From http://citizentom.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/hummer-gas-prices_jpg_w300h300.jpg

And yeah, it's a "two-fer" - using all that gasoline to drive a few tons of metal around for one relatively tiny person by comparison not only cranks up demand for imported oil and thus bleeds our country something silly money-wise, but the by-product of burning oil products is CO2 pollution. Do this hundreds of millions of times a day around the world and there is some serious giga-tonnage (one gigaton is a billion tons) of CO2 pollution tossed up into the air. Do it long enough at rates faster than the ocean can absorb the CO2 (the ocean is the main "sink" for CO2) and the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere rises to the point where the temperature starts rising. When that happens the ice that has been stashed away in Greenland and Antarctica as well as the minor amounts stashed as glaciers onshore start melting and, for the ice-sheets, sliding into the ocean. That causes ocean levels to rise, and a whole lot of trouble, too, especially for humans. It's sort of fitting - those who cause the mess get nailed by their own stupidity - but it's more complicated, and the victims usually don't cause the problems, or at least most of the ones they are about to get nailed with - many of the perps are dead and gone by the time the effects are in full bloom, or at least reasonably apparent.

So, perhaps a little review is in order. Let's start with the planetary energy balance, of which 99.95% comes from the sun and the rest is "internal" (alias geothermal). Here's the macro version of the Navier-Stokes Equation, or in this case, the planetary heat balance:

Accumulation = Energy In - Energy Out

Energy leaves our planet by radiating infared photons (averaging around 10.06 microns, centered at corresponding to an average temperature of around 288 K = 15 C = 59 F), but at these temperatures, there is a big range of wavelengths in action, and the ones near 14.3 micron (CO2 and CH4 absorbances) are important - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wien%27s_displacement_law and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation. Energy comes in from the sun whose source temperature is around 5780 K = 5507 C = 9947 F (kinda toasty, eh?). At steady state, Accumulation = 0. If it is made more difficult to radiate heat into space (such as by altering the composition of our atmosphere), then higher surface temperatures will be needed to raise the "Energy Out" to the point where it matches "Energy In". Similarly, if radiating heat to space is made easier (again, by altering the composition of the atmosphere), Accumulation will be negative and surface temperatures of our planet will drop until a balance is re-established. Small changes in the solar radiation output can also have similar effects.

Since the great dinosaur wipe-out from the meteor crash in the Gulf of Mexico around 65 million years ago, the earth was kept nice and warm by higher CO2 concentrations, and partly this was caused by India (then a big island in the Indian Ocean) moving northwards, and in effect, digging up a lot of CO2 and methane (CH4) that had been buried in the ocean mud (sort of like a snow plow). But 25 million years ago it slammed into the Eurasian land mass (about 25 million years ago), and this sprouted the Himalayan Mountains in an alkaline part of the earth's crust. As rains eroded this alkaline earth, the waters flowed into the Indian and Pacific Ocean, and this alkali (limestone, dolomite, soda ash) reacted with the CO2 in the air/dissolved in the ocean, and the result was a gradual lowering of the CO2 content of the atmosphere, allowing infared radiation to radiate out at greater rates, and eventually lowering the temperature of the planet's surface. Soon, Antarctica became ice covered, along with the Arctic Ocean and Greenland; the increased ice cover reflected more light/heat, adding to the process.

The two pertinent physical laws at play are the Beer-Lambert absorption law (Beer''s Law as most chemists name it) and Planck's Blackbody Radiation Law (Nobel prize in 1904). There are also cycles of solar activity and eccentricities in the earth's orbit that slightly alter the "Energy In" aspect, but these are well understood. In addition, there are "lag times" due to the heat stored in the ocean, the rate that the ocean can absorb CO2, extent of ice-cover and the effects of the occasional volcano or many which dump sulfates into the air (causing cooling). There are now several accurate computer models of climate, all of which serve as the underpinning of weather models. The discovery of the "Ozone Hole" phenomena (chlorofluorocarbons, organobromine, organochlorine and methyl iodide compounds causing ozone to be decomposed on ice crystal surfaces in the stratosphere) has also helped in the understanding of the planetary energy balance. And while more climate science R&D should be done, that is no excuse not to act on what is already known....

Anyway, here are the results:
1. Surface Air Temperature:
from http://www.c2es.org/facts-figures/trends/co2-temp

2. Average Ocean Heat Content (water surface temperature proxy):
from http://www.c2es.org/facts-figures/trends/oceans

3. The models - one example of "The Hockey Stick" and this was before it gets worse in the 2000 to 2012 era):
from http://www.c2es.org/facts-figures/trends/model-vs-observed

4. And here is the anthropogenic (human caused) CO2 mass input data:
from http://petrolog.typepad.com/climate_change/2010/01/cumulative-emissions-of-co2.html


Houston, maybe we have a problem here.... ya think?

But then, so many say, "So what". Besides, there is no evidence of this being a problem... Wrong!
Here is just one of a whole lot of "paleoclimate" studies showing that a big surge in CO2 gives really significant changes in climate, ice coverage of earth's surface and ocean levels:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/c338g7j559580172/fulltext.pdf. It's a bit of a read, but compressed as best as can be done (it's a big subject...).

Well, when facts get in the way of bigotry, stupidity, short term profits and general corporate whoredom (well, at least on behalf of fossil fuel extractors and the present day Republican Party), time to "go Rogue", or, as pointed out in this awesome parody, "go Rouge": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_Rouge:_Sarah_Palin,_An_American_Nightmare

From the good folks at "De Smog Blog", comes a disturbing tale of "enforced ostrich behavior" where a group of evil intentioned types wish to perpetuate lies in the classroom of American children by trying to "instill doubt" with respect to climate science on aspects where there is no doubt except that of the fantasies of "denialists", and pass off lies as "contrary opinions", or else outright ban the teaching of any climate science:
http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-institute-exposed-internal-documents-unmask-heart-climate-denial-machine and further explained here:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/14/1064831/-Documents-Heartland-Institute-plans-to-instill-climate-change-denialism-in-every-school-child
After all, if "the truth will set you free", but the truth is never taught to American Children, will they ever really be free other than being free of the truth? Ah yes, it is truthiness (http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/06words.htm), in action, but with malicious intentions......

And we have small time local punksters, some free of charge and doing it because they wish to be contrarian, or else so far gone that they believe that dumping CO2 into our atmosphere at a furious rate is a right inferred by God to humans to bring on "End of Days" and Biblical Armageddon, while others do trolling for the money. Whenever somebody writes a letter to the editor expressing concern at how we humans (and in particular, the corporate/governmental leaders of the U.S.) are trashing the climate control system of our planet, out comes the Trolls. Out comes derision, lies, "weasels", and such twisted logic it would make a pretzel jealous. The main point is to get nasty with those concerned about our future well-being, and in effect, to "nasty out" such subversive (at least to pollution based profiteers) expressions of opinion. Here is one example:

http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial-page/from-our-readers/letters-to-the-editor/article715440.ece

No wonder Climate Concerns in the U.S. are at an all time low...

So, here's the response, and perhaps a cure for this "Davenport Malady":

This opinion and the denialism from one critic/troll (Rich Davenport) is a classic example of what has been repeated all across our country. Facts are just fodder and excuses to twist other facts and lies into quite the toxic little gumbo, where the goal is presumably a stalemate. And do this long enough, and nothing gets done till it is too late. Add to this the current Republican Party national trend (see "Republicans Undiscover Fire" http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/12/1063989/-Republicans-undiscover-fire?showAll=yes&via=blog_1), where ignorance and anti-science of some professions (except when it comes to petroleum geology, armaments and and some aspects of nukes, for example) reigns supreme, and we have a whole lot of ugly on a stick, with big ramifications. But remember, the goal of these trolls is really stalemate for a while, another 10 to 20 years of fossil fuel sourced energy allowing some to live large until both supplies get scarce and get really expensive by today's standards (and for oil, that's saying a lot). Then there is the CO2 waste product's impacts on the climate, too, when it gets just too darn obvious to ignore. Of course, a lot of the trolls (mostly oldish geezers, anyway) will be in retirement or post-retirement mode anyway, so if the climate version of The Rapture comes about, why should they care. Their work is done.... Mission Accomplished....

So how do we deal with the "immune to facts, immune to the scientific method" crowd? They are pretty frustrating, and they seem to either have media dominance, or have adapted to our "dumbed down" media where 15 seconds of face time is all there is, in between commercials and sports stories.

Odds are, money and jobs trumps their ignorance. After all, when the vast majority in this country are seeing a real decline in both wealth and income, and the means to skirt such an unwanted situation can't really be had anymore in sufficient numbers, people should be receptive to such approaches. In a lot of Europe, even in places ruled by conservatives who are trashing the world and their own national/regional governments/economies with delusions of "expansionary austerity", Green Jobs and associated renewable energy are a big hit and quite popular. Even when these raise prices for electricity a bit and gasoline/diesel a lot.

But that connection has not been successfully made in the U.S. Our present present wimped-out incentives for renewables (scheduled to end Dec 31, 2012) and punitive proposed dis-incentives for coal (rarely petroleum, it seems, which is the leading cause of both CO2 pollution and money/wealth export in this country) are not working to the extent needed, either, nor is it doubtful they even could.

So, maybe instead of playing defense, we need to play offense. Instead of raising prices on all pollution sourced electricity, just raise prices for the renewable sourced electricity and allow them to operate at profitably. Instead of raising mass transit fares, lower them, and add a very slight fee to gasoline (about 1 cent per gallon per month for one year, hardly noticeable at today's prices). Or raise Mitt Romney's marginal income tax rate (and that of his fellow one percenters). But, get back to a focus on using less petroleum, domestic or imported, and by all means, drop that imported oil bill to zero ASAP. And let's get the idea that we also have to be using LESS natural gas every year, not the same or more each year. As for nukes, well, Fukushima and high prices for new nukes have turned that into a zombie technology.

People employed in and associated with Green Jobs/Green Economy will be unreceptive to the trolls "stalemate strategy" on Climate and Energy. But with so few employed in Green Jobs, well, that allows the trolls to exercise far too much trouble. This "chicken or egg - which comes first?" conundrum, where the chicken seems to predominate, needs to be made a thing of the past.

DB

From http://news.hjnews.com/news/article_b87ec744-d1ea-11e0-abad-001cc4c03286.html

Many decades ago, natural gas (methane, fossil fuel form, alias Ngas) was proposed as the fossil fuel "bridge" between coal and a nuclear future. But then that nuclear future morphed into an ever more renewable energy one as nukes "came out of the closet" to reveal their darker side (extremely expensive, perpetually in need of various subsidies, prone to catastrophe on occasion). And of course there is no separating nukes from The Bomb, from which they were spawned. So, exit nukes, and apparently, exit renewables, as here comes fracking sourced natural gas (Ngas)... You mean, not a bridge but instead more of a destination? Were those Ngas use "bridge concept" promoters, er, stretching the truth a bit? Oh Noes !!!!

Basically, the Ngas producers want to get their customers good and hooked, so they can extract maximum revenue from them. This is no different than any other capitalists in the energy biz, but Ngas is a bit special. It is a pain to transport across oceans, and very capital intensive/expensive to do so, which means that Ngas extracted on a given continent isolated by lots of water is best used on that continent. But, on land or on islands near land, gas is easy to transport via pipelines. Storage of Ngas is also possible, but also expensive and a pain, too. Unlike oil, Ngas is not easily used in transportation, and since most cars, trucks, ships and planes are based on liquid fuels; it is easier to convert the Ngas to liquid fuels than convert present transportation users into Ngas users. So, the oil products have a solid lock on transportation energy, but oil and Ngas can compete for stationary applications.

Or, used to, but since oil is so much more pricey these days, oil has experienced "demand destruction" except in rare cases. The use of oil for heat and power generation in areas where there is also access to Ngas is pretty much extinct in the US these days... For example, the going spot price for Ngas is around $2.50/MBtu (MBtu = Million British Thermal Units, roughly 1000 standard cubic feet), but at $100/bbl, oil in bulk is around $17.50, or 7 times the thermal equivalent price.

But, Ngas is no longer needed to make electricity OR heat. In WNY, the combination of hydropower, wind turbines, pumped hydroelectric storage and biomass can replace both coal, Ngas AND nukes as sources for electricity. And as for heat, electricity can also supply it, and if groundwater based heat pumps are used, at an equivalent price, too. So do we really need that Ngas, especially given all the nasty that gets done to get some Ngas? No. And then there are those infernal price spikes that happen with the Ngas supply/demand mix, and which can throw huge regions into bankruptcy (think California during the Enron crimewave in the 2000-2001 era) when those who own the Ngas put the greed into overdrive and try to collect a record fortune in a record amount of time....

So, if you don't like fracking (and a lot of people in NY State don't, especially as one becomes more informed about it), don't support fracking with YOUR money! We often vote with how we spend our money, and in the case of Ngas and electricity, that is definitely the case. Besides, the wind turbine-pumped hydro-groundwater based heat pump approach can put far more people to work manufacturing and installing these than will occur with continued addiction to Ngas as our source of home and work heating. And if you continue to use Ngas ad infinitum, fracking is going to happen. If you want to be sensible and not stupid as well as frivolous, and you want to oppose/stop fracking in NY State, then we need to take steps to reduce Ngas usage in NY State every year. Insulate, "solar thermalize", live in reasonable sized housing, manufacture AND install solar hot water heaters, manufacture AND install groundwater heat pump systems and insist that our government tax dollars are not wasted on Ngas heating (schools, offices and buildings can be heated using heat pump systems, too, and at lower long term cost, too). That's how you stop fracking! Quit being so 20th century about heating and electricity production. Join the freaking 21st century...!

Ngas is easy to use in stationary applications (furnaces, kitchens, power plants), and burning Ngas into CO2 and water vapor plus heat can be done with a minimum of non-CO2 pollutant generation. But, there is that darn CO2 pollution aspect, and any leaks of methane are immensely a Global Warming problem due to the intense infared raditation absorbance by methane at the 14.4 micron wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum. There are many historical periods where giant eruptions of methane from oceans (where it gets stored under cold and pressure as "methane hydrates") are suspected of leading to serious temperature spikes which then set off other "feedbacks", including more CO2 pumping into the atmosphere. The half life of methane in our atmosphere is around 10 years, and after 68 years, a molecule of methane emitted has the same global warming potential as a molecule of CO2; after 68 years, over 99% of the methane emitted all those years ago has been changed into CO2 by the action of UV radiation from the sun and oxygen in the air.

Thanks to some really clever advertising campaigns, whenever the phrase "natural gas" is uttered or read, the word "clean" almost automatically pops up. This is untrue - Ngas is not clean and getting/delivering Ngas also can be a bit messy or really messy, depending on how it is done. Yes, coal is usually "dirtier", but is that really saying much? But then this is advertising - after all, is the right brand of beer or booze going to entice that supermodel to take home an average income and a bit overweight dude and do historically anomalous wonders to said dude? Right....

In North America, "conventional Ngas", which used to and sometime still does come pouring out of the ground in copious quantities with relatively little effort expended is now getting to be more of an exception than the rule. Nowadays, more and more Ngas is produced as a by-product of oil production or else via "unconventional" means - from ground that has really limited permeability or in the case of a lot of shales, with the permeability and porosity more like a brick. The Ngas deposit has to be "stimulated" and fracking seems to be the least costly approach (a nuclear bomb was once tried by the US Government (Operation Plowshare, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plowshare#Natural_gas_stimulation_experiment) but guess what, the Ngas recovered was too "hot" to handle - gee whiz, who could have predicted that one....?). But in addition to being expensive and yielding relatively little Ngas per well drilled compared to the mother-lodes of the past, it's also messy, it "leaks" a lot of methane into the air and then what to do with the spent fracking fluids and "produced water" that is often saturated with hydrocarbons in the shale? And then there are the active ingredients used in the fracking fluid "formulations", or what about co-produced toxic heavy metals and the associated radon produced from some shale gas deposits? if it costs money to treat and/or dispose of the unwanted stuff, that comes out of profits....

Here is an example of a "good" conventional North American gas prospect - a field with 60 trillion cubic feet of methane reserves, where 60 wells would allow 2 billion cubic feet per day to be produced for decades (at least 82 years), at roughly 33 million cubic feet per day per well (1 trillion cubic feet per well). A typical fracking well makes maybe 1 billion cubic feet in a 4 year timespan, after which it "drips" out the last 2 % of the stash. But, that conventional field is located at the McKenzie River delta (Canada, on the Arctic ocean coast). And the cost of a pipeline has doubled to $25 billion, due to the permafrost in Northern Canada going soft due to Global Warming and making pipeline design and construction an ever worsening nightmare. Doh! But, that's where the "good fields" are, in remote and/or dangerous to get places. The BP spill (April, 2011) in the Gulf of Mexico at 60,000 bbls/day of crude that was 50 wt% methane was belching out 192 million cubic feet per day of methane from ONE out of control well. That also would have been a "decent" find, but it's located in 5000 feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico almost 100 miles from the coast.

BTW, here are a couple of great articles on the recent natural gas price collapse, written by some very knowledgeable people in the profession. They are worth the read:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8914
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8900

Fracking means that we are going after the dregs of Ngas of the remaining supplies. It's Alice in Wonderland, where we run faster and faster just to stay in place, until it is no longer possible when the Ngas reserves run out. We don't have to wait until the oil and Ngas companies have extracted the maximum quantity of wealth from their "hosts" - it's customers. Now would be a smart time to start making the change.

DB

An Enercon E126 x 7.5 MW wind turbine, installed and operating in Austria (one of a pair of them). Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/rockenbauer/6702504217/. Even though this turbine model is a few years old, it is still one of the most advanced wind turbines made anywhere in the world. And this company has THE best reputation as far as quality goes. The original design was first built in 2004 (Emden, Germany as the "E-112 x 4.5 MW"), and it has been "tweeked" up to 7.5 MW and a 126 meter diameter rotor. Each of the three 61.5 meter long blades per turbine are transported in two parts and assembled on the erected tower/nacelle. These are the most aerodynamically efficient ones installed to date, partly due to the "winglets" on the end of the blades which keep air from "spilling off" as noise/useless turbulence. The unit is a direct drive (no gears) and the generator stator is over 10 meters (32.8 ft) in diameter; the generator unit weighs over 240 tons. Since steel is too flexible to use for the 135 meter tall tower (443 feet), the tower is made from reinforced concrete sections (in one of the larger factories in the world) that are assembled into a 2800 ton unit on a foundation weighing about 2500 tons (1200 cubic yards). But, since the nacelle is so far above the ground (so as to take advantage of winds that are stronger in the 198 to 62 meter zone above the ground) and there are no gears, this is one of the quietest (at ground level) wind turbines operating anywhere. Designed and manufactured in Germany, these are among the most visually stunning wind turbines presently in existence (note the door size, left hand side on the dark green band). However, these are designed to make money for their owners and not just for looks, and there is a lot of competition in Europe for wind turbine sales.

There are now 35 of these operating or under construction in Europe, and another 98 ordered, but with several hundred E-126 units (plus some smaller E-101 x 3 MW turbines) likely to be installed in northern Sweden in what will be the largest onshore wind farm - an estimated 1101 turbines in total - when complete (~ 4 GW capacity - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markbygden_Wind_Farm). These units in Sweden will be installed in a boreal forest that requires a tall tower height to reach optimal wind resources in forested areas (trees severely degrade wind speeds in the 0 to 100 meter height above ground range because the leaves and branches resist the flow of moving air past them (high surface roughness)).

And you cannot buy these in the USA, not because no one would order them (these probably would cost around $US 20 million each installed), but because the owner refuses to sell them in what can be be charitably described as a deranged renewable energy pricing system that we in the USA still consider to be better than nothing (and lots of justification for the nothingness comparative standard, too). More information on the E-126 can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enercon_E-126 or at http://www.enercon.de.

These turbines have been made possible because of the German Feed-In Tariff (FIT) system, where turbine owners are allowed to sell their electricity product for the cost to produce it plus a reasonable, socially determined profit rate. It is the ability to sell the reliable annual output of turbines like this that allows low cost financing for their purchase, which then drops the installed cost of these compared to what happens when no fixed price for electricity and possibly no stable incentives exist. After all, if you want to kill off the wind turbine business it is pretty easy - just maximize the insecurity in electricity pricing for ALL sources of electricity (usually gas turbines and government subsidized coal and nuke plants become the "winners"). In much of Europe, there are no government subsidies for renewable energy generation, especially in the form of avoided taxes. However, the avoided tax approach is used extensively in the USA, even though it delivers the least amount of delivered electricity at the highest cost and in the most regressive manner (usually poor and middle class people get stuck paying the taxes which are avoided via credits and deductions given to developers). But, better than nothing is still a winning argument....

Anyway, by providing a market for renewable electricity in a very competitive manner, a market for renewable energy generation equipment is created. And as a result, people and companies buy units like the E-126, and in doing so they create lots of new jobs and business opportunities, as well as pollution-free electricity that allows for less gas, coal and nuke generation to be used. And given a market that is somewhat predictable in sales volume, companies that make renewable energy equipment can go and improve on previous models and invent new ways to make and install these, which is how the E-126 came about - with NO government R&D (though some government funding was used to develop a crawler crane big enough to install models like this (a Terex 1600 ton model with a boom as long as a football field, including the end zones -> http://www.solaripedia.com/13/201/enercon_giant_wind_turbine_produces_seven_mw.html)). Oh well, try getting THAT message out, even to some environmental organizations like the NRDC....

The Punch Line:
In our country, if renewable energy, and especially electricity derived from wind turbines, was an economically viable business not dependent on the "kindness of strangers" so to speak (tax credits, grants, and tax deductions accumulated by "paper losses" like rapid depreciation combined with interest on loans), we also could be designing awesome wind turbines like the E-126. After all, we have the most awesome wind resource of any country with more than 30 million people in it (Canada's wind resource is also similar to ours). The US wind resource is capable of powering between 20 to 30 times the amount of electricity we now consume (depends on how the offshore resource is evaluated, and it could be more than 40 times if West Coast deep water winds can be tapped). But, you really only need two times our present electricity usage to completely displace natural gas, nukes, coal and most petroleum used for transportation, so why push it?

And it turns out that the US now has 1.8 million unemployed or underemployed engineers among the 25 million or so Americans that also fall into that zone of "not employed but employable" or "employed at a fraction of their potential" - often part time jobs that don't require a pair of college degrees in order to do them well. Here is a link describing the breakdown (http://www.numbersusa.com/content/nusablog/beckr/february-1-2012/news-pres-obama-18-million-americans-engineering-degrees-dont-have-en) and here are the "read it and weep" numbers:

U.S.-BORN INDIVIDUALS WITH ENGINEERING DEGREES (under age 66) (based on most recent American Community Survey by the Obama Administration itself)

101,000 -- U.S. engineers looking for a job who can't find any work at all

244,000 -- U.S. engineers who have dropped completely out of the labor market

1,470,000 -- U.S. engineers who are working but no longer as engineers

Kind of a waste of talent, ya think? Actually, President Obama sort of "did a Romney" (i.e. "stepped in it, big time" and "open mouth, insert foot") in a town hall meeting when a respondent asked why we are importing engineers when so many home grown ones can't find work in their chosen field. I guess us 1.8 million "economic discards" should send our resume to President Obama so that he "gets it" and does not do "another Romney", again, though how he and he aides could be so clueless.....

