It seems that most environmental policy involves regulation by a governing body, and most environmentalism on a personal level involves self-sacrifice. If we are going to get serious, really serious, about the issue of climate change, is it inevitable that we adopt heavy-handed government mandates to get our emissions under control?
As environmentalists, do we just have to accept that human nature is to fail to grasp environmental consequences until bad problems result, and so helpful actions must be externally enforced to have a hope of being implemented effectively?
I'm not sure that I know enough about economics or sociology to intelligently answer this question--but it is an important one, because it cuts to the heart of some of the political difficulties with environmentalism. Because on the other side of the argument is the Rand-ian elevation of individual rights and the critical importance of personal liberty in allowing creativity and innovation. In this view government regulation only stifles our potential, and individuals doing things for the greater good or against inclination is not just silly, it's immoral, in part because who has the right to define "greater good?"
There is plenty of evidence that lack of oversight is detrimental: Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons is a great place to start. But does that oversight have to come from the government? And is regulation from the government in the name of curtailing our own tendencies toward destruction really such a bad thing?
I find it extremely hard to believe that X Large Manufacturing Company That Happens to Have a Polluting Process, absent any environmental regulation, is going to add any environmental safeguards just cause hey that's the right thing to do. The employees might have the same desire for clean air and water that we do, but if all the competitors of X aren't doing it, X would go out of business if it chose to raise it's overhead cost in a way no other competitor was bothering to do, and the employees of X would also like to have jobs. But if the playing field has been made level to the point that all of X's competitors must treat their sludge and scrub their smoke stacks, that becomes the cost of doing business. Sure, I the consumer pay a higher price. But you know what, the price I would otherwise pay is chloride rivers and asthma, and honestly a higher price for a good is a bargain in comparison. It's not just that clean air and clean water are pretty and endemically valuable in themselves, although they are that, it's that the doctor's bill for asthma costs a lot of money, it's that chloride rivers might contaminate my drinking supply without somebody ensuring it doesn't, it's that if I ever wanted to start my own business using that river that wouldn't work if it were chloride, well that's just too bad.
In other words, clean air and water regulations have to be the cost of doing business, because otherwise, dirty air and dirty water are going to be the costs of having an economy--but only an economy which allows for dirty air and dirty water activities. Personally I'd rather have a diverse economy and clean air and water too. I've seen economists argue that these things are still luxuries when compared to the basic necessity of employment in order to gain sustenance, and sure, when our grand economy developed, we didn't have those things. And we realized how bad an idea that was, and consequently we are not Haiti. As for clean air and clean water verses money to eat--one will kill you sooner yet too much of the other may well kill you later, but either way, life's better if you can have both.
That leads me to climate change, because we've sort of mostly figured out how to create a decent balance of clean air, clean water, and economy, but we're still at a loss about how and even if to do something about carbon emissions while maintaining an economy and standard of living that depend deeply upon emitting carbon. There is no other way to describe this unique situation in history except to say that it royally sucks. And it looks like most of the feeble solutions we've come up with are full of imperfection on many fronts, heavy-handed government intervention and the necessity of mass personal sacrifice being high among them.
Two ideas, both of which are politically dead as dead can be, match two common economic strategies for dealing with "externalities," which in economic terms are bad consequences caused by an entity which don't directly penalize that entity, resulting in little incentive within the market structure to do much about it. One could call climate change the largest externality our global economy has ever created. One proposed solution is a tax on carbon, getting everybody who uses it, which is most of us, to pay per unit of use. When the price of something goes up, demand goes down, so that would force reductions somewhere along the way. Since people use carbon as a matter of necessity for things likes getting to jobs that give sustenance and getting the sustenance to stores too, that is going to have bad consequences for those who can't afford the higher price, the counter argument being that none of us can afford climate change and this way we are, at least, fairly paying according to our contribution thereof.
Another dead solution is a carbon cap and trade scheme, which mimics what we've already done with decent success to get other air pollutants under control. This seemingly puts the cost on large-scale polluters but will really put it on us too, because anybody providing a service whose costs go up must of necessity raise their prices all the same as if we'd all been taxed. The advantage, in my mind, in this kind of approach, is that it allows companies already doing better at reducing their emissions to be rewarded, and in general leaves more room for innovating in order to comply with the rules.
Both of those involve heavy government intervention--but they are still market solutions, far from "this must be this way" laws. Yet both of those were politically killed dead by most Republicans and not a small number of Democrats, see once again "wow this situation sucks" and the fact that no matter what we choose, some people are going to be burdened.
Other solutions: "investment in the green economy." I don't think this will work without further clarification of intent, because what is the "green economy" really? "Green jobs" seems to mean jobs for people who go out and install solar panels and put insulation in your attic--but somebody's got to be buying those solar panels and that insulation first--does the average homeowner have money for that? I sure as heck don't, and my observation is that despite everyone clamoring about how great that economy will be, these "green jobs" are largely a myth at the moment. Maybe Science! will give us new renewable energy and nuclear technology that will be awesome, but we need workable solutions now already, and have quite a few at least workable technologies already, with only economics and rapidly only politics standing in their way.
Ron Paul, as one example of the opposition to governmental intervention in all things environment, when he's not calling climate change a hoax, insists that removing oil subsidies and letting the price be what it is will go a long way to fix the problem naturally--again, not without pain. George W. Bush shared this sentiment, and sometimes attempted to structure policies this way while he was in office. It seems to me that doing this would at the very least solve a few birds with one stone: cut deficits though perhaps not substantially, have the same effect as carbon tax without having to actually tax people and deal with the associated bureaucracy, and would likely work to reduce carbon emissions as well as any other idea. And it may well severely staunch our recovery by damaging the oil and gas industry which even now employs millions of Americans.
