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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

PhotobucketI can’t say that I make a serious attempt to follow the politics of Great Britain — even as they apply to the energy sector — but I do check out BusinessGreen periodically. It’s really a wonderful source of information.

Whenever I read BusinessGreen, I’m reminded of how sessions of Parliament are peppered with loud grunts and groans from those dissenting from the presenter’s point of view.  I can only imagine that this necessitates considerable care to walk a tight line if the speaker expects to avoid that type of heckling.

Good evidence of this came from recently appointed energy secretary Chris Huhne, who vowed that “the renewables industry will come of age under this government.” But while Huhne clearly embraces renewable energy, he is quite clear in his support of the fossil fuel industries, insisting that he is completely committed to the continued development of both North Sea oil and gas and low-carbon energy sources. Huhne said the new government would aim to “fully exploit” the remaining North Sea oil and gas fields, and would potentially reform licensing rules to encourage continued development in the sector.

Speaking during his first official visit as energy and climate change secretary to Aberdeen, Huhne said: “There could be 20 billion barrels of oil equivalent left to exploit, but the UK competes against every other basin in the world for investment and I am committed to making sure that we have a licensing regime and investment environment that attracts quality companies and investment to fully exploit the remaining potential.”

I can almost hear the grunts and groans from here.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

PhotobucketI’m aware that the vast majority of those reading this do not live in the state of California, USA – and thus have no reason to want to understand “Proposition 16” as it exists on our June ballot. Why then would I burden readers with something that does not directly affect them? Because it illustrates exactly how power utilities can abuse the democratic process, and use huge sums of money (derived, of course, from the consumers themselves) along with deliberately misleading advertising to wrangle positions of even greater monopoly — while thwarting the adoption of renewables.

Pacific Gas and Electric is the sole sponsor of Prop 16. The measure exists on the ballot solely because PG&E spent $35 million getting it there.  And the reason for the proposition is singular: if passed, the bill would further strengthen the stanglehold PG&E has over its customers, by changing the State Constitution to require a two-thirds majority from any community wishing to look elsewhere for electric power — making that possibility practically impossible to achieve. As PG&E CEO Peter A. Darbee proudly told investors on a recent conference call, Prop 16 would discourage communities within its massive jurisdiction from any attempt to buy power from a competitor – this is the one and only consequence of the referendum.

Outside of the media purchased with PG&E’s money, Prop 16 has been roundly jeered – largely for the sheer brazenness of the attempt to buy a constitutional amendment with only real beneficiary: PG&E itself.

According to a white paper from UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment:

An independent analysis of Proposition 16 finds that it would protect the monopoly status of investor-owned energy utilities and block the development of publicly owned electric power companies, if passed by California voters. At the same time, the initiative could conceivably slow the development of renewable energy.

I also have to say that this is the wrong state to try something like this. The proposition is broadly opposed by every group associated not only with environmentalism and sustainability – but also with basic fairness and belief in the democratic process. I’ll be very surprised if their $35 million buys PG&E anything more than the public loathing it so richly deserves.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

PhotobucketMy fine friend and 2GreenEnergy associate Terry Ribb did a long and productive stint at Deloitte Consulting, and thus I tend to put special value on the reports I get from that esteemed organization. But when it comes to market research, they seem to have made the same critical mistake that most people do: survey the wrong people. Here’s their recent report on the EV adoption curve.

Do you note anything startling?

In response to Deloitte’s question, “From whom would you be most likely to purchase an EV?” the top three responses are Toyota, Honda and Ford – none of which even have EVs in production yet — and two of the three — Honda and Toyota — are openly waffling on the idea.

The report goes on to suggest that Nissan needs to work extra hard to promote its LEAF, since it seems not to have been noticed by EV buyers. Bull manure. I find it hard to believe that almost anyone of any real relevance to the survey would have named Nissan with its LEAF, GM with its Volt, Mitsubishi with its i-MiEV, BMW with its Mini-E  — or any of dozens of other serious EV programs from established and new OEMs.

