All posts by Adam Aston

GreenBiz

Are We Entering Cleantech’s Dark Ages? | GreenBiz

The budget brinksmanship that, amazingly, lasted all the way into the first days of August pushed me over the edge. Whether a willful choice, or some kind of subliminal denial, I opted for a partial mental vacation in recent weeks, trying to tune out from the mostly dismal news about elections, energy and environment.

But all vacations must end, and as distasteful as the political process has been for the last few weeks, the late-summer news cycle holds potentially big impacts for the world of cleantech.

From policies enacted and planned to electoral and financial developments, all signs suggest we’re moving from relative boom times for cleantech into what will almost certainly be dark days.

Cleantech’s “Age of Austerity”

Let’s start with the fallout from budget deal, known officially as the Budget Control Act (BCA) of 2011. Scanning a few weeks’ worth of news releases from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), the prospects for cleantech finance are nothing short of grim.

“For the clean energy sector, the Act heralds an era of austerity in which current subsidy programmes may not be extended beyond their current funding,” wrote Stephen Munro, a policy analyst at BNEF, in a research note on Aug 5 titled “An age of austerity for clean energy?”

The BCA agreement requires cuts of $917 billion in discretionary spending. Clean energy programs aren’t named specifically, but they fall under the discretionary spending portion of the budget, Munro points out.

Programs are likely to become vulnerable as they come up for renewal. First up is the Treasury Department’s “1603” cash grant program for early-stage project investment, which expires at the end of this year.

For solar and wind developers formerly dependent on tax equity finance — which evaporated as a result of the mortgage-backed security crisis — these 1063 grants, which can cover 30 percent of a project’s upfront costs, have been a lifesaver. Last December, the Solar Energy Industry Association estimated that the grant program had made possible more than 1,100 solar projects in 42 states, with a total investment value $18 billion.

Similarly, the 100 percent bonus depreciation incentive for new equipment and property purchased for renewable energy projects sunsets soon. Known by the unwieldy acronym MACRS (short for Modified Accelerated Cost-Recovery System), the federal program allows businesses to accelerate deductions for the capital investments to five years, or just one, for certain bonus projects.

Renewal looks “unlikely” for either of these programs.

There’s some stirring that the tax-equity market — which the 1603 cash grants were established to replace — will rise again. ClimateWire’s Joel Kirkland recently wrote that a return to tax equity financing may be nigh (via the NYT). Given that corporate America is sitting on mountains of cash, it follows that they’ll seek higher returns than are available through Treasury bills.

Kirkland’s central example is Google, which has made seven green energy investments totaling $700 million over the past few years. Although it would be encouraging if those investments marked the start of a rush to market, that’s not the sense I’m getting from my review.

Further out, the bipartisan committee of 12 created as part of the BCA boondoggle is required to come up with another $1.5 trillion in cuts over the next decade. For wind, solar and geothermal projects, tax credits end as early next year, and deadlines continue through 2016.

What’s more, the fisticuffs aren’t over. The Act doesn’t make adjustments to the overall budgets for the Energy Dept. or Environmental Protection Agency or any of their sub-programs, such as ARPA-E. Yet these budgets, Munro points out, will be among the first to be addressed when lawmakers return from their summer recess on Sept. 5. Given the bludgeoning GOP presidential aspirants have lately been administering to the EPA, it’s likely the EPA and DOE budgets could be especially tortured in the next couple of weeks.

“The debt agreement, which is focused on cuts only and not revenue increases, makes it more likely that this infant sector gets strangled before it matures,” said Daniel Weiss, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington policy group that advises Democrats, in an interview with Bloomberg Government.

Subsidies for renewable energy are expected to decline beginning this year, and will fall 77 percent by 2016 from their peak in 2010, according to Bloomberg News, citing data from the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Cleantech VC Investment Ebbs

Well maybe the private sector will step up and fill the gap — maybe Google’s investments are a sign of things to come, right? Probably not.

Second-quarter venture investment in early-stage cleantech startups decelerated, according to the Cleantech Group’s preliminary data for the quarter, released in early June.

Global funding hit $1.83 billion, a 33 percent retreat from the prior quarter ($2.75 billion) and 10 percent down on 2010 ($2.03 billion). Quarter to quarter VC numbers are notoriously volatile, but behind these numbers are other signals that the U.S. cleantech ecosystem is not generating a lot of new companies: Most of the deals — 66 percent by deal number, and 87 percent by value — were B-series or later stages. Funding retreated more sharply in the U.S. than Europe or Asia-Pacific.

A Dearth of IPOs

A close cousin of cleantech venture capital funding is the rate of initial public offerings of shares by young, fast growing companies. By this measure too, the climate in the U.S. is growing more anemic by the week, just when it should be offering a vigorous exit path for smart, small companies.

While the Cleantech Group data reflected a “robust” global IPO market through June, the bulk of the listings have come in China. Here in the U.S., the swooning stock market is reinforcing a sense that much-anticipated listings are likely to hold back. At GigaOm.com, Ucilia Wang captured this snapshot:

“…companies that have filed papers for IPOs (but not yet traded) include solar equipment developer Enphase Energy, smart grid tech companySilver Spring Networks, biodiesel producer Renewable Energy Group, and solar power plant developer BrightSource Energy. VentureWire reported that electric car company Fisker Automotive, and biofuel company Genomatica had also hired bankers to investigate the IPO process. But it’s seemed apparent to some of these companies that the IPO window has been slowly closing.”