None of these fixes are what I would call socialism, and have been shot down for economic reasons, rather than philosophical ones. Yet a rising timbre in American political discourse pre- 2012 election calls for reduced business regulation and also a symbolic return of rugged individualism to the tune of Ayn Rand, and this does not seem to bode well for fixing an externality associated with a large swath of our individual behaviors. And so with all proposed solutions so far struck down and a new sentiment a'brewing, this raises the philosophical question: are there any solution to climate change that don't involve unprecedented self-sacrifice where it's willing and social engineering where it's not? Do all practical environmental solutions equate to accepting some incremental new level of socialism, and is that always such a terrible thing?
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Friday, April 29, 2011
Don't Be So Attached to Those Individual Electrons--The Real Model of Solar Power Production
Solar electricity has been around for several decades, and for several decades, it has had it's champions and it's spread-out user base, typically the uber-environmentally conscious, especially those among that movement who preferred many miles of removal from the rest of society, those whose paranoid preparation for all unknowns demand utter self-reliance, or other such folks who found that producing their own power without dependence on the utility was an idea so attractive they put it into practice despite the considerable expense and drastic lifestyle changes involved.
That model is always going to be a small percentage of the population, because for the rest of us, it is vastly most convenient--not to mention cheaper although it is that too and by a couple of order of magnitude--to let somebody else make our power and pay for it as we use it in monthly installments.
Luckily then, that model is not the only, and is not, at this point, the predominant, way in which solar electricity is deployed, precisely because the number of people who are going to live in their little solar cabin the woods is too small to ever kick-start the kind of mass deployment of solar that would help it get cheaper and more efficient--and yet that kind of deployment is already well underway. One of the attractive things about solar is that it offers an option for somebody who does want to just have his or her own little power farm in a way that minimally disturbs land and often can be doubled on existing space--but that doesn't mean it can't play with the big boys, too.
In today's market, solar is all about the regulatory structure--a vast patchwork of differences, in the case of the United States. Small Solar farms pop up as investments with ROI's estimated to exceed other ways of investing in California, while the solar market in South Carolina is as sparse as the brain cells of Ozzy Osborne. Tax incentives have something to do with this, certainly, as state tax credits equaling up to a third of the system cost on top of federal tax credits also good for a third of the cost do work wonders on the up-front system price, currently between $6 and $8 a watt--for those who owe that much in taxes. But the regulatory structure also helps determine distribution. There are quite a lot of good ideas out there, that when combined with federal tax credits have turned a hippie's pipe dream into an attractive portfolio item.
Net Metering
Forget batteries, the cheapest way to develop solar energy is to take central production of power and de-centralize it--but still leave everybody connected to the grid. Net metering laws allow solar-array owners who also use electricity to get credit on their electricity bill for what they've produced with solar. They won't be using the electrons they produce directly--that just floats out into the grid to get used by somebody, reducing by some fractional amount how much of the instantaneous electricity demand has to come from large power plants. In essence, your electric meter can run backwards or forwards--forwards when you use electricity, backwards when you produce it. If you don't produce all of your power, this nonetheless lowers your power bill by some agreeable amount. If you produce what you consume, no power bill for you. And if you overproduce, the power company has to pay you. This setup helps eliminate expense of batteries and the headache of maintaining them, and lets you live solar with no particular change in lifestyle. You can fall asleep with the TV on and still be able to turn the lights on the next morning.
Too bad that, while still paying the retail price for any electricity purchased from the utility, the utility only has to pay you the wholesale price for whatever extra production it must buy from you. There are reasons for this--we've generally decided it is in our best interest to not have competition among those who would provide us electricity and this is why the utility industry is so regulated. But it still sorta stinks for those who want to sell clean energy even if the utility won't.
Renewable Energy Portfolio Standards
I live in North Carolina, where net metering makes pretty much no economic sense compared to the other programs that do exist for systems connected to the grid. One of them is the Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard, which stipulates that utilities must diversify their fuel sources, and that ever-increasing percentages of their power production must come from renewable energy. Rather than go out and build their own solar farms, although they are doing this too, most utilities find this a reason to do extra business with the solar enthusiasts out there, and although they'll still just pay you the wholesale price for your kilowatt-hours, they also have to buy the rights to say that your renewable energy helps them comply with the rules. We call that a Renewable Energy Credit, and it's essentially a market for Units of Greenness. But Units of Greenness are worth more per kilowatt than the wholesale price of electricity, and produces of grid-tied systems can get both--a sum which currently tops the retail price. So whereas in net metering, where you produce electricity for yourself and get paid a considerably lower rate for any extra you make, with a system like the ones in North Carolina and New Jersey, any kilowatt you produce with solar is worth more than what you'd have to pay for it.
Power Purchasing Agreements
The whole reason even grid-tied solar remains impractical for individuals is that ownership of something that takes several decades to pay itself back is expensive and risky. Power Purchasing Agreements (PPAs for you acronym lovers) allow solar customers to nonetheless have the "green" credentials and warm-fuzzies from getting renewable energy, without having to put the up front investment and risk into the proposition--and the solar contractors, who make their money by installing systems, benefit from elevated business installing them. In fact these agreements transform a solar contractor into a solar service provider, who charges a fee but not one on the order of magnitude of the actual system cost to install solar electricity on the property of the customer, who then leases it from the solar provider for contract periods of up to two decades. The customer gets the satisfaction of paying a monthly bill for power that goes to renewable energy production with the same convenience of paying power bills to a utility (maintenance remains the responsibility of the solar provider), while the solar provider gets to pocket all of the tax credits for the system, and, depending on the state, might even get a contracted income from its energy.* Aside from sustainability itself, the only substantial difference between paying a solar provider and paying a utility is that the power production happens on your rooftop.*
Power purchasing agreements allow businesses especially to jump into renewable energy. My company has 70kw system installed under a power purchase agreement on the roof of our manufacturing facility. Recently a local and much-maligned paper mill used a PPA to commission a half-Megawatt solar farm on it's old landfill. I was going to call it the largest to date in North Carolina, but that superlative gets topped by another, larger one, pretty much monthly.
