When we see records being broken and unprecedented events such as this, the onus is on those who deny any connection to climate change to prove their case. Global warming has fundamentally altered the background conditions that give rise to all weather. In the strictest sense, all weather is now connected to climate change. Kevin Trenberth
HIT THE PAGE DOWN KEY TO SEE THE POSTS
Now at 8,800+ articles. HIT THE PAGE DOWN KEY TO SEE THE POSTS
Wind turbines and transmission lines in Nauen near Berlin, Germany.
CREDIT: AP PHOTO/FERDINAND OSTROP
On Sunday, Germany’s impressive streak of renewable energy milestones continued, with renewable energy generation surging to a record portion — nearly 75% — of the country’s overall electricity demand by midday. With wind and solar in particular filling such a huge portion of the country’s power demand, electricity prices actually dipped into the negative for much of the afternoon, according to Renewables International.
In the first quarter of 2014, renewable energy sources met a record 27% of the country’s electricity demand, thanks to additional installations and favorable weather. “Renewable generators produced 40.2 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, up from 35.7 billion kilowatt-hours in the same period last year,” Bloombergreported. Much of the country’s renewable energy growth has occurred in the past decade and, as a point of comparison, Germany’s 27% is double the approximately 13% of U.S. electricity supply powered by renewables as of November 2013.
Observers say the records will keep coming as Germany continues its Energiewende, or energy transformation, which aims to power the country almost entirely on renewable sources by 2050.
“Once again, it was demonstrated that a modern electricity system such as the German one can already accept large penetration rates of variable but predictable renewable energy sources such as wind and solar PV power,” said Bernard Chabot, a renewable energy consultant based in France, via email. “In fact there are no technical and economic obstacles to go first to 20 percent of annual electricity demand penetration rate from a combination of those two technologies, then 50% and beyond by combining them with other renewables and energy efficiency measures and some progressive storage solutions at a modest level.”
CREDIT: BERNARD CHABOT
To reach the lofty goal of 80% renewables by 2050, Germany had to move quickly. Despite being known for gray skies, the country has installed an astonishing amount of solar photovoltaic (PV) power — setting multiple solar power generation records along the way. At the end of 2012, Germany had installed considerably more solar power capacity per capita than any other country. The rapid growth has slowed, however, with 3.3 GW of PV installed in 2013, compared to 7.6 in 2012. And as countries like the U.S., Japan and China catch up, installations have continued to drop in 2014.
Regardless, a recent analysis by the consulting firm Eclareon found that solar power has reached grid parity in Germany, meaning once all of the costs are accounted for, the price of commercial solar power is now equal to retail electricity rates.
And wind power reached record output levels last year — producing a massive 25.2 GW and accounting for 39% of the electricity supply on a single day in December.
The unprecedented growth of solar PV in particular has been fueled in large part by policies that incentivize clean energy. Germany’s simple feed-in tariff (FIT) policy, which pays renewable energy producers a set amount for the electricity they produce under long-term contracts, has driven the solar power boom. But as installations continued to outpace government targets, Germany announced last year that it would begin scaling back its feed-in tariff.
The FIT is financed by a surcharge paid by utility customers, but a major part of the problem stems from the fact that industry is largely exempt from the renewables surcharge — meaning the burden falls on households. Rather than adjust the industry exemption, the government instead proposed a “PV self-consumption charge” on new photovoltaic systems, something Germany’s Solar Industry Association recently announced it plans to challenge in court.
The equity of the renewables surcharge isn’t the only criticism of Germany’s power transformation. Along with cutting out fossil fuel-generated energy to a large extent, the transition to renewables includes completely phasing out nuclear power. These goals are only achievable in combination with greatly reduced energy demand. Instead, coal imports are increasing in order to meet the country’s baseload power demands. And retail electricity rates are high and rising, putting pressure on lower income individuals in particular.
But many of the criticisms are largely overblown, according to Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute. The modest uptick in coal-fired generation was substituting for pricier natural gas, not representative of a return to coal as it’s often mischaracterized. In fact, last December, as renewable energy production continued to grow and energy demand shrank, Germany’s largest utility chose not to renew two long-term contracts for coal-fired power.
And while much is made of rising industrial electricity prices, Lovins points out that in fact, “giant German firms enjoy Germany’s low and falling wholesale electricity prices, getting the benefit of renewables’ near-zero operating cost but exempted from paying for them.”