Oil Prices Falling

With the economy teetering between neutral and reverse, oil prices are falling. West Texas Intermediate (WTI, the U.S. benchmark) fell to around $80 per barrel early in the month, presaging a fall of 40 cents per gallon at the pumps, if the price signal follows through.

Lower fuel prices are salve to an ailing economy, of course. But they’re trouble for companies looking to sell innovative transportation technologies, whether they’re century old automakers pushing advanced EVs or algal biofuel startups targeting their production price for $100 oil. More broadly, low energy prices dilute public urgency on energy efficiency and alternative energy.

In its Aug. 8 research note, Bank of America’s Global Energy Weekly pointed to threat of a double dip recession. By its models, a mild recession would draw Brent Crude (Europe’s North Sea reference blend) to $80 per barrel, and (more importantly to U.S. buyers), WTI to $50-60 per barrel.

While these two blends typically trade within a dollar of one another, in recent weeks their prices have diverged to record levels, with Brent trading at over $25 per barrel more than WTI. The gap reflects unprecedented levels of uncertainty with Europe’s fiscal outlook and worries the U.S. is about to tip back into recession.

Is It Darkest Before the Dawn?

If all these harbingers from the political and economic arenas weren’t enough, we’ve also had one of the most extreme and disaster-filled weather years ever — with 2011 already bringing more billion-dollar catastrophes than in any other year, according to NOAA.

And to top it all off comes news from the Energy Information Administration that U.S. carbon emissions rebounded by more than 3.9 percent last year, the sharpest uptick in more than 20 years, as industrial activity, power generation and travel volumes returned to norms depressed by the Great Recession.

It’s enough to make anyone want to go back on vacation, at least until Labor Day, or maybe Groundhog Day, or … anytime after November 6, 2012.

But perhaps I’m overly pessimistic — I’d love to know if you’re seeing anything out there in the world that offers some hope for a resurgence of cleantech’s potential?

Photo CC-licensed by Samuel Stocker.

Global CCS Institute

Can Skyonic combine chemical production and pollution mitigation to transform carbon capture into a profitable business? | Global CCS Institute

I recently caught up with Skyonic, an Austin (Tex.)-based carbon capture startup that is expanding a demonstration unit into a production-scale facility at a cement plant in San Antonio, Tex. Due to come on line in 2012, Skyonic’s new deployment is designed to snare 75,000 metric tons of CO2 per year from the cement kilns’ exhaust and convert it into saleable materials.

Founded in 2005, Skyonic has attracted plenty of buzz for its SkyMine process which transforms the CO2 in smokestack exhaust into a buffet of industrial chemicals – including chlorine, hydrogen, magnesium carbonates, sodium bicarbonates, and sodium carbonates – at lower costs than today’s commodity chemical manufacturing methods, according to Joe Jones, Skyonic’s CEO and founder.

Versatile as its technology promises to be, Skyonic’s business model could prove to be as important. That is, if Jones can get the finances to work. With a solution that promises to generate revenue from both pollution reduction services and chemical production, Jones argues that Skyonic is on track to deliver carbon capture services cost effectively without the need for a regulatory price on carbon.

Notably, Skyonic’s recipe also pulls SOx and NOx and heavy metals such as mercury from flue gases. This scrubbing process is, of course, one that big power plants have used for many years. Jones says Skyonic’s SkyMine process can remove these pollutants more cheaply and at smaller scales than today’s methods.

The Environmental Protection Agency has been ratcheting up pressure for power plants to cut emissions of criteria pollutants, which is in turn driving demand for treatment technologies. Last May, the EPA officially recognized the SkyMine process as a “multi-pollutant control” to help power plants comply with the tougher new rules for hazardous air pollutants (known by the acronym, NESHAP, or also as the “utility air toxics rule”).

Jones ran through the numbers for SkyMine for me when we spoke. According to the company’s Jan. 2011 announcement: Current wet-limestone and SCR scrubbing is only scalable for large (400 megawatt or greater) facilities and costs US$400–650 per kilowatt of generating capacity. The SkyMine process can operate down to the 10 megawatt equivalent level and costs less per kilowatt. Additionally, Jones said, current scrubbing technologies release CO2 as they capture acid gases; SkyMine does not.

Skyonic’s technology impressed Department of Energy researchers sufficiently that in July last year, the company was awarded $25 million – the lion’s share of a $106 million tranche of DOE funds distributed to a half dozen U.S. companies all focused on productizing CO2 .

The DOE monies are the second dollop that Skyonic scored from Washington, coming on top of a $3 million grant at an earlier stage of the technology’s development.

“If carbon capture and sequestration policy is going sideways right now,” Jones told me, “demand for technologies that cut conventional pollutants is moving forward.” Their appeal is they can offer a market viable way to develop technology that can in time be focused on CO2 capture, should a cap and trade program emerge.  “This is a neat little key that fits into the public policy hole right now.”

