In this episode: electricity conservation, privatized nuke waste, mystery sea level rise, EDF press release

Intelligent Demand Response to Prevent Electricity Shortages, Brownouts and Blackouts:

Demand response isn’t a topic that comes to mind for most people when they think of energy conservation. When the summer sun is beating down, it’s stifling hot, and the air-conditioners are on full blast, we’ve all heard the requests from our local utilities to save electricity as electric power supplies get tight so, we voluntarily conserve energy, individually, to prevent power shortages.

Back in the “old days” — 10 years ago — companies participating in the early demand response programs did it the old-fashioned way, literally going around and turning off lights and equipment to consume less electricity, helping out their local utility to reduce their electricity consumption and prevent potential brownouts and rolling blackouts.

Very sophisticated, automation technologies — some introducing technology imported from Europe — are now being promoted by a number of companies, including Powerit Solutions. These technological advancements allow computers to make “intelligent” decisions for each individual industrial facility using demand response technology, carefully “shedding,” in progressive stages, the electrical requirements for each company. By acting in this “intelligent” manner, production is minimally affected until the energy squeeze crisis passes.

Demand response has proven tremendously successful for the utilities and big, electrical-grid operators in managing an impending, peak-power crisis. Though the technology is growing quickly in popularity with systems installed in more and more industrial companies, there is still a great deal of potential in the management of even more fundamental industrial energy loads.

See the article for more detail. Note that the author is the President of the company mentioned above, Powerit Solutions.

My general reaction to this article is: Welcome to our future. We live in a world where we emit far too much CO2 and other pollutants per unit of electricity we generate. That means we’ll be hard pressed to build up those technologies with very low or no marginal CO2 emissions/kWh, such as solar, wind, wave, tidal, geothermal, nuclear and CCS retrofitted onto coal plants as quickly as we’ll need them. One way to avoid some of the pain of this emerging market pinch is through conservation–and it goes far beyond changing your light bulbs.

While it’s true that we have a ridiculous amount of low-hanging fruit to pick in almost all areas of our energy use, it’s equally true that it will take a very different mindset than most people have today before we actually take those steps and exploit that untapped energy source. Modern industrial society has evolved in an era of absurdly cheap energy, including electricity and oil, and we’re suddenly faced with a sea change in the basic rules of the game that’s making our decades of experience and learned habits obsolete.

When people talk about energy issues they tend to fixate on oil and its most obvious use, transportation, and with at least some justification. But I’m increasingly convinced that the biggest challenge will not come from keeping goods and people moving, but in keeping the electrons flowing while we deal with the need to reduce CO2 emissions as well as the growing impact of past emissions, including drought, rising sea levels, and warming temperatures.

It bothers me deeply that so few people seem to be connecting these dots and talking about the larger picture, particularly the overlap of peak oil and global warming, which is where electricity generation lies.

DOE Idea: Going Private With Nuke Waste:

Energy Department officials trying to promote nuclear power are suggesting that private industry assume some responsibility for the country’s nuclear waste.

Edward F. “Ward” Sproat said Thursday that the idea could ensure more stable management and financial support for the long-delayed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump project in Nevada that he manages.

“I do think that providing some sort of an organization with legislative fiat that provides that stability and fixes some of these institutional problems is a good idea,” Sproat said after addressing a conference of nuclear regulators. “But it’s got to be done right.”

He heads the Energy Department’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.

Even Yucca Mountain supporters say stability has been lacking at the 77,000-ton repository planned 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. It is intended as the resting place for the spent reactor fuel and high-level defense waste piling up at power plants and other sites around the country.

…

A power point briefing prepared for lawmakers by Dennis R. Spurgeon, the Energy Department’s assistant secretary for nuclear energy, includes a slide showing a “nongovernmental entity” that would manage nuclear waste disposal and fees from nuclear utilities in concert with a still undeveloped recycling program supported by the Bush administration.

…

Yucca Mountain’s opening date has been delayed repeatedly since the original 1998 goal. Sproat had pegged 2017 as the best achievable opening date. But that has slipped and he could not give a new one on Thursday.

He did say that plans to submit a required construction license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by the end of June are back on track, after coming into doubt this year because of Reid’s budget cuts.

Meanwhile, liability to taxpayers is surpassing $7 billion because the department contracted with utilities to take possession of their nuclear waste beginning in 1998.

Somebody tell me that this is a bad joke. Please.

Reservoirs keep sea levels down:

The water stored worldwide in reservoirs has stopped global sea levels by rising by more than an inch in the past half century alone, cutting the effects of global warming on ocean levels significantly.

