Solar Coming Standard

It’s interesting to see at least one of the big homebuilding companies starting to include solar panels as standard equipment in some of its subdivisions in California.  If this becomes a broader trend it could have major implications for the development of the solar industry, since the scale at which these developers build means a huge market for panels and the potential for considerable efficiencies in installation that could affect practices elsewhere as well.  The fact that KB is doing this at all is of course a testament to how much cheaper solar has gotten in recent years, and with this sort of thing going on it’s likely to continue to rapidly fall in price.  It’s a really exciting time for the solar industry right now.

Energy in Israel

I was recently in Israel for a few days, and while I was there I of course paid close attention to what I could see and hear about the energy situation there.  This is a particularly interesting time for energy in Israel, due to the recent discovery of the Leviathan field containing vast reserves of offshore natural gas in Israeli waters.  This has the potential to totally transform the country’s energy situation in numerous ways, most importantly by weaning it off of imported fuels for electricity generation and possibly for transportation as well.  Like the US, Israel currently depends primarily on coal to generate electricity.  (The change over time in fuel use is interesting.)  Unlike the US, however, Israel doesn’t have substantial domestic coal reserves and imports its coal from Russia.  There are numerous coal plants visible all through the country, including a whole string of them along the Mediterranean coast (one right next to each major city, basically).  This gas discovery offers the potential to convert those coal plants to burn gas instead, which is not difficult to do, and there would likely be plenty of gas left over to export.  Israel is also a major center for research into the development and implementation of electric cars, and it’s quite possible that wide deployment of electric cars in the near future would reduce the need to import oil at the same time as the switch to gas would remove the need to import coal, making Israel effectively self-sufficient for energy or “energy independent” as they say.

Becoming a net exporter rather than a net importer of fossil fuels would do wonders for Israel both economically and geopolitically, and its vibrant democratic system of government puts it in a good position to escape many “resource curse” problems associated with sudden mineral wealth, although the potential for “Dutch disease” to impact its agricultural and high-tech manufacturing sectors is an important caveat and something the government would do well to watch for.  Israel’s central bank is widely credited with effectively managing the global downturn and quickly returning the country to the robust economic growth that is very visible today, so it’s likely that it could also handle any problems that might start to arise because of the gas discovery.  Some disagree and have a more pessimistic take, however.

One thing that was really striking about seeing Israel is what an efficient country it is, especially compared to the US.  This is due in part to development patterns modeled more after Europe, but also to the basic fact that resources there are limited and people have to make do with what they have.  This is particularly the case with water.  Not all of Israel is a desert, and as in most countries that have deserts most of the people live in the non-desert part, but there is a lot of desert there, and in any case there isn’t a lot of water to go around and the amount of available water has been declining in recent years.  The importance of this is apparent particularly in the agricultural sector, where the Israelis have developed many remarkable innovations such as drip irrigation to conserve water and reduce losses to evaporation.  Another example, more relevant to energy, is the very widespread use of solar water heaters on the rooftops of buildings.  This is a relatively simple technology that has been around for a long time, but it has never really caught on in the US.  It doesn’t require any fuel, which makes it very efficient, and it’s particularly effective in a sunny climate like Israel’s.  Because of the use of these water heaters, relatively little of the gas from the Leviathan field will be needed for heating domestic water, and it will therefore remain available for electricity generation (which would need to be stepped up considerably if electric cars come into widespread use) or for export.  Some may still be needed for space heating; I don’t know how that is typically done.   Israel’s climate is very mild compared to most of Europe and the US, but it still gets cold enough in some areas that buildings would need to be heated for part of the year.

Interestingly, despite the widespread use of solar heating, there is very little use of solar for electricity generation so far, although that may be changing with the recent signing of a power purchase agreement for a 4.9 MW photovoltaic plant.  In conjunction with the switch from coal to gas, widespread installation of solar plants in the very sunny deserts would go a long way toward both reducing Israel’s dependence on foreign energy and reducing its carbon emissions.  It also seems that this sort of major change in the energy system is much easier to achieve in Israel than in the US, probably for a mix of reasons having to do with scale, priorities, and political culture.  In any case, it is (and will be) interesting to see how energy issues play out in a place with some of the same concerns that we see in the US and some very different ones.

Eleventh Hour

I hadn’t realized that the recent tax bill included extensions of both the treasury grant program for renewable energy and the ethanol subsidy program, but it makes sense that it would.  The renewable grants are very good, of course, while the ethanol subsidies remain a ridiculous boondoggle.  I think this is an okay result overall, though obviously not ideal.

Will the Senate Extend the Rewable Energy Grant Program?

