Meanwhile, corporations everywhere are setting up green storefronts, then scrambling to put product behind their "we are sustainable" storefront. As they do, urban wind struggles on in the "garages" of so many start-ups.
You two ought to get together.
Forget big wind farms with their pesky transmission issues. Locally produced power is the way forward. (See the richly detailed argument made almost a decade ago in the compelling treatise Small is Profitable). Floundering efforts to get transmission in place for big wind farms highlight the wisdom of Small.
T. Boone Pickens' $8B wind program is mucked in a transmission tarpit (okay, maybe among other issues as well). This Fast Company article plumbs California's similarly large, expensive, mired, maybe-someday transmission project Green Path North, and arrives at the same "power locally" conclusion.
Big Wind and Big Solar may pencil out as cost effective renewable energy solutions, but adding variables like government agency and NIMBY can wreck the cost equation, or, in a time equation, put them in the way back (back there with Nuke and Big Fossil Plant). Priced holistically and in the real world, distributed renewables might be best, and what we should be focusing on.
Distributed renewables: an old idea to make powr cleanr soonr.
Photo: Darren Rogers on flickr. Also, check out Darren's stuff at RedBubble.
Every day I walk by a college football stadium. And every time I walk into a wall of wind on the east side (as listeners on the other end of my cell phone will attest). The mass of the stadium appears to make a one-sided venturi. For a campus dismissed as not having enough wind to support even smaller wind turbines, I wonder: are there microclimate pockets that beg to differ? And what if there was a tool to accurately map microclimate wind power opportunities.
The solution is so obvious: water.
Water, water everywhere. The earth's surface is seventy percent ocean. Half the world lives within fifty miles of (but not on) the oceans. More live near (but not on) lakes and rivers and streams. This represents a lot of energy laden water, located exactly next to people, that is not burdened by terra firma's messy eminent domain issues.
There's a lot of water-borne energy prototyping going on now, seeking to capitalize on the various ways water creates and releases energy: current, vortex induced vibration, offshore wind (well, wind actually happens above water, but when it does so over the flatness and openness of the ocean, wind gets bigger and thus more attractive), salinity gradient, ocean thermal, wave, tidal.
With all of this going on in the water, could we not cordon off sections of the ocean for energy production, staking out areas best suited to tap water's multiple energy offerings? Imagine an ocean farm with wind turbines and solar panels topside, and hydrokinetic and other water based solutions on and below the surface. The farm's total production curve would be much smoothed by the different things happening at different times: wind blowing, sun shining, tides and currents moving, temperatures differing. Yet the variously contributing energy sources each get to attach to the common, costly structure that anchors them in place, and they each get to ride the same expensive transmission line to the end user (making expensive oceanic structure and transmission, pro rata, less expensive).
Whereas we've been thinking about renewable solutions like solar and wind since the 1973 oil embargo, water based renewable energy solutions are just getting started (see Walt Musial's PowerPoint here). What if a big, fat, juicy solution was there beside us all along, and we're just now catching on that all along we had a big, fat, juicy solution right there beside us?
Photo: Joan Gomez on flickr
If you owned an island in Hawaii, there are many things you could do with it. Castle & Cooke owns Lanai island. And the developer is doing the things you would expect a developer to do: a Four Seasons Resort, homes, retail. But Castle & Cooke departs the traditional territory of the developer as it contemplates bringing the largest wind farm on the Hawaiian Islands to its little island. Castle & Cooke would build a 300 to 500 megawatt farm on the relatively small 90,000 acre island, exporting the excess production to neighboring Oahu island via underwater cable.