In case that's not enough outrage (though polite), here's some more:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/05/1061800/-Obama-team-sadly-misinformed-by-job-outsourcers?via=siderec

The answer why so many engineers can't find engineering work is pretty simple - most of us are/were tied to the real (as in manufacturing) economy, or else work for local governments (which have been successfully targets by the Republican "Austerians" (about half a million local government workers have been laid off due to the collapse of local government revenues since the Great Recession struck). In the recent past, over 50,000 American factories have been closed down, and several million people in the USA have lost their jobs. Those factories all needed engineers as a part of the workforce. And then there are the companies supplying those factories with services and goods, such as energy efficiency improvement approaches and devices, civil engineering upgrades, etc, and this also employed a lot of engineers. Then there is the category of "sales engineer"; no factory to sell to, no sales. There is also the R&D part, normally only a small fraction of engineers, but one which provides a new flow of products and ideas that spawns future work, or work that can take the place of things that become obsolete. And when communities become poorer because the source of the wealth and income produced in that community goes belly up, less tax revenue means less local and state governmental services, such as roads, sewers and water system, where lots of engineers get employed. The twin fates of factories and engineers are pretty tightly intertwined. The death of manufacturing in the computer and cellphone business in the US is also rather disturbing.... It's almost unethical to suggest people go to college to get engineering degrees with the goal of getting a job - instead, engineering degrees are just a good "base knowledge' that can be used to work in a Repo office, a Bail Bonds business or as a grocery store clerk. Uggh....

So, how do we go about getting jobs for engineers in our country? Well, it would help to actually have a viable market for the products that are made and which could use some improvement, too. That Enercon E126 got designed and manufactured because there was a market for the electricity made by that wind turbines. And the factories that had to be designed and then built to make this machine and ones like it (including the cast concrete tower sections in a 300,000 square meter building (about 3.23 million square feet), its components, for reliably and cost-efficiently making the products from that factory and to make the parts of the factory, all started with a demand for a product. It's like this - no problems to solve is a really big problem for engineers, as the "solution" to that predicament is unemployment.

So, you want Green Jobs (and especially Green Engineering jobs, which are in high demand by college students, but far too rare)? Create a demand for the "Green Product"in this case, electricity from "Green Machines" such as the E-126 and similar systems. This is why renewable energy Feed-In Laws (Feed-In Tariffs (FITs) come from these) are so important.... Once people start associating that which dominates their existence - which is the money they earn in order to pay their bills, buy food, shelter, clothing, health care and energy - with renewable energy, you've come a long way.

As of the end of 2012, NY will have an estimated 1820 MW of installed wind turbine capacity. About $3.6 BILLION was spent on the turbines and installation of them (about $2.6 billion on the machines themselves and $1 billion on the construction). Construction by its nature is temporary for any given project, but that is not so for the manufacture of these. Only a couple hundred manufacturing jobs have been created in NY State to supply, on net, what $2.6 billion was spent on. Truly a Jon Stewart (Comedy Channel) "Win The Future" (alias WTF) moment! We could do far better than this, as something like 40,000 job-years in direct employment went elsewhere, but not to NY State. Anyway, in order to improve on the less than 5% batting average, some political muscle and effort is going to have to be expended on politicians of all stripes, and also environmental groups of all sorts, too. But, ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

Anyway, my 2 cents worth. What's yours? And BTW, when you put an engineer to work making a better world, you also put a lot of other people to work, too.... Till then, if you know of an unemployed or underemployed or "mis-employed" engineer, have them send their resume to President Obama c/o the White House. We don't want him falling for the con that we need to import engineers from around the world to do what could be done with the homegrown varieties, given the number who could be doing such jobs already here...

DB

A PV system on the property of the US Energy lab at Brookhaven, on Long Island, NY
from http://www.lipower.org/company/powering/solar-bp.html

Introduction
Assemblyman Fred Thiele (Independent, AD2) who caucuses with the Democrats (used to be a Republican - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Thiele) and Senator Ken Lavalle (Republican, SD1), both located at the east end of Long Island (the Hamptons) have introduced a solar photovoltaic (PV) Feed-In Tariff (FIT) proposed legislation. These bills are A7178 and S4862, and they specifically site the success of Germany and Gainesville, Florida (Gainesville Regional Utility, alias GRU) with regards to PV job creation - both manufacturing and installation. We wish them luck in their endeavor, and hopefully this very limited "testing" in NY State will be expanded. After all, this is the windiest part of NY's flat lands (only a few mountain tops/ridgelines in the Catskills and Adirondaks are windier), the offshore waters are shallow AND windy, there is an awesome tidal resource, and this part of NY has some of the most expensive electricity - especially in high demand days in the summer. Long Island holds the record for the most expensive hourly price - 99.5 c/kw-hr in August of 2006. Some PV at the time would have helped....

The Assembly and Senate Bills are apparently the same (needed for passage) - see http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?default_fld=&bn=A07178&term=2011&Summary=Y&Text=Y for details. As with a lot of legislation, often the language points to questions, such as what this portion actually means:
48 NO MORE THAN ONE HUNDRED MEGAWATTS OF ALTERNATING CURRENT RATED
49 PEAK ELECTRICITY IS SUBJECT TO THE REQUIREMENTS OF THIS SECTION.Discussion
In the 1970's, the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO) monopoly decided to build a 1.1 GW nuke plant (a clone of the Nine Mile 2 unit and of the big ones at Fukushima) at Shoreham (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoreham_Nuclear_Power_Plant), despite the problem of no possibility of timely evacuation of the Long Island/NY City/Connecticut coastal regions if there was an accident. But, they proceeded on their own corporate version of this Hellbound Train, no matter what. The Three Mile Island partial core meltdown added billions in revamps/delays/design modifications, and LILCO still had no answer to the big "What If?" questions, especially in regards to evacuation. By 1986 - and especially with the April 1986 Chernobyl disaster freshly imprinted in their minds, over 74% of LILCO ratepayers were opposed to this $6 billion plus "platinum plated turkey". Gov. Mario Cuomo actually ordered NY State officials NOT to approve of any LILCO sponsored evacuation plans. The plant never did receive full power operating permits, and so the plant could not operate.

In effect LILCO had flushed $6 billion PLUS INTEREST of shareholder equity/company capital down the proverbial sewer, and they were the walking corporate dead. In return for agreeing to decommission the plant, NY State formed LIPA - the Long Island Power Authority (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Island_Power_Authority) - in 1985 via the Long Island Power Act. It acquired the assets (and debts) of LILCO in 1985, as well as the transmission system in 1988. As such, LIPA is a municipal electric utility (MEU) owned by not the Long Island ratepayers/community but by the people of NY State via the state government. A big part of their job was to pay off the Shoreham debt via monthly charges onto ratepayers. LIPA has about 3 million people serviced by them (1.1 million customers), and they are one of the biggest MEU's in the U.S. It's 2011 revenues were around $2.8 billion, mostly derived from sales of transmitted electricity averaging around 2.5 GW (initial 9 months of 2011 was 2681 MW).

In the proposed bill, only solar PV is covered. Long Island has a tidal resource of up to 2 GW with the water that flows in and out of Long Island Sound (about a 10 foot height range or more) twice every day. It also has a great wind resource onshore (the region is really flat and next to some decently windy ocean), and then there is a huge offshore region of shallow waters with an average wind speed of around 9 m/s at hub heights (see http://www.wagengineering.blogspot.com/2011/12/ny-new-years-resolution-real-wealth.html). Odds are, some biomass and biogas also could be tapped. But maybe these other renewables that are actually lower cost electricity production techniques than solar PV can be incorporated in a subsequent bill. After all, Long Island could completely power up on an average basis, and even be a net exporter of electricity to NYC, and via NYC/underwater cables across Long Island Sound, it can tap into a lot of deferred hydro or pumped hydroelectric stored energy.....

Anyway, this bill is a bridge to SOMEWHERE, and it is a start. LIPA can do this because they do not always have to choose the cheapest and most foolish/most polluting power price for any given hour, unless the management chooses to do so. They can actually incorporate human values, such as local real wealth creation, job growth and the real cost of CO2 pollution (which is more like $85/ton of CO2 pollutant per the Stern Review Report - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review), the real costs of dependence on depleting fossil fuels (alias natural gas and coal).

And of course, Long Island is smack dab in the cross-hairs of the Global Climate Change ... er .. war (of words, of philosophy, of science versus ignorance, or petrochemical greed versus our collective common good, etc). That is because slightly warmer atmospheric temperatures worldwide lead to significantly warmer temperatures over Greenland and also in the ocean waters in the Arctic Ocean and Atlantic that are next to Greenland. This leads to melting waters on the Greenland land mass/from its ice-sheets that can be a mile thick or more. The ice-melt water borrows through the ice/sinks to the land, and then flows to the ocean, in the process lubricating the land-ice interface. And this can lead to massive "landslides" of ice. Ice is also brittle - like glass, you can compress it, but you can't stretch it without it breaking. Ice sheets lubricated by a water film that are located on a sloping land mass will crack apart under their own weight, and start moving pretty fast. So within a matter of a few years, a lot of Greenland's stored ice can slide into the Atlantic, causing all kinds of misery. Notably, a 5 meter rise in ocean levels. The details can be found in Jim Hansen's latest article: http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/notyet/inpress_Hansen_Sato.pdf

That would not be good for a lot of locations, but especially Long Island, whose highest elevation is around 125 feet above present sea-level. The island is really a big sand-bar, and the eastern end is particularly flat. So, converting a lot of NY State's most valuable real estate into a fish farm is economically the equivalent of "biting the big one". Dumb on an epic scale is another polite way of putting it.

Conclusion
FITs deliver more renewable energy, more jobs and more economic growth for a given investment than any other renewable energy system yet devised, all at zero cost to the taxpayer. They democratize investment opportunities, ending the defacto monopoly of the super rich with lots of passive income. In fact, FITs will raise governmental income (tax revenue) at constant tax rates because they stimulate economic activity via by-passing useless financial gambling and risks associated with unknowable future electricity prices. And that's pretty cool.... and if it takes this baby-step on Long Island to get the ball rolling, well, why not. But, we don't have eternity to wait - the clock is ticking, and Greenland's ice is melting at an accelerating rate (exponentially so, to). So hurry up about it, eh?

DB

Introduction
It now can be logically argued that we now have less freedom (= less rights) than even a decade ago - for example, via indefinite detention, "legal" assassination of Americans, (lack of) on-line privacy, the "death" of "habeus corpus" and warrantless wiretapping. And yet one local (to NY State) hard won right is the freedom to vote with the money you spend on your electricity bill as to how you want that electricity made. Do you want it made via polluting or non-polluting means? You get your choice - by a way that maximizes the probability of a Fukushima/Chernobyl event (and we've had some really close calls in NY State), or way with a zero probability of such a horror? Do you want that electricity made in a way that has minimal CO2 pollution, or maximal CO2 pollution. After all CO2 pollution (CO2 made by burning fossil fuels) is the prime driver for Global Climate Change, which will NOT be good for us, by a long shot. About 40% of the CO2 pollution made in our country comes from burning coal and natural gas to make electricity. How about electricity in a way that maximizes NY State job creation, instead of in a way that exports the maximum quantity of money (out of state corporate profits, fossil fuel expenditures/corporate rentier profits)?

Discussion
Wow, all that via that once a month ritual of paying a (usually) corporate monopoly for the monthly allotment of electricity, and which most people don't associate with freedom at all (it's a money expenditure bill, after all, and who wants to pay that!). So, let's use my electricity bill as an example of a residential bill. There are about 7 million residential customers in NY State, as well as about 1 million "commercial" and 80,000 "industrial" customers, and in 2009 (the last with the readily available data) about $22.4 billion was spent on electricity purchases (15.52 c/kw-hr average delivered price) - see http://205.254.135.7/cneaf/electricity/st_profiles/new_york.html. Of that, about one third of that (maybe $8 billion) was actually paid to the people who generated the electricity. And it is in that $8 billion/yr where you as a customer can choose to direct your purchases. Only a very tiny percentage of NY'ers actually do that, unfortunately.

So here is a breakdown of my monthly bill (Dec 2011), total household usage of 247 kw-hr, averaging 332 watts, all for $56.07:

Delivery Services
Connection ................................. $16.21
Delivery ...................................... $12.87 5.268 c/kw-hr
Delivery Adjustment .................. $ 4.30 1.743 c/kw-hr
Incr State Adjustment ............... $ 0.76 0.307 c/kw-hr
SBC/RPS .................................... $ 1.35 0.5452 c/kw-hr
RDM ........................................ - $ 0.75 - 0.305 c/kw-hr
Transmission Adj Rev ............... $ 0.36 0.144 c/kw-hr
Tariff Surcharge ......................... $ 1.85 5.26316 %
Sales Tax .................................... $ 1.76 4.75 %
Subtotal .............................$38.71

Supply Services
Electricity Supply ....................... $ 9.46 3.831 c/kw-hr
Merchant Function .................... $ 0.43 0.174068 c/kw-hr
Renewable Service ..................... $ 6.18 2.5 c/kw-hr
Tariff Surcharge ......................... $ 0.50 3.09278 %
Sales Tax ..................................... $ 0.79 4.75 %
Subtotal ............................. $17.36

One gripe commonly expressed about electricity bills is the "nickel and diming" those $0 to $2 per item things, that add up to 12.6% of this bill. Total taxes are about one third of the "nickel and diming" that happens when those fractions of a penny per kw-hr are added up and multiplied by 247 kw-hr. The actual generated electricity could be as low as 19% of the total bill when the "Renewable Service" (Green Tags) is excluded, which would have saved all of $6.18. It is those dollars which go to the wind turbine owners - in this case, ENI, and Italian company that owns the initial Wethersfield NY wind farm (10 x 660 kw units that were installed in 2000), in addition to the "average spot market price" for the month of December 2011, which was 3.206 c/kw-hr. Thus, ENI was raking in 5.706/kw-hr, or $14.09 last month from me, and the rest either went to NY State ($2.55) or National Grid ($39.43), our British owned local distribution monopoly whose abbreviations are, fittingly, NG (beats our natural gas monopoly, National Fuel Gas, abbreviated ever so appropriately as NFG).

In other words, 4.75% goes to NY State, 25.1% goes to the wind turbine owner who, on average, supplies my electricity, and 70.3% goes to the foreign owned monopoly who owns the wires and does the billing. Even if the cost of electricity generation was that of NYPA's Niagara Power Project (0.2 c/kw-hr) - where I would pay 50 c/month for 247 kw-hr/month - that still leaves over 75% of the (existing) bill for the "other" category unaltered.

Like most WNY residents, most of the bill for December 2011 was in the "Delivery Services" category, and not much was in the "generation" part - and that's where the pollution does or does not come from. Or that nasty radioisotope poisoning potential - Chernobyl did in or 970,000 people via cancer and related nasties, as well as significantly messing with the genetic code and immunity systems or 60 million Ukranians and Belyrusians, where less than 1 in 10 children born has a "normal" health profile. Yum.....

There are very few NY'ers who take advantage of the "electricity choice", and instead use the "default", which, for National Grid/ex-Niagara Mohawk, is heavily nuke oriented (nukes were the prime cause of NiMo's "corporate dead man walking" situation that began in 1988 and ended up in their de-facto bankruptcy/pennies on the dollar sale to National Grid in the early 2000's). Less than 1% of residential customers, and close to that for commercial (includes NY State governmental units) and industrial entities, use the "vote with your dollars" right. In theory, Gov. Pataki's Executive Order 111 (a massive unfunded mandate/wish fullfillment/empty promise), requires at least 10% of all electricity sales to NY government entities are non-pollution based (in effect, wind or landfill gas), and SUNYAB is about the only institution that even bothered to try to meet the EO 111 decree to a significant extent.

The Wrap Up
So what can be concluded from this minute/pathetic participation rate, and also the completely never budgeted (if you want it, try paying for it) E.O. 111? Renewable electricity in NY can be home-grown (recycles money instead of exporting our wealth), once installed is non-polluting, and poses zero threats from fall-out and catastrophic climate change. And for a pretty nominal cost, you can make the world a better place and provide some American's with good jobs, and businesses with a way to exist for the betterment of most of us, as opposed to extracting all available wealth and leaving us as an emptied shell in "the dustbin of human history".

Now, some will say they don't know about the "Green Tags" option (and there are better ways to do this, such as Feed-in Laws, but since we don't have them in NY, "Green Tags" are it for now). Some will just not care about trashing the climate control system with CO2 pollution - as long as today's electricity price is dirt cheap, NOTHING else matters. Some could care less about exporting dollars to import fuels and send off exorbitant profits to the mothership for NY nuke owners, and just discount the "NY Fukushima Scenario" by invoking the concept of perpetual luck.

But most people get uncomfortable when asked the question of "If your part of salvaging a viable climate for the next few generations might cost $5 to $20/month, would you do it?" - the idea of trashing the prospects of their children and grandchildren for their own short term gain and/or comfort is unsettling. It's just best to push that question into a dark corner, leave it there undisturbed, and forget about it. After all, given what comes across as news these days, (here is an rare exception - http://UpwithChrisHayes.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/14/10157366-saturday-2nd-hour-jan-14 ) it's not at all difficult to ignore the climate problem/economic problems coming from pollution based electricity. For most people, such questions will never be asked. "Move along now, nothing to see here..."

Now some will pose the "great diversions" - such as, why not tax CO2 pollution for its real cost ($85/ton of CO2 pollution emitted), and why not let nukes pay their full share of catastrophic insurance (if nuke owners had to do this, they would just shut them down ASAP, as there is no commercially viable way to do this - see http://www.wind-works.org/LargeTurbines/Nuclear%20Expensive%20and%20Uninsurable%20Say%20Studies.html). Either of these actions would raise generated electricity prices from coal by between 8 to 10 c/kw-hr and from gas by 5 c/kw-hr, rendering all more expensive than onshore wind turbines, and shocking the economy something fierce if done all at once. Actually, that's why Feed-In Laws are so attractive - all pollution sources can be replaced via the "renewables get grid access preferentially", and there is no need for cranking up pollution based electricity prices (now the bulk of our supply). In these, the more expensive (until the capital investment is paid off) renewable electricity can get blended into the grid mix in a way that minimizes the speculative rip-offs that are possible in "marginal pricing systems". But, if you can't figure out how to "vote with your money" via "Green Tags" - see http://www.buffalowind.org/node/12 - even comprehending Feed-In laws is probably going to be a stretch. And as for getting the Federal law change (alter Section 210 of the 1978 PURPA law with a measly 132 words) needed to allow a FIT system in states - well, not good. And even if that does happen (it's zero cost, after all, and not "State's Wrongs" but "State's Rights"), then try getting the NY Governor, NY Senate and NY Assembly to do the right thing. Well those all have to be done, but you can immediately vote with your dollars today, or at least by the end of the month. Besides, a big market share moves politicians, as this is actual money talking - it won't work on all of them, but maybe enough of them. Hey, maybe even the guilt trip about them trashing the world's climate so bad that their descendant's will forever curse them something fierce might change a couple of legislative minds...

In the immortal words of the Floyd dudes:

"Breathe, breathe in the air
Don't be afraid to care ...."

(Dark Side of the Moon - "Speak to Me/Breathe" - try out this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx6iIp-PvnY)

DB

See http://www.principlepowerinc.com/products/windfloat.html for details

This is a picture of a big deployment of wind turbines in deep waters, sometime in the future. So far, just one of these units has been deployed off of the coast of Portugal, in deep waters. Despite the ungainly look, these floating platforms are very stable (it was designed by former US Navy captain and close associate of Admiral Rickover (US nuclear Navy fame), who also was instrumental in starting up the US wind industry with his MIT course in the 1970's). It has been operational for about 2 months, and seems to have made it past this awesome and massive winter hurricane that slammed England with 165 mph winds. This foundation can be assembled in harbors, where the cost to do this is much less expensive than it is to assemble a wind turbine far offshore at the site where it will be used. The unit gets anchored to the ocean or lake bottom, wired up to the offshore substation/other turbines, and then its "sit back and make some money time".

It turns out that in shallow waters, it is less expensive to use other foundations. For Lake Erie, the "gravity" or "caison" one seems really appropriate - this is a 1800 ton or so concrete structure that is floated out to the site, then carefully sunk to the bottom; then the wind turbine is placed on the part sticking out of the water (these were used for Copenhagen harbor's wind farm). Another popular style is the monopole - ideal for those 5 to 25 meter depths - which is a BIG piece of pipe (now 5 meters, or 16 feet in diameter with a 3 to 4 inch wall thickness). A variety of tripod or tetrapod ("jacket") style units are good for perhaps 50 meter depths - which also need 3 or 4 smaller monopoles rammed into the seabed, with the foundation platform placed on them. And there is also the "jack-up platform", which has been used in thousands of offshore oil and gas platforms in the 10 to 100 meter range. So many options..... the judge of what will be best is, of course, the cost to do this. Capitalism at work.... along with ingenuity, skill and a need for quality done on time and at or under budget.

Foundations amount to roughly half of the price of offshore wind turbines, so economies of scale that can lower the per unit cost of foundations are important. This is where mass production can come in handy. The raw material (for example, for a 500 ton monopole), might only be $500,000 in steel, but the entire foundation system and associated labor can go for $8 million or more for a 3.6 MW wind turbine, where the total installed cost is likely to be $16 million a pop. This is not for amateurs, and big stakes can be involved with projects now typically between $1 to $2 billion. So maybe a Detroit style assembly line would come in handy.

Lake Ontario has an average depth of 89 meters, or about 282 feet, and a lot of the shallow parts of this pond are in Canadian waters, near the mouth of the St Lawrence River. Most of the 2500 square miles of the lake that is "U.S. territory", are, in offshore wind terms, "deepwater". There is some shallow water near the shore, but near the shore, wind speeds tend to slow down:
from http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/data/bathy/ont_bathy.gif

Add that to the lake Ontario wind speed map:
from http://www.awstruepower.com/wp-content/media/2010/09/NYSERDA_AWST_NYGreatLakesFS.pdf, pg 80

The brown color that is the bulk of the offshore portion of this map signifies average wind speeds in the 8 to 8.25 m/s range at 80 meters above the water. Half of Niagara, Monroe and Oswego as well as all of Orleans, Cayuga and Wayne County's waterfront has this combination of very decent wind speeds and deep water.

The normal rule is between 10 to 20 MW of capacity per square mile of water surface. Getting 2000 MW of wind capacity would thus need about 100 to 200 square miles of surface, or between 4% to 8% of the US part of Lake Ontario's surface. And that would produce around 800 MW of electricity, on average - in other words, it could readily produce more electricity than any one of the 3 smallest nukes on the NY Lake Ontario shoreline. Replacement of all of those nukes (Ginna, Nine Mile 1, Nine Mile 2 and FitzPatrick) would need about 2800 MW delivered, or about 7000 MW of offshore capacity, which would need about 2300 units of 3 MW each, or 350 square miles of offshore array. Bigger turbines would result in bigger floating platforms, though less platforms and turbines to get the same energy output.

Of course, eminently feasible, especially when the offshore arrays are connected to pumped hydroelectric storage units in the finger lakes, and also to NY City for a market for this electricity. And that gets rid of upstate NY's very own Fukushima/Chernobyl issue. Sounds good to me. Now all we have to worry about is the nukes in Ontario, Ohio and Michigan....