It looks like some senators, not all of them very liberal, are pushing to extend the cash grants for renewable energy projects in lieu of tax credits that were included in the stimulus bill and are scheduled to expire at the end of this year.  If they succeed it would be a very good thing for the solar industry in particular, since solar projects have such high up-front costs.  The tax credits are in place through 2016, but they are less useful now that the economy is in the doldrums than they were a few years ago, and in general they are less useful for small developers in particular than the prospect of cash in hand that the grants represent.

This Is Huge

Ken Salazar has now approved the Blythe Solar Power Project, which at 1,000 MW capacity will be the largest solar plant in the world when it is completed.  As I’ve mentioned before, the Obama administration has been pushing to get a lot of these big solar plants on BLM land approved, but I’ve been keeping an eye on this one in particular because it’s the biggest of them all.  It’s quite impressive to see it go through the process so quickly.  It’s also impressive that it will be air-cooled; as John Fleck notes, and as I’ve also discussed before, water for cooling is one of the major issues with these big concentrated solar plants.  Because, unlike photovoltaic cells (i.e., solar panels), concentrated solar plants can only use direct rather than diffuse sunlight, they’re only really practical in very sunny areas like the desert Southwest.  Also unlike photovoltaics, however, concentrated solar works the same way fossil-fuel and nuclear plants do, which is by using heat to spin a turbine to generate power.  The difference is that the heat comes from solar radiation rather than burning fuel or triggering a nuclear reaction, but the fact that there’s still all this heat involved means that the plants need some sort of cooling mechanism.  The cheapest and easiest way to cool them is with water, but since they’re in the desert that can be a problem, especially for these big ones in the Mojave Desert where the main water source would be the rapidly diminishing Colorado River.  Dry cooling, which the Blythe plant will use instead, uses much less water but reduces plant efficiency.  With a plant this big, however, losing a little efficiency to save a lot of water is a reasonable tradeoff.

Navajo Energy Issues Hit the Big Time

The energy-related issues facing the Navajo Nation are complex and multifaceted, and I’ve discussed them in numerous posts.  Coal has long been a major part of Navajo life, both at the well-known and controversial coal mines on Black Mesa in Arizona and at other mines in New Mexico that get less attention.  In addition, oil and gas drilling in the off-reservation Checkerboard region of New Mexico and elsewhere has had substantial (and not always positive) effects on the lives of Navajo residents.  There’s also the history of uranium mining in many parts of the reservation and Checkerboard.  With changing conditions in the energy industry, the possibility of wind and solar development on the vast tracts of Navajo land is beginning to be discussed as well.

Now the New York Times seems to have noticed and published an article which is really quite good.  The complexity of these issues often leads outsiders to misunderstand and misinterpret what is going on, but this article hits most of the major issues and does a pretty good job of explaining how they are interrelated.  Unlike many articles by major news organizations, it also does a fairly good job of showing the diversity of Navajo opinion on these issues, although it doesn’t cover quite the whole spectrum of opinion; Navajos who are in favor of coal and other “dirty” energy sources are notably absent.  Still, the article avoids the common trap of quoting some random medicine man as if he speaks for all Navajos.

I also learned from the article that the EPA has issued a proposed rule on nitrous oxide emissions at the Four Corners Power Plant.  I have studied this issue quite a bit, but I hadn’t been keeping up with it lately.  Looking at the proposed rule, it seems the EPA has decided to require Selective Catalytic Reduction, which is the most effective and the most expensive of the technologies that it had been considering.  This shows that they are indeed quite serious about reducing haze in the area, and unconvinced by the howls of outrage from the utilities that own the plant.  This is still not quite the final rule; there is another round of public comment on the proposed rule until December 20, after which the EPA will consider the comments then issue the final rule.  The fact that they seem to have settled on SCR as the preferred technology at this point suggests that they will stick with it, however.  Note that it is restrictions on pollutants like this, rather than anything to do with carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases, that may well make coal power too expensive for many utilities to keep using.  The closing of the Mohave Generating Station was an early example of this, and while I doubt SCR will force FCPP to close, if it does that would be another sign that the age of coal may be beginning to wane.

Anyway, I’m not going to go through all the issues mentioned in the article, but it’s a good article and definitely worth reading, especially for those who don’t already know much about the subject.

I’ll Believe It When I See It

If this company has indeed developed a commercially viable way to make solar cells much cheaper, that would indeed be a huge boost to making solar cost-competitive with other energy sources.  And it’s quite possible that they have; ARPA-E seems to think the idea has potential, and they presumably know more about the technical side of these things than I do.  However, this part makes me bit leery:

The trick is to get the wafer out of the mold without breaking it. Company officials will not say just how they do that. The president of 1366 Technologies, Frank van Mierlo, predicted that the development would make solar power cheaper than coal power, although the technique has not yet been commercialized.