And as for the impact on the consumer, “the FIT surcharge raised households’ retail price of electricity 7% but renewables lowered big industries’ wholesale price 18%. As long-term contracts expire, the past few years’ sharply lower wholesale prices could finally reach retail customers and start sending households’ total electricity prices back down.”
What’s more, “in Germany you have the option of earning back your payments, and far more, by investing as little as $600 in renewable energy yourself,” Lovins writes. “Citizens, cooperatives, and communities own more than half of German renewable capacity, vs. 2% in the U.S.”
Challenges aside, Energiewende — rooted in the acknowledgement that a fossil fuel-based energy system is not sustainable — is remarkable for its scope and its widespread support, particularly in a heavily industrialized country like Germany. “Don’t forget what Germany is doing right now. It’s changing its power supply,” Paul Hockenos, a Berlin-based energy expert and journalist, told Voice of America earlier this year. “The last time when an energy supply was changed was the industrial revolution; this is something that has never been done before.”
One of the dirtiest coal-fired power plants in the U.S. will soon shut down, thanks to a well-known billionaire and previously passed legislation.
As part of its acquisition of Nevada’s largest utility, NV Energy, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway also inherited Reid Gardner, a 557-megawatt (MW), coal-fired energy plant near Las Vegas. The massive structure, which has a history of recognition among the country’s dirtiest carbon polluters, won’t be a lasting legacy of NV’s profile.
NV plans on shutting down three of Reid Gardner’s units that generate about 300 MW by the end of this year, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The remaining 257 MW would be closed by the end of 2017. In all, the company wants to end all of its coal operations by 2019.
Coal-fired plants will soon be a thing of the past for NV Energy. Photo credit: OccupyLV.org
As The Atlantic points out, the utility’s decision is tied to state legislation passed last year requiring the company to eliminate 800 MW of coal energy in favor of renewables. That passage was influenced by years of fighting for cleaner air by the Moapa Band of Paiutes, a Native American community that lives near Reid Gardner.
The state utilities commission has 180 days to approve the plan, which would also include a new solar project totaling 200 MW of clean energy on the Moapa Band of Paiutes reservation. The land is about 70,000 acres and has enough to space to also support the 1.5 gigawatts of renewable energy the Moapa Band of Paiute wants to construct through a joint venture announced last year with Terrible Herbst Inc. and Stronghold Engineering Inc.
“This is going to provide a strong economic base for the tribe,” Sandy King, director of renewable-energy project development at Stronghold, told Renewable Energy World.
by Evan Halper, The Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2014
— The political attack ad that ran recently in Arizona had some familiar hallmarks of the genre, including a greedy villain who hogged sweets for himself and made children cry.
But the bad guy, in this case, wasn't a fat-cat lobbyist or someone's political opponent.
He was a solar-energy consumer.
Solar, once almost universally regarded as a virtuous, if perhaps over-hyped, energy alternative, has now grown big enough to have enemies.
The Koch brothers, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and some of the nation's largest power companies have backed efforts in recent months to roll back state policies that favor green energy. The conservative luminaries have pushed campaigns in Kansas, North Carolina and Arizona, with the battle rapidly spreading to other states.
Alarmed environmentalists and their allies in the solar industry have fought back, battling the other side to a draw so far. Both sides say the fight is growing more intense as new states, including Ohio, South Carolina and Washington, enter the fray.
At the nub of the dispute are two policies found in dozens of states. One requires utilities to get a certain share of power from renewable sources. The other, known as net metering, guarantees homeowners or businesses with solar panels on their roofs the right to sell any excess electricity back into the power grid at attractive rates.
Net metering forms the linchpin of the solar-energy business model. Without it, firms say, solar power would be prohibitively expensive.
The power industry argues that net metering provides an unfair advantage to solar consumers, who don't pay to maintain the power grid although they draw money from it and rely on it for backup on cloudy days. The more people produce their own electricity through solar, the fewer are left being billed for the transmission lines, substations and computer systems that make up the grid, industry officials say.
"If you are using the grid and benefiting from the grid, you should pay for it," said David Owens, executive vice president of the Edison Electric Institute, the advocacy arm for the industry. "If you don't, other customers have to absorb those costs."
The institute has warned power companies that profits could erode catastrophically if current policies and market trends continue. If electricity companies delay in taking political action, the group warned in a report, "it may be too late to repair the utility business model."
