Your Driving Habits and the Environment
Pretty much everyone these days knows how environmentalists feel about SUVs and other large, inefficient vehicles. Many of them are used mostly to transport just one person, despite their ability to hold far more people. But even far smaller vehicles are not used terribly efficiently.
Much of this is due simply to the fact that few people live in a situation where carpooling is an easy enough option. Carpooling is a great idea, but it’s very hard to find a good carpool. You often don’t live near enough a coworker for this to be possible, never mind someone who drives close enough to your own job.
Many cities have terrible public transportation. I live in such an area myself. People don’t like to ride buses and such because it takes such an extraordinarily long time to get a lot of places. That’s not true in all places, but in enough of them.
Rising gas prices have made everyone more aware of how much driving costs. More people have been thinking about how much they drive and what they drive.
Cutting back on driving is difficult, but it can be done. I speak from experience, having spent the past several months having only one car between my husband and myself. It’s tough, but possible for us as I work at home.
One of the big changes you can make to improve your driving habits is to get more efficient about running errands. If the store is close enough, walk or ride a bike. If not, make sure that you take care of your errands efficiently. Combine errands, make lists so that you don’t forget anything and need to run back. Little things like that can make your driving habits more friendly to the environment.
Beyond errands, you can think about ways you can use your car less. If your employer has a telecommuting program, see if you can participate. Even working from home one day a week will make a difference.
Look actively for a carpool. Yes, it can be hard, especially since it makes going out for lunch harder, but it makes quite a bit of sense on both the environmental and the financial level.
If your area has a great public transportation system, why not take advantage of it? A good system doesn’t take forever for you to get to work, and can save you the stress of driving yourself.
Changing your driving habits for the better is one of the little things you can do for the environment. It’s not one of the easiest things, and generally means accepting some inconvenience, but it can also help you save money. The combined benefits make such efforts very much worthwhile.
Stephanie Foster blogs at http://www.greensahm.com/ with a focus on how stay at home moms can help the environment. She offers more tips on going green at her blog at http://www.greensahm.com/category/going-green/
Ethanol And Brazil: The New Global Energy Brand?
When it comes to energy, Brazil is on its way to becoming a “global brand.” Although the United States recently outpaced Brazil in ethanol production, Brazil is by far the leader in sugar-based ethanol. Its exports are growing, and it could become a major energy supplier to the world. But what Brazil is particularly known for is its grand conversion-moving almost 40 percent of its automotive fuel from gasoline to ethanol.
Ethanol in Brazil is used in two ways: either blended, in a mix of 75 percent gasoline and 25 percent ethanol, or as pure ethanol pumped directly into a car’s fuel tank. On any given day, motorists across Brazil can stand in front of a pump and decide, based on price, whether they want to put ethanol or gasoline into their “flex fuel” car engine or whether they want to blend them.
Brazil has now achieved energy self-sufficiency. Ethanol is a part of the explanation, but it would be an error to think that it is the only one. There has been great success from drilling in Brazil’s offshore waters, and domestic oil output has increased by 40 percent since 2000-from 1.2 million barrels per day (mbd) to 1.7 mbd in 2006. This 500,000 barrel per day increase compares to 240,000 barrels per day of ethanol consumption.
How did ethanol achieve its prominent role in Brazil? It has been made possible by a series of factors: strong government support, especially after the 1973 oil shock; continual adoption of new technologies over more than a quarter century; and the cheapest production costs in the world.
The Brazilian government made a strong commitment to ethanol in the mid-1970s, in response to the first oil crisis. At that time, Brazil was importing more than 80 percent of its oil. The first oil shock had a highly detrimental effect on Brazil’s economy, influencing a significant drop in the country’s GDP growth, from almost 14 percent in 1973 to five percent in 1975. A program to stimulate domestic production of ethanol as a transport fuel was embraced as the way to reduce the country’s exposure to the world oil market.
This Brazilian effort began in 1975. It was championed as the Pro-Alcohol Program, since ethanol is known as alcohol in Brazil. The program consisted of both public and heavily subsidized private investment in ethanol production, together with governmental mandates to blend the fuel with gasoline and incentives to stimulate the sales of cars that ran on pure ethanol.
With government incentives, pure ethanol vehicles comprised 95 percent per cent of domestic auto production in 1984. By 1988, Brazil was consuming 1.7 gallons of ethanol for each gallon of gasoline.
In the mid-1980s, however, ethanol got caught in a vise. Oil prices fell sharply and, at the same time, international sugar prices rose. Ethanol was no longer as attractive as it had been for Brazilian producers and motorists.
