Climate Change and Sustainability

'Pioneering in pellets' at $199 a ton | The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram

2010-12-09T12:59:00.000-08:00

'Pioneering in pellets' at $199 a ton | The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram

A Jay businessman shakes up the market with below-cost prices as he tries to build a customer base across Maine.

By Tux Turkeltturkel@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer

PORTLAND - Elizabeth Miller was waiting as a truck backed into her driveway Wednesday afternoon. On the truck's trailer were five tons of Maine-made wood pellets, produced in Athens this week and driven 65 miles from Jay.

Miller had been buying pellets from hardware stores, but these were selling for the cheapest price she'd ever seen.

"In this economy, I just couldn't turn it down," she said. "And the free delivery made a big difference to me."

Miller is among the latest customers of the Wood Pellet Warehouse in Jay. The company's owner, Steve Barker, is shaking up the state's wood pellet business this year by undercutting competitors and advertising aggressively. He's selling a ton of pellets for $199, cash or credit, and he'll even stack the 40-pound bags for the customer.

That price doesn't cover his costs, Barker acknowledges. His goal is to build a loyal customer base this year with discount prices and an extra measure of service. And he's willing to drive across much of Maine to do it, making the trip to Portland at least once a week. his count, he'll deliver 3,000 tons of wood pellets in 2010.

Barker said he started a price war in the spring. He saw pellets advertised in Greater Portland at $250 a ton, without delivery, and figured he could beat that.

"I started at $199 a ton last April," he said. "I look at it as pioneering in pellets."

Some of Barker's competitors in the Portland area question whether his business plan makes sense. They can't offer pellets for the price Barker is charging, they say, and don't intend to try.

Sales of pellet stoves -- and wood pellets -- exploded two years ago, when oil prices hit record highs. Activity stalled just as quickly after that, when the recession and an oil glut took hold.

But oil prices are climbing again, and so is interest in alternative heat. That may help Barker find a niche in a market that has had too many pellets and too few customers.

For now, at least, pellet burners such as Elizabeth Miller are happy to find bargains just as the weather turns cold. She took two tons from Barker on Wednesday.

"I'll be ordering more from him later in the winter, I imagine," she said.

Barker was a facilities manager for the G.H. Bass shoe company until it moved out of state in 2004. He wound up buying a warehouse in Jay and opening a recycling and redemption center. Recently, he made a connection between recycling and Maine's forest economy.

"My concept is, joining forces in Maine to get cheaper fuel," he said. "We have plenty of wood to heat with in Maine."

Barker's supplier is Maine Woods Pellet Co. in Athens, the largest of four pellet mills in the state. Retailers also sell pellets from Canada and other parts of the United States.

Wood pellets have subtle differences that invite debate and marketing. Heat output and ash content are variables that influence customer loyalty and dictate price. Among the most costly are Okanagan, made in British Columbia from 100 percent softwood sawdust. Barker sells some, at the request of a stove shop. They retail for $282 a ton.

Maine Woods pellets are a blend of sustainably harvested hardwood and softwood. Earlier this fall, Barker was buying a trailer load -- 26 tons -- nearly every day. Demand spiked after he began running newspaper ads in southern and central Maine.

"If you're reading this ad, we will deliver!!," the ad says.

That promise has put Barker and another driver on the road daily from Kittery to the Bangor area. After Barker finished at Miller's house, he was off to two other homes in Portland.

Around the block from Miller's house, Paris Farmers Union sells Maine Woods pellets for $199 a ton -- to customers who pick them up. With delivery, the cost is $219, although the crew will stack the bags.

Maine Woods is the store's best-selling brand. It sells two other Maine brands and one from Canada. Prices range from $229 to $289 a ton, delivered.

Pellets are only part of the store's business; it's not looking to expand sales with discount pellet prices. "We have our hands full with deliveries as it is," said Joel Fellows, the assistant manager.

Pellets also are a sideline for Bob Maurais at Southern Maine Renewable Fuels in Windham. He doesn't carry Maine Woods pellets, but sells the comparable Maine's Choice, produced in Strong.

He charges $229 per ton for cash and $235 for credit cards. He tacks on a $30 delivery fee, plus $1 per mile from his warehouse.

"I know what I need to get for a (ton) to make it profitable for us," he said.

Barker's ads have prompted many of Maurais' customers to call and ask about the $199 deal. He tells them he can't match that price.

"We stopped playing that game a long time ago," he said. "But I never begrudge anyone for starting a business. I wish him every success."

Barker's ability to influence the wood pellet market with a truck and a strong back helps illustrate that the industry in the U.S. -- unlike in Europe -- is very young. The time will come, suggested Bill Bell, executive director of the Maine Pellet Fuels Association, when bigger companies will begin delivering with greater efficiency.

That's starting to happen. Maine Energy Systems in Bethel, which sells automated wood pellet boilers, announced this week that it's building a bulk pellet delivery truck to service businesses, institutions and homes. The European design can unload a ton of pellets in four minutes.

But with most customers buying the fuel in bags to feed stoves and fireplace inserts, there's still room for entrepreneurs. Barker is benefiting, Bell said, by buying from a mill with its own wood supply and a lower cost of production. With Maine pellet mills running below capacity, it's a buyer's market.

"I think 'price war' is probably too strong a term, but there are some good deals for consumers," Bell said.

Staff Writer Tux Turkel can be contacted at 791-6462 or at:

tturkel@pressherald.com

New England sets electricity use records - Bangor Daily News

2010-10-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

New England sets electricity use records - Bangor Daily News

HOLYOKE, Mass. — Despite the weak economy, electricity consumers in New England have set new records for power use.

ISO-New England, the Holyoke-based grid operator for the region, says peak demand hit record levels in May and September. The region also set an all-time record in electricity consumption for one month in July.

ISO-New England says July was the second-hottest July in New England since 1960 and New England’s all-time electricity consumption for one month was recorded that month at 13,385 gigawatt-hours.

The previous one-month consumption record was set in July 2006, with 13,365 gigawatt-hours of electricity used.

Energy consumption in June, July and August totaled 36,863 gigawatt-hours, ranking summer 2010 in third place behind summer 2005 and summer 2006.

UMaine tidal power research wins $1M grant

2010-10-08T07:56:00.001-07:00

Bangorbiz

UMaine tidal power research wins $1M grant

BY THE MAINEBIZ NEWS STAFF
Yesterday

The University of Maine's Tidal Power Initiative has won a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to help determine the environmental impact protocols at Ocean Renewable Power Co.'s tidal turbine test site in Eastport.

A group of researchers and students headed up by engineering professor Michael "Mick" Peterson has been working with ORPC for more than two years and is researching the turbine's impact on fish and sea life in Cobscook Bay, according to a press release from UMaine. The results of the studies will be used to establish protocols for evaluating and monitoring other tidal energy projects in the area. The funding will also support testing the university's Maine Tidal Turbine in the laboratory and in the field, and evaluating a small-scale tidal energy site in the Bagaduce River, near Wiscasset. Work force development efforts in the area of renewable energy are also included in the $1 million grant.

The Maine Tidal Power Initiative is in its second year and has been awarded a total of $4 million in government and non-government funds, according to the release.

For Those Near, the Miserable Hum of Clean Energy

2010-10-06T08:39:00.001-07:00

October 5, 2010

For Those Near, the Miserable Hum of Clean Energy

By TOM ZELLER Jr.

VINALHAVEN, Me. — Like nearly all of the residents on this island in Penobscot Bay, Art Lindgren and his wife, Cheryl, celebrated the arrival of three giant wind turbines late last year. That was before they were turned on.

“In the first 10 minutes, our jaws dropped to the ground,” Mr. Lindgren said. “Nobody in the area could believe it. They were so loud.”

Now, the Lindgrens, along with a dozen or so neighbors living less than a mile from the $15 million wind facility here, say the industrial whoosh-and-whoop of the 123-foot blades is making life in this otherwise tranquil corner of the island unbearable.

They are among a small but growing number of families and homeowners across the country who say they have learned the hard way that wind power — a clean alternative to electricity from fossil fuels — is not without emissions of its own.

Lawsuits and complaints about turbine noise, vibrations and subsequent lost property value have cropped up in Illinois, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, among other states.

In one case in DeKalb County, Ill., at least 38 families have sued to have 100 turbines removed from a wind farm there. A judge rejected a motion to dismiss the case in June.

Like the Lindgrens, many of the people complaining the loudest are reluctant converts to the antiwind movement.

“The quality of life that we came here for was quiet,” Mrs. Lindgren said. “You don’t live in a place where you have to take an hour-and-15-minute ferry ride to live next to an industrial park. And that’s where we are right now.”

The wind industry has long been dogged by a vocal minority bearing all manner of complaints about turbines, from routine claims that they ruin the look of pastoral landscapes to more elaborate allegations that they have direct physiological impacts like rapid heart beat, nausea and blurred vision caused by the ultra-low-frequency sound and vibrations from the machines.

For the most extreme claims, there is little independent backing.

Last year, the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group, along with its Canadian counterpart, assembled a panel of doctors and acoustical professionals to examine the potential health impacts of wind turbine noise. In a paper published in December, the panel concluded that “there is no evidence that the audible or sub-audible sounds emitted by wind turbines have any direct adverse physiological effects.”

A separate study financed by the Energy Department concluded late last year that, in aggregate, property values were unaffected by nearby wind turbines.

Numerous studies also suggest that not everyone will be bothered by turbine noise, and that much depends on the context into which the noise is introduced. A previously quiet setting like Vinalhaven is more likely to produce irritated neighbors than, say, a mixed-use suburban setting where ambient noise is already the norm.

Of the 250 new wind farms that have come online in the United States over the last two years, about dozen or so have generated significant noise complaints, according to Jim Cummings, the founder of the Acoustic Ecology Institute, an online clearinghouse for information on sound-related environmental issues.

In the Vinalhaven case, an audio consultant hired by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection determined last month that the 4.5-megawatt facility was, at least on one evening in mid-July when Mr. Lindgren collected sound data, in excess of the state’s nighttime sound limits. The developer of the project, Fox Island Wind, has contested that finding, and negotiations with state regulators are continuing.

In the moonlit woods behind a neighbor’s property on a recent evening, Mr. Lindgren, a retired software engineer, clenched a small flashlight between his teeth and wrestled with a tangle of cables and audio recording equipment he uses to collect sound samples for filing complaints.

At times, the rustle of leaves was all that could be heard. But when the surface wind settled, a throbbing, vaguely jetlike sound cut through the nighttime air. “Right there,” Mr. Lindgren declared. “That would probably be out of compliance.”

Maine, along with many other states, puts a general limit on nighttime noise at 45 decibels — roughly equivalent to the sound of a humming refrigerator. A normal conversation is in the range of 50 to 60 decibels.

In almost all cases, it is not mechanical noise arising from the central gear box or nacelle of a turbine that residents react to, but rather the sound of the blades, which in modern turbines are mammoth appendages well over 100 feet long, as they slice through the air.

Turbine noise can be controlled by reducing the rotational speed of the blades. But the turbines on Vinalhaven already operate that way after 7 p.m., and George Baker, the chief executive of Fox Island Wind — a for-profit arm of the island’s electricity co-operative — said that turning the turbines down came at an economic cost.

“The more we do that, the higher goes the price of electricity on the island,” he said.

A common refrain among homeowners grappling with sound issues, however, is that they were not accurately informed about the noise ahead of time. “They told us we wouldn’t hear it, or that it would be masked by the sound of the wind blowing through the trees,” said Sally Wylie, a former schoolteacher down the road from the Lindgrens. “I feel duped.”

Similar conflicts are arising in Canada, Britain and other countries. An appeals court in Rennes, France, recently ordered an eight-turbine wind farm to shut down between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. so residents could get some sleep.

Richard R. James, an acoustic expert hired by residents of Vinalhaven to help them quantify the noise problem, said there was a simpler solution: do not put the turbines so close to where people live.

“It would seem to be time for the wind utility developers to rethink their plans for duplicating these errors and to focus on locating wind turbines in areas where there is a large buffer zone of about a mile and one-quarter between the turbines and people’s homes,” said Mr. James, the principal consultant with E-Coustic Solutions, based in Michigan.

Vinalhaven’s wind farm enjoys support among most residents, from ardent supporters of all clean energy to those who simply say the turbines have reduced their power bills. Deckhands running the ferry sport turbine pins on their hats, and bumper stickers seen on the island declare “Spin, Baby, Spin.”

“The majority of us like them,” said Jeannie Conway, who works at the island’s ferry office.

But that is cold comfort for Mrs. Lindgren and her neighbors, who say their corner of the island will never be the same.

“I remember the sound of silence so palpable, so merciless in its depths, that you could almost feel your heart stop in sympathy,” she said. “Now we are prisoners of sonic effluence. I grieve for the past.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 6, 2010

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the composition of wind turbine blades. They are typically made of fiberglass or some sort of carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic, not steel.

The Copenhagen That Matters

2009-12-23T05:24:00.001-08:00

NY Times
December 23, 2009

OP-ED COLUMNIST

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Copenhagen

As I listened to Denmark’s minister of economic and business affairs describe how her country used higher energy taxes to stimulate innovation in green power and then recycled the tax revenues back to Danish industry and consumers to make it easier for them to make and buy the new clean technologies, it all sounded so, well, intelligent. It sounded as if the Danes looked at themselves after the 1973 Arab oil embargo, found that they were totally dependent on Middle East oil and put in place a long-term strategy to make Denmark energy-secure and start a new industry at the same time.

The more I listened to the Danish minister, Lene Espersen, the more I thought of my own country, where I’ve been told time and again by U.S. politicians that proposing even a 10-cent-a-gallon increase in gasoline taxes to make America more energy independent and to stimulate fuel efficiency is “off the table,” an act of sure political suicide.

Not in Denmark. So I asked the Danish minister: “Tell me, what planet are you people from?”

Espersen laughed. But I didn’t. How long are we Americans going to go on thinking that we can thrive in the 21st century when doing the optimal things — whether for energy, health care, education or the deficit — are “off the table.” They’ve been banished by an ad hoc coalition of lobbyists loaded with money, loud-mouth talk-show hosts who will flame anyone who crosses them, political consultants who warn that asking Americans to do anything important but hard makes one unelectable and a citizenry that doesn’t even ask for optimal anymore because it believes that optimal is impossible.

Sorry, but there are no good ideas proven to work in other democratic/capitalist societies that we can afford to shove off our table — not when we need to build a knowledge economy with good jobs and everyone else is trying to do the same.

“Already the green taxes here are quite high,” said Espersen. “And even though we know this is not popular with business and industry, it has made all the difference for us. It forced our businesses to become more energy efficient and innovative, and this meant that, suddenly, we were inventing things nobody else was inventing because our businesses needed to be competitive.”

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute, a nonpartisan research center, and the Embassy of Denmark recently held a briefing on how Denmark is working to become a low-carbon economy. Here are some highlights:

Although it still generates the majority of its electricity from coal, “since 1990, Denmark has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 14 percent. Over the same time frame, Danish energy consumption has stayed constant and Denmark’s gross domestic product has grown by more than 40 percent. Denmark is the most energy efficient country in the E.U.; due to carbon pricing, through energy taxes, carbon taxes, the ‘cap and trade’ system, strict building codes and energy labeling programs. Renewable resources currently supply almost 30 percent of Denmark’s electricity. Wind power is the largest source of renewable electricity, followed by biomass. ... Today, Copenhagen puts only 3 percent of its waste into landfills and incinerates 39 percent to generate electricity for thousands of households.”

The Danish government funnels energy tax revenue “back to industry, earmarking much of it to subsidize environmental innovation,” wrote Monica Prasad, a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research, in a March 25, 2008, essay in this newspaper. Therefore, “Danish firms are pushed away from carbon and pulled into environmental innovation, and the country’s economy isn’t put at a competitive disadvantage.”

It’s why Denmark, with only five million people, boasts some of the leading wind, biofuel and heating, cooling and efficiency companies in the world. Energy technologies are now 11 percent of Denmark’s exports. Oil exports and energy taxes also subsidize mass transit and energy efficiency, keeping bills low for Danish consumers.

Where do Danish politicians get the courage to do the right things — even if painful?

“We don’t have a lot of resources,” said Ida Auken, a spokeswoman for the Danish green/socialist party, S.F. “We have a welfare state that we have to keep up, so we have to think forward all the time and not get stuck in the past. That is where we get the courage. And we have seen it work for 30 years. It is good business. Danish contractors are begging for strict standards on buildings because they know that if they can become efficient and meet them here, they can compete anywhere in the whole world.”

My fellow Americans, the fact that the recent Copenhagen climate summit was a bust in terms of solving our energy/climate problems doesn’t mean that we can ignore those problems — or that we can ignore how individual countries, like Denmark, have effectively addressed them. With unemployment in Denmark at about 4 percent, compared with our 10 percent, maybe we should at least consider putting a few of its ideas on our table.

DEP issues environmental laws guide for businesses - Bangor Daily News

2009-11-30T08:31:00.000-08:00

DEP issues environmental laws guide for businesses - Bangor Daily News

MaineBusiness.com | Vote may herald wind backlash

2009-11-30T08:29:00.000-08:00

MaineBusiness.com | Vote may herald wind backlash

Can wind power lift Maine's economy? - Bangor Daily News

2009-11-24T06:34:00.000-08:00

Can wind power lift Maine's economy? - Bangor Daily News

Proposed Highland Plantation Wind Farm Generates Concern

2009-11-23T08:42:00.000-08:00

Proposed Highland Plantation Wind Farm Generates Concern

MaineBusiness.com | Turbine setbacks leave towns twisting in the wind

2009-11-23T08:41:00.000-08:00

MaineBusiness.com | Turbine setbacks leave towns twisting in the wind

Work set to begin on Danforth wind project - Bangor Daily News

2009-11-23T08:40:00.000-08:00

Work set to begin on Danforth wind project - Bangor Daily News

Islanders flock to unveiling of wind turbines - Bangor Daily News

2009-11-18T06:25:00.000-08:00

Islanders flock to unveiling of wind turbines - Bangor Daily News

Offshore wind farm developers visit Brewer - Bangor Daily News

2009-11-18T06:24:00.000-08:00

Offshore wind farm developers visit Brewer - Bangor Daily News

MaineBusiness.com | Maine shows off its wind potential

2009-11-18T06:23:00.000-08:00

MaineBusiness.com | Maine shows off its wind potential

What They Really Believe

2009-11-18T05:00:00.000-08:00

OP-ED COLUMNIST

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: November 17, 2009

If you follow the debate around the energy/climate bills working through Congress you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims. One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can’t afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax.

But here is what they also surely believe, but are not saying: They believe the world is going to face a mass plague, like the Black Death, that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050. They believe it is much better for America that the world be dependent on oil for energy — a commodity largely controlled by countries that hate us and can only go up in price as demand increases — rather than on clean power technologies that are controlled by us and only go down in price as demand increases. And, finally, they believe that people in the developing world are very happy being poor — just give them a little running water and electricity and they’ll be fine. They’ll never want to live like us.

Yes, the opponents of any tax on carbon to stimulate alternatives to oil must believe all these things because that is the only way their arguments make any sense. Let me explain why by first explaining how I look at this issue.

I am a clean-energy hawk. Green for me is not just about recycling garbage but about renewing America. That is why I have been saying “green is the new red, white and blue.”

My argument is simple: I think climate change is real. You don’t? That’s your business. But there are two other huge trends barreling down on us with energy implications that you simply can’t deny. And the way to renew America is for us to take the lead and invent the technologies to address these problems.