The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a membership group for conservative state lawmakers, recently drafted model legislation that targeted net metering. The group also helped launch efforts by conservative lawmakers in more than half a dozen states to repeal green energy mandates.
"State governments are starting to wake up," Christine Harbin Hanson, a spokeswoman for Americans for Prosperity, the advocacy group backed by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, said in an email. The organization has led the effort to overturn the mandate in Kansas, which requires that 20% of the state's electricity come from renewable sources.
"These green energy mandates are bad policy," said Hanson, adding that the group was hopeful Kansas would be the first of many dominoes to fall.
The group's campaign in that state compared the green energy mandate to Obamacare, featuring ominous images of Kathleen Sebelius, the outgoing secretary of Health and Human Services, who was Kansas' governor when the state adopted the requirement.
The Kansas Senate voted late last month to repeal the mandate, but solar industry allies in the state House blocked the move.
Environmentalists were unnerved. "The want to roll it back here so they can start picking off other states," said Dorothy Barnett, director of the Climate and Energy Project, a Kansas advocacy group.
The arguments over who benefits from net metering, meanwhile, are hotly disputed. Some studies, including one published recently by regulators in Vermont, conclude that solar customers bring enough benefits to a regional power supply to fully defray the cost of the incentive.
Utilities deny that and are spending large sums to greatly scale back the policy.
In Arizona, a major utility and a tangle of secret donors and operatives with ties to ALEC and the Kochs invested millions to persuade state regulators to impose a monthly fee of $50 to $100 on net-metering customers.
Two pro-business groups, at least one of which had previously reported receiving millions of dollars from the Koch brothers, formed the campaign's public face. Their activities were coordinated by GOP consultant Sean Noble and former Arizona House Speaker Kirk Adams, two early architects of the Koch network of nonprofits.
In October, California ethics officials levied a $1-million fine after accusing groups the two men ran during the 2012 election of violating state campaign finance laws in an effort to hide the identities of donors.
The Arizona Public Service Co., the state's utility, also had Noble on its payroll. As a key vote at the Arizona Corporation Commission approached late last year, one of the commissioners expressed frustration that anonymous donors had bankrolled the heated campaign. He demanded APS reveal its involvement. The utility reported it had spent $3.7 million.
"Politically-oriented nonprofits are a fact of life today and provide a vehicle for individuals and organizations with a common point of view to express themselves," company officials said in a statement in response to questions about their campaign.
The solar companies, seeking to sway the corporation commission, an elected panel made up entirely of Republicans, formed an organization aimed at building support among conservatives. The group, Tell Utilities Solar Won't Be Killed, is led by former California congressman Barry Goldwater Jr., a Republican Party stalwart.
"These solar companies are becoming popular, and utilities don't like competition," Goldwater said. "I believe people ought to have a choice."
The commission ultimately voted to impose a monthly fee on solar consumers — of $5.
The solar firms declared victory. But utility industry officials and activists at ALEC and Americans for Prosperity say the battles are just getting underway. They note the Kansas legislation will soon be up for reconsideration, and fights elsewhere have barely begun.
In North Carolina, executives at Duke Energy, the country's largest electric utility, have made clear the state's net metering law is in their sights. The company's lobbying effort is just beginning. But already, Goldwater's group has begun working in the state, launching a social media and video campaign accusing Duke of deceit.
"The intention of these proposals is to eliminate the rooftop solar industry," said Bryan Miller, president of the Alliance for Solar Choice, an industry group.
"They have picked some of the most conservative states in the country," he added. "But rooftop solar customers are voters, and policymakers ultimately have to listen to the public."
We’ve seen and published many dramatic graphs about the fall in solar, such as this one tracing the fall over the past 30 years and this from Citigroup, but the following graph from investment bank Sanford Bernstein is quite stunning – not just for its simplicity but because it draws attention to the potential impact of solar to the $5 trillion global energy market.
As you can see, the cost of solar PV has come from – quite literally – off the charts less than a decade ago to a point where Bernstein says solar PV is now cheaper than oil and Asian LNG (liquefied natural gas). It does its calculations on an MMBTU basis. MMBTU is the standard unit of measure for liquid fuels, often referred to as one million British thermal units.
“For these (developing Asian economies) solar is just cheap, clean, convenient, reliable energy. And since it is a technology, it will get even cheaper over time,” Bernstein writes in a newly released report.