But the cost?!?! Well, for a bit, let's forget that somebody's investment is another person's job, and let's say the installed cost is roughly $4.5 million per MW of capacity. That's about $31.5 billion, but it can be spread out over a number of years (10 to 20, for example); let's assume 10 years. That's $3.15 billion per year worth of capital investment, or about 48,000 job-years/yr of direct jobs (assuming most of the project is sourced in the region/in state/near state. That electricity at 280 MW per year added (delivered version) would come in between 15 to 20 c/kw-hr, and it would gradually raise everyone's electricity price (but that also pays for close to 50,000 jobs), all of about 0.22 cents/kw-hr per year. Oh well that's the cost of getting rid of upstate NY's potential Fukushima problem (those are all GE boiling water reactors, too, just like at Daiichi....). And whether these are privately owned and financed (high cost version), or owned by the people of NY State via NYPA and are all bond financed (low cost version), the job creation potential is still there, waiting.

Just like thousands of upstate NY'ers, waiting for a job, or a job that depends on these primary jobs becoming a reality. Meanwhile, on the northern side of the pond, Windstream Energy (http://www.windstreamenergy.ca/), the only company to receive a FIT contract with Ontario for an offshore wind farm (300 MW one near Wolfe Island, in the shallow northeast part of Lake Ontario), is pressing on regardless of whether Ontario has a moratorium on offshore wind turbine arrays or not. Check out http://www.offshorewind.biz/2012/01/19/windstream-energy-to-build-ontarios-first-offshore-wind-farm-canada/ and http://www.offshorewind.biz/2012/01/19/windstream-energy-to-build-ontarios-first-offshore-wind-farm-canada/. They are busy lining up subcontractors and at the same time working on the Liberal and New Democrat members of Parliament (the Conservatives are a lost cause and seem terribly "whored out" to pollution sourced energy generators - is that universal or what?) with the virtues of that combination of electricity made without pollution, nuke "oops" probabilities and jobs, jobs, jobs, not to mention some perceptible increase in sales of made in Hamilton, Ontario steel. And while there is pollution associated with the manufacture the components and assembly of the wind farm, the energy payback is typically more than 30:1. One unit invested to get a return of 30 in a 25 year time frame. Who wouldn't want that?

And lastly, a word from the fishes.... Fish like offshore piers and floating platforms, and so do all the birds that depend on the fish for food, or the people who like sport fishing. Tourism... it goes well with offshore wind farms. Maybe they can even have sailboat races through the wind turbine array - more tourism. But above all, good for cows and pigs, too, as one of their favorite mottos is "eat more fish..." After all the nasty things we have done to Lake Ontario and it's aquatic residents, can't we at least be nice to them and provide some happy hunting waters for Lake trout and similar big boys....


So, support your local lake trout! Get an offshore wind farm located in a Great Lake near you. And hurry up about it, while we still have a viable climate that let's trouts live in the Great Lakes......

DB

From http://www.city-data.com/city/Sheldon-New-York.html - after all, no city webpage is complete without a nifty picture of a wind turbine in town (you also can click on http://www.city-data.com/picfilesc/picc50574.php). This is one of the "Sheldon High Winds" 75 unit array (a GE 1.5 MW x 77 meter long blade on an 80 meter tall tower) in Sheldon, NY, near the Wyoming/Erie County border. And it's just so darn cool looking.... as well as partly powering up the very device you are reading this article on if you are in the Western NY area when this is occurring. And, as Mylie Cyrus is rumored to say, "And that's pretty darn cool, too..." BTW, hey City of Buffalo government, what's the problem here? When are you going to join the 21st century?

Anyway, 2011 is gone, and for many of us, we want to keep it that way. The pretty poor economic situation around here does leave one hoping for a better 2012, though in theory, it could be worse (after all, in January 2009, the economy was shrinking at a 7.5%/year rate or more and three quarters of a million Americans were losing their jobs per month - eeks!). But, despite the less than desirable economic situation, it looks like about 45 to 50 GW of new wind capacity (worth about $US 70 billion) was installed last year worldwide, bring the worldwide total to near 245 GW (a GW is a gigawatt, or 1000 megawatts (MW)). If every country had the wind turbine performance of the US, that would be about 73 GW of average delivered output, or the equal to 73 Nine Mile 2 nukes (for 2010 anyway). So, still think this is a trivial pursuit of some idealistic hippies (and yes, that is so true) and no one else? Of course, not every country has such a wind turbine performance (China is a total slacker in that regard, and they now have about 25% of the world's wind turbine capacity, with almost all of that "Made in China", too). But even with that caveat, wind is a big source of jobs, economic development, invested wealth as well as delivered electricity made with no possibility of "nuke belch" or CO2 pollution, and depletion of the resource is not a real issue.....

In the US, about 8 GW was installed last year, bringing our total to about 46 GW capacity, and a delivered average of about 14 GW, or 14 nukes that deliver 1 GW. All indications are that over 10 GW will be installed in 2012, as developers rush to get their projects finished before the Federal incentives disappear on December 31, 2012. Consider that to be "Pumpkin Time" in a renewable energy version of Cinderella.... More and more of the ones installed in America are being made in America, even if a lot of the companies making them are European (Vestas, Gamesa, Siemens, REPower, Nordex) or Indian (Suzlon). More importantly, the supply chain is filling out. Making wind turbines is very metalworking intensive (sort of related to cars, trucks and locomotives), and states like Michigan and Ohio are pursuing these opportunities intensely, as are our neighbors in Ontario and Quebec.

As for NY State, still pretty much zip-ola on the wind turbine manufacturing jobs front; that is where most of the jobs associated with the wind biz are situated and the most desirable ones as far as economics are concerned. It appears that the NY State capacity is now near 1350 MW, and will be close to 1800 MW by the end of 2012, delivering more electricity than the rated capacity of the Huntley (400 MW) coal burner (though there should be to replace the output of the Dunkirk unit (540 MW)). 1800 MW of wind turbine capacity is roughly $3.5 to $4 billion invested, and there SHOULD be a lot of manufacturing jobs associated with that, but NY State officials have instead stressed the pollution-less electricity made, the avoided fossil fuel combustion (essentially, all natural gas), the avoided CO2 pollution as well as the construction and installation jobs that temporarily were needed to install the roughly 900 turbines so far. At present, that is of SECONDARY importance; manufacturing job creation should be of PRIMARY importance, as that leads to other permanent job creation. Oh well, instead, we stress the booby prize, the "Miss Congeniality" award of economic development, while Ontario, Quebec, Michigan, Ohio and even Pennsylvania have their eyes on the real prize...

World wide, Europe again installed about 10 GW (total now near 90 GW), and the average size of new onshore turbines is evolving to a 3 MW per turbine rating. Europe is now the technological leader in this field - it is where India and China buy and/or steal most of their wind technology from these days. Over 1 GW of offshore wind capacity was installed, and 5.5 GW was under construction, with over 200 GW "permitted" or "under consideration"; this sub-field is set up for rapid exponential growth, with 40 GW anticipated to be installed by 2020. Europe has targeted offshore wind as a major business/job growth sector, with about 150,000 people anticipated to be employed in it by 2020. The decision by Germany to cancel its nuclear option after the first Fukushima reactor hydrogen gas explosion has intensified the offshore push. Furthermore, the strong connection between the high skilled, high quality manufacturing sector employment and wind turbines is firmly established. Any attempts to impede wind turbine development will now get an intense push-back from the banking/finance sector, the business sector and organized labor, as well as the "enviro's".... The design of a North Sea "super-grid" of at least a 10 GW rating to move the offshore derived electricity to all of Europe is also underway (also a great Keynesian-like economic stimulus...).

China has manufactured another 20 GW of wind turbines in 2010 (see http://www.worldfutureenergysummit.com/Portal/news/4/9/2011/world-wind-energy-association-report.aspx), bring their total to 65 GW. However, over 20 GW of that has yet to be connected to the grid (the turbines are installed, but not wired in...). Of the turbines that are grid connected, the average output is in the 11% of capacity range (about 38% of the US average, or less), and this is not due to them being installed in poor wind regions. Most of this problem is due to either poor grid quality and/or especially poor manufacturing quality. Part of this is a result of China's reason for making and installing these - they want steel, concrete, machine tools, the components (generators, gears, transformers, transmissions, bolts, rebar, etc.), concrete and labor to be consumed, and they really don't care what the end result is, though they really would prefer that it was exported. But since much of the technology of their turbines is either licensed or stolen and is of poor quality, their export options are limited. One "niche" they are pushing is the use of permanent magnet generators (PMG), which are slightly more efficient than "doubly fed" electromagnet based generators, since the preferred magnets are rare earth based (especially neodynium based - the so-called NIB materials - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium_magnet). However, the main benefit of PMGs is that they can be used in "poor quality grids" and that they can be started up without an initial use of grid-based electricity needed to magnetize the rotor electromagnet in the "doubly fed" generators (and China has significant grid quality issues). Another issue in China is electricity cost - since they have essentially no pollution control costs (no controls, filters and scrubbers - no cost!) on coal based electricity, it is very cheap (so is the labor to extract this coal; coal mines in China can be worse than horrid prison camps). Manufacturing things that use a lot of electricity (especially solar panels) can be really low cost when the electricity is low cost, and lower cost than everywhere else (labor, pollution control and electricity, especially) is an essential core part of the Chinese mercentilistic export strategy (i.e. drive everyone else out of business/monopolize the business/keep restive populations busy by working them hard at barely survival wages).

So this is a bit of a problem for China. They need electricity production to grow, and wind turbines can supply this at ~ 6 to 10 c/kw-hr, and it uses neither coal or natural gas in the process. China has arrived at "Peak Coal" - they now must import some coal from countries like Australia, Indonesia, Mozambique, South Africa and the U.S. to make up for what they cannot produce domestically. And China mines a lot of coal, but they burn even more. Coal is a depletable resource, and China is burning through the easy to extract coal at a prodigious rate - over half of all coal consumed in the world is burned in China - mostly for electricity, heat, steel and ammonia production. China now competes with India (who can only supply about half of their needs) on the world market for coal. This is why U.S. east coast coal prices are now $80/ton versus $50/ton these days; China and India now import coal from the U.S. (mostly east coast) at a rate of close to 150 million tons/yr - or 15% of all coal produced.

Wow, what a trade - we export coal to "Chindia"and import Walmart sold manufactured crap from "Chindia", as well as iPhones, TVs, tools, iPads, computers, apparel and shoes as well as solar panels. China would love to add wind turbines to that list, but there is the quality problem, which they hope to overcome via using cheap Chinese sourced credit (in effect, another Walmart curse - the profits from the cheap Walmart crap are used to finance purchase of made in China wind turbines..).

Development Trends
One nifty world wide trend is that wind turbines are going world wide - such as Brazil's 2011 big bulk purchase, the developments in one of Mexico's "wind tunnels" (Oaxaca), South Australia's wind surge and the recent Morrocan 850 MW tender. FYI - India now has 14 GW of installed capacity, and they are also headed "offshore", where their mediocre land based wind resource can be significantly augmented. South Africa also recently announced several new wind projects (coinciding with the Durban conference). Canada is also developing at least 1 GW/yr, and that will accelerate with Ontario's FIT pricing system (and now, Nova Scotia).

In general, wind turbines have been getting both bigger and more dependable. Except for China, competition between manufacturers, combined with Feed-In Tariffs, is pushing the technology in many good ways. Of late, Low Wind Speed Turbines (LWST), which can be roughly classified as having a power ratio (swept rotor are divided by generator rating) of 4 m^2/kw or more have been accounting for significant sales. Augmenting those are "medium wind speed turbines", with a power ratio between 3 to 4 m^2/kw; they have been getting larger, and offshore versions of these are now offered (such as the Siemens 3.6 MW x 120 m rotor diameter model, and the Vestas V112). Many manufacturers now offer turbines for onshore installation of 3 MW or more (Siemens, Vestas, REPower, Enercon, Gamesa, WinWinD, Fuhrlaender), and the 2.5 MW size is now COMMON. In the U.S., towers taller than 80 meters are now available (these go with LWST and bigger rotors). In 2012, some may even be "hybrid towers" that are common in Europe - a lower concrete section and an upper steel, one, with heights of 100, 120 and 140 meters available.

Finally, there is the real push to make onshore wind a major factor in Europe. Wind speeds average over 9 m/s in much of the North Sea (and often greater than 10 m/s), and above 8 m/s in much of the Baltic Sea. Since the amount of power production is proportional to the cube of the wind speed, a given region at 10 m/s can provide over 4.6 times as much power as can a zone with a 6 m/s wind resource, for the same rotor area. Plus, transporting big blades and towers is easier by water than on land, and in general, there are no neighbors offshore. Offshore wind has been demonstrated for over 20 years at commercial scale, and the challenge has been with foundations, underwater cables, offshore transformer stations as well as making and installing these on time and under budget. In general, that is NORMAL now, unlike for nukes, where cost over-runs seems to be the rule and not the exception. Offshore wind derived electricity is now cheaper than making electricity with a new nuke, and after Fukushima...

The full effects of the Fukushima disaster on Japan have still not been felt. TEPCO, the owner of the Daiichi complex, was one of the biggest companies in the world, and now it is "the walking corporate dead" - bankrupt in practice but not allowed to be on an official basis. Too bad the Obama Administration has yet to get the message...... However, the ongoing disaster has spelled the practical end of nukes, and wind energy is still between 5 to 10 times less costly than solar as a way to make mass quantities of electricity. More importantly, no private consortia will finance nukes (which cost over $10 billion per unit and take close to a decade to make). Odds are, Japan will soon see an enormous push for offshore and onshore wind energy development to replace out their nuclear and fossil fuel sourced electricity.

As for the U.S., "Pumpkin Time" (December 31, 2012) is fast approaching, and the delay in either replacing the tax avoidance based subsidies with a sane pricing system or else extending them is likely to cost 30,000 jobs, at least, starting in 2013. Until that situation is rectified, many of the remaining 40,000 people employed in the wind biz will also be endangered, as will be many of their employers. All because Republicans in general and the "teahadist" branch in particular put either their ideology (can't delay the Rapture, belief that there is no such thing as Global Warming, belief that what's good for the 1% is good for them and the rest of the country, and loyalty to those who buy and/or rent them via campaign contributions) or their belief that bringing our country to its economic knees will allow a Republican to be President and allow Republican control of the Senate and the House in the 2012 elections, above that of our country. In other words, the needs of a few outweigh the needs of the many. Well, obviously, they are no fans of Vulcan (Star Trek) morality, even if the Texas Supreme Court once was... (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101027/05183111607/texas-supreme-court-cites-the-wisdom-of-spock-on-star-trek.shtml)

Anyway, the official numbers will come out in early February, and they will show how the rate of wind turbine installations is still increasing (GW capacity installed per year), despite poor economic prospects. Last year, the amount of wind power installed (capacity or net produced by this new capacity) was greater than the nuke installs for 2011. In the U.S., wind turbine produced electricity is significantly cutting into sales of (and the probability of a higher price for) natural gas. The avoided gas amouts to almost 1 trillion cubic feet of methane per year, or over 4% of that consumed. And that is definitely enough gas not burned to affect natural gas prices in a major way, and one beneficial to most gas customers, too. Viewed another way, this is close to 14 x 1.1 MW nukes that did not get built, and that is a good thing, too. It sure beats having to get a full body scan for radio-isotope ingestion as will be the norm in Japan for annual doctor visits....

What would really be nice for 2012 in the wind biz is for the general public to understand the combination of the job creation potential of the mass production of wind turbines (say, at a rate of 10 times what was done this year) coupled to our country's enormous wind energy potential. Or that certain environmental organizations (it's too large a list) would join with the Sierra Club and understand the the job issue is of far more immediate importance to most Americans than is the longer term threats posed by elevated CO2 levels, or of the health effects of wide scale fracking and continued wide scale use of coal when we could be using a combination of wind energy and pumped hydro storage. Heck, maybe even the NY State government could figure out the potential of pumped hydro in NY State for Ontario, Ohio and Indiana....

Oh well, I guess a person can wish...

DB

Graph by Jerome Guillet, from http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2011/12/19/121933/16

Long Introduction
Macroeconomics is so important, and generally so misunderstood, especially by right wing economists and associated business types. But rather than launch into the topic full tilt, there are a few important aspects of it that are relevant to Western New York, the US and the world at the present time, especially since we are still stuck in the effects of The Great Recession that George "Evildoer" Bu$h and Alan "Bubbles" Greenspan helped bring in and which metastasized in such spectacular and undesired fashion in the fall of 2008.

1. The present period is characterized by a lack of economic demand (alias macroeconomic demand). Increasing the supply of stuff (labor, materials, etc) will do little good and may do more harm. When the workers who make (or in our case, used to make) things cannot afford to buy them, you've got trouble, big time.

2. Our society runs on energy, among other things, and especially oil based energy (oil is used for almost all forms of transporting people and things). At present, replacement of oil usage is very difficult compared to coal, natural gas and nuke replacement, but, "ya gotta do what ya gotta do". The price of oil has been rising at an average rate of 14.6%/yr for that last 14 years, and there is no logical or truthful reason to believe this trend will do anything but get worse. And we export close to $400 billion a year to import about 10 million bbls/day. This acts as an additional regressive sales tax (and increasingly onerous one, too) on lower and middle income people. World oil prices (and US domestic oil prices) are set not by the total oil produced in the world but by the fraction of oil available for export (about 50% of total oil produced). Global Net Oil Exports are declining (a drop of 10% in the last 5 years) and this rate will accelerate as time marches on... Natural gas prices can also act like regressive sales taxes on most people, but for now, prices have collapsed. However, that situation will not last for too long, and so the more we can avoid getting hooked on natural gas (especially for electricity), the lower the demand will be and thus the lower the price will be. Lower demand is the way to keep gas prices down.

3. At the present time, if you tax rich people more and spend the money on infrastructure or in transfer payments to the poor, this will stimulate the economy.

4. If present spending levels by governments (federal, state, local) are decreased without a corresponding increase in spending by the private sector in this country, that will depress our economy; doing the opposite (increased government spending on poor and middle class people) while private spending/investment stays the same will stimulate our economy, especially since we are "macroeconomic demand deficient" these days.

5. If you tax poor and middle income people (in effect, the bottom 95% and especially the bottom 80% of the income distribution) more, or do things like raise the cost of the oil and natural gas they buy without also raising their income, this will depress the economy.

6. Income and wealth distribution does affect macroeconomic performance. A more equitable/less unequal income distribution will lead to a better performing economy (less unemployment, more GDP/person, more stability in economic performance), and a more unequal income distribution leads to a lower GDP/person ratio, higher unemployment and a more unstable economy. Greater inequality will eventually produce drastic "corrections" - more severe recessions/depressions than would happen with more equitable income distributions, and more often, too.

7. These "lack of macro demand" recessions and depressions can actually INCREASE inequality, setting up the next recession/depression, and also increasing the likelihood it will be worse than the preceding one. Bummer!

8. When income and wealth distribution become too obscene, stuff hits the proverbial fan. Drastic inequality can only be maintained by brute force and strenuous media control (Remember the book "1984"? Well, there are corporate versions of a totalitarian state, too - for example, see Naomi Klein's book "Shock Doctrine"). After all, do you want to live in abject poverty, work like a slave or worse so that some freeloading parasite of a corporate overlord can indulge in their wildest luxury fantasies (food, intoxicants, choice selection of "pleasuring opportunities", etc) just because they are a member of what radio and TV show star Ed Schultz calls "the lucky sperm club"?

9. Inequality tends to produce more inequality, especially on the rich side of the ledger. For example, when major money buys media access as well as media ownership, the media/money arrangements buy and/or rent political power, and political power helps determine income as well as wealth capture/distribution/retention, this sets up a positive (for the well off) feedback loop. In addition, when the vast majority of societal wealth is captured by a small minority for an extended period of time, well... do the math .... that means there is less for the vast majority of people.

10. People tend to resist getting further impoverished. Generally speaking, getting poorer is not one of the main ambitions in life for most people, especially since getting poorer means an increasing probability of dying earlier (medical, type of food, crime, etc) than for the wealthy, as well as a higher probability of a less pleasurable life. And if presented with the option of decreasing real wages/standard of living or taking out a loan to maintain current/prevailing living conditions, people often go the loan route, at least until they cannot pay back the loan or even just pay the debt service (interest portion of the loan).

11. When the vast majority of the population are also debtors and when they can no longer even pay the interest on those loans, those who were doing the loaning (the wealthy) have to get hosed, eventually. It's just simple math..... Unless debtors are allowed to earn more money (and hence the vast majority of the population are allowed to earn/collect a larger fraction of the national economic output), the math result will come home to roost with a rip roaring recession or depression, or worse. While most people associate the Rwanda and Bosnia civil wars and genocides with tribal and religious disputes, there also were intense economic causes for the squabbles over the local resources that may have been MORE important that the "surface cause" of religious/ethnic bigotry. After all, the "winners" get to keep the land, while the "losers" lose it all, including life itself.

12. Real wealth is created through farming, mining and manufacturing; stealing only works until the "distant hosts" have been pillaged to the point where there is nothing left to steal. Financial activities do not create wealth, they only rearrange wealth, and too much of this activity and too little real wealth creation is eventually unstable. And that appears to be where our country is at at the present time.

Short Discussion
Point #1 should be as obvious as the nose on your face. If you have problems with that one, perhaps medical help is in order, though this does PERSONALLY affect different people in varying ways. Some people are getting by remarkably well, and some businesses may be experiencing a high demand for their goods and/or services - cool. Unfortunately, for our society as a whole, we could be doing SO much better.

The data for Point #2 (and the graph below) is from the U.S. Government Energy Information Agency, and it is based on the "West Texas Intermediate" (WTI) oil price (now artificially lower than most other oil prices for some pipeline related issues). In general, most crude oil prices (especially the Brent index, which is made possible via an exchange operated by BP (British Petroleum) and Goldman Sachs) are now higher than WTI by at least 10%. The starting year (1998) is somewhat arbitrary, but prices from 1984 to 1998 were remarkably flat, and from then on, that is no longer the case. The growth rate in price is obtained by getting the slope of the best fit equation of the natural logarithm (Ln) of the price versus the year:

First Order Oil Price Rise Rate Calculation (for those not engineers or math savvy)

The lower graph is the conversion of this growth rate equation into a "normal" format, in this case price (y axis) versus time (x axis), and then projecting this onwards. On average, a 14.6%/yr growth rate for crude oil prices means that they double every 5 years. And now you can't say you were not warned! And while the graph is a bit noisy, keep in mind that it is the long term effect that you have to worry about...

Next, here is an excellent article documenting Points 3, 4 and 5. It's just plain awesome:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/12/30/1049892/-Occupy-the-tax-code:-why-taxing-the-rich-will-make-the-economy-soar?via=spotlight. There is also a corresponding (and even stronger) relationship between income distribution and job creation - see http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/05/1051834/-Occupy-the-tax-code-II:-exploding-the-job-creator-myth?via=spotlight. So, those yahoos promoting that "yahooey" about the rich getting richer faster will lead to more job creation than by taxing them more - that is SO "fact-free" and all that is implied by that phrase. But, that is hardly surprising....