By the end of the 1980s, a sharp fall in ethanol production, together with a prevalence of pure ethanol vehicles, led to a shortage, enraging motorists and damaging the credibility of Brazil’s ethanol industry. As consequence, ethanol cars fell from 92 percent of total vehicle sales in 1985 to less than 20 percent in 1990. At the end of the 1990s, ethanol production was back to same level that it had been in the mid-1980s. Today, almost no pure alcohol vehicles are being produced, in large part because of an innovation that has recently helped ethanol enjoy a new boom in Brazil. This is the “flex-fuel vehicle.”
The flexible fuel vehicle is a simple technological innovation that has dramatically enhanced the attractiveness of ethanol in Brazil by giving consumers choice of the fuel they can use in their cars.
After 2000, stimulated by rising oil prices and a new initiative by the government to encourage consumption of renewable fuels, the Brazilian automotive industry began to produce vehicles that could run on either ethanol or gasoline in any proportion. The previous experience with the Pro-Alcohol Program had left behind a strongly developed ethanol infrastructure, with more than 90 percent of the country’s filling stations capable of offering the fuel in its pure form.
Thanks to competitive pricing for the vehicles and for ethanol, flex-fuel vehicles have been widely adopted in Brazil. They represented 80 percent of all light cars sales in 2006, a number even more impressive considering that they only started to be marketed by the end of 2003.
Today, many Brazilian motorists make their fuel choice based on the relative price of gasoline and ethanol. And ethanol is able to compete without any subsidies against gasoline. This partly is because the government taxes gasoline at a higher rate-the gasoline tax burden is 45 percent of the final price, while the tax on ethanol is only 28 percent. But the main reason behind ethanol’s competitiveness is that Brazil’s sugar-based ethanol has the lowest production costs in the world-estimated at $1.10 per gallon.
Good weather and high land quality are certainly important factors in keeping down the costs of ethanol in Brazil, but they are not the only ones. Sugarcane has been grown in the country since the Portuguese colonization in the early 16th century, and industrial production of ethanol as a fuel goes back to the 1930s.
The 70-year old ethanol industry has invested heavily in new technologies and processes, and biotechnology is now employed to improve the quality and productivity of the sugarcane species. Integration of ethanol production with sugarcane processing has led to significant gains in efficiency and scale. For example, the cane fiber (called bagasse) is burned to generate electricity, which powers the sugar and ethanol production plant, with surplus power sold to the central grid.
The oil input in Brazilian’s ethanol production is minimal, restricted to the transporting of the sugarcane to the processing plant and moving ethanol from there to filling stations. The combination of these advantages provides Brazilian ethanol with a comfortable competitive position against oil.
The success of Brazil’s domestic industry poses an important question: Can Brazil go global with its ethanol? Brazil is already the largest ethanol exporter in the world, shipping 20 percent of it annual production abroad.
International demand for ethanol is expected to keep growing in the years to come. The main ethanol consumers outside Brazil are the United States and Europe, which are seeking to increase their domestic sources of ethanol supply. But, at least with current technology, their prospects are constrained.
High volume ethanol exports from Brazil to both the U.S. and Europe are also currently impeded by import duties, though some believe that growing demand for bio-fuels could lead to loosening of these barriers. But what happens to those barriers will be highly political, both in terms of domestic politics and trade negotiations.
If trade barriers fall, Brazil’s industry has much room to grow. Even excluding the rain forest and other protected areas, Brazil still has large areas that could be used to grow cane. Only two percent of the country’s total endowment of arable land-and ten percent of currently cultivated land-are now under sugarcane cultivation with half of that dedicated to ethanol production.
Advances in bio-technology have substantially enhanced plant types, improving their ability to thrive in a wider range of soils and climates. All this means that there is potential to expand Brazil’s ethanol production substantially and make it a major global energy supplier.
Furthermore, expansion of ethanol production in Brazil is unlikely to create the kind of food versus fuel conflicts that can be expected in other developing countries with agricultural potential.
How large a role Brazil will play in global markets will depend on many factors-the ability of the Brazilian industry to expand; the nature of fuel mandates and domestic industries of the large industrial countries; and international trade rules. Brazil’s ethanol industry will continue to play a large role in meeting Brazil’s domestic energy needs. It also has the potential to grow beyond the domestic market and to create large scale exports-and definitely make Brazil an energy brand around the world.
Daniel Yergin, chairman of CERA, received the Pulitzer Prize for “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power” and the United States Energy Award for lifelong achievements in energy and the promotion of international understanding. Vist CERA at http://cera.ecnext.com.
Closing The Conservation Gap In Electric Power
Today, as U.S. electric power demand grows and environmental and energy security issues become more urgent, there is a growing concern that the current balance encourages the construction of new power plants rather than investment in the conservation of electric power.
This subject is coming to the fore, in part, because of the capacity challenges that the electric power industry will start facing in the next few years. But at least as important is that conservation is coming to the top of the agenda across the U.S. economy-an emphasis that has not been seen for decades.
That, in turn, forces us to focus on the dynamics of conservation or, as it is also called, energy efficiency. Most industry observers agree that there is indeed a “power conservation investment gap” in the U.S. But the gap does not exist for the reasons most people think.
