All posts by Adam Aston

GreenBiz

How IBM is Enabling Smarter Management of … Medieval Abbeys | GreenBiz

Question:What does a rack of high-performance, network blade-servers have in common with the 15th century Flemish tapestry The Hunt for the Unicorn?

Answer: Both are being watched over by some of IBM’s most advanced smart building systems.

Last week, as part of a roll-out of a broader suite of smart building technologies, I got to enjoy a dose of high culture and high technology, catching Big Blue’s announcement of novel collaboration with New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

IBM is supplying a suite of hardware and software as part of its Intelligent Building Management system to help the Met fine-tune the maintenance and preservation of its one-of-a-kind collection of medieval artwork.

The move adapts technology developed originally to monitor and manage energy-intensive data centers — cutting-edge technology of the 21st century — to help care or for some of the most priceless, hand-made religious and secular artifacts dating back to 800 AD.

hunting of the unicorn detailAt the announcement, Dr. Paolo DionisiVici, an Associate Research Scientist at the Met, made clear why doing the latter represents the greater challenge.

The Met’s main medieval collection is housed in The Cloisters Museum & Gardens, an assemblage of medieval French abbey structures, transplanted nearly a century ago (more on that below).

Authentic as the setting is, the challenges of managing temperature, humidity, and other variables are daunting: castle-like thick rock walls define a space that sees tens of thousands of visitors each year.

The artwork itself also offers up material preservation challenges of a stupefying variety.

The tapestries, like the most-famous-of-all Unicorn hanging, are made of a combination of wool, linen, metal threads, vegetable dyes and other delicate materials. After 600 years, they remain remarkably vivid.

Nearby in the museum are painted wooded religious artifacts that require different preservation conditions.

“Every object is unique,” DionisiVici said.

memsic iris moteThat’s where IBM comes in. To monitor this menagerie, IBM is deploying a network of low-power motes — small electronics packages fitted with sensors and antennae for communication. [An example of a type of mote IBM has developed, the MEMSIC IRIS mote, is pictured at left.]

“The motes can sense temperature, humidity, corrosion, contamination, light levels, air flow, pressure and more,” said Dr. Hendrik F. Hamann, one of IBM’s research scientists working on the project. The motes are also very energy-efficient and self-configure into a “mesh” network, he explained, by independently figuring out how to route data from one to the next.

For now, the technology covers seven rooms, a portion of the Cloisters’ overall layout, but including the famous Unicorn tapestries.

What can motes do when overseeing a vaulted-ceiling room filled with priceless art? In a way the museum cannot today, the sensors and analytic software can tap into real-time data to observe and model microclimates, revealing with greater precision areas of higher heat, or dryness, or other variables that can conventional sensor systems.

IBM’s analytical models can even guide how to place particular works of art, given better understanding of a room’s thermal dynamics. Wooden materials, for example, need steady humidity for optimal preservation.

“This is the first large-scale deployment of a smart sensing infrastructure coupled with deep analytics in a museum environment,” said Hamann.

IBM’s pairing with The Cloisters continues a century-old tradition of one-of-a-kinds that define the site.

About a century ago, craftsmen in France painstakingly dismantled five cloisters — essentially, abandoned convents or monasteries designed for secluded, contemplative living — packed the pieces in boxes, and shipped them via boat across the Atlantic.

Once landed, the crates were hauled up to the highest promontory of Manhattan, to land owned by John D. Rockefeller — the wealthiest man in U.S. history. Through the years of the Great Depression, some of those same craftsmen methodically reassembled the stones into a meticulous recreation of an abbey complex.

To complete the setting, Rockefeller bought up scores of acres of Manhattan land around the Cloisters and — just for good measure — also acquired the ridge of land immediately across the Hudson River, so as to protect the view from his creation.

Rockefeller had no interest in living in the transplanted abbey. In fact, he died a year before the complex was completed.

It was built strictly as a home for the more than 5,000 pieces of medieval art he collected in his twilight years, with the intention of donating the entire complex — building, land and artwork — to the Met.

If visiting New York City, The Cloisters is a must see — one of the best and least-known treasures the city has to offer. With IBM’s help, the masterworks there will be around to enjoy for a long time to come.

Interior Cloisters photo CC-licensed by respres. Mote photo courtesy of IBM.

New York Times

Utilities Turn to Mergers as Demand for Power Slows | New York Times

The slowdown is spurring a fresh cycle of deal-making among publicly traded utilities. Not unlike the wave of consolidation that came after deregulation in the 1990s, major electricity players are looking to get bigger to protect their bottom lines.