Think about this.  If you were conducting an interview about attitudes towards professional baseball,  and the respondent couldn’t name a single major league team, could you imagine any real value to the rest of the interview?  My only take-away from this report is that the research effort itself missed the mark.

Here’s another post further confirming that Deloitte is taking a very strange perspective with respect to the EV adoption curve.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

I want to call readers’ attention to 2GreenEnergy Associates Bill Paul’s report: The Top Twenty Takeover Candidates among Publicly Traded Alternative Energy Companies Headquartered in the U.S.

As I’ve mentioned, speaking with Bill Paul really is like drinking from a fire hose. I ask a question, shut up, and take notes patiently, as if I were a court stenographer. Bill wades through 75 different data streams every day of the week, and recently he’s been focusing on mergers and acquisitions – the subject of the report — looking for great volatility and the accompanying opportunity. He has a great deal of incredibly well researched material assembled here.

Where most stock brokers focused on the energy sector read about oil and gas, and a few know something about solar and wind, most of the money to be made in the coming few years in renewables will be derived from places in which very few people are looking. “New energy” is a constantly changing combination of dozens of intertwining technologies – and changes in infrastructure, e.g., smart grid, electric transportation, energy storage — as well as clean fuel sources.

Bill has really nailed this in his report. I hope you find it valuable. We weren’t able to give this one away, but there is a 100% money-back guarantee if for ANY reason you’re not completely satisfied.

We’re quite proud of our exclusive relationship with Bill. We are honored to have an exclusive arrangement whereby this incredible content is made available to a world so ravenously hungry for solid information — in a market that can be so terribly fickle and difficult to grasp.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

Here’s a post I wrote on carbon capture and sequestration that I put on Renewable Energy World. I note that even the sites that cover the traditional energy markets — like Energy Central – are coming down hard on the utter absurdity of clean coal. Martin Rosenburg, the main voice there, writes very well and clearly, and his recent piece does a good job in laying out the issues surrounding clean coal in a few short paragraphs, with solid stats, nailing down the extreme volumes of gas, lengths of new pipelines, and extreme costs associated with the endeavor.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Solar Thermal

The other day, I wrote a short post on Renewable Energy World extolling the virtues of concentrated solar power, and predicting that CSP would someday (probably in my grandchildren’s lifetimes) dominate the landscape of world energy production. Almost immediately, someone asked me why I held that belief, and I realized that I should have provided a bit of my reasoning. In brief, here it is:

1) The ultimate winner in energy will be safe, scalable, reliable, and inexpensive. This kills most energy technologies more or less immediately. Fossil fuels aren’t scalable, nuclear is neither safe nor inexpensive, etc.  And a great number of green energy technologies, e.g., run-of-river-hydro, don’t scale well.

2) With a few exceptions, the sun’s radiation is the ultimate source of all energy on Earth. Thus, the most obvious line of investigation for energy policy is determining the most direct way to convert the warmth of the sun into useful energy.

3) Most of the dozens of renewable technologies attempt to capitalize on this fact. The sun makes the wind blow, the rivers run, and builds the chemical bonds that are broken down when we convert complex organic molecules back into simpler ones (e.g., burning wood in our fireplaces, explode gasoline in our cars, or gasify waste in processing plants). But the most direct, efficient way to harness the sun’s energy is transferring those photons as directly as possible into electricity. This leaves us with solar photovoltaics and CSP.

4) It could be argued that PV is even more direct than CSP. And, if it weren’t for the problems in building large volumes of semiconductors for PV, I believe it would have won. But PV is ultimately doomed to significant manufacturing issues and materials shortages that, I believe, will limit scalability.

5) CSP, by contrast, uses low-cost and abundant materials, which can be deployed in areas that are relatively unimportant to plant and animal habitat (deserts). Of course, all energy-related technologies — even the dozens of breakthroughs in extracting coal, oil, and natural gas — are improving day by day. But CSP is still in its infancy. The gains in efficiency, the way in which solar thermal heat is stored to produce reliable baseload power, and the way in which that energy is effectively transmitted via high-voltage direct current to population centers — is improving every day.