The first is that the world is getting crowded. According to the 2006 U.N. population report, “The world population will likely increase by 2.5 billion ... passing from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in 2050. This increase is equivalent to the total size of the world population in 1950, and it will be absorbed mostly by the less developed regions, whose population is projected to rise from 5.4 billion in 2007 to 7.9 billion in 2050.”

The energy, climate, water and pollution implications of adding another 2.5 billion mouths to feed, clothe, house and transport will be staggering. And this is coming, unless, as the deniers apparently believe, a global pandemic or a mass outbreak of abstinence will freeze world population — forever.

Now, add one more thing. The world keeps getting flatter — more and more people can now see how we live, aspire to our lifestyle and even take our jobs so they can live how we live. So not only are we adding 2.5 billion people by 2050, but many more will live like “Americans” — with American-size homes, American-size cars, eating American-size Big Macs.

“What happens when developing nations with soaring vehicle populations get tens of millions of petroleum-powered cars at the same time as the global economy recovers and there’s no large global oil supply overhang?” asks Felix Kramer, the electric car expert who advocates electrifying the U.S. auto fleet and increasingly powering it with renewable energy sources. What happens, of course, is that the price of oil goes through the roof — unless we develop alternatives. The petro-dictators in Iran, Venezuela and Russia hope we don’t. They would only get richer.

So either the opponents of a serious energy/climate bill with a price on carbon don’t care about our being addicted to oil and dependent on petro-dictators forever or they really believe that we will not be adding 2.5 billion more people who want to live like us, so the price of oil won’t go up very far and, therefore, we shouldn’t raise taxes to stimulate clean, renewable alternatives and energy efficiency.

Green hawks believe otherwise. We believe that in a world getting warmer and more crowded with more “Americans,” the next great global industry is going to be E.T., or energy technology based on clean power and energy efficiency. It has to be. And we believe that the country that invents and deploys the most E.T. will enjoy the most economic security, energy security, national security, innovative companies and global respect. And we believe that country must be America. If not, our children will never enjoy the standard of living we did. And we believe the best way to launch E.T. is to set a fixed, long-term price on carbon — combine it with the Obama team’s impressive stimulus for green-tech — and then let the free market and innovation do the rest.

So, as I said, you don’t believe in global warming? You’re wrong, but I’ll let you enjoy it until your beach house gets washed away. But if you also don’t believe the world is getting more crowded with more aspiring Americans — and that ignoring that will play to the strength of our worst enemies, while responding to it with clean energy will play to the strength of our best technologies — then you’re willfully blind, and you’re hurting America’s future to boot.

The Herald Gazette: Wind proposal tops Camden agenda

2009-11-17T10:50:00.001-08:00

The Herald Gazette: Wind proposal tops Camden agenda

The Herald Gazette: Oceans called solution to energy crisis

2009-11-17T10:50:00.000-08:00

The Herald Gazette: Oceans called solution to energy crisis

University of Maine hosts wind energy company - Bangor Daily News

2009-11-17T10:49:00.000-08:00

University of Maine hosts wind energy company - Bangor Daily News

MaineBusiness.com | Building green for a sustainable future

2009-11-17T10:48:00.000-08:00

MaineBusiness.com | Building green for a sustainable future

Lost There, Felt Here

2009-11-17T10:38:00.001-08:00

OP-ED COLUMNIST

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: November 14, 2009
Belem, Brazil

The question was asked with eyes wide and a voice of incredulity. The person asking was Antonio Waldez Góes da Silva, the governor of the Amazonian state of Amapá, which has the biggest national park in the world. I had just shared with Gov. Waldez Góes a recent news article in The Hill, the Congressional newspaper, which said the total cost of stationing one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan for one year is $1 million.

What if we kept just one soldier back from Afghanistan and gave you the money, I asked the governor? What would it buy you? Gov. Waldez Góes mulled that over: “If you kept three soldiers back, that would be enough for me to keep the State University of Amapá running for one year, so 1,400 students could take different courses on sustainable development for the Amazon.”

O.K., I know. It is a bit misleading to take a war budget and assume that if it weren’t spent on combat, it would all go to schools or parks. And we do have real enemies. Some wars have to be fought, no matter the cost. But such comparisons are still a useful reminder that our debate about Afghanistan is not taking place in a vacuum. We will have to make trade-offs, and there are other hugely important projects today crying out for funding, as my colleague Nick Kristof has pointed out regarding health care.

Well, if America is going to assume the primary burden of fixing Central Asia, maybe, say, China, could help pick up the tab for saving what is left of the Amazon and the world’s other great tropical forests. Could President Obama raise that idea in Beijing?

An intergovernmental working group for saving the rainforests estimates that for about $30 billion we could reduce deforestation in places like Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo by 25 percent by 2015. After that, financing from global carbon markets, plus these countries’ own resources, could save much of the rest. China now has $2.2 trillion in reserves. How about it, Beijing? Why don’t you step up and provide some public goods for the world for once — not because you get a direct benefit, but just because it would make the world a better place for everyone?

Sure, America should still lead such efforts. But China’s days as a global free-rider should be over. China should pay its fair share — and more — since it will benefit every bit as much as the U.S., Europe and Japan. Indeed, the U.N. Foundation estimates that because living tropical forests are such huge storehouses of carbon — which gets released when we chop the trees down — if we just stop deforestation, we get a big chunk of the carbon-emissions reductions the world needs between now and 2020.

“And forest-rich developing countries, like Brazil, are now ready to do their part because they depend on the water that the rainforests provide for energy and agriculture, and because they see a new model for growth based on their natural capital,” said Glenn Prickett, a senior vice president with Conservation International and my traveling companion here. “Brazil has developed the science, political will and basic rules and institutions for preserving its rainforests. What Brazil and other rainforest nations like Indonesia lack, though, are the funds to take this new economic model to scale.”

I was struck by how many of the building blocks for “natural capitalism” that Gov. Waldez Góes — whose state sits at the mouth of the Amazon — is putting in place, so that he can have an economy based on preserving the rainforest rather than stripping it. He’s building on the three P’s — creating protected forest areas, improving productivity on lands that have already been cleared so farmers there will not need more, and establishing property rights for Amazonian lands, which are a legal mess, inviting Wild West land grabs and scaring off investors in sustainable agriculture.

Gov. Waldez Góes has already protected 75 percent of his state as rainforest and has enacted the laws and created a technical college to provide for sustainable logging and eco-tourism and for developing medicinal and cosmetic products from rainforest plants. But he needs funds to implement and monitor at scale and prove that “natural capitalism” can deliver more than the extractive version.

“I am the son of a rubber tapper,” he explains. “I was born and raised in the jungle, so even before becoming a politician I had a strong connection to nature.” The world is facing this relentless “development path that brings pollution and degradation and deforestation,” he added. He and other Brazilians want to prove you can do better by bringing “conservation and development together.”

Tropical forests represent some 5 percent of the earth’s surface but harbor 50 percent of all living species. Conservation International has a motto: “What is lost there is felt here.” If we lose what is left of the Amazon, we’ll all feel the climate effects, changing rainfall and loss of biodiversity that enriches our world. Brazil seems ready to do its part. Are we? What about you, China?

MaineBusiness.com | Collins bill would back wind power technology

2009-11-13T10:16:00.000-08:00

MaineBusiness.com | Collins bill would back wind power technology

Group takes stand against wind power - Bangor Daily News

2009-11-10T07:31:00.000-08:00

Group takes stand against wind power - Bangor Daily News

Bar Harbor Times: $8 million grant to develop offshore wind test

2009-11-06T08:57:00.000-08:00

Bar Harbor Times: $8 million grant to develop offshore wind test

Provincial power deal aimed at N.E. energy markets - Bangor Daily News

2009-11-02T09:55:00.000-08:00

Provincial power deal aimed at N.E. energy markets - Bangor Daily News

MaineBusiness.com | State appliance rebate program pushes all the right buttons

2009-11-02T09:53:00.000-08:00

MaineBusiness.com | State appliance rebate program pushes all the right buttons

MaineBusiness.com | Mainers get ready for oil's next spike

2009-11-02T09:52:00.000-08:00

MaineBusiness.com | Mainers get ready for oil's next spike

MaineBusiness.com | State narrows areas off coast for test wind turbines

2009-10-30T04:38:00.000-07:00

MaineBusiness.com | State narrows areas off coast for test wind turbines

MaineBusiness.com | New CMP meters to help customers save on power

2009-10-30T04:37:00.000-07:00

MaineBusiness.com | New CMP meters to help customers save on power

King issues cautions on wind power obstacles - Bangor Daily News

2009-10-30T04:35:00.000-07:00

King issues cautions on wind power obstacles - Bangor Daily News

PUC staff: Power grid upgrade is too costly | Portland Press Herald

2009-10-29T08:43:00.000-07:00

PUC staff: Power grid upgrade is too costly
| Portland Press Herald

Angus King urges business owners to conserve, think alternative energy

2009-10-23T09:44:00.000-07:00

By Rebekah Metzler, Staff Writer
Published: Oct 23, 2009 12:00 am

LEWISTON — Former Maine Gov. Angus King told local businesspeople to start conserving and to think about investments in renewable energy sources in his keynote address at a conference held at Bates College on Thursday.

The Androscoggin County Chamber of Commerce hosted the event, titled "Surviving the Energy Crisis: How to Save Money," which was sponsored by the Unitil Corp., Efficiency Maine and the Natural Resources Council of Maine.

King is a principal investor in Independence Wind, a company seeking to develop large-scale wind power projects in Maine. The group recently won state regulatory approval for a project in Roxbury.

"For every dollar that gasoline and home heating oil go up, that represents $1.2 billion a year out of the Maine economy," he told the audience of about 30 people. "It affects you as businesspeople because that's money people don't have to spend to buy CDs or go to the movies or go out to dinner or buy clothes. It's money that just disappears."

The combined state earnings from sales and income tax is about $1.8 billion a year, King said.

"So if gas goes up $1.25, it's as if the major taxes in Maine doubled and we get nothing for it," he said.

King pointed to Maine's exceptional reliance on fossil fuels — up to 88 percent of all the energy consumed in state — and its inability to control the price or supply of things such as gas and home heating oil as a dire problem.

"In my view, we're really in borrowed time on this and we really need to be thinking about what the alternatives are and how to hedge our bets," he said.

The first step to solving the problem, King advised, is conservation.

"It's the least expensive, the quickest, the least permitting involved, the least hassle and there are all kinds of things that can be done," he said.

But, he added, conservation alone would not be enough to counteract the growing global demand for fossil fuels.

"While we're caulking windows, in China they are building whole new cities," King said.

So, King said, looking to invest in alternative energy sources, like wind power, makes sense both for Mainers' pocketbooks and the environment.

"We have this energy going by us every day that's free," he said of wind power. "It's just the opposite of gas, which is cheap to build but more expensive to operate because you have to pay for the gas."

Successful off-shore wind development could produce enough energy to completely wean Maine off oil, King said.

The University of Maine has been awarded federal money to development technology that could withstand the rough off-shore elements, such as corrosive saltwater, and create a way to tap into the high-powered winds in the Gulf of Maine — "the Saudi Arabia of wind," according to King.

Americans tend to look for one solution to a problem, but King said that wouldn't work in this case.

"There is no one answer, but there are lots of little ones," he said. "We have to do for ourselves, we have to look at what it is we have."

rmetzler@sunjournal.com

To Cut Global Warming, Swedes Study Their Plates

2009-10-23T07:32:00.001-07:00

October 23, 2009
BY DEGREES
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

STOCKHOLM — Shopping for oatmeal, Helena Bergstrom, 37, admitted that she was flummoxed by the label on the blue box reading, “Climate declared: .87 kg CO2 per kg of product.”

“Right now, I don’t know what this means,” said Ms. Bergstrom, a pharmaceutical company employee.

But if a new experiment here succeeds, she and millions of other Swedes will soon find out. New labels listing the carbon dioxide emissions associated with the production of foods, from whole wheat pasta to fast food burgers, are appearing on some grocery items and restaurant menus around the country.

People who live to eat might dismiss this as silly. But changing one’s diet can be as effective in reducing emissions of climate-changing gases as changing the car one drives or doing away with the clothes dryer, scientific experts say.

“We’re the first to do it, and it’s a new way of thinking for us,” said Ulf Bohman, head of the Nutrition Department at the Swedish National Food Administration, which was given the task last year of creating new food guidelines giving equal weight to climate and health. “We’re used to thinking about safety and nutrition as one thing and environmental as another.”

Some of the proposed new dietary guidelines, released over the summer, may seem startling to the uninitiated. They recommend that Swedes favor carrots over cucumbers and tomatoes, for example. (Unlike carrots, the latter two must be grown in heated greenhouses here, consuming energy.)

They are not counseled to eat more fish, despite the health benefits, because Europe’s stocks are depleted.

And somewhat less surprisingly, they are advised to substitute beans or chicken for red meat, in view of the heavy greenhouse gas emissions associated with raising cattle.

“For consumers, it’s hard,” Mr. Bohman acknowledged. “You are getting environmental advice that you have to coordinate with, ‘How can I eat healthier?’ ”

Many Swedish diners say it is just too much to ask. “I wish I could say that the information has made me change what I eat, but it hasn’t,” said Richard Lalander, 27, who was eating a Max hamburger (1.7 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions) in the shadow of a menu board revealing that a chicken sandwich (0.4 kilograms) would have been better for the planet.

Yet if the new food guidelines were religiously heeded, some experts say, Sweden could cut its emissions from food production by 20 to 50 percent. An estimated 25 percent of the emissions produced by people in industrialized nations can be traced to the food they eat, according to recent research here. And foods vary enormously in the emissions released in their production.

While today’s American or European shoppers may be well versed in checking for nutrients, calories or fat content, they often have little idea of whether eating tomatoes, chicken or rice is good or bad for the climate.

Complicating matters, the emissions impact of, say, a carrot, can vary by a factor of 10, depending how and where it is grown.

Earlier studies of food emissions focused on the high environmental costs of transporting food and raising cattle. But more nuanced research shows that the emissions depend on many factors, including the type of soil used to grow the food and whether a dairy farmer uses local rapeseed or imported soy for cattle feed.

Business groups, farming cooperatives and organic labeling programs as well as the government have gamely come up with coordinated ways to identify food choices.

Max, Sweden’s largest homegrown chain of burger restaurants, now puts emissions calculations next to each item on its menu boards. Lantmannen, Sweden’s largest farming group, has begun placing precise labels on some categories of foods in grocery stores, including chicken, oatmeal, barley and pasta.

Consumers who pay attention may learn that emissions generated by growing the nation’s most popular grain, rice, are two to three times those of little-used barley, for example.

Some producers argue that the new programs are overly complex and threaten profits. The dietary recommendations, which are being circulated for comment not just in Sweden but across the European Union, have been attacked by the Continent’s meat industry, Norwegian salmon farmers and Malaysian palm oil growers, to name a few.

“This is trial and error; we’re still trying to see what works,” Mr. Bohman said.

Next year, KRAV, Scandinavia’s main organic certification program, will start requiring farmers to convert to low-emissions techniques if they want to display its coveted seal on products, meaning that most greenhouse tomatoes can no longer be called organic.

Those standards have stirred some protests. “There are farmers who are happy and farmers who say they are being ruined,” said Johan Cejie, manager of climate issues for KRAV.

For example, he said, farmers with high concentrations of peat soil on their property may no longer be able to grow carrots, since plowing peat releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide; to get the organic label, they may have to switch to feed crops that require no plowing.

Next year KRAV will require hothouses to use biofuels for heating. Dairy farms will have to obtain at least 70 percent of the food for their herds locally; many previously imported cheap soy from Brazil, generating transport emissions and damaging the rain forest as trees were cleared to make way for farmland.

The Swedish effort grew out of a 2005 study by Sweden’s national environmental agency on how personal consumption generates emissions. Researchers found that 25 percent of national per capita emissions — two metric tons per year — was attributable to eating.

The government realized that encouraging a diet that tilted more toward chicken or vegetables and educating farmers on lowering emissions generally could have an enormous impact.

Sweden has been a world leader in finding new ways to reduce emissions. It has vowed to eliminate the use of fossil fuel for electricity by 2020 and cars that run on gasoline by 2030.

To arrive at numbers for their company’s first carbon dioxide labels, scientists at Lantmannen analyzed life cycles of 20 products. These take into account emissions generated by fertilizer, fuel for harvesting machinery, packaging and transport.

They decided to examine one representative product in each category — say, pasta — rather than performing analyses for fusilli versus penne, or one brand versus another. “Every climate declaration is hugely time-intensive,” said Claes Johansson, Lantmannen’s director of sustainability.

A new generation of Swedish business leaders is stepping up to the climate challenge. Richard Bergfors, president of Max, his family’s burger chain, voluntarily hired a consultant to calculate its carbon footprint; 75 percent was created by its meat.

“We decided to be honest and put it all out there and say we’ll do everything we can to reduce,” said Mr. Bergfors, 40. In addition to putting emissions data on the menu, Max eliminated boxes from its children’s meals, installed low-energy LED lights and pays for wind-generated electricity.

Since the emissions counts started appearing on the menu, sales of climate-friendly items have risen 20 percent. Still, plenty of people head to a burger restaurant lusting only for a burger.

Kristian Eriksson, 26, an information technology specialist, looked embarrassed when asked about the burger he was eating at an outdoor table.

“You feel guilty picking red meat,” he said.

Scientists Unite! 18 Scientific Groups Reaffirm Climate Science in Letter to Senators

2009-10-23T06:44:00.000-07:00

By gulledgej
Created 10/21/2009 - 09:13

Scientists to Congress: You can argue about the politics all you want, but if you decide not to act on climate change, it won’t be because the science wasn’t strong enough.

In a letter [1] sent today, a slew of scientific organizations, including the American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, Crop Science Society of America, and American Chemical Society, informed the U.S. Senate that there is a strong scientific consensus [2] that manmade greenhouse gases are changing the climate and that claims to the contrary are scientifically indefensible:

“Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver. These conclusions are based on multiple independent lines of evidence, and contrary assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment of the vast body of peer-reviewed science.”

And they go further: “there is strong evidence that ongoing climate change will have broad impacts on society, including the global economy and on the environment.” They also say the United States will experience significant impacts; climate change isn’t just a problem for poor or developing countries [3]:

Notably, eight agricultural, plant, and ecological organizations signed the letter, thoroughly undermining recent attempts by opponents of climate policy to spin [4] manmade CO2 emissions as “plant food” that’s good for the environment. The letter, signed by 18 scientific groups, warns that: "For the United States, climate change impacts include sea level rise for coastal states, greater threats of extreme weather events, and increased risk of regional water scarcity, urban heat waves, western wildfires, and the disturbance of biological systems throughout the country.” More CO2 is not going to do crops and forests any good if they can’t get enough water or if storms, pests, or wildfires are mowing them down.

This is the first time that so many professional scientific organizations have spoken in unison on the need for climate change policy:

“If we are to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change, emissions of greenhouse gases must be dramatically reduced. In addition, adaptation will be necessary to address those impacts that are already unavoidable.”

You won’t find a political statement in the letter to the senators. Instead, you’ll find a professional community united against politically motivated denialism [5] designed to deceive the public and Congress about what scientists know about climate change. You’ll also find a community of professional problem solvers eager to help our nation find the needed solutions, if and when our policy makers finally decide to act.

In my two decades as a practicing scientist, I’ve never seen scientific organizations speak with one voice about a politically controversial issue. Why is this happening?

