The climate war and the war machine

The US Department of Defense consumes an incredible about of energy every day.

The Department of Defense uses 4,600,000,000 US gallons (1.7×10¹⁰ L) (4.6 billion gallons) of fuel annually, an average of 12,600,000 US gallons (48,000,000 L) (12.6 million gallons) of fuel per day. A large Army division may use about 6,000 US gallons (23,000 L) per day. According to the 2005 CIA World Factbook, the DoD would rank 34th in the world in average daily oil use, coming in just behind Iraq and just ahead of Sweden.

In FY 2006, the DoD used almost 30,000 gigawatt hours (GWH) of electricity, at a cost of almost $2.2 billion. The DoD’s electricity use would supply enough electricity to power more than 2.6 million average American homes. In electricity consumption, the DoD would rank 58th in the world, using slightly less than Denmark and slightly more than Syria (CIA World Factbook, 2006).

via Wikipedia

DoD is interested in reducing its energy use for several practical and strategic reasons,

1. Energy is expensive;
2. Convoys are predictable, high-value targets; and
3. Buying energy from people who support anti-American militants makes little sense.

Thomas Friedman’s widely circulated book Hot, Flat and Crowded, describes the world of ‘petropolitics’ in which a hostile or outright authoritarian government is kept afloat by its resource exports. Listen to this NPR interview with Friedman in 2006 to get the basics of his book.

I recently attended a briefing by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) entitled Energy Innovation in Our Nation’s Defense, which was designed to show “why and how the military is addressing security concerns through clean energy innovations.” If you can, watch the entire briefing. This comes on the heels of the Pentagon announcing that climate change will be addressed in its Quadrennial Defense Review.

Filed under: uncategorized

Painful planning: adaptation means tough decisions

Wait until it really hits the fan.

The period of human-induced rapid warming that we are in for has already started is going, to say the least, be uncomfortable. When we have entered the full-fledged climate war and are scrambling to reduce CO2 in any way possible, we’ll have to make decisions which not everyone will like. I’m not saying that we should abandon New Orleans or the American Southwest; but the time, expertise and capital used to protect those heritage sites are finite resources. Using those resources in City X means not using them somewhere else.

The fact is that we have to be practical. We may be able to stop a river from flooding and destroying City X for twenty years. New dikes and other mega-engineering projects may lengthen the city’s lifespan, but when we eventually can’t stop the flooding all the resources invested will be lost. We built our civilization during a time of great climatic stability, and the vulnerability of our built environment shows this.

We need to balance our urge to never surrender with painful pragmatism. The dilapidated state of American infrastructure today is both cause for rejoice and despair. We have a lot of work to do to maintain functionality and improve reliability, but we also are very close to an empty slate, which is good while embarking on new investments.

Take, for example, our railroad system. Arguably the best in the world, the system does not have the bandwidth to support more freight and (high-speed) passenger use. At a recent conference a speaker said that it takes two days for a freight train to get from a West Coast port to Chicago (the central hub of the American system,) two days to get THROUGH Chicago, and another two days to get to the East Coast. Bottle necks such as this cost all players money and reduce the use of the system. There is a lot of room for joint public-private investment to improve American effectiveness and make our economy more resilient.

Also consider New Orleans. The city is a cultural landmark and plays an important part in American history. Cultural landmarks like New Orleans certainly are worth preserving. We’ll make these decisions as a country. For the time being, I wouldn’t be doing any real estate speculation in these endangered areas.

Filed under: adaptation, infrastructure, cities, climate war, disasters, planning

The atmospheric bathtub: why we need to act first on climate legislation

A lot of people have trouble understanding the amount of GHG pollution we have pumped into the atmosphere since industrialization.

CO2 emissions can be thought of as water flowing into a bathtub.

Many politicians oppose American action on global warming without binding agreements from China, for fear that we will lose what little competitive advantage we have left. There are (WTO-compliant) ways to ensure that export countries pay on the same playing field as domestic industries, but that’s not the point of this article. The fact is that developed economies are responsible for most of the anthropogenic CO2, and should bear the price of being a first mover in the field of climate action.