Writing in GreenTechMedia.com last December, Eric Wesoff rightly points out that that the chief question mark hanging over Skyonic’s ambitious claims is whether the technology will be truly economic and CO2 negative at an industrial scale.

Jones believes SkyMine bests CCS because of his technology’s superior economics. “Mineralization is the way to get rid of CO2. You don’t have to do open-heart surgery with the plant.” Since Skyonic’s approach is a post-combustion process, existing facilities can be retrofitted relatively easily, he said. Nor does the process require pipeline transport or geological storage and may therefore be more saleable to policy makers and the public.

Putting some numbers on his claims, Jones told GreenTechMedia that Skyonic’s current “carbon penalty” is 43 per cent, less than what he estimates is the range for CCS, if one includes the full energy toll posed by CO2 capture, compression, transportation and injection. Jones added: “The DOE’s assessment of our process is the most important and the DOE says the process has a negative carbon footprint. It consumes CO2 . Period.”

Jones told the Austin Statesman that the construction of Skyonic’s pilot facility is slated to conclude in 2012 with a total project cost in the neighborhood of $135 million. Funding in addition to the government’s share has come from venture investors.

Turning carbon capture into a profitable business, rather than a costly regulatory hurdle, seems like a smart path here in the U.S., especially as the budgetary outlook continues to darken for continued, let alone heightened, research subsidies for carbon capture and other clean technologies.

Enhanced oil recovery, which I wrote about last month, looks to be one of the biggest potential markets for carbon capture and use. And in coming posts I aim to profile the other companies pursuing carbon capture and use technologies backed by the DOE in its July 2010 funding announcement. In addition to Skyonic, these include Alcoa, Calera, Novomer, Phycal and Touchstone Research Laboratory.

Read or comment on the original post here:
http://www.globalccsinstitute.com/community/blogs/authors/adamaston/2011/08/17/can-skyonic-combine-chemical-production-and-pollution-m

GreenBiz

Cisco Quietly Shuts Down Building Energy Management Program | GreenBiz

Another one bites the dust. At the end of June, the names Google PowerMeter and Microsoft Hohm were chiseled on the grave marker of casualties in the race to build smart grid-linked software and gizmos. To this list of famous fallen, Cisco Systems adds its name, with an announcement yesterday that it will exit building management software services while also retreating from the home energy management market.

You could be forgiven if you missed the announcement. The news was tucked into Cisco’s fiscal fourth quarter earnings call. Amidst the perilous rollercoaster-ing of the markets of the past few days, Cisco showed signs of recovering from recent missteps, solidly beating expectations — a performance rewarded by antsy investors with a 17 percent stock price runup.

Almost lost in the din was the news that Cisco is unwinding its investment in the energy management market. Cisco entered this market almost two years ago to the day, with an ambitious announcement of a new product, dubbed Mediator, that would tap into Cisco’s deep networking skills to hook up the many and disparate software networks used to heat, cool, and otherwise operate big commercial buildings.

The precise fate of these business lines remains to be seen, but prospects look dim. At her Cisco blog site, Laura Ipsen, senior vice president of global policy and government affairs, expanded on Cisco’s thinking in a company blog post, although the jargon is tough going. She writes:

“Over the past two years the home and building energy management markets have evolved in such a way that we believe we can provide more value to our customers and the industry by enabling interoperability through our core networking products and solutions (for example, EnergyWise) as part of our integrated architecture within the broader smart grid effort.”

Based on this rationale, it appears that Cisco will likely sell its building management software suite, Mediator. Ipsen writes: “For building energy management, this means we are actively pursuing several strategic options for Cisco’s Network Building Mediator and Mediator Manager product line, with an emphasis on minimizing the impact on current customers, partners and employees.”

The outlook for home energy management systems is less clear — the jargon reaches fever pitch here — but it looks like Cisco is simply going to pull the plug on household offerings, instead focusing on utility and other B2B markets: “For energy management in the home, we will transition our focus from creating premise energy management devices to using the network as the platform for supporting innovative applications and architectures that will improve our customers’ value proposition in the consumer energy management market.”

For close watchers of the smart grid space, the retreat comes as no surprise. At Greentech Media, Michael Kanellos predicted Cisco would retreat last week, pointing out that the company’s earlier success tempted it to overreach into unknown markets, even as its core networking technologies were under intense competitive pressure.

A harbinger of Cisco’s exit was the early-retirement of Ed Richards, an original developer of the software behind Mediator, a system which Cisco acquired in the acquisition of Richards-Zeta back in 2009.

As Google and Microsoft found in their forays into energy management, Cisco’s market expectations went unmet. The market has been slow to develop, utilities have proven hard customers to develop, and consumers have been all but indifferent to the hype around home energy management software, points out Katie Fehrenbacher at GigaOm.

Cisco’s been riding through a winnowing reorganization in recent quarters. In July, the company shed 9 percent — or 6,500 employees — of its staff, part of a plan to lower costs by $1 billion. And in April, the company killed off its consumer business, including the Flip video camera, which it had bought just two years earlier.

Photo CC-licensed by John Brennan.