Misperceptions about the reasons behind the conservation gap lead to a focus on the wrong set of fixes and set unrealistic expectations. To close the gap, we must first address these misperceptions and identify the gap’s real causes.
The first misperception is that power conservation potential has hardly been tapped. The reality is quite different-a great deal of power conservation has already occurred. The U.S. has slowly but steadily reduced its electric intensity-the amount of power used per unit of economic output-over the past two decades.
Overall, the weather-normalized electric intensity of the U.S. economy has declined 18 percent since the mid-1980s. And most of these efficiency gains occurred during a period when the real price of power was steadily declining.
The cumulative effect is quite dramatic-if the U.S. consumed electricity with the same intensity it did in 1987, its power system today would need the daily operation of additional power supply equal in size to the combined power systems of Texas and California.
Misperception Number Two is that conservation and efficiency are free-that the benefits to consumers and producers far outweigh the costs-and that cost is not an issue. But conservation is not just a matter of switching off lamps and turning thermostats down in winter and up in summer. Substantial and sustained power conservation involves real effort and requires real up-front investment and ongoing costs.
Misperception Number Three is that power users underinvest in conservation because they are chronically ill-informed about its benefits. Due to this view, the most common public policy solution for conservation underinvestment today is funding consumer education programs.
Yet the concept that households make poor decisions when it comes to conservation simply does not square with observed data on consumer behavior. Over the past several decades, the statistical evidence is quite compelling-power consumers act quite rationally and in an informed manner by consistently responding to real increases in power prices by consuming less. Last year was a good example.
Consumers responded to some of the biggest price increases they have seen in quite some time by reducing their consumption of electricity. As a result, power demand stayed flat, even though inflation-adjusted economic growth exceeded 3 percent on the year.
Misperception Number Four is that power engineers are just genetically conditioned toward building big and advanced power plants rather than pursuing small and beautiful conservation options. This idea stems from the perception that if cost-effective conservation potential exists, then power producers should naturally invest in conservation rather than production.
Yet when power producers actually do invest in conservation, they find it hard to pay for the investment because the benefits naturally flow to the consumers who end up using less power.
So even if regulators do allow producers to treat these investments the same way they treat production investments-allowing these costs onto the balance
sheet as the basis for approved cost recovery-the effect is that higher costs must be recovered from a smaller base of sales. In order to break even, the producer needs a price increase. And that is something customers and politicians typically resist. And this represents the current best case for producers.
Most states do not provide such cost recovery, and no state in the U.S. has put together a regulatory and incentive package that encourages power producers to seek the proper balance of conservation and production investments.
Although the conventional wisdom concerning power conservation underinvestment may not be accurate and current policy is lacking, there are nevertheless real reasons to expect a conservation gap. Power deregulation has created bigger and more liquid wholesale power markets that express the cost of power at any point in time. One lesson from the emergence of power markets is clear: the cost of electricity varies considerably through time and is often well above the price that most customers face.
This is especially true during peak periods of power demand when the cost of electric production (and conversely the value of conservation) is many times higher than the prices customers are being charged. This is intentional-consumers, regulators and politicians want stable and predictable power prices that do not reflect the cost of power during its most expensive times.
It is not surprising that these stakeholders work together to fetter wholesale prices with price caps and disconnect retail power prices from costs with a variety of mechanisms in order to make them less volatile and more predictable. The net result is that the prices customers see are often lower than the costs of the power they are consuming.
Customers invest in conservation based on the retail prices they face. Yet, it is the more volatile cost of power that determines how much conservation is truly cost effective. When confronted with typical retail prices instead of the costs of power, consumers quite sensibly invest in some but not all of the cost effective conservation. The unintended consequence of this well-intended retail price regime is the continuing underinvestment in power conservation from the consumer side.
From this perspective, the root cause of the power conservation investment gap is not an uneducated consumer but rather an informed consumer rationally responding to the prices they face.
The implication is clear: there is a very real electric power conservation gap, and it is on the consumer side of the power sector. Further, the simple fix of confronting consumers with real-time power prices is not desirable. There are very good reasons not to have grandmothers living on social security paying real power costs to keep their air conditioners going in August. Therefore, if the objective is to have power producers invest in the cost effective conservation that consumers do not invest in, then regulatory policies must create a set of incentives for them to do so.
Although some attempts have been made, so far, no state in the U.S. has created a structure that gives power producers sufficient incentive to close the conservation gap. With the renewed focus on energy efficiency, the time is right to meet the challenge and close the conservation gap in order to balance the investment playing field between new power plants and
conservation.
Doing so will certainly not eliminate the need for new power plants in the future. But it will reduce power plant requirements, lessen price increases, create environmental benefits, increase energy security and create greater incentives for long-term research and development in efficiency.