First, the sophisticated understanding of the climate system that has developed over the past century is a truly historic achievement shared by thousands of professionals representing many scientific disciplines in dozens of countries. Claiming that we don’t know enough about climate change to do anything about it unfairly diminishes this accomplishment and stands as an affront to the profession.

Second, with knowledge comes the burden of understanding the risks [6]. Scientists know better than anyone that the consequences of doing nothing are likely to be severe and could even be catastrophic [7] for society and for nature as we know it.

As a scientist, I would have preferred to see our professional community come together like this sooner, but scientists are a fractious bunch and are politically shy. It speaks volumes about the seriousness of climate change that they have come together at all!

Read the letter [1].

Organizations signing the letter: American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Chemical Society, American Geophysical Union, American Institute of Biological Sciences, American Meteorological Society, American Society of Agronomy, American Society of Plant Biologists, American Statistical Association, Association of Ecosystem Research Centers, Botanical Society of America, Crop Science Society of America, Ecological Society of America, Natural Science Collections Alliance, Organization of Biological Field Stations, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Society of Systematic Biologists, Soil Science Society of America, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

Source URL: http://www.pewclimate.org/blog/gulledgej/scientists-unite-18-scientific-groups-reaffirm-climate-science-letter-senators

Links:
[1] http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2009/media/1021climate_letter.pdf
[2] http://www.pewclimate.org/science-impacts/realities-vs-misconceptions#consensus
[3] http://www.cnas.org/blogs/naturalsecurity/2009/06/climate-change-developing-country-problem.html
[4] http://www.pewclimate.org/blog/jeremy-richardson
[5] http://www.cnas.org/blogs/naturalsecurity/2009/09/beware-climate-change-denialism-you-re-target.html
[6] http://www.pewclimate.org/docUploads/Gulledge-Risks-Uncertainty-Aspen08.pdf
[7] http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2009-04-29-climate-worst-case-scenario_N.htm

Turning 'sawdust' into fuel for future

2009-10-21T12:06:00.000-07:00

A team that tested its formula in Gorham seeks a $50 million grant for a biofuel demonstration plant.

By TUX TURKEL, Staff Writer
October 19, 2009

GORHAM — Stephen Fitzpatrick reaches into a bag and scoops up a handful of ground waste wood. Beyond him stands a maze of pipes, pumps and vessels that fill a small warehouse.

In his other hand, Fitzpatrick holds a bottle of clear liquid. It has the aroma of ripe fruit, but it actually is a substitute for heating oil.

Using a proprietary process that involves chemicals, pressure, temperature and time, Fitzpatrick and his colleagues at Biofine Technology LLC say they've figured out how to turn what's essentially a sack of sawdust into heating and motor fuels, at a cost of roughly $2 a gallon.

For three years, researchers inside this anonymous building in the Gorham Industrial Park have been pursuing a vision that could radically change Maine's energy and economic future.

Maine is the most forested state in the nation. It's the most dependent on imported petroleum for home heating. And it has a paper industry struggling to survive.

That makes for a natural fit: Set up commercial versions of the Gorham pilot plant next to paper mills. Use Maine's plentiful wood supply to kick petroleum. Create thousands of jobs building, operating and supplying the plants.

Now Fitzpatrick and his team are at a pivotal point. They have applied for a $50 million federal energy grant, meant to help offset the cost of a $113 million demonstration plant that would pave the way for full-scale production in Maine. They'll find out in December whether they got the money.

"This Department of Energy grant will be the key to putting this technology into pulp mills in Maine," Fitzpatrick said. "It's a huge deal."

Efforts to build production-scale biorefineries are ramping up nationwide. The U.S. government is encouraging these plans because of their promise to convert wood, farm waste and other low-grade materials into fuel. By contrast, the ethanol now mixed in gasoline has become controversial because it relies on food crops, namely corn.

In Maine, a second biorefinery effort is under way at a former paper mill near Bangor. Old Town Fuel and Fiber is in the final stages of negotiating a $30 million federal energy grant that would cover half the cost of a similar demonstration project.

Both companies are working with the Maine Technology Institute and the Forest Bioproducts Research Initiative at the University of Maine. As it turns out, the different technologies being pursued by Old Town and Biofine complement each other, and the firms are likely to end up working together at a tech center the university is preparing to build inside the Old Town mill.

Although Old Town's ambitions have been well-publicized, the work in Gorham has gone on largely unnoticed in Maine. A reporter and photographer from the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram last week were the first media to tour the plant.

The Gorham plant is capable of turning a ton a day of biomass – including wood, pulp, recycled paper and food waste – into 20,000 gallons of liquid fuel a year. The demonstration plant the team wants to build would be sized to handle 50 tons a day and make 1.2 million gallons a year. It would create an estimated 125 jobs in operation and supply.

A full-scale commercial biorefinery would convert 1,000 tons a day into 28.7 million gallons of liquid fuel a year and create 486 jobs, the company estimates. No one has done this yet, although a commercial plant is being built in Georgia.

The technology being used in Gorham has been under development by Fitzpatrick since the 1980s. It was validated at a Glens Falls, N.Y., pilot plant in a partnership with a subsidiary of energy giant Royal Dutch Shell.

In 2006, Shell spent $5 million to build an upgraded test plant in Maine. Gorham was chosen because it's near the wood supply, Fitzpatrick's home in Massachusetts and two partners – Paul Nace and Norman MacIntyre of Maine BioProducts – who also were working on biofuels in Maine. The two efforts have since merged under the Biofine Technology LLC name.

Shell's ambition was to develop motor fuels, and various car engines were run on the fuel produced in Gorham. But seal problems on early fuel-injection models led Shell to end its involvement.

That left Fitzpatrick, Nace and MacIntyre to pursue what they decided was an easier and more logical path – home heating oil. The Northeast burns 4 billion gallons a year, in a market concentrated near underused paper mills and abundant forestland.

Despite ready demand, the men don't expect homes to be heated with pure biofuel right away. Until several full-scale plants are built, it makes more sense to mix biofuel with regular heating oil, just as vegetable-based oil is now blended with heating oil and diesel fuel.

Scientists have come up with different technologies to produce biofuels.

Old Town Fuel and Fiber uses fermentation to extract sugars that can be converted to ethanol. Biofine's process is chemical, rather than biological. Its product is levulinic acid, an organic compound that's ultimately turned into ethyl levulinate, a chemical that serves as a platform to make fuels, plastics, pharmaceuticals and – producing a fruity smell – fragrances.

Inside the plant, the biomass is dumped in a large hopper, mixed with acid and subjected to steam and high heat for 15 minutes. The resulting liquid moves through a system of pipes and tanks, where it's blended, turned into a vapor and condensed. The process also makes marketable byproducts and a carbon char that can produce steam and electricity for the plant. Biofine says a larger plant will make enough surplus green energy to sell on the power grid.

Don't look for trucks delivering this Maine-made biofuel any time soon, however.

If Biofine receives full funding from the federal government, and it can raise $63 million in additional private capital, a 50-ton demonstration plant could be operating by 2014. After testing and data collection, a commercial plant could come online by 2017, the company estimates.

In its application for federal money, the company says 16 regions of the country could support commercial-scale Biofine facilities, including multiple locations in Maine.

This potential, even if it's far off, is exciting to the state's heating oil industry.

The fuel produced in Gorham has been run full-strength in a test oil burner that needed only a minor pump-seal replacement to operate reliably. Late this summer, national oil heat scientists visited the Gorham plant and reviewed the process.

They concluded it's for real, which was encouraging to Jamie Py, executive director of the Maine Energy Marketers Association. The trade group recently launched a campaign to get oil dealers to embrace biofuels and energy efficiency.

"It's an indigenous product from a biorefinery," Py said. "It has low greenhouse gas emissions, we already have the infrastructure and it will keep jobs in Maine. It makes a lot of sense. Hopefully it can happen."

University of Maine researchers say the chances appear good. With billions of dollars in economic stimulus money available, and a congressional mandate to reach aggressive quotas for biofuel blending, Biofine's timing may be just right.

Biofine has made it to the final round of the grant program. Competitors aren't using the same thermo-chemical process, said Mike Bilodeau, assistant director of the university's forest bioresearch group, and the government has already invested millions in fermentation technology. That gives Biofine a distinction, with a process that appears to be more cost-effective than fermentation at a commercial level, he said.

"It has a lot fewer issues when you scale up," Bilodeau said. "I think the Department of Energy will have a very favorable view."

Staff Writer Tux Turkel can be contacted at 791-6462 or at: tturkel@pressherald.com

Petition on wind power moratorium accepted

2009-10-21T10:31:00.000-07:00

OXFORD HILLS

By Mary Standard, Special to the Sun Journal
Published: Oct 21, 2009 12:24 am

BUCKFIELD — A resident's petition asking the town to approve a 180-day moratorium on wind power development was found sufficient by selectmen Tuesday night. There were 115 valid signatures on the petition.
The decision on whether to hold a referendum at the polls or a special town meeting to vote on the issue was tabled until all members of the Board of Selectmen are present.

James Parker's petition says that the full impact of wind turbines has not been fully explored and the town has a duty to protect the health, safety and welfare of its residents. The moratorium would give the town time to approve an ordinance to regulate wind power projects, according to the petition.

In other business, the Recreation Committee bylaws were approved after some discussion. The main area of concern for Selectman John Lowell was that the committee should have full control of choosing a chairman. Town Manager Glen Holmes said the wording was a compromise with the Recreation Committee. It states that once the committee has elected a chairman, the name will be sent to the Board of Selectman for ratification.

The bylaws also say that close relatives of members will not be appointed to the committee.

Another area of concern for Lowell was that any member who fails to attend two consecutive regular meeting must be reported in writing to the selectmen. That member would meet in executive session with the board and if the reason for missing was not excusable, they would be removed from the committee.

Holmes read lengthy letters of resignation from three members of the Recreation Committee. The Board accepted with regret the resignations of Jillian and David Shabe. The resignation of Sandy Albert was not accepted.

No appointments were made, as Selectman Chip Richardson was not present and had asked to be present for any appointees since the board had decided to review applications more fully.

The resignation of Dick Piper from the Planning Board was accepted. The board approved alternate Joyce Hartson as a full member. Warren Wright pleaded with the board to appoint an applicant to fill Piper's spot so they could conduct business. A decision was tabled until the next meeting.

The selectmen's meeting was recessed until Friday, Oct. 23, at 5:30, when the tax rate could be set. The board will also consider applicants for the Planning Board.

Decentralizing Electricity

2009-10-19T14:12:00.000-07:00

Decentralizing Electricity
The Coming Energy Revolution

By Stefan Schultz

Electric cars, intelligent washing machines, mini power plants in your basement: Germany is on the verge of an energy revolution. SPIEGEL ONLINE looks at the latest developments in the smart grid and how it will change the relationship between consumers and energy suppliers.

The power grid of the future is one of humanity's boldest visions. Gigantic wind farms in the sea and enormous solar fields in the desert are to generate the bulk of our power in the years to come. But consumers and companies are also producing energy with mini-power plants in their own basements and solar panels on the roof. And intelligent appliances are saving energy in our homes: washers, dryers and refrigerators that communicate with each other wash, dry or cool when electricity is cheapest. The information age is arriving at a new level: It's becoming the electricity age.

The electricity age is imminent in six German regions: The technology of the future for smart energy management is going to be developed and tested, under the label E-Energy, in several cities. A number of projects will kick into high gear this month. Tens of thousands of homes and hundreds of companies are expected to participate in the field tests. Research will be conducted into the possibility, for example, of homes that can largely produce all the electricity required by a household, as well as energy exchanges that enable consumers to sell any excess, self-produced and environmentally friendly electricity at a profit back to the energy grid.

Together with firms like Siemens, SAP, IBM and energy giants like EnBW, RWE and Vattenfall, Germany's economics and environment ministries have already mobilized €140 million for the development of the associated technologies and the tests. The government has provided €60 million and the industrial partners are raising the rest together with public utilities and smaller, innovative technology partners. According to Ludwig Karg, one of the researchers working together with scientists and communication experts in the model regions, E-Energy is intended to jump-start a greater energy revolution in Germany. "We are providing German companies with future access to markets worth billions," he said.

Companies Create New Super Sector

The project actually does have the potential to speed things up. It could help to explain the new technologies to consumers. Indeed, a number of recent developments suggest the energy revolution is already taking shape. In recent months, numerous spectacular future-oriented projects have been launched:

In mid-September, the German federal government agreed to the massive expansion of power generation through large offshore windparks.
Companies like Munich Re, Siemens, Deutsche Bank, E.on and RWE, working together under the name Desertec, want to build giant solar power plants in Africa's Sahara desert to feed the European power grid.

Carmaker Volkswagen, together with ecologically friendly energy utility Lichtblick, wants to install 100,000 mini power plants directly in consumers' homes. Demand for the system has been strong from day one.
Car parts maker Bosch acquired solar cell manufacturer Ersol in 2008 and, rumors suggest, is currently working to design a solar-powered car.

IT giant Cisco is working together with one large European electricity grid provider to create a smart power grid of the future. By mid-2010, the company wants to equip power lines, substations and transformers with information technology.
Search engine giant Google is also trying to get in on the smart grid action. The US company is developing software to allow consumers to track their electricity usage in real-time over the Internet.

The upheaval these projects have the potential to cause is enormous: Energy and IT markets are drawing closer together and the automobile industry will likely follow soon. A new super sector could change the competitive landscape and create new opportunities for partnerships. It will open up new business opportunities for the beleaguered automobile sector, power and IT companies as well as innovative start-ups, providing vast growth opportunities.

'The Greatest Infrastructure Project of the Decade'

Consumers could also stand to benefit from the transformation of the energy market. The German government estimates that more efficient power supply management could save 10 terawatt-hours (i.e. a billion kWh) of energy a year, which corresponds to the annual consumption of 2.5 million households. Márta Nagy-Rotherngass, head of the European Commission's Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainable Growth unit, says the modernization of the energy grid is a "win win situation" for everyone.

Industry experts are urging Germany to spearhead this future market and to try to create an export success story with the technologies that are being tested. E-Energy expert Karg, who introduced the project late last month at a conference in Washington, said the Americans were keen to work together intensively with German companies on the modernization of the power grid.

But there is plenty of competition: The International Energy Agency expects to see investments of several billion dollars worldwide by 2030 in projects to generate electricity, manage consumption and modernize power grids. "The change in energy will be the greatest infrastructure project of the next decade," said Christian Feisst, head of business development at Cisco's SmartGrid subsidiary.

In China there is a huge need for a smart electricity grid and the government is working hard to lay the technological foundations for it. The Americans are also investing heavily in future-oriented projects. Of the $39 billion that President Barack Obama has made available in his economic stimulus package for the promotion of green energies, more than $4 billion is expected to flow into the energy market. Dozens of US startups are producing hardware and software to enable consumers to monitor energy usage in real time, or to automatically regulate it.

Hive Intelligence Will Revolutionize Energy Production

The German government and energy companies are generating plenty of headlines these days with projects like the giant wind farms in the North and Baltic seas, and the desert solar project Desertec. They are intended to massively increase green energy supplies. The Germany economics ministry has forecast that alternative energy sources could provide one-third of the country's electricity needs by 2030.

But the true environmental revolution will happen from the bottom up, through mini power stations in basements of private homes, that generate both heat and power, as well as solar panels that can cover the electricity needs of factories. In future, energy will be supplied from millions of networked mini power plants rather than from relatively few centralized sources.

In early September, carmaker Volkswagen and utility company Lichtblick launched their first major offensive on the people power grid: The two companies intend to install up to 100,000 combined heat and power units (CHPs) in the basements of apartment buildings. They will initially be fired by natural gas, later on possibly by biogas. The basement power plants will heat the homes while simultaneously producing electricity and sending precise data to the companies. The companies believe the total investment in the project will come to €2 billion.

'Virtual Power Plants'

Residents of the cities of Karlsruhe and Stuttgart, where a government pilot E-Energy project is being tested, are already experiencing what it is like to be part a smart grid. There, 200 homes and companies have been equipped with photovoltaic systems and CHPs or fuel cells.

This model transforms the consumer into a producer who can make some money in the energy market. They are also testing a pricing model in which electricity rates depend on supply and demand. If the amount of available energy goes down, the rates go up correspondingly. Users can monitor the system on an Internet portal and generate energy whenever the price peaks, thereby also stabilizing the overall supply.

Lichtblick executives call them "virtual power stations" that can, within minutes, be networked to form a virtual giant electricity producer that can quickly compensate when other electricity production facilities are disturbed -- for example if the wind suddenly slows and thousands of wind turbines begin turning more slowly.

How Consumers Can Take Power from Utilities

Currently, it is next to impossible for consumers to see how much electricity they are using day to day, but devices are being developed to make it easier for consumers to monitor their energy usage. Franz-Reinhard Habbel, spokesman for the German Association of Municipalities, speaks of a "black box" for homes. The smart grid would tell consumers how much electricity each appliance is using. And consumers will be able to do a lot more to determine at which prices they consume electricity.

Customers will be able to cut their electricity bills, moreover, by pinpointing off-peak hours to run their energy-intensive machines. Software and hardware is currently being developed that would enable consumers to automatically shut off washing machines, dishwashers or refrigerators during price peaks.

"The utility companies will lose control," predicts Scott Lang, head of the Silicon Valley-based Silver Spring Networks, whose firm sells electricity meters that can already calculate up-to-the-minute usage.

In addition to smart meters, a number of other potential growth markets are being tested as part of the E-Energy project. German household appliance maker Miele, for example, is supplying hundreds of homes in the Ruhr region with intelligent washing machines that provide exact details about usage and can be either programmed or operated remotely to automatically turn on and do their work at times of the day when electricity is cheapest. Other companies are building adapters that can turn older machines on and off, based on energy prices.

A household's smart devices would be controlled by so-called home management systems. In the city of Mannheim, also home to an E-Energy pilot project, companies like Papendorf Software Engineering are developing related hardware and software under the "Energy Butler" label.

Energy Management and Storage

This sort of energy management -- that can switch appliances on and off depending on the amount of energy available from wind farms and solar plants -- is the main prerequisite for a power grid running largely on renewable energies. Supply and demand have to be tightly controlled to keep the grid from crashing.

Innovative energy storage systems are also intended for the system. Batteries up until now have proven too expensive and in some cases too inefficient for the task. Now scientists are looking into other ways of storing energy, and new concepts are being tested in the German port city of Cuxhafen. During peak times, the region is able to produce more than 80 percent of its needed electricity using wind turbines, but when the wind dies down, so does the capacity to supply electricity. "To make up for fluctuations," said project leader Wolfram Krause, "cold stores could be cooled more than needed or swimming pools overheated. If less electricity is available later, cooling and heating devices could be temporarily turned off until the energy buffer has been used up."

Storage solutions could also play a special role in electric cars in the future. In one E-Energy project in Germany's Harz mountains region, they serve as reserve batteries from the regional power net. If electricity supplies are low, cars not in use can also feed energy back into the grid.

Tech Giants Are Building Power Grid 2.0

If millions of small power stations are feeding the mains with a fluctuating quantity of electricity, and millions upon millions of terminal devices and home management systems are transmitting energy consumption data or receiving commands, the grid operators' systems could go haywire. The power transmission has to be continually adjusted at millisecond intervals. And it's a process that can only be achieved if it is highly automated.