Of course, such facts are heresy to the present Republican "economic belief system" (alias bogus psuedo-religion, and which seems to trump even the hard core Christian fundamentalism of many of them). Bottom line - taxing the wealthy while not taxing the non-wealthy at the present time is the smart thing to do. It will get more people employed, raise more tax revenue, lower Federal debts, and allow many businesses to make more profits, hire/retain people.

Next comes the income distribution problem , especially in the aftermath of asset bubble burstings - "It's the Class War, Stupid!": http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2011/12/19/121933/16. The graph at the top is from this excellent article. It shows how the asset bubble process transfers wealth from average people to the "upper echeloners". And that process as also not a good thing.

Another, more lengthy examination of this effect can be seen in a paper published by, of all entities, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who have a long history of afflicting the afflicted/poor/working class and enriching the rich. Well, irony abounds, no doubt about it, and this is a great example of this. In general, they (the IMF and "friends") tend to fleece second, third and fourth world countries something fierce, but nowadays, looks like they are about to help impose "Austerity" on much of Europe, which will only make things worse, and further increase the debts of countries like Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Great Britain. However, maybe the ruling apparatchiks of the IMF don't read the research papers that they publish.... See http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2010/wp10268.pdf. A brief description of this 30 page paper (hint: avoid the equations, stick to the writing and graphs) can be found here:
http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2011/02/inequality-debt-and-financial-crises.html.

Conclusions
So how do we stimulate demand while at the same time not stimulating significantly greater oil imports and natural gas consumption? Well, things like mass US manufacture of and subsequent installation of wind turbines, construction of pumped hydroelectric energy storage systems and installation of additional grid transmission capacity would be a start. In general, this will displace natural gas usage, but after a while, even coal and nukes will get replaced with wind. At the end of 2011, both South Dakota and Iowa were supplying an average of 20% of their electricity supply, and in parts of Colorado, more than 50% was supplied by wind for significant periods. But, that trend needs to be replicated for big load centers/population centers.

Another thing to do is making alternatives to gasoline consumption, and hence oil importation needs. This would include both electric mass transit for urban centers and also electrified freight rail for long distance freight lines (and which also provides the long distance transmission corridors from the Great Plains to the east, west, south and north coast population centers). And building new roads (for more car traffic) should not be encouraged. The prime strategy for eliminating oil imports should be to use less oil (domestic AND foreign) - less diesel for trucks, less gasoline for cars and less kerosene for jet aircraft. While domestic oil extraction and renewable fuels production is helpful, the best bang for the buck is better fuel efficient cars and avoidance of using gasoline consuming cars and diesel consuming trucks.

And finally, there is the replacement of natural gas usage. As stated earlier, the electricity generation part can be replaced by wind turbines, but what about the heating issue? It turns out that wind turbines (electricity) can replace gas used for room temperature space heating via heat pumps - groundwater sourced ones are preferable (more heat "pumped" per kw-hr consumed in the compressor). Over half of the natural gas consumption in this country can be avoided by any combination of heat pumps, passive solar thermal, better building insulation and solar hot water heaters. And that will insure that natural gas prices stay low, and thus do not add more economic woe to poor and middle income people.

Residential and commercial building heat pump manufacture can be like the car industry, too. Maybe that should be the next Buffalo target - an auto plant sized heat pump factory....

There are millions of jobs to be had for the next two decades or more with just these few examples. But to be effective, the manufacturing part can't be off-shored; imports of these need to be viewed as morally repugnant, as well as economically "stupid on steroids". The solar PV industry in particular needs to be based on made in USA PV cells/modules/systems; using Chinese slave labor and mercentilistic capital to provide "cheapies" is so unpatriotic, and such a job killer, when job creation in THIS country needs to be stressed.

And while some will stress replacement of coal burners and nukes, that can be done after the gas based plants (also most expensive) get replaced. After all, very few new coal and nukes are being installed, and are likely to be installed. Nukes are just too expensive, and they CAN go Fukushima on us. New coal burners are also expensive, and the price of coal on the east coast is just no longer predictable (Chinese and Indian purchases have added at least $30/ton onto prices in the last year). The combination of affordable electricity and job creation pretty much targets wind, geothermal, tidal, biomass and biogas as to how the bulk of our electricity needs to be made.

Oh well, that's at least two cents worth of advice. What's your opinion(s) on this? After all don't forget to

the public conversation as we certainly cannot leave that to the corporate owned media around here. Talk about a proven to be a brain deadening concept...

DB

from http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/windmaps/offshore_states.asp?stateab=ny - your tax dollars at work

Introduction
There are many famous sayings with respect to "too late". A classic is "shutting the barn door after the horse has got out". Or "better late than never", even if "it's all for naught but still for show". And that brings us back to the subject of offshore wind turbines and NY State. As you may recall, there was an initiative called the Great Lakes Offshore Wind (GLOW) project, which got canned this fall by the New York Power Authority (NYPA), or at least the NY State part of GLOW. The cancellation had a lot to do with political intrigues and personality clashes in the upper realms of NY's political bureaucracy and especially in that pot of gold known as the People's Power Company of NY - alias NYPA. NYPA is owned by the people of NY State via our state government - it is the biggest municipal electric utility (MEU) in our country. And due to the Niagara River and St Lawrence River power projects (NPP and FDR Dam), it produced an average of about 2200 MW of electricity at a cost of less than 0.2 cents/kw-hr, or about 7% of the low, low cost that NRG makes electricity at the old (76 years and counting) Huntley facility (COST is about 3 c/kw-hr, but that is not the PRICE that it gets sold at - the price is a bit of a random value). Note: NYPA also makes other electricity, but most of it is more costly to make, such as the natural gas sourced energy. And the electricity made at Huntley is made cheap, especially compared to natural gas sourced electricity. This low cost hydroelectricity is highly sought after and the subject of a lot of fighting over it, as well as impressive displays of ignorance on behalf of many local politicians, economists, businesspeople, the general public, too. More on that, in a bit...

Discussion
Some of this super-cheap hydro-power is sold at cost (transmitting it costs about 10 times what the manufacture of it costs at these largely depreciated facilities) - mostly to municipal electric utilities in NY and 6 neighboring states, and some to local industries around here. However, some of it gets sold at "market rates", which can also be called "NYISO spot price", or "NYISO price". Last year the NYISO price in WNY averaged 3.92 c/kw-hr, so a tidy profit was made on this - for example, on the 58 MW average production from the Lewiston "pumped hydro" attachment to the Niagara Power Project, which acts like a giant battery (equivalent to around 4 million car batteries (100 amp-hr ratings)). Whatever electricity that is made but not allocated via a contract with a MEU or an eligible business can get sold at the NYISO rate, which varied from 1 c/kw-hr to 12 c/kw-hr last year in WNY, and that essentially all translates into profit for NY State via its NYPA subsidiary.

Anyway, a couple of months after the demise of NY part of GLOW (see http://www.wagengineering.blogspot.com/2011/09/offshore-wind-revisted-in-2011.html), along comes a bunch of well meaning people and well meaning organizations advocating for offshore wind development near Long Island - see http://www.offshorewind.biz/2011/12/22/new-yorkers-push-for-offshore-wind-power-usa/. Sure, they hit all the right buttons, and are to be commended for the general focus on job creation, but, the time for these sentiments was a few months ago, and doing this now is .... what? Maybe this is for show, or maybe regret at seeing the massive job creation going in in Northern Europe with their offshore wind energy efforts contrasted with the whole bunch of "nothing" going on in NY State? And that "nothing" includes no manufacturing jobs, no business opportunities, no investment banking, no marine construction jobs in the offshore wind biz, and lots of opportunities for environmental destruction via the "Swiss Cheesing" (fracking) of much of upstate NY. At a minimum, offshore Long Island will be much harder to do, as this is the THIRD attempt, and the unspoken hurdle to be overcome is "are you really serious, or just pretending, AGAIN?".

For example, before this can be seriously considered, somebody is going to have to put a deal with the purchaser(s) (for example, LIPA and/or Con Ed) for a fixed price/long term supply of electricity, the developer, their suppliers, engineering and environmental consultants, the project managers/planners/schedulers, the equity investors (typically 30% in Europe) and the bank consortia (which also means putting together this consortia, typically in for 70%). This offshore deal would involve over $1 billion INITIALLY, and to make any sense, it has to be a part of a continuing program of offshore wind projects. Just putting this deal together will cost lost of money, and involve facilitators (also highly compensated) such as these: http://www.green-giraffe.eu/uploads/111201%20GGEB%20presentation%20EWEA%20Offshore%20Wind%20-%20Show%20me%20the%20Money.pdf. These people have far better things to do and real money-making opportunities to pursue than another snark-hunt equivalent which has been the two previous offshore NY "adventures".

After all, placing big wind turbines in the Atlantic Ocean in 30 to 50 meters of salt water subject to the occasional hurricane and 60 ft tall waves is not going to be cheap, nor will the electricity made by those turbines be cheap until the investment is paid off in 20 years or so. At least Lake Erie is generally less than 30 feet deep, alkaline fresh water and waves have never been reported to be more than 15 feet (30 feet peak to trough)...... Well, that 500 MW worth of projects (one of which could have been on Galloo Island in Lake Ontario, and thus pretty inexpensive) would have provided a nice "base" of suppliers, labor, consultants and engineering for the more difficult Long Island adventure, but, no go. Yes, you might need different models of turbines for the slightly less intense Great Lakes winds versus the slightly more intense Atlantic Ocean winds, but that's not a big deal - large wind turbines are customized somewhat to the wind resource. Now the Long Island project will be even less job creating, more expensive and more improbable WITHOUT the GLOW projects.

from http://www.offshore-power.net/Files/Billeder/scrobyaerial.jpg, the 60 MW Scroby Sands project in Great Britain (also owned by RWE)

If you look at the wind map at the top of the page, you will notice that the winds to the south of NYC and Long Island are in the 9 to 9.5 m/s range 90 meters above the average water surface (orange) or 8.5 to 9 m/s (purple). That is a righteously great wind resource, and with the correct turbines, would translate into at least a 45% net output for a set of turbines. At 9.25 m/s average wind speed, the probability of the turbines not making some electricity is less than 10.42%, while the chances that the wind speeds are too high is less than 5 hours per year. This covers about 4100 square miles on the wind speed map. And since about 10 GW of electricity is consumed in NYC and Long Island, and a decent sized (for example, the Nordsee 1 ~ 1 GW array - see http://www.rwe.com/web/cms/en/288766/rwe-innogy/sites/wind-offshore/developing-sites/innogy-nordsee-i/) offshore wind farm has a power capacity density of about 6.9 MW per square kilometer (average of 17.7 MW/mile^2), that means about 1255 square miles of water surface would need to be tapped to supply, on average, ALL of Long Island and NYC's electricity needs. At an average of 5 MW per wind turbine, that's 4445 of these. And, at $4.5 million per MW of capacity, a cool $100 billion would be needed. Of course, if 2 GW (delivered basis) of tidal turbines (no dam/barage needed) was employed, only about 1000 square miles of ocean would need to get tapped (tidal and offshore wind systems have comparable installed costs, though tidal turbines are still in the "rookie" stage. See http://www.offshorewind.biz/2011/12/26/european-marine-energy-centre-receives-hs1000-tidal-turbine-uk/:


from Hammerfest Strom, the manufacturer; this picture is of their 300 kw pilot unit that has been tested for 5 years in 50 meters of water (http://www.hammerfeststrom.com/products/tidal-turbines/hs300/). Yes, they are coming, and the big question is where they will be manufactured, and who will deploy them. Very fish friendly, too....

So, a nice $100 billion project, equivalent to 1.6 million jobs years, if we play our cards right, or about 80,000 direct manufacturing/construction/engineering jobs if conducted over a 20 year time interval. Odds are, the delivered electricity price would be less than would be the case if natural gas was used to make this 10 GW of electricity over the next 20 years, let alone the next 45 years. After all, prices for NYC/LI electricity would not rise significantly for 10 years, since the fraction of offshore sourced electricity would only be a small part of the supply mix until the 10 year mark is reached. And if you can predict what the price of natural gas would be in a decade from now, maybe you should also be continually winning big bucks from the NY Lotto .... as the only answer that makes sense for average future natural gas prices is "higher". Besides, those 80,000 jobs will spawn up to another 400,000 ones (the job multiplier effect).

Anyway, that quantity ($100 billion) money is now not a problem - after all, there is at least $2 TRILLION in corporate cash stashed in funds earning between 1%/yr to 3%/yr OR LESS in interest. That means that such a Long Island project would be putting less than 5% of that to work over time, but probably less than $5 billion/yr (for 20 years, that's the $100 gigabucks). And this is not money poured down a black hole, like it was for the $800 billion wasted (so far, but more expenses as the medical and other bills pile up) in the IraqNam FUBAR. This invested money would actually pay back the investor via sales of electricity, amortized over at least a 20 year period. A 7.5% ROI would be a big improvement on what they are in effect, paying people and hedge funds ("hedgies") to hide/handle. And of those 80,000 jobs, about 70% of them actually have nothing directly concerned with the wind turbine manufacture, too - most of the jobs would be associated with the foundations, construction and electrical transmission aspects. But, it would be a job creation machine the likes of which NY has not seen since WW2. And unlike the bankster jobs on Wall Street, these actually make the world a better place, and don't merely rearrange existing wealth mostly into the hands of some already really really rich people. oops, sound a bit like this article: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/12/18/1046522/-How-the-GOP-stole-America?via=blog_1.

Oh well, I guess people can dream; maybe that is what the new promoters of offshore Long Island are doing. But why just limit it to one spot in the state, which has weather patterns that tend to be different at any given time from eastern Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Spreading out wind farms over a wider area (and especially to areas with different weather patterns) means that less energy storage facilities have to be built for a given average delivered quantity of electricity. And here's something to think about - we have 800 MW of extra transmission capacity available in the Dunkirk, NY region, without any upgrading (such as via thicker wires, and upping the voltage from 230,000 volts to at least 345,000 volts). One new line from Dunkirk to Buchanan, NY (present site of Indian Point) could easily replace at least one of those nukes, and a pair of them could replace both of those pesky nukes. And, of course, this could interconnect several pumped storage potential sites in the Finger Lakes and Southern Tier. Such projects are also great for job creation, and these also will help staunch the export of money to pay for either imports of natural gas, or for the cleanup of Marcellus and Utica shale regions laid to waste via fracking.

Another nice thing that the new offshore Long Island groups are doing is to focus on the job creation potential of offshore wind turbines (and maybe, eventually, they will get around to Long Island Sound's tidal energy potential). This is the most immediate benefit of such projects; the benefits of the locally produced delivered electricity take a while to be seen/pay back. And since we are at least 1 million jobs shy of what we should have in NY State alone, the Long Island projects do seem like a great idea. But why be so limited? Think big, and not just at that one spot. Odds are, the new batch of offshore wind supporters are still thinking small - a few billion dollars worth - in effect, almost a "one-timer". That is just so myopic, and so wrong. With an attitude like that, Global Climate Change easily will put Long Island into "fish farm" status before decent amounts of electricity from offshore are being tapped for this part of our state. After all, when the Greenland ice-sheets slide into the sea in a process analogous to landslides, that will raise ocean levels by at least 20 feet.

It would be far less expensive to install these big turbines on land and design them for offshore mode, and let Global Warming do its thing. Unfortunately, that does not create the number of jobs that putting them offshore in the first place does. And maybe that sounds a bit too much like being an environmental surrender monkey. Of course, we won't really have that problem in the Great Lakes, which is another reason why installing turbines in lake Erie, Lake Ontario, in Long Island Sound and in the Atlantic alongside Long Island is the smart way to go. Lots of them.

Cheap Electricity and Job Creation
Once upon a time, when the electricity in Niagara Falls was more or less stranded via inadequate long distance transmission, cheap electricity and lots of it did lead to lots of manufacturing jobs. And as a result, this region prospered. But then a lot of the sort of/actual local companies got bought out, sometimes off-shored and Corporate America/Corporate World figured out how to extract maximum profits from these operations and that cheap electricity, or else they just dumped their relic factories and went elsewhere, or just cashed out. Then add in automation, and what used to be done by 30,000 people could be done with 3,000 or less. Plus, there is only 400 MW of electricity reserved for locally situated industries. If electricity is, in effect, a raw material, it becomes a major cost factor, and obviously cheaper electricity leads to either a lower cost product and/or a higher profit product when the product price is set by higher production cost manufacturers. For example, chlor-alkali, air separation, silicon/ferro-silicon manufacture, lots of ceramics and aluminum production all have electricity as one of the (or THE) major production cost factors.

But, when electricity consumption is only a tiny fraction of the production cost, and when the generated electricity is itself only a small fraction of the total delivered electricity price, the advantages of super-cheap electricity production vanish real fast. In many cases, the cost of the "overpaid" part of executive management often exceeds the cost of the generated electricity, so that department would seem to be a better spot to look for cost-cutting. In addition, for the next couple of decades, there will be more jobs obtainable from manufacturing renewable energy systems than in using electricity in jobs where the cost of electricity is a significant production cost. As for those believing that old-timey religion about cheap electricity providing mass quantities of high paying, local wealth creating jobs, they may never change their opinion, especially since religious beliefs can trump facts on just about any occasion. After all, in the last decade in NY, most jobs have been created where electricity is the MOST expensive, not least expensive. In fact, NYPA headquarters (in White Plains, NY, one of the more exclusive, expensive sub-urbs in the state) should be moved to Niagara Falls, where electricity as well as housing is cheaper (especially in the City of Niagara Falls), air conditioning loads are significantly lower, and where almost all the over $100,000/yr employees could be paid half of what they are now hauling in and still maintain the same standard of living). And what are they waiting for - for Hell to freeze over? So, the generated electricity price is a bit over-rated when it comes to attracting a lot of jobs. Besides, all those sever-farm jobs require a massive quantity of electricity per job, and yet there is no commitment to the manufacture of the servers in WNY, which is where some serious quantities of blue-collar employment could happen. But, that's a bit of a digression...

Which leads to the Big Quest conducted by Lilly Tomlin - "The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe". When it comes to large scale energy issues in NY State by so-called "responsible parties" and our elected/appointed officials, we would have to advise Ms. Tomlin to steer way clear of "here". But, we could get lucky - maybe the Occupiers have paved the way, and the NY Lotto motto is actually in force - "Ya Never Know". And we do wish our "Offshore Long Islanders" the best; who knows, some of those scarce as hens teeth proverbial jobs might spill into WNY, too. But it would be nice if they realized there is more to the offshore story in NY State than that sandy outcrop in the Atlantic...

DB

Introduction
If you've driven by the relics of Bethlehem Steel recently, you will see that 6 more Clipper 2.5 MW wind turbines are now installed. This 15 MW addition to the existing 25 MW array will soon be generating electricity. The incentives used for this project and to justify the investment of roughly $30 million will be extinct at the end of 2012 if nothing is done to change the wishes of the ruling Republicans of the U.S. House of Representatives; for the owner of the wind farm, it was a now or never deal. So that will mean 14 of these pollution free electricity generators, ones that are rarely ever heard but often seen. If they perform like advertised and do not experience "economic curtailment" (where wind turbines are shut off by grid operators because the added outputs of these units depress the spot market price for electricity TOO MUCH), an average of about 5 MW of natural gas sourced electricity can be avoided, which is a GOOD thing.

In other nice news, Invenergy recently announced they would soon start construction of their Stony Creek wind farm in Wyoming County. This will be located bear Rte 20A between Varysburg and Warsaw in the town of Orangeville. From a location standpoint, this is situated next to a 230,000 volt line (rated at over 300 MW of capacity) on a hill/ridgetop in diary country. The project will consist of 59 x GE xle turbines, rated at either 1.5 or 1.6 MW (but with the 82.5 meter rotor diameter in either case), total capacity being 88.5 or 94.4 MW. Again, with a 30% net output, this should average about 28 MW on a delivered basis, which also means that an average of 28 MW of natural gas sourced electricity will be replaced by the output of this project, and this is also a GOOD thing....

Discussion
Both of these projects are examples of economic development done by big companies which are also good for the American economy. First Wind (see http://www.firstwind.com/projects) has 11 operating projects rated at 735 MW and two under construction rated at 141 MW - they have concentrated on the US Northeast and in Hawaii. In this case, they are using Clipper Liberty turbines (96 meter rotors, 2.5 MW capacity, 80 meter towers); Clipper is now owned by United Technologies (UT), a major industrial/aerospace/defense contractor. The Clipper units are made in Iowa, towers (often) in Tennessee and the blades used to be made in Brazil, but after some notoriously bad quality blades, perhaps these are domestically made nowadays...

Invenergy (see http://www.invenergyllc.com/default.htm and http://www.thewindpower.net/developer_en_124_invenergy.php) now has 23 operating projects in the U.S. totaling 2025 MW of capacity. Their favorite machine of choice is the GE 1.5 MW (they have invested over $4 billion installing 1350 of these), and because they buy in bulk, they are believed to get discounts. Invenergy also owns the 112.5 MW Sheldon wind farm, which is about 10 miles east of the Orangeville location (Rte 20A might have to get renamed as "Wind Turbine Way"). General Electric (GE) is also a major defense/aerospace/finance/technology/manufacturing company, sort of like UT, only bigger. The GE turbine nacelles are made in California, the gearboxes in Erie, Pa and the blades in Pennsacola, Fla; towers for the WNY GE turbines tend to be made by DMI in Fort Erie using steel made in Hamilton. However, there are about 8,000 parts in a turbine, and lots of USA/Canada located companies supply parts and make a living/get income/pay employees based on sales of products and services to GE and Clipper.

In fact, the First Wind and Invenergy combined portfolio is almost 2760 MW, which is an investment of close to $5.5 billion. And since the number of job-years per billion dollars invested in the wind biz is about 16,000 direct ones, this supplied about 88,000 job-years of employment at manufacturing/construction wages. If the "job multiplier factor" for the wind biz is similar to the auto industry (about 4.5), this combined investment facilitated close to 400,000 job-years of employment. And since most of this has been done in the last 6 years, one can safely say that these two companies have helped create about 15,000 direct jobs and 51,000 indirect ones. Providing they keep up this pace of wind farm installations, that's a decent bit of job creating, a lot of which is centered around the Great Lakes metal-working industries.

Of course, this comes at a cost because of the bizarre way that we fund the renewable energy business in this country. In order to allow wind farm owners to make a profit while selling electricity at the rate more or less set by natural gas and coal sourced electricity providers (around 4 c/kw-hr), subsidies to the owners of the renewable energy systems are needed. In fact, no one can install ANY kind of new electricity production facilities and make a profit at a sale price of 4 c/kw-hr or less - notably new coal and nuke facilities (especially new nukes, which need over 20 c/kw-hr and are more expensive than offshore wind farms, even with their subsidies!). Besides, on a kw-hr basis, the subsidies to wind are pretty small compared to those given to coal (air pollution allowances/cost avoidance worth about $200 billion/yr - @ $85/ton CO2 for CO2 pollution and $62/ton of coal burned for particulates and SO2/NOx/elemental poisons like mercury and radon - plus the $12 billion/yr in subsidies given to coal mine owners) and nukes (subsidized money, the Price-Anderson Act, and no need to find a way to properly dispose of the spent fuel rods, for starts, as well as the equivalent of the PTC). But, instead of more logical payment systems such as those used in either Quebec or Ontario, we in this country subsidize the price of electricity, keeping it lower than it should be or would be if no subsidies were employed and if all external costs (like air pollution) were internalized.