Daniel Yergin, chairman of CERA, received the Pulitzer Prize for “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power” and the United States Energy Award for lifelong achievements in energy and the promotion of international understanding. Vist CERA at http://cera.ecnext.com.
The Importance Of Regular Air Duct Cleaning
Indoor air pollution is a serious health hazard; in fact, it has been shown to be at least partly responsible for the occurrence of a number of health conditions. Many people have reported their allergies are often made worse by the unclean air circulating in their homes. That is why it is essential to be sure your air ducts are cleaned and properly cared for on a regular basis.
One important part of maintaining a clean air conditioning and heating system is making sure the filter is regularly changed. This process should take place at least once a year, and even more frequently if necessary. If you do not own your own home, you should make sure your landlord takes care of this important detail. Failure to do so can result in the circulation of unclean air through your home, as well as actually diminishing proper air flow.
Regular air duct cleaning has been shown to help prevent some health problems, while easing the stress of others that already exist. While some in the profession will argue that this has not actually been proven, it is strongly believed by others because of the improvement people have experienced after having the ducts cleaned. It is time to consider having your air ducts cleaned if the following occurs.
If mold is visible on or around your air duct, it is time to have it cleaned. This will remove the mold that can be potentially dangerous to you and others living in your home. Because of the nature of certain molds, it may be necessary to have this area treated before the cleaning takes place. It is important to remember that though a substance may appear to be mold, it may take an expert in the field to actually determine if this is true.
If your air ducts are insolated and they become wet or moldy, it is time to have them cleaned. If this is the case, the insulation should be removed and replaced. This is an important detail because it may be more internal and, therefore, more difficult to see.
If you do find there is an occurrence of mold, you should remove the cause. If you fail to do this, the mold will recur. The cleaner your air is overall, the easier it will be to breathe. Cleaner, less polluted air will also result in better health for you and your family.
Heat Seal Equipment Ltd. manufactures Air Duct Cleaning Equipment & Tools, Insulation Blowing Machines and Accessories. We are a supply house for all the industry’s needs and requirements.
http://www.heatsealequipment.com/
Biofuels In The U.S-Just The Facts
Biofuels are hot. But how hot? Here are “just the facts.” But first, what are biofuels? These are fuels derived from plants or animal fat that can replace such familiar oil-based transportation fuels as gasoline or diesel.
Ethanol can be distilled from corn, sugarcane or even straw and other cellulosic plant materials such as wood chips or grasses. Biodiesel is produced from vegetable oil crops such as palm, soybeans or rapeseed, or animal fats and leftover restaurant grease.
High oil prices, technological advances, concerns about energy security and the environment, and efforts to revitalize rural economies have all intersected to drive the biofuels boom. Ethanol has been used as a gasoline additive or stand-alone fuel in the United States and Brazil since the 1970s, but in recent years there has been an explosion of interest, resulting in substantial investment and steeply increased production.
Biodiesel is relatively new in the U.S., but has attracted strong interest and investment as well. There are 113 ethanol plants producing today in the U.S., with a capacity of 5.6 billion gallons per year or 365,000 barrels per day (bd).
Another 84 ethanol plants are either under construction or expanding, which could add another 6.1 billion gallons of annual production capacity (400,000 bd) in the next few years. A barrel of ethanol contains 3.54 million British Thermal Units (BTUs) of energy, while a barrel of gasoline contains 5.25 million BTUs. This means that a gallon of ethanol only provides about 70 percent of the energy that one gets from a gallon of gasoline. A state-of-the-art ethanol plant today can convert a bushel of corn into about 2.8 gallons of fuel ethanol. Two decades ago, this figure was closer to 2 gallons.
n the United States, blenders of ethanol receive a 51 cent-per gallon tax credit for every gallon of ethanol used in gasoline; for biodiesel, the equivalent credit is $1.00 per gallon. In 1980, the U.S. consumed a grand total of 11,000 barrels of ethanol per day. By early 2007, that demand had reached about 400,000 barrels per day, or over four percent of the total gasoline market by volume.
Current federal legislation requires 7.5 billion gallons (490,000 bd) of biofuel use by 2012. The Bush administration recently proposed a target of 35 billion gallons (2.3 million bd) of renewable and alternative fuels by 2017-a goal that would likely require major advances in cellulosic ethanol technology.
In 2006, the ethanol sector consumed nearly 2.2 billion bushels of corn-about 20 percent of the total U.S. harvest of 10.7 billion bushels. Ethanol can be produced from non-food crops, such as switchgrass and straw. But this approach can’t yet compete in the marketplace. There is currently intense interest in making this process-”cellulosic ethanol”-commercially viable.
The US biodiesel industry is much smaller than the ethanol industry. Current annual production is estimated at 250 million gallons (16,000 bd), although it is growing quickly. Europe is currently the world leader in biodiesel production and use. Annual production is currently over 1.5 billion gallons (100,000 bd) with substantial new capacity under construction.