That's why setting up such an intelligent power grid, that can manage this mass of data across the country, is probably the biggest challenge of the new electric age. "The deployment of all modern energy technologies will rise or fall based on the construction of a communications network that can deal with mass amounts of real-time data and transport them using Internet Protocols," said Ingo Schönberg, the head Power Plus Communications (PPC), a company that is producing such technologies. "A smart grid is the backbone of the new infrastructure."

It's also one of the most lucrative emerging business opportunities. The hitherto dominant energy giants are suddenly faced with new and formidable foes: technology groups keen on seizing control over energy supplies on the Internet. Siemens CEO Peter Löscher puts the volume of the smart grid market at €30 billion by the year 2014. In September, the company said it was planning to invest €6 billion in this area over that period.

IT giant Cisco is also eyeing the market. "We are calculating a future annual market potential of $20 billion," said Cisco SmartGrid executive Christian Feisst. He believes that within 10 years the technology will be deployable on a mass scale. And PPC's Schönberg believes that smart grids will be available in some cities in the next few years and that they will be available to the masses by the middle of the next decade. He said the first aim must be to automate as many measuring and control processes as possible in order to reduce the increasing levels of complexity. Cisco is currently conducting pilot tests of smart grids, but the company said it would like to provide an entire region with intelligent electricity by mid-2010.

As part of the government's E-Energy project, companies including Siemens, ABB and IBM are developing central system platforms that can collect all the data on decentralized energy production and consumption. The systems also calculate electricity prices based on fluctuations and pass this information back to consumers using broadband connections or by mobile radio. Together, these technologies will create an energy market place in which consumers themselves can buy and sell power.

An El Dorado for Service Providers

A market in which energy is traded according to supply and demand will provide immense opportunities for service providers and startups. Some are developing systems to predict rate fluctuations based on weather forecasts and behavioral statistics. Mobile software, e.g. iPhone-Apps, are likely to figure prominently in this sector.

Resourceful start-ups can also come up with business innovations for an energy grid 2.0, e.g. setting up social networks to help and hone ecological householding. In the US, a new generation of startups is already sounding the clarion call to an ecological revolution on the Web.

Web visionaries say the Internet has the potential to revolutionize the way we think about the environment: For one thing, it can expose waste and pollution, and pinpoint the culprits. That should give rise to a collective environmental conscience, forcing us to think more critically about how we use energy.

URL:
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Superfreakonomics on climate, part 1

2009-10-19T06:12:00.000-07:00

Ralph Krugman
October 17, 2009, 9:55 AM

OK, I’m working my way through the climate chapter — and the first five pages, by themselves, are enough to discredit the whole thing. Why? Because they grossly misrepresent other peoples’ research, in both climate science and economics.

The chapter opens with the “global cooling” story — the claim that 30 years ago there was a scientific consensus that the planet was cooling, comparable to the current consensus that it’s warming.

Um, no. Real Climate has the takedown. What you had in the 70s was a few scientists advancing the cooling hypothesis, and a few popular media stories hyping their suggestions. To the extent that there was a consensus, it was that there wasn’t much evidence for anything, and more research was needed.

What you have today is a massive research program involving thousands of scientists and many peer-reviewed publications, with all major international bodies agreeing that man-made global warming is real. You can, if you insist, dismiss it all as a gigantic hoax or whatever — but it’s nothing like the isolated 70s speculations about cooling.

And then we come to a bit of economics. The book asks

Do the future benefits from cutting emissions outweigh the costs of doing so? Or are we better off waiting to cut emissions later — or even, perhaps, polluting at will and just learning to live in a hotter world?

The economist Martin Weitzman analyzed the best available climate models and concluded that the future holds a 5 percent chance of a terrible-case scenario ..
Yikes. I read Weitzman’s paper, and have corresponded with him on the subject — and it’s making exactly the opposite of the point they’re implying it makes. Weitzman’s argument is that uncertainty about the extent of global warming makes the case for drastic action stronger, not weaker. And here’s what he says about the timing of action:

The conventional economic advice of spending modestly on abatement now but gradually ramping up expenditures over time is an extreme lower bound on what is reasonable rather than a best estimate of what is reasonable.
Again, we’re not even getting into substance — just the basic issue of representing correctly what other people said.

Administrative note: I’m going to block comments here, because I know it will be overwhelmed.

Foreign groups eye Maine’s wind potential

2009-10-16T07:33:00.000-07:00

A recent trade mission could lead to $18 million in sales and contracts, a group says.

By MATT WICKENHEISER Staff Writer
October 15, 2009

AUGUSTA — At least two foreign business groups plan to visit Maine to explore wind power investment possibilities, following the governor's trade mission to Spain, Germany and Norway last month.

StatoilHydro is expected in mid-November. The Norwegian energy giant has the only deep-water wind turbine off its coast, and it has an agreement with the University of Maine to explore the feasibility of putting such a turbine in the Gulf of Maine.

StatoilHydro officials want to further the agreement with the university while in Maine, and they plan to tour companies that might be involved in making and erecting such a turbine.

A Spanish investment group plans to visit Maine in late fall or early winter to look at the potential for onshore wind farms in the state, said Janine Bisaillon-Cary, director of the Maine International Trade Center.

She spoke to about 16 businesspeople who went on the trade mission and gathered Wednesday at the Blaine House to discuss what they had accomplished on the mission and their plans for the future.

Bisaillon-Cary said companies on the trade mission, which was focused on wind power, are projecting about $18 million in potential contracts and sales generated by the trip — more than double any other trade mission.

The companies included Bath Iron Works, Cianbro Corp., Reed & Reed Construction, James W. Sewall Co., Larkin Enterprises, Sullivan & Merritt, Sargent Corp., Central Maine Power Co. and Sprague Energy.

On Wednesday, officials from those companies and organizations compared notes and suggested next steps.

Paul Williamson of the Maine Composites Alliance said he is exploring training options for Mainers in the wind field.

He met with a German group that is testing a floating offshore wind platform and may have interest in working with Maine on a similar model.

Richard Larkin of Larkin Enterprises said he had identified a lack of skilled, trained technicians to maintain turbines. The trade mission solidified that observation, said Larkin, who is working with Northern Maine Community College to develop a program to train workers for jobs here and around the world.

Steve Levesque, director of the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority, which is seeking to redevelop the soon-to-be-closed Brunswick Naval Air Station, said he met with companies in hopes of attracting investment or businesses to the base. He was particularly interested in an industrial park the group toured in Bremerhaven, Germany, that was geared to wind power companies.

"It really became pretty clear to us we can replicate what they've done in Bremerhaven in the Brunswick area," he said.

To begin producing wind turbine tower structures, a shipyard like BIW would need minor capital investments and space to work, said Andrew Bond, director of labor and business planning. Baldacci said he'd want to know about any help the state could give BIW in the financial or policy arenas.

While the state must cut about $200 million to balance its budget, it also must continue to make strategic investments in its future, said Baldacci.

John Henshaw, executive director of the Maine Port Authority, said the visit showed the need for areas around Maine's ports that could store huge turbine pieces. The state may want to explore buying industrial parcels in key locations, he said.

Parker Hadlock of Cianbro wasn't on the trip, but he has been exploring wind power through the governor's Ocean Energy Task Force. He said that the federal government must come up with a national policy on wind power. Until it does, foreign companies will see U.S. investment as risky, he said.

Hadlock pushed the need for an umbrella organization to pull along university research, industry and government in support of offshore wind power. Baldacci suggested that such a group should be industry-led.

Maine is in a position to become a leader in offshore wind power, said Baldacci, and it needs to seize the opportunity.

"You have to have energy to exist, to do business, to live," he said. "I'm not going to resign Maine to being on the receiving end. I want us to be on the ownership side."

Staff Writer Matt Wickenheiser can be contacted at 791-6316 or at mwickenheiser@pressherald.com

Houlton OKs lease to Bangor pellet firm

2009-10-16T07:32:00.001-07:00

By Jen Lynds
BDN Staff

HOULTON, Maine — Town councilors approved a lease with a new pellet manufacturing business on Tuesday evening that could bring up to 40 new jobs to the area.

Councilors voted 5-0 in favor of the lease, which was negotiated between the town and Aroostook Renewable Energy, a group of partners doing business as Aroostook Pellets.

The businessmen from the Bangor area will pay $240 a month to lease a parcel of land at the Houlton International Airport Industrial Park, where they plan to construct a building.

Town Manager Douglas Hazlett told councilors the group has not started building, but has secured the majority of the financing needed for the project.

Some residents attending the meeting had questions about the project, asking for background on the company and expressing a desire to see the business come to fruition. Hazlett assured them the town was optimistic the business would be constructed and would open. Once operational, it could bring up to 40 new jobs to the area, he said.

Hazlett said the business could not buy the land because the town and the Federal Aviation Administration own it, thus it can be leased but not sold.

The town also has taken steps to assure the project will come to fruition.

If the business does not construct the facility in a year or if the financing falls through, the town can terminate the lease. The town also reserved the right to terminate the lease at any time with 90 days’ notice.

Council Chairman Paul Cleary was enthusiastic about the project, classifying it as a major win for the municipality.

“This could possibly create up to 40 jobs,” he said, adding that it also would establish a new business in town.

A company profile indicates that Andrew Durkovich is the primary contact for the business, but he could not be reached for comment Thursday afternoon regarding when construction might begin.

jlynds@bangordailynews.net

538-6567

Lawyer fighting wind power

2009-10-16T07:31:00.001-07:00

Green candidate for governor supports alternative energy

By Nick Sambides Jr.
BDN Staff

Though Lynne Williams supports alternative energy production and doesn’t oppose the use of windmills to create it, she is fighting wind power in Maine just about every way she can.

A Bar Harbor attorney representing the Friends of Lincoln Lakes, Williams is pursuing two appeals of decisions that, if reaffirmed, would help clear the way for an industrial wind site on Rollins Mountain ridgelines in Burlington, Lee, Lincoln and Winn.

As a Maine Green Independent Party candidate for governor in 2010, Williams called last month for Maine Attorney General Janet Mills to create a code of conduct for wind operators and a governmental committee to monitor compliance. Williams also wanted Mills to investigate whether wind companies in Maine had violated any ethics statutes.

Williams opposes a flawed and hurried process, not the concept of industrial wind power, she said.

“Unlike some attorneys, I never represent someone that has different values from me, so I agree 100 percent with my clients,” Williams said Thursday of Friends of Lincoln Lakes. “This issue is way too important for us to be rushing through it.”

She suggested Mills model Maine’s system on a similar, voluntary code established by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. Under that code, wind companies are banned from hiring municipal employees or their relatives; refuse confidential information from municipal officers; post on their Web sites the names of all municipal officers who have financial stakes in their companies; and file all wind easements and leases with county clerks.

Williams’ proposal didn’t gain much traction with Mills. Kate Simmons, a spokeswoman with the Attorney General’s Office, says that Mills’ office is “not aware of any allegations of impropriety made against any wind power developers.”

“In order to create any code of ethics, the office would need to be directed by the appropriate regulatory body to do so,” Simmons said. “Maine already has many statutes regarding conflict of interest on the books to protect citizens from improprieties.”

A group of Lincoln-area landowners or leaseholders, the Friends group has appealed in Superior Court a Department of Environmental Protection permit for First Wind of Massachusetts to build 40 11/2-megawatt wind turbines on the ridgelines.

The group’s second court action protests the Lincoln Board of Appeals refusal to hear the group’s appeal of a permit the Lincoln Planning Board issued to the proposed $130 million wind farm. As of Thursday, both appeals were pending, Williams said.

The DEP appeal is the first in Maine of a permit granted for an industrial wind-to-energy site. The project lacks only an approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and financial backing that would pay for its construction, First Wind officials have said.

Proponents have praised First Wind as a conscientious creator of wind power, saying the Lincoln Lakes project would create as much as 60 megawatts of pollution-free electricity in peak winds.

The Friends group contends that the turbines will lower land values and threaten human and animal health with light flicker and low-decibel sound and vibrations, disrupt the pastoral nature of Rollins and generate a fraction of their capacity.

In its first hearing since 2005, the planning appeals board ruled 4-2 on Jan. 8 that the friends group had no right to appeal the planning board’s Dec. 1 decision approving First Wind’s project because the group was legally incorporated Dec. 31 but filed its appeal on Dec. 15. Group members called the town’s review process chaotic and deeply flawed.

Under its regulations, the board “decides whether the applicant has a right to appear before the Board,” the regulation states. With the group’s existence in question — and no group members’ names on the group’s incorporation papers — the board felt it had to reject hearing the group’s complaint, the panel’s chairman has said.

Williams argued that group members defined themselves adequately just by being there. Group members also were recognized at Town Council and planning and appeals board meetings, and in minutes and e-mails the appeals board had, Williams said.

Given that the judge reviewing the appeals board case recently issued a ruling on another Williams case that began when the Friends group first filed its appeal, Williams has hopes that the appeals board case ruling would be issued soon, she said. But that would mean only that the planning board permit appeal would go back to the appeals board or Superior Court, she said.

“It could be the middle of next year before everything is resolved,” Williams said. “Things are not moving quickly in any court. There’s a shortage of personnel and shortage of judges, and they can’t replace them because of the [state] hiring freeze.”

UM center awarded $8M grant to develop 3 offshore turbines

2009-10-16T07:29:00.000-07:00

ENERGY

By Jessica Bloch
BDN Staff

BANGOR DAILY NEWS PHOTO BY MICHAEL YORK

ORONO, Maine — A University of Maine-led research and development effort to explore deepwater offshore wind power in the Gulf of Maine received an $8 million boost Thursday, with up to $5 million more possibly on the way.

The Department of Energy announced Thursday afternoon it has awarded a 38-member consortium led by UMaine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center an $8 million grant to develop and deploy three small-scale deepwater offshore wind turbines that will float on composite platforms off the coasts of Maine and New Hampshire.

Click here for a list of consortium participants.

Two of the turbine models, which could all be in place in the next two years, will be located in one as-yet undetermined site in the Gulf of Maine. The third model will be located at the Maine-New Hampshire border. Researchers will use the models to develop lightweight composite platforms with the eventual goal of a large-scale floating wind farm in the Gulf of Maine, which would be the first of its kind in the world.

“This puts Maine in the drivers’ seat of deepwater offshore technology in the country,” UMaine professor Habib Dagher, the director of the Advanced Structures and Composites Center, said Thursday. “The fact that the Department of Energy has selected us provides a catalyst for industry in the state to work with us to help achieve this goal. It’s a bright day for Maine [and] a bright day for the future of Maine.”

The $8 million could grow to $13 million for the Advanced Structures and Composites Center if President Barack Obama signs an energy and water budget bill the Senate passed 80-17 Thursday afternoon and the House approved earlier. The bill includes a $5 million appropriation for the UMaine center secured by U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, a member of the Senate Appropriation Committee.

The $5 million would go toward establishing a UMaine-based national center for deepwater offshore wind research and development. Part of the allocation would also go toward the development of the models.

Dagher, a longtime advocate for Maine to be the site of future research and development of deepwater offshore wind facilities, has equated the Gulf of Maine’s wind capacity to that of Saudi Arabia for oil production.

Dagher, who testified last summer about wind energy in front of Congress’ Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, has estimated Maine has the potential to produce about 130 gigawatts of power in deep water — 60 to 900 meters deep — within 50 nautical miles of the coast.

By comparison, the entire U.S. coastline has about 1,500 gigawatts of offshore wind potential in waters deeper than 60 meters within 50 nautical miles of its shores, Dagher has said.The Department of Energy has a stated goal of achieving 20 percent of the nation’s electricity from wind power by the year 2030. Gov. John Baldacci said Thursday Maine’s goal is to generate 5 gigawatts of power by 2030.

Dagher said 1 gigawatt is roughly equivalent to the energy output of one nuclear power plant. Five gigawatts of power, which is 3 percent of the energy potential of the Gulf of Maine within 50 miles of shore, would be enough to attract roughly $20 billion in related investment, according to Dagher.The Department of Energy grant is also expected to lead to job growth in Maine, Dagher said. Initially, UMaine will hire students, scientists and some faculty for research, development, production and deployment of the technology.

However, with an estimated $20 billion in investment, Dagher said estimates are that the project could create up to 15,600 jobs — if the entire project from creation to implementation occurs in Maine. Even if half of the project ends up outside Maine, Dagher added, it would still mean several thousand jobs.

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Thursday during a conference call that the wind power initiatives are part of “a new industrial revolution” that will reduce independence on foreign energy sources and keep America competitive.

“The world is beginning to take hold of this and many countries are moving in this direction,” Chu said. “The country, and Maine in particular, has enormous promise for wind energy.”

The consortium will be called the University of Maine DeepCwind Deepwater Offshore Wind Consortium.

The Department of Energy grant money, along with some of the anticipated $5 million congressional appropriation, will go toward the design and deployment of two 10-kilowatt and one 100-kilowatt floating offshore turbine prototypes.

The 100-kilowatt model will be roughly one-third the size of a standard 300-foot high turbine, while the 10-kilowatt models will be about one-fourth the standard 80- to 100-foot size.One 10-kilowatt turbine will be located at an offshore test site in the Isle of Shoals near the Maine-New Hampshire border.

The other 10-kilowatt turbine and the 100-kilowatt turbine will be located at one of seven Maine areas currently being considered for five offshore wind turbine sites, one of which will be operated by UMaine. The potential sites include areas off Cutler and Jonesport in Washington County, south of Isle au Haut, and near Matini-cus, Monhegan, Damariscove and Boon islands. Damariscove is off Boothbay Harbor and Boon Island is off Cape Neddick in York County.

The projects will not go forward without local approval.

Dagher has said the turbines would be far enough offshore so they could not be seen from land.

With the grant money, the Advanced Structures and Composites Center and other consortium members intend to experiment with designs for floating platforms by evaluating options for durable, light hybrid composite materials, the manufacturability of the platforms, and deployment logistics.

The grant also will fund educational initiatives such as a model Master of Science Degree in Renewable Energy and the Environment, with a focus on deepwater wind energy, and a new undergraduate minor in deepwater wind energy.

The DOE announcement came about 4½ months after a June meeting among Dagher, Chu and the Maine congressional delegation. The Maine group requested $20 million in federal economic stimulus funds for a wind research center.

Collins said Thursday she wasn’t disappointed in receiving less than half of the requested funding from the Department of Energy.

“There’s no disappointment at all, because the $8 million will be supplemented by the $5 million that I secured through the appropriations process, and the state has also pledged funding,” she said. “So the combination should be very close, or even exceed the $20 million.”

Dagher said the state will vote next June on a $6 million bond to develop offshore wind test sites.

Late last month, Baldacci traveled to Europe with a group of business leaders to meet with wind power industry representatives there in an effort to attract more interest in the state. The group came back with an agreement with StatoilHydro, a Norwegian firm, to explore the possibility of using the firm’s offshore turbines in the Gulf of Maine.The UMaine grant, which was awarded as part of a competition among other university consortia, was announced along with $8 million DOE grants for on-shore wind-power projects at the University of Minnesota and the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Bangor Daily News reporters Kevin Miller and Bill Trotter contributed to this report

jbloch@bangordailynews.net

990-8287

Tours of wind power project offered

2009-10-16T07:28:00.001-07:00

By Donna M. Perry, Staff Writer
Published: Oct 15, 2009 5:21 am

KIBBY TOWNSHIP — TransCanada Corp. will hold a grand opening celebration of its Kibby Wind Power Project for invited guests only on Friday.

However, there will be a chance for members of the public to get a tour as well at another time, project spokesman Tobey Williamson said Wednesday.

To set up a tour of the site, people may call 1-877-943-3367.

Nearly half of the project's 44 wind turbines are now operational, providing clean energy to the New England power grid, according to a news release.