But, let's consider the 2760 MW of installed capacity and what we are paying to subsidize this wind sourced electricity, as well as a particular benefit that rarely seems to get mentioned. At a 30% average net output, these wind farms (including the 135 MW Montana Judith Gap wind that has an average output near 42%, and which is one of the most productive ones in North America) would make about 828 MW on average, or 7.26 million MW-hr/yr. BTW, this also is about the output of a large nuke in North America (such as NY's FitzPatrick nuke near Oswego, of 838 MW capacity and 6.92 million MW-hr/yr in 2010).

The prime subsidy is the one rarely mentioned at all, which is the MACRS plus the interest paid on loans combined deduction from taxable income. The MACRS portion is mostly used up in 3 years/totally in 6 years. Over the course of 6 years, the "paper losses" estimate would be $5.5 billion (MACRS) and about $1.5 billion for the interest on $3.3 billion in loans for 6 years, totaling about $7 billion in deductions, or about $2.8 billion in avoided combined federal (35% marginal tax rate) and state (average of 5% income tax rate) taxes on regular or passive income. Next comes the PTC or its various equivalents, the ITC or the Section 1603 grants, which can be approximated by the PTC tax credit that only applies to passive income. The PTC rate is now$21/MW-hr for 10 years, so 828 MW * 8766 hr/yr *$21/MW-hr = $152 million/yr. Over 10 years, this would add up to about $1.5 billion; so far, most of this has yet to be recovered. For the "tax investors" who benefit from this via the partnerships that are made between the developers and rich people/companies/"hedgies" with massive passive income and thus a potential big passive tax bill (as long as they haul in that flow of passive cash), it's a bit of a risk; if their "booty haul" rate slows down or ceases due to another Great Recession or worse, they get no tax credit. After all, if you have no income, you still can't take any tax credits. It must be special to be able to anticipate a full decade of massive taxable income and thus book those tax credits, otherwise known as avoided taxes, as income on another set of books. But, that's a digression, and besides, who made up these crazy rules, anyway? And besides, what is crazier, having to depend on this dubious slight of hand, or thinking that we could fund a few trillion dollars worth of renewable energy investment in the US in the next decade or two in this manner?

So, the total in avoided taxes for the owners or "psuedo-owners" of this project would be $2.8 billion (MACRS/interest) and $1.5 billion (PTC), or $4.3 billion over a 10 year period. Not bad for an investment of $5.5 billion to make an average of (estimated) 828 MW. On the other hand, consider this example - Invenergy has a long term (20 year) Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with Northwestern Energy to sell the Judith Gap energy at $31.25/MW-hr, or 3.125 c/kw-hr (http://dnrc.mt.gov/Trust/Wind/JudithGap.asp), which is really really CHEAP. That cheap electricity comes at a price, as the 135 MW of turbines cost close to $270 million in today's dollars to install. Without the subsidies, the owners would need to charge near $70/MW-hr to $80/MW-hr, at least until the project gets paid off. And other projects with less robust wind resources would need even higher prices....

At the end of 2011, the US wind turbine capacity will be around 52 GW, and the net output will be around 15.6 GW (44 GW at the end of 2010 = 13.2 GW net output). Almost all of the wind derived electricity displaces natural gas sourced electricity (but in some cases this might be fuel oil, coal or even nukes). And while some of this might be the less efficient single cycle gas turbines, a lot of combined cycle ones with a thermal efficiency averaging 45% are being displaced. This can be used to estimate how much natural gas usage is avoided, and this works out to a rate of 878 billion cubic feet/yr (bcf) of natural gas. Last year, 7,377 bcf/yr was used to make electricity, and dramatic rise from 2009 (well, for a commodity), at 6.9%/yr. Overall gas usage increased by about 5.4%, and yet prices still remained very low for gas. However, the increase in demand that would have come from not using wind turbines and actually using more natural gas would have increased prices for methane significantly. That 878 bcf would have increased demand by an additional 3.6%, so that the total increase in gas demand would have been near 9%. To get an idea on how sensitive to supply/demand imbalances natural gas prices can be, sales in 2008 were about $230 billion, but in 2009, when 3% less gas was sold, sales were only $92 billion. Pretty touchy, eh? For 2011, gas usage will be displaced at a rate of over 1 trillion cubic feet per year (tcfy), or about 4% of all natural gas used and 13% of the methane used to make electricity. Like it or not, wind turbines are now an important impediment to rising natural gas prices..... and the more wind turbines that get installed, the bigger the impediment to natural gas price increases as well as the use of fracking to extract natural gas from shale gas sources.

The increase in prices would mostly affect those who use gas for heat (about 2/3 of methane consumed each year is used just to make heat). Merely raising prices by $1/MBtu would pull $16 billion/yr out of residential, commercial and industrial customers, but this "demand shock" (where wind turbine electricity is replaced by gas sourced electricity) could have easily spiked the nation's methane bill by $50 to $100 billion/yr. All that becomes money which cannot be spent on other things, and such a price increase would act like a giant, ultra-regressive sales tax, where the proceeds don not go to pay for governmental services but instead get siphoned largely to the "upper 1%" of our income brackets. Just what we need these days..... NOT! The resulting depressed economic activity would affect our local, state and federal government in two ways - increased costs (heating schools and buildings, for example) and decreased tax revenues. Also just NOT what the doctor ordered, economically speaking, these days. Of course, gas price rises would also raise electricity prices, especially in states like NY where we have "competitive" electricity generation markets (quotes are highly deserved). Since coal and nuke generation costs remain unaffected by natural gas price increases, gas price rises translate into the equivalent of "rentier" profits to owners of coal and nuke sourced electricity generators in such states. Since most of such profits go to the upper echelons of the American income distribution and that does not seem to be very beneficial to our economy as a whole, it seems that actions encouraging these "rentier" profits associated with increasing usage of natural gas are unwise and them some.

Installations of real wealth producing investments are far too rare these days. But, if we are to fix both our economy and our climate, what is needed is installations like these two companies have undertaken, but on a massive scale, and not just exclusively by companies who need massive tax avoidance in order to lower their electricity generation prices to rates that are historically depressed levels. Investment by companies, cooperatives, individuals and governments big and small all have the same effect at job creation, and especially manufacturing job creation/retention. We need at least 400 GW of non-polluting electricity to replace pollution sourced electricity (gas, coal, nukes, some oil), which is roughly 400 times the combined First Energy/Invenergy investments to date, and it would be good if this was done in less than a decade. Then we need about 300 GW additional (delivered basis) just to replace all the natural gas used for heating (such as by replacement with heat pumps) as well as a lot of the gasoline now used in cars/diesel in trucks and trains - the diesel trucks mostly need to get replaced with electric freight rains. And it's rather obvious that if 0.828 GW delivered costs $4.3 billion in avoided taxes, this system is not going to deal with 400 GW or 700 GW delivered, even if this is on a 6 year average/10 year total basis... In case the math eludes you, that's a lot of tax avoidance by the super-rich - approximately $3.6 trillion in avoided taxes to replace all our polluting electricity sources and most of our pollution based heating. And guess who would have to make up for that budgetary discrepancy....

The Wrap-up
As for WNY, these two new wind farms can deliver lower spot market electricity prices via bumping off gas used to make electricity, which in turn will put further downward pressure on coal sourced electricity pricing. Last year we only used 46.1 MW of gas sourced electricity (see table 3, pg 6 of this report: http://www.4shared.com/document/IKgU61cv/Lee050411e.html), and adding in another 33 MW (5 + 28) means that we only have 13 MW to go until we are freed from the scourge of using that fossil fuel to make electricity. Of course, then we have to move on to the next fossil fuel scourge of our electricity system, but one scourge at a time might be the way to go at it.

Also of note, the permit and documentation for the Orangeville project can be found here: http://www.invenergyllc.com/stonycreek/index.html. One interesting conflict between the developer and those opposing it (and by default, those almost invariably in favor of more pollution) concerns the sound levels made by these turbines. The Invenergy report can be found here: http://www.invenergyllc.com/stonycreek/pdf/1/03_DEIS/DEIS_Appendices/D_Noise_Study_2010_02_11.pdf while the opposing view can be found at the end of the public comments (warning 17 MB download!): http://www.invenergyllc.com/stonycreek/pdf/2/E.2.h%20-%20Written%20Public%20Comments%20306-342.pdf. It is like night and day difference, with opponents claiming that houses located next to busy roads like Rte 20 experience amazingly quite lives. Road noise and "wind noise" - wind blowing through trees - add up to more than the wind turbines are likely to produce. The 50 dBA level is pretty low, and to be able to argue that background sound levels next to a busy road are below average hearing levels for most people (40 to 45 dBA) is a bit of a stretch. But, sound is a great arguing point because after all the measurements come in, the question of "what do they mean?" becomes the main refrain.

Finally, here is the latest of First Wind's wind farms to get commissioned - a 40 MW, 16 Clipper array in Vermont - http://www.firstwind.com/projects/sheffield-wind. And on a ridge line no less, where it will actually be seen! Oh well, I guess that beats using an old geezer nuke (Vermont Yankee) with its nasty habit of leaking radioactive Tritium into the neighborhood. BTW, Vermont Yankee is one of those 500 MW GE made units that is identical to Fukushima Unit #1.

DB

From http://nuclearromance.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/quake-raises-red-flags-for-indian-point-nukes/

Introduction
As you may have heard, there is a big fracking controversy in NY State, and especially in the rural regions that stand in the cross hairs of it. However, it turns out, at core, this is another example of squeezing the hydrocarbon dregs out of North America. Since NY has essentially no oil and natural gas resources still left to tap, the Marcellus and Utica tight shale gas resource are it as far as commercializable hydrocarbon mining goes in NY.

Natural gas (Ngas) is used in NY to make electricity (about 1/3 of Ngas consumed in the state), heat houses (about 1/3) and the remainder is used for commercial and industrial heating. All of that electricity made by Ngas in NY (about 6 GW) could be replaced with non-polluting sourced electricity, and the lowest cost way to do this would be using wind turbines along with a few additional pumped hydroelectric energy storage units (NY has two of those, one in Niagara Falls and one in southeast NY State at Blenheim-Gilboa State Park). In the process of evolving from this depletable, air polluting (the CO2 combustion by-product, "fugitive" methane emissions) fossil fuel electrical energy source, a lot of jobs could be created and maintained in NY, though it might raise the price of electricity a bit (but not out of the realms of affordability, however). To make an average of 6 GW of electricity, about 18 GW of wind turbine capacity would be needed, and at about $2.5 billion per GW of capacity these days, that's a long term investment of about $45 billion investment, and 720,000 job-years of direct employment. If you or your friends, neighbors and relatives need a job, well, that's one way to do it. Add in the jobs created by creating those wealth producing manufacturing jobs, and UB 2020 just looks like amateur hour, assuming there is even any net job creation even before all the various governmental subsidies and "prop-ups" are considered/factored into the equation.

In fact, from a marketing perspective, the only way to increase the Ngas price significantly these days is to increase the consumption of it slightly (Ngas is a price inelastic commodity). Correspondingly, the best way to keep the price low is to steadily decrease the consumption of Ngas.

But now, along comes the Indian Point nuke complex (2 operating out of the 3 nukes that have been installed there). Indian Point 2 is up for operating license renewal in 2013, and IP 3 is up for relisencing in 2015. If they do not get re-licensed (and the renewal is strongly opposed by both Governor Cuomo and Attorney General Schniederman and much of the public), some means of coming up with close to 2 GW of electricity for NY City and its northern burbs will be needed. Enter Ngas, and in particular, NY State sourced fracking derived Ngas, lots of politics, lots of intrigue, the Entergy Corporation (who owns these two major nuke cash cows) and the recent and still not crammed down the memory hole Fukushima FUBAR. Mix well, and then prepare for a a major rumble!

After all, that's a nice big new market for Ngas. Or, that's a lot of jobs making wind turbines, pumped hydro "batteries" and improvements to our existing high capacity transmission lines. And just because the latter option is more job creating (especially working class jobs), more environmentally logical/desirable, well, this is NY, and those options don't carry much weight. Right?

Discussion
In the summer of 2008, natural gas (Ngas) prices were going for over $13/MBtu on the spot market (Henry Hub - see chart at http://www.neo.ne.gov/statshtml/124.htm), but these soon crashed, partly as a result of the Great Recession reducing demand by a few percent and partly due to foolish bets made by the likes of Aubrey McClendon (CEO of Chesapeake Energy, a natural gas exploration and production (E & P) company and prime fracking advocate/pusher), who lost $2.3 billion when Morgan Stanley called in a bet he was stupid enough to make regarding gas futures contracts with them (by and large, the operator of a casino, on average, always comes up ahead, and in this case, that would be Morgan Stanley). For 2008, Ngas averaged close to $10/MBtu, so national Ngas bulk sales were close to $230 billion. By 2010, bulk prices were still in the pits (and still are), averaging below $4/MBtu, so sales were close to $92 billion/yr. In general, the cost to get Ngas out of the ground where fracking tight shales was the means to do this was greater than the price that could be obtained for this Ngas. Oops. Most frackers subsisted and continue to exist on the higher prices they had locked in via the futures market, but that jackpot only lasts for so long (most gas futures contracts are only a few years long). Or they went the "asset sales route", hoping to get bought out by cash-bloated major oil companies whose stock price is unrelated to their cash stockpile but is related to proven hydrocarbon reserves, and who are having a hard time coming up with new hydrocarbon reserves.

So how to boost Ngas consumption enough to re-establish the thermal equality with oil prices that had been the norm until the late 2000's (Ngas would need to be $18/MBtu to match crude oil at $100/bbl and 5.6 MBtu/bbl of crude oil)? Running cars and trucks on compressed natural gas (CNG) is going at a snails pace, much to the dismay of characters like T.B. Pickens (also called T. Boone, but T.B. may be a better analogy of his societal usefulness). Converting methane to gasoline and diesel (GTL plants, see http://wagengineering.blogspot.com/2010/11/marcellus-gas-pipe-dreams-or-wind.html) can be done, but at close to $18 to $25 billion per world scale facility, well, that's not in the cards when there seems to be a de-facto capital strike by corporate types against president Obama. And those darned wind turbines now make about 3% of the electricity in the US (44 GW capacity, 13 GW delivered), and displace over 4% of all the Ngas consumed in the US - that's the OPPOSITE of increasing Ngas consumption! As for shutting down coal burners and replacing them with Ngas, well, coal makes for cheaper electricity, especially from old plants. Also an "oops", even at presently depressed Ngas prices.

Besides, nobody trusts Ngas prices - since 2000 there have been 4 significant price spikes, starting with the Enron crimewave in California. About the only thing trustworthy about Ngas prices is that there is no stable long term price that can be accurately used. After all, both political and weather disasters can affect Ngas production, and slight mis-matches between supply and demand have drastic effects on Ngas prices. And then there is all that wonderful speculation activity, and the betting on bets on Ngas prices that can be done and which can dwarf the money spent on buying actually delivered product. A lot of such activity does not mesh well with those who make electricity, where most production plants last over 20 years, and in the case of the Huntley coal burner in Tonawanda, over 75 years (with occasional improvements).

And so, the question of how to replace the 2 GW of Indian Point electricity - with Ngas, with wind turbines and tidal energy systems - or whether to replace it (by extending the original 40 year operating licenses by another 20 years) is one fraught with economic, political, financial speculation, job creation or no job creation as well as societal safety and environmental ramifications. For example, if you want to minimize job creation potentials for middle class people, then keeping those plants going or else replacing them with Ngas sourced electricity would be the best way to achieve that wish-fulfillment. On the other hand, if you want to maximize job creation without pushing electricity prices so high as to cause a lot of economic misery, wind and tidal would be the way to go (requiring around $15 to $20 billion of investment/job creation). Or, you could maximize job creation by producing 2 GW delivered via solar PV (requires at least 20 GW PV capacity plus about 4 GW new pumped hydro capacity and huge storage capability and an investment/job creation expenditure north of $100 billion). Of course, that solar PV would be in the 40 to 50 c/kw-hr range, which is over 10 times the present generation price for electricity in that part of the state...).

This topic of using the replacement of the "IP Twins" is explored in further detail in a paper that was written for the benefit of the local Sierra Club (who are not fans of either new Ngas fracking in NY State or of continued operation of the IP Twins). They like renewable energy approaches to job creation and environmentally sensible electricity production (the Apollo Alliance/Blue-Green Alliance are joint efforts by the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club). Anyway, this paper is not their official policy - just written to them as a way of sounding out some ideas.

There is just no way that the IP Twins are "safe". So far we have been lucky, but, as Clint Eastwood famously said, "Feeling lucky, punk?" They are an accident waiting to happen, and if it does happen, effectively the finances of NY State are toast. An "oops" event at one or both would render most of the wealth of NY as useless when mass radioisotopic poisoning of the majority of the population of NY and more importantly, the vast majority of the wealthy (and millions of not so wealthy) real estate in the state occurs. And there is just no accurate way to ascertain the risks (= probability of an event times the severity of that and subsequent spin-off events) of a nuke incident - you can't use Gausian ("bell-curve") statistics for "black swan" events. And then there are the humongous subsidies associated with no final disposal method of spent fuel rods ("swimming pools" don't cut it) and the Price-Anderson Act, which makes nukes possible in this counrty. The P-A Act essentially puts the Federal Government on the hook for disasters above the $10 billion mark, and an "oops" at Indian Point would likely push past $1 trillion with little effort.

Of course, there are four more nukes in NY State that also need to be shut down ASAP - all located in the SE part of the Lake Ontario coast, (Rochester-Syracuse- Oswego). And then don't forget the 12 on the Ontario side of Lake Ontario (10 active and two dormant). After all, prevailing winds tend to go from west to east, especially in the winter, when lots of Syracuse to NYC and Syracuse to Boston winds set up. It's just that there are well over 15 million people within 50 miles of the IP twins, and the money obtained from taxes down there tends to support us in WNY, so that's sort of like threatening the goose that lays those golden eggs with a sawed-off shotgun and/or an RPG. Not wise at all..

Anyway, a copy of the paper (with references and lost of numbers) can be found here:
http://www.4shared.com/document/d-fbvXsg/bwag080911b.html. Got any opinion on this matter? Maybe all we have to lose in WNY is a lot of unemployment, and we could gain employment if those nasty twins are replaced in a cost effective manner with a job-creating approach.

BTW, for those who scoff at whether this is possible, check out this article:
http://www.renewableenergyfocus.com/view/16406/comment-north-german-state-doubles-onshore-wind-energy/. While there may not be much of a way to change some peoples minds, perhaps others may not be immune to facts and logic... Of course, what might have to change is the pricing system for renewable energy in NY State - see this article as to why that might be/as to what actually works: http://energyselfreliantstates.org/content/what-renewable-energy-policy-works-best-feed-tariffs.


DB

From http://www.solarworld.de/en/solar-power/projects-and-campaigns/for-farmers/
The money quote:
"Every single ray of sunshine provides a secure income, thanks to a SolarWorld solar power system and state incentives guaranteed under the German Renewable Energy Law. Moreover, income is assured for 20 years, irrespective of economic trends. Earnings from roof systems are comparable with those from conventional financial investment opportunities, but are more solid. Solar technology also makes an important contribution to preserving the natural environment."Introduction
Germany recently had its one millionth PV system hooked up to the grid, and the vast majority of these have been installed in the last decade. This was made possible via their Feed-In Tariff (FIT) system, which is designed to stimulate manufacturing jobs/industries by removing a lot of the valueless added financial risk associated with fluctuating grid spot market prices (and whose exact value at any given time in the future is unknowable). Due to the way that the FIT system works, almost all PV systems in that country are hooked up to the grid. In effect, the grid and associated pumped hydroelectric energy storage units (Alps, Norway, Sweden, France, southern Germany) become the battery, buffering variable supply and variable load. Recently, PV output contributed over 12 GW to the German grid, or roughly 15% of the power needed for the country, for a short while.

Most Americans are quite ignorant of why FITs work so remarkably well, and most German's who are knowledgeable about energy pricing look at what passes for our pricing systems with a mix of horror (how could a country with so many armed and dangerous nuclear weapons be SO stupid?) and wonder (at how we hobble ourselves and our awesome renewable energy potential, but to our disadvantage/their benefit), since the dysfunctional US system certainly allows their companies and exports to be in an advantageous position. Germany has both a pretty pathetic solar PV AND wind energy resource, especially compared to the USA. We have over 30 times our present electricity consumption in commercially viable wind locations, and we also have a lot of really sunny regions. And all we in the USA really need is a bit over twice current consumption to replace all pollution sourced electricity, allow for the extra needed electrical energy storage (pumped hydro) to go all renewable and replace most of our natural gas consumption (that used for residential and commercial heat and hydrogen manufacture). Unlike Germany, we have deserts, where at least 325 all sunny days per year is a reasonable expectation; Germany has more cluody/rainy/snowy days than we have in Buffalo - and ours is a 52% "sun obstructed" climate...

Discussion
A good overview of Germany's PV efforts can be seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany. According to this article (http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2011/03/doing_the_math_comparing_germa.shtml), over $US 86 billion had been spent/invested as of the end of 2010 to install 17.3 GW of PV capacity. Since the average output is 9.5% of the peak rating (-> 1.64 GW average output), this works out to an average cost of $US 52 billion per delivered GW, or about 60 cents/kw-hr, and that's just to generate it; there are hefty transmission costs, fees and VAT taxes on electricity sold, too, so that the full delivered cost is not cheap.... However, because of the way the FIT system operates, this small fraction of Germany's overall electricity is "blended in" to other generated sources, so the average German residential customer is only out a few Euro's a month. These days, the fully installed cost has been reduced by about 30% or so, but PV will never be cheap until the capital investment has been paid off.

In 2011, a bit more than 5 GW of PV will get installed, pushing the total up to near 23 GW, and pushing the total investment to over $US 100 billion. Almost all of these systems have been made in Germany, employing vast numbers in the chemical industry (making the semiconductors, dopants, encapsulants, cell wiring, etc), specialty glass, chemical/factory equipment needed to make PV and PV component factories, electronics (the dc output needs to get converted into ac via inverters), and then there is the fastener, framing, structural support and electrical equipment biz. Close to 200,000 people directly employed in a country of 85 million... and also a sizable export business, too. FITs are ideal for stimulating high skilled capital intensive manufacturing and all of the support systems/supply chains. In Germany, the FIT system was seen as a way to replace the employment that would be lost from the automobile sector in the late 1990's; nowadays, more steel is consumed by wind turbine manufacture than by the car industry. And that is really cool...

Most American's can't really get over the fact that the PV sourced electricity made (now about 2.5% of Germany's average electrical consumption) is so expensive. And this is completely unsubsidized - there are no tax deductions or tax credits (which almost invariably work out best for those who have a lot of money and are supposed to pay the highest tax rates) to help lower the needed price to make the investment worthwhile and at the same time be able to sell PV electricity at something like 5 c/kw-hr. The full cost of PV is paid by German consumers of electricity - the ratepayers. And since cheap prices only promote gluttony while more expensive prices promote a more efficient use of electricity - well, that's good, too, right?