I know there are people who disagree, but CSP is my pick for the late 21st Century. I only hope we still have a planet that supports life by that point.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

PhotobucketI wrote a blog post on “Energy Central” last week on clean coal, referring to it as an “oxymoron,” and a “seedy PR ploy.” And a few moments after the post went up, some guy told me, “take your silly invective elsewhere.”

Ouch, pal!

But I note that many of those who know ten times more about this than I have reached the same conclusion I did. In particular, I read an excerpt from SRI Consulting’s (SRIC) techno-economic report Advanced Carbon Capture that examines in detail three post combustion scrubbing technologies: conventional monoethanolamine (MEA), advanced amine, and chilled ammonia. They note that all three of these processes have technical and economic issues that must be overcome before they can be implemented at scale.

“On a levelized cost basis with 90% CO2 capture and compression, MEA scrubbing adds 4.5¢/KWh, while the advanced amine and chilled ammonia processes each add 4.1¢/KWh to the cost of power generation.” Noted author Michael Arné at SRIC commented, “The scale of the process equipment needed for power plant applications is remarkable. All three processes covered in this report require Gulliver-like equipment that will have its own challenges such as proper liquid distribution, pressure drop, and structural issues in the construction of such large equipment items. For example, for a plant producing 550 MW net power output, each of the processes analyzed will require two absorbers roughly 40 feet in diameter by 100 feet tall.”

I honestly don’t think my “invective” was all that “silly.”

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

PhotobucketMy association with Bill Paul has provided me with a crash course in what’s happening behind the scenes in the world of alternative energy finance and investment. Yet it’s not hard to see what makes all this so difficult for the average investor: the sheer number of variables; it’s a true moving target. One set of such variables, of course, is the price of competitors’ products – determined, as they are, by a number of different forces – all out of our control: wars, storms, natural disasters, unforeseeable discoveries, decisions to limit or expand oil production, and so forth. Another is the subject of renewables itself – a twisted knot of new technologies, efficiency breakthroughs, discontinuous cost reductions, government subsidies and incentives, and back-office political deal-making.

I was delighted with the turnout at Tuesday’s webinar, and with the great number of the favorable comments we received. This shows me that a large number of people out there find this subject as vitally important as we do here. We’ll try to keep up a regular schedule.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

PhotobucketWhen I was back East earlier in the week, I had the opportunity to speak with Bill Paul on a great number of interesting topics related to our renewable energy field. I happened to mention that the public attitude that surrounds global climate change is a moving target, and I speculated that I knew the essential cause: people tend to react more violently to immediate, close-to-home crises (e.g., their personal financial scene) than they do to those that are more distant — either in space (foreign wars) or in time (global climate change). “Yes,” Bill agreed, “No one has the bandwidth to watch a slow-motion train wreck.” What a good metaphor that is.

I’m reminded of my interview with the man generally credited with the discover of global warming in the early 1970s, Dr. V. Ramanathan, now teaching and conducting ongoing atmospheric research at the Scripps Institution. I asked if he agreed that fewer people believed in his theory now than two or three years ago. “Oh yes,” he replied. “People have a limited amount of space in their heads for crises; they can only hold so many terrifying ideas in place at one time.”

A related idea that I support is one I call “crisis fatigue.” I liken it to the phenomenon in which the nerve cells in our nostrils that process smell soon “tire” of a certain odor stimulus and fail to respond to it completely after a minute or two. It seems that the public — at least in the US — has become numb to the enormity of the threat posed by global climate change.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

I want to thank everyone who attended Tuesday’s webinar with Bill Paul. In his characteristically humble manner, Bill asked me as we were leaving the room if he handled himself well with the questions from the audience and me. Yes, Bill, you were terrific. I apologize, however, for the technical glitches. We’re scheduling another webinar soon, and I promise to have addressed the noise issues and other annoyances.

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