Daniel Yergin, chairman of CERA, received the Pulitzer Prize for “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power” and the United States Energy Award for lifelong achievements in energy and the promotion of international understanding. Vist CERA at http://cera.ecnext.com.
The Future Of Electricity-Center Of Gravity Shifting To Asia
The global electric power landscape is changing fast, and increasingly, the action in it has been shifting to Asia. On average, in each of the last three years, China alone has added as much new generating capacity as all of existing capacity in Texas. The shift to Asia will continue.
CERA’s Dawn of a New Age scenarios project that Asia will account for well over half of the increase in worldwide power generation capacity over the next 25 years. By comparison, North America will claim only a little more than 10 percent.
This move toward Asia has big implications for everyone connected to the power industry-plant developers, fuel suppliers, equipment vendors, engineering and construction companies, service providers and, of course, investors.
The biggest factor in this change is China, which is industrializing on the strength of its vast coal reserves. Over the past three years, China added 200 gigawatts of coal-fired power-generating capacity.
This is equivalent to two-thirds of total U.S. coal-fired capacity, which, by comparison, was installed over the course of half a century. The Chinese government has ambitious plans to build more hydro, nuclear, renewable and gas-fired power plants to diversify its electricity sources.
But coal-indigenous, cheap and abundant-is set to dominate new power capacity in China for years to come.
China’s current path is much like the one taken by the United States several decades ago. Rising Chinese power demand comes from both strong economic growth and increasing electricity intensity-that is, the amount of electricity consumed per unit of economic activity. In the 1990’s, one percent real growth in Chinese gross domestic product (GDP) corresponded to 0.7 percent growth in electricity consumption.
But today, one percent GDP growth corresponds to 1.4 percent growth in electricity usage. China’s recent record of 10 percent annual growth in real GDP thus translates to double digit annual growth in electricity consumption.
Many forces contribute to increasing electricity intensity: infrastructure development to sustain high economic growth; China’s move up the value-added chain into energy-intensive manufacturing; and rising middle-class incomes, which now support larger dwellings, with a full complement of air conditioners and modern appliances.
If we look at in those terms, this pattern starts to look familiar. And it should. The United States experienced something like it half a century ago. In the 1960’s, coal-indigenous and abundant- was the leading option for expansion of U.S. power generation capacity. Real GDP grew 4.2 percent annually during that decade, while electricity consumption grew 7.3 percent, driven by industrial expansion, and by widespread adoption of air conditioning and electric heating.
Electricity consumption continued to grow faster than real GDP during the first half of the 1970’s. But this changed quickly after the first oil shock of the mid-1970’s. High oil prices led to improvements in end-use efficiency, and the recession of 1980-82 shook up the manufacturing sectors and led to the closing down of less competitive factories. These forces pushed growth in electricity demand below the rate of real GDP growth, where it remains today.
But China is still at the stage the U.S. was in the 1960’s and early 1970’s and so is likely to move along its current path of rapidly growing power demand for the coming decade, and perhaps longer.
What does the shift to Asia mean to those in the power business? Sustained economic growth in Asia has strengthened Asian power developers and produced financial institutions capable of handling the expansion of the Asian power system. Homegrown Asian firms are increasingly winning businesses away from their Western competitors.
In addition, heightened concerns for energy security have reinforced the government’s role in the power sector and an emphasis on using power generation equipment and design, engineering and construction services provided by Asian companies or by Western companies that work closely with Asian partners.
For example, China’s objective of self reliance means that all the resources needed for coal-fired power plants-such as plant design, boilers and turbines, and construction-are coming from Chinese companies.
Nuclear power development is proceeding along two tracks: indigenous reactor designs and resources on one, and imports of Western technologies with heavy technology transfer requirements on the other.
Sustained growth of the Chinese power sector, combined with the government objective of self reliance and technology transfer, will likely lead over the coming decade to the growth of strong local companies in equipment manufacturing, design and engineering, construction, services and project development.
These companies will compete not only in the domestic Chinese markets, but also in the regional Asian market. The rise of strong Asian competitors in the power sector will intensify competition for Western firms. Some Western firms have sought business opportunities in Asia through partnerships, but many have found it difficult to get a foot in the door, and as they share technology, they fear that they also risk strengthening their competitors.
Eventually, Western firms will face the prospect of competing with Asian players in Western markets. How will Western power companies respond?
Western utilities focusing on domestic markets will source components and services worldwide. Western firms that provide equipment and services will strive to maintain their competitive advantage by staying on the innovation frontier. Even with their much faster GDP growth, China and India will still have lower per capita income than North America and most of Western Europe for the next two decades.
Higher incomes in the West will support research, development and the use of advanced technologies, giving Western firms opportunities to stay at the technology frontier.
