2 and temperature.  What we have already done is far out of the normal, and what will happen in the next few years if we don’t really get serious about stopping it will be orders of magnitude worse than anything that the earth has experienced in millions of years.  As far as we can tell, it appears that will be a far larger effect than volcanoes, ice ages, or whatever other unbalances the earth has been subjected to.

Just as a note to those that believe the oceans can absorb the extra CO2 in the atmosphere.  That is probably correct at any instance in time.  If we stopped producing new CO2, the oceans could probably absorb the extra and bring it back into equilibrium.  However, that is not what is happening.  The oceans are right now absorbing as much as they can, but we are clearly adding more faster than can be absorbed, that is why the concentration continues to increase.  It is a good thing that there are large “sinks” available, otherwise there would be no hope in reducing the concentrations, and the temperature, even if are capable of solving the problem of adding too much.  In any case, it is clear that the oceans are not capable of absorbing it nearly as fast as we are in making it, otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing the increases that are very evident.

I think the scariest part of Gore’s talk was his clear presentation of the idea that this is a process that accelerates on itself, meaning there is positive feedback.  For example, the more ice melts on the poles exposing open water, the less sunlight gets reflected back into space, meaning that more sun goes to warming the exposed oceans, meaning that the ice melts faster.  There are many positive feedback loops involved, and few negative ones. (There are a few negative ones that I know of which he didn’t mention, such as plants growing faster in warming weather, using more carbon dioxide to add to their growth.)  However, the overall effect is that the feedback is a positive one, leading toward run-away (moving away from equilibrium) increases in global temperatures.

Then of course there is the big potential problem of turning off the huge energy pump sometimes called the “conveyor belt” that runs around the world through our oceans.  This giant “heat pump” is responsible for much of our excellent weather because it transfers excess heat from the tropics up to the northern regions, and brings cold water back to the tropics to cool them.  It results in moderating the overall temperature of earth.  If this stops working, then the tropics will get much warmer, and the poles much colder – throwing us into another ice age.  So global heating results in ice ages – interesting.  This is most likely to occur if the ice melts and changes the salinity of the oceans in the vicinity of the down currents.  

If the ice melts, stopping the conveyor belt, the same water would result in raising the oceans about 20 feet.  If the ice on the other pole melts also, it would add another 20 feet.  Hum, that would be a problem.

Gore ended up with a bunch of recommendations on how to get ourselves out of this mess, made a compelling point that this effort would be good for the economies of the world (including the USA).  He also pointed out that we have been successful in banding together to solve the ozone depletion problem, and have all of the tools and know how necessary to solve this one – but seem to be lacking the will to do so.

I find it very odd that people object to doing anything because it would be inconvenient and expensive to do anything about it.  That seems like a pretty short sided view of expense and convenience to me.  If the oceans rise 30 feet or so, it will destroy untold trillions of dollars worth of property and real estate, not to mention the cost of displacing billions of people.  I think that could be considered to be “expensive” by any ones thinking.  What good it is to save a few billion dollars if the outcome of doing this is to destroy most of human civilization and wealth.  This doesn’t include the effects of changing the climates so that floods and draughts prevail over large parts of the world, making it impossible to grow enough food to sustain our population.  Large scale death and disease is bound to result, which is both quite inconvenient and costly.

To me it just makes no sense at all to not take on this problem.  We know it is there, there is scientific question that it is happening, that it will happen faster and we could do something about it.  It is about as close to a scientific certainty as science can get.    I talked to a local friend about this last night and his response was, “it doesn’t matter, God is coming back soon.”  That is taking a whole lot of faith that I don’t see any reason at all to support.

Even if it turns out that we aren’t on the verge of causing a global catastrophe with our use of petroleum products, what harm could possible be caused by cutting back on that by conservation, creating new and more efficient products, in using renewable (non-polluting) energy sources?  How could not burning fuel have a negative impact on us, particularly if we are careful and do it in ways that do not reduce, but rather enhance, our style of living and productivity?  For example, how has cutting automobile pollution resulted in anything bad happening to us or the economy?  It looks like we still have pretty good cars, that we still go where we want, and that our lifestyle is better, not worse.  Why does the prospect of a change necessarily mean reverting to the dark ages?  (Actually, not making the changes might very well mean reverting to the dark ages.)

The biggest problem and complaint that I had with the movie was the more or less constant self-aggrandizing of Gore as a person and a politician.  He should have stayed with his topic, and stayed away from any discussion of the person of Gore.  As it is, there is so much political stuff in the movie that I can’t honestly recommend it to my conservative “friends”.  They will just see it as the beginning of a run for the Presidency.  They will entirely miss the good points that he is making because they are forced to see Gore the politician, rather than Gore the concerned citizen.  This is a very big, and nasty mistake.  It is similar to the mistakes that Gore made in his last run for the Presidency.  Instead of telling us what he thinks and believes, he tried to tell all of America what he thought that we wanted to hear.  This didn’t work at all.  We just needed to hear him say what he believes in, and let the chips fall as they may.  This is the same.  We need to hear about global warming, not about Gore.  Once again he has ruined the opportunity by using the forum for multiple messages.