The $320 million, 132 megawatt Kibby Wind Power Project is the largest wind power development in New England, according to the company.

It is providing renewable electricity for the equivalent of 50,000 average-sized Maine homes, a release stated.

TransCanada plans to have half of the 44 turbines in service this year, with the remaining turbines going on line in 2010.

TransCanada has spent more than $75 million in U.S. dollars on materials, labor and services in Maine, with nearly $6 million spent in Franklin County, the release states. The project has also supported approximately 300 construction jobs, 90 percent of which have gone to Maine residents. Eight people, mostly from Franklin County, now have full-time jobs maintaining the turbines and overseeing local operations, the release stated.

dperry@sunjournal.com

First half of Kibby wind project powers up today

2009-10-16T07:21:00.000-07:00

State officials will mark completion of 22 of 44 windmills, the largest project in New England.

By GLENN ADAMS The Associated Press
October 16, 2009

AUGUSTA — Power generation from winds blowing across Maine will increase today when Gov. John Baldacci helps to start up the first half of the Kibby Mountain wind-power project in the state's western mountains.

Baldacci will join other state and local government officials and builders of TransCanada's project at the remote site in Franklin County. The ceremony will mark completion of the first 22 windmills and the start of their production of power, which will flow to Central Maine Power Co. and through its interconnections to the New England grid.

The second 22 windmills in the project on nearby Kibby Ridge are scheduled to be done by next August or September, said Corey Goulet, vice president of energy projects for the Calgary, Alberta-based TransCanada. The portion of the project to be dedicated today will provide the equivalent average energy needs for 25,000 homes.

When all 44 windmills are complete, the Kibby wind farm will provide twice that power and be New England's largest wind power project. It has an overall cost of $320 million, said Goulet.

In addition to developing wind, hydro, gas-fired and nuclear power facilities, TransCanada has gas transmission pipelines all over the North America and is building an oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast.

"I have never seen so much interest as I have in the state of Maine in wind projects and renewable energy in general," Goulet said Thursday.

Maine already has major operating wind farms, in Mars Hill and Stetson Mountain, both owned by FirstWind of Newton, Mass. Expansion of the Stetson project in eastern Maine is under way, and construction of a project near Rumford in western Maine, whose principals include former Gov. Angus King, is in progress.

State regulators have approved plans for FirstWind's Rollins wind-power project in northern Maine, and several other projects are in earlier stages of planning.

Angus King to speak at chamber workshop

2009-10-12T07:27:00.000-07:00

Published: Oct 09, 2009 9:31 am

LEWISTON — Former Gov. Angus King will be the featured speaker at a workshop titled Surviving the Energy Crisis: How to Save Money, sponsored by the Androscoggin Valley Chamber of Commerce. It will be held Oct. 22 from 7:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at the Bates College Dining Commons, Central Avenue.

The workshop is listed as a practical, energy efficiency workshop for businesses and other organizations. Registration is $25 for members, $45 for nonmembers, and includes a continental breakfast, lunch and conference materials. All participants will also receive a free copy of the Natural Resources Council of Maine's 54-page manual, "A Guide to Energy Efficiency for Maine Businesses."

The workshop begins at 7:30 a.m. with check-in and continental breakfast. The keynote address by King follows at 8 a.m. The agenda continues at 8:45 a.m. with the panel, Businesses Share Energy Saving Ideas; 10 a.m. panel, Financing Energy Improvements, and 11 a.m. panel, Alternative Energy Sources.

Lunch will be at noon with discussion topics: How to involve employees, ventilation considerations, how to get started/prioritizing, free/low-cost things, energy use at home, alternative energy sources and financing improvements.

At 1:30 p.m. there will be a panel titled Saving Energy/$$$ at Home.

For more information or to register, call the Chamber at 783-2249 or online at: www.androscoggincounty.com.

Open house shines light on Rockland solar power company

2009-10-12T07:25:00.000-07:00

By Stephen Betts
The Herald Gazette Associate Editor

ROCKLAND (Oct 9): An idea that started a few years ago in a garage in Rockport has gained the attention of the state.

GSInc. received an $11,400 grant last week from the Maine Technology Institute, a private, nonprofit agency paid for by the state. The grant will assist the company in its plans to manufacture solar manifolds at its plant at 12 Moran Drive in the Industrial Park.

GSInc., which produces EOS solar collectors, employs seven people. The goal is for the company to hire six to eight more people, said Steve Stinson, the company's sales and marketing director.

The company manufactures solar collectors that use insulated glass vacuum tubes to heat water.

The company plans to add the manufacture of its solar manifolds.

The company is the product of Stinson and Nate Greenleaf, the director of research and development. The two came up with the proposal for the company in their garage in Rockport about two-and-a-half years ago.

Stinson was the owner of a convenience store in Rockport. Greenleaf had 15 years of experience in the heating, ventilation and air conditioning industry. With a background in alternative energy, Greenleaf approached Stinson with a concept.

Greenleaf said full scale production should start in three weeks.

The company's Web site notes that the traditional solar industry has failed to go mainstream over the course of the last 30 years.

"We believe that this is due in part to their inability to deliver traditional designs and products that can easily be implemented by plumbing and heating tradesmen," according to the Web site. "GS Inc. has employed these tradesmen to design products and systems that will easily integrate with existing practices. These products are then sold through traditional supply chains and are installed by their peers. The result is a mainstream product that is installed by trained professionals, that virtually anybody can afford."

The system consists of an 80-gallon solar preheat tank that feeds an instant-on tankless hot water heater. This design provides all the domestic hot water needs for the convenience store in Rockport, including the full service kitchen and deli.

The Herald Gazette Associate Editor Stephen Betts can be reached at 207-594-4401 or by e-mail at sbetts@villagesoup.com.

Highland Plantation residents learn more about $250 million wind farm project

2009-10-12T07:21:00.000-07:00

By Terry Karkos, Staff Writer
Published: Oct 10, 2009 2:21 am

HIGHLAND PLANTATION — A $250 million project to erect 48 wind turbines on four peaks in Somerset County was outlined at a meeting of about 30 people Thursday night.

Because Highland Plantation is considered an unorganized territory, Independence Wind principals Angus King and Robert Gardiner are expected to file an application for permits for their plan with Maine's Land Use Regulation Commission by early November.

The 120- to 130-megawatt turbines are proposed for Stewart and Witham mountains and Briggs and Burnt peaks. They would be lined up single-file and southeasterly along the high land. The area is east of the Bigelow Range and Carrabassett Valley in Franklin County.

In Roxbury, Independence Wind and business partner Wagner Forest Management Ltd. of Lyme, N.H., formed Record Hill Wind LLC to build 22 2.5-megawatt turbines atop Partridge Peak, Flathead Mountain and part of Record Hill. Construction on that $120 million project is under way.

"So, we've bitten off a lot and we're chewing right now," Gardiner said.

In Highland Plantation, King and Gardiner's company partnered with Wagner to form Highland Plantation LLC.

Gardiner said he and King have been talking with Highland Plantation residents and officials about the project for 18 months.

The turbines would be installed during the summer of 2011 on Wagner land, Gardiner said Friday afternoon at his Cumberland Foreside home. Roadwork and foundation work for the turbines would be started next summer.

Due to the project's proximity to the National Park Service's Appalachian Trail, which crosses Roundtop Mountain (elevation 2,240 feet) to the north of Stewart Mountain (elevation 2,673 feet), Gardiner said they've also been talking with officials from the Maine Appalachian Trail Club.

The club maintains the national trail from the east side of Route 26 in Newry to the northern terminus atop Mount Katahdin in Baxter State Park.

He said that only a few turbines will be visible from Bigelow's Avery Peak, elevation 4,088 feet.

"You've really got to get up high to see this project," Gardiner said, due to wooded terrain. "Most of the turbines are beyond the (NPS) eight-mile limit for visual impact."

Appalachian Trail hikers heading west from Long Falls Dam Road and topping the first open ledges of Little Bigelow Mountain, which is 4½ miles from the nearest turbine planned for Stewart Mountain, will see a few turbines.

"But they will not have that big of a scenic distraction," Gardiner said.

The closest camps located within a mile of the Highland project are owned by Greg Perkins and Dan Bell.

On Thursday, Gardiner said there was no opposition to the project, but Perkins, who attended Thursday night's meeting, said by e-mail on Friday morning that he and two others are against it.

"Maybe two or three more on the fence, and the rest can't wait for the development to take place in order to lower their taxes," Perkins said.

He criticized Gardiner for not advising him or Bell about the meeting, but Gardiner said it wasn't his place to do that.

Gardiner said Highland officials notified every voting resident by letter, but it isn't clear if camp owners are considered voting residents, because Highland officials were not available Friday.

Issues discussed Thursday night included wind subsidies; jobs; threatened and endangered species such as the northern bog lemming, a salamander, Bicknell's Thrush and the Roaring Brook mayfly; bald eagles; project financing; and tangible benefits like free electricity.

As with the Roxbury project, Gardiner said a possibility exists for jobs for area workers, but only for small chunks of money.

He said that of the four threatened or endangered species, the project won't affect lemmings or salamanders because they live only in ridge bogs and those areas are being purposely avoided.

Gardiner said their survey found no Bicknell's Thrushes atop the ridges, the mayfly is only in one stream that the access road crosses, and the closest eagles are about eight miles away.

Gardiner also said they can't yet discuss financing until they get permits, but they are open to discussing possible tangible benefits.

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

PUC OKs First Wind contract to supply CMP, Bangor Hydro

2009-10-12T07:19:00.000-07:00

By Nick Sambides Jr.
BDN Staff

A subsidiary of the state’s largest wind power manufacturer will get Maine’s first long-term electricity supply contract for its proposed 60-megawatt Rollins Mountain project in Penobscot County, officials said this week.

The Maine Public Utilities Commission unanimously approved awarding the 20-year contract to First Wind Holding LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Evergreen Wind Power III LLC, on Wednesday, state officials said.

While a state permit allowing construction of the project, which has yet to attract investors, has been appealed by a group opposing the wind farm, proponents are optimistic that the contract will help secure investors in the project.

“This is good news for ratepayers and renewable energy development in Maine,” commission Chairwoman Sharon Reishus said in a statement.

“The First Wind contract makes it possible for Maine ratepayers to gain energy supply cost benefits from a renewable energy resource, and the company gets the financial assurance the contract provides to become fully operational,” Reishus added.

The contract is the first long-term deal approved since the state restructured its electric utilities in 2000. The state Legislature gave the commission authority in 2006 to create long-term electric generation contracts in order to bring cost benefits to Maine ratepayers, officials said.

Those contracts were supposed to lower electricity supply costs for Maine consumers, increase renewable capacity, hedge against market prices of electricity, offset costs resulting from new transmission and provide a lower cost alternative to new transmission investment.

The commission directed Central Maine Power Co. and Bangor Hydro-Electric Co. to share the contract in an 80-20 split with CMP securing the larger portion, officials said. The decision will be final with completion of the written order.

While First Wind has been awarded the contract, a state permit allowing the Rollins Wind project — a proposed 40-turbine, $130 million industrial wind site for the Rollins Mountain ridgelines in Burlington, Lee, Lincoln and Winn — is being appealed in Superior Court by the Friends of Lincoln Lakes, a residents’ group.

Moreover, the project lacks an investor to pay for its construction. The project has no set construction or start-up date and might not occur at all if the Friends group wins its appeal, said John Lamontagne, First Wind’s spokesman.

“The contract is triggered by the commissioning of the project,” Lamontagne said Wednesday.

However, the securing of the contract will help First Wind draw investors to the project, he said.

“It allows us to secure project financing because of the certainty of the sale of the power once the project is built,” Lamontagne said.

The Maine Department of Environmental Protection issued First Wind of Massachusetts a permit for the Rollins Mountain project in April. Individual towns and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have also issued permits.

Proponents have praised First Wind as a conscientious creator of wind power, saying the Lincoln Lakes project would create as much as 60 megawatts of pollution-free electricity in peak winds.

The Friends group contends that the turbines would lower land values and threaten human and animal health with light flicker and low-decibel sound, disrupt the pastoral nature of Rollins and typically generate a fraction of their capacity.

The group argued its case to the DEP, but the agency largely dismissed the complaints for lack of evidence.

It would typically take nine months to a year to build a project like the one proposed for Rollins Mountain, Lamontagne said.

First Wind to present plans

2009-10-12T07:16:00.000-07:00

By Eileen M. Adams, Staff Writer
Published: Oct 12, 2009 12:00 am

RUMFORD – Several representatives from First Wind LLC plan to attend a public forum on a proposed wind farm for three Rumford mountains.

Karl Aromaa, a member of the Wind Farm Development Committee, said Matt Kearn of First Wind and several others will make a presentation on the proposal at 6 p.m. Oct. 13 at Mountain Valley High School.

Travis Small, a spokesman for First Wind, said tentative plans call for building between 14 and 15 turbines that would generate a total of about 40 megawatts of electricity.

Along with Kearn several contractors familiar with wind turbine construction as well as other associates of First Wind will also be in attendance.

Aromaa announced the forum recently. At that time, a panel of people largely opposed to local wind farm development were the sole participants. He had said that the community knew very little about the proposal and that he had hoped that both sides of the issue would be represented.

Among the other participants are Albert Aniel, Tom Powell, Steve Thurston, Lisa Linowes and J. Dwight.

First Wind LLC, located in Newton, Mass., has dozens of wind farm projects in various stages of planning or construction in the Northeast and West.

The Rumford project is tentatively planned for Black, North Twin and South Twin mountains.

eadams@sunjournal.com

Our Three Bombs

2009-10-09T09:01:00.000-07:00

NY Times

OP-ED COLUMNIST

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: October 6, 2009

I am a 56-year-old baby boomer, and looking around today it’s very clear that my generation had it easy: We grew up in the shadow of just one bomb — the nuclear bomb. That is, in our day, it seemed as if there was just one big threat that could trigger a nonlinear, 180-degree change in the trajectory of our lives: the Soviets hitting us with a nuke. My girls are not so lucky.

Today’s youth are growing up in the shadow of three bombs — any one of which could go off at any time and set in motion a truly nonlinear, radical change in the trajectory of their lives.

The first, of course, is still the nuclear threat, which, for my generation, basically came from just one seemingly rational enemy, the Soviet Union, with which we shared a doctrine of mutual assured destruction. Today, the nuclear threat can be delivered by all kinds of states or terrorists, including suicidal jihadists for whom mutual assured destruction is a delight, not a deterrent.

But there are now two other bombs our children have hanging over them: the debt bomb and the climate bomb.

As we continue to build up carbon in the atmosphere to unprecedented levels, we never know when the next emitted carbon molecule will tip over some ecosystem and trigger a nonlinear climate event — like melting the Siberian tundra and releasing all of its methane, or drying up the Amazon or melting all the sea ice in the North Pole in summer. And when one ecosystem collapses, it can trigger unpredictable changes in others that could alter our whole world.

The same is true with America’s debt bomb. To recover from the Great Recession, we’ve had to go even deeper into debt. One need only look at today’s record-setting price of gold, in a period of deflation, to know that a lot of people are worried that our next dollar of debt — unbalanced by spending cuts or new tax revenues — will trigger a nonlinear move out of the dollar and torpedo the U.S. currency.

If people lose confidence in the dollar, we could enter a feedback loop, as with the climate, whereby the sinking dollar forces up interest rates, which raises the long-term cost of servicing our already massive debt, which adds to the deficit projections, which further undermines the dollar. If the world is unwilling to finance our deficits, except at much higher rates of interest, it would surely diminish our government’s ability to make public investments and just as surely diminish our children’s standard of living.

Unfortunately, too many conservatives, who would never risk emitting so much debt that it would tank the dollar, will blithely tell you on carbon: “Emit all you want. Don’t worry. It’s all a hoax.” And too many liberals, who would never risk emitting too much carbon, will tell you on emitting more debt: “Spend away. We’ve got plenty of room to stimulate without risking the dollar.”

Because of this divide, our government has not been able to put in place the long-term policies needed to guard against detonating our mounting debt bomb and climate bomb. As such, we’re in effect putting our kids’ future in the hands of the two most merciless forces on the planet: the Market and Mother Nature.

As the environmentalist Rob Watson likes to say, “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics.” That’s all she is. You can’t spin her; you can’t sweet-talk her. You can’t say, “Hey, Mother Nature, we’re having a bad recession, could you take a year off?” No, she’s going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate, based on the amount of carbon we put in the atmosphere, and as Watson likes to add: “Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats a thousand.”

Ditto the market. The market is just a second-by-second snapshot of the balance between greed and fear. You can’t spin it or sweet-talk it. And you never know when that balance between greed and fear on the dollar is going to tip over into fear in a nonlinear way.

That is why I was heartened to see the liberal Center for American Progress stating last week that, while the stimulus is vital to rescuing our economy, the size of projected budget deficits demand that we also start thinking about broad-based tax increases and reductions in some spending and entitlement programs supported by liberals. I am equally heartened when I see Republicans like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger urging his party to start taking climate change seriously.

But we also need to act. If we don’t, we will be leaving our children to the tender mercies of the Market and Mother Nature alone to shape their futures.

This moment reminds me of an image John Holdren, the president’s science adviser, uses when discussing the threat of climate change, but it also applies to the dollar: “We’re driving in a car with bad brakes in a fog and heading for a cliff. We know for sure that cliff is out there. We just don’t know exactly where it is. Prudence would suggest that we should start putting on the brakes.”

Baldacci touts wind potential

2009-10-09T08:56:00.000-07:00

By Kevin Miller

BDN Staff

AUGUSTA, Maine — Gov. John Baldacci and a national energy expert on Tuesday touted Maine’s capacity to become a major producer of wind power and manufacturing jobs as the nation shifts to greener sources of energy.
But just outside the wind energy conference where the two men spoke, several dozen protesters accused the Baldacci administration and wind power companies of ignoring the impacts that the enormous turbines can have on the health and property values of nearby residents as well as on wildlife.

The Maine Wind Energy Conference brought together about 300 representatives of government agencies, nonprofits and energy-related businesses at the Augusta Civic Center. The event was sponsored by the Maine Small Wind Working Group and about a dozen other partners.

During his opening remarks, Baldacci said he and other participants on a recent wind power-related trade mission to Europe came back energized after seeing examples and hearing ideas that could be replicated in Maine.

In addition to expanding green energy production, Maine is well positioned to tap into its manufacturing know-how, such as in the ship-building industry, to construct turbines, blades and other components locally, Baldacci said. Maine is also working to be a national leader in the development of floating offshore wind turbines that can be deployed in the deep waters of the Gulf of Maine, where the vast majority of the state’s best wind resources are located.

“This opportunity isn’t going to come along very often,” Baldacci said. “We have got to work together, and that means the people who don’t like what we are doing and the people who criticize what is being done. Everybody needs to be heard from and to be able to have participatory debate and discussion. But we need to take action.”

Wind power facilities in Maine have the capacity to generate about 100 megawatts of electricity, although actual production is often much less due to the inconsistency of winds. While a leader in New England, Maine is well behind states like Minnesota and Iowa that can already generate up to 10 percent of their power from wind.

State officials have set a goal of generating at least 2,000 megawatts of wind energy from inland and offshore sources in Maine by 2015. If all of the wind projects under construction and in development were actually built, Maine would be nearly 43 percent of the way toward that goal, according to figures supplied by the Governor’s Office of Energy Independence and Security.

Larry Flowers, principal project leader at the federal government’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Wind Powering America Program, said 26 states currently have more than 100 megawatts of wind energy installed and nine states have more than 1,000 megawatts.