Global CCS Institute

Researchers find that PECONFs might offer a better CO2 sorbent at lower costs | Global CCS Institute

The search for a material that can soak up high volumes of CO2, at a low cost, remains a tantalizing goal at labs around the world.  Ideally such a material will mop up lots of CO2 under certain conditions, but happily let it go under others. Likewise, it should be particular to CO2, such that it won’t absorb other gases. And it should be fairly stable across a range of chemical conditions and heat levels. Last but not least, it shouldn’t be too costly.Earlier this month, chemists at Lehigh University, in eastern Pennsylvania, released findings of a new porous material that promises to do all that, and maybe more. The researchers, Kai Landskron, Paritosh Mohanty and Lillian D. Kull reported their findings on 19 July in the journal Nature Communications.

Results of the study show that the new material captures CO2 almost as well as more expensive materials in use today, but works at lower pressures, and is stable at temperatures as high as 752 degrees Fahrenheit. The combination suggests it would be cheaper to deploy given that current materials achieve optimal performance only in conditions that are costlier to maintain.

Quoted by Australia’s ABC News, lead research Dr Landskron said he believes the material can be mass produced on a large scale. “We can make this material… simpler than most other materials can be made,” he said. “We can make them from relatively inexpensive building blocks in simple solution reactions, by so-called polycondensation reactions.”

The material still has a long way to get from lab to power plant though. CSIRO’s Dr Lincoln Paterson, who focuses on carbon capture, told ABC News’ Meredith Griffiths that Dr Landskron’s work is a fundamental advance but “…still needs to be taken a long way towards practical application.” He added: “The tests they’ve got so far are that it performs extremely well in the laboratory and it uses low cost materials.”

For those with the appetite, here’s what I could find on the chemical recipe for this new material. According to USA Today, the team reacted two chemicals, hexachlorocyclotriphosphazene and diaminobenzidine, to create a gel. Once dried the material formed porous electron-rich covalent organonitridic frameworks (or PECONFs) that proved to have a strong appetite for CO2.

Here’s how the researchers describe it in their abstract:

Here we report the synthesis and CO2, CH4, and N2 adsorption properties of hierarchically porous electron-rich covalent organonitridic frameworks (PECONFs). These were prepared by simple condensation reactions between inexpensive, commercially available nitridic and electron-rich aromatic building units. The PECONF materials exhibit high and reversible CO2 and CH4 uptake and exceptional selectivities of these gases over N2. The materials do not oxidize in air up to temperature of 400 °C.

For a deeper dive, click through to the full article here: “Porous covalent electron-rich organonitridic frameworks as highly selective sorbents for methane and carbon dioxide.” (Subscription required.)

This is just the latest in a string of research findings looking for lower cost sorbent materials. Back in April, I checked out promising lab work showing that a form of treated sawdust might offer an affordable option as a CO2 sorbent. See ‘Capturing carbon with sawdust‘ 6 April, 2011.

Global CCS Institute

Fretting over a ‘valley of death’ for basic CCS research | Global CCS Institute

As Christopher Short pointed out on these pages earlier this week, American Electric Power (AEP)’s recently suspended operations at its Mountaineer project in West Virginia, a move which underscores how policy uncertainty is having a corrosive effect on viable CCS projects. Short reminds us that, based on Global CCS Institute projects data, Mountaineer is just one of a half dozen US projects that have been shelved partly because of a lack of federal carbon policy. 

There’s a second troubling dimension to this policy problem that occurred to me while catching up on what should otherwise pass for good news in the realm of CCS research and development.

In investment circles, the phenomenon is known as the ‘valley of death’. It happens when promising early-stage technologies fail not for lack of groundbreaking performance improvements, but for a lack of finance or other business-related barrier to scaling.

In the case of CCS, the absence of clear policy means that promising research has fewer paths to scale up for commercial  deployment.

Here’s what brought the thought to mind. On 12 June, just two days before AEP’s announcement, the US Department of Energy (DOE) expanded by three the group of projects designed to confirm the safety of long-term sequestration of CO2. (Find details of the projects further down.)

It’s welcome news, of course, but given the AEP news, generally dim prospects for US carbon policy, and resulting indecision among both private and public-sector players, there’s a worrisome question over how the results of the DOE’s valuable CCS research can evolve.

Take a step back. Much has been written about the failings of the US R&D machine. The country is inarguably blessed with many of the planet’s finest research universities, and is famously skilled at incubating discoveries. But we’re notoriously poor at commercializing those advances. Exceptions exist, to be sure, such as IT and software, but the spectre of ‘invented here, built there’ haunts much of US economic and job growth policy discussions.

Now there’s reason to argue that just such a pattern is setting up in CCS. And there’s certainly risk that a ‘valley of death’ may open up, distancing CCS R&D  projects from crucial commercialization opportunities.

The DOE is seeding numerous R&D projects, but there’s a decreasing population of commercial players who can take on the risk of commercializing them. Likewise, talented researchers drawn to carbon related technical fields face dimmer prospects with the erosion of mid-stage projects.

Now, back to the good news. Cribbing from Carbon Capture Journal, here are details of the projects being newly funded. Funding for the trio will total $34.5 million over four years:

* Blackhorse Energy, based in Houston, Texas, plans to inject approximately 53,000 tons of CO2 into a geologic formation located in Livingston Parish, Louisiana. The project will assess the suitability of strandplain geologic formations for future large-scale geologic storage of CO2 in association with enhanced oil recovery. Additionally, they will test the efficacy of increased storage using short-radius horizontal well technology to inject supercritical CO2 and CO2 foam into the reservoir.