So far this year, utilities in the United States have announced mergers and acquisitions with a total value of $44 billion. That compares with $30 billion in all of 2010, according to Thomson Reuters.

A Progress Energy nuclear plant in New Hill, N.C.  The utility’s merger with Duke Energy is pending.

If approved, Duke’s Energy’s $26 billion deal in January to buy Progress Energy would create the country’s largest utility. The combined company would own power plants with 57 gigawatts of capacity, generate $22.7 billion in revenue and serve 7.1 million customers across six states.

The surge of deals “marks the acceleration of a long-awaited consolidation of the U.S. electric utility industry,” said Todd A. Shipman, credit analyst of utilities and infrastructure ratings at Standard & Poor’s.

By his take, today’s deal-making will pick up from the previous era of consolidation. Since deregulation, the industry has shrunk to roughly 50 publicly traded companies, from 100. That number could be halved to 25 in as little as five years, Mr. Shipman said.

While the usual financial pressures to fortify balance sheets and improve credit quality are once again pushing mergers and acquisitions, environmental dynamics are playing a bigger role than in the past. Utilities — facing pending regulation on greenhouse gas emissions and renewed enforcement of older rules on air pollution — must reckon with the rising costs of compliance.

The added expenses come just as growth in electricity demand is being crimped by efficiency gains. Electricity usage increased 0.5 percent a year on average for the decade that ended 2010, down from 2.4 percent a year during the 1990s, according to the Energy Information Administration.

The anemic figures represent the tail end of a six-decade deceleration of electricity demand. The rate peaked in the 1950s, at 9.8 percent a year, during a period of supercharged industrial growth and home construction.

Customers’ plans reflect a secular shift. Nine out of 10 businesses and 70 percent of consumers have set specific goals to lower their electricity costs, according to a recent study by the Deloitte Center for Energy Solutions with the Harrison Group, a research services firm. Nearly a third of companies polled have goals to self-generate electricity, whether through solar panels, reuse of wasted heat or other methods.

Utilities are adjusting to the new reality. With customers tapering their electricity use, Consolidated Edison is deferring the installation of transformers and other costly capital equipment in New York, said Rebecca Craft, the company’s director of energy efficiency and demand management. Con Ed trimmed its outlook for how much the city’s appetite for power will grow in the coming decade to 1 percent a year, from 1.7 percent.

“Practically every utility today is thinking about flattened growth of demand for energy,” said Gregory E. Aliff, a vice chairman of energy and resources at Deloitte.

“In the last wave of utility mergers, it was more offensive — companies were seeking growth,” he said. “Today is different: the industry is more on the defensive. Companies face a question of how to grow, and consolidation is a way to grow earnings.”

New environmental regulations are only heightening the growth challenge. The industry faces potentially sizable bills to meet a raft of air pollution rules being pushed by the White House.

Utilities with a big reliance on coal face the steepest emissions penalties. American Electric Power, which derives about 85 percent of its power from coal, recently estimated the new rules could cost $6 billion to $8 billion in coming years. The money would pay for adding filters to power plant smokestacks, closing coal-fired generators and switching to lower-emission natural gas generators.

Some merger-minded utilities are shedding assets to lower their exposure to such rules. As part of its $7.9 billion deal to buy Constellation Energy, Exelon plans to sell a batch of coal-fired plants. While coal fuels 12 percent of their current generation, the companies aim to halve that share after the merger.

A.E.P., Duke and Exelon declined to comment.

Unlike in previous periods of consolidation, regulators seem more willing to approve deals, given the sluggish economy and job market. Previously, the process could drag on for years, but recent mergers have been moving along more quickly.

This month Connecticut regulators effectively approved Northeast Utilities’ tie-up with NStar, despite opposition from the state’s attorney general. When the $6.9 billion deal including debt was announced last October, the companies pledged that “no broad-based, corporatewide layoffs or early retirements are planned.”

Said Mr. Shipman of S.&P., “In most of these deals, executives have been careful to emphasize that jobs will be spared, rather than cut.”

DealBook - A Financial News Service of The New York Times

Copyright 2011 The New York Times Company

See the story original story here http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/utilities-turn-to-mergers-as-demand-for-power-wanes/

GreenBiz

How Peppermill Makes the Most of Its Geological Blessings | GreenBiz

In the virtuous race over bragging rights for the title of greenest building, there are various shades of LEED, there’s net-zero energy, and there’s Energy Star, too.

But how many facilities can sink a pipe into a parking lot, tap into more than enough energy to supply year-round heating needs, and just maybe have enough left over to generate much of the site’s electricity?