A Local Example
North Carolina has one of the most effective renewable energy programs in the southeast. We don't match California and we don't even match New Jersey, but we're in the top 10 for most solar-friendly states. We have net metering, but as I mentioned practically nobody does it, because of the Portfolio Standards and because of an organization called NC Green Power that pays consumers for what they produce but only if they don't do net metering. We also have Power Purchasing Agreements, but our state does not allow anyone but the utilities to sell electricity to the consumer (although we are trying to change this), so owners of solar electric systems don't get the added benefit selling the power directly to their customers. Nonetheless, they do get the RECS and paid by the utility a little bit and all that, so Power Purchasing Agreements are still quite popular.
Here are some statistics, gleaned from the recent State Energy Office Conference I just got back from in Raleigh:
The cost of photovoltiacs has gone down 46% in North Carolina since the implementation of the Renewable Energy Portfolio Standards
In 2009, installed solar capacity in North Carolina grew 900%...from 4kW to 4 MW
We have met and exceeded the Portfolio Standard requirement for solar of 0.02% of utility production by 2010 easily, and have built a solar industry that is poised to do much more, ahead of schedule.
That model is always going to be a small percentage of the population, because for the rest of us, it is vastly most convenient--not to mention cheaper although it is that too and by a couple of order of magnitude--to let somebody else make our power and pay for it as we use it in monthly installments.
Luckily then, that model is not the only, and is not, at this point, the predominant, way in which solar electricity is deployed, precisely because the number of people who are going to live in their little solar cabin the woods is too small to ever kick-start the kind of mass deployment of solar that would help it get cheaper and more efficient--and yet that kind of deployment is already well underway. One of the attractive things about solar is that it offers an option for somebody who does want to just have his or her own little power farm in a way that minimally disturbs land and often can be doubled on existing space--but that doesn't mean it can't play with the big boys, too.
In today's market, solar is all about the regulatory structure--a vast patchwork of differences, in the case of the United States. Small Solar farms pop up as investments with ROI's estimated to exceed other ways of investing in California, while the solar market in South Carolina is as sparse as the brain cells of Ozzy Osborne. Tax incentives have something to do with this, certainly, as state tax credits equaling up to a third of the system cost on top of federal tax credits also good for a third of the cost do work wonders on the up-front system price, currently between $6 and $8 a watt--for those who owe that much in taxes. But the regulatory structure also helps determine distribution. There are quite a lot of good ideas out there, that when combined with federal tax credits have turned a hippie's pipe dream into an attractive portfolio item.
Net Metering
Forget batteries, the cheapest way to develop solar energy is to take central production of power and de-centralize it--but still leave everybody connected to the grid. Net metering laws allow solar-array owners who also use electricity to get credit on their electricity bill for what they've produced with solar. They won't be using the electrons they produce directly--that just floats out into the grid to get used by somebody, reducing by some fractional amount how much of the instantaneous electricity demand has to come from large power plants. In essence, your electric meter can run backwards or forwards--forwards when you use electricity, backwards when you produce it. If you don't produce all of your power, this nonetheless lowers your power bill by some agreeable amount. If you produce what you consume, no power bill for you. And if you overproduce, the power company has to pay you. This setup helps eliminate expense of batteries and the headache of maintaining them, and lets you live solar with no particular change in lifestyle. You can fall asleep with the TV on and still be able to turn the lights on the next morning.
Too bad that, while still paying the retail price for any electricity purchased from the utility, the utility only has to pay you the wholesale price for whatever extra production it must buy from you. There are reasons for this--we've generally decided it is in our best interest to not have competition among those who would provide us electricity and this is why the utility industry is so regulated. But it still sorta stinks for those who want to sell clean energy even if the utility won't.
Renewable Energy Portfolio Standards
I live in North Carolina, where net metering makes pretty much no economic sense compared to the other programs that do exist for systems connected to the grid. One of them is the Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard, which stipulates that utilities must diversify their fuel sources, and that ever-increasing percentages of their power production must come from renewable energy. Rather than go out and build their own solar farms, although they are doing this too, most utilities find this a reason to do extra business with the solar enthusiasts out there, and although they'll still just pay you the wholesale price for your kilowatt-hours, they also have to buy the rights to say that your renewable energy helps them comply with the rules. We call that a Renewable Energy Credit, and it's essentially a market for Units of Greenness. But Units of Greenness are worth more per kilowatt than the wholesale price of electricity, and produces of grid-tied systems can get both--a sum which currently tops the retail price. So whereas in net metering, where you produce electricity for yourself and get paid a considerably lower rate for any extra you make, with a system like the ones in North Carolina and New Jersey, any kilowatt you produce with solar is worth more than what you'd have to pay for it.
Power Purchasing Agreements
The whole reason even grid-tied solar remains impractical for individuals is that ownership of something that takes several decades to pay itself back is expensive and risky. Power Purchasing Agreements (PPAs for you acronym lovers) allow solar customers to nonetheless have the "green" credentials and warm-fuzzies from getting renewable energy, without having to put the up front investment and risk into the proposition--and the solar contractors, who make their money by installing systems, benefit from elevated business installing them. In fact these agreements transform a solar contractor into a solar service provider, who charges a fee but not one on the order of magnitude of the actual system cost to install solar electricity on the property of the customer, who then leases it from the solar provider for contract periods of up to two decades. The customer gets the satisfaction of paying a monthly bill for power that goes to renewable energy production with the same convenience of paying power bills to a utility (maintenance remains the responsibility of the solar provider), while the solar provider gets to pocket all of the tax credits for the system, and, depending on the state, might even get a contracted income from its energy.* Aside from sustainability itself, the only substantial difference between paying a solar provider and paying a utility is that the power production happens on your rooftop.*
Power purchasing agreements allow businesses especially to jump into renewable energy. My company has 70kw system installed under a power purchase agreement on the roof of our manufacturing facility. Recently a local and much-maligned paper mill used a PPA to commission a half-Megawatt solar farm on it's old landfill. I was going to call it the largest to date in North Carolina, but that superlative gets topped by another, larger one, pretty much monthly.