* The University of Kansas Center for Research, in Lawrence, Kansas, will inject at least 70,000 metric tons of CO2 into multiple formations. The project will demonstrate the application of state-of-the-art monitoring, verification, and accounting tools and techniques to monitor and visualize the injected CO2 plume and establish best practice methodologies for MVA and closure in ‘shelf clastic’ and ‘shelf carbonate’ geologic formations.

* Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, in Blacksburg, Virginia, will test the properties of coal seams, and evaluate the potential for enhanced coalbed methane recovery by injecting approximately 20,000 tons of CO2 into un-mineable coalbeds. (Click here for further details at Carbon Capture Journal.)

As a signal of continuing commitment to CCS, this is encouraging. Given political realities in the US, where legislative policy is blocked by partisan politics, the White House is smart to use federal agencies—the DOE and Environmental Protection Agency, mainly—to spur the climate policy agenda.

But in the absence of full-blown federal policy, I can only wonder: how far can this approach really go, for how long?

NRDC OnEarth

Review: Revenge of the Electric Car | OnEarth

Chris Paine’s 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? arrived with perfect timing, capturing the country’s collective frustration with sky-high energy prices as well as our growing disenchantment with the automotive alternatives on offer. Let’s hope his sequel, Revenge of the Electric Car, previewed last week in New York and set for wide release this October, proves equally as prescient. The film, which captures what may turn out to be the first stages of the auto industry’s evolution away from oil, cruises smoothly over the finish line where its predecessor ultimately stalled short.

For Revenge, Paine scored fly-on-the-wall access to three of the most charismatic leaders in the auto industry. And he did so at a key moment — just as each was in the midst of executing a high-risk, multi-billion-dollar bet on battery-powered cars. Add in the fact that Paine’s crew was filming during the 2008 economic crisis and implosion of GM, and the result is more than just a snapshot of the gamesmanship behind the creation of mass-market vehicles. Revenge offers a look inside the minds of business leaders struggling through one of the most troubled periods of recent economic history.

As the documentary opens, U.S. automakers face an environment that’s radically different from the cheap-oil days that ruled when GM developed its first electric vehicle, EV1. Now oil prices are running at historic highs, and governments around the world have begun to put some real muscle behind the idea of the electric car.

Here’s Bob Lutz, GM’s American-born vice chairman and a veteran of the Big Three (Chrysler, Ford, and GM), becoming the unlikely champion of the Chevy Volt, and opening a door to GM’s salvation after the company’s downfall. Known in Detroit as “Mr. Horsepower,” Lutz personifies the about-face that the industry as a whole went through in the time that passed between the making of the two films. Once a deep skeptic of EVs, he now artfully tilts GM’s monolithic culture toward his goal of developing the Volt.

Facing off against GM is the enigmatic Carlos Gohn, the Brazilian-Lebanese CEO of Nissan/Renault, which is building the all-electric Leaf. Gohn’s orderly execution of the Leaf offers a welcome perspective on EVs from beyond American borders. After all, battery-powered cars are likely to flourish on the roads of Paris, Shanghai, and Tokyo before they do here, for the same reasons that small cars did.

Playing counterpoint to the corporate titans is Paypal-founder Elon Musk, a charismatic South African-Canadian struggling to steer the scrappy Tesla from startup mode to full-scale manufacturing. With confidence bordering on hubris, the then 38-year-old is at once inspiring and pain-inducing, as he underestimates the complexity of manufacturing and struggles to produce a stream of fault-free $100,000-plus electric sportsters. (This while also navigating his way through a painful divorce and playing doting dad to his five sons.) There’s real drama in watching Musk’s brave face flicker as he inspects an armada of faulty cars and in watching him awkwardly deliver the news to early depositors that the price of their vehicles will have to rise yet again.

One of the film’s delightful subplots involves the struggles of Greg “Gadget” Abbott, a goateed indie tinkerer who made a brief appearance in Who Killed and who excels at retrofitting classic cars with batteries and electric motors. With an infectious, mischievous air, Gadget offers a reminder of the gear-head roots of EVs’ most devoted fans.

Unlike with his first film, where Paine came to the topic too late to build a “how-it-happened” tale and leaned instead on activists and half-baked acolytes, Revenge captures rich natural tension as it unfolds. Who Killed, for example, featured a parade of Hollywood A-listers (Tom Hanks) and B-listers (Phyillis Diller), many of them sore about having lost their exotic cars and whining about GM’s decision to kill the EV1. Revenge gives us mercilessly few Hollywood prima dons — though Danny Devito does get downright giddy test-driving the Volt.

It won’t be giving anything away to tell you that the end of Revenge is a happy one. Of course, it’s far from the end of the story. Should Paine opt to complete what seems like a natural triptych, the final installment will no doubt prove more global in scope. Beijing has set national EV goals that dwarf those of Washington, for example, and the Chinese have much deeper capital resources. They also have a strong knack for building things like smart grids, which will be necessary for the wide-scale adaptation of EVs. And the race to build a better battery is heating up elsewhere overseas, with labs in dozens of countries working to build batteries capable of matching the range of your average gas tank.