The secret of why this works is the FIT system (here is how these work in a bit more detail: http://www.allianceforrenewableenergy.org/join-are.html), which has two major facets and a nifty wrinkle that is based on the way that a technology tends to develop over time. In the FIT system, all contracted Green energy (wind turbines, geothermal, biomass, biogas - which makes about 800 MW of electricity in Germany - small hydro, tidal, run of river and PV) must be sold at contracted prices when it is made and no "economic curtailment" is allowed (more on that in a bit). Then comes the FIT contract (generally a fixed price for 20 years), which is tailored to the actual cost of production for a given technology and scale of that technology. For example, onshore wind, which is less expensive that offshore wind, gets a lower price than offshore wind. The price is based on the average cost of production for that technology/scale and a socially determined reasonable return (profit). So, if you place wind turbines in a place with a really poor wind resource, you would go broke, but if you place them is a decent spot, you could make money. Unlike US mega-banking (or more properly, bankstering), failure is not rewarded. This stable price insures predictable cashflow as long as the project is decently installed and maintained. Then there is the "digression rate" (nifty wrinkle), where every year, the FIT contract prices for that technology/scale are dropped from the last year's value to match the increase in performance/drop in the manufacturing/installation costs, until those no longer drop. This forces competition between manufacturers, developers and bankers (who finance these to an amazing extent). The combination of stable pricing and digression is the main reason why Germany and countries who use the FIT system are the world leaders in wind, biogas, biomass and PV technologies, and in the employment of people making and installing them.

In Germany, renewables are a very safe investment (see "the money quote"), and actual competent banking is a big reason for this. In general, individuals, small companies, partnerships and cooperatives get 95% of the project cost as a bank loan, and for bankers, this is pretty easy money. Since they know the price for the product, and a reasonable estimate of the annual energy production is also a given (required for loan), it is really easy to determine if the owner will be able to pay back the loan. Contrast that with the U.S. for wind projects, where at least 60% of the project is equity and less than 40% is debt. In a place like NY, the full price that will be obtained for the electricity is unknowable, as is the likelihood that the investor(s) will be able to use the tax credits/deduction incentives, or whether enough of the project output will get shaved off by economic curtailment to send the financials into the red zone. All that uncertainty ups the financial risk of the project, which means loans that come in at higher interest rates and shorter terms than in FIT countries. It makes the USA less competitive, so much so that our superior wind and solar resources are rendered meaningless.

One advantage of the FITs is that they actually force the prices of pollution based electricity DOWN, and in some instances, polluters actually have to pay up to 5 c/kw-hr for someone to take their generated electricity (this price lowering tendency is called the Merit Order Effect, alias MOE). The increase in renewable electricity production at relatively constant consumption rates results in less consumption of coal and natural gas (mostly imported into Germany), and with less demand comes lower prices. Which is good, right? And the "no curtailment" aspect prevents utilities from cutting off renewable generators whenever a large surge (sunny and/or windy day) of green electricity depresses the spot market price (even into negative territory) and ruins the profits of the owners of coal burners and nukes. Oh well...

So, FITs are designed to stimulate employment in value added manufacturing, which is where advanced industrial societies (like the US and Germany) create most of their real wealth (mining and agriculture also result in real wealth production). And, for good measure, some electricity gets made with no pollution, no possibility of a nuclear "oops event", and no fuel consumption. Also, when that electricity gets made there is the added benefit that is puts some downward pressure on fossil fuel prices that are going up as a result of depletion as well as increased demand for energy worldwide. Net new employment in the renewable energy business in Germany is roughly 350,000 in the last decade, equivalent to about 1.4 million in the U.S. Not bad... After all, would you trade real unemployment north of 16% (U6 value) for employment, but at slightly higher electricity prices, or maybe even the same prices once the MOE is factored in?

But a funny thing happened, along with all these other societally beneficial things, and this is especially noticeable in the PV biz in Germany. In 2010 there were 250,000 new PV installations, 7.4 GW of capacity and an the average size was 29 kw (though most of the installed systems would be smaller than the average, since there were some larger installations). Most of these are small scale investments, probably averaging about $US 100,000 each. But, for 5% down (or $US 5000), individuals, families, partnerships and groups of friends can also become owners of income generating energy production systems. That 29 kw average unit would make about 24 MW-hrs/yr of electricity, and at $US 450/MW-hr (45 c/kw-hr), that's about $10,800/yr, or roughly about $500/yr in profit based on that $5,000 investment. Try getting that from a bank. Of course, most of the revenue from the sales of electricity go to pay back the loan, but, it sure beats 0.5% from a bank account in a bank that probably did something really stupid like invest in Spanish government bonds or Irish real estate values. Plus, people tend to like investing in something that makes the world a better place, gets them a bit of money, does not lose money and helps put their fellow citizens to work who would otherwise be unemployed. And while similar things are done with wind turbines, in 2010 an average new turbine installed was 3 MW in size and it probably cost $US 8 million. And 5% of $US 8 million is still $US 400,000, so that's a pretty hefty threshold to market entry, and not available to everybody. But 5 grand? Sign me up... Oh wait, this is the US, where such opportunities do not exist. Instead, real estate or an often kleptocartic stock market (see http://www.zerohedge.com/news/goldman-punkd-clients-yet-again) awaits its next small investor suckers... excuse me, potential investors alarmed a the net loss of money that happens when you leave your money in the bank.

Besides, what else are they doing with their roof, the south side of a barn, that parking lot for their business, or maybe the back yard that otherwise needs more mowing? And when the bank loan gets paid off, they will have a nice income supplement of, for this project, about $US 5000/yr.

It is now the strong desire of middle and working class Germans to actually have something to invest in that is driving the German PV biz. They don't trust their stock market much these days, either. And the ones who bought into European Sovereign Bonds...they can't be pleased with that choice at all. Otherwise, they have dead end options like more bars and restaurants, or real estate (you can never lose there, right?). And they are more than willing to pay more for their electricity in order to employ their neighbors, as well as provide a decent low risk way to invest some of their savings in something that actually makes Germany a better place. Naturally, all that export income from the sale of PV's and PV factory components also is nice, too.

Of course, the government and most German's realize that most of their electricity will be made by non-PV routes, even when coal usage fades to nothing, the Russian gas fields get drained or that gas gets too pricey, and tall of their remaining nukes get shut down. Odds are, onshore and offshore wind will supply most of Germany's electricity. Besides, maybe soon some Made in Germany PV systems will get installed in North African deserts, and then the HVDC power systems (also made in Germany) will transmit it across the Mediterranean via underwater lines (also made in Germany) into Europe. Geez, more jobs....

DB

From http://www.nordex-online.com/fileadmin/MEDIA/Fotos/nordex_hybrid-tower_140meters.jpg, a 2.5 MW turbine on a 140 meter tall "hybrid" tower (80 meters concrete, 60 meters steel), located in a very industrial part of some city (possibly Hamburg, Germany). The taller hub height taps stronger winds than it would using an 80 meter tall (usually all steel) tower, resulting in at least 20% greater energy output for that site than would be the case with the 80 m tower. Cool, and then some....

Introduction
Durban, South Africa is hosting the 17th UN Sponsored Climate Conference, an event that is largely invisible to the American public thanks to essentially non-existent mass media coverage (scandals and the circus-like Republican primary campaign soap opera seem to be more entertaining). And it looks like there will be no upgrade of the problematic Kyoto Agreement, which, like tax-based subsidies for wind power in the U.S., is better than nothing, but sure leaves a lot to be desired. And, as a businessman just said in a Democracy Now interview, in business you rarely get 17 times to do a deal, and thus, maybe this is not a productive way to achieve a useful result.

Odds are, he has a point, though his preferred solution might not work, either, especially if it involves the sale of "carbon credits", whose price in Europe has collapsed from $US 33/ton of CO2 pollutant to less than $US 3/ton of CO2. The sale of those "credits" was supposed to fund all kinds of wonderful stuff, but this was based on people paying extra to consume electricity, oil and natural gas. And given the impending collapse of the Euro and the austerity induced recessions affecting almost all of Europe and much of the US economy, that is not a happening concept.

Many third and fourth world countries (often presently characterized by low per capita CO2 pollution and low per capita fossil fuel consumption) are complaining, with lots of justification, that the U.S. is not going to reduce it's CO2 pollution rate (as in ~ 6 gigatons CO2 pollution per year for 300 million people) significantly in the nest 8 years. This is because we will keep on burning coal to make cheap electricity, burning natural gas for heat and electricity and burning oil for cars, trucks and jet airplane transport at essentially a constant level (on the plus side, at least we are not increasing our CO2 pollution rate, as is the case with China and India). In effect we are using up their share of the "CO2 dump" that is our atmosphere, and have been for a long time. And they think that the present administration should, could and/or would try to order U.S. citizens and companies to drop our fuel usage/CO2 pollution significantly by 2020, or that U.S. residents/companies would willingly do so by paying more in the form of de-facto CO2 pollution fees (those "carbon credits" or something equivalent, like increased sales taxes on gasoline). Well, any administration that attempts such a thing now or in the next few years would be voted out of office in record time, and US citizens, the majority of whom are actually experiencing a declining standard of living, are not going to pay more to use less energy, at least willingly. As for paying MORE taxes to fund fund a $100 billion global climate change adaptation/"third world greening" when local, state and federal services are already getting whacked for lack of governmental tax revenues, that is also not likely. And while increasing taxes on those who have pigged out at the proverbial trough in this country (the top 10% of earners, and especially the top 1%/top 0.1% top 0.01%) is a very popular concept (about 75% or greater popular approval), getting that accomplished to even a minor extent for domestic purposes is proving a difficult task. To fund overseas economic development, even if it is "green", is also not a likely sell to most Americans at the present time..

So we have a massive failure to communicate. In many ways, the vast majority of the world is expecting Americans to willingly cut their CO2 pollution rate by roughly 66% in 8 years, and if this means a significantly lower standard of living for most Americans, (energy usage and economic standard of living are pretty well connected/correlated - see http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8670), so be it. And since the vast majority of Americans are already experiencing a declining real standard of living, notably a result of higher oil prices, and are not happy about that (seriously, who would be?), calls to magnify that trend by a factor of close to 10 are going to be way past unpopular. Since our government is at least nominally a democracy (in reality, more a mix of democracy, kelptocracy, purchased media access, oligarchy and "oiligarchy", as well as others), the consent of the governed would be needed to accomplish this drastic lowering to our standard of living for MOST people. And that is just so not happening...

A Possible Solution...
Of course, there are ways that the US could keep consuming roughly our present level of energy, but without the CO2 pollution. And we actually need NO input from the rest of the world to do this - we can make all the wind turbines, solar hot water heaters, PV panels, pumped hydro storage units, electric cars, electric trains, electric heat pumps and upgrades of where we live and work to a decent level of energy efficiency we need. We could probably even do it in 8 years. But instead, our country nudges into the 21st century at a snail's pace with regards to energy efficiency and renewable energy installations, and this is best exemplified by commercial scale wind turbines. We have a wind resource capable of supplying 30 times our present electricity consumption (around 420 GW), yet this year only ~ 9 GW will be installed, equal to 3 GW on an average delivered basis. We would need over 120 to 140 years to replace our present pollution based electricity generation at this rate. And as of 2013, essentially all wind turbine installations will stop unless the Republican efforts to kill off the wind industry are circumvented...

The basic problem is that, in much of the world and especially the U.S., if it is not profitable, and especially if it is a money loser, renewable energy installations will not take place at climatically speaking meaningful rates. With coal derived electricity production cost (NOT including external costs like particulate and CO2 pollution) in the 2 to 4 c/kw-hr range, and the real, unsubsidized cost of wind derived electricity in the 7 to 15 c/kw-hr (depends on the site wind resource), something needs to be done. Either wind based electricity is allowed to be sold on a cost plus reasonable profit basis (PPA's, Feed-In Laws), wind is subsidized (in the US, via avoided taxes and tax-payer funded grants/price subsidies) and/or pollution based electricity prices are raised SIGNIFICANTLY (raising all electricity prices), but something has to be done. The existing electricity markets are deformed, terminally short-term focused and unable to correctly price the real external costs of pollution and the risk of nuke "oops" events.

So, if one desired to correct this problem, perhaps making renewable energy profitable (even only modestly so is all that is needed) is all that is required. But, until is is profitable to sell renewable electricity at significantly increasing quantities, orders for this equipment will not happen at rates that are climatically meaningful (i.e. those that will prevent the 2 C increase in average air temperatures due to excessive human caused CO2 pollution). And with no orders come no jobs to make and install these systems, and with no jobs/employment base comes no business and labor constituency which can advocate for the "wind biz" and other renewables. And the supply pipeline - everything from steel manufacture to transformers, epoxy resin, glass fiber and generator production - will also not be an advocate for renewable electricity. Money and jobs talk, and all else will wither... that's one of the American Ways...

Of course, a WW2 style effort at wind turbine installation could employ millions, and those millions might employ close to ten million other people. That would be good, right...? Electricity production in the U.S., via coal and natural gas combustion, is responsible for roughly 40% of the CO2 air pollution presently emanated (see this article for the list of CO2 pollution by countries for 2009: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions), so that's 2.4 Gigaton/yr reduction in CO2 pollution... Another "low hanging fruit" opportunity is residential and commercial heating, which consumes roughly 60% of US natural gas usage (and is responsible for another 0.8 GT/yr of CO2 pollution) - combinations of better insulation, passive solar retrofits, solar hot water heaters and electric heat pump systems could rapidly eliminate a lot of this, and the reduction in natural gas usage would also have another great benefit - it would drop and/or keep low natural gas prices for users who don't or can't readily switch. Anyway, that's over a 50% Co2 pollution reduction from present rates, and a rather massive job creation and real wealth generation effort, all in one.

The last half of US CO2 pollution is largely oil based, and this will be much more difficult to achieve, as it is oil based. At present, our society is using the "demand destruction caused by higher prices" method of minimizing oil usage. Most oil products are used for transportation, and our society has adapted to incredibly gluttonous oil consumption levels - notably cars/sub-urbs, long distance trucks instead of trains, much train usage just for coal transport, and medium to long distance travel by jet planes. Due to an effect called the "Export Land Model" - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_Land_Model - prices are now rising at an average rate of 14.6%/yr. This results in an exponential price rise of roughly doubling every 5 years - so the crude oil price of $100/bbl in 2011 is apt to be near $200/bbl in 2016, and the prices for kerosene (jet fuel), gasoline and diesel are apt to double in 5 years. This price rise is graphically shown in the following graph (data for graphs from U.S. Energy Information Agency).


The smart people will adapt to use less oil products to get what they need to do via transportation, or perhaps no oil to speak of via higher mileage cars, electric mass transit and electric or plug-in hybrid cars. Those less smart, or those unable to change, or unwilling to change to more fuel efficient cars/more electrified cars/no cars, less vehicle miles traveled per day, and less need for long distance trucking/more rail will get, economically speaking, spanked severely. Odds are, this will not be equitably distributed negative behavior modification via higher oil pricing, but that seems to be our country's present policy.

Conclusion
The electricity and residential/commercial heating segments of the US energy consumption portfolio are probably the easiest to switch over from pollution based to non-pollution based, and we could drop our national CO2 pollution rate by roughly half and drastically stimulate employment/our economy in doing so. All that is needed is a way or ways to make this renewable electricity modestly profitable and in some cases, just not a money loser. The oil half of our CO2 pollution portfolio will be a tougher nut to crack, especially since so much of our country is built around gasoline/diesel/kerosene consuming transportation. But, demand destruction does work, and will be increasingly effective AND increasing cruel to those who have the least. While there are many governmental actions that can help wean us off the oil addiction, it seems that not enough pain in the form of higher prices has been applied to most Americans, though we may be close to that point. Till then, lots of ouch to go around....

But for the third world and the fourth world countries (where things are really bad, like Somalia) representatives at the Durban Conference, the path should be pretty clear. If they want the U.S. to drop it's CO2 pollution rate fast, just make renewable electrical energy production profitable within the U.S. Odds are, due to Peak Oil and especially Peak Global Net Oil Exports, the transport part will drive solutions like greater car mileage/less truck travel/more train transport in short order as prices rise at, what to many, is a dizzying rate. And they really should by-pass the gasoline epoch, since they will just get out-bid for the remaining bits by China and India, anyway.

For the U.S., we will need to prevent Chinese mercantilism from doing to our renewable energy sector what they did with shoes and clothes. And if it requires import duties or quotas based on the slave labor wages Chinese companies pay (many owned by the government or military), so be it. In this country, we need the jobs associated with mass producing wind turbines more than we actually need that wind-sourced electricity, at least for now. And a big wind industry in the U.S., employing at least 1 million people directly, is what the 3rd and 4th worlders in Durban need more than handouts from non-existent carbon credit monies, anyway. It's what gets the electricity segment off of fossil fuels and nukes, and "climate friendly". Who knows, maybe some of those countries might even like to buy some of our QUALITY made turbines for themselves, whether big, commercial scale, or village sized (where the U.S. is a world leader). And if they want grants, why not take this as Made in USA wind turbines, and not money that is far too often squandered via corrupt 3rd and 4th world government and business leaders....

Oh well, my 2 cents worth. What's yours?

DB

BTW, just announced, South Africa has selected Nordex (who has an American assembly facility in Arkansas) for two wind projects totaling 174 MW capacity. South Africa has a great wind resource, and plenty of ability to store electrical energy via pumped seawater (lots of cliffs near the ocean). It's time they quit being coal exporting/coal based hypocrites and also join the 21st century: http://www.nordex-online.com/en/news-press/news-detail.html?tx_ttnews[tt_news]=2223&tx_ttnews[backPid]=1&cHash=b3c628d9f3

One of the monopile foundations for the Anholt wind farm made at the Bladt factory in Aalborg, Denmark. These often use 4" thick steel plates that have to get rolled into "cans", then welded, and then these are welded together after passing inspection/documenting the quality. The length of these range from 35 to 45 meters, and these weigh between 450 to 580 tons. 111 of these are needed for the Anholt array. From http://www.offshorewind.biz/2011/12/06/anholt-offshore-wind-farm-construction-to-begin-soon-denmark/

Here is how the "cans" are made, but with 4" (10 cm) thick steel plate, not so easy:


Introduction
The announcement of the beginning of the construction phase for the Anholt wind turbine array recently was made. This wind farm will be located about 25 km (15 miles) from the northeast tip of Denmark in the Baltic Sea. This wind farm will supply about 4% of Denmark's electricity (well, there are only 5.5 million people in the country), and it will supply between 250,000 to 400,000 households with all of their electricity, depending on how the average usage of a household is defined. And it will mean that about half a megaton/yr of CO2 pollutant does not get dumped into our planet's air, which would be the case in natural gas or coal was used to make that electricity.

Discussion
This is a pretty big project, estimated to cost around $US 1.8 billion, and is owned by Denmark's main electric utility (DONG, 50%) and a pair of Danish pension funds (20% + 30%). It will use 111 of Siemens SW3.6 x 120 wind turbines (3.6 MW capacity, 120 meter rotor diameter). These will be made in Denmark (Siemens bought out the Bonus wind turbine company a few years ago) - blade and nacelles in Brande, Dk, and the monopile foundations and turbine towers will be made by other companies in Denmark. The medium (34,000 volts) and high voltage underwater cable will be made in Germany (Nexans), and the substation/transformers (stepping up the 34 kv volt feeds from the turbines to 220 kv so it can be sent onshore) will probably be made by either Siemens or ABB somewhere in Europe. A brief summary can be seen here: http://www.dongenergy.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/wind/anholt/Anholt_offshore_wind_farm.pdf. But, with about 8,000 components to these turbines, lots of smaller companies will als get a piece of this action, and most of them local, too. And lots of money in marine construction is going to be spent (see page 4 for views of 4 of these vessels, and also http://www.4coffshore.com/windfarms/anholt-denmark-dk13.html).

In other words, jobs, jobs, jobs! High value added manufacturing jobs, environmental and geotechnical review, design, project management, logistics, legal and electrical engineering jobs, to name a few. And scheduling.... there will be lots of "moving parts" and quite the tight choreography required, with weather as the wild card. And since so many of these jobs are in Denmark and/or near Denmark, this will be a significant economic boost to the Danish economy. Another benefit is the avoidance of future fossil fuel imports. This 400 MW wind farm will have an average output of at least 160 MW, and this will avoid the need for between $85 to $100 million per year in coal imports, or significantly more if natural gas had to be imported from Russia for this electricity.

Of course, this does not come cheap. The $1.8 billion investment will be repaid by Danish electricity consumers, who will pay about 18.9 c/kw-hr for 20 TW-hrs (20 million MW-hrs) of electricity (about 14.3 years worth). That expensive electricity will get blended in with the electricity from mostly paid off wind turbines from onshore, as well as with the offshore ones that are still getting paid off. But, this is much cheaper than a new nuke, and more dependable, too. And there is a 100% certainty that no radiation "oops" event will happen, as has been the case at Fukushima, where a humongous does of Sr-90 contaminated water just spilled into the ocean, poisoning that region for the next century (it has a half-life of ~ 28.8 years, and is a nasty varmit, as Sr-90 gets concentrated in bones and then causes leukemia). With these wind turbines, no need for CO2 "sequestration" exists, either, which can cost in excess of 10 c/kw-hr for just that. The wind farm will also utilize the pumped and stored hydro facilities in nearby Sweden and Norway (more underwater electric cables between them and Denmark) to store excess electricity when the winds are blowing fast during times of low electricity demand.

The Baltic Sea has a lot in common with Lake Erie. Both are shallow water bodies surrounded by large industrialized populations. And both ice up in the winter (the Baltic is "brackish", with a salt content less than in the Atlantic Ocean). But, that is not a major problem. Of course, it never really was much of a problem in Lake Erie, either, and so easily engineered around, despite claims to the contrary by opponents of offshore wind turbines in Lake Erie......

This may be one of the last set of wind farms that use turbines as small as this 3.6 MW model. Siemens recently introduced a 6 MW x 154 meter rotor diameter unit with a gearless drive, but several years of actual field trials will be needed before it is deployed in large numbers. Here is a picture of this 3.6 MW unit installed near the shore near Copenhagen at the Avedore Holme project (see picture below, 3 of these installed in ~ 2 meters of water, 400 meters from shore http://www.4coffshore.com/windfarms/avedøre-holme-denmark-dk15.html). That project "only" cost about $US 33 million, but it also allowed Siemens to get real world data, and to examine the installation approach. Slight delays in the schedule can totally trash the economics of an offshore wind project, which is why project management is so important for these efforts.

From http://www.energy.siemens.com/hq/pool/hq/power-generation/wind-power/E50001-W310-A169-X-4A00_WS_SWT_3-6_120_US.pdf

As described earlier, there are lots of economic benefits that come from such a massive Keynesian-like stimulus at this time/state of the European economy. In this recent paper (http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/published_study/PERI_military_spending_2011.pdf - page 7) that describes the wisdom-deficient approach of using militarism as an economic growth program, data for the job creating potential of clean energy systems are provided. A bit over 16,000 job-years per billion dollars invested comes from wind turbines, and this does not even describe the benefits of not exporting money for importing fuels, and making electricity with no negative health effects. Other efforts have described wind turbine induced job creation and similar values were obtained. This project will create about 28,800 direct job-years, and lots of "spin-offs" and "multiplier effects" also arise.

