From a 50,000-Foot Level: What’s Happening with Renewable Energy in the United States? – Part 2 of 2
Energy Storage and the Advent of Electric Transportation. The only real issue with solar and wind is variability, i.e., the fact that the sun doesn’t shine at night, and the wind doesn’t blow in a given place all the time. Ultimately, this will give rise to the need for storage, which comes in many flavors: pumped hydro, compressed air, etc. One type of energy storage that is often overlooked, however, is electric vehicles. Our civilization is tantalizingly close to a grid infrastructure that simply takes off-peak energy and uses it to charge our electric vehicles (simultaneously making gasoline and diesel irrelevant in the world market—think for a minute what that will mean to a planet filled with war and tyranny over petroleum).
Public Concern with Environmental Damage. The most obvious aspect of all this is climate change, but there are many other elements, all of them quite valid to the average citizen’s increasing level of outrage that, to the degree that we do nothing about the energy status quo, you and I will be remembered as a part of the generation that ruined the planet. Bright, sensitive people don’t like that. But as time passes we’re learning something important: nobody likes that. As dim-witted as many U.S. voters are, they are catching on to the fact that they are being systemically lied to about this situation, and accordingly, they’re becoming increasingly furious.
Here’s another recent quote from President Obama: “I guarantee you that the Republican Party will have to change its approach to climate change because voters will insist upon it.” That’s putting it mildly, as the president is wont to do.
In Closing. When I speak at conferences, I often run into someone in a Q&A session who sees doom on the horizon, who believes that humankind is facing unavoidable catastrophe, and will not be able to deal with things like drought and the loss of arable farm land, sea-level rise, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, lung disease, etc. I say, “OK, you’re a pessimist; I totally understand where you’re coming from. Let me ask: Are there any optimists in the audience, who many believe that humankind faces a “soft-landing” here, i.e., that our civilization will deploy the skills and compassion it needs to escape this disaster?” I get at least a few hands up. At that point, I turn back to the pessimist, smile warmly, and say, “Well, as you can see, there are people on both sides of the issue.”
I continue: “For whatever it may be worth, you’re talking to someone who has written four books on the subject, and I personally think it’s too early to tell. I believe, and I spend every day of my life learning more about this, that the ultimate outcome depends on what you and I and all the people in this room do, and what all the people accomplish in all of the 200,000 groups worldwide whose purpose is environmental and social justice. I really, honestly, in all my heart and mind, simply don’t know this will end. And, no offense, but neither do you.”
– Craig Shields is editor of 2GreenEnergy.com. His four books on the subject can be found here.
CS – once again thank you for a refreshing and lucid commentary. I do believe that notwithstanding the apparent “doom and gloom” we will make the change albeit not in a fluid and generally cohesive many mainly based on the merchants of status quo who’s influence and leverage are slowing down the inevitable. There are bright spots both in US and globally that suggest the shift to Renewables and Clean technologies is both creditable and increasingly compelling…it is simply not moving at the pace that many of us believe it should.
The obvious long term solution is to unbundle the electricity market – separating out the grid (a natural physical monopoly) from electricity providers.
In England and Wales, National Grid owns the electricity grid and effectively sells its services to a whole range of electricity suppliers and providers of electrical balancing services. Electricity producers must compete in the market place for market share.
Similar markets could operate more extensively in the US.
When the wind is blowing or the sun is shining, wind and solar power (along with nuclear are first into the market as they have very low marginal cost of production i.e. the cost of producing or not producing power is very similar.)
Fossil fuels cannot compete when there is a large quantity of solar or wind power in the market place as wind and solar do not have to pay for fuel.
At other times when the demand is very much higher than is provided for by low carbon sources, the price of electricity spikes, and the fossil fuel power stations make their money.
The market must have rules which ensure that there is a ready supply of electricity at all times, and that all players whose services are required to achieve this are adequately compensated for their contribution. This may involve making significant payments from time to time for suppliers to deliver extra power, or to take power out of the market place. Over time, the less competitive providers will naturally be competed out of the market place as they will no longer be commercially viable.
With the right rules, a mix of power generators, demand side management providers, and energy storage providers can compete in the market place to ensure that the power system continues to work.
One more thing, do not expect energy storage to replace the power grid any time soon as the power grid does a fantastic job at relatively modest cost of distributing power from where it is generated to where it is needed e.g. if it is windy in Texas, excess power from Texas can be sent to neighbouring states, or even across the country or into Mexico where the excess production can most likely be utilised.
Without the grid, such local excess production will not find a market. The grid will almost always be less costly than a fully autonomous off grid solution, and even energy storage benefits from a grid connection where available.
I may be either a cautious optimist or a reluctant pessimist, but I prefer to think and behave as much as a realist as I can manage. I fully realize, there are good minds on both sides and in the middle.
Lawrence Wilkerson, retired United States Army soldier and the former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, had this to say in a 2009 speech: “Royal Dutch Shell has done a look. They have some of the best strategists that I’ve run into in a long time – and I was a strategist in the military. Their look says, the future is a blueprint, or the future is a scramble. They talk about 2075 – how dwindling water resources, dwindling petroleum resources, gas and oil, and so forth, are going to cause world leaders to have to either cooperate and coordinate – ‘blueprint’ – or fight each other, mercilessly, for half a century or longer. Royal Dutch Shell believes it’s probably going to be the latter. They call that ‘scramble’…”
There are many who don’t see the motivation to think and act long-term rising in either corporations or the legislators they bribe. There is significant observable evidence to buttress this view.