With the gee-whiz stage of EV creation now complete, GM, Nissan, and Tesla also face the tougher slog of turning these enormous bets into reliable, mass-market machines that can actually make some money. Sales of EVs and hybrids are so far running far below the ambitious targets set by national governments, including our own.

Lurking farther out is the persistent threat of volatile oil prices. Many, myself among them, would argue that the real killer of the electric car was cheap oil. In the late 1990s, prices hit a post-’60s low, in inflation-adjusted terms, at the very moment that GM’s EV1 was being rolled out. That wouldn’t make it easy for any $1.25-million prototype to get off the ground, I don’t care how many starlets tell you it’s a great idea. Sub-$2-a-gallon gasoline may seem unimaginable to us today, but a double-dip recession — a real possibility given the anemic economic growth and sovereign debt woes on both sides of the Atlantic — could send energy demand crashing, rendering the EV once again an intolerably uneconomic prospect.

Revenge closes with a scene featuring the Los Angeles Times reporter Dan Neil. The sole automotive writer ever to win a Pulitzer, Neil is cynical about the industry’s abysmal record on eco-cars. At the same time, reflecting on a lifelong affair with gas-guzzlers, he admits that in recent years even he has begun to “let go” of the idea of the traditional car, and to acknowledge that it may finally be rolling toward the sunset.

Original URL: http://www.onearth.org/article/revenge-of-the-electric-car

GreenBiz

GM Upgrades OnStar to Power First Real-World, Smart Grid EV Pilot | GreenBiz

Hard to believe that OnStar — GM’s in-car mobile data service — celebrates its Sweet 16 this year.

Back in 1995, when the service was launched for GM’s luxury line, pundits griped it was just a superfluous add-on. This was back in the cell phone Stone Age when they were still a luxury, analog and kinda huge. Few predicted then that telematics would mushroom in importance over the next decade. These days six million subscribers pay for OnStar’s emergency assistance, remote diagnostics, mapping, entertainment and more.

To that long list, add one more trick OnStar is helping GM to pull off: offering a short-cut to connect electric vehicles (EVs) to the smart grid. GM yesterday announced the launch of a pilot program that can let utilities and customers skip the need to install physical smart grid points to manage recharging of their EVs. The new OnStar service will act as a remote brain, wirelessly tracking and governing the EV’s charging behavior, coordinating the timing and billing, and potentially dramatically lowering the costs to extend smart-grid management features to EVs.

By skipping the need to install physical smart apparatus, the OnStar system can save utilities some $18 million per 1,000 customers, said Vijay Iyer, GM’s director of communications for OnStar, citing GE estimates. To mesh OnStar’s data services with utilities’ internal information management systems, GM worked with GE, whose IQ Demand Optimization Services unit is used by utilities to monitor demand response systems.

This is important step for utilities which are busily, and expensively, building intelligent power and data devices in customers’ garages, as well as at charging terminals, to referee how and when EVs will re-charge. Utilities don’t want fleets of EVs drawing power on 95 degree summer afternoons when power is in short supply. Customers, likewise, will prefer the option of charging at night when power is much cheaper.

The Detroit automaker is calling the trial the first “real-world pilot of smart grid solutions.” This quarter, staff of regional utilities will become the guinea pigs for this program, driving Chevrolet Volts for everyday use. Ford announced plans to scale up a broad smart-grid integration at the last Detroit auto show. And Toyota has laid out ambitions to collaborate with Microsoft.

GM is betting that this approach will let it leapfrog the smart-grid technology demos being piloted across the U.S. Given that OnStar can pick up recharging activity anywhere — whether at home or on a distant road trip — the approach promises to offer deeper insight into how, where and when EVs are charged. Since it doesn’t matter whether the EV is connected to a smart-grid charge point, OnStar should let utilities more accurately model how to manage peak versus non-peak charging too.

GM’s EV approach may get real traction where others have struggled. It appears to offer utilities a faster, cheaper way to hook up a major new source of electricity consumption to the grid. If utilities don’t see the benefit, it will be DOA. We saw evidence of the importance of this recently when software heavyweights Google and Microsoft suspended efforts to develop software applications for home energy management, in part because of the difficulty of getting access to the all-important data stream from utilities.

There are some intriguing long-term implications to GM’s announcement. With smart-grid enabling technology embedded in the car, GM opens the door to a faster rollout of sophisticated vehicle recharging schemes than would be possible if utilities must first build hardware networks of recharging stations.

There’s big global potential too: GM as a company remains the No. 2 auto producer in the world, even after its recent near death experience. Two of the top 10 selling vehicles in China, the world’s largest auto market, are GMs. And China has the largest goals for EV deployment of any country.

The inevitable next question is whether GM might make this service available to other automakers, so that they could roll out smart grid EV charging on a faster track too? Until 2006, GM licensed OnStar through a variety of other carmakers, but has since stopped. This Sunday, however, GM will release a portable form of OnStar that can be installed in any car, OnStar for My Vehicle (OnStar FMV).