“Fossil fuel extraction costs will keep rising. There is a massive global market for cheap energy and that market is oblivious to policy changes” in China, Japan, the EU or the US, it writes.
This has potentially massive impacts for the oil, gas and LNG markets, and therefor the massive investments in the LNG plants in Queensland, Australia, where tens of billions of dollars have been invested by Australian and international energy majors on the assumption that the demand, and the price, of LNG will rise ever upwards.
As Bernstein notes in its report, the share of solar PV in the global energy market is currently so small (see graph to the right) that “the idea that oil and gas is the “loser” in this formulation is laughable … in 2014.”
But that’s not the case a decade hence. Solar is already eating away at the margins of oil and gas demand. Bernstein says the adoption of solar in off-grid areas in developing markets means less kerosene and diesel demand. The adoption of solar in the Middle East means less oil demand. The adoption of solar in China and developed Asia means less LNG demand. And distributed solar in the US, Europe and Australia means less natural gas demand.
And then Bernstein drops this bombshell – while solar has a fractional share of the market now, within one decade, solar PV (plus battery storage) may have such a share of the market that it becomes a trigger for energy price deflation, with huge consequences for the massive fossil fuel industry that relies on continued growth.
“The behavior from here seems clear: the solar industry will expand. Retaliatory steps from distribution utilities will increase the market for cost-effective battery storage. This becomes – initially – a secondary market for battery technologies being developed for the auto sector. A failed battery technology in the auto sector (too hot, too heavy, too rigid a form factor) might well be perfect for the home energy storage market…. with an addressable end market of 2 billion backyards.
“And for some years, that will be the extent of the effect. We have previously calculated how large the solar sector would need to be in order to become a material share of incremental energy supply each year and therefore begin to displace high-cost oil and gas supply and start to depress prices.
“We estimate that the solar industry would need to be an order of magnitude larger than it is today to have this kind of impact. At the point where solar is displacing a material share of incremental oil and gas supply, global energy deflation would become inevitable: technology (with a falling cost structure) would be driving prices in the energy space. But even on an aggressive view, this could take the better part of a decade.”
But, the Bernstein analysts say, the risks are that they are being too conservative. The big oil and gas producers, and the investors that control the flow of capital, may not wait until energy prices do actually deflate, they will likely change their behaviour well before than in anticipation that it will happen.
“If the downward sloping forward curve is ever accepted as permanent, rational behavior from energy producers will guarantee it is so. Sitting on oil and gas reserves for the benefit of generations yet to come ceases to be a rational strategy if that reserve represents a depreciating rather than an appreciating asset.”
This, Bernstein says, is the hidden flaw with the idea that solar is “too small to matter.” Ultimately, it says, what may kill the energy market for equity investors is not the fact that renewable technology and battery storage will turn into behemoths, but the realisation of that future as inevitable.
The economic foundations supporting fossil fuels investments are collapsing quickly, as the business case for renewables such as solar and wind finds a new center of balance.
by Chris Neldon, "The Take," smartplanet.com, March 3, 2014 I have waited a long time—decades, really—for a tipping point in the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables beyond which there can be no turning back. Fresh evidence pertaining to many themes I have explored in this column over the past three years suggests that tipping point is finally here.
Oil and gas
Underlying the abundance hype over tight oil, tar sands and other "unconventional" sources of liquid fuel has been a dirty little secret: They're expensive.
The soaring cost of producing oil has far outpaced the rise in oil prices as the world has relied on these marginal sources to keep production growing since conventional oil production peaked in 2005. Those who ignored the hype and paid attention to the data have known this for years. I have detailed this evidence repeatedly (for example, in “The cost of new oil supply,” “Oil majors are whistling past the graveyard,” and “Trouble in fracking paradise”), but now the facts are earning mainstream recognition.
The Wall Street Journal recently pointed out that oil and gas production by Chevron, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell has declined during the past five years even as the companies spent more than a half-trillion dollars on new projects. Chevron’s costs alone have jumped 56% since 2010.
A marvelous new presentation by Steven Kopits, Managing Director of the Douglas-Westwood consultancy, details oil supply, demand, cost and price trends with merciless precision. If you can take an hour to watch Kopits' presentation I highly recommend it, as it's the most comprehensive perspective you'll find on the global dynamics of oil.