A Local Example
North Carolina has one of the most effective renewable energy programs in the southeast. We don't match California and we don't even match New Jersey, but we're in the top 10 for most solar-friendly states. We have net metering, but as I mentioned practically nobody does it, because of the Portfolio Standards and because of an organization called NC Green Power that pays consumers for what they produce but only if they don't do net metering. We also have Power Purchasing Agreements, but our state does not allow anyone but the utilities to sell electricity to the consumer (although we are trying to change this), so owners of solar electric systems don't get the added benefit selling the power directly to their customers. Nonetheless, they do get the RECS and paid by the utility a little bit and all that, so Power Purchasing Agreements are still quite popular.
Here are some statistics, gleaned from the recent State Energy Office Conference I just got back from in Raleigh:
The cost of photovoltiacs has gone down 46% in North Carolina since the implementation of the Renewable Energy Portfolio Standards
In 2009, installed solar capacity in North Carolina grew 900%...from 4kW to 4 MW
We have met and exceeded the Portfolio Standard requirement for solar of 0.02% of utility production by 2010 easily, and have built a solar industry that is poised to do much more, ahead of schedule.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Confidence
This is my second running in a program mentoring shy and quiet teenage girls in the realm of self-confidence and standing up for yourself (something, goodness knows, I pretty much sucked at when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen...etc), using rock climbing as a tool to teach about both success, failure, and expressing your boundaries.
Confidence is a crucial skill for a teenage girl, faced with peer pressure and all too often growing up in a culture of sex and violence. The sponsor of the program is the local rape crisis shelter, and the underlying goal of the program is rape prevention, by grabbing the people considered most vulnerable to future harm and trying to give them a set of skills and experiences that might help them later in life--and for some of these girls, it's not even later that we're worried about.
But it's the little things, too, where voice and confidence to use it is not an optional skill if one wants to succeed. The girl who shakes her in fear when she is called on to speak, the one who shrugs and says "I don't know" in a quiet little voice when she does know and we call her on it, I wish I could tell her how crucial confidence is to everyday life, how even as someone who is supposed to be an example of confidence, I struggle with it, and so do most of the adult women I know.
Confidence is the difference between the person people contact to get their question answered and the person they pass by who may know the answer too but only quietly seethes that they didn't ask her. Between the salesperson who closes and the one who doesn't. Yes, between the woman who says "no" and follows through with "I said no!" and the woman who says "no" and then allows her refusal to be washed away in a sea of self-doubt, as well as between the woman who goes after her desires and one who only waits, dissapointed. For that matter between a woman who says "I can do that" and tries, maybe fails, maybe succeeds, and a woman who says wistfully "I could never do that" yet always wonders.
Confidence is how job interviews are won, mistakes are learned from, how knowledge becomes application and application becomes experience. It is how friends are made and kept, and relationships are sustained, it is how opportunities are seized and successful endeavors are realized. It is how not knowing turns into finding out--by having the assurance to ask the right questions of the right people without assuming that having to ask implies a deficiency beyond simple newness to the information. It is not confusing newness to information with intellectual deficiency. It is how successful communication bridges interpretation gaps without being caught up in defensiveness or fear of provocation.
Confidence is how people who can see their own shortcomings can look past those shortcomings and onto what they can do to lesson them, grow, and apply their strengths. Confidence is how people who know their talents keep themselves grounded in the human aspect of their journey through the world.
On some level, you really can't make it up. Confidence informs every interaction. It is easier to have confidence where we have some experience and some success, but confidence is most essential in situations where we have neither yet still hope to grow.
Teenage girls deserve to be taught confidence. All people do, but I have seen adult women kill their lives with all-consuming self-doubt. I have seen adult women devalue themselves in a world that fairly often devalues us anyway---and I have been such a woman myself. But I am not one of those women now. I know my strengths and I am empowered to better my weaknesses.
Confidence is a crucial skill for a teenage girl, faced with peer pressure and all too often growing up in a culture of sex and violence. The sponsor of the program is the local rape crisis shelter, and the underlying goal of the program is rape prevention, by grabbing the people considered most vulnerable to future harm and trying to give them a set of skills and experiences that might help them later in life--and for some of these girls, it's not even later that we're worried about.
But it's the little things, too, where voice and confidence to use it is not an optional skill if one wants to succeed. The girl who shakes her in fear when she is called on to speak, the one who shrugs and says "I don't know" in a quiet little voice when she does know and we call her on it, I wish I could tell her how crucial confidence is to everyday life, how even as someone who is supposed to be an example of confidence, I struggle with it, and so do most of the adult women I know.
Confidence is the difference between the person people contact to get their question answered and the person they pass by who may know the answer too but only quietly seethes that they didn't ask her. Between the salesperson who closes and the one who doesn't. Yes, between the woman who says "no" and follows through with "I said no!" and the woman who says "no" and then allows her refusal to be washed away in a sea of self-doubt, as well as between the woman who goes after her desires and one who only waits, dissapointed. For that matter between a woman who says "I can do that" and tries, maybe fails, maybe succeeds, and a woman who says wistfully "I could never do that" yet always wonders.