Who knows? In time, maybe even your Toyota could hook up to the smart grid via GM’s OnStar.

NRDC OnEarth

Business Loves Lighting Efficiency, So Why Try to Dim Efforts to Make a Better Bulb? | OnEarth

Efficiency is a generally considered a good thing. Good politics. Good business. That’s why efforts from national mileage standards for cars to rules requiring your refrigerator to use less energy have proven popular and effective, quietly spurring the gradual replacement of outdated technology with better-performing alternatives.

And that’s why, back in 2007, barely anyone raised an eyebrow when Congress applied efficiency standards to an energy guzzler that hadn’t changed much in more than a century: the light bulb.

A requirement that would make bulbs at least a third more efficient starting next year passed Congress as part of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 in a 3-to-1bipartisan vote. Half of House Republicans supported the bill; Rep. Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican who now chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, called the legislation a “common sense, bipartisan approach … to save energy as well as help foster the creation of new domestic manufacturing jobs”; and President George W. Bush duly signed it into law.

The lighting industry welcomed the bill, which gave it time to work on meeting the new standards and set out a schedule gradually phasing them in, starting New Year’s Day 2012. First to be replaced will be the bulbs we’ve long know as “100-watt” incandescents. Over the next two years, today’s 75-, 60-, and 40-watt bulbs will have to likewise cut there energy use by about a third.

And guess what? The new rules have worked just as intended, accelerating the development of a variety of new lighting offerings, all of which save consumers money in the long run. In addition to improved CFLs, the new options include low-energy halogens that look like today’s incandescents, as well as LED bulbs that last for years. They’re already on sale at your local hardware store or Home Depot. You’re probably using some of them in your house, perhaps without even realizing there’s a difference.

“Efficiency is a desirable thing, and this type of standard has been a part of our body politic for a long time,” said Randall Moorhead, vice president of government affairs at Philips, as quoted at ThinkProgress.org. “The reality is, consumers will see no difference at all. The only difference they’ll see is lower energy bills because we’re creating more efficient incandescent bulbs.” The National Electrical Manufacturers Association and General Electric have also voiced support for the new rules.

So who’s got a problem with lighting efficiency standards now? Not business, certainly. And not the consumers reaping the benefits (which are estimated to reach $6 billion a year). It’s some of the same House Republicans (including Upton, whose statement crowing about the 2007 law as a “common sense, bipartisan approach” that will create jobs has disappeared from his website) who think they can score cheap political points with fans of Rush Limbaugh — who decries efficiency standards as “nanny state-ism” — and Glenn Beck, who apparently thinks anything that saves consumers money is “all socialist.”

On Tuesday night those House Republicans failed to pass a law known as the “Better Use of Light Bulbs Act,” or BULB Act, that would have repealed state and municipal rights to set efficiency standards for light bulbs. Business and consumers can hope this signals the end of a misguided effort to roll back progress. That’s never been a very bright option.

UPDATE 7/14/2011: Not the end! On Thursday, House Republicans launched yet another misguided attack on light bulb efficiency. Sigh.

Original URL: http://www.onearth.org/blog/business-loves-lighting-efficiency-so-why-try-to-dim-efforts-to-make-a-better-bulb

Global CCS Institute

Can big oil jump-start CCS? Expanding enhanced oil recovery could absorb decades’ worth of U.S. coal-plant CO2 emissions | Global CCS Institute

Just how big is the potential to sequester power-plant CO2 emissions into the U.S. oil patch?

In a word, “vast,” says a recent report released last month by MIT and The University of Texas at Austin that evaluated the capacity of the oil sector to pump CO2 into ageing wells to boost oil recovery, a process known as enhanced oil recovery, or EOR.

Aligning oil-producing areas with potential supplies of power-plant CO2, the researchers identified a variety of geographies that could accept an estimated 15 years or more of current, total CO2 output from U.S. coal plants, or approximately 3,500 gigawatt-years-equivalent of CO2.

That’s a potentially huge wedge to remove from the country’s climate challenge, given that coal plants account for about 30% of total US CO2 emissions.

(Jump to the bottom for links to the report and related resources.)

What’s more, domestic U.S. oil output would surge. The report estimates that, using the full CO2 output of coal-fired power plants to drive more petroleum from oil reservoirs, an additional 3 million barrels per day could be produced by 2030. That would be a 50 per cent increase over current domestic output.

The promise of scaling up CCS to expand EOR is nothing short of tantalizing. Near term, there is no larger potential source of commercial demand for CO2. The U.S. needs more domestic oil and the resulting economics could substantially subsidize the scaling up of CCS technology.

To be sure, widespread adoption of combining EOR-CCS faces major hurdles. The report names: a lack of CO2 transport and injection infrastructure; regulations remain underdeveloped at best; and there are scant and inconsistent incentives to match up supply and demand of CO2. Each of these shortcomings, the authors conclude, could be overcome with better government coordination.

There’s a long way to go. To get to the levels imagined by the report – that EOR could absorb a full year’s worth of coal plant CO2 output for 15 years – the industry has a long way to go. At its current scale, the industry could only handle 3 percent of that amount.