The graphic above shows how capital spending (capex, i.e., capital expenditures) by the world's publicly listed oil majors has increased by more than a factor of five since 2000, while their production of oil has fallen back to the 2000 level after a few years of very modest increases. In Kopits' earthy metaphor, the companies kept watering the plant but it just wouldn't grow anymore—precisely as the peak oil model predicted.
The sources for the Bloomberg article are shockingly candid about the difficulties facing the shale sector, considering that their firms have been at the forefront of shale hype.
The vice president of integration at oil services giant Schlumberger notes that four out of every 10 frack clusters are duds. Geologist Pete Stark, a vice president of industry relations at IHS—yes, that IHS, where famous peak oil pooh-pooher Daniel Yergin is the spokesman for its CERA unit—actually said what we in the peak oil camp have been saying for years: "The decline rate is a potential show stopper after a while…You just can’t keep up with it."
The CEO of Superior Energy Services was particularly pithy: "We've drilled all the good stuff…These are very poor quality formations that I don't believe God intended for us to produce from the source rock." Source rocks, as I wrote last month, are an oil and gas "retirement party," not a revolution.
The toxic combination of rising production costs, the rapid decline rates of the wells, diminishing prospects for drilling new wells, and a drilling program so out of control that it caused a glut and destroyed profitability, have finally taken their toll.
Numerous operators are taking major write-downs against reserves. WPX Energy, an operator in the Marcellus shale gas play, and Pioneer Natural Resources, an operator in the Barnett shale gas play, each have announced balance sheet “impairments” of more than $1 billion due to low gas prices. Chesapeake Energy, Encana, Apache, Anadarko Petroleum, BP, and BHP Billiton have disclosed similar substantial reserves reductions. Occidental Petroleum, which has made the most significant attempts to frack California’s Monterey Shale, announced that it will spin off that unit to focus on its core operations—something it would not do if the Monterey prospects were good. EOG Resources, one of the top tight oil operators in the United States, recently said that it no longer expects U.S. production to rise by 1 million barrels per day (mb/d) each year, in accordance with my 2014 oil and gas price forecast.
Coal and nuclear
When I wrote “Why baseload power is doomed” and "Regulation and the decline of coal power" in 2012, the suggestion that renewables might displace baseload power sources like coal and nuclear plants was generally received with ridicule. How could "intermittent" power sources with just a few percentage points of market share possibly hurt the deeply entrenched, reliable, fully amortized infrastructure of power generation?
But look where we are today. Coal plants are being retired much faster than most observers expected. The latest projection from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is for 60 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired power capacity to be taken offline by 2016, more than double the retirements the agency predicted in 2012. The vast majority of the coal plants that were planned for the United States in 2007 have since been cancelled, abandoned, or put on hold, according to SourceWatch.
Nuclear power plants were also given the kibosh at an unprecedented rate last year. More nuclear plant retirements appear to be on the way. Earlier this month, utility giant Exelon, the nation’s largest owner of nuclear plants, warned that it will shut down nuclear plants if the prospects for their profitable operation don’t improve this year.
Japan has just announced a draft plan that would restart its nuclear reactors, but the plan is "vague" and, to my expert nose, stinks of political machinations. What we do know is that the country has abandoned its plans to build a next-generation "fast breeder" reactor due to mounting technical challenges and skyrocketing costs.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Germany, which now obtains about 25 percent of its grid power from renewables and which has the most solar power per capita in the world. I have long viewed Germany’s transition to renewables (see "Myth-busting Germany's energy transition") as a harbinger of what is to come for the rest of the developed world as we progress down the path of energy transition.
And what's to come for the utilities isn't good. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Germany’s three largest utilities, E.ON, RWE, and EnBW are struggling with what the CEO of RWE called “the worst structural crisis in the history of energy supply.” Falling consumption and growing renewable power have cut the wholesale price of electricity by 60 percent since 2008, making it unprofitable to continue operating coal, gas and oil-fired plants. E.ON and RWE have announced intentions to close or mothball 15 GW of gas and coal-fired plants. Additionally, the three major utilities still have a combined 12 GW of nuclear plants scheduled to retire by 2020 under Germany’s nuclear phase-out program.