Imagine a bathtub with hundreds of faucets around it. Some faucets started to turn on about 200 years ago, while others haven’t leaked more than a few drops in that time. As the pace of industrialization increased, so did the flow of water from each faucet. Some faucets which have previously been leaking at a trickle’s pace are now fully open, and raging torrents of water are pouring out every second. Our bathtub is getting pretty full now. Though when we look into it we can’t be sure which faucet each drop came from, we know that some faucets contributed more because have been open longest and have had continuous high-volume flow.

Late industrializing countries like China, India, etc contribute a lot of CO2 to the atmosphere annually. In 2007, China surpassed the United States as the globe’s most prolific GHG emitter. Still, American historical emissions are far greater because we have been industrialized for a longer time. The Pew Center on Global Climate Change has published this graph showing global cumulative emissions:

International climate action must consider both current emission rates and historical totals.

It’s not a position you want to be in, but the historical data speaks for itself and the United States should have the sense of responsibility to be a leader in the international climate arena. It also cannot be avoided that the developed world is at least in part responsible for the accelerating pace of Chinese emissions. Globalization has pushed manufacturing to the far reaches of the globe, and as consumers of Chinese-made goods, we drive their consumption of energy. This point is well articulated in a post on New Geography titled Will Anyone Stand Up for American Industry? by Aaron M. Renn:

Also, too often industry is viewed only as a source of pollution. Many industrial expansions are opposed on environmental grounds. But from a global, not local perspective, an ever stricter regime of regulation is sending firms offshore where pollution standards are usually far laxer. Corporations put a green gloss on their branding campaigns while building their products in China, where they get electricity from one of the new coal fired power plants that open at a rate of more than one per week. [...] To really protect the environment, we should be doing more manufacturing at home, where we can keep an eye on it and prevent the worst abuses..

Pushing a factory offshore does little to protect the environment and leaves Americans with fewer jobs. Government needs to work with industry, not against it. Likewise business must recognize that regulation is not just a burden aimed at cutting into the bottom line, but a tool by which government protects industry and society alike.

Filed under: american, politics, cumulative emissions, externalities

‘Brownouts’ not only sound gross, they’re bad for everyone involved

This post is part of a collection on the electric power sector. See the post Electric Feel: how to flip the power sector on its head for more.

In order to provide reliable energy flow to the grid, utilities must produce (slightly) more electricity than is being consumed at any given moment. If the system is too close to equilibrium, sudden spikes in consumption will cause ‘brownouts,’ which are so called because of the dimming effect they have on lights.

Update: An interconnected system like our power grid provides both resilience and susceptibility. The Oil Drum recently updated an article that was originally published in January 2008 called, The Failure of Networked Systems. David Clarke’s main thesis is that the petro-dependent world we live in creates an illusion of stability, while actually being precariously balanced.

There is a critical angle for piles of sand–a level of steepness that the slope cannot go beyond without sand starting to roll down the slope. Imagine that, as you add sand, you colour red all of the areas of the pile that achieve this critical angle (and are thus on the verge of an avalanche). You will notice that the red patches appear as tendrils running down the side of the pile. As you add sand to the pile it gets higher and wider – the pile gets steeper and more little tendrils of red appear. Eventually you will see the tendrils of red start to interconnect.

If you drop a grain of sand on a red area then you will precipitate an avalanche. If the red area is interconnected with other red areas then all these areas will be drawn into the avalanche. If the red area is isolated, then the avalanche will be confined to one red tendril running down the side of the pile.

The area affected by the Northeast Blackout of 2003

That’s how a series of random, though common, events brought down the electric grid providing power to more than 55 million people in the Eastern United States and Canada in 2003.

But this article isn’t about the problems brownouts pose, it’s about the solution: demand response.

Because reliability is a key tenant of the utility business model, they do a lot to prevent any type of blackout. Luckily, electricity demand can be predicted according to expected weather, day of the week, time of year, etc. In order to meet this demand fluctuation, utilities must build power infrastructure capable of meeting peak-of-the-peak demand, which leads to an astonishing amount of capital investment which lays idle for most of the year.