The most successful states have the policies, economics, political leadership and transmission infrastructure in place. As the nation prepares to address climate change — potentially through a cap-and-trade system that forces industries to pay for each ton of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide that is emitted — wind energy could become the cheapest form of energy.

Flowers said wind energy is now economically competitive with other new energy sources being installed due to the cost of pollution controls and future uncertainty over the price of fossil fuels. “Wind is fully competitive with most markets of new generation of traditional sources,” he said. Conference attendees didn’t have to travel far to hear from critics of where some of the wind farms have been built and proposed in Maine.

Among the protesters gathered outside the Civic Center was Steve Bennett, who lives 2,900 feet from one of three turbines built by Beaver Ridge Wind LLC in Freedom.

Bennett said the sun causes a “flicker” from the spinning blades that, in turn, creates a strobe effect inside the kitchen of his 200-year-old home. The strobe effect and appearance of movement is strong enough to make some people feel ill, he said.

Neighbors living even closer to the turbines, some of whom have young children, are reporting problems sleeping at night due to the noise and vibrations from the blades, he said.

He and other protesters accused wind energy companies of reaping large profits by taking advantage of small towns unprepared to deal with the large projects. They also accused the Baldacci administration of pushing wind power projects through a regulatory review process that they claim is steeply tilted in the industry’s favor.

“I am here today because what has happened to us is wrong, and I don’t want to see it happen to other towns,” Bennett said.

Jonathan Carter with the Forest Ecology Network said all of the protesters are “absolutely supportive” of wind power.

“We recognize it is critical to dealing with the catastrophic impacts of climate change,” Carter said. “The problem is they are not being driven by ecological sense. It is being driven by greed.”

Wind meeting draws planners, marchers

2009-10-09T08:55:00.000-07:00

The 300 attendees at the first statewide wind power conference get a national perspective on the trend.

By MATT WICKENHEISER, Staff Writer
October 7, 2009

Andy Molloy/Kennebec Journal

AUGUSTA — The nation is increasingly looking to wind for new power generation and Maine has a role to play, an official with the U.S. Department of Energy's National Wind Technology Center said Tuesday.

Larry Flowers, national technical director of Wind Power America at the center, spoke to about 300 people at Maine's first statewide wind power conference, at the Augusta Civic Center.

Flowers, Gov. John Baldacci and others addressed the group at the beginning of the day, laying out national trends and where Maine fits in. In the afternoon, attendees sat in on sessions ranging from wind power generation for cities and towns to energy transmission issues in Maine.

Outside, about 40 people protested Maine's wind power projects and the current regulatory process.

Flowers said that in 1999, four states were using wind power on a "serious" level: Minnesota, Iowa, Texas and California. This year, 26 states have more than 100 megawatts of generation installed, Flowers said, and nine have more than 1,000 megawatts installed.

In the next few days, when the Kibby Mountain project's turbines start turning, Maine will have 170 megawatts installed. The state has a goal of producing 2,000 megawatts from wind by 2015, and 3,000 megawatts by 2020.

Flowers said that, nationally, 28,000 megawatts of wind power generation has been installed. Two states produce at least 10 percent of their power from wind, he said – Iowa at 13.3 percent, and Minnesota at 10.4 percent.

Nationally, 1.8 percent of the country's power comes from wind. The national goal, said Flowers, is to hit 20 percent by 2030.

Baldacci returned recently from a wind power trade mission to Spain, Germany and Norway. He talked about his visit to the world's first deep-water offshore wind turbine, which was installed this summer in the North Sea about six miles off the coast of Norway.

"It was an engineering marvel, but we can do that here," Baldacci said. "We're going to be part of the national energy solution."

Maine people and businesses are starting to look at producing wind turbines in the state, and generating power here instead of importing it, Baldacci said.

He spoke about the importance of energy independence, as well. "We've been through too many contrived (oil) shortages, real or imagined, that are outside of our control," Baldacci said.

He acknowledged the protesters who began to gather outside the civic center about 10 a.m.

"Everybody needs to be heard from," he said, "but we need to take action."

Outside, Steve Bennett of Freedom displayed a picture of his 200-year-old home with a year-old wind turbine looming in the background. There are three 400-foot turbines around his home, part of the Beaver Ridge wind project.

The one in the picture is 2,900 feet from his home, Bennett said. He said he is unhappy with the project and thinks wind technology isn't worth the expense to the government in the form of credits, tax breaks, grants and other subsidies.

Asked for other options for power, he said, "Nuclear – we know it works, and we know it's safe. Hydro, if we want green."

He said there are 12 other homes around the Beaver Ridge project, and 15 young children who are bothered by the turbines. From October to February, the angle of the sun contributes to a strobe effect from the turbine blades, he said, with quick shadows passing over his house.

"If I were susceptible to those types of things, I think I'd freak out," Bennett said.

Other protesters carried signs decrying big business, such as "Big Wind Equals Big Corruption."

Former Green Party gubernatorial candidate Jonathan Carter, executive director of the Forest Ecology Network, said the protesters aren't against wind power per se, but are unhappy with the state process used to locate wind farms to date.

The welfare of people and the environment hasn't been considered, Carter said, and decision-makers, including some environmental groups, are willing to sacrifice "ecological integrity" for wind development.

"I would strongly disagree with that," said Dylan Voorhees, energy project director for the Natural Resources Council of Maine, when asked later about Carter's comments.

Voorhees, one of the main presenters of the conference, pointed to reliance on fossil fuels, and particularly the practice of mountaintop mining for coal in the United States, and said, "We need better choices."

The presence of environmental protesters outside, and environmental supporters inside, demonstrated the intricacy of the wind power debate.

While there's broad agreement in the environmental community about the perils of fossil fuels, wind as a renewable resource doesn't enjoy full support.

The National Resources Council of Maine has actively supported each of the current sites for wind power in the state, said Voorhees. That includes the sites being protested Tuesday.

"We don't want to see wind power developed on the Allagash," he said. "What that means is, we need to put wind power where there's development."

Staff Writer Matt Wickenheiser can be contacted at 791-6316 or at: mwickenheiser@pressherald.com

State purchases system to route school buses

2009-10-09T08:21:00.000-07:00

Note: I recommended that my school district consider software similar to this over two decades ago. Simple use of a branch of mathematics known as Methods in Operations Research.

10/7/09

By Rich Hewitt
BDN Staff

AUGUSTA, Maine — The Maine Department of Education has signed a contract with two out-of-state companies for software that will help school districts design and manage student transportation systems.

The five-year, $1.3 million contract with Core Education and Consulting Solutions of Atlanta and Transfinder Corp. of Schenectady, N.Y., will provide school districts in Maine with a way to tailor their transportation systems to meet their specific needs, a move that should reduce transportation costs, according to Education Department spokesman David Connerty-Marin.

The Education Department will cover the costs involved and will make the program available to all school districts throughout the state. The $1.3 million includes the startup costs and maintenance over the five-year period, and will save money for districts that have used transportation software systems in the past and have had to pay those yearly fees, he said. The contract also calls for two two-year extensions.

The idea grew out of the school district reorganization plan, Connerty-Marin said, as a way to help districts that had reorganized deal with transportation in the new, larger districts. Using the new system to design more efficient bus routes also should help save districts money on transportation costs, he said.

“Reorganization was all about finding ways to streamline operations,” he said. “This is a huge one.”

Core will manage the project and develop a Web-enabled platform, or secure Web site, where school districts can tap into Transfinder’s software for student routing and transportation.

There will be no cost to the districts, nor will they have to install new software.

“One of the requirements of the contract was that the state didn’t want the districts to have to install software from us,” said Jay Worth, vice president for technology at Transfinder. “The state did a very good job at developing the requirements for this project. They were looking out for the school districts.”

One of the benefits of this system, according to Connerty-Marin, is that Transfinder’s software can be linked to the student data management software school districts already are using. School districts will be able to use that student information with the new system to design bus routes based on individual parameters they want to set. The savings are expected to come from the more efficient bus routes, which should reduce costs for buses, maintenance and drivers, he said.

“The state is enabling districts to connect to a statewide Web-enabled software solution for their routing and transportation needs at no cost,” said Rick Soules, the Education Department’s state transportation director. “This will eliminate the costly and time-consuming efforts by local school units in procuring the same technology from a variety of vendors.”

The system will be run in 10 pilot sites around the state this fall and should be ready to be rolled out next year. Among the pilot sites are school districts in Bethel, Presque Isle, Fairfield, Berwick, Bridgton, Saco and Farmington.

According to Connerty-Marin, the pilot sites include districts that have not used transportation software systems before, some who have used Transfinder’s system and others that have used similar software systems.

“By the time we’re done we should have adapted to all the scenarios we’ll run into,” he said.

Districts that choose to use the system likely will work on it during the spring and implement it for the 2010 school year, Connerty-Marin said.

Federal stimulus funds help pay for new, cleaner marine engines

2009-10-09T08:19:00.000-07:00

by Hanna Wheeler

Jason Witham, captain of the 40-foot Siren, stands between his old engine, on the left, and his new engine. Hanna Wheeler
Old diesel engines in 40 boats will be replaced, thanks to a program run by the state Department of Environmental Protection.

One of the first fishermen to replace his boat's engine through this program is Jason Witham, captain of the 40-foot Siren, out of Tenants Harbor. "Without this opportunity, I would not have been able to put a newer, cleaner engine in my boat," Witham said.

Billings Marine is replacing Witham's old 692 Detroit Diesel (which used about 50 to 55 gallons of diesel per day) with a new Caterpillar C9 (which will use about 30 gallons per day).

The program, funded by the federal stimulus program, covers half the cost of the engine and installation. Witham says he'll save about $20,000 of the $43,000 it would take to purchase and install the new engine.

The state Department of Environmental Protection is distributing $1.2 million through its clean marine engine program.

Some 330 qualifying applications for the program were submitted. Of those, 40 were accepted, including 30 lobster boats, four fishing vessels, a schooner, an aquaculture boat, the island-service boat Sunbeam, and three island ferries: Cranberry Island's Island Queen, Monhegan's Elizabeth Ann, and the Isle Au Haut ferry.

This program is the first of its kind. "Maine's program will serve as a national model for the benefits of repowering commercial marine vessels," said DEP Commissioner David Littell, in a press release.

Julie Eaton, a lobsterman from Deer Isle, says her husband, Sidney Eaton, will be able to replace his boat's engine through the program. "It takes so much weight off our shoulders," she said. "It's like winning the lottery." The program will also benefit the community, she said, since money invested in such upgrades circulates through marine businesses and local merchants. "It affects everybody," she said.

The DEP is working with the Maine Marine Trades Association and the Harvard School of Public Health to administer this program. The public health school is monitoring lobstermen's exposure to diesel exhaust before and after the engines are replaces, according to a press release.

In addition to paying for 50 percent of the cost of the engine and installation, the program pays 100 percent of the cost for exhaust controls that include pollution control devices, such as oxidation catalysts or systems that control crankcase emissions.

The DEP is accepting new applications and re-applications for a second round of funding. The deadline is November 1. See www.maine.gov/dep/air/mobile/clean_marine.htm or call 287-7599 for more information.

Hanna Wheeler is the communications coordinator Maine Lobstermen's Association. Working Waterfront Editor David A. Tyler also contributed to this article.

Staying warm this winter shouldn't break the bank

2009-10-09T08:17:00.000-07:00

Relief will be less dramatic in the Northeast because heating fuel is expected to see only a modest decline.

The Associated Press
October 7, 2009

WASHINGTON — Staying warm won't be quite as expensive this winter.

People who heat with natural gas should do especially well, seeing their lowest bills in five years. But no matter what fuel is used, heating costs are expected to take less of a bite out of household budgets in the coming months – from $20 to as much as $280 lower than last winter depending on what fuel is used, the government says.

An expected milder winter, along with lower fuel costs, should cut average residential heating expenditures by 8 percent from last year, the Energy Information Administration said in its annual winter outlook on Tuesday.

The nearly 58 million households that use natural gas stand to save about $105 compared with last year, and propane users will get an even bigger break – as much as $280. More modest reductions, $20 to $60, are expected for people who use electricity or fuel oil to heat their homes.

The federal agency, which keeps track of energy statistics and trends, cautioned that its projections are overall averages based on broadly expected weather conditions and fuel supply and cost trends. How much a family actually spends also will depend on local weather, the size and energy efficiency of their home and the efficiency of furnaces and other heating equipment.

But generally the news is good for consumers already hammered by the economic downturn and possibly worried about keeping jobs.

According to the EIA, households are expected to pay an average of $783, nearly 12 percent less than last winter, for natural gas, and $1,821 for heating oil, about 2 percent lower. People using electric heat will pay about $933, a decline of 2 percent, and those using propane $1,667, a 14 percent drop.

Natural gas prices have been on the decline because of a drop in demand caused by the sliding economy and because of hefty supplies. The EIA expects a record high of more than 3.8 trillion cubic feet of gas in storage by the end of this month. The wholesale price of natural gas has been around $3 per thousand cubic feet, roughly half of what it was a year ago.

About half of all households depend on natural gas for heating, especially in the Midwest where seven in 10 homes use the fuel. People in the Midwest also are expected to benefit from a milder winter, compared to last year, and see natural gas bills 15 percent lower than last year, the agency said.

The nearly 8 million households that use heating oil, primarily in the Northeast, can expect to save an average $40 to $60 compared to last winter. The agency said residential heating oil prices in the Northeast are expected to average $2.64 a gallon this winter, just two cents cheaper than last winter but a significant drop from the average $3.31 a gallon of two winters ago.

The biggest savings will be seen by the 6.2 million households that use propane, an average of $280 this winter for a decline of 14 percent. Propane users in the Midwest are expected to save as much as 21 percent compared to last winter because of a combination of lower fuel prices and milder weather, the agency said.

About 39 million, or 35 percent, rely on electricity, especially across the South and in the Pacific Northwest. The EIA said on average these households will save about $20 this winter, compared to last, although costs vary depending on what fuel is used to generate the power. Residential heating with electricity is growing at a rate of 2.5 percent a year, faster than any other major heating source, the report said.

The report covers the winter period from October through March. It also said:

• Gasoline prices are expected to hit a national average of $2.44 a gallon by the end of the year, then increase next year to an average of $2.62.

• Crude oil prices are likely to average about $70 a barrel through the winter period, and global petroleum consumption is expected to increase by about 1.1 million barrels a day in 2010 as the economy strengthens.

• U.S. crude oil production is expected to increase slightly next year to 5.34 million barrels a day.

• While a 5.9 percent decline in carbon dioxide emissions is projected for this year compared to 2008, mainly because of the declining economy, carbon dioxide pollution will again be on the rise next year. The EIA projects an increase of 1.1 percent in 2010.

Carbon dioxide is the leading greenhouse gas linked to climate change.

$20M GRANT TO MAINE’S SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS INITIATIVE'S TO BE DISCUSSED BY CHARLES S. COLGAN

2009-10-09T06:43:00.001-07:00

$20M GRANT TO MAINE’S SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS INITIATIVE'S TO BE DISCUSSED BY CHARLES S. COLGAN

SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITY

DATE: October 22, 2009
TIME:
7:30 am - Registration and networking

8:10 am - 9 am - Presentation with Q & A
LOCATION:
Maine Audubon Educational Center

20 Gilsland Farm Road
Falmouth, Maine 04105

DETAILS

$20M for Maine’s Sustainable Solutions Initiative

Charles S. Colgan, Professor of Public Policy, Muskie School of Public Service, University of Southern Maine, will describe the work to be completed under the recently awarded $20M National Science Foundation EPSCOR (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) grant for a wide-ranging new project called the Sustainability Solutions Initiative, a partnership between the University of Maine, the University of Southern Maine, and other institutions seeking to transform Maine's capacity for addressing scientific challenges in ways that can directly benefit Maine and other regions.

EPSCOR is a federal program directed at states that have historically received smaller portions of federal research and development funding. The program provides states with financial support to develop partnerships between their higher education institutions, industry, government, and others to affect lasting improvements in infrastructure, capacity, and national competitiveness. Maine EPSCOR at the University of Maine is responsible for administering and implementing the NSF EPSCOR program for the state.

Several Maine businesses and communities, understanding that they are being transformed by changes in the global economy, rising energy costs, and a realization that a healthy environment is needed for long-term prosperity, have joined the Sustainability Solutions Initiative as Business Partners to learn sustainable practices in order to survive and thrive. Professor Colgan will discuss how the EPSCOR award might impact E2Tech members.

Charles S. Colgan is Professor of Public Policy and Management in the Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine. He is Chair of the Muskie School’s Graduate Program in Community Planning and Development and is Associate Director of the USM Center for Business and Economic Research. His regular economic analysis activities include being the Maine Model Manager for the New England Economic Project and Chair of the State of Maine Consensus Economic Forecasting Commission. His long term economic forecasts are used by the Maine Department of Transportation and the Economic Development Districts of Maine.

Prior to joining the University of Southern Maine, he served with the Maine State Planning Office in the administrations of Governors James Longley, Joseph Brennan, and John McKernan. His state government positions included State Economist, Director of Natural Resource and Economic Policy, and Special Assistant to the Governor for International Trade Policy. He also served as Director of Research for the Finance Authority of Maine.

He received his B.A. from Colby College in 1971, did graduate studies in international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, and received his Ph.D. in economic history from the University of Maine in 1992.

This forum starts at 7:30 AM with a continental breakfast and networking.

Please register in advance and pay by credit card at www.e2tech.org.

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Your logo on the E2Tech website and on all outgoing event-specific email notifications to E2Tech members and supporters. Typically, there are four email notifications per event received by more than 600 individuals.
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Special recognition during the forum, and if desired, an opportunity for literature, signage, and a small booth at the forum.
Those interested in sponsorship of the September 24 forum should please contact Sam Townsend at 207-767-5283 or at director@e2tech.org.

Lee named to energy board

2009-10-09T06:34:00.000-07:00

By Staff Report

Published: Oct 09, 2009 1:11 am

LEWISTON — Local businessman Adam Lee has been appointed to the board of the Energy and Carbon Savings Trust, which is in charge of distributing money to energy efficiency projects in Maine.

Sharon Reishus, chairwoman of the Maine Public Utilities Commission, announced the appointment Thursday.

The three-member trust allocates funds produced by the auction of carbon allowances under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, according to a PUC press release. Since its implementation in September 2008, RGGI has generated about $13.5 million.

Lee, who has served as the president of Lee Auto Mall since 1997, also serves as chairman of the recently-formed Efficiency Maine Trust.

Maine approves long-term deal with First Wind

2009-10-09T06:33:00.000-07:00

BY THE MAINEBIZ NEWS STAFF

Oct. 7, 2009

Maine's utility commission today approved a 20-year electricity supply contract with First Wind, the first long-term contract the state has committed to since it deregulated the electricity industry in 2000.

The Maine Public Utilities Commission has reached a deal with First Wind Holdings LLC, a subsidiary of Evergreen Wind Power III LLC, for electricity generated at the company's $130 million, 60-megawatt Rollins Mountain wind farm in Penobscot County, according to a press release from the PUC. No dollar figure can be attached to the contract until it is signed, which is expected to occur next week, Evelyn deFrees, a PUC spokesperson, told Mainebiz.