Confidence is how job interviews are won, mistakes are learned from, how knowledge becomes application and application becomes experience. It is how friends are made and kept, and relationships are sustained, it is how opportunities are seized and successful endeavors are realized. It is how not knowing turns into finding out--by having the assurance to ask the right questions of the right people without assuming that having to ask implies a deficiency beyond simple newness to the information. It is not confusing newness to information with intellectual deficiency. It is how successful communication bridges interpretation gaps without being caught up in defensiveness or fear of provocation.
Confidence is how people who can see their own shortcomings can look past those shortcomings and onto what they can do to lesson them, grow, and apply their strengths. Confidence is how people who know their talents keep themselves grounded in the human aspect of their journey through the world.
On some level, you really can't make it up. Confidence informs every interaction. It is easier to have confidence where we have some experience and some success, but confidence is most essential in situations where we have neither yet still hope to grow.
Teenage girls deserve to be taught confidence. All people do, but I have seen adult women kill their lives with all-consuming self-doubt. I have seen adult women devalue themselves in a world that fairly often devalues us anyway---and I have been such a woman myself. But I am not one of those women now. I know my strengths and I am empowered to better my weaknesses.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Sustaining Words
"Green" as a term for "environmentally-friendly" is stupid. Green is a color. It's use to describe a philosophical/political/methodological concept stems, I suppose, from the fact that vegetation outside of winter and fall is often green, and vegetation is something that abounds especially in places where humans are not giving it undue suppression, is thus associated with preserving such places as well as the whole planet. Even though the whole planet is much more blue.
Tongue no longer in cheek, I don't like "green" as a concept other than a nice color because it is imprecise and very quickly made nonsensical. I'm nonetheless saddled with using it, since it is recognized as a marketing tool by the company I work for and is front-and-center in the descriptions of my department and my job title, and even the industry in which I work.
"Sustainable" and "Sustainability" is the more sophisticated term, embodying a more clear view of what the philosophy actually means, which is to consider how well said activity/object/policy can be carried out into the long-term with regard to the environment, recognizing that we care about the environment because of how interrelated it is to pretty much everything if you look at it hard enough and how much we depend on having a functioning environment, not only because in some places said environment is pretty and "pristine" (hah!) We can and do talk about "sustainability" as not meaning the environment: most frequently economic sustainability, but no-sleep college kid running off of ten cups of coffee also comes to mind. The idea is the same: short-term actions without regard to long-term consequences has the real potential to come back to bite you later.
"Sustainability" is recognized and understood by most people associated with environmentalism, yet may not obviously be so to those who are not. And I say that also makes it a preferable term, because the goal of sustainability is not to be a side pursuit for hippies, but to describe how society actually is. Able to keep going. With positive delta well being, even, not something degrading over time from overuse and lack of planning.
Tongue no longer in cheek, I don't like "green" as a concept other than a nice color because it is imprecise and very quickly made nonsensical. I'm nonetheless saddled with using it, since it is recognized as a marketing tool by the company I work for and is front-and-center in the descriptions of my department and my job title, and even the industry in which I work.
"Sustainable" and "Sustainability" is the more sophisticated term, embodying a more clear view of what the philosophy actually means, which is to consider how well said activity/object/policy can be carried out into the long-term with regard to the environment, recognizing that we care about the environment because of how interrelated it is to pretty much everything if you look at it hard enough and how much we depend on having a functioning environment, not only because in some places said environment is pretty and "pristine" (hah!) We can and do talk about "sustainability" as not meaning the environment: most frequently economic sustainability, but no-sleep college kid running off of ten cups of coffee also comes to mind. The idea is the same: short-term actions without regard to long-term consequences has the real potential to come back to bite you later.
"Sustainability" is recognized and understood by most people associated with environmentalism, yet may not obviously be so to those who are not. And I say that also makes it a preferable term, because the goal of sustainability is not to be a side pursuit for hippies, but to describe how society actually is. Able to keep going. With positive delta well being, even, not something degrading over time from overuse and lack of planning.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Further Reasons to Be Hesitant About Nuclear Power
As you can tell, I am quite ambivalent about nuclear power. On the one hand, I think more widespread use of nuclear energy is better than continuing to burn coal. On the other hand, I think nuclear is a foolish stopgap measure--it has it's own problems and is not where humanity needs to end our quest for the energy alternative to carbon.
After last night's post, I started thinking even more, and I want to articulate several against nuclear power that I cannot handily ignore. While the accusations of just being misinformed about the risk and thus afraid and alarmist are often leveled against nuclear power opponents, I don't find that to be true about all of them. Sure, nuclear power can be scary and that is bound to rally strong opposition, but many of the intelligent people I know who oppose it do so for reasons more sophisticated than how scary it is. I think they have decent arguments, which I will sum up below:
1.) As I address last night, we still have not decided what to do with the waste, which is a problem on a timescale we may not be equipped to deal with. Sitting in cooling ponds on reactor sites is not a permanent solution--but you know, I really don't want it buried near me, either. As I mentioned, this problem is probably more relevant to future generations than it is people currently alive, but there is an ethical problem with creating such a concerning problem and dumping it on future generations--perhaps mitigated by future technology that can solve the problem better than we can now.
2.) Nuclear is too expensive--more expensive by far than the conventional coal or natural gas plants, and more expensive than renewable energy--certainly more expensive than renewable energy could and will be as technology gets cheaper and if politicians stopped dismissing it's potential. Why waste time on such a costly and risky fix?
Perhaps that argument is weak sauce when compared to the benefits of lots of non-greenhouse-gas energy.
The other argument is philosophical:
3.) Nuclear power is just a distraction. This is essentially the argument I tried to make earlier--although I argue that it is unfortunately a necessary one. However, some of my colleagues are bold enough to say that since the time for an energy paradigm shift is nigh, let's do it right the first time. Don't do something you know creates another unacceptable problem when you know what the real solution is, and that solution is renewable energy, most likely mixed with a more sustainable use of fossil fuels. If we wait until a convenient "later" to switch from nuclear to renewable energy, later may never come, or will come only after a host of problems with steep human and economic costs forces us to switch. At worst, a focus on nuclear energy will overshadow and thus further hinder development of renewable energy.
