What’s geothermal again?

October 29, 2009

By Elisa Wood

Some green energy sources seem to have charisma; others struggle for public attention with little success.

Solar energy is an “it” technology, as evidenced once again by the tremendous participation in the annual Solar Power International conference in Anaheim, California this week (Oct. 27-29). Twice as many companies (945) are displaying their wares in the Expo Hall this year, despite the still lagging economy. And overall attendance is expected to break last year’s record, itself a record breaker.

Even on Main Street, ask pretty much anyone and they know solar, probably like it, and see it as an economy builder.

Ask the same people about geothermal heat pumps and there is a good chance they won’t know what you’re talking about. Or they may give an answer that confuses the appliances with geothermal geyser power plants. For whatever reason, the concept of extracting heat from the ground has yet to capture the public or political imagination as much as extracting it from the sun.

Yet, geothermal heat pumps could have a significant impact on our energy supply. They can be installed pretty much anywhere there is a building. And if we used them to maximum potential in the United States, we could avoid building 91-105 gigawatts of generation, nearly half of the new power we will need in 2030, according to the US Department of Energy.

Homeowners who consider then discard the idea often cite the high upfront installation costs. Yet the same argument could easily be made about solar photovoltaic panels. So why is geothermal an also ran technology?

One problem, according to the DOE, is that the heat pump industry needs to collect and disseminate more solid data on heat pumps. Work underway by the Chewonki Foundation, an educational institute in Maine, moves in this direction. With a grant from the Maine Public Utilities Commission, Chewonki is monitoring and measuring the performance of a newly installed heat pump system at its 11,000 square-foot meeting hall. The state is looking for an alternative to heating buildings with oil, a relatively common fuel in Maine. Geothermal heat pumps may prove to be that alternative. http://www.onsetcomp.com/resources/white_papers

This is not to imply that the geothermal heat pump industry is not growing. To the contrary, US shipments of geothermal heat pumps grew 40 percent last year, according to a report released this month by the Energy Information Administration.http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/ghpsurvey/geothermalrpt.pdf. The industry is very much a domestic jobs builder. Most of the systems shipped in the US last year where manufactured here — 416,019 tons – with the remaining 86 tons from China. Sixteen percent of US product was exported.

Still, the geothermal heat pump industry is a small one, representing $319 million last year. Compare this to a domestic solar PV cell and module market of $1.72 billion in 2007 (2008 figures are not yet available from EIA).

Of course, it was just a few years ago that solar conferences were drawing hundreds, not tens of thousands of people, as Solar Power International does now. So who knows? Perhaps it’s not far-fetched to imagine the term” geothermal” rolling off the tongue of the average consumer, as easily as “solar” does today.

Visit Elisa Wood at http://www.realenergywriters.com/ and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

It’s the environment, stupid

By Elisa Wood

October 22, 2009

If Harry Truman were running for president today, he’d probably ‘Give ‘em Green,’ rather than ‘Give ‘em Hell.’ Bill Clinton’s campaign slogan would be, ‘It’s the environment, stupid.’ And Herbert Hoover might be promising a solar panel on every roof, rather than a chicken in every pot – and the pot would sit on a smart-metered stove, powered by a plug-in hybrid, eligible for renewable energy certificates.

Today, green credentials count. Hardly a day goes by without a mayor, governor or legislator claiming some sort of first, best or highest green energy goal.

That’s why the state energy efficiency scorecard, released this week by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, is significant. It carries political currency.

Bragging rights go to California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Oregon and New York,* the top five states (in that order) doing good by energy efficiency. Some red faces, however, might be found in Nebraska, Alabama, Mississippi, North Dakota, and Wyoming, the group that ACEEE says “most needs to improve.”

States are expected to continue their pursuit of energy efficiency into the next decade. The ACEEE reports that utility ratepayer-funds for efficiency will likely grow from $3.1 billion in 2008 to $5.4-$12 billion in 2020.

What’s most interesting is that so much money and effort is being put into energy efficiency now – during the Great Recession – when states face deficits. This defies conventional behavior: Historically, Americans worry about the environment only when the economy is sound. It appears that green energy advocates have successfully imprinted in the American psyche a link between renewable energy and efficiency and economic prosperity.