Electricity demand is predictable.

Electricity consumption usually peaks in the early evening. Consumption is constantly watched and the amount of energy let onto the grid is adjusted accordingly. Utilities gather a lot of data to make estimates of the demand at any point in the current day. Power companies also charge more for peak power in part to pay for the peaking power plants and in part to incentivize use at another time of day.

“It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Utilities are good at making these predictions because it is critical to their business, but they don’t like wasting capital on power plants which only run 4 hours a day. There is, however, an elegant solution. If the peak hours of demand are 4:00-6:00pm, minimize power use during that period. In the Energy Policy Act of 2005 the U.S. Department of Energy was mandated to study demand response and report on its benefits.

The basic idea is that if we can level off the peak electricity demand and shift part of that load to other parts of the day (preferably the low-load nighttime) we will 1) pay less for power, and 2) build fewer peaking power plants. In the same way that you may use an automated timer to water your lawn at night instead of during ‘peak play’ hours of daylight, we’ll run the dishwasher, drying machine, etc at night instead of the early evening when there are thousands of other people doing it too.

A friend of mine operates a ski resort in New Hampshire that pumps water uphill into a reservoir at night when electricity is cheap and runs the water through a turbine during the day when power is expensive to offset its own electrical costs. For more on pumped-storage hydroelectricity, click here. The idea is basically the same with demand response, if something isn’t a priority, wouldn’t you prefer to wait and pay less to do it at night? This can be achieved through automation, like your water sprinkler mentioned above, or by behavioral changes.

Filed under: centralized, electricity, demand side management, utilities

The break up: utility decoupling

Not all power plants look this captivating.

This post is part of a collection on the electric power sector. See the post Electric Feel: how to flip the power sector on its head for more.

Power providers have little incentive to sell less power, but state regulators have a couple tricks up their sleeves to make it profitable to do so. Many states “decouple” their utilities’ profits from how much they sell. The process is well described on Wikipedia,

In public utility regulation, decoupling refers to the disassociation of a utility’s profits from its sales of the energy commodity. Instead, a rate of return is aligned with meeting revenue targets, and rates are trued up or down to meet the target at the end of the adjustment period. This makes the utility indifferent to selling less product and improves the ability of energy efficiency and distributed generation to operate within the utility environment.

Ideally, utilities should be rewarded based on how well they meet their customers’ energy service needs. However, most current rate designs place the focus on commodity sales instead, tying a distribution company’s recovery of fixed costs directly to its commodity sales.

I know from experience with many state energy office directors and public utility commissioners that decoupling is a lot of work, and inserts the government into the electric power sector. But there aren’t many other well-formed alternatives: we know, also from experience, that utility deregulation doesn’t lead to lower prices.

It’s complicated, but deregulation accomplishes something big: it shifts the utility paradigm from that of product provider to service provider. Ala they are no longer rewarded solely for quantity (commodity), but for keeping the lights on (service), the company profits even if it pursues the sale of less energy through efficiency or the use of distributed power – which would have previously cut into profits. Climate Progress has a detailed description of the New England ISO’s Forward Capacity Market and how that drives demand for efficiency  which Joe Romm describes as “Utility decoupling on steroids”.

Filed under: centralized, electricity, decoupling, utilities

Electric Feel: how to flip the power sector on its head

Transmission lines allow the ill effects of power generation to be hidden hundreds of miles away.

My boss said to me a few weeks ago, “If we were going to design the electric grid today from scratch, it wouldn’t look anything like it does now.” He’s right, think about it: right now we overbuild property-value-depressing power plants and transmission lines to meet the “peak of the peak” demand; pollute our air and water; and destroy the environment to produce electricity. There are many regulatory structures and financing mechanisms which achieve these two goals while lowering greenhouse gas emissions and electrics bills.