In an ideal democratic republic, you might think that if a particular idea had universal support across the population, that fact would yield a virtual certainty of legislation upholding that idea. Conversely, if an idea was so unpopular that almost no one agreed with it, the chances of supportive legislation for that idea would be virtually nil.
There was a study that came out not long ago looking back at 20 to 40 years of public opinion records with a data set of the lower 90% of income earners and a data set for the highest 10% of income earners. The study compared these sets as they relates to a history of legislation over the same periods. In the last twenty years the findings have firmly illustrated a stark reality.
No matter how solid the opinions of the lower 90% of the public for or against any given topic, the chances of related legislation passing was about 30% across the board. The existence of solid public opinion – either for or against – had a “minuscule” and “statistically insignificant” effect.
When the opinions of the highest 10% were compared, there was a striking resemblance to the ideal. If there was no support for the idea among that 10%, supportive legislation stood a near zero chance of passage. The relationship was near linear until about the 50% mark, where the relationship between the 10%’s opinion and legislation loosened but remained strong.
An awareness of the fixated and methodical army of lobbyists, eleven thousand strong and pouring out an average of over six million dollars per congressperson in 2012 alone, will well serve to obliterate any doubt about the mechanism behind the control of our legislatures. That army makes a mockery and a hypocrisy of the mere notion of a democratic republic.
Let me convey both my fear and my hope on the topic of sustainability.
My fear: The elite employ shrewdly servile advisers whose strongest motivation is to protect the status quo until what they regard as the approach of the last survivable moment. Further, that because of that very bias, their judgment will be skewed so as to delay that decision far beyond the actual rational thresholds. Indeed, the deepest aspect of my fear is that this fatal delay may already have occurred.
My hope: A significant percentage of the people now living in every society will soon organize around truth and non-violence – that these many will cooperate to engage in massive and widespread direct action to counter and overwhelm the forces preventing wise progress, and that they will persevere in that effort until a new paradigm and a new power structure is evolved and implemented. My fondest hope is that the resulting change will endure, for the benefit of all humankind, and for the healing of the broad web of life that will always be necessary for our existence.
What’s happening with renewable energy in the U.S. and around the world isn’t happening anywhere near fast enough to prevent our passing the so called tipping points like warming permafrost etc. etc. When those inputs are added to what humanity is adding the end of the world as we know it will be in sight.
Here is a notice I’ve posted on Facebook and elsewhere.
STRATEGIC ALLIANCE OR INVESTMENT NEEDED FOR NOVEL NEW CONCEPT REPOWERING TECH ONLY SIX MONTHS TO ONE YEAR FROM MARKET ENTRY.
AAEC has developed technology designed to allow towns, cities and even counties to convert nearly completely to cleaner renewable energy. AAEC is for those who understand that clean distributed alternative/renewable energy derived from coal, solar, wind, biomass and waste is a viable pathway to stall global warming and produce a better future for our communities, for our descendants, and ultimately for all humanity. AAEC offers a viable way to move beyond talking about climate change to controlling it. Fossil Fuel firms and utilities oppose what AAEC offers and want to maintain their monopoly positions as sole energy providers and pass unlimited costs in cleaning up their operations on to their customers, even if much better options are available.
AAEC has invented, patented, tested and further developed a new concept low-carbon energy technology we’ve designed for serving as the core technology for far cleaner renewable energy production systems and energy efficiency improvements across the American landscape and around the world. AAEC’s novel new concept technology consists of a biomass, fossil fuel, and municipal waste combustion, gasification and pyrolysis conversion technology that can provide scalable heat and power requirements as well as both biofuel and biochar production. AAEC’s technology is for stand-alone use or as backup for alternative energy systems that depend on solar, wind or other intermittent sources of energy, and in this way it will help enable a doubling of the deployment of alternative energy projects around the world in coming decades.
AAEC management believes we will do better and be safer in the long run if we can deploy a practical way to power all societies on extraction of greenhouse gases that have already been emitted into earth’s atmosphere while also reducing ongoing greenhouse emissions and begin protecting our communities and electric power grids. We are claiming to be the inventor of one of the “tools” needed to enable humanity to overhaul the power delivery system, in the USA and elsewhere, and help get us out of the box fossil fuels and governmental inaction have humanity boxed up in. We propose to do this through deployment of advanced alternative energy projects at the village, community and county scale, and because good paying infrastructure jobs are also needed. Thus AAEC is seeking support from all that may care to support this project.
AAEC’s product lines can be manufactured in the US and in most any locality on any continent for the local and regional market. This we believe will create licensing opportunities and many thousands of good paying jobs, and these are among the things we are offering to an alternative energy hungry world. For further details please contact:
Les Blevins, President Advanced Alternative Energy
1207 N 1800 Rd., Lawrence, KS 66049
Phone 785-842-1943 – Email LBlevins@aaecorp.com
For more info see
http://aaecorp.com/ceo.html
http://advancedalternativeenergycorp.com
https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=45587557&trk=nav_responsive_tab_profile
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Advanced-Alternative-Energy/277213435730720
http://buildings.ideascale.com/a/dtd/SCALABLE-MIXED-WASTE-TO-ENERGY-CONVERSION-TECHNOLOGY/84117-33602