Welcome to Reno, Nevada, where the filigreed micro-fractures that spread out from California’s San Andreas and other major faults have created a subterranean wealth of hot rocks and heated water.

These geological blessings have made it possible, right in downtown Reno, for the Peppermill Resort Spa Casino a 2.2-million-square-foot complex — to switch off its fleet of fossil-fueled boilers as part of a $9.7-million project to switch over to geothermal heat.

The hotel is saving $2.2 million per year in natural gas purchases. “That is what you call a no-brainer,” says Dean Parker, who as Peppermill’s Executive Director of Facilities, has overseen the four-year project.

Heat exchangerPeppermill’s past and future sit side by side in its spotless power plant shed, a stone’s throw from the main hotel. To get to the new geothermal heating unit, you have to pass by four hulking Cleaver Brook Boilers. Now barely used, the central-plant boilers once cranked out up to 100 million BTUs of heat.

But today, Parker jokes he’s thinking of putting them up on eBay. Replacing all four of the garage-sized boilers is a single so-called “plate and frame” heat exchanger, made by Alfa Laval and pictured at right, no larger than a modest bathroom.

The device sandwiches together hundreds of thin, table-sized stainless steel sheets that work as a radiator, transferring heat from incoming geothermal fluids that measure 174 degrees Fahrenheit into fresh water passing through the heated plates. The fresh water is thereby warmed to 120 degrees and then stored in an armada of oversized Thermoses. Earth-heated water supplies all of the hotel’s needs: 1,600 guest rooms, heating, kitchens, laundry, pools, hot tubs, spas, kitchens and more.

The heat exchanger can meet the hotel’s needs and then some, pulling about 900 gallons per minute of geothermal fluids from the earth. Both it and the well are designed to crank up to 1,500 gallons per minute. “So far as we know, we’re the only hotel-casino fully heated by on-site geothermal,” says Parker.

Geothermal Heating is a Go; Energy is on the Horizon

Electricity generation could be the company’s next project. The geothermal resource below Peppermill has enough capacity that the Peppermill is scoping out a 6- or 7-megawatt electricity generator. With commercial rates for power in the Reno area at around 9 cents per kilowatt-hour, the savings could be considerable.

There are challenges, however. Though warm enough to meet the hotel’s day-to-day hot water demands, Peppermill’s geothermal supply may be a too cool to generate power, since conventional geothermal power plants typically need water at 275 degrees and higher.

But the technology is improving quickly: Parker is hopeful that a so-called “binary cycle” power plants might work. Rather than spinning a turbine by boiling water into steam, these systems use special gases that transform from fluid to gas at room temperatures.

The hotel’s experience developing its new project also reveals the risks of prospecting geothermal resources. Northwest Nevada is rich in geothermal resources, and the hotel had years ago built a so-called “shallow” well, that, at around 900 feet deep, was supplying 120-degree water. Hot enough to heat its pools, but not sufficient to meet operational needs.

To upgrade its geothermal capacity, the hotel decided to dig deeper. Following studies suggesting hotter water could be found deeper down, the hotel erected a drilling rig in a parking lot late in the summer of 2009. Sound barriers helped minimize the noise from affecting guests and neighbors.

Parking lot drillAt first, the drill came up dry, raising the specter of a costly error. Pushing on, and operating round the clock for 28 days — at $100,000 per day — the rig bored to a depth of 4,421 feet down. There it found a gusher of 174-degree water that today provides all of the hotel’s heat.

These days, with the drill long gone, the well is all but invisible, hidden under a manhole cover that straddles two parking spaces in the restored lot. Opening that cover, all that can be seen now is a 9″ diameter pipe that surfaces into a fire hydrant-sized valve which can steer up to 1,500 gallons of hot, salty brine into the hotel’s power plant a few hundred yards away.

In January 2010, the hotel drilled a similar, second well located about 1,000 feet across the hotel’s property. Plunging to just 3,900 feet, this second well is used to re-inject the hot brine back into the earth after it has been used to heat fresh water.

This closed-loop is designed to make sure the subterranean heat resource isn’t depleted. Once the hot fluid surfaces, only some of its heat is extracted before the fluid is piped back to the injection well and sent back down into the same geological formation. Down below, the water re-absorbs heat from the earth, to be recycled again and again.

The Peppermill’s location is blessed with more than ample superheated water. Over the past decade, Reno has emerged as a hotbed (couldn’t resist…) of the geothermal industry. About a quarter of Reno’s daytime electricity demand, and most of its nighttime needs, are supplied by Ormat’s 100-megawatt Galena geothermal plant just outside the city.

