Alternate Energy Blog

Somewhat to my surprise my most highly read article of the past week was an off-the-cuff pointer to some tinfoil about oil in Haiti. F William Engdahl (one time peak oil theorist and now vociferous anti-peak oil and anti-global warming theorist) has taken to the story like a duck to water, floating his now familiar theory about abiotic oil and suppression of oil production – The Fateful Geological Prize Called Haiti. I guess time will tell if Haiti does have any oil or if this is all just some colourful theorising from the fringes.

A President becomes UN Special Envoy to earthquake-stricken Haiti.

A born-again neo-conservative US business wheeler-dealer preacher claims Haitians are condemned for making a literal ‘pact with the Devil.’

Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Bolivian, French and Swiss rescue organizations accuse the US military of refusing landing rights to planes bearing necessary medicines and urgently needed potable water to the millions of Haitians stricken, injured and homeless.

Behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country, a drama is in full play for control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the world’s richest zones for hydrocarbons-oil and gas outside the Middle East, possibly orders of magnitude greater than that of nearby Venezuela.

Haiti, and the larger island of Hispaniola of which it is a part, has the geological fate that it straddles one of the world’s most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of three huge structures relentlessly rub against one another—the intersection of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Below the ocean and the waters of the Caribbean, these plates consist of an oceanic crust some 3 to 6 miles thick, floating atop an adjacent mantle. Haiti also lies at the edge of the region known as the Bermuda Triangle, a vast area in the Caribbean subject to bizarre and unexplained disturbances.

This vast mass of underwater plates are in constant motion, rubbing against each other along lines analogous to cracks in a broken porcelain vase that has been reglued. The earth’s tectonic plates typically move at a rate 50 to 100 mm annually in relation to one another, and are the origin of earthquakes and of volcanoes. The regions of convergence of such plates are also areas where vast volumes of oil and gas can be pushed upwards from the Earth’s mantle. The geophysics surrounding the convergence of the three plates that run more or less directly beneath Port-au-Prince make the region prone to earthquakes such as the one that struck Haiti with devastating ferocity on January 12.

WASHINGTON, DC , January 29, 2010 – President Barack Obama today announced that the federal government will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent by 2020.

MSU: Fiber harder to convert to fuel, worth effort EAST LANSING, Mich. – Michigan State university researchers say efficient biofuels made from plant fiber could be an important part of the fight against the greenhouse gases now causing our world to heat up.

UPI has a report on yet another Australian LNG project, this one in the Timor sea – GDF Suez, Santos reach Australian LNG deal.

French energy giant GDF Suez signed an agreement with its Australian partners at Santos to develop three offshore gas fields in Australia, the company said.

GDF Suez announced a $200 million deal with Santos that concludes plans launched in August to develop its Bonaparte liquefied natural gas project. The integrated project envisions the construction of a floating liquefaction plant with a capacity to produce more than 2 million tons of LNG per year.

The project relies on gas resources from the Petrel, Tern and Frigate gas fields in the Bonaparte gas basin in the Timor Sea, which GDF Suez described as one of the richest gas regions in Australia.

Kevin Drum has an article on profitable (for the buyer) forms of energy efficiency investment – Climate Change’s Low-Hanging Fruit.

If you don’t live in California, you might not have heard of Arthur Rosenfeld. But for the past four decades, he’s been the main inspiration behind a host of energy efficiency and conservation regulations that have made California the greenest state in the nation. He’s retiring from the California Energy Commission this week, and today the LA Times remembers his early battles :

New homes and buildings were required to be better insulated and fitted with energy-wise lighting, heating and cooling systems. Appliances had to be designed to use less power. Utilities were forced to motivate their customers to use less electricity.

….Not surprisingly, those rules were attacked by business groups as bureaucratic job killers. Rosenfeld, who received his doctorate from the University of Chicago, was called unqualified by critics at Pacific Gas & Electric Co., one of California’s largest utilities.

Yet these mandates have yielded about $30 billion annually in energy savings for California consumers. They’ve eliminated air pollution that’s the equivalent of taking 100 million cars off the roads. They have been copied by states and countries worldwide. California’s gains are so closely linked to Rosenfeld that they’ve been dubbed the Rosenfeld Effect in energy efficiency circles, where the 83-year-old has taken on rock star status.