So, yeah.  I’m not going to be celebrating just yet.  Still, if this does end up being successfully implemented commercially that’ll definitely be a welcome development.  Solar has enormous potential just from the sheer amount of solar energy that hits the earth all the time, but current technology to capture that energy and convert it to a usable form is still way too expensive to implement on a really large scale.  It’s getting cheaper all the time, though, thanks to various technological innovations, and this certainly could be a further big step forward.  It’s just too early to tell, so I’d hold off on the celebratory news stories for now.

Moving Right Along

So it looks like Ken Salazar has given the final green light to the first two of several large solar projects in the Mojave Desert.  One is expected to generate 709 megawatts, which is huge for a solar plant.  For context, a typical coal plant generates 500 megawatts.  Of course, to generate that much power a solar plant has to be huge; this one covers 6,360 acres.  In contrast, even a big coal plant like the Big Bend Power Station in Florida, with a capacity of nearly 1,800 megawatts, covers only about 1,500 acres.  This is what people mean when they say solar power is land-intensive.  There’s no shortage of sunlight, but capturing enough of it to seriously displace coal and other fossil fuels would require vast amounts of land.  Of course, the BLM has vast amounts of land, much of it in very sunny areas such as the Mojave Desert, which is why these solar projects on BLM land are so important and it’s good to see them going forward.

Passive Houses

When it comes to energy policy, electricity and transportation tend to get the most attention, which is hardly surprising since those are the main uses of energy.  Heating, however, is perhaps the most obvious place to look for easy ways to reduce energy use, mostly because, at least in the US, buildings are notoriously inefficient and waste enormous amounts of energy through heating (and, to a lesser extent, cooling).  Building heating is mostly done with either fuel oil or natural gas, both fossil fuels with significant carbon dioxide emissions, and reducing those emissions is very hard to do because they are so small-scale and widely distributed.  Improved insulation would do an enormous amount to reduce energy use at negative cost, and is probably the biggest piece of low-hanging fruit out there.  Getting rid of fossil-fuel heating entirely, though a more expensive and daunting prospect than just improving insulation, is totally doable with solar thermal technology.

In that context, this article is interesting.  It describes the passive house approach to energy efficiency, which has become pretty popular in Europe, especially in Germany, but is just barely beginning to catch on in the US.  These houses are built with a focus on insulation so that they require much less energy to heat.  The catch, of course, is that the up-front cost is much higher than for standard construction techniques because of the different materials needed.  This is more of a problem in the US, where passive houses are not a large enough portion of new construction to spur the creation of a network of materials procurement to lower the cost of building, but such a network has developed in Europe and passive houses there aren’t much more expensive than standard ones.  The whole thing reminds me of the Earthship movement, which has a similar approach wrapped in different rhetoric.

Obviously, focusing on new construction, as these approaches necessarily do, is only a small part of the solution to energy concerns, since there are so many buildings out there already that aren’t going away any time soon.  But it is one place to look for straightforward gains while working on the harder problems in other sectors.

Missing the Sewage for the Trees

Via John Fleck, it seems there’s been a breakthrough compromise on one of the contentious solar-power projects in the California desert.  These disputes tend to revolve around the water needed to cool the plants, an issue I’ve discussed before.  In this particular case, the company proposing the plant came to an agreement with the California Energy Commission and the local towns of Rosamund and California that resolved the issue.  Part of the agreement, and the part the LA Times article mostly focuses on, involves the company agreeing to cut down a bunch of tamarisks in exchange for being allowed to use well water to cool the plant when it first starts up.  The tamarisk is a notoriously thirsty invasive species that has been a huge problem throughout the West recently, so it’s not surprising that it’s the tree agreement that the article prefers to headline (literally).  A careful look at the story, however, shows that the tree agreement is really a peripheral part of the deal, which is mainly about the plant buying treated wastewater from the towns for cooling after the initial start-up period.

The tamarisk thing looks like it’s mainly a publicity stunt on the part of the company.  The wastewater thing, though, is a big deal, and it sets an important precedent for how these disputes might be resolved in the future.  The important thing to keep in mind about this is that while power plants use lots of water, it doesn’t have to be good water.  Using reclaimed wastewater works fine.  Indeed, the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant in Arizona has been cooled with wastewater from Phoenix for decades.  Cooling power plants with wastewater is attractive because it provides a solution for dealing with both wastewater disposal and plant water requirements without impinging on the increasingly urgent need to conserve high-quality water for human and agricultural use.

This agreement is very important, then, but not for the reason implied by the article.  Tamarisk eradication is all well and good, but this story is all about the sewage.