Along with Ormat, the bulk of the U.S. geothermal industry — including Ram Power, Magma Energy, Terra Gen, Gradient Resources and Enel Green Power — all operate locally. Dozens of geothermal power plants are in the pipeline, in large part to help meet California’s looming goal of generating one-third of its electricity from renewables.

Political support is strong too: Reno is an area where “Republicans want renewables,” and lawmakers have supported both state-level renewables policy, along with university R&D programs as well as community college courses focused on supplying geothermal technicians.

Global CCS Institute

Capturing carbon from the air? Economics make it a non-starter, says blunt U.S. physics report | Global CCS Institute

There has been tantalizing, if very early, progress in the technology of capturing CO2directly from the atmosphere. If such “air capture” could be done economically, developers of the technology imagine it could radically lower the costs and complexity of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).

But a recent study has cast serious doubts that such an approach could ever be economically viable.

First, a reminder of how air capture could simplify the development of carbon capture infrastructure. As now envisioned, most CCS regimes would require power plants to capture emissions at or before the smokestack, then pipe the CO2 some distance to regions with the right geology to entomb the greenhouse gas.

Building the pipeline system to transport these gases within North America, an industry insider once explained to me, could be comparable in scale and cost to the construction of the grid of natural gas pipelines that criss-cross the continent, and that have taken most of a century to build.

Air capture could do away with much of that costly network. Whether CO2 is captured at the source, a mile away, or on the other side of the planet, it doesn’t matter to the atmosphere where the CO2 is extracted, so long as the same amount, or more, is removed.

This would make it possible to site CO2 injection operations directly on top of the best geological sites. It could also simplify the CCS challenge in more populated regions, where zoning complexities, property costs, and public anxieties might make local sequestration operations a headache.

A handful of companies are developing early-stage business models headed toward the goal of air capture. Here in New York City, Global Research Technologies (GRT) is working to commercialize “carbon trees” based on a proprietary material being developed at Columbia University that mops up CO2 from ambient air. (For more on the technology, I profiled GRT’s plans over at NRDC’s OnEarth, here.)

Promising as it sounds, there’s a twist. Surveying the carbon balances behind air capture, a panel at the American Physical Society (APS) in May issued an unusually blunt rejection of the viability of such systems in a report entitled Direct Air Capture of CO2 with Chemicals.

The report’s criticism focuses not on the technical viability of direct air capture (DAC) of CO2, but on the peculiar catch-22 carbon balance that powering any such systems would put in motion.

In short, DAC systems would have to be powered by low-carbon energy sources such as renewables. But in any scenario where there are still higher-carbon power plants on the grid, there’s a bigger benefit to simply using the low-carbon energy sources to replace the higher-carbon power plants and hold off on the DAC systems. In other words, DAC doesn’t make sense until big CO2 emitters are virtually eliminated from the globe’s power plant mix.

Here’s how the authors put it…

…[ DAC] is not currently an economically viable approach to mitigating climate change. Any commercially interesting DAC system would require significantly lower avoided CO2costs…. In a world that still has centralized sources of carbon emissions, any future deployment that relies on low-carbon energy sources for powering DAC would usually be less cost-effective than simply using the low-carbon energy to displace those centralized carbon sources. Thus, coherent CO2 mitigation postpones deployment of DAC until large, centralized CO2 sources have been nearly eliminated on a global scale…

As I read it, the report shouldn’t derail research into DAC technologies per se. Given the alarming momentum of CO2 growth in the atmosphere, such tools are potentially powerful aides for the long-term carbon reduction. But the findings should remove the idea that DAC offers a short cut—along with geo-engineering—that could allow humans to continue emitting, business-as-usual, in the hopes that a future, far-off technology will solve the problem of atmospheric CO2 buildup.

“This report provides no support for arguments in favor of delay in dealing with climate change that are based on the availability of DAC as a compensating strategy,” concludes its authors, among whom is Princeton University’s Robert Socolow. Along with Stephen Pacala, Socolow co-authored the hugely influential “carbon wedges” analysis of the climate change challenge.

As Bill Sweet succinctly puts it over at IEEE Spectrum’s EnergyWise blog, the APS report “will take atmospheric capture of carbon off the policy agenda. This means, together with the collapse of an anticipated nuclear renaissance, that coming to terms with climate change will be more challenging than ever.”

Download a copy of the American Physical Society paper evaluation here, as a PDF.