Here’s how the industry looks today, by that measure:

  • Demand for CO2, from current EOR operations – EOR uses about 115 million metric tons (MT) of CO2 per year currently.  Of this, 65 million MT are “new”,  rather than recycled CO2 being re-injected. This “new” CO2 comes mostly from natural geological CO2 reservoirs, and is pumped to oil wells via a network of pipelines.
  • Supply of CO2, from coal-fired power plants – Coal-fired power plants in the U.S. produce about 2,000 million MT of CO2. As a share of the total, EOR’s current demand (65 million MT of CO2) amounts to 3 per cent. Put another way, EOR’s appetite for CO2 could be met today with the emissions from approximately 10 gigawatt electric (GWe) of high-efficiency (supercritical) baseload coal power plants capacity, according to the report.

For a deeper dive into the MIT Univ. of Texas study, along with the research papers underlying the report, and other related material, follow the links below:

  • The report, summarizing the findings of a conference held in June last year, was published in May 2011 and can be downloaded from the Univ. of Texas here. You can view the individual academic presentations given at the July 2010 meeting at the homepage of MIT Energy Initiative, here.

Check out the original post at:
http://www.globalccsinstitute.com/community/blogs/authors/adamaston/2011/07/13/can-big-oil-jump-start-ccs-expanding-enhanced-oil-recov

Global CCS Institute

Firing up first world’s first coal-fired CCS plant: Five questions for Southern Co | Global CCS Institute

After two years of construction, Southern Co.  flipped the switch on the world’s largest-scale, coal-fired CO2 capture facility at a site on the banks of the Mobile River, in Barry, Alabama last month.

Teaming up with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Southern Co. brought on line a 25-megawatt, coal-fired carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) facility on a patch of river-side land that is home to the James M. Barry Electric Generating Plant, one of the largest in Southern Co.’s portfolio.

With more than 42 gigawatts of total generating capacity, and 4.4 million customers, Atlanta-based Southern Co. is one of the largest electric utilities in the United States.
For more details on the Barry CCS project, I had a quick exchange with Southern Co.’s Nick Irvin, a principal research engineer, just before the July 4th long weekend.

What carbon capture technology is the facility using? 

Southern Company teamed up with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries which, together, we are responsible for the CO2 capture plant design and operation. This facility utilizes the KM CDR Process, a capture technology which was developed jointly by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and The Kansai Electric Power Co.

The first step, of course, is coal combustion, which generates electricity and gives off a flue gas. A share of the flue gas from the main coal power plant is piped to the CCS facility. There, as part of the KM CDR process, the flue gas reacts with KS-1, an amine solvent, which captures the CO2. This creates a flow of CO2 that can then be separated from the KS-1, compressed and sent to a sequestration off site.

What made the Barry plant the site of choice?

Barry was chosen on the basis of the facility’s size and status as a flagship site among Southern Co.’s fleet. The main facility here – the James M. Barry Electric Generating Plant – is home to seven generating units, powered by coal and natural gas, with a total nameplate generating capacity of 2,657 megawatts. The CCS plant takes a slipstream of the existing plant’s flue gas, equivalent to about 25 megawatts out of the total 700-megawatt gas flow.

What volume of CO2 are you capturing?

The facility is designed to capture about 500 metric tons per day, pulling about 90 per cent of the CO2 out of the inbound flue gas slipstream. Annually, it will operate with the capacity to capture 150,000 tons to 200,000 tons of CO2.

How is the CO2  being handled?  

Pipeline construction is underway to pump the CO2 to a site about 12 miles away.  Beginning this autumn, the Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership will transport the captured CO2 through a pipeline to the Citronelle Oil Field, which is operated by Denbury Resources.

There the CO2 will be injected 9,500 feet into a deep saline geologic formation. The CO2 is being injected into an oil-drilling region but it is not being used for enhanced oil recovery. The CO2 is being sequestered in a formation about 3,000 feet above the deeper oil deposits, where it will remain permanently stored.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), along with its program participants -Denbury Resources, Electric Power Research Institute and Southern States Energy Board – are managing the design and operation of the pipeline and injection system.

What’s next for Southern Co.’s CCS strategy? 

The goal at first Southern Co. is developing options to reduce emissions and meet potential regulatory requirements. We want to look at technologies of the future as an option to do this.  In addition to the Barry CCS project, the company is also:

  • Managing the DOE National Carbon Capture Center in Alabama, where we’re testing the next generation of technologies to capture carbon dioxide emissions.
  • Building a commercial-scale, 582-MW generating plant in Kemper County, Mississipi, using local lignite and the company’s Transport Integrated Gasification (TRIG) technology, with 65 per cent carbon capture and re-use.
  • Drilling wells to assess geologic suitability for carbon storage at other power Southern Co. power plants
  • Partnering with universities to train the next generation of CCS engineers and to advance the industry’s geologic testing capabilities.

Other resources: For more information on Mitsushishi’s KM CDR process, which is described as less energy-intensive than other CO2 capture technologies, see this introduction. Mitsubishi is rolling out the process at a variety of other facilities globally which are listed here.

Check out the original story here:
http://www.globalccsinstitute.com/community/blogs/authors/adamaston/2011/07/06/firing-first-world%E2%80%99s-first-coal-fired-ccs-plant-five-qu