We can think of North American companies that are doing well amid fierce competition from Asia. These companies flourish not because they can pare costs to the bone, surviving on high volumes and thin margins, but because they remain at the frontier of technology and product design.
If Western firms in the electric power business can follow this strategy, they will find it a very competitive approach in a world of intensified competition.
Daniel Yergin, chairman of CERA, received the Pulitzer Prize for “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power” and the United States Energy Award for lifelong achievements in energy and the promotion of international understanding. Vist CERA at http://cera.ecnext.com.
Is Solar Power Finally Going to Take Off?
Solar power has been hyped for decades now as one of the best solutions to our energy problems. But in simple truth it hasn’t progressed the way many have hoped it would. Has that changed yet?
Installing solar power for your home is still incredibly expensive, even with government rebates, and earning your money back takes more years than most can stand to wait. So you can’t really say things have turned around quite yet.
But things are looking promising.
The technology is finally showing signs of improvement. There are companies such as Nanosolar which are changing the way solar panels are made. They’ve developed a printable solar panel technology which will be much faster to create. They hope to drive down the costs of producing solar panels tremendously.
Scientists have also developed solar panels that are more 3-D than the traditional ones. These capture more of the light that reaches them and are much more efficient than the standard flat panels. These are not yet fully developed, but it’s another step in the right direction.
Then there’s Citizenre, a company that is taking the direct sales approach to solar panel installation. While they haven’t launched as of this writing, their plan is to install solar panels onto home free of charge, and then homeowners pay them for the electricity they use, rather than the electric company.
The price customers pay for electricity generated by these systems stays fixed, no matter what other electricity costs may be doing. The idea here is that electricity prices are likely to keep going up, so customers can save a lot of money by fixing their rates at current levels. Add in the benefits of net metering for those who qualify, and it has the potential of being a great deal.
Then again, since the company hasn’t launched yet, no one knows how well it will all work.
So no, solar power hasn’t quite taken off yet, but it looks to be getting very, very close to it. There’s a lot more promise there than there has been for quite some time.
The question then comes, will anything come of it all? That’s much harder to say. The next year or so may well see some big changes in solar power generation, as these companies gear up and as the technology improves. But all that means little until proven. Still, these are very hopeful signs that the promise of cheap solar power is much closer to being fulfilled.
Stephanie Foster runs http://www.seriouslysolar.com/ as a resource for people wanting to learn about solar power. Her site offers a variety of solar accent lighting products available at http://www.seriouslysolar.com/store/decorative-lights.php
Energy’s Challenges
The energy challenge certainly ranks at the top of the world’s agenda. What makes it particularly difficult to deal with is that it is created by two forces.
Though not usually put in these terms, one is globalization-and, in particular-the success of globalization. High growth rates, the emergence of large middle classes in countries like China and India, the continuing integration of the global economy-all this is powered by energy. To keep it going requires energy, lots of it.
But the second is the flip side, the consequence of the use of energy. Modern industrial societies have proved that-with willpower, innovation and capital-they are good at mitigating local and regional pollution. And they are continually getting better at it. But the build-up of carbon in the atmosphere is something else. Over the last year or two, a global consensus has come together that this is truly a global problem and that responding is urgent.
It is these cross-cutting concerns-the need for energy, and the need to manage the consequences of energy use-that are creating the energy challenge that will dominate the decades ahead. And the magnitude is daunting. Every day the global economy requires 86 million barrels of oil per day, and that is only 40% of the total daily world energy consumption.
With a challenge so large and so complex, it should not be surprising that there is no single answer. Nor even just a few. Some of the solutions are clearly on today’s list; some will emerge as surprises. And, no doubt, some on which hopes are pinned today may, in the end, just not pan out. That is why Forbes.com’s “Solutions” is so timely. Like other readers, I am keenly interested in seeing what participants with such different expertise and perspectives will offer and how they will rank the choices.
For starters, I will put three ideas on the table. But, before doing that, let us consider the scale of the enterprise. For it is not just the energy the world consumes today, but how much more it will consume in the future. At Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), we’ve developed new energy scenarios out to the year 2030. The implications are daunting.
In a world of good economic growth, even with greater conservation, world energy demand grows by 75%. This reflects, more than anything else, the tremendous increase in automobile ownership and electricity consumption that will come with rising incomes.
Consumption grows the fastest in Asia, as it comes to represent over half of world GDP. In line with that, more than half of the total growth in oil demand will be in Asia, and two-thirds of the new electric power capacity. There’s nothing theoretical about this prospect. Over the past three years, China has added 200 gigiwatts of coal-fired electric power capacity-equivalent to 20% of the entire installed capacity of the United States.
Assuring that the energy supplies are there to underpin economic growth is, in itself, a big and expensive challenge. The International Energy Agency points to a $20 trillion price tag.
But how to meet these needs and, at the same time, cope with carbon? We will hear many ideas in the course of this roundtable, but let me point to three.