“This growing and deepening commitment to energy efficiency is so strong that the current recession has not put a dent in the vast majority of state programs,” says Steven Nadel, ACEEE executive director. “And that is for good reason: Energy efficiency is the only resource that can actually reduce energy consumption while growing the economy — making efficiency the ‘first fuel’ states can use to balance their energy portfolios.”

So we find ourselves in a kinder, greener nation, one with no electric meter left behind, where we walk softly and carry a big wind tower…

*At about the same time the ACEEE released the report, New York announced plans to shift Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative money, slated for clean energy programs, toward reducing its deficit. This may have reduced New York’s ranking in the eyes of the environmental community.

Visit Elisa Wood at http://www.realenergywriters.com/ and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

Efficiency left out of cap and trade

By Elisa Wood

October 15, 2009

Waxman/Markey’s climate change bill is about 1,400 pages. Its length and complexity, alone, provides fuel for its opponents. Would it stand a better chance of enactment if it encompassed less?

For example, would it have been wiser if Congress pursued cap and trade one year and a renewable energy standard another? I’ve asked this question a lot during interviews the past few weeks, and received a range of responses. But what I found most enlightening, at least from an energy efficiency perspective, was a webinar offered by Bill Prindle, vice president at ICF International. http://www.icfi.com/markets/energy/webinar/webinar-archive.asp.

Here’s what I took away: Energy efficiency helps the carbon reduction cause. But the carbon reduction cause doesn’t do much for efficiency.

Most versions of cap and trade programs now on the table do not recognize the value of demand-side resources in reducing emissions. Credit goes to emissions reductions at the power plant level, not at the retail customer level. So while my new, efficient heat pump will cut my energy use and therefore carbon emissions, this action is not acknowledged anywhere in a cap and trade system. Cap and trade offers no financial reward to the consumer or business that invests in energy efficiency measures.

In a perfect world, lawmakers would rethink cap and trade to encompass demand-side efficiency. But it appears that political and technical obstructions make that difficult. This is bad news – and downright odd – given that energy efficiency is widely acknowledged to be the cheapest way to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

So what’s to be done?

Prindle describes the need to enact polices that complement cap and trade. This is where a national renewable energy standard comes into play. Within Waxman/Markey, the standard requires not only a certain percentage of renewables in a state’s energy mix, but also certain amount of efficiency – a so-called energy efficiency portfolio standard. With a standard in place, efficiency increases, energy use declines, and fewer greenhouse gases are emitted – without any cap and trade influence. As is often the case, the states have already jumped out in front of federal policy: 19 now have such energy efficiency portfolio standards.

A bill with just a cap and trade scheme, one without a portfolio standard, eliminates a powerful way to reduce carbon emissions. So perhaps the 1,400 pages of Waxman/Market are justified. The verdict, of course, is out on whether or not Congress will pass an energy bill this year. Much has been made of the complexity and length of health care reform legislation. Expect the same when, and if, the energy bill comes under public scrutiny. We’ll see what pages make it beyond the cutting room floor.

Visit Elisa Wood at http://www.realenergywriters.com/ and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

Energy head tilters for this week

By Elisa Wood

October 8, 2009

I’ve been writing about energy for 20 years. And during those years, I’ve heard many out-of-the box concepts and witnessed some surprising trends. But it seems that lately head-tilting news comes along more and more frequently, a sign I think of how quickly innovation is occurring in the electric power industry.

Below are three ideas that caught my attention this week as I covered the industry. Perhaps you have your own head-tilters to add. Please do!

By the way, two decades ago solar and wind power were pretty much oddball ideas. Consider that before judging any comments.

• A 14-year-old boy in an impoverished African village, who has never heard of the Internet, built a working windmill out of scrap material

Too poor to attend school anymore William Kamkwamba went to a US-sponsored library to try to keep up on his learning. There the Malawian boy found diagrams for building windmills and painstakingly followed the directions to bring electricity and water to his famine-stricken village. He scavenged for junk and found old bike parts, pipes and fans to make it work. His fellow villagers thought he was crazy until he succeeded. His story is chronicled in his book, “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.” http://williamkamkwamba.typepad.com/

There is some irony here that an attempt has been underway for 10 years to build offshore wind power on wealthy Cape Cod, with no luck. Maybe the region needs to hire Kamkwamba as a consultant.

