Blog Archive for July, 2011
75 mpg … in the 1970s?
From Mother Earth News - the car of the future?
As the Obama administration announces ambitious new fuel economy standards for America’s automakers, it’s worth reflecting on how advanced our cars have become. Today’s cars are more powerful, more efficient, and safer than ever, in large part because regulations have mandated it.
So it’s hard to imagine a future where cars average 54 mpg. If, after all these years, the best we can manage is an average of 27 mpg, how could we possibly double that in 15 years? Will technology move that quickly?
This morning, I came across an article from a 1979 issue of Mother Earth News about a hobbyist who’d converted his Opel CT into a hybrid, using an electric motor with a lawnmower engine to charge the batteries as backup – a similar setup to the Chevy Volt. The car, the owner claimed, topped out at 90 mph, had virtually unlimited range, and could get 75 mpg.
Granted, a vintage Opel is by no means safe, by modern standards (or even by 1970s standards). The point is that technology isn’t necessarily the barrier to higher mileage.
John German, a former automotive engineer, recently wrote a column for The Hill accusing automakers of “crying wolf” over stricter economy standards — noting a history of dire predictions over federal regulations — and explains how it’s market forces and institutional culture that hold back innovation:
If you hear automakers grumble that they cannot meet these fuel efficiency standards, don’t believe them — they are much better at innovation than they’re letting on. It is important to understand how risk adverse automotive engineers have to be. Just misplacing the accelerator pedal cost Toyota billions of dollars. Quality constraints are so severe that engineers are mired in a very conservative mindset that causes them to always underestimate what they can accomplish. Auto manufacturers not only have a plethora of new alternative fuel technologies to explore and develop, they also have plenty of on-the-shelf technologies they are in the process of deploying to make cars more fuel-efficient.
So a higher mileage standard doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll all be forced to drive around in kludged-together Opels. The automakers might have a few tricks up their sleeves that we’re not aware of.
Chicago coal ordinance to be reintroduced
An ordinance that will effectively shut down Chicago’s two urban coal plants will be reintroduced at the city council today.
Alderman Danny Solis and Joe Moore announced this morning that the Clean Power Ordinance, which would require major pollution reductions at the Crawford and Fisk power plants, now has 31 co-sponsors, well beyond the 26 votes it needs to pass.
Reporter Kari Lydersen is covering the meeting — check back later today for updates.
Can electric cars revive Michigan?
A recent USA Today story gives an overview of the progress American automakers have made in recent years, and also the challenges ahead. While larger factors such as cutting labor costs and restructuring supply lines (and, let’s be honest, building cars that aren’t junk) will be the main driving forces behind the industry’s revival, electric and hybrid cars will also be part of the picture.
What [GM CEO Dan] Akerson finds exciting, and believes is a mark of GM’s integrity and a harbinger of its success, is that the company continued to work on the controversial Chevy Volt extended-range electric car even during the distractions of Chapter 11.
“I want you to think of God Bless America playing in the background,” he says, knowing how this will sound: “Great nations make things. They don’t flip hamburgers and live on class-action suits. They make things.”
That ambition has also prompted a coalition of businesses, advocacy groups and individuals to kick off a campaign that it hopes will help revive Michigan’s auto industry by promoting electric cars.
The Built by Michigan campaign was formally launched with a series of events last week, and will promote policies to provide incentives for EVs – including rebates for car buyers (a bill proposed by U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabanow) and clean fuel standards.
One of the more interesting features from the site is this handy map, which shows all of the manufacturers in the electric car supply chain:
View Electric Vehicles: Built By Michigan in a larger map
It’s a good reminder that the auto industry extends well beyond the final assembly lines — all those parts have to come from somewhere, and Michigan, which has lost more than 120,000 auto industry jobs since 2006, could use the work.
You can also follow the campaign on Twitter.
Tracking energy efficiency policy
Today, reporter Dan Haugen takes a look at how states are turning to financial incentives – rather than mandates – to encourage utilities to promote energy efficiency.
Utilities have no market incentive to convince people to use less of their product – in order to make more money, they have to keep building more power plants and transmission lines. In the long run, saving energy is more cost effective, so state regulators have come up with a variety of schemes to reward utilities for selling less power.
Minnesota’s new incentive structure helped Xcel Energy save 416 gigawatt hours of electricity last year – a record.
But what’s going on in other states?
Haugen recommends the Edison Foundation’s State Electric Efficiency Regulatory Frameworks report (PDF), which was just released in June. The report includes state-by-state summaries of the types of efficiency incentives that are being used.
It’s a little wonky, but now that you know the difference between a Revenue Decoupling Mechanism and a Lost Revenue Adjustment Mechanism, you should be able to sort it out
Not in my (desert) backyard, either
California dreamin'.
Two stories today highlight the efforts of organized wind farm opposition in Michigan and Minnesota. Coincidentally, another article from the Los Angeles Times over the weekend looks at similar backlash to wind and solar projects in desert areas of California and Arizona.