Rosenfeld’s ideas, far from being job killers, have been a boon for California. We have plenty of problems here in the Golden State right now, but better energy efficiency isn’t one of them. In the end, Rosenfeld was right and his critics in the corporate world were wrong.

This reminds me of a current kerfuffle over energy efficiency on a national scale. McKinsey, the consultancy firm, has pressed the cause of energy efficiency for some time, and in 2007 they released a report that contained this now-famous chart (this is the 2009 version):

The point of the chart is simple: Some energy efficiency measures have a net cost and require fairly careful analysis to decide if they’re worthwhile. Those things are shown on the right side of the chart. But there are lots of efficiency measures that not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions but produce net cost savings at the same time. These are the low-hanging fruit of climate change, otherwise known as “no-brainers.” There are tremendous savings out there for the taking.

But there’s still opposition to this idea. A couple of weeks ago Ted Gayer of the Brookings Institution wrote that McKinsey’s conclusion “violates the basic principles of economics. If firms (or consumers) could reduce emissions at negative cost, then they would do so. To say otherwise is to say that they are willingly or ignorantly passing up profits.” But firms and consumers do pass up opportunities to save money. Maybe it’s through ignorance, maybe through laziness, maybe because of financing limitations. But there’s plainly friction in the real world that doesn’t always show up in simple Econ 101 models. A few days ago Brad Plumer linked to a Wall Street Journal report about an energy efficiency consultant, EnerNOC, that audited Morgan Stanley’s New York headquarters and immediately saved them a bundle of money…

China vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last year to become the world’s largest maker of wind turbines , and is poised to expand even further this year.

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NT News has an article on interest in tidal power in the Northern Territory – Tidal power project could run all homes.

A COMPANY wants to build a multimillion-dollar tidal power project in the Top End. Territory-based Tenax says it could potentially generate enough electricity to supply 194,000 homes – more than exist in the NT. It has applied for an environmental assessment of the scheme at Clarence Strait at Glyde Point, 50km northeast of Darwin.

More than 450 generators would be installed across 1690ha of the seabed and connected to the NT’s electricity grid by 2km-long underground cables. Each generator would sit on a 14m x 21m x 3m-high concrete and steel base.

Clarence Strait was selected for two reasons:

* IT HAS the greatest tidal velocity near Darwin, with tidal movements of up to 5m; and
* IT HAS the minimum 20m depth needed for tidal power.

The Economist has an overly-negative look at the issues involved in recharging electric cars in the US – How will we recharge all the electric cars?.

IN THE ten years since hybrid electric vehicles first hit the highways and byways of America, they have come to represent 2.5% of new car sales. Yet, in places like Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington, DC, every other car seems to be a Toyota Prius. That is because hybrids like the Prius have sold overwhelmingly where well-heeled early adopters reside.

Expect the new generation of “Post-Prius” electrics—plug-in hybrids like the Chevrolet Volt from General Motors and those relying only on a battery such as the Nissan Leaf—to end up nosing around the same upscale neighbourhoods. With more than a dozen plug-in and pure-electric models arriving in showrooms over the next year or so, sales are expected to outstrip even those enjoyed by the Prius and other hybrids in their early days. A couple of million of the new electric vehicles could be bought by early adopters during the first few years.

That would be a problem. Unlike the Prius and its ilk—which use their petrol engines, along with energy recovered from braking, to recharge their batteries while motoring—plug-in hybrids and pure electrics have to be recharged direct from the grid. The popular assumption is that they will be plugged into a wall socket in the garage late at night, taking advantage of cheap off-peak power. Unfortunately, things are not that simple.

For a start, the new generation of electric vehicles are not glorified golf-carts, but cleaner and more frugal alternatives to today’s petrol-powered family cars. When fully charged, the Volt (to be called the Ampera in Europe) can travel 40 miles (64km) on electric power, enough for three out of four commuters in America to get to work and back without needing to burn a single drop of fuel. Beyond that range, a 1.4-litre engine kicks in to generate electricity and simultaneously propel the car and recharge its batteries.