And we sure could use some of that in Buffalo, right? Oops, not an option, thanks to the NYPA cancellation of the GLOW initial 500 MW set of projects. Instead, we get a future based on pollution sourced electricity - from nukes in Ohio and NY, and lots of coal burners. How 20th century can you get, right? One other hope for polluters was the faint prospect that more natural gas (from fracking) will be used to make the electricity that 500 MW of offshore wind could have made, but will not make. Not only would this backwards approach still create 733,000 tons/yr of CO2 pollution by burning 12 billion cubic feet/yr of methane, but that would also cause natural gas prices to rise as a result of increasing gas demand. And seriously, who needs that?

No wonder a lot of us formerly complacent types are not happy campers any more. We could do so much better on America's North Coast... Way to go, Occupiers, for changing the "public conversation" from dead end topics like financial Shock Therapy (also called Austerity, debt reduction during a major recession) to live wire topics like job creation as a cure for economic inequality and economic decline! Keep up the great work!

DB

The Sprogo wind farm in Denmark, deliberately placed next to a major bridge across "The Great Belt", where they can be seen, composed 7 x Vestas 3 MW x V90 turbines with gravity foundations. This stretch of water does freeze over in cold winters (http://www.helcom.dk/ice_breaking/icebreaking_main.htm). See http://www.4coffshore.com/windfarms/sprogo-denmark-dk12.html and http://www.sundogbaelt.dk/uk.

Introduction
Installing wind turbines in shallow waters near land has been done as an experimental project since 1991 (those 11 x 450 kw units in the Vindeby wind farm are still operating, btw). However, these days it is a really big deal, with over $US 25 billion worth UNDER CONSTRUCTION, and over 4000 MW (4GW) now operating, involving an investment of close to $US 12 billion, and producing an average of close to 1.3 GW on an average continual basis. In 2011, a bit more than 1 GW of capacity will be brought on line, worth about $US 5 billion. Over half a trillion dollars worth of permitted or in the process of getting approvals projects. The offshore wind installation business is now touted as one of the MAJOR job creating pushes for Europe for the next 20 years. Got the picture?

And to the bosses at NYPA, a few questions. Are you proud of yourselves, yet over you decision to make NY State irrelevant in the offshore wind industry? After all, your efforts at quashing offshore wind in NY State for once and for all (despite claims to the contrary about try # 3 near Long Island) could be a veritable fountain of gold for the natural gas business in NY State, and a major hurt to NY's natural gas and electricity consumers, too.... How does it feel to be such an aid and comfort to the natural gas industry and the associated financial speculators who live on betting on future methane prices, while the job creation potential of offshore wind in NY State (several times that of the frackers, and not even an environmental threat like fracking for gas and oil is) gets the "bug on a windshield" treatment... Happy now?

Discussion
Last week, there was a major offshore wind energy conference in Amsterdam - "Offshore 2011", sponsored by the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) - see http://www.offshorewind2011.info/. The events have grown from 150 participants in 2002 to the 8200 or more attendees plus lots of exhibition space and exhibitors. And also, there was some intense marketing and sales efforts , with several tens of billions of dollars in direct sales, and more than that set up in the near future. And in conjunction with this event EWEA put out a great report detailing the current state of the business and future trends - see http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/publications/reports/23420_Offshore_report_web.pdf (93 pages, but easy to understand).

One part of the executive summary really caught my eye - by 2030, an estimated 300,000 Europeans will be employed making and installing offshore wind turbines. And due to the high multiplier effect that goes with such jobs, this will directly and indirectly employ close to 1.5 million other people. By 2020, the (at least) 40 GW of installed capacity will be making over 16 GW of electricity on an average basis, or more than the output of 16 x 1.1 GW nukes. Or, put another way, that is a lot of avoided imported natural gas and coal, a lot of avoided CO2 pollution, and a lot of wealth creation. And a lot of avoided new nukes, too.... which IS a good thing.

In fact, the strong desire by the German population to dump nukes has made followers out of the presently politically and economically conservative German leaders. Ever since the various Fukushima reactor hydrogen gas explosions, nukes have been about as popular in much of Europe as syphilis and AIDS put together. So that leads to the next question - where to get the ~ 10 GW of electricity now made by Germany's still operating nukes within 10 years, and how to do so without burning any more natural gas or coal? Germany has a pretty crappy onshore wind resource, at least compared to the U.S., and even with almost 28 GW in onshore wind turbine capacity in a country of 85 million people, more electricity is needed. And while lots of progress has been made in the PV industry in Germany thanks to Feed-In Laws (same for wind and biogas), the solar resource in Germany is even crappier than is the average onshore wind resource. Well, their portion of the North Sea and to a lesser extent, the Baltic Sea, has excellent wind resources - notoriously so for the North Sea, where winds average between 9 to 11 m/s at 100 meters above the surface. And so, that's where the wind turbines are going, using turbines with capacities ranging from 3 MW to 7 MW, despite the pain and high cost of installing them. And since the North Sea is pretty shallow, these units will be installed on foundations attached to the seabed and sticking about 45 feet to 60 feet above the average surface of the water (wave height considerations).

At present, the UK has more offshore turbine capacity installed than any other country - almost 1.8 GW, and 11 of the biggest 25 offshore installations are located in British waters. And there are very impressive amounts of offshore wind turbine arrays being installed around the British Isles, including the 1 GW London Array. However, Germany will soon be catching up, with several 400 MW sized installations, as well as a recently announced 576 MW (96 x 6 MW) project by Vattenfall costing nearly $US 2.6 billion - see http://www.powerengineeringint.com/articles/2011/11/vattenfall-to-build-576-mw-north-sea-wind-farm.html. Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.... most of them difficult to outsource, and ones where quality counts (and this excludes China a significant extent).

Here is another summary of this event by one of key participants - http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2011/12/2/162029/490. It is centered around the second major floating turbine demonstration - this one of a 2 MW Vestas V80 wind turbine attached to a triangular floating support, installed offshore of Portugal, where waters are deep, but winds are generally impressive. The first one was the "Hywind" floating spar unit installed in 180 meters of water in Norway, using a Siemens 2.3 MW turbine (summer of 2009, and still going strong). There is a huge potential combination of near shore, deep water, fast wind arrangements where the traditional offshore foundations (monopile, tripod, gravity caison, jacket) that will only work in depths up to 50 meters are not appropriate in deeper water. In the Great Lakes, this especially means Lakes Michigan, Ontario and Superior, where floating turbines would be a great way to make electricity. Most of the entire west coast of the U.S., and a lot of the Gulf of Maine, are also perfect for floating turbines.

So in conclusion, how's the local job scene on the southern side of The Great Lakes these days? Not so good, right? So much potential, so much underused capacity to build stuff, so many people who could be making and installing non-polluting offshore wind farms, and onshore ones, too, but who instead are also being treated similar to the bug on a windshield, only maybe with less respect. And yes, all those offshore wind arrays will probably raise the price of electricity a bit, but the job creation, the benefits of making electricity without pollution (especially nuke fallout...), and alleviating the need to export massive troves of treasure to pay for imported fossil fuels more than compensates for the higher price.

And unlike the U.S, most of this offshore electricity will be sold without subsidies and on a cost plus reasonable return basis, with prices set via Feed-In Tariffs or the result of long term Power Purchase Agreements from successful bidders on these projects. As it turns out, when you get efficient with electricity and concentrate on the jobs made by manufacturing renewable energy systems, the economic benefits vastly outweigh those from cheaper generated electricity prices. And of course, a lot of those cheaper prices are a temporary mirage, all related to what are for now manifestations of natural gas being sold below its replacement cost.

How's that for a way to introduce the windiest month of the year in Buffalo?

DB

This is a very strange time in the wind turbine business/wind power industry. Technologically, great strides have recently been made in tapping the polar opposites of the wind energy spectrum - offshore wind (uses FAST winds to overcome the high installation cost). Meanwhile, the sales of Low Wind Speed Turbines (LWST) in the US as well as the use of taller wind turbine towers (100 meters, for example) are on a roll. For example, Vestas recently announced another project using 33 of their V100 x 1.8 MW units in Michigan (http://www.vestas.com/en/media/news/news-display.aspx?action=3&NewsID=2892) ,while RE Power announced the sale of turbines in SW Pennsylvania using "medium" speed turbines but using 100 meter towers (http://www.repower.de/en/presse/press-releases/detail-press/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=3558&cHash=f1811f56217a469104fc35ba401242a7). These are both ways to produce more electricity from a given site which happens to be reasonably close to large load centers (Detroit and Pittsburgh, respectively). GE now has over $500 million in confirmed sales of their LWST, the GE 1.6 MW x 100 meter rotor, and only a few of them have been installed to date. Vestas also announced 1000 MW of their V112 - a 112 rotor diameter x 3 MW rating - (now closer to 1.5 GW), worth about $4.5 billion in new sales, just for the turbines.

In the U.S., almost all of the wind turbines that are likely to be installed for the next several years have now been ordered, and construction is underway so that they can qualify for the Section 1603 grants (where 30% of the cost of the project is paid to the owner instead of them using the Production Tax Credit (PTC)). Perhaps 10 GW or more worth of turbines will get installed next year, and it looks like close to 8 GW could get installed this year. Unfortunately, on December 31, 2012, all of the incentives (mostly tax avoidance schemes available to only ultra wealthy people and corporations) will disappear, as so far the new crop of Republicans in Congress show no willingness to extend them. This will not mean that coal or gas fired units will replace them - and no new nukes are on the Horizon except for the twins in SE Georgia (Vogtle). It's just that without the net 3 to 5 c/kw-hr subsidies, new projects (which make electricity for between 8 to 13 c/kw-hr on a completely unsubsidized basis) cannot compete with electricity from old coal plants selling for 4 c/kw-hr or less. Instead, old coal plants will continue to be used. So, the wind turbine industry, and with it about 80,000 jobs, goes into hibernation until the equivalent of a Feed-In Law, mandated Power Purchase Agreements or new subsidies gets authorized.

One nifty example of the recent dash for installations might be near Sacremento, where the Sacremento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) is adding 128 MW of new wind capacity - 24 x 3 V90 MW units (fast winds) and 31 x 1.8 MW V100 units (slow winds). SMUD is a governmental utility (get the hint, Jamestown, NY?), and this will double their capacity to produce electricity from wind (http://www.vestas.com/en/media/news/news-display.aspx?action=3&NewsID=2418). Well, good for them, and phooey on Jamestown, NY, who are still lusting for a 50 MW coal burner to supply an average of about 5 MW of their electricity not supplied by NYPA. SMUD will take advantage of the REPI incentive, worth about $9 million per year for the next 10 years...

Meanwhile, one of North America's largest proposed offshore wind projects - the NaiKun project in British Columbia - still keeps on going. The market for this electricity - from the extremely windy Hecate Strait (about halfway between the Washington-BC border and the Alaska-BC border) in British Columbia - would probably be California. See this for details (warning, a 60 page report): http://www.haidanation.ca/Pages/Splash/Documents/Independent%20Evaluation_Tom%20Gunton_August172011.pdf. And there is this wind map of the region: http://www.offshorewind.biz/2011/11/23/naikun-updates-information-on-wind-project-relocates-office-canada/. Average winds look to be around 9.25 m/s at hub heights or more.... and will have twice the energy of the winds in the Cleveland, Ohio offshore project (about 7.5 m/s for this 20 MW pilot project). Of course, there are actually nearby customers for the Lake Erie project, while the NaiKun project might need at least 500 miles of new transmission lines...

Worldwide, the European banking system looks like it is headed for collapse, and mostly because of Germany's outrageous success, no less. Germany has become a major exporter, and especially with renewable energy systems, despite or because of the high wages workers get paid. It keeps racking up balance of payments and budgetary surpluses, because other countries in Europe keep buying their stuff. Of course, if these other countries DON'T keep buying German stuff, the German economy will also go down the tubes really fast, but that fact keeps getting ignored. One country's surplus is another country's deficit, after all. So what has happened to all of the surplus money? German banks went and bought up a lot of the debts of other European countries (Sovereign bonds), and in the case of Greece, Italy and Spain, their value is going away fast. And unless some means of recycling this money is arranged, real fast, things will seize up fast, especially in the investment banking (and that's what finances wind projects) sector. It affects America significantly (some of our banks are also in deep trouble with Sovereign bonds) because most American big banks no longer "do" project finance - in this country, that task is mostly done by European banks. "Oops" is not just for Rick Perry these days...

The last area of growth in Europe largely untouched by the man-made Eurodebt crisis seems to be offshore wind projects. There is something like $US 30 billion under construction, and a tremendous amount of the construction infrastructure has been built. And now that Germany is dumping its nukes, offshore wind is one way that hope to close the gap. Rumor has it, Korea and japan will soon be following suit - dumping nukes in favor of offshore wind. Anyway, to get an idea of the scale of this, check out this story of how an existing 300 MW wind farm in England is getting refinanced with long term, low risk money: http://www.offshorewind.biz/2011/11/23/eib-funds-thanet-offshore-wind-farm-uk/.

Note: there is a big opportunity for a quality underwater electric transmission line manufacture - European companies can't keep up with the demand. So, any American companies want some extra business? Voltage ratings in the 35 kv and 150 kv range, power in the 50 MW to 150 MW range...

Finally, on the money front, check out this article recommended by Paul Krugman: http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.4.165. It recommends a top marginal tax rate (on the really really rich/high income types) of 70% - this will push more money into things like wind turbine investments and less into useless gambling on Wall Street. That is the estimated top tax rate on rich people that will maximize economic growth for our country, and also maximize governmental tax revenues (so we don't have to feed old folks catfood in lieu of decent Social Security checks that would allow them to buy decent human food). After all, we would not like this future to come about:

from http://my.firedoglake.com/somethingthedogsaid/2011/07/19/conrad-coburn-and-cat-food-ii-oh-my/

One synergistic effect with the old, soon-to-be extinct US wind subsidy system is that a 70% marginal tax rate means that you can avoid a lot more taxes for the same wind turbine investment - especially via the MACRS arrangement. And thus, high income tax rates on the super rich means more jobs for those making and installing wind turbines, as well as faster returns on invested capital for wind turbine project investors.

Who knew.... So, maybe you can write your representatives between now and Christmas...?

Images from Vestas (http://www.vestas.com)

DB

from the You-Tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xsc40niu9Uk&noredirect=1

Introduction
First off, apologies for this cringing pun - Eric Clapton's version "Living on Blues Power" is a great song. But, we're talking Ethanol here - and the worst drug that Mr. Clapton ever tried to kick was EtOH - for him, it was worse than heroin. But then he had affluence problems - he did not have to worry about whether he could afford his booze for a long time. And combine an addictive personality, lots of friends who also loved to imbibe, a yearning for the fun that booze can bring about (as well as rumored looseness in some women) and an unlimited bank account - that can make for a whole lot of ugly, over time.

Actually, with regards to liquid fuels, the USA shares a lot in common with Eric's permanent alcoholism problem. It was fun before it became a serious problem, and the signs that we should be looking for other ways to get around (and/or have fun) have been around for some time. And both addiction to liquid fuels and alcoholism (and lots of other "ism's") are dopamine based behaviors that get reinforced over time, morphing into a situation where continued use merely puts off the pain of not indulging in EtOH usage. They (intoxication/maintenance of the buzz and fuel usage) have a lot in common, including the disturbing tendency to do ANYTHING to keep on getting that fix, and to keep using even when the consequences can be very negative (Global Climate Change for the CO2 pollution associated with oil combustion, and the huge money/income/wealth transfer from most Americans to the fuel suppliers (= pushers, dealers)).

But, apparently Mr. Clapton kicked the EtOH "monkey" off his back a while ago, though it was not easy. Meanwhile, our country is just as firmly in denial (the mighty wide river called "De Nile) about liquid fuels - most of which are fossil based - as ever, and in this case, Ethanol is not the villain. Actually, it has bought us some breathing room, lessened our export of money for imports of oil, mitigated what is effectively a massive, regressive sales tax BY CORPORATIONS AND SOME FOREIGN COUNTRIES on the public and on governments (Federal, State, local) which are (and on occasion, they actually behave that way) supposed to behave as representatives of the general public, and not just the really wealthy fraction of the public.

So, right now there is a convoluted subsidy paid to those who produce EtOH made from biomass (in the US case, mostly corn) and indirectly to those who grow these crops that provide the sugars that the EtOH is made from of about $6 billion a year. The savings to the public are rather large - about $55 billion per year in fewer oil imports, and about $208 billion/yr not "donated" to companies that sell gasoline/oil in the US. Or more... And also on the plus side, the equivalent of about 70 million TONS/yr of sugar is removed from American diets (that gets made into EtOH and CO2) while 35 million tons/yr of high protein (DDGS) food product is co-produced. The high ammonia usage of corn gets converted into protein - it's how the "amino" gets put into "amino acids", and protein is a very valuable part of foods.

Discussion
So, spending $6 billion/yr of taxpayer money to avoid having the general public spend an extra $55 billion on imported oil at an average price of $100/bbl - why is this even the least bit controversial? And also, why is this a mystery to most, including a lot of Grade A Certified Environmentalists? Maybe it's all in how it is phrased, as well as the general ignorance of the American public when it comes to even simple aspects of the chemistry of food... like the big difference between protein and sugars, or the small difference between sugars and low molecular weight starches (like those in corn). Of the 13 billion bushels/yr of corn we harvest, about 5 billion bushels/yr are used to make a combination of EtOH, CO2 and DDGS.

Here's how it works. Right now, we produce a bit more than 900,000 bbls/day of EtOH, and this is added to about 8.6 million bbls/day of petroleum derived gasoline to make about 9.5 millions bbls/day of car fuel (see http://ethanolrfa.org/pages/weekly-ethanol-feed-production). That 0.9 million bbls/day (mbd) of EtOH is equivalent in energy content to close to 0.6 mbd of gasoline (all petroleum derived). EtOH also adds octane (pure EtOH has an octane rating of 113) and allows the hydrocarbons in the car fuel mixture to burn cooler and with less air pollution, but let's concentrate on the energy for now. In order to make 0.6 mbd of gasoline, a lot more crude oil would be needed. Various crudes yield differing amounts of gasoline; "light sweet crude" (Gulf of Mexico, or GOMEX derived, for example) can deliver about 22 gallons of gasoline per bbl of crude, while Tar Sands sludge, even the "upgraded" Syncrude, only can provide about 10 gallons per 42 gallon bbl, while California, Saudi Arabian and Venezuela "heavy crudes" can deliver around 15 gallons/bbl. The percentage of the crappier grades (heavy crudes, tar sand sludge) is increasing in the national "mix"; these tend to be cheaper, too, than the high quality light crude oils (see http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy/sources/petroleum-products-market/1519 for an explanation of this in more detail). On average about 2.5 bbls of crude are needed for each bbl of gasoline (40% yield). The US tends to be a net importer of gasoline and a net exporter of diesel due to our ability to refine "from the bottom of the barrel" feedstocks. And then there is that big petroleum secret - done correctly, the volume of products from a refinery often exceeds the volume of inputs - oil is sold by volume, not necessarily by mass. Cracking big molecules like asphaltenes into gasoline increases their volume/lowers the density, especially when the extra hydrogen needed to do this is provided by the reaction of petroleum coke and water. But it's a secret, so... mum's the word, OK?

In summary, getting the energy equivalent of 0.6 mbd of gasoline would need a crude oil input of 1.5 mbd. And at $100/bbl, that's a cool $150 million/day of avoided imports, or close to $55 billion/yr.

There is another aspect to this, also good. The US now consumes about 19.5 mbd of crude oil, which is about 25% of all the oil extracted worldwide. However, we now import around 11.2 mbd of crudes - see (or switch to monthly mode) http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbblpd_a.htm, which means we now supply about 8 mbd (see http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_snd_d_nus_mbblpd_m_cur.htm). If we had to buy an additional 1.5 mbd of crude oil off of the international market (in other words, import it), this would mean that either the world would have to come up with another 1.5 mbd on top of the 74 mbd now extracted, or more importantly, the US would have to compete with the other importing countries for some share of the approximately 42.6 mbd that is exported - see http://www.graphoilogy.com/2011/10/daniel-yergin-massively-reduced-his.html#more. More likely, the latter would take place by outbidding those with either less money or less credit, and in turn the price of exported oil would shift upwards. Each shortage of ~ 1 mbd (or increase in demand) raises the price of oil about $20/bbl, so an increase in demand of 1.5 mbd would crank up the world oil price by $30/bbl.

Another way to view it is via "price elasticity" - alias PE - see http://blahla.wordpress.com/2007/10/29/price-elasticity-in-the-real-world-oil-prices/. In this article, PE for oil , defined as the ratio of the change in supply to the change in price is about 0.1. So, changing the supply by 1.5 mbd is changing it by 3.5%. In turn, this would raise the price of oil by 35% (from roughly $95/bbl to near $128/bbl. These two estimates are pretty close. In the long run, this price spike would result in less petroleum usage by the US - we are down from 21.6 mbd in mid 2008 to around 19.5 mbd, which is good, but it takes a while for this to happen, and that is not good. Of course, this would probably trash our fragile economy in the process.... as occurred in 2008, where the high price of oil became, in effect, the final sack of cement loaded on the proverbial camel, and the one that broke the proverbial camel's back...

Anyway, raising the total crude price for oil by $30/bbl would be a $585 million/day defacto tax by US oil corporations and the countries/companies who supply that oil on both American consumers and American governmental entities, such as all governments, school districts, transit authorities, etc. This adds up to real dollars - about $214 billion/yr, and it would up out money exported from $420 billion/yr (11.5 mbd * $100/bbl) to $617 billion (13 mbd * $130/bbl), or $197 billion MORE than the already obscene $420 billion/yr. You can thus end up exporting $197 billion/yr more than we presently are exporting for oil by importing another 1.5 mbd of crude oil - and not the good stuff (light sweet crude) but probably "Saudi sour heavy crude", which the KSA cannot presently sell because most oil refineries in the world are not presently set up to handle. If you feed sour heavy crude into an oil refinery designed for light sweet grades, that $20 billion refinery will get trashed and made inoperable in just a few months...

The US EtOH industry is supported by about $6 billion/yr in taxpayer subsidies; all this allows the price of EtOH sold into the market to be $6 billion/yr less than it would normally be. However, this is definitely "small potatoes" compared with what would happen otherwise. The demand for corn to make EtOH is about 5 billion bushels/yr, and at an average yield of 175 bushels/acre, this means that without this demand for corn, 28.5 million acres less of corn, worth $32.5 billion, would not have been planted (about 90 million acres/yr is planted for corn in the U.S.). Of course, that would completely tank the price of corn (now $6.50/bushel, or about 11.6 cents/lb), and the most immediate victim would be.... third and fourth world farmers, who would be put out of business when the US decided to dump excess corn onto the world market at $2.80/bushel (5 c/lb) - this actually happened in 2001-2003, wreaking havoc on Mexico's farmers. However, this also would effectively tank the US rural economy, followed by tanking wheat, soy, and milk prices, but with the ultimate consumer experiencing essentially no benefit. And after a year or two of negligible farm production, serious price spikes for food would result until various economic equilibria are more or less re-established. After all, you can't go without food production for too long before lots of people notice there is little or no food available at any price...