The anti-development arguments will be familiar to anyone who follows these things. But in the sun-drenched southwest, there’s the additional angle of distributed vs. centralized energy:
Activists there and elsewhere say that the fight is more than a classic case of “not in my backyard” resistance. Large, remote projects aren’t the only solution to the nation’s energy woes, they say.
City-dwellers could produce just as much clean electricity without the transmission hassles, they said, using rooftop solar panels, small wind turbines, fuel cells and other adaptable forms of renewable energy generation.
“Large, remote projects.” Isn’t that the case with most types of electricity generation? Some cities get their energy from local, municipal dams and power plants, but generally, big generating stations are located in rural areas far from the people that consume the energy.
A recent editorial in the Wichita Eagle makes a similar criticism of the controversial Sunflower coal plant proposed for western Kansas:
The Sunflower coal plant has been the subject of exhausting legislative and legal fights for five years, in part because Colorado would get most of the power while Kansas would get the air pollution and provide the water.
That’s an important social dynamic – rural culture is steeped in the mythical ideal of self-reliance (I know this, having grown up in small towns). So, it’s understandable that people in these communities would be resistant to a large, industrial-scale project that will primarily benefit city dwellers. That’s an oversimplification, but it’s nevertheless part of the equation that is often ignored.
In the L.A. Times story, Tom Soto, a California environmental activist, offers this salient warning:
“These large projects enter at their own peril without involving the community. Just because they’re renewables instead of landfills doesn’t mean they’re off the hook.”
Photo by Xavier de Jaureguiberry via Creative Commons
New FERC rules intended to ease grid upgrades
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission released a ruling today that will enable grid upgrades to help bring more renewable energy to market.
The new rules build upon changes approved in December for the Midwest, allowing costs for transmission upgrades supporting “multi value projects,” i.e., those that enable states to meet renewable energy mandates, to be passed on to consumers. The changes today essentially apply that standard nationwide.
In a column posted yesterday on Grist, Bill White of the Energy Future Coalition explains further:
While FERC’s rule will be hundreds of pages long, it is likely to focus on just two topics: how regions plan and pay for transmission. For decades, planning and cost allocation have been the graveyards where hopes of building modern regional grids capable of delivering inexpensive clean power to customers have gone to die.
Cost allocation — the formulas that decide how ratepayers share the costs of these large investments in our infrastructure — has traditionally been simple and straightforward: Everyone pays according to how much they benefit. FERC’s new rule will not change that; it will simply help regions account for all the benefits that transmission provides — including, for the first time, the benefits of meeting state clean energy standards. The agency has signaled that its guiding principle will be to ensure that those who do not benefit from transmission do not pay for it.
Not everyone supports the change. In an op-ed published in The Hill last week, Bruce Edelston, a consultant for utilities, says the new rules will unfairly burden consumers:
Michigan consumers may be the first to experience FERC- approved sticker shock — a $500 million a year surtax on their utility bills. In December, FERC issued an order that socializes the cost of certain new transmission lines across 13 Midwestern states. Michigan could be forced to pay 20 percent of at least $16 billion for new wind farms in other states that will provide virtually no benefits to Michigan consumers.
…
The market should determine what generation and transmission should be built. Instead, under its proposed rules, FERC would pick winners and losers, favoring remote renewable projects that require a transmission build out costing hundreds of billions of dollars over cheaper and possibly greener energy projects built closer to home.
White dismisses those claims, pointing out that transmission costs represent a small portion of customers’ bills, and suggests utilities are just looking out for their own bottom line:
It’s easy to see why these utilities are opposed to transmission reforms and are supporting a transmission bottleneck of their own: to keep collecting billions in unnecessary costs every year from customers trapped in congested and uncompetitive regions. Many Americans currently do not have access to competitive energy supplies. Many regions, including much of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, suffer from high congestion costs. And incumbent utilities benefit from the inflated electric bills of ratepayers in these markets. Transmission has the power to open up uncompetitive energy markets to competition from cheaper forms of energy like wind.
In a news release, FERC Chariman Jon Wellinghoff called the decision “an important step forward.”
“Our action today promotes efficient and cost-effective transmission planning and the fair allocation of costs for new transmission facilities. These changes will provide consumers with greater access to efficient, low-cost electricity.”
Photo by Seattle Municipal Archives via Creative Commons
Mapping renewable energy in Wisconsin
RENEW Wisconsin, through the wonders of intern-ology, has just unveiled two new Google Maps showing the location and type of every, or at least *nearly* every, renewable power installation in the state (disclosure: RENEW Wisconsin is a member of RE-AMP, which also supports Midwest Energy News).
There is a statewide map, showing all the biomass, wind, solar and biogas projects statewide, and another map that ranks installations by county.
Interestingly, the majority of those power sources are solar, and not surprisingly, there seems to be a direct correlation between solar power systems and population density. That illustrates one of the advantages of solar panels – they can be placed closer to the people using the energy, as opposed to wind turbines, which are most effective in remote areas.