The first is a renewed emphasis on energy efficiency, whether in the established infrastructures of the U.S. and Europe, or in the ones that are now being built in China and India. Energy conservation, efficiency, savings-whatever you want to call it is-is a very large resource in itself. It is, without doubt, the biggest near-term way to reduce CO2. The United States is twice as energy efficient as it was in the 1970s. Why not double that again? China has made energy efficiency one of its top priorities, but implementing it is not proving easy. Expect more to come on this front.
The second is what I’ve taken to calling the “great bubbling.” This is the surge in research and development and innovation that is now taking place all along the energy spectrum-whether in conventional sources or for renewables and alternatives. These research dollars-whether from government, industry, research organizations or the new entrant, venture capital-are adding up. If this level of commitment is maintained, the impact could be considerable, even dramatic. But the timing is not easily predicted. One of the imperatives is to continue to develop not just renewables, but the commercialization of renewables, which ultimately need to demonstrate that they are competitive in the marketplace.
The third is to push for the development of carbon capture and storage technologies. Though there is much hope for them, they are still at the early stages. Pilot efforts are underway. To have a major impact, these technologies will have to prove doable on a very large scale. A good deal of effort will also be required to figure out how to price and regulate such aspects as the sequestration of carbon underground.
The future will evince how much-and how many different things-will have to be done meet this double challenge. Whatever the solutions, markets will be central, for they will bring forth the ingenuity and creativity to get things done and, hopefully, more quickly than would otherwise be the case.
Daniel Yergin, chairman of CERA, received the Pulitzer Prize for “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power” and the United States Energy Award for lifelong achievements in energy and the promotion of international understanding. Vist CERA at http://cera.ecnext.com.
Concepts of Waste Management
Dealing with waste management has become an issue of major importance. Some things, like landfills, are becoming increasingly full. This creates a situation in which we are forced to find new ways to dispose of waste. This said; let’s explore some of the concepts of waste management.
- Some interest groups seem to oppose any new development anywhere. It can seem as though their goal is to avoid all new developments. In the UK, these groups are commonly referred to as BANANA, which means Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. By contrast, NIMBY means Not In My Back Yard. These groups do not oppose development projects as a whole. They only disagree with certain ones that they feel are inappropriate for their particular neighbourhood.
- Great Britain has come up with a way of managing waste called the BPEO, which stands for Best Practical Environmental Option. The BPEO essentially looks at a project and determines the best course of action. They look at the implications to the environment in the short term and the long term. They are dedicated to minimizing environmental impact and maximizing benefits.
- EPR, or Extended Producer Responsibility, is the concept that producers must incorporate the cost of disposing or reusing a product once it has served its purpose. A company who manufactures these things must ultimately take care of the waste it generates. The company can do this alone, or outsource it to a PRO, a Producer Responsibility Organization.
- Linguistic Detoxification is an environmental term used to describe a process in which the level of toxicity is downgraded by assigning it a different term through legislation. The naming of this phrase is credited to Barry Commoner, an environmental activist.
- Some places have taken the Pay As You Throw approach. Consumers are charged a fee based on the amount of municipal solid waste they turn in at the collection site. Normally, recyclable materials are accepted free of charge. PAYT is also known as variable rate pricing or unit pricing.
- The Polluter Pays Principle basically means that the person or entity producing the waste product is fiscally responsible for the damage done to the natural environment. This is also known as Extended Polluter Responsibility. The government seeks to put the responsibility for disposal onto the producer, hopefully providing incentive for them to improve the recycling ability of their products.
- There is a moral and political principle called the precautionary principle. This principle states that if harm to the public might occur, then if there is no scientific consensus that states that harm will not occur, the responsibility for the result falls on the advocates. In regards to the environment, this principle is most often applied to the release of toxins.
- Product stewardship is a concept that says that everyone involved in the product is responsible for its disposal after its useful life. The manufacturer must plan for and even pay for the disposal of the product. The consumer must recycle or properly dispose of the product. Everyone takes a part to minimize environmental impact.
- Waste Hierarchy is talking about the “three Rs”, and classifies waste management approaches based on their desirability. These are reduce, reuse, and recycle. Basically the goal is to get the most use out of a product and to generate the least amount of waste.
- The Zero Waste concept essentially promotes the idea that the current recycling procedures be enhanced to create a circular pattern in which the most use is obtained from a product. The goal is to create zero waste by reusing a product as many times as possible.
http://www.envirochemcontrol.co.uk/ specialise in waste management services, including recycling, metals recovery, waste haulage and waste consultancy.
Commentary: Yergin Sees Clear Road Ahead For More Fuel-Efficient Cars
The road is getting much clearer.
This week, legislation will emerge from committee, and almost certainly soon head to the floor of the U.S. Senate. It might not get that much notice in itself, but it ought to, because it tells you how much has changed on energy issues. And, given its probable passage (or that of something along its lines), the new legislation will have a big impact on the automobile industry, on gasoline consumption, and on what people drive.