This fits nicely within an emerging picture of Hawaii at the forefront of an American energy revolution. There is much to recommend this project. Electricity on Lanai costs a staggering 55 cents a kilowatt hour, so wind doesn't have to work as hard to make budget. The Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative promises help from the state and the Department of Energy to create an environment conducive to such projects (one help would be to knock down the five to seven year permitting process anticipated by Castle & Cooke). Hawaii's deal with electric car infrastructure company Better Place creates significant potential demand for the otherwise unusable electricity that is produced by wind during the night, which is usually wind's prime production time. (Better Place founder Shai Agassi notes in this interview that Denmark, which produces 20 percent of its electricity from wind, can't wait for the electric car, because they actually have to pay Germany to take nighttime wind off their hands). Throw on top of this any incentives coming from the Obama administration's pledge to create the green collar economy, and one wonders if the Lanai Wind Farm is fronting a new wave of wind projects for the islands.
Wind speed at 50 meters in the Hawaiian Islands, courtesy HECO
We're getting ready to do lots of infrastructure. But exactly what "infrastructure" is has become a loosely defined, elastic territory at the critical juncture of being made firm. And while the shovel ready stuff is needed to create jobs quickly, more important for long term success is the transformative undertakings listed below. Some don't create lots of jobs right away, but they don't require as much capital either, and it makes sense to get them (and their big, long lead times) rolling now.
Here are some good bets for infrastructure that could unleash untold (and as of yet unimagined) waves of innovation and progress by creating abundant energy and transport (as computing and the internet created easy, abundant information):
Photo: Steve Kelley on flickr
When Walmart has a little conversation, it's a big conversation because Walmart is the largest retailer in the world. Walmart had a little conversation with T. Boone Pickens last month about providing fifteen percent of its Texas stores' power from wind.
Things that make the little conversation bigger:
Little conversations offering big evidence that the sustainability flywheel is gathering momentum.
Photo: Audrey Hamdan on flickr
Thirty thousand attended GreenBuild 2008. So imagine my surprise when Craig Briscoe, the architect who presented on urban wind the day before, sat down next to me in a session on the final day. What were the odds that the guy I most needed to learn more from would happen to this chair? Excellent. An opportunity to get inside the story of one of the world's first building integrated wind turbine projects: the 12W in Portland. Maybe we'd discuss how, yes, there had been obstacles, but developer Gerding Edlin expected in the end to be able to power the building with wind cheaply in perpetuity.
If it works, this idea may be a real humdinger. Humdinger Wind Energy LLC of Honolulu has a new take on harvesting energy from wind, and it doesn't involve turbines. Like something as small as a guitar string humming in the wind, or as large as the infamous Tacoma Narrows bridge shaking itself to pieces, Humdinger's belt tech leverages a common phenomenon known as a flutter oscillation to efficiently extract energy from wind.
The company claims that the price per KWh will be less than half that of conventional turbines, but remember that these guys are still in the R&D phase and sometimes the real world forces cost revisions when it comes to the strictures of mass production. Either way though, in the current tough economy with falling oil prices, and with many solar and wind projects on hold, it would be great to see a new renewable tech approach blossom as a result of belt tightening.
AP Photo
One fifth is commonly held to be wind's limit in the power mix, given wind's tendency to blow at times but not at other times. If you could store wind power for later use, could you push the mix higher, could you make wind more than a fifth of the electricity production capacity mix? Store it in a battery, perhaps?
If you had a country with electric cars and wind, could you use the car batteries to store the wind? If so, would wind be cheaper because you don't need to back it up with conventional power plants ?
Let's try. Let's blanket a country that gets a fifth of its power from wind with electric vehicles. Let's get Denmark to do so in 2011. And let's get the potent startup Better Place to drive the plan.
The Oil Embargo pushed Denmark from being completely dependent on foreign oil in 1973 to being energy independent today, in large part because a fifth of their electricity comes from wind. Better Place has intentions of putting a full scale Electric Recharge Grid in Denmark by 2011, with tens of thousands of electric vehicles to match.
When they do, we'll get to see if it's possible to buffer wind with car batteries at the grand scale of an entire country. How fortunate that Denmark responded with foresight to the Oil Embargo so that the wind is in place to permit the experiment. If the experiment works, there'll be a Place for all that pent up venture capital hunting for the good green bet, and all the regular capital, and manufacturing capacity, and labor looking for jobs, and governments looking to craft forward-thinking energy policy.
Photo: Y on flickr
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