RWE said it will write down nearly $4 billion on those assets, but the pain doesn’t end there. Returns on invested capital at the three utilities are expected to fall from an average of 7.7 percent in 2013 to 6.5 percent in 2015, which will only increase the likelihood that pension funds and other fixed-income investors will look to exchange traditional utility company holdings for “green bonds” invested in renewable energy. The green bond sector is growing rapidly, and there's no reason to think it will slow down. Bond issuance jumped from $2 billion in 2012 to $11 billion in 2013, and the now-$15 billion market is expected to nearly double again this year.
A new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute and CohnReznick about consumers "defecting" from the grid using solar and storage systems concludes that the combination is a "real, near and present" threat to utilities. By 2025, according to the authors, millions of residential users could find it economically advantageous to give up the grid. In his excellent article on the report, Stephen Lacey notes that lithium-ion battery costs have fallen by half since 2008. With technology wunderkind Elon Musk's new announcement that his car company Tesla will raise up to $5 billion to build the world's biggest "Gigafactory" for the batteries, their costs fall even farther. At the same time, the average price of an installed solar system has fallen by 61 percent since the first quarter of 2010.
At least some people in the utility sector agree that the threat is real. Speaking in late February at the ARPA-E Energy Summit, CEO David Crane of NRG Energy suggested that the grid will be obsolete and used only for backup within a generation, calling the current system "shockingly stupid."
Non-hydro renewables are outpacing nuclear and fossil fuel capacity additions in much of the world, wreaking havoc with the incumbent utilities' business models. The value of Europe's top 20 utilities has been halved since 2008, and their credit ratings have been downgraded. According to The Economist, utilities have been the worst-performing sector in the Morgan Stanley index of global share prices. Only utilities nimble enough to adopt new revenue models providing a range of services and service levels, including efficiency and self-generation, will survive.
In addition to distributed solar systems, utility-scale renewable power plants are popping up around the world like spring daisies. Ivanpah, the world's largest solar "power tower" at 392 megawatts (MW), just went online in Nevada. Aura Solar I, the largest solar farm in Latin America at 30 MW, is under construction in Mexico and will replace an old oil-fired power plant. India just opened its largest solar power plant to date, the 130 MW Welspun Solar MP project. Solar is increasingly seen as the best way to provide electricity to power-impoverished parts of the world, and growth is expected to be stunning in Latin America, India and Africa.
Renewable energy now supplies 23% of global electricity generation, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, with capacity having doubled from 2000 to 2012. If that growth rate continues, it could become the dominant source of electricity by the next decade.
Environmental disasters
Faltering productivity, falling profits, poor economics and increasing competition from power plants running on free fuel aren't the only problems facing the fossil-fuels complex. It has also been the locus of increasingly frequent environmental disasters.
On February 22, 2014, a barge hauling oil collided with a towboat and spilled an estimated 31,500 gallons of light crude into the Mississippi River, closing 65 miles of the waterway for two days.
More waterborne spills are to be expected along with more exploding trains as crude oil from sources like the Bakken shale seeks alternative routes to market while the Keystone XL pipeline continues to fight an uphill political battle. According to the Association of American Railroads, the number of tank cars shipping oil jumped from about 10,000 in 2009 to more than 230,000 in 2012, and more oil spilled from trains in 2013than in the previous four decades combined.
Federal regulators issued emergency rules on February 25 requiring Bakken crude to undergo testing to see if it is too flammable to be moved safely by rail, but I am not confident this measure will eliminate the risk. Light, tight oil from U.S. shales tends to contain more light molecules such as natural gas liquids than conventional U.S. crude grades, and is more volatile.
February 11 will go down in history as a marquee bad day for fossil fuels, on which 100,000 gallons of coal slurry spilled into a creek in West Virginia; a natural gas well in Dilliner, Pa., exploded (and burned for two weeks before it was put out); and a natural gas pipeline ruptured and exploded in Tioga, ND. Two days later, another natural gas line exploded in the town of Knifely, Ky., igniting multiple fires and destroying several homes, barns, and cars. The same day, another train carrying crude oil derailed near Pittsburgh, spilling between 3,000 and 7,500 gallons of crude oil.
And don't forget the spill of 10,000 gallons of toxic chemicals used in coal processing from a leaking tank in West Virginia in early January, which sickened residents of Charleston and rendered its water supply unusable.
No return
At this point you may think, "Well, this is all very interesting, Chris, but why should we believe we've reached some sort of tipping point in energy transition?"