According to the contract, Central Maine Power Co. will receive 80% of the electricity and Bangor Hydro Electric will receive 20%. The deal will lower energy costs for consumers, increase renewable energy capacity and offset new transmission costs, according to the release. "The First Wind contract makes it possible for Maine ratepayers to gain energy supply cost benefits from a renewable energy resource, and the company gets the financial assurance the contract provides to become fully operational," said PUC Chair Sharon Reishus in the release. In a separate release, First Wind said the agreement "will provide protection against the fluctuating prices of power produced by fossil fuels."

This is the state's first long-term supply contract since deregulation in 2000, and since the Legislature gave approval to the PUC in 2006 to develop long-term energy contracts. The PUC issued a request for proposals for contracts in December 2008 and received the first proposals in April 2009, according to the release. The commission is still considering other proposals it has received, deFrees said.

Massachusetts-based First Wind operates wind farms in northern and Down East Maine under various Evergreen subsidiaries, and earlier this year received approval from the Department of Environmental Protection to build the Rollins Mountain wind farm, which is planned for ridgelines in Burlington, Lee, Lincoln and Winn. Construction is expected to start by the fall of 2010, and the farm will produce enough electricity to power about 23,000 homes, according to First Wind.

States Have the Wind at Their Backs in the Offshore Debate

2009-10-08T10:26:00.000-07:00

NY Times
October 8, 2009

By EVAN LEHMANN of ClimateWire

Eastern states advanced their commitment this week to quell the fierce competition around building the nation's first offshore wind farm and cooperate toward creating and pushing a web of ocean-based turbine facilities.

States from Maine to Maryland are exploring ways to share potential infrastructure, like strings of underwater transmission lines, and know-how about siting, permitting and building fields of turbines off their coastlines.

The states met in New Jersey early this week for a clean energy summit, and participants said a main theme emerged: An offshore industry will be created more quickly if they act as a team. That could mean more jobs, local energy in a region that is reliant on borrowed power, and cost savings for a fleet of facilities on the outer continental shelf.

"The states in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions want to be the captains of their own clean energy future," said Mark Sinclair, executive director of the Clean Energy Group, a nonprofit that promotes state renewable power initiatives.

"They don't want transmission to be built from the Great Plains that then dictate that they have to purchase wind and coal from the Midwest," he added. "They realize if they are going to avoid that kind of national transmission approach they need to tap resources in this region, and do it soon."

Discussions ventured into rarely visited territory, including the idea that several states could act together to require utilities to buy offshore wind electricity, Sinclair said. That could raise demand for wind power. States might also coordinate public financing efforts, such as feed-in tariffs and production tax credits, that could spark economic interest in offshore wind, he added.

States seek simplicity to soothe industry nerves

The team effort is meant in part to convince Washington that the states can be a big player in offshore wind, even as the federal government continues to plod through its effort to permit the first such project: Cape Wind, the proposed 130-turbine wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts.

The states have plunged forward on several projects, and they don't want the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service and other agencies to slow down their progress with duplicative requirements, or by opening up sections of the seafloor that states have identified for turbine projects to new competitive bidding.

Developers of offshore wind farms are also "very concerned" that federal bidding -- after state acceptance -- could undercut a lot of expensive work that companies have done to identify sites and comply with state rules, said Laurie Jodziewicz, an offshore wind expert with the American Wind Energy Association.

"It's a difficult process already," she added. "It's very complex to get an offshore wind project [approved], and we don't have any here in the United States yet. So people are very nervous about making something that is that complex even more complex."

MMS established rules on offshore wind earlier this year. It's unclear how the agency will proceed with federal bidding, so some states and industry participants want MMS to formally acknowledge the standings of existing state decisions. New Jersey, Delaware and other states, all of which preside over the seafloor up to 3 miles from their shores, are moving forward with offshore proposals. But they need MMS to issue ocean leases, which give developers the right to build facilities between 3 miles and 200 miles from shore.

Wind is the 'secret' to East Coast power

The states want to shave off the time it takes to build the projects, so they can meet renewable power standards, build manufacturing plants and beat other nations to the punch on offshore wind. They think that can happen if states join forces to do the legwork around the impacts on birds, bats, marine life, boaters, planes and other issues.

"If there's any way -- and I'm not suggesting that there may be -- if there's any way by collaborating and by coming into certain areas with a clear and consistent voice so that perhaps MMS wouldn't have to, on certain issues, consult with every state individually ... if we could help them up front by doing that, by coming to some agreement, then maybe that could make that time period a little bit shorter," said Greg Watson, the top clean energy consultant for Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D).

Several states are moving forward with projects. Massachusetts recently gave final approval to Cape Wind. Delaware chose Bluewater Wind for a proposed 450-megawatt facility. New Jersey is working with several developers on a 350-megawatt plan. And Rhode Island, Maryland, New York and other states are pushing ahead, too.

Maine, meanwhile, is choosing five sites to test deepwater technologies, like various types of floating turbines. One version would bob in the water like a buoy, fastened to the seafloor with guy lines.

All of the plans are meant to make the East, which currently imports much of its power, more able to generate its own electricity. Unlike the West, the densely populated strip along the East Coast has relatively little vacant land upon which to site wind farms. Plus, the region's strongest and most reliable winds blow offshore, putting this energy source relatively close to major cities.

"Offshore wind in some ways is the secret to energy independence in the mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states," said Sinclair of the Clean Energy Group.

Copyright 2009 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

For more news on energy and the environment, visit www.climatewire.net.

Moore’s Law and the Law of More

2009-04-26T17:26:00.000-07:00

NY Times

April 26, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

It is not an exaggeration to say that the team that President Obama appointed to promote his green agenda is nothing short of outstanding — a great combination of scientists and policy makers committed to building an energy economy that is efficient, clean and secure. Now there is only one vacancy left for him to fill. And it’s one that only he can fill: Green President. Is he ready to do that job with the passion and fight that will be required to transform America’s energy future? Hope so. Not sure yet.

Have no doubt, the president is off to a terrific start: His stimulus package will provide an incredible boost for all forms of renewable energy. The energy bill being drafted by House Democrats Henry Waxman and Ed Markey contains unprecedented incentives for energy efficiency and clean-tech innovation. And the ruling from Mr. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency saying that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that threatens public health was courageous and historic.

But while all of that is hugely important, we must not fool ourselves, as we have done for so many years: Price matters. Without a fixed, long-term, durable price on carbon, none of the Obama clean-tech initiatives will achieve the scale needed to have an impact on climate change or make America the leader it must be in the next great industrial revolution: E.T., or energy technology. At this stage, I’d settle for any carbon price mechanism — cap and trade, fee-bates, carbon tax and/or gasoline tax — as long as it real and provides consumers and investors a long-term incentive to shift to clean cars, appliances and buildings.

Bob Lutz, a vice chairman at General Motors, offers a useful example of why price matters. When Congress demands that Detroit make smaller, lighter, better mileage vehicles, but then refuses to put a higher price on carbon — like with a gasoline tax — so more consumers will want to buy these smaller cars, said Lutz, it is the equivalent of ordering all American shirtmakers to make only size smalls while never asking the American people to go on a diet. You’re not going to sell a lot of size smalls.

Have no doubt: From right-wing tea parties to coal states to manufacturers, there is going to be a no-holds-barred campaign to kill any carbon price signal, including cap and trade. A vast army of lobbyists is already working against it. Only President Obama can blunt this. Only he has the platform for framing and elevating the issue properly and taking it to the American people with the passion and clarity needed to move the country. It will take more than one speech.

Here’s one way to start: “My fellow Americans, I want to speak to you about a new economic law. You’ve heard of Moore’s Law in information technology. I’d like to speak to you about the ‘Law of More’ in energy technology. Americans, Indians, Chinese, Africans, we all want more — more comfort in our homes, more mobility in our lives, more technologies with which to innovate. But there is only one way all 6.3 billion of us can have more and not make this an unlivable planet, and that is by living our lives and running our businesses in more sustainable ways and properly accounting for it.

“Right now we’re paying a huge price — a tax — for everyone trying to achieve more in an unsustainable way. But the ‘More Tax’ is not imposed by the U.S. government. It is a tax imposed by the market and will continue rising indefinitely as more and more people want more and more stuff. It will steadily drive up gasoline prices, home heating prices and factory electricity prices. But because this ‘More Tax’ is set by the market and not the government, many opponents contend that there’s nothing to be done: ‘Oh, $4.50 a gallon gasoline — that’s just the market at work. We can’t do anything about that.’ And then all that tax money out of your pocket goes to enrich oil companies and petro-dictators.

“My proposal is that today we fix a durable price on carbon-based fossil fuels, but set it to begin only in 2011, after we’re out of this recession. Every home builder, air-conditioning manufacturer, gasoline refiner, carmaker will know that it’s coming and will, I believe, immediately look for ways to profit from and invest in more energy efficient systems. Yes, the cost of gasoline or kilowatt hours will rise in the short term. But in the long term, your actual bills and expenses will go down because your car, appliances and factory will become steadily more productive and give you more power for less energy.

“I call it the ‘Carbon Tax Cut.’ You won’t receive the dividend in the first week or month, but you will get it soon, and it will be a permanent tax cut, a gift that will keep on giving.

“So those are our choices, folks — an escalating ‘More Tax’ forever, premised on immediate gratification and short-term thinking, or a ‘Carbon Tax Cut’ forever, which is exactly what you’ll get from establishing a carbon price signal that shapes the market in favor of American interests and not those of our adversaries and competitors. If you’re with me, write your member of Congress and senator today.”

(No) Drill, Baby, Drill

2009-04-12T07:34:00.000-07:00

NY Times

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: April 11, 2009

Sailing down Costa Rica’s Tempisque River on an eco-tour, I watched a crocodile devour a brown bass with one gulp. It took only a few seconds. The croc’s head emerged from the muddy waters near the bank with the footlong fish writhing in its jaws. He crunched it a couple of times with razor-sharp teeth and then, with just the slightest flip of his snout, swallowed the fish whole. Never saw that before.

These days, visitors can still see amazing biodiversity all over Costa Rica — more than 25 percent of the country is protected area — thanks to a unique system it set up to preserve its cornucopia of plants and animals. Many countries could learn a lot from this system.

More than any nation I’ve ever visited, Costa Rica is insisting that economic growth and environmentalism work together. It has created a holistic strategy to think about growth, one that demands that everything gets counted. So if a chemical factory sells tons of fertilizer but pollutes a river — or a farm sells bananas but destroys a carbon-absorbing and species-preserving forest — this is not honest growth. You have to pay for using nature. It is called “payment for environmental services” — nobody gets to treat climate, water, coral, fish and forests as free anymore.

The process began in the 1990s when Costa Rica, which sits at the intersection of two continents and two oceans, came to fully appreciate its incredible bounty of biodiversity — and that its economic future lay in protecting it. So it did something no country has ever done: It put energy, environment, mines and water all under one minister.

“In Costa Rica, the minister of environment sets the policy for energy, mines, water and natural resources,” explained Carlos M. Rodríguez, who served in that post from 2002 to 2006. In most countries, he noted, “ministers of environment are marginalized.” They are viewed as people who try to lock things away, not as people who create value. Their job is to fight energy ministers who just want to drill for cheap oil.

But when Costa Rica put one minister in charge of energy and environment, “it created a very different way of thinking about how to solve problems,” said Rodríguez, now a regional vice president for Conservation International. “The environment sector was able to influence the energy choices by saying: ‘Look, if you want cheap energy, the cheapest energy in the long-run is renewable energy. So let’s not think just about the next six months; let’s think out 25 years.’ ”

As a result, Costa Rica hugely invested in hydro-electric power, wind and geo-thermal, and today it gets more than 95 percent of its energy from these renewables. In 1985, it was 50 percent hydro, 50 percent oil. More interesting, Costa Rica discovered its own oil five years ago but decided to ban drilling — so as not to pollute its politics or environment! What country bans oil drilling?

Rodríguez also helped to pioneer the idea that in a country like Costa Rica, dependent on tourism and agriculture, the services provided by ecosystems were important drivers of growth and had to be paid for. Right now, most countries fail to account for the “externalities” of various economic activities. So when a factory, farmer or power plant pollutes the air or the river, destroys a wetland, depletes a fish stock or silts a river — making the water no longer usable — that cost is never added to your electric bill or to the price of your shoes.

Costa Rica took the view that landowners who keep their forests intact and their rivers clean should be paid, because the forests maintained the watersheds and kept the rivers free of silt — and that benefited dam owners, fishermen, farmers and eco-tour companies downstream. The forests also absorbed carbon.

To pay for these environmental services, in 1997 Costa Rica imposed a tax on carbon emissions — 3.5 percent of the market value of fossil fuels — which goes into a national forest fund to pay indigenous communities for protecting the forests around them. And the country imposed a water tax whereby major water users — hydro-electric dams, farmers and drinking water providers — had to pay villagers upstream to keep their rivers pristine. “We now have 7,000 beneficiaries of water and carbon taxes,” said Rodríguez. “It has become a major source of income for poor people. It has also enabled Costa Rica to actually reverse deforestation. We now have twice the amount of forest as 20 years ago.”

As we debate a new energy future, we need to remember that nature provides this incredible range of economic services — from carbon-fixation to water filtration to natural beauty for tourism. If government policies don’t recognize those services and pay the people who sustain nature’s ability to provide them, things go haywire. We end up impoverishing both nature and people. Worse, we start racking up a bill in the form of climate-changing greenhouse gases, petro-dictatorships and bio-diversity loss that gets charged on our kids’ Visa cards to be paid by them later. Well, later is over. Later is when it will be too late.

Oil Giants Loath to Follow Obama’s Green Lead

2009-04-08T12:59:00.001-07:00

NY Times

April 8, 2009

By JAD MOUAWAD

The Obama administration wants to reduce oil consumption, increase renewable energy supplies and cut carbon dioxide emissions in the most ambitious transformation of energy policy in a generation.

But the world’s oil giants are not convinced that it will work. Even as Washington goes into a frenzy over energy, many of the oil companies are staying on the sidelines, balking at investing in new technologies favored by the president, or even straying from commitments they had already made.

Royal Dutch Shell said last month that it would freeze its research and investments in wind, solar and hydrogen power, and focus its alternative energy efforts on biofuels. The company had already sold much of its solar business and pulled out of a project last year to build the largest offshore wind farm, near London.

BP, a company that has spent nine years saying it was moving “beyond petroleum,” has been getting back to petroleum since 2007, paring back its renewable program. And American oil companies, which all along have been more skeptical of alternative energy than their European counterparts, are studiously ignoring the new messages coming from Washington.

“In my view, nothing has really changed,” Rex W. Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, said after the election of President Obama.

“We don’t oppose alternative energy sources and the development of those. But to hang the future of the country’s energy on those alternatives alone belies reality of their size and scale.”

The administration wants to spend $150 billion over the next decade to create what it calls “a clean energy future.” Its plan would aim to diversify the nation’s energy sources by encouraging more renewables, and it would reduce oil consumption and cut carbon emissions from fossil fuels.

The oil companies have frequently run advertisements expressing their interest in new forms of energy, but their actual investments have belied the marketing claims. The great bulk of their investments goes to traditional petroleum resources, including carbon-intensive energy sources like tar sands and natural gas from shale, while alternative investments account for a tiny fraction of their spending. So far, that has changed little under the Obama administration.

“The scale of their alternative investments is so mind-numbingly small that it’s hard to find them,” said Nathanael Greene, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “These companies don’t feel they have to be on the leading edge of this stuff.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, most investments in alternative sources of energy are coming from pockets other than those of the oil companies.

In the last 15 years, the top five oil companies have spent around $5 billion to develop sources of renewable energy, according to Michael Eckhart, president of the American Council on Renewable Energy, an industry trade group. This represents only 10 percent of the roughly $50 billion funneled into the clean-energy sector by venture capital funds and corporate investors during that period, he said.

“Big Oil does not consider renewable energy to be a mainstream business,” Mr. Eckhart said. “It’s a side business for them.”

Shell, for example, said it spent $1.7 billion since 2004 on alternative projects. That amount is dwarfed by the $87 billion it spent over the same period on its oil and gas projects around the world. This year, the company’s overall capital spending is set at $31 billion, most of it for the development of fossil fuels.

Industry executives contend that comparing investments in oil and gas projects with their research efforts in the renewable field is misleading. They say that while renewable fuels are needed, they are still at an early stage of development, and petroleum will remain the dominant source of energy for decades.

In its long-term forecast, Exxon says that by 2050, hydrocarbons — including oil, gas, and coal — will account for 80 percent of the world’s energy supplies, about the same as today.

“Renewable energy is very real,” David J. O’Reilly, the chief executive of Chevron, said in a speech in New York last November. “We need it. It will be an essential part of the future I envision. But it’s not realistic to suppose we can replace conventional energy in a timeframe that some suggest.”

Chevron has spent about $3.2 billion since 2002 on “renewable and alternative energy and energy efficiency services,” according to Alexander Yelland, a spokesman. It plans to spend $2.7 billion in the three years through 2011 on a variety of projects, including a business that helps improve energy efficiency for companies and government agencies, he said.

Despite Washington’s newfound green enthusiasm, industry executives argue that replacing any significant part of the fossil fuel business will take decades, at best. Just to keep up with growth in demand for conventional sources of energy, producers will need to invest more than $1 trillion each year from now to 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.

“Many of these companies see the world is changing,” said Daniel Yergin, the chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and a historian of the industry. “But the challenge for a very large company is to get critical scale. People tend to forget the scale of the energy business.”

The world consumes about 85 million barrels of oil a day. The United States alone would require six times its arable land — and 75 percent of the world’s cultivated land — to supply its needs with ethanol made from corn, according to calculations by Vaclav Smil, an energy expert at the University of Manitoba.

More realistic, and modest, targets are proving tough to reach. Congress’s ethanol mandate, which requires oil companies to use 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2020, cannot be achieved, experts say, without major technological advances that are still years away.

To increase supplies, most companies are looking to tar sands in Canada or converting coal or natural gas into liquid fuels, technologies that emit far more carbon dioxide than conventional oil does.

Shell, a major investor in Alberta in Canada, says that traditional oil supplies will not be enough to meet the growth in the world’s energy needs over the next half-century. In 2007, BP invested in Canadian tar sands, prompting criticism that it was “recarbonizing” itself.

John M. Deutch, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former director of central intelligence, said there was little point in criticizing oil companies without first establishing federal rules that set a price on carbon dioxide emissions. Once that happens, he said, companies will adapt their strategies.

“What role will oil companies play in the future in alternatives to conventional hydrocarbon? The correct answer is nobody knows,” Mr. Deutch said. “The important thing is for the government to establish a carbon policy. You can be absolutely confident that oil companies will pursue that, as will any other companies.”

One area where companies are increasingly focused is the development of liquid fuels from plants. BP said it would soon build a demonstration plant in Florida for a type of ethanol made from plant material; Shell has worked with several firms since 2002 to develop ethanol from nonfood crops. Last year, it signed agreements with six companies, including one in Brazil, and decided to drop its other renewable efforts to focus solely on biofuels.

“Biofuels feels closest to our core business,” said Darci Sinclair, a company spokeswoman.

Other areas also hold significant promise for the industry, like technologies to capture carbon dioxide emissions and store them underground, and energy-efficiency programs, especially in the transportation sector. Exxon, long the most skeptical of the oil companies toward alternative energy investments, is working on long-term programs to improve fuel economy and reduce emissions.

In the end, many analysts say they believe that oil companies are waiting for a winning technology to emerge. Alan Shaw, the chief executive of Codexis, a biotechnology company in Silicon Valley that works with Shell, said oil companies were not blind to the new political reality but they were also in the business of making a profit.