There is considerable debate over whether renewable energy, whether in current or future form, can really power some/most/all of our energy needs. My experience with it leads me to believe that with not-so-distant future innovation, yes, it will be sufficient by itself, but with current technology, there is plenty of potential but the distribution and storage of energy has to change dramatically for us to really assess how much of our society we can power with it. If we focus on renewable energy, we will make those changes out of necessity. If we focus on nuclear instead, we won't, because nuclear already fits into the "central production location creating power as is demanded" paradigm, and renewable energy, which doesn't work that way, will stay on the margins. We could argue that we need nuclear to get to the carbon emissions reductions we desperately need to get to--or we could argue that necessity is the mother of invention and without relying on nuclear, necessity will drive us to skip the intermediate step and throw ourselves directly into the most sustainable solution that technology has given us so far, which is renewable energy.
I am swayed by that argument, because not only do I "believe" in the ideal of renewable energy but also of the imperative to use it--I see it in my work. Solar farms are not just a happy fuzzy butterflies pipe dream, my region is seeing ever larger and more powerful solar arrays being commissioned every month. It's a case of "perfect" verses "good," a phrase an environmental engineer I know uses to describe the balance he walks between pushing his company for sustainable solutions and doing what makes sense to continue to have manufacturing and the resultant jobs stay in the United States and be profitable.
Letting a drive for perfection get in the way of taking incremental steps, of choosing to do what is at least better than doing nothing, is a bad idea, especially if insisting on perfection only gets in the way of taking any steps at all. But so, too, is getting complacent with marginal improvements, and not using will and vision to pursue the alternative that has the most benefits and the lowest cost, just because getting there is not an easy task.
After last night's post, I started thinking even more, and I want to articulate several against nuclear power that I cannot handily ignore. While the accusations of just being misinformed about the risk and thus afraid and alarmist are often leveled against nuclear power opponents, I don't find that to be true about all of them. Sure, nuclear power can be scary and that is bound to rally strong opposition, but many of the intelligent people I know who oppose it do so for reasons more sophisticated than how scary it is. I think they have decent arguments, which I will sum up below:
1.) As I address last night, we still have not decided what to do with the waste, which is a problem on a timescale we may not be equipped to deal with. Sitting in cooling ponds on reactor sites is not a permanent solution--but you know, I really don't want it buried near me, either. As I mentioned, this problem is probably more relevant to future generations than it is people currently alive, but there is an ethical problem with creating such a concerning problem and dumping it on future generations--perhaps mitigated by future technology that can solve the problem better than we can now.
2.) Nuclear is too expensive--more expensive by far than the conventional coal or natural gas plants, and more expensive than renewable energy--certainly more expensive than renewable energy could and will be as technology gets cheaper and if politicians stopped dismissing it's potential. Why waste time on such a costly and risky fix?
Perhaps that argument is weak sauce when compared to the benefits of lots of non-greenhouse-gas energy.
The other argument is philosophical:
3.) Nuclear power is just a distraction. This is essentially the argument I tried to make earlier--although I argue that it is unfortunately a necessary one. However, some of my colleagues are bold enough to say that since the time for an energy paradigm shift is nigh, let's do it right the first time. Don't do something you know creates another unacceptable problem when you know what the real solution is, and that solution is renewable energy, most likely mixed with a more sustainable use of fossil fuels. If we wait until a convenient "later" to switch from nuclear to renewable energy, later may never come, or will come only after a host of problems with steep human and economic costs forces us to switch. At worst, a focus on nuclear energy will overshadow and thus further hinder development of renewable energy.
There is considerable debate over whether renewable energy, whether in current or future form, can really power some/most/all of our energy needs. My experience with it leads me to believe that with not-so-distant future innovation, yes, it will be sufficient by itself, but with current technology, there is plenty of potential but the distribution and storage of energy has to change dramatically for us to really assess how much of our society we can power with it. If we focus on renewable energy, we will make those changes out of necessity. If we focus on nuclear instead, we won't, because nuclear already fits into the "central production location creating power as is demanded" paradigm, and renewable energy, which doesn't work that way, will stay on the margins. We could argue that we need nuclear to get to the carbon emissions reductions we desperately need to get to--or we could argue that necessity is the mother of invention and without relying on nuclear, necessity will drive us to skip the intermediate step and throw ourselves directly into the most sustainable solution that technology has given us so far, which is renewable energy.
I am swayed by that argument, because not only do I "believe" in the ideal of renewable energy but also of the imperative to use it--I see it in my work. Solar farms are not just a happy fuzzy butterflies pipe dream, my region is seeing ever larger and more powerful solar arrays being commissioned every month. It's a case of "perfect" verses "good," a phrase an environmental engineer I know uses to describe the balance he walks between pushing his company for sustainable solutions and doing what makes sense to continue to have manufacturing and the resultant jobs stay in the United States and be profitable.
Letting a drive for perfection get in the way of taking incremental steps, of choosing to do what is at least better than doing nothing, is a bad idea, especially if insisting on perfection only gets in the way of taking any steps at all. But so, too, is getting complacent with marginal improvements, and not using will and vision to pursue the alternative that has the most benefits and the lowest cost, just because getting there is not an easy task.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Updated Fission Cost-Benefit Analysis
About six months ago, I posted my thoughts on the costs and benefits of nuclear power. Nuclear power is a hot-point among we environmentalists: some of us are staunchly, utterly opposed, some insist that it can be made reasonably safe and is an important piece of getting us out of this climate change mess.
In the context of the earthquake, tsumai, and corresponding crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan, it is certainly time to think about this once agian.