To which I would say, ask yourself: Is any of this reversible?
Is there any reason to think the world will turn its back on plummeting costs for solar systems, batteries, and wind turbines, and revert back to nuclear and coal?
Is there any reason to think we won't see more ruptures and spills from oil and gas pipelines?
What about the more than 1,300 coal-ash waste sites scattered across the United States, of which about half are no longer used and some are lacking adequate liners? How confident are we that authorities will suddenly find the will, after decades of neglect, to ensure that they'll not cause further contamination after damaging drinking water supplies in at least 67 instances so far, such that we feel confident about continuing to rely on coal power?
Like the disastrous natural gas pipeline that exploded in 2010 and turned an entire neighborhood in San Bruno, Calif., into a raging inferno, coal-ash waste sites are but one part of a deep and growing problem shot through the entire fabric of America: aging infrastructure and deferred maintenance. President Obama just outlined his vision for a $302 billion, four-year program of investment in transportation, but that's just a drop in the bucket, and it's only for transportation.
Is there any reason to think citizens will brush off the death, destruction, environmental contamination of these disasters—many of them happening in the backyards of rural, red-state voters—and not take a second look at clean power?
Is there any reason to believe utilities will swallow several trillion dollars worth of stranded assets and embrace new business models en masse? Or is it more likely that those that can will simply adopt solar, storage systems, and other measures that ultimately give them cheaper and more reliable power, particularly in the face of increasingly frequent climate-related disasters that take out their grid power for days or weeks?
Is there any reason to think the billions of people in the world who still lack reliable electric power will continue to rely on filthy diesel generators and kerosene lanterns as the price of oil continues to rise? Or are they more likely to adopt alternatives like the SolarAid solar lanterns, of which half a million have been sold across Africa in the past six months alone? (Here's a hint: Nobody who has one wants to go back to their kerosene lantern.) Founder Jeremy Leggett of SunnyMoney, who created the SolarAid lanterns, intends to sell 50 million of them across Africa by 2020.
Is there any reason to believe solar and wind will not continue to be the preferred way to bring power to the developing world, when their fuel is free and conventional alternatives are getting scarcer and more expensive?
Is there any reason a homeowner might not think about putting a solar system on his or her roof, without taking a single dollar out of his or her pocket, and using it to charge up an electric vehicle instead of buying gasoline?
Is there any reason to think that drilling for shale gas and tight oil in the United States will suddenly resume its former rapid growth rates, when new well locations are getting harder to find, investment by the oil and gas companies is being slashed, share prices are falling, reserves are getting taken off balance sheets and investors are getting nervous?
I don't think so. All of these trends have been developing for decades, and new data surfacing daily only reinforces them.
The energy transition tipping point is here, and there's no going back.
Google And Facebook Keep Supporting Laws That Gut Their Own Renewable Energy Investments
And they refuse to explain why. It's time for the tech giants to do a little reconciling for their massive support of renewable energy policy and their support of a legislative group that's now trying to punish people for generating their own solar energy.
by Sydney Brownstone, Co.Exist, December 5, 2013 How’s this for a cognitive dissonance doozy? Despite having invested more than $1 billion in renewable energy, Google also belongs to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a powerful corporate lobbying group that, among other things, seeks to defeat supportive renewable energy policies on the state level. Facebook, which recently installed an extensive solar power system by Cogenra on its Menlo Park campus, also belongs.
ALEC's mission is to help mostly conservative state legislators collaborate on writing bills which they can bring back to their home states and pass, resulting in uniform conservative laws enacted at the state-level around the country (perhaps most notoriously, it's been responsible for "stand your ground" laws around the country). It's also poured money into vehemently opposing state renewable portfolio energy standards, regulations that require increased energy sourcing from renewables. This is interesting, as Google proudly states that it derives 34% of its total energy from renewables, and Facebook has pledged to power 25% of its data centers from renewables by 2015.
Though Google and Facebook have previously denied requests for comment on their ties to ALEC, theDaily Beast reported that both were members of ALEC's communications technology task force. It's likely that Google and Facebook not only pay normal corporate membership fees, but also task force membership fees, probably in thousands of dollars. What the companies get in return is relatively cheap and unique access to thousands of legislators across the country, and direct input into ALEC's highly influential model bill-making process on technology issues. This makes sense: Companies often play both sides of the ideological spectrum; they'll take any corporate advantage where ever they can buy it. What doesn't make as much sense -- because they refuse to explain it in any sort of depth --is why Google and Facebook find that access more valuable than the millions they have poured into clean energy.