The medium-sized hatchback Leaf can carry five adults 100 miles on a single charge. To go farther, Nissan has put its faith in a network of rapid-charging stations it is developing with partners. The Leaf is expected to cost $25,000-30,000, about the same as a comparable diesel-powered car. But the battery pack will have to be leased separately (for around $150 a month).

One thing the new plug-ins and pure electrics have in common is a beefy lithium-ion battery pack that needs a lot of heavy charging. At the very least, that involves installing 220-volt wiring in the home. Trying to recharge a modern electric car with a standard American 110-volt supply takes too long to be practical (up to 18 hours in the case of the Leaf).

Of course, if not fully charged at night it may have to be recharged during the day—when electricity rates can be up to five times more expensive. Average peak rates in America are 33 cents a kilowatt-hour compared with seven cents off-peak. Charging at the peak rate is equivalent to buying petrol at $3.63 a gallon (80 cents a litre), instead of 77 cents a gallon off-peak, reckons Southern California Edison, a utility based in the Los Angeles area. In America, peak-rate charging totally destroys any economic advantage an electric car may have. …

Much, of course, will depend on how quickly the new plug-ins and pure electrics become part of mainstream motoring. Generally speaking, it takes 15-20 years for a new technology to capture 10% of an established market, and a further 10-15 years for it to own 90%. That was the case when steam ships replaced clippers in the mid-19th century, and when petrol-engined taxis took over from horse-drawn cabs in the early 20th century. The same sort of lag occurred with the introduction in the 1970s of emission controls on cars. It takes years for the benefits of volume production to work their way through to the market, and for the supply chain to catch up.

If plug-in electrics follow a similar demand curve to other disruptive technologies, there could be 25m of them humming quietly around by 2025, and ten times that number by 2040. Hopefully, by then, the utilities will have learned to cope with recharging them.

The New York Times has an article on the forthcoming release of the plugin Toyota Prius – The Dawn of Plug-In Priuses and Smart Meters.

Toyota announced on Monday plans to begin selling “several tens of thousands” of plug-in versions of its popular Prius hybrid in 2012 2011, as Hiroko Tabuchi reports.

In another article in The New York Times today, Matthew L. Wald describes how the rollout of so-called smart meters – which are promoted by electric utilities as a way to save ratepayers money over the long term because they allow for variable electricity rates – is meeting resistance from skeptical consumers, who do not appreciate the meters’ up-front price tag.

In many ways, these articles are about pieces of the same thing — the “smart grid” envisioned for the future.

These two new technologies, plug-in cars and smart meters, are both critical components of the smart grid. In the future, large numbers of automobiles are expected to run on electricity and recharge from a home outlet during the night. (That is true not just of the plug-in Prius, but also of other electric vehicles in the pipeline, like the Chevrolet Volt.)

Smart meters are expected to help encourage consumers to charge their cars at night, because they allow utilities to offer lower rates for electricity at off-peak times. Far less electricity is used at night, when most people are sleeping, than during the day, so power plants have spare capacity to charge automobiles. However, under the current system, there is little incentive to charge automobiles at night because most utilities charge consumers a single rate that stays the same, daytime or nighttime.

The federal government has formally notified the United Nations that Canada will cut its carbon emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels over the next 10 years as part of the Copenhagen Accord on climate change, Environment Minister Jim Prentice announced Saturday.

The U.S. Department of Labor grant will be funneled to ISU’s Energy Systems Technology and Education Center.

ClipperCreek, Inc’s TS and CS product lines have been CE Certified and are ready for introduction into the European Union in 2010. The ClipperCreek EVSE (electric vehicle supply equipment) is also UL-Listed.

• The TS line represents EVSEs specifically designed for use with the Tesla Roadster. The TS line is UL-listed to charge from 30 Amps to 100 Amps, accommodating power available at different charging locations.

• The CS Line is for the home, office, fleet or public infrastructure. The CS line is also UL-listed to charge from 30 Amps to 100 Amps.

The company has begun shipping its TS-70 product to Europe with Tesla for use with the Tesla Roadster and plans to introduce its CS model for public infrastructure in the coming months.

ClipperCreek produced more than 2,500 chargers in 2009 and is the exclusive provider of EVSE chargers for BMW’s Mini-E and for Tesla Motors’ Level 2 EVSE charging stations. ClipperCreek also provides chargers to power Mercedes, GM and Nissan vehicles.