In my last post, I posed the question: "In a cost-benefit analysis between a climate that is definitely warming up and changing even if we still don't know how much, and a remotely possible local but who knows maybe worldwide radiation induced horror, which would I choose?"
And I said I'd choose a warmer climate.
On further investigation I do not think I would choose a warmer climate, because the economic and human cost of billions of climate refugees, more frequent and stronger natural disasters, increased incidence of tropical disease, is clearly going to be more than the human cost of a nuclear disaster. The human and economic cost of losing all of the land we're predicted to lose to rising seas enough would probably outweigh the cost of a nuclear disaster. There is no such thing as a perfectly safe situation, the unthinkable happens, and not all contingencies can be planned or engineered for. But we can learn from the mistakes of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the not-a-mistake-at-all situation in Fukushima. Large scale disaster is unlikely, while climate disruption of some degree is almost a certainty.
However, I do not think nuclear is good for humanity; we have found that it and fossil fuels alike have consequences that, in a perfect world, are unacceptable for humanity. Risks to health, environment, and well-being we should not settle for. One day, we'll have to reckon with the consequences of those risks.
Right now, nobody has a good answer to what to do about nuclear waste. No matter how safe nuclear power plants are--and there's good reason to think we can get really good at making those safe-- there is still the issue of the extremely hazardous waste they produce, that will be around for thousands of years. Nobody wants it stored their community, threatening the integrity of their groundwater or their property values--and I don't blame them at all--but the concern is more than just a short-term one.
It seems incredibly naive to think we can isolate and keep that stuff out of the environment or the hands of terrorists for thousands of years. Looking thousands of years into the future, it's not even a sure bet that the safeguards of a constant and well-governed state will be around to provide the stability that helps mitigate the risk. We have been running reactors for forty years and we plan to make more and more waste, but we still do not have a solid plan for what to do with it even while a solid plan itself is laughable on the scale of thousands of years.
The upside to this is that we are likely to be able to to keep waste out of the environment for a few hundred years--although I'm not as optimistic about keeping it away from terrorists for that long--and the problems it will cause are left to far future generations, and are of unknown scope and who knows maybe they'll develop the technology to render it all harmless.
Since we've already left future generations a planet with an altered climate, morally I just can't feel good about that. But we've got to fix this climate problem, morally you could say we owe it to the people alive right who expect to be alive throughout the next century to rapidly counteract greenhouse gas emissions. Long-term, nuclear is not our answer--but we've already, however unknowingly, crossed the threshold into doing things that have steep and painful consequences with fossil fuels, and we have to deal and we have to act.
The technology for a truly sustainable energy exists and that isn't even counting future innovations, is getting cheaper and is expanding all the time, and ultimately needs to play the largest a role we can get it to play to have a society that can keep going without creating unacceptable risks. There is absolutely no reason to stop short of that goal. That being said, nuclear provides an impressive amount of energy without producing greenhouse gases, and seems necessary to make a transition out of fossil fuels happen quickly and less painfully in light of the threat of climate change.
But then we need to transition out of that too, and really figure out how to solve the question of waste.
(Clarity note: I am not talking about Bomb-making potential when I refer to terrorists, being aware that most of the waste from the first few generation light water reactors doesn't make weapons-grade materials and that's one of their upsides in the eyes of the government. However, it has always struck me that concentrated sources of a material that is dangerous to human life if entered into the atmosphere or groundwater would be a desirable sabotage target for the truly evil, and being suicidal wouldn't hurt.)
In the context of the earthquake, tsumai, and corresponding crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan, it is certainly time to think about this once agian.
In my last post, I posed the question: "In a cost-benefit analysis between a climate that is definitely warming up and changing even if we still don't know how much, and a remotely possible local but who knows maybe worldwide radiation induced horror, which would I choose?"
And I said I'd choose a warmer climate.
On further investigation I do not think I would choose a warmer climate, because the economic and human cost of billions of climate refugees, more frequent and stronger natural disasters, increased incidence of tropical disease, is clearly going to be more than the human cost of a nuclear disaster. The human and economic cost of losing all of the land we're predicted to lose to rising seas enough would probably outweigh the cost of a nuclear disaster. There is no such thing as a perfectly safe situation, the unthinkable happens, and not all contingencies can be planned or engineered for. But we can learn from the mistakes of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the not-a-mistake-at-all situation in Fukushima. Large scale disaster is unlikely, while climate disruption of some degree is almost a certainty.
However, I do not think nuclear is good for humanity; we have found that it and fossil fuels alike have consequences that, in a perfect world, are unacceptable for humanity. Risks to health, environment, and well-being we should not settle for. One day, we'll have to reckon with the consequences of those risks.
Right now, nobody has a good answer to what to do about nuclear waste. No matter how safe nuclear power plants are--and there's good reason to think we can get really good at making those safe-- there is still the issue of the extremely hazardous waste they produce, that will be around for thousands of years. Nobody wants it stored their community, threatening the integrity of their groundwater or their property values--and I don't blame them at all--but the concern is more than just a short-term one.
It seems incredibly naive to think we can isolate and keep that stuff out of the environment or the hands of terrorists for thousands of years. Looking thousands of years into the future, it's not even a sure bet that the safeguards of a constant and well-governed state will be around to provide the stability that helps mitigate the risk. We have been running reactors for forty years and we plan to make more and more waste, but we still do not have a solid plan for what to do with it even while a solid plan itself is laughable on the scale of thousands of years.
The upside to this is that we are likely to be able to to keep waste out of the environment for a few hundred years--although I'm not as optimistic about keeping it away from terrorists for that long--and the problems it will cause are left to far future generations, and are of unknown scope and who knows maybe they'll develop the technology to render it all harmless.
