America the Schizoid?
The contradictions that are slowing down our progress towards a green-energy recovery and climate recovery were on full display last week in our nation's capitol. On the one hand, you had the Southern Company, its polluter allies among power companies, and the ultimate parties with an interest in clinging to the past (Big Oil and Coal) successfully forcing major weakening provisions into the House Commerce Committee's version of climate legislation, and protesting loudly that cutting even 17 percent of our greenhouse pollution in 11 years would be a bridge too far.
But while Congress was mired in a debate about the past vs. the future, the Sierra Club's first Climate Recovery Symposium featured the rest of America eagerly analyzing the urgency -- the opportunity -- and the means, of doing it much, much faster.
We had giants in the field of biology like Donald Kennedy and Tom Lovejoy -- chair and co-chair of the Club's Climate Recovery Partnership, which sponsored the Symposium -- again laying out the impact of unchecked climate deterioration on the ecosystems on which human beings depend. Dr. John Sperling, the founder of the University of Phoenix, laid out his vision for how to creatively combine solar and wind power to make renewable electricity truly "dispatchable," and a group of a half dozen venture capitalists in the audience grilled him intently on the technical arcana of the idea. (They concluded it made sense.) Kleiner Perkins partner John Gage, GridPoint CEO Peter Corsell, Bluewater Wind's Peter Mandelstam, and Sunpower CTO Tom Dinwoodie debated how best to combine entrepreneurship, grass-roots advocacy, and public-private partnerships to rush clean, low-carbon energy sources to market. Lovejoy and John Moussouris of the VenEarth Group showed how by restoring ecosystems we can actually reduce the CO2 overload in the atmosphere and truly restore the climate -- Moussouris pointed out that just using biomass to create a small quantity of charcoal -- less than an inch -- to mix with every acre of the world's farmlands would actually reduce atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm -- restoring it to preindustrial concentrations.
No, we didn't ignore the politics. We heard from the Obama administration (EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson). Speakers as diverse as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and American Wind Energy Association CEO Denise Bode warned that unless the American people and the Obama administration demand that Congress break with the energy sources of the past, the green economic recovery and the hope of a healthy climate may be strangled in the cradle.
But we spent most of our time learning how much fun this could be -- maybe Congress should have a similar session!
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Turn Future Cars into Cash Cows. They can Become Power Plants.
Revolutionary self-powered engines and generators are expected to replace the need to plug-in a plug-in hybrid. A 2 kW generator is on the horizon. It will eventually demonstrate a compact, inexpensive, capability to end the need to plug-in.
Since no fossil fuel or battery recharge is required, existing engines are likely to become obsolete.
Consumer purchasing patterns could begin to reflect a new reality, with the market deciding most future cars will never need fossil fuel.
When a substantial number of vehicles powered by such systems fill a parking garage, wireless power transmission technology can turn it into a multi-megawatt power plant.
The cost of many vehicles might be paid for by utilities, as they purchase electricity whenever needed.
The parked cars, trucks and buses, each become decentralized power plants - a rapid, cost-effective alternative to the many tough and costly challenges of constructing new coal burning and nuclear power generation facilities.
Auto makers will have no trouble selling fuel free cars that need no batteries or recharge, and can pay for themselves.
Imagine the potential for stimulating the world economy.
Auto makers and utilities have a unique opportunity to lead the nation and the world.
For truly distributed energy production, we should cover all the flat roofs in sunny locales with PV. Those same areas typically have huge expanses of asphalt set aside for parking and they get really hot in the summer. Cover some of the parking areas to provide shade and a place for more PV (thin film). Add charging stations to recoup some of the costs. Luxury car owners would probably pay to park in the shade without even using any of the electricity generated.
Until we get cheap BIPV, residential solar will remain a small part of the mix. Most households are better off planting shade trees and investing in energy conservation.
If windmills produce electricity we are loosing around 50% of wind energy on resistance of batteries, when we charge them. When we use batteries around 50% of their energy will be loosing when power from batteries will go to customers. Efficiency of this process around 25% in best case.
The same we could tell about solar cells, which as wind power using sun energy for electricity production.
Efficiency of using sun energy in solar cells is around 1%.
Most computer modeling looks at water vapor as static element in air, when they trapped infrared radiation and heat the air.
Water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas, more important, than carbon dioxide. Molecular weight of water vapor is 18, nitrogen-28, oxigen-32, carbon dioxide-44. That means that water vapor is lighter than almost all others gases in the air.
It takes 339 kcal of energy to evaporate 1 kg of water. It takes only one kcal to heat one kg of water on 1º C.
It take 80 kcal of energy to melt one kg of ice, when its temperature will be 0º C.
In atmosphere we have water vapor, small droplet of fog, clouds and droplets of rain. If water vapor as GHG will trap infrared radiation that energy will evaporate droplets of fog etc., and cool the air lifting up lighter water vapor close to clouds and beyond, where heat can escape to space.
If you will look in dynamic water vapor actually cool the air.
Attitude to water vapor as static component misleads many scientists, Al Gore and our Government.
This is huge problem!
As someone who values our nation's open spaces, i fail to see the "fun" in industrializing another 50 million plus acres of them for Big Energy profits (Big Solar, Big Wind, Big Transmission), when there is a much faster, cheaper, democratic solution that doesn't kill our wilderness.
why would anyone claiming to be an environmentalist push for 50 million acres of america's wilderness to be permanently destroyed and never push for feed in tariffs, generous loan programs and point of use solutions that do NOT monopolize our energy supplies, ruin our views and impoverish us? the DOE proved back in 2003 that we could quickly and cheaply use existing rooftops to get 100% of the US' electricity needs met. 100%. an additional 90% could be met in urban brownfields. all with super-cheap thin film PV.
So, why kill all that wilderness and greenwash it when we could do something GOOD for the planet, democracy, the water table and the polar bears? unless you are being paid off by Big Energy, perchance?
If Al Gore will ask himself: “Why during 160,000 years change of carbon dioxide from 200 ppm to 285 ppm created changes in temperature almost 10º C? Why right now we change CO2 level from 285 ppm to 355 ppm during 50 years and have temperature changes only around 1º C?”
I hope he will be not so sure about role of carbon dioxide in nature.
He misunderstands role of water vapor and simplifies explanation of global warming.
It is not only carbon dioxide.
It is winds and their direction, which send hot air to cloud level.
It is reflection, which send short wave back to space.
It is huge convection forces.
It is cloud formation.
It oceans streams.
It is properties of water and ice.
It is water evaporation, which take a lot of energy on the ground level and send vapor as lighter gas to cloud level, where infrared radiation escapes to space. We need to use all natural properties to reduce effect of global warming.
Thanks for this informative recap of the Sierra Club's Climate Recovery Symposium. The challenge is to ensure that government spending on and tax breaks for "green energy" projects actually benefit the public, and not just well-heeled and well-connected private entities like venture capital behemoth Kleiner Perkins.
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