The bill is the “Ten-in-Ten Fuel Economy Act,” and it is coming out of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Technology under the joint sponsorship of Democratic Chairman Daniel Inouye and Republican Vice Chairman Ted Stevens. Whether it is the provisions in this bill, or something like it, fuel efficiency standards for American vehicles are going to go up.
It’s no longer left versus right, Democrats versus Republicans, Congress versus the Administration. In this year’s State of the Union address, President Bush cited the need to “reform and modernize fuel efficiency standards,” and the Administration is working on its own proposals. Putting it simply, on this formerly contentious issue, bipartisanship prevails.
We even know pretty much by how much efficiency will go up. “The Great Mentioner” (to borrow a conceit that the columnist Russell Baker invented years ago) has decided on the “Four-Percent Solution.” That is, fuel efficiency is meant to go up by about 4% a year (though, some of the time, by 3.5%). That translates into about a 10-mile-per-gallon improvement over the next ten years. That’s your “Ten in Ten.”
There are some key characteristics of this “Ten in Ten.” First, it will apply not only to cars, but also to SUVs, vans, pickups, and medium and heavy trucks, all at the same rate. Secondly, it will be based on “attributes.” That is, it will allocated across class of vehicles (measured by weight and size and functionality). This will help eliminate the rigidities of the current Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency Standards, which measure changes across a company’s entire output - a problem when the public tilted to larger, less fuel-efficient vehicles, forcing companies to produce smaller, less-profitable or barely-profitable cars to meet the targets.
There is still one hot issue - the appropriately named “off-ramps.” Tuesday’s legislation would give the National Highway Transport Safety Administration the authority to reduce or waive the 4% target in a given year if it was proving not cost-effective.
Off-ramps are controversial, so expect much debate on that question before this is all over, but don’t expect the debate to go off road.
Where did this consensus come from? The answer is clear. It’s the coalescing of concerns about energy security, prices at the pump, and climate change. And it is a very powerful consensus.
In his opening statement at last week’s hearing on the legislation, Senator Stevens captured the new tone: “The issue of fuel economy of our cars and light trucks is significant as our country faces an increasing energy crisis.” He then went on to talk about the effects of climate change on his state, Alaska.
Retired Admiral Dennis Blair, formerly commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, testified at the same hearing. He was representing the Energy Security Leadership Council, headed by Former Marine Commandant P.X. Kelley and FedEx CEO Fred Smith, which has been one of the key players in helping to shape this consensus. Over the last few months, the Council had worked with Democrat Byron Dorgan and Republican Larry Craig to draft legislation that embodies many of these principles.
“Improved security,” said Admiral Blair, “will require greater conservation as well as increased production of petroleum and alternatives here at home. Put another way, improved vehicle fuel economy will increase our military flexibility and our overall national security, not just our energy security.”
The ESLC estimates that this improvement will end up saving 4.5 million barrels a day by 2030.
The fuel-efficiency standards were originally established in 1975, two years after the 1973 oil embargo, with the aim of doubling fuel efficiency levels within a decade. It was a furious battle to get them enacted.
“We do not want any handouts, we do not way any taxes, and we do not want any regulations,” said the CEO of one of the Big Three in the midst of the battle. “We do not like that sort of thing.”
But a few years later, Henry Ford II declared, “It is fair to say” that the fuel efficiency standards “moved us faster toward energy conservation goals than competitive, free-market forces would have done.”
They certainly did work, saving about two million barrels per day, compared to what would otherwise have been consumed.
At the same time, two million barrels per day of new supply was added with the construction of the Alaska oil pipeline. That’s the same point that the ESLC and others argues today, about the importance of both greater efficiency and additional supply.
Our study Gasoline and the American People shows that fuel-efficiency gains have flattened out in recent years as Americans’ love affair with the automobile turned into a passion for SUVs. Low gasoline prices further stimulated the ardor. The larger, less-efficient vehicles also turned out to be the part of the market where Detroit had competitive advantage. Any significant improvement in fuel efficiency standards was stalemated by, among other things, fear for the impact on beleagured Detroit, struggling as it is with heavy legacy and health costs compared with its competitors.
But circumstances have been changing over the last couple of years. In 2002, for instance, the National Academy of Science argued that fuel efficiency could be improved by a quarter over a decade with “existing and emerging technologies.” Right now, the momentum for higher standards looks unstoppable. Tying the changes to class of vehicles, rather than across an automaker’s entire output, is meant to help troubled Detroit steer it way through the challenges ahead.
Daniel Yergin, chairman of CERA, received the Pulitzer Prize for “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power” and the United States Energy Award for lifelong achievements in energy and the promotion of international understanding. Vist CERA at http://cera.ecnext.com.