Read the original here:  http://www.globalccsinstitute.com/community/blogs/authors/adamaston/2011/06/07/capturing-carbon-air-economics-make-it-non-starter-says

 

Global CCS Institute

New Jersey pulls out of multi-state greenhouse gas trading regime – signs of 2012 election? | Global CCS Institute

In what could prove to be an early signal of carbon policy dynamics in the 2012 presidential race, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the sole multi-state, cap-and-trade program operating in the U.S., was dealt a setback when the governor of New Jersey announced plans to exit the program late last month.

Against a backdrop of record fiscal deficits, New Jersey’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie announced plans to end the state’s participation in the two-year old program, calling it a gimmicky and costly failure.  The move culminated months of political pressure from Republican state legislators as well as campaigns sponsored by conservative national groups to exit the program.

This is not a deathblow to the program but the withdrawal of the second largest state economy in RGGI—pronounced like Reggie—hurts momentum to build low-carbon energy technologies, from renewables to carbon capture and storage (CCS) pilots.  If the governor’s decision survives anticipated legal challenges, it could set a precedent for others. Earlier in May, legislators in three other states rejected bills to pull those states out of the 10-state program too.

RGGI’s ten members, prior to New Jersey’s exit, are shown in dark green. Observer states and provinces are in lime.

As a policy experiment, RGGI was heralded as a potential template for the development a nation-wide carbon cap and trade program, and as such has emerged as a key target for opponents of climate change policy. If the program derails, green energy funding would suffer, too. To date, RGGI has conducted 11 quarterly auctions that have raised nearly $861 million from sales of carbon allowances. According to RGGI data, almost two thirds of the proceeds have been steered to fund energy efficiency and alternative energy technologies.

In the national context, Gov. Christie’s move provides a snapshot of the paradoxical politics of climate change in the U.S. at the moment. While announcing plans to exit the carbon-trading program, the governor simultaneously reversed an earlier position doubting the science behind global warming.
At the RGGI news conference, Christie also pledged to maintain the state’s commitment to renewables, to support the build out of more solar and offshore wind energy, while also pledging to prevent the construction of any new coal-fired power plans in his state. In early June, however, Christie slashed the state’s goal to develop renewable sources of electric power. From a minimum of 30% of all supply by 2021 — one of the most ambitious in the nation — the governor wants to aim for 22.5%, calling the new target more “achievable”.

The governor also released a report saying the state’s emissions had already fallen below goals for 2020, but discounted RGGI’s role in the shift. Quoted by Christa Marshall of ClimateWireNews, Christie said:

“We remain completely committed to the idea that we have a responsibility to make the environment of our state and world better,” Christie said. “We’re not going to do it by participating in gimmicky programs that don’t work.” He said New Jersey would depart RGGI by the end of the year.

“Reduced emissions have been due to increased use of natural gas, and the decreased use of coal. We’re seeing that the market, and not RGGI, has created incentives to reduce the use of carbon-based fuels,” Christie added.

Christie’s decision highlights the dramatic shift in the politics of climate in the Republican Party over the past decade. Keep in mind that RGGI was first championed by George Pataki, top Republican governor of New York in the early 2000s. That was a time, barely a decade ago, when Senator and eventual Republican presidential nominee John McCain also backed climate policy.

A decade later Christie, who has repeatedly denied any intention to run for president, is a darling of the Republican punditry.  And of the few Republican candidates who have officially declared a bid to seek the presidency, Mitt Romney also withdrew from RGGI while he was governor of Massachusetts—although it was before trading had begun and the state later re-joined.

Gov. Christie’s move was not a surprise. An early sign that New Jersey may pull our of RGGI came last year when, like a handful of other governors of deficit-strapped RGGI member states, Gov. Christie redirected $65 million raised from auctions of carbon credits for use in the general ledger.

All that said, RGGI continues to operate, with its next quarterly auction dated June 8. Nine states remain active in the trading pool. These are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont. Pennsylvania acts as an “observer”, along with three Canadian provinces along the U.S. north-eastern border: Québec, New Brunswick, and Ontario.

It’s worth noting there are two other multi-state climate initiatives in North America. Both are less evolved than RGGI and both face similarly rocky political prospects. They are:

  1. Western Climate Initiative, which includes 11 U.S. and Canadian regions, is larger than RGGI and is slated to come on line in 2015. Its goal: to lower greenhouse gas emissions by 15% by 2020, from a 2005 base.
  2. Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Accord includes six more heavily industrialized U.S. states and one Canadian province, but is the least evolved of the three.

Check out the original post here: http://www.globalccsinstitute.com/community/blogs/authors/adamaston/2011/06/06/new-jersey-pulls-out-multi-state-greenhouse-gas-trading