In order to mount a serious effort to mitigate climate change, we must de-carbonize our electric sector. This collection of articles will focus on several topics:

• Utility decoupling;
• Demand-side management;
• The smart grid; and
• Distributed generation

No matter what you do to change the electric power sector you must strive towards the two goals which dictate how power generation companies do business:

• Keep prices low; and
• Keep reliability high

Let’s review the way our current electric system works:

1. A centralized power plant burns coal or natural gas, divides atoms or uses falling water to spin a turbine and produce electricity;
2. The transmission grid distributes that electricity over large distances, eventually delivering it to your home;
3. You (or rather, your appliances) consume electricity, you are charged according to how much you use.

It’s pretty simple. Large power plants provide economies of scale and drive down the price of electricity, while your interests are looked out for by your local public utility commission (PUC), which sets the prices your utility can charge. PUCs exist to prevent price gouging because utilities are effectively local monopolies. As a society we have more than a hundred years of legacy investment in this system. Only with trillions of dollars in government subsidies have we accomplished this massive feat of engineering. This simple system, however, is not the most efficient option (neither economically nor environmentally) we have available.

Filed under: centralized, electricity, decoupling, demand side management, distributed generation, smart grid

You can stop holding your breath now, finally

Edit: America has an obligation to act on global warming first. For more information see also The atmospheric bathtub: why we need to act first on climate legislation.

You can stop holding your breath now, finally. Not because we’ve passed a comprehensive climate bill; but rather because we haven’t – and we won’t for some time.

It’s upsetting that my second post would be about how myopic American politicians have killed any hope of a climate bill in President Obama’s first term, but so it goes. I understand why the President’s political opponents did what they did. An unpopular outgoing president fueled a groundswell of support for a young candidate and his party. I would have been scared too: with strong majorities in both houses, Democrats could pass almost anything they wanted, almost. If I were a member of the Republican leadership I would have done anything – which means to do nothing – to refuse any legislative victory to the President. Otherwise he might look like a strong leader, which I just couldn’t allow.

And that is what happened. Every agenda item was greeted with cries of tyranny and conspiracy; administrations officials, including the president himself, were derided as communist-socialist-apologists who want America to fail; and the party in power did nothing to expose these claims as vitriolic fear mongering, and so they grew out of control like an infectious disease.

I don’t care about any politics other than climate politics. Politicians have little incentive to be civil or to pursue the art of compromise. Demagoguery is the lay of the land. The science and urgency of global warming have been politicized, made toxic and damned to limbo. All the while we build more inertia into the climate system and ignore the effects: the heatwaves, the flooding, the crop failures.

Even if, in some alternate universe, Congress had the cajones to pass a climate bill this session, I don’t think they had the knowledge (of the science) to go far enough. Few in congress understand the threats to global stability and American economic interests posed by climate change. The difficulty we face now is that we need time to phase in a climate plan so as to not kneecap our economy, but we are critically short on that ingredient: time.

What will it take to bring climate policy to the forefront of American politics?

Filed under: american, politics

Arriving late to the Climate War

Many people in the climate policy realm have talked about the Climate War. It means different things to different people, but the idea is the same: global warming will make is making life difficult for everyone on Earth, and something must be done to preserve global stability.

My Climate War is the fight to become a carbon neutral (eventually carbon negative) society since not doing so means collapse. Through intelligent planning and ambitious action we can adapt to and mitigate climate change. Global warming is an affliction with no single remedy; many solutions are required to address many problems. No system operates in a vacuum, and solutions for different problems often compound, yielding impressive results.

Our economic system treats the atmosphere as an infinite dumping ground, without regard for the costs the effluent imposes on others. As your econ 101 teacher explained it to you, the factory that pollutes the river without regard for what is downstream has created an externality: it is not paying the full price of its waste – the people who live with it downstream are. Greenhouse gases are a waste product of our industrialized society, and though they have a negative impact they bear no price.

We are already on our back foot in the Climate War. Over the last 200 years we have built a staggering amount of inertia into the climate system, and we aren’t ready to absorb its effects. It will take everything we’ve got to avoid societal collapse. That’s scary and exciting, but there is no option.

Filed under: uncategorized, carbon neutral, climate war, externalities, stability