According to this report (http://www.ethanolrfa.org/news/entry/university-report-ethanol-reduced-gas-prices-0.89-in-2010/), US consumers saved an average of 89 cents/gallon for their gasoline via all this homegrown EtOH. And according to this report, about 500,000 jobs have been created in the US farm-EtOH-equipment complex: http://awakeatthewheel.net/2009/12/10/500000-jobs-created-by-u-s-ethanol-industry/. However, maybe you think we don't have enough unemployment, or that those 500,000 people would actually have other viable means of employment. In that case, can I interest you in Enron bonds, which are generally considered worthless? But hey, if you believe those employed in the EtOH to fuel business have other means of economic viability, you'll probably believe anything...

Conclusion
As it turns out, it is unlikely we can grow sufficient crops to make an additional 13 mbd of EtOH. And while various people deride all the effort to grow crops and then extract the sugar and starch and convert it into fuel (EtOH), while the proteins, fats, vitamins, mineral and complex food items (fiber, enzymes, DNA, RNA, etc) get extracted as DDGS, what's the alternative? Aside from bankruptcy, and eliminating 1/3 of all farmers in the country (and there are far too few), for starts. After all, when rural times get tough, farms consolidate and get even bigger, as the remaining surviving farmers try to cut costs while they also cut output in the hopes that prices will eventually recover.

At our present gluttonous levels of gasoline consumption, we can never self supply. But let's say we employ a touch of magic, say from this cutie:


from http://sjrlc.lib.overdrive.com/312ACD2C-9CD7-42E5-B655-DE8E61E7DDAE/10/420/en/ContentDetails.htm?ID={FC341246-2BD2-4C1C-AE25-8A08FB334BAE}

Let's pay her those exorbitant union wages, and wish for a car fleet that get an average of 42 mpg, like the ones that exist already in Europe and Japan. And presto! That would cut our gasoline consumption to roughly 5.0 mbd, and we would only need to use roughly 4.1 mbd of gasoline, this effectively gets rid of the need for most imports of crude oil, and would up the biofuel content of gasoline to roughly 18% from the present 10%. And with the higher octane fuel, we could actually increase the compression ratio of the engines, resulting in still better fuel economy...

Next, lets say that we travel only half the number of vehicle miles in fuel driven cars as we presently do. So however this gets done - more electric mass transit, more ride sharing, more electric or plug-in hybrid cars, more examples of sensibly locating residence near the workplace, or at least near a transit line, that would drop our automobile fuel consumption to near 2.5 mbd, and with an EtOH content of near 36%, 100 octane or better fuel should be available. And higher octane leads to higher compression ratios, which means that you can get more work from a given gallon of fuel. The Scania high compression all EtOH engines (see http://www.scania.com/Images/P07X03EN%20New%20ethanol%20engine_tcm10-178705_81054.pdf) get about 42% of the fuel energy out as mechanical energy, versus maybe 26% for an all gasoline low compression engine. See also http://www.epa.gov/otaq/presentations/sae-2002-01-2743-v2.pdf for details on a small EtOH engine (a modified 1.9 liter VW diesel engine) running at a 19.5:1 compression ratio. Cool, with over 40% thermal efficiency possible (versus 26% for a low compression gasoline powered one). See also http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/alcoholengines.aspx and http://www.caddet-re.org/assets/no91.pdf.

And when we actually use about 2.5 mbd of liquid fuels to get around, funny things happen. But good things, too. We could actually make that much renewable fuel (probably a mix of ethanol and hydrocarbons derived from syngas derived from biomass). We do know that about 1 mbd of EtOH will still be supplied from crops, as it is and probably always will be cheaper than making EtOH from cellulose. But, no more need to waste $200 billion/yr in military protection/enforcement for overseas oil fields/oil countries. And all that money now exported (and what about 5 years from now when the price for oil on world markets is more like $200/bbl, as it doubles every 5 years..) could remain in country, doing good things for our economy.

And yes, there's even a place for wind turbines in this, as well as the replacement of all the natural gas used in boilers to distill EtOH and also to dry the wet distillers grains and convert that clay like mess into storable DDGS using corn stover as the fuel. All those EtOH facilities are also a great electricity customers. And making the ammonia to grow the crops can also be done with electricity from wind turbines (nationwide, we'd need about 69 GW of wind turbine capacity to make 18 million tons/yr of renewable energy sourced ammonia). After all, over half of the protein Americans consume is synthetic ammonia derived. And providing hydrogen to reduce the CO2 by-product from the crop to EtOH as add-ons to existing EtOH facilities also would be a great market for renewable electricity (electricity from wind turbines plus water gives hydrogen and oxygen). This would increase EtOH production by 50% using exactly the same amount of biomass grown.

Of course, if we keep pouring our money down the drain by spending it on imported petroleum, well, we won't have much left of a country, let alone sovereignty. Instead, we will get a financial coup d'etat, and somebody from Goldman Sachs will get appointed as our real leader (Italy, Greece, for starts), and the next stage of ravaging our poor and middle class can then commence. After all, any sins committed in the name of financial austerity really are good for us, and should probably be redefined to get any semblance of morality out of the discussion. Just ask the people of Greece and Italy...

Anyway, any comments?

DB

Introduction
I was given the opportunity to give a presentation to the Engineers for a Sustainable World meeting in Buffalo, NY this fall, held and sponsored by SUNY Buffalo. The file for the presentation can be seen here: http://www.4shared.com/document/NheZ7t5W/REPricingSystems1c.html; odds are, you'll have to wait a whole 20 seconds before the download starts. Anyway, this is the Powerpoint version (but in.pdf format) - in other words, a highly summarized version with pictures (generally nice to have those...). Below is an explanation of this summary.

Many thanks to the students who attended this session of the conference. The room was packed, and they seemed to have a lot of interest in this subject. And much thanks to Dr. Jensen and the many UB engineering and science students who made this a really great meeting! Of course, one of the reasons there were so many people there is because there were lots of great speakers and presenters, including a hour long super-informative one from Gary Stottler of GM with regards to the guts of electric cars - the battery systems, and how fuel cells and car battery powered cars have a lot of things in common.

BTW, the title page of this presentation is a picture of the Samso offshore wind farm in Denmark, which consists of 10 x 2.3 MW Bonus (now Siemens) units installed in about 10 to 14 meters of water. It is owned by the municipality of Samso Island and some private investors, so it is a community owned offshore wind turbine array. How cool is that? These displace about 23,000 tonnes of CO2 per year and complement the 11 x 1 MW turbines that are on the island. The offshore turbines are installed about 3.8 km (about 2.2 miles) offshore and YES, the ARE seen by island residents - in fact, the touristy aspect of these turbines was one of the minor reasons they were placed where they are now installed. See http://www.4coffshore.com/windfarms/samsoe-palludans-flak-denmark-dk01.html and http://www.appropedia.org/Sams%C3%B8_renewable_energy. The island now bills itself as "140% renewable", though perhaps that claim should be taken with a grain of salt. But, it probably is a net exporter of renewable electricity...

Discussion
If you want to find out information about U.S. electricity consumption and production, the Energy Information Agency is totally where it's at. Here can be found a humongous trove of data, but let's keep it simple with a summary of the last decade or so:
http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/pdf/tablees1.pdf . In 2010 (with 8760 hours in it), our country produced 4,127,648 MW-hrs of electricity (averaging 471 Gigawatts (GW)), but we only sold/accounted for 3,889,047 MW-hr/yr (444 GW average), including 15.3 GW of on-site usage (never went over the grid; mostly at large industrial customers). So right off, about 9.4% of that generated never got billed to customers. This quantity of electrical energy made annually has been fairly consistent for the last 6 years, though varying by 3 to 5% depending on weather or economic conditions.

Of that, wind provided 10.8 GW, or 2.3% of the total electricity Made in the USA, and this came from 39.1 GW of capacity (installed by end of 2009); output was about 27.6% of the rated capacity. However, between 5% to 10% greater outputs (usage rates going to between 29% to 30.4%) could have been observed if not for a phenomena called "economic curtailment", where wind turbine output is cut off whenever the price of electricity collapses due to the combination of too much wind and too little electricity demand. In a society that actually values renewable energy, economic curtailment of wind turbine output would probably not happen.... For example, in 2010, about 9% of Texas wind turbine output was restrained in such a manner...

Anyway, that's the long lead up to the premise of this presentation, which is sort of set up like a detective trying to solve a crime. The crime is that we have a such a small quantity of wind derived electricity being produced compared to what we COULD produce. Of course, the ~ 40 GW installed by the end of 2009/operating throughout 2010 represents an investment by (mostly) private investors/industry of roughly $80 billion, and some would not consider that to be small. But, this is all relative, and to make lots of electricity via ANY means, some major investments are going to have to be undertaken. For example, replacing all of the old existing nuke fleet with new ones at a going rate of about $10.8 billion per GW of capacity would mean someone has to come up with close to $1.1 trillion, and that is to make less than one fifth of our electricity (not all energy, just electrical energy). So, it's big bucks in this league, and $80 billion is barely chump change compared to what is needed. And because inquiring minds might want to know, the EIA estimates all that generated electricity was sold for about $369 billion in 2010, and that's when prices were really depressed..

At the end of 2011, we might be making up to 3% of our electricity via wind turbines. But, we could make up to 30 TIMES our present electricity production using already identified wind resources and using already in existence wind turbines. So that's operating at less than 0.1% (one thousandth) of our potential. And tapping that resource at such a tiny fraction of what we have available is hardly a stellar effort, especially given the urgent need to job creation (making wind turbines creates lots of jobs, assuming you actually have a viable market for the electricity made by these wind turbines, something that also does not exist at the present time) and the need to do something about electricity production that does not befoul our planet with either radioisotope poisoning (think Chernobyl, Fukushima) or CO2 pollution from fossil fuel combustion.

Of course, you only need to make the electricity that is being used - making an excess serves no purpose, and that IS the purpose of making electricity - of doing stuff with this energy. So we really only need to replace the pollution-sourced part of US electricity production - such as nukes, coal, oil and natural gas derived electricity (these add up to 421.4 GW in 2010). Next would come the need to replace the fossil fuel used to make heat (mostly natural gas) and for transportation (mostly oil) - equal to about 360 GW worth of electricity. After that, unless you want to convert water into hydrogen (to make ammonia or reduce CO2 into liquid fuels, for example), that's electricity we don't need to use.

Piece of cake, right? So, on to page 4...

So, why aren't we proceeding down this more logical path, one that would make for a more viable planet and one with a lot more employment, too? Is it because of a lack of money? NO! Is it because wind turbines are that unpopular? NO! How about the fact that US industry is just too busy at the present time churning out manufactured items? Yeah, right.... Is it because we can't afford the real price of wind derived electricity? NO! Although, who wants to pay even a few pennies (2.56 to be exact) more per kw-hr to non-pollution sourced electricity? Evidently, only about 70,000 of NY's more than 9 million electricity customers, and this after a decade of being given the opportunity to do so.

Or how about the fact that making mass quantities of wind turbines also makes mass quantities of jobs... is that a problem? Some ACTUALLY MIGHT think that is is a problem, but I'm guessing that most people would say the lack of jobs IS the problem, and making lots of jobs to make lots of wind turbines would be just fine....

So, onto page 5. For this crime puzzle, how about a bad renewable energy pricing system as being the culprit, or at least one of the main varmits in this ongoing tragedy? I guess you never saw that one coming... So here is my big presumption - if we had a renewable energy pricing system in NY like either Quebec (second best option) or (best option) Ontario (and because Canada and the US have differing laws about lots of things, this requires a touch of specific Federal Legislation - the insertion of Section 102 of the failed Waxman-Markey ACES law (2009-2010) - all 132 words - into Section 210 of the 1978 PURPA law), we would actually have significant growth and especially significant job growth in manufacturing sectors connected with the wind biz. (This "Section 102 Approach" is shown at the end of this post - it's a no cost, no need to tax anyone or anything provision). More importantly, we would be on a steady and rapid path to eliminate the natural gas psuedo-parasite from our NY economy, where more of the money goes out of NY State, and where prices paid by NY consumers act like an ultra-regressive sales tax (imposed by some private corporations, on consumers, some of who are also corporations - oh, the irony!) that is not even levied by the government! What a racket, eh?

Anyway, the rest of the presentation is pretty self-explanatory, I hope....

So, what follows is a brief explanation of how tax subsidy, quota and Feed-In Tariff pricing systems work. Oh, this could get wicked complicated in a NY nanosecond, so save your questions for later.... And I even got noted religious heroine Church Lady on my side to drive home a point on how unfair some of the existing arrangements are in our U.S. renewable electrical energy pricing arrangements are, though they ARE better than nothing....

And, for those who like them, some references are on page 13. And to wrap it up a nice picture of the brand new and now up and running Ormonde offshore wind farm, located offshore of the UK between England and Ireland. This one uses 30 x 5 MW RE Power turbines (remember, ones these size ARE COMMERCIAL these days and have been for some time - if you have around $10 million, you can buy one), and which will produce an average of 60 MW of clean sourced electricity. This wind turbine array will displace of about 4 billion cubic feet of natural gas per year (which the UK apparently no longer has and must import since they also have encountered "Peak Natural Gas") which the UK would have otherwise burned to make electricity and 0.367 megaton/yr of CO2 pollution. Nothing like ending on a note of hope....

So, any comments?


"The Section 102 Approach"

111TH CONGRESS
1ST SESSION H. R. 2454 AN ACT
To create clean energy jobs, achieve energy independence,
reduce global warming pollution and transition to a clean
energy economy.
1 Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representa-
tives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

2
1 SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE; TABLE OF CONTENTS.
2 (a) SHORT TITLE.—This Act may be cited as the
3 ‘‘American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009’’.
4 (b) TABLE OF CONTENTS.—The table of contents for
5 this Act is as follows:
Sec. 1. Short title; table of contents.
Sec. 2. Definitions.
Sec. 3. International participation.
TITLE I—CLEAN ENERGY
Subtitle A—Combined Efficiency and Renewable Electricity Standard
Sec. 101. Combined efficiency and renewable electricity standard.
‘‘Sec. 610. Combined efficiency and renewable electricity standard.
Sec. 102. Clarifying State authority to adopt renewable energy incentives.
Sec. 103. Federal renewable energy purchases.
Subtitle B—Carbon Capture and Sequestration

53
8 SEC. 102. CLARIFYING STATE AUTHORITY TO ADOPT RE-
NEWABLE ENERGY INCENTIVES.
10 Section 210 of the Public Utility Regulatory Policies
11 Act of 1978 is amended by adding at the end thereof:
12 ‘‘(o) CLARIFICATION OF STATE AUTHORITY TO
13 ADOPT RENEWABLE ENERGY INCENTIVES.—Notwith
14 standing any other provision of this Act or the Federal
15 Power Act, a State legislature or regulatory authority may
16 set the rates for a sale of electric energy by a facility gen
17 erating electric energy from renewable energy sources pur
18 suant to a State-approved production incentive program
19 under which the facility voluntarily sells electric energy.
20 For purposes of this subsection, ‘State-approved produc
21 tion incentive program’ means a requirement imposed pur
22 suant to State law, or by a State regulatory authority act
23 ing within its authority under State law, that an electric
24 utility purchase renewable energy (as defined in section
25 609 of this Act) at a specified rate.’’.

DB

The picture (from http://www.ci.lackawanna.ny.us/windfarm.html), is used by permission of Lackawanna Mayor Norm Polanski; much thanks!

Note: This was written to be a feature article, but so far it has not made it that far. So, here goes....

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Whether or not the Marcellus and Utica tight shale gas gets tapped in NY State is really a choice of how we want to generate electricity. For all practical purposes, methane (natural gas, alias Ngas) in our state is used primarily for space heating. And space heating is a stable to shrinking market in NY State. This is a consequence of a stable population, less industry, better insulation in homes and businesses, more efficient operations, lower temperature set-points in home and commercial settings. The direct use of methane as a fuel for transportation is very small and will likely remain negligible. Any increase in energy usage for transportation purposes probably will come from increased usage of electricity to charge electric vehicles. In general, any growth in Ngas consumption in NY (and also much of this country) is only likely through its use to make electricity (see http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3045ny2a.htm for reference data).

Fracking sourced gas is more expensive than “conventional” natural gas. The price needed to cover all production and waste disposal costs plus provide the profits needed for such investments is now far greater than the is the current Henry Hub spot market price, as well as the listed NYMEX “futures prices” for the next 5 years. Investors in such wells/projects would lose massive quantities of money and wealth at present natural gas prices. However, those supplying the tools of the trade (drilling rigs, pumps, trucks, drilling muds, diesel oil for diesel gen-sets, fracking chemicals, etc.) will do just fine, once the problem of the massive losses by the gas field developers and Ngas producers is overcome. If by some chance the price for this fracked methane hits the targets recommended by bankers who finance such efforts (such as Credit Suisse), then another squeeze will occur. At such Ngas prices, it is becomes less expensive to produce electricity using commercial scale wind turbines that are “tuned” for NY State winds, even if there are NO or minimal Federal wind energy subsidies involved.

Because of the way that electricity is priced in NY State, the “extra” profits (and sometimes the “regular” profits) of companies using old nukes and old coal burners to generate electricity are dependent on having at least some natural gas sourced generation “in the mix”. Even at the present highly depressed Ngas prices with very efficient combined cycle generation systems, Ngas is the more expensive option to make electricity, with a production cost almost twice that for large coal burners or any of NY’s six nukes (and all of these pollution based approaches – coal, Ngas, nukes - have huge subsidies associated with them, notably no CO2 pollution cost or the Price-Anderson Act that limits liability in the event of a nuclear accident). When no Ngas sourced electricity is “in the mix”, electricity prices tend to fall to “minimal profit” status, which is a bad state of affairs to their corporate owners (they are in it for the money, after all). When wind turbine sourced electricity is added to our regional grid, Ngas sourced electricity is displaced first (as it is the more expensive electricity bid in for a given hour), and this drops the electricity spot market price. In Europe, electricity prices can go negative during major wind events, where pollution sourced electricity producers temporarily actually have to pay someone to take their electricity. This process is known as the Merit Order Effect.

So, if you want your natural gas based heating costs to remain low, use less Ngas. Less Ngas consumption also leads to lower Ngas prices, because the price for Ngas is very sensitive to the supply-demand balance. Nationwide wellhead prices in 2009 were less than half of those in 2008, yet demand in 2009 was not quite 2% less than in 2008 – that should give you an idea how “touchy” Ngas prices can be. Longer term, the best solution is to get rid of the Ngas based heat, using solar hot water, passive solar, active solar thermal and/or electricity (resistance or heat pump) systems. This will keep the demand for Ngas dropping over time, which also could match or exceed the decline in our North American methane reserves. And the other way to keep Ngas prices low is to use less of it to make electricity. This strategy is working, too, at least in WNY. Last year, Ngas only provided 2.6% of the electricity that was sold in NYISO Zone A, while wind turbines provided 4.8% of our electricity. A couple more wind farms in our part of NY will mean that Ngas no longer will be required to make electricity in NYISO Zone A, and at that point, any additional electricity from wind turbines will start to displace coal sourced electricity.

This is not to advocate for the use of coal or nukes to make electricity. In NY State, wind can be the prime energy source needed to replace such pollution based approaches at a reasonable price. The by-product of such an approach would be a massive increase in real wealth creating manufacturing jobs, as well as the required installation jobs and associated support/service jobs. And who would argue against the equivalent of another auto and steel industry (circa 1970) in our neck of the woods? The intermittency issue (of wind, resulting in a temporary mis-match of the variable supply and variable demand of electricity) is easily dealt with via pumped hydroelectric storage, stored biomass fuels plus interconnections with Quebec, Ontario and New England. Installation of more pumped storage systems (there are three of them within 100 miles of Buffalo) is also a great Keynesian stimulus, too; these provide a significant increase grid stability and dependability, at a minimal price.

Let’s use the medical analogy for a bit, where fracking for Ngas and associated hydrocarbons (natural gas liquids, gas condensates, crude oil) is considered an addiction. Fracking involves going after the dregs of hydrocarbon supplies – you only do this when the easy to get, formerly more plentiful “conventional” supplies of buried methane (natural gas) are used up or in the process of being used up. Far from tapping the “mother lode”, this fracking is an admission that you are going after the tail end of supplies. After all, what existed before 1800, when we began tapping them in earnest, was finite, not infinite, even though it appeared to be infinite back then. As far as oil goes, by 2006 we had burned through over half of the “conventional” supplies. Ditto for conventional methane supplies in North America, although that peak happened around 2000.

Making methane at current usage rates requires a lot of effort and our homemade “fracked” stuff is not cheap to make..., but it is cheaper than hydrogenating CO2, or converting cellulose and lignin into methane via "bio-syngas" approaches...

Clearly this is not a sustainable path; instead, it is a downward spiral. But life as we know it in NY State is one based on energy, and of three major forms, too – for transportation (oil), heat (mostly natural gas) and electricity. The electricity portion can be made at reasonable cost in NY in only a few ways – hydroelectrically, with nukes, burning coal or Ngas, burning biomass and biogas, wind turbines or near Long Island, via tidal and ocean wave energy. These forms of energy are somewhat interchangeable – for example, electricity can provide some transportation energy and all heat, but that heat tends to be pricier than when the heat is sourced from natural gas. As for 5 or 10 years from now, who knows what the price of natural gas might be – or exactly what the damage to our planet’s climate control system will bring out with weather disasters for that year.

Here’s the bottom line. Electricity is the only domestic growth market for Ngas in NY, but any new electricity demand can easily be displaced by a combination of wind turbines and pumped hydroelectric energy storage. Next, any “old” demand for electricity made by gas can also be replaced by wind turbines and pumped hydro, as can coal and nuke sourced electricity. And finally, the use of Ngas for space heating can also be replaced via existing, known means. All these alternatives to burning natural gas create a huge demand for new products and labor, something that is vitally important these days. Our hydrocarbon reserves will not last forever.

Fracking is a route to a very insecure and financially disastrous future. After all, spikes in Ngas prices can be quite ruinous for most, while benefiting only a few. But if you want such a future, with a few years of cheap Ngas prices achieved through socially and environmentally short-sighted policies, use more Ngas to make electricity now. If you want to destroy the motivation to frack in NY State, use less Ngas, and keep shrinking the quantity used in NY’s electrical mix. Since fracking will require higher prices for the methane than we are presently paying, and the only way to keep Ngas prices low is to use less Ngas, use less Ngas! And don’t buy the line about Ngas replacing coal or nukes for electricity production. Nobody will build new nukes or new coal burners – electricity prices north of 15c/kw-hr (coal) to 20 c/kw-hr (nukes) will be needed, and that assumes existing subsidies for these polluting approaches are continued.

Yeah, wind energy has a big drawback – you can see how your electricity is made. And to do wind on a large scale in the most cost-efficient way, we will need to use either a Ontario-like (Feed-In Law) and/or Quebec style (where NYPA signs up lots of long term Power Purchase Agreements) renewable energy pricing systems. The existing renewable energy pricing system in NY is obsolete, and continued adherence to it will maximize the probably we get fracked big time. And for good measure, a large scale renewable effort also will create a lot of manufacturing jobs in NY.

Oh well, I could live with seeing how my electricity gets made, and seeing my neighbors actually able to get viably employed. How about you?

Dave Bradley and (awesome editing by) Derek Bateman