A new study suggests that even though global sea level has been climbing steadily by 1.8 mm per year over the same period - a rate that is now increasing - the contribution from melting ice or thermal expansion may have been much greater than realised by scientists.

…

In the journal Science, the Taiwanese scientists point out that the total rise in sea level over the past century is due largely to ocean water expanding in volume as it warms up, and ice melt from mountain glaciers and Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

Subtracting the effect of thermal expansion from the observed rate of sea level rise should give a reasonable estimate of the rate of ice melting, but the equation leaves out the amount of water locked up in reservoirs, which stops run off into the oceans.

The researchers estimate that trapping the reservoir waters has artificially dropped sea levels by 30 millimeters over the past 50 years. Add that water back in, and suddenly the contribution of ice melt, or thermal expansion, or both, “plus some other unidentified causes,” must be higher than previously thought.

The latest climage change report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report indicated that, after summing up all the known natural causes, scientists are still short of explaining fully the observed rise; “so the (man-made) reservoir impact actually makes the situation even worse - or more difficult to explain.”

I get a lot of e-mail from people asking why I’m so alarmed about global warming when peak oil is, as I say endlessly, likely only three or four years off. This article perfectly exemplifies why: We keep making discoveries about climate change and the environment and they’re almost universally bad news.

We don’t know exactly how bad the situation is. We don’t know for sure precisely how much we have to cut CO2 emissions and how soon. The conventional wisdom at one time was that CO2 had to remain below 500 parts per million. Now we’re talking about 450 as the “magic number”, but there’s already been talk that it might be 350–which we passed some time ago, given that we’re above 380 and still climbing.

But back on point: What do you think accounts for the mystery sea level rise? My hunch is that it’s the obvious candidates, accelerated melting of polar ice and other glaciers, plus thermal expansion of the oceans.

Related article, from 1996(!), about the same scientist talking about dam building: Dams for Water Supply Are Altering Earth’s Orbit, Expert Says

See also Melting glaciers bigger cause of rising sea levels than estimated for some detail about dams and glaciers, from an Indian perspective.

Statement on NAM-ACCF Analysis of Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Tony Kreindler, 202-572-3378 or 202-210-5791 (cell)

(Washington – March 13, 2008) An analysis released today by the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Council on Capital Formation dramatically overstates the potential cost of reducing global warming pollution under the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act and ignores the severe economic impact of inaction.

“Unfortunately, we’ve seen this sort of scare tactic every time Congress takes up a major environmental law. The fact is, the dire predictions never come true,” said Steve Cochran, director of the National Climate Campaign at Environmental Defense Fund. “Instead of rehashing wrong assumptions about climate policy, it would be much more productive for NAM and ACCF to take a hard look at what it will cost if we do nothing at all.”

The analysis of S. 2191 released today is based on the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS) model, which is used by the Energy Information Administration. However, the “input assumptions” used by NAM and ACCF produce dramatically different results from other estimates – including previous EIA modeling of similar legislation and work done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The misguided assumptions used by NAM and ACCF include:

• No use of market tools to manage costs. This is directly counter to the provisions of the Climate Security Act, which provides for banking and borrowing of emissions allowances to keep costs down.
• Artificially limited use of offsets. The analysis caps offset use at 20 percent. This also is counter to the provisions of S. 2191, which allows 30 percent of reductions from offsets.
• Very limited carbon capture and storage (CCS). The modeling appears to assume that there will be few if any coal plants built with CCS, causing prices to go through the roof.
• Very limited use of renewable energy. In fact, the “low-cost” assumption about wind power (less than 5 gigawatts per year) is lower than the actual amount of wind power deployed in 2007 (5.244 gigawatts).
• Unreasonably high oil prices and no price response as a result of climate policy. MIT on the contrary predicts producer prices falling as a result of curtailed demand.

Most importantly, the analysis only looks at one side of the ledger. NAM and ACCF consider the costs of reducing emissions, but not the costs of inaction. According to recent studies by the University of Maryland and Tufts University, unchecked climate change will strain public budgets and impact jobs and competitiveness in every economic sector. According to the University of Maryland study, the most expensive climate policy for the U.S. is not having one.

About Environmental Defense Fund

Environmental Defense Fund is at the forefront of an innovation revolution, developing new solutions that protect the natural world while growing the economy. Founded in 1967 and representing more than 500,000 members, the group creates powerful economic incentives by working with market leaders and relying on rigorous science. For more information, visit edf.org.

And you thought all of our friends in the business community were going to play nice… why, exactly?