Since we've already left future generations a planet with an altered climate, morally I just can't feel good about that. But we've got to fix this climate problem, morally you could say we owe it to the people alive right who expect to be alive throughout the next century to rapidly counteract greenhouse gas emissions. Long-term, nuclear is not our answer--but we've already, however unknowingly, crossed the threshold into doing things that have steep and painful consequences with fossil fuels, and we have to deal and we have to act.
The technology for a truly sustainable energy exists and that isn't even counting future innovations, is getting cheaper and is expanding all the time, and ultimately needs to play the largest a role we can get it to play to have a society that can keep going without creating unacceptable risks. There is absolutely no reason to stop short of that goal. That being said, nuclear provides an impressive amount of energy without producing greenhouse gases, and seems necessary to make a transition out of fossil fuels happen quickly and less painfully in light of the threat of climate change.
But then we need to transition out of that too, and really figure out how to solve the question of waste.
(Clarity note: I am not talking about Bomb-making potential when I refer to terrorists, being aware that most of the waste from the first few generation light water reactors doesn't make weapons-grade materials and that's one of their upsides in the eyes of the government. However, it has always struck me that concentrated sources of a material that is dangerous to human life if entered into the atmosphere or groundwater would be a desirable sabotage target for the truly evil, and being suicidal wouldn't hurt.)
Friday, March 18, 2011
Mainstream
Thought for the day, from a Green Building journal:
"Convincing reluctant clients to go green is unnecessary--many green strategies should be incorporated as a matter of course."
This sums up quite succinctly what my job is about. There is a lot of explaining, a lot of listening, and lot of trade-off research and presentation involved, and a lot of nerdtalk tried to be made simple, and yes, sometimes what the "green department" wants customers to put into their house because it's better by our philosophy are not things the customer or the rest of the company care much about because getting the job finalized (on company end), cost and conventional thinking (on customer end) get in the way. Our job is to expand green practices, while not forcing those practices upon people. Sometimes it feels like I do a lot of research and model-building and question answering all for naught, cause they then go and stick their furnace in the crawlspace anyway because that's what their HVAC contractor knows how to do and the architect forgot to make room on the floor-plans for a mechanical room.
You've just got to make good design practice be what you do, when you're in a position to do it, and not worry overmuch about labeling it "the green alternative." Rather, it's the smart alternative and heck it's not even alternative-- it's part of our process because there are many reasons it makes sense for it to be. It would be my dream that "green" as a term is made utterly irrelevant, because the process no longer needs "greening," and the "green" stuff is just as mainstream as everything else.
This isn't to say that everyone should put solar panels on their house (okay, there are good arguments as to why they should, but they can't, it is often impractical), but that the decision as to whether or not to install them should be just as obviously part of the design process as choosing between granite or fer-mica counter-tops. In each case, cost-benefit trade-offs as part of the path from conception to final product.
In my job, I work to forward this in small ways. I bring up energy efficient strategies to all customers who come my ways because they are good strategies, not just because they're the "green" ones that our "green" customers might want. I create fact sheets to simplify technical information relevant to may aspects of building, and throw the green choices in with the conventional as if each is equally mainstream--because they are, in my world, they are becoming more and more so as this industry matures, and treating them that way on paper is a subtle force in that direction. I work in the "green" department and the word "green" is constantly thrown around (though I prefer the word "sustainable" to describe the same philosophy) for the marketing value it gives us with people who self-identify with those ideas and look for their evidence in businesses they work with. But the things we do, the solar panels on our roof that power our manufacturing plant, the way we build our wall panels to exceed even the strictest new energy codes (that was my big project--figuring out what those codes were and how we can top them), are things we do because we think they are things that need doing.
"Convincing reluctant clients to go green is unnecessary--many green strategies should be incorporated as a matter of course."
This sums up quite succinctly what my job is about. There is a lot of explaining, a lot of listening, and lot of trade-off research and presentation involved, and a lot of nerdtalk tried to be made simple, and yes, sometimes what the "green department" wants customers to put into their house because it's better by our philosophy are not things the customer or the rest of the company care much about because getting the job finalized (on company end), cost and conventional thinking (on customer end) get in the way. Our job is to expand green practices, while not forcing those practices upon people. Sometimes it feels like I do a lot of research and model-building and question answering all for naught, cause they then go and stick their furnace in the crawlspace anyway because that's what their HVAC contractor knows how to do and the architect forgot to make room on the floor-plans for a mechanical room.
You've just got to make good design practice be what you do, when you're in a position to do it, and not worry overmuch about labeling it "the green alternative." Rather, it's the smart alternative and heck it's not even alternative-- it's part of our process because there are many reasons it makes sense for it to be. It would be my dream that "green" as a term is made utterly irrelevant, because the process no longer needs "greening," and the "green" stuff is just as mainstream as everything else.
This isn't to say that everyone should put solar panels on their house (okay, there are good arguments as to why they should, but they can't, it is often impractical), but that the decision as to whether or not to install them should be just as obviously part of the design process as choosing between granite or fer-mica counter-tops. In each case, cost-benefit trade-offs as part of the path from conception to final product.
In my job, I work to forward this in small ways. I bring up energy efficient strategies to all customers who come my ways because they are good strategies, not just because they're the "green" ones that our "green" customers might want. I create fact sheets to simplify technical information relevant to may aspects of building, and throw the green choices in with the conventional as if each is equally mainstream--because they are, in my world, they are becoming more and more so as this industry matures, and treating them that way on paper is a subtle force in that direction. I work in the "green" department and the word "green" is constantly thrown around (though I prefer the word "sustainable" to describe the same philosophy) for the marketing value it gives us with people who self-identify with those ideas and look for their evidence in businesses they work with. But the things we do, the solar panels on our roof that power our manufacturing plant, the way we build our wall panels to exceed even the strictest new energy codes (that was my big project--figuring out what those codes were and how we can top them), are things we do because we think they are things that need doing.
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