While the dataset is exhaustively researched, it’s not necessarily 100% complete, so if you spot something that’s missing, let them know.
Baby, it’s hot outside
Yes, your grandparents had it tougher: Residents of St. Paul sleep outside during a heat wave in 1936. (Photo via Minnesota Historical Society)
After enduring a brutal winter, upper Midwesterners don’t cotton much to complaining about the heat. But with temperatures in the 90s compounded with record humidity, one can be forgiven for grousing a bit.
Paul Douglas of the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that yesterday, Moorhead, Minnesota was the hottest spot on planet Earth, with a heat index of 134 degrees.
But it’s not just weather records that are falling. The unbearable conditions have air conditioners running non-stop, leading to unprecedented electricity demand. Some headlines:
South Dakota: NorthWestern Energy surpasses demand record (Associated Press)
Wisconsin: MGE customers set another power usage record (Wisconsin State Journal)
Iowa: MidAmerican, Alliant report record electric demand (Cedar Rapids Gazette)
Minnesota: Xcel set new power demand record Monday (Star Tribune)
While there have been power outages throughout the region, most of the utilities seem confident they can meet demand, which is expected to peak yet again today. But as a changing climate makes these “heat storms” (Douglas’ term) more likely, we’ll need to find ways to continue to meet (or reduce) this increasing demand.
Wouldn’t want to get left out in the heat.
What climate and the debt ceiling have in common
Nobody's wrong if everybody's right.
This past weekend, WNYC’s On The Media looked at the media narratives surrounding the debt ceiling showdown.
What does that have to do with climate change?
Take a look at this:
As U.S. News and World Report’s chief business correspondent Rick Newman wrote recently, “Outside the Beltway there is some consensus. Many economists, corporate CEOs and those on Wall Street can agree that the debt ceiling situation needs to be resolved, and quick, with a combination of spending cuts and increased taxation.”
The economic consensus, though, is buried in the drama of the political showdown. The question is if there is so little to debate, why obsess about the debate.
Rick Newman says that all the coverage the public needs is there, if the audience is willing to sift through all the irrelevancies to find it. But the media are once again trapped in the losing proposition of giving equal time and equal respect to all parties.
I’m not the only one making that connection. Host Bob Garfield continues:
What if, and this is just a suppose, but what if this is a case, as we have seen in other issues – let’s say climate change, for example, where one side is right, the other side is just flatly wrong, but because the situation is so politicized the press can’t just categorically say, you know, this side is right? Let’s just say what the nation requires right now is a combination of deep spending cuts and modest tax gains. What if reality has a liberal bias?
In March, Raymond Pingree of Ohio State University released a study showing that politicized coverage of health care not only left readers less informed, but also more apathetic and disengaged in the policy process.
Which, then as now, was also clearly evident as a primary source of public ambivalence to climate change. And, as per yesterday’s post, unquestioning repetition of political talking points about light bulb efficiency standards has also led to a great deal of confusion and agitation.
It’s important to make sure news stories include multiple perspectives. But not at the expense of accuracy.
Photo by John Lawford via Creative Commons
Light bulb wars: Where it all began
Give me exposed filaments, or give me death.
Last week while I was vacationing in exotic Nebraska, I had a phone conversation with Poynter’s Matt Hochberg about the great light bulb controversy. Hochberg, who was as baffled as I was that a bipartisan energy law passed in 2007 had suddenly turned into a major political wedge issue four years later, has put together a wonderfully complete and concise summary of the controversy.
Hochberg looked back and found that, not surprisingly, it was conservative web sites such as World Net Daily (which today is claiming to have “irrefutable proof” that President Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery) and bloggers like Michelle Malkin who were key early forces in crafting the narrative that the government was coming, perhaps in sleek black helicopters, to take your light bulbs away.
For instance, why do many people believe (incorrectly) that the 2007 law bans the possession of incandescent bulbs? A 2008 column by WND founder and bumper sticker entrepreneur Joseph Farah may have had something to do with it:
Did you know the congressional busybodies in Washington have actually passed a law that will ban the sale and possession of incandescent light bulbs a few years from now?
…
I hope others see the importance of this issue. If the federal government can take away your incandescent light bulbs, is there anything the federal government can’t take away from you?
And what about the mistaken belief that the law will force us to buy compact fluorescent bulbs? Perhaps, in part, because this was implied (but not stated directly) by Malkin back in 2007, the day after the law was passed.
Tucked into the legislation is a provision that mandates the phase-out of the 125-year-old incandescent bulb in the next four to 12 years in favor of a new generation of trendy, supposedly energy-efficient Gorebulbs.
As Hochberg points out, there’s plenty of room for debate over whether it makes sense for the government to set efficiency standards for bulbs, just like they do for refrigerators, TVs, washing machines, and automobiles.
What we got instead, however, was yet another culture war — sucking away vast amounts of media attention and political capital at a time when we have little of either to spare.
And we all remember what the first casualty of war is, right?
Photo by mastahanky via Creative Commons