• Baby you can drive my combined heat and power car

We’ve all heard that combined heat and power is a highly efficient approach to heating, cooling and electrifying schools, stores, office buildings, factories, hospitals, and multi-famly housing complexes. But cars? Thomas Blakeslee, president of the Clearlight Foundation, posits that we could achieve far greater fuel efficiency if, rather than feeding ethanol directly into cars, we used it to fuel combined heat and power plants that would in turn electrify cars. The efficiency would be so great, we could drive these electric cars 22 times farther on CHP electricity than if we used the same acre of corn to make ethanol. http://www.clrlight.org/CHPethanol.htm

• Energy efficiency: The invisible hand that Adam Smith never saw

Energy efficiency is often discussed in terms of how much money it can save a household or business on utility bills. But how about what it can save an economy? Environment Northeast issued an interesting report in September that investigates what efficiency can do for state gross product. The macroeconomic report found that every $1 million invested by a state in energy efficiency increases gross state product by $7 million. http://environmentnortheast.org/

Visit Elisa Wood at http://www.realenergywriters.com/ and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

Is small business left out of the EE boom?

By Elisa Wood

October 1, 2009

The US has about 29.6 million small businesses and they employ over half of the nation’s private sector. They hire 40% of our high tech workers, make up 97.3% of our exporters, and generate most of our innovations, according to SCORE. http://www.score.org/small_biz_stats.html

Still, we hear small business often say it gets the shaft when it comes to public policy; it just doesn’t have the political clout of big business.

What’s this got to do with energy efficiency? I’ve been wondering – suspecting actually – that small business is getting left out of the energy efficiency boom sweeping the United States.

I admit that my evidence is purely empirical and cursory. I have been trying to collect case studies from the Eastern states for an energy efficiency guide that I am collaborating on with my colleagues at RealEnergyWriters.com. I’ve put out a request for the case studies from small businesses to my many good sources, as well as through the social media.

I’ve received profiles of schools, colleges, hospitals, and manufacturing facilities – all non-profits or large energy users. Where I wonder is the dry cleaner, the Mom & Pop shop, the car wash?

I don’t mean to imply there are no small business efficiency programs. Several people have directed me to Efficiency Maine’s program, which does not target small businesses per se, but does serve many. I’ve also received some great examples from United Illuminating in Connecticut.

Manufacturers and data centers are low-hanging fruit that energy service companies like to pursue. Homeowners have consumer groups pressing state regulators on their behalf. But who is pushing before state utility commission’s to be sure small business gets its fair share of the vast amount of efficiency funding now being distributed?

Perhaps the fault lies with small business, itself. Overwhelmed by trying to operate in this economy, do small business owners have the time to think about energy efficiency? It’s likely few even realize funds and financing mechanisms exist in several states to help them with upfront capital costs.

Small business may well fall victim to some of the market failures Environment Northeast points out in its October 1 report, “Energy Efficiency: Engine of Economic Growth.” http://www.env-ne.org/

These failures are:

* Liquidity Constraints – when a consumer or business has inadequate access to capital to purchase efficient equipment or improve building energy performance

* Split Incentives – when the owner of a piece of equipment or building (the landlord) does not pay the energy bill and is thus unlikely to invest in efficiency improvements that would benefit the resident/renter

* Information Problems – when purchasers do not know the future energy costs of a product or property and are thus unlikely to invest in the more efficient option with a higher upfront cost

* Behavioral Problems, such as bounded rationality – when the complexity of a decision is beyond the ability of a consumer to make an economically optimal choice.

So this blog does not really reach a conclusion, but asks a question: Are small businesses getting left out of the energy efficiency boom? If so, what’s the problem? If not, please direct me to success stories!

Visit Elisa Wood at http://www.realenergywriters.com/ and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.