We managed to get a Facebook spokesperson to speak in broad, fuzzy brushstrokes about the company's relationship to ALEC, telling Co.Exist in a statement: "Facebook belongs to various organizations representing views across the political spectrum. The private sector members of ALEC's technology committee have worked on model legislation on issues that directly affect our company including data security, privacy, and a free and open Internet. We want to be part of any conversation that contributes to shaping these issues and giving our users a better experience."
While ALEC has always pushed an anti-climate regulation agenda, the interest in punishing the owners of solar panels is a new development, as the Guardian revealed earlier this week. John Eick, ALEC’s analyst for its energy, environment and agriculture program, told the newspaper that the group would be exploring initiatives that charge homeowners a fee for distributing solar power back in the grid. "As it stands now, those direct generation customers are essentially freeriders on the system. They are not paying for the infrastructure they are using. In effect, all the other non direct generation customers are being penalized,” Eick said.
"They should be paying to distribute the surplus electricity,” Eick added.
The effort flies directly in the face of Google's residential solar initiatives. In 2011, Google entered a $280 million deal with SolarCity, a solar power system company, to create a fund for residential solar projects. The partnership would extend lease and purchase agreements to customers who couldn’t afford all the costs upfront. “Google is setting an example that other leading American companies can follow,” said Lyndon Rive, CEO of SolarCity, announced proudly in the Solar City press release at the time.
“Now, through this partnership with SolarCity, we’re excited to be making our first investment in distributed residential solar, making it easier and more affordable for consumers across the country, including our own employees, to use renewable energy at their own homes,” said Rick Needham, director of Google’s green business operations at Google, in the same release.
Neither Needham nor SolarCity responded to a request for comment over ALEC’s solar fee proposal.
The proposal also appears to contradict Facebook's green efforts. Last month, Brad Johnson, campaign manager for Forecast the Facts, a climate activist group, asked Bill Weihl, Facebook’s manager of energy efficiency and sustainability, why the company joined ALEC. Weihl explained that Facebook also works with the likes of Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, but didn’t explain the ALEC incentive. “It’s certainly not because we’re trying to oppose renewable energy legislation,” Weihl told Johnson. Weihl did not respond for comment to this piece.
“It’s definitely a reputational risk for these forward-thinking online companies like Google and Facebook and Yelp to keep their membership in ALEC,” Gabriel Elsner, executive director of thinktank-watchdog Energy and Policy Institute, said. “ALEC is an anti-clean energy bill mill that is creating model legislation to help its fossil fuel and utility members at the expense of ratepayers and the public.”
In November, Arizona’s utility regulatory agency voted to charge solar homeowners 70 cents per kilowatt of solar energy installed on their roof a month. A spokesman from Arizona Public Service, Arizona’s largest utility, told the Arizona Capitol Times that the utility pays $10,000 in membership and specialized taskforce membership fees to ALEC. Now, the group is working on a resolution that would weaken rules allowing solar users to feed energy back into the grid and offset regular energy costs.
“The new model bills would eliminate incentives for home owners to go solar and invest in solar in their own homes, and would water down the renewable portfolio standards by opening up those policies to out of state energy sources,” Elsner said.
Elsner added that these new initiatives would likely all be on the table at ALEC’s energy task force meeting with corporations and state legislators this week. If those model bills pass the committee, they go to ALEC’s board of directors, and subsequently to legislators across the country.
Google chose not to respond to requests for comment on this piece. But regardless of whether the tech giant joined ALEC primarily to rally on other issues -- like, say, anti-SLAPP legislation that would protect online commenting -- it's certainly supporting a platform that contradicts its own investments.
The cynical notion that joining ALEC is par for the business course is also a flimsy suggestion. Coca Cola, Pepsi, McDonalds, Kraft, Amazon, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have all dropped relationships with ALEC in the face of its controversies (especially following the death of Trayvon Martin) over the last two years. But if Google and Facebook continue to stay on with ALEC, they owe us better logic as to why.
As Bernstein notes in its report, the share of solar PV in the global energy market is currently so small (see graph to the right) that “the idea that oil and gas is the “loser” in this formulation is laughable … in 2014.”
Posts