“Don’t lose heart with Big Oil,” Mr. Shaw said. “They aren’t at a point where they are ready to invest yet, but they are getting there. I think in the next 10 years, they will invest hundreds of times more than they have in the past 10 years.”

Experts discuss solar energy in Unity

2009-04-08T10:22:00.000-07:00

Bangor Daily News

By George Chappell
BDN Staff

UNITY, Maine — Eighty-six percent of houses in Maine do not meet minimum housing efficiency standards, a state energy official told about 50 people gathered for a discussion of solar thermal energy at the Unity Community Center on Monday evening.

“Maine has the oldest housing stock in the nation, and the highest dependency on foreign oil. A lot of the houses are not insulated, and most are underinsulated,” Richard Fortier, commercial energy auditor and program manager for Efficiency Maine’s solar rebate program, told the group. He was citing a recent energy efficiency survey of homes in Maine.

“This state is in a lot of trouble, energywise,” Fortier said.

Efficiency Maine is a program intended to address the issue of energy efficiency in Maine homes by promoting the more efficient use of electricity, helping Maine residents and businesses reduce energy costs and improving Maine's environment, according to the program’s Web site. It is funded by electricity consumers and ad-ministered by the Maine Public Utilities Commission.

For more than two hours Monday night Fortier and Bob Hussey, president of Solar Tech Inc. in Waterville, gave details and answered questions on the use of solar thermal energy for hot water, solar air for heating and solar photovoltaic as a power source.

A few in the audience already had installed their systems and had come looking for refinements.

“This was a savvy audience,” Hussey said after the meeting, “more savvy than most.”

Fortier said Efficiency Maine is going to look at energy efficiency for fossil fuels — gas, propane and oil — and electricity and develop programs to help commercial and industrial users to help them reduce costs.

The Maine State Housing Authority takes care of low-cost housing energy needs to make homes more efficient, he said.

“Maine State Housing has dealt with everybody of low income, and left everyone else to their own devices,” Fortier said. “We’ll be working on programs that will help weatherize homes for people in the middle and upper income stratas.”

Efficiency Maine also plans to train business leaders how to operate efficiently, he said of the proposed two-pronged attempt to reduce energy costs in a community.

“Everybody wants wind [power] or geothermal,” Fortier said. “Geothermal, solar and wind power solutions have been around for many years, but they present many snags unless someone really understands the industry.”

He said solar energy is the most cost-effective energy for the investment.

Hussey talked about the ratings and sizes of solar panels and urged people to have an energy audit to understand the payback period of an investment.

“The larger the panel you have, the less cost per panel for energy,” he said.

Hussey explained that there are two kinds of panels: the evacuated tube panel, which is more effective but twice as expensive as the other kind, the more common flat-plate panel that usually rests on a roof.

Urging people to shop around for the best and most effective panels and contractors, he referred the audience to a solar rating and certification organization at www.solar-rating.org.

Hussey recommended looking at two other Web sites for information and ideas: www.homepower.com, Home Power Magazine, and www.motherjones.com, Mother Jones Magazine, for tips on solar energy construction.

Tess Woods, executive director of Unity Barnraisers, also provided background information on the community’s concerns for efficient fuel use. The group began “Neighbor Warming Neighbor” last fall, in which more than 60 volunteers weatherized 34 homes and provided weatherization materials for another 32 homes, Woods said.

George Chappell may be reached at 236-4598 or at gchap@gwi.net.

Entrepreneur: Solar better than plan for power lines

2009-04-08T10:19:00.001-07:00

Sun Journal

By Scott Taylor , Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 8, 2009

LEWISTON - Solar power could be an alternative to Central Maine Power Co.'s proposed $1.5 billion expansion program, councilors were told Tuesday

Energy consultant Mark Isaacson of Competitive Energy Solutions in Portland outlined his plan for a distributed solar grid that could supply electrical power to Lewiston during peak times - just like CMP's expansion program.

The difference, Isaacson said, is that solar energy makes sense for the future.

"The (CMP) power reliability program is based on 1960s assumptions and technology," Isaacson said. "But a lot has changed and those assumptions are outdated."

According to Isaacson, communities in Central Maine would get electrical solar panels at sites around their communities. Each farm site would be able to generate up to two megawatts of electrical power, and up to 500 megawatts for the entire community.

That electrical power would be used to bolster the existing electrical grid during high demand periods, especially during hot summer days when people are using air conditioners.

"What we find is that the high electrical demand periods and the high solar electrical generation periods are about the same time - when the sun is hottest," Isaacson said.

Each community solar grid would have smaller natural gas or propane powered generators as a backup. Together, it would make CMP's Maine Power Reliability Program unnecessary, he said.

CMP's proposal calls for upgrading a nearly 40-year-old swath of power lines. The lines start south in Eliot and pass through central Maine in Litchfield, Monmouth, Leeds, Greene, Lewiston and a corner of Auburn at the Durham line. They stop in Orrington, where they connect to lines from Canada.

It's designed to make sure there is enough electricity for Central Maine's growing communities, Isaacson said.

He vowed to beat CMP's price, saying the solar grid utility would agree to sell electricity for three cents per kilowatt-hour. The market rate is currently between eight and 12 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Tuesday's presentation was one of several Isaacson is making to cities, towns and businesses in the area. He hopes to take the proposal to the Maine Public Utilities Commission later this year.

Councilors were skeptical, especially of the price.

"I just find it hard to believe that you would be able to sell us electricity below the market rate," Councilor Bob Reed said. "I'm an accountant, and something about this just doesn't make sense."

Show Us The Ball

2009-04-08T09:43:00.000-07:00

NY Times

OP-ED COLUMNIST

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: April 7, 2009

I am really encouraged by President Obama’s commitment to clean energy and combating climate change. I just have three worries: whether he has the right policies, the right politics and the right official to sell his program to the country. Other than that, things look great!

Last week, House Democrats, with administration support, introduced a 600-page draft bill on energy and climate. At the center of it is a plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions through a complicated cap-and-trade system. These people have the very best of intentions, but I wish they would step back and ask again: Can cap-and-trade pass? Will it really work? And is it the best strategy, with all the bureaucracy it will require to monitor, auction emissions permits and manage the trading?

Advocates of cap-and-trade argue that it is preferable to a simple carbon tax because it fixes a national cap on carbon emissions and it “hides the ball” — it doesn’t use the word “tax” — even though it amounts to one. So it can get through Congress. That was true as long as no one thought cap-and-trade could ever pass, but now that it might under Mr. Obama, opponents are not playing hide the ball anymore.

In the past two weeks, you could hear a chorus of Republicans, coal-state Democrats, right-wing think tanks and enviro-skeptics all singing the same tune: “Cap-and-trade is a tax. Obama is going to raise your taxes and sacrifice U.S. jobs to combat this global-warming charade, which many scientists think is nonsense. Worse, cap-and-trade will be managed by Wall Street. If you liked credit-default swaps, you’re going to love carbon-offset swaps.”

Some of the refrains from this song have a very catchy appeal. They could easily kill this effort. So, if the Obama team cares about the “ends” of a stronger America and a more livable planet, as much as the “means,” I hope it will consider an alternative strategy, message and messenger.

STRATEGY Since the opponents of cap-and-trade are going to pillory it as a tax anyway, why not go for the real thing — a simple, transparent, economy-wide carbon tax?

Representative John B. Larson, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, has circulated a draft bill that would impose “a per-unit tax on the carbon-dioxide content of fossil fuels, beginning at a rate of $15 per metric ton of CO2 and increasing by $10 each year.” The bill sets a goal, rather than a cap, on emissions at 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050, and if the goal for the first five years is not met, the tax automatically increases by an additional $5 per metric ton. The bill implements a fee on carbon-intensive imports, as well, to press China to follow suit. Larson would use most of the income to reduce people’s payroll taxes: We tax your carbon sins and un-tax your payroll wins.

People get that — and simplicity matters. Americans will be willing to pay a tax for their children to be less threatened, breathe cleaner air and live in a more sustainable world with a stronger America. They are much less likely to support a firm in London trading offsets from an electric bill in Boston with a derivatives firm in New York in order to help fund an aluminum smelter in Beijing, which is what cap-and-trade is all about. People won’t support what they can’t explain.

MESSAGE Climate change is a real threat to a healthy planet Earth — the only home we have. But because the worst effects are in the future, many Americans have more immediate concerns. That is why our energy policy should be focused around “American renewal,” not mitigating climate change.

We need a price on carbon because it will stimulate massive innovation in the next great global industry — E.T. — energy technology. In a warming world with huge population growth, clean power systems are going to be in huge demand. The scientific research and innovation needed for America to dominate E.T. the way it did I.T. could be the foundation for a second American industrial revolution, plus it would tip the whole planet onto a greener path. So American economic renewal is the goal, but mitigating climate change would be the great byproduct.

MESSENGER The Obama administration’s carbon tax spokesman — the one who should sell this to the country — should be the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, not the environmentalists. The imposing former head of the Marine Corps could make a powerful case that a carbon tax is vitally necessary to stimulate investments in the clean technologies that would enable the U.S. to dominate E.T., while also shifting consumers to buy these new, more efficient and cleaner power systems, homes and cars.

He could make the case that the country with the most powerful clean-technology industry in the 21st century will have the most energy security, national security, economic security, healthy environment, innovative companies and global respect. That country must be America. So let’s stop hiding the ball and have a strategy, message and messenger that tell it like it is — and make it so.

Wind power generates interest in Sumner

2009-04-03T06:51:00.001-07:00

By Tom Standard , Special to the Sun Journal
Friday, April 3, 2009

SUMNER - A standing-room-only crowd voted Tuesday night to support studying possible development of a wind farm on Mollyockett Mountain.

The Wind Power Committee, chaired by Selectman Mark Silber, and representatives from Kean Project Engineering Inc. of Turner answered questions from about 40 residents.

The meeting was called to gauge the community's attitude toward a possible wind power installation. Silber pointed out that if there is significant opposition to the project, there is no point in the committee and Kean investing more effort and money into the study.

After the discussion, all but one attendee voted in favor of the committee continuing its study of the project. Since the site under study is on town-owned, tax-acquired property, no action can be taken without a formal town meeting, Silber said.

Kean President Kirk Nadeau stressed that his company was interested in a project that has wide community support and would not proceed if there were opposition from residents close enough to see and hear the turbines. He said he is hoping that at least 50 percent and possibly 100 percent of the funds would come from Maine investors.

Questions centered on financing, expected revenue, noise and visual impact.

The project, consisting of three wind turbines with a maximum combined output of 4.9 megawatts, is expected to cost about $8 million and require $1.6 million in cash with the remainder financed.

The base plan is for Kean to do the feasibility study, design, build, operate and maintain the wind farm. Financing and ownership can be through a newly formed limited liability corporation, town ownership or several other options. With available incentives, the payback is expected to be five to seven years.

Depending on the option approved by the town, the town would receive rent, royalties or taxes. If a private company owns the turbines, the taxes would reduce the Sumner tax rate by more than $1 per $1,000 of assessed property.

Nadeau said the noise from the turbines at the nearest home would be less than the normal background noise in a rural community such as Sumner. Noise decreases rapidly with distance from the source, so few, if any residents, should hear the turbines in their homes, he said.

He said that the power generated by the turbines could be greatly increased by placing them on top of the mountain. However, to reduce their visual impact, the hubs will be located below the ridgeline with only the thin blades rising above it. There will be one red strobe light mounted on the center hub.

Silber said he was pleased with the turnout, and the committee will continue studying the project.

Expert touts renewable energy

2009-04-03T06:49:00.000-07:00

Bangor Daily News
April 3, 2009

By Jessica Bloch
BDN Staff

BANGOR — There is hope that eventually consumers will rely on renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power, but it will take an increase in research and development funding and a faster way to develop consumer-ready products, a solar-power expert said Thursday during a University of Maine-sponsored conference on energy.

Larry Kazmerski, director of the National Center for Photovoltaics at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., gave the keynote address to about 200 people at the daylong Haskell Energy Conference at the Hilton Garden Inn.

“There’s no doubt that there’s going to be a lot of money going into renewable energy technology over these next couple of years,” Kazmerski said. “With the stimulus package already out there, those investments are already starting. Part of the [national economy] recovery is based on investment in renewable energy.”

The conference is named after Robert N. Haskell, a 1925 University of Maine graduate who was former president and chairman of the board of Bangor Hydro-Electric Co. He also served in the Maine Senate and Maine House of Representatives.

Kazmerski was a member of the UMaine electrical engineering faculty in the 1970s. During his time at UMaine Kazmerski did groundbreaking research in thin-film photovoltaics for solar panels. Photovoltaic solar panels are designed to absorb sunlight and convert it into usable energy.

He touched on the history and current status of solar power, which is a $35 billion business worldwide. Solar-power companies and interest in solar power was more prevalent in China, Japan and Germany, but the U.S. is starting to catch up.

If solar power is to make a real dent in the energy market, however, R&D funding levels must be increased. In addition, the time gap between lab discovery and consumer-ready product is too long, Kazmerski said.

“It just takes too long right now for almost all the renewables to have some advancement,” he said. “In many cases, it’s 12 to 15 years and we just cannot have that time span between what might happen here in a lab at the University of Maine and when [the product] becomes commercial.”

UMaine also released Thursday a white paper supporting the implementation of a Maine Smart Grid, or MSG, which is an effort to modernize electricity transmission and encourage economic development. All the major Maine electric utility companies, including Central Maine Power Co., Bangor Hydro-Electric Co., Maine Public Service Co. and Eastern Maine Electric Cooperative have announced their intention to participate.

UMaine is seeking funding for development of a Maine Smart Grid Center for research and technical training.

Other speakers Thursday addressed Maine’s role in renewable energy issues in New England, and advances in wind energy and tidal energy.

Mother Nature’s Dow

2009-03-29T05:08:00.000-07:00

NY Times

March 29, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

While I’m convinced that our current financial crisis is the product of both The Market and Mother Nature hitting the wall at once — telling us we need to grow in more sustainable ways — some might ask this: We know when the market hits a wall. It shows up in red numbers on the Dow. But Mother Nature doesn’t have a Dow. What makes you think she’s hitting a wall, too? And even if she is: Who cares? When my 401(k) is collapsing, it’s hard to worry about my sea level rising.

It’s true, Mother Nature doesn’t tell us with one simple number how she’s feeling. But if you follow climate science, what has been striking is how insistently some of the world’s best scientists have been warning — in just the past few months — that climate change is happening faster and will bring bigger changes quicker than we anticipated just a few years ago. Indeed, if Mother Nature had a Dow, you could say that it, too, has been breaking into new (scientific) lows.

Consider just two recent articles:

The Washington Post reported on Feb. 1, that “the pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said. ‘We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations,’ Christopher Field, director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said.”

The physicist and climate expert Joe Romm recently noted on his blog, climateprogress.org, that in January, M.I.T.’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change quietly updated its Integrated Global System Model that tracks and predicts climate change from 1861 to 2100. Its revised projection indicates that if we stick with business as usual, in terms of carbon-dioxide emissions, average surface temperatures on Earth by 2100 will hit levels far beyond anything humans have ever experienced.

“In our more recent global model simulations,” explained M.I.T., “the ocean heat-uptake is slower than previously estimated, the ocean uptake of carbon is weaker, feedbacks from the land system as temperature rises are stronger, cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases over the century are higher, and offsetting cooling from aerosol emissions is lower. Not one of these effects is very strong on its own, and even adding each separately together would not fully explain the higher temperatures. [But,] rather than interacting additively, these different effects appear to interact multiplicatively, with feedbacks among the contributing factors, leading to the surprisingly large increase in the chance of much higher temperatures.”

What to do? It would be nice to say, “Hey, Mother Nature, we’re having a credit crisis, could you take a couple years off?” But as the environmental consultant Rob Watson likes to say, “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics,” and she is going to do whatever they dictate. You can’t sweet talk Mother Nature or the market. You have to change the economics to affect the Dow and the chemistry, biology and physics to affect Mother Nature.

That’s why we need a climate bailout along with our economic bailout. Hal Harvey is the C.E.O. of a new $1 billion foundation, ClimateWorks, set up to accelerate the policy changes that can avoid climate catastrophe by taking climate policies from where they are working the best to the places where they are needed the most.

“There are five policies that can help us win the energy-climate battle, and each has been proven somewhere,” Harvey explained. First, building codes: California’s energy-efficient building and appliance codes now save Californians $6 billion per year,” he said. Second, better vehicle fuel-efficiency standards: “The European Union’s fuel-efficiency fleet average for new cars now stands at 41 miles per gallon, and is rising steadily,” he added.

Third, we need a national renewable portfolio standard, mandating that power utilities produce 15 or 20 percent of their energy from renewables by 2020. Right now, only about half our states have these. “Whenever utilities are required to purchase electricity from renewable sources,” said Harvey, “clean energy booms.” (See Germany’s solar business or Texas’s wind power.)

The fourth is decoupling — the program begun in California that turns the utility business on its head. Under decoupling, power utilities make money by helping homeowners save energy rather than by encouraging them to consume it. “Finally,” said Harvey, “we need a price on carbon.” Polluting the atmosphere can’t be free.

These are the pillars of a climate bailout. Yes, some have upfront costs. But all of them would pay long-term dividends, because they would foster massive U.S. innovation in new clean technologies that would stimulate the real Dow and much lower emissions that would stimulate the Climate Dow.

Wind farm proposed for Carthage

2009-03-27T04:30:00.000-07:00

By Eileen M. Adams , Staff Writer
Saturday, March 21, 2009

CARTHAGE - This small Franklin County town is the latest site for possible wind turbine development. If constructed, the project would more than double the valuation of the town.

Todd Presson, chief operating officer for Patriot Renewables, a Quincy, Mass.-based company, said at least 12 turbines capable of producing about one-and-a-half megawatts each, are in the early planning stages. The company has an option to buy about 1,000 acres for siting the 400-foot turbines.

He said a meteorological tower was erected on Saddleback Ridge in the north central part of the town in October.

Another six or seven towers could also be built on an adjacent 300 acres owned by the town, Presson said.

First Selectman Steve Brown said residents voted in 2001 to preserve that acreage in its natural state.

If Patriot Renewables leased the property to build additional turbines, Brown said the town would receive royalties.

To change the status of the land requires a vote by residents, he said.

On Monday, about 60 residents turned out at the town office to hear a presentation by Presson and two other representatives from the company on their plans.

He said the company plans to meet with the Department of Environmental Protection within the next couple of weeks to discuss the spring bird migration season.

Because the town does not have ordinances governing structures such as turbines, the permitting process will be done through the state.

Residents, however, will have a chance to learn about the project every step of the way.

Presson said a visit to a completed wind farm in the Waldo County town of Freedom is being organized for sometime in the next couple of weeks for Carthage residents who would like to learn more about the impact of turbines. That recently completed project is comprised of three turbines.

Anyone interested in joining the tour should contact the Carthage town office.

Presson said another public meeting will be scheduled sometime after the field visit and a decision by residents on whether to lease the town's 300 acres on Saddleback Ridge.

Patriot Renewables is also in the early stages of planning a six- to 12-turbine project in Woodstock along Spruce Mountain.

Presson said if all permits go according to hopes, construction on both the Carthage and Woodstock wind farms could begin in 2010.

Electricity produced would be sold to the New England grid.

Brown said the current value of the town is $26 million. If the turbines are built, that could more than double.

Other area wind farm projects in various stages of planning include Black Mountain in Rumford and a site in Roxbury.

Climate proposals feel a bit of a chill

2009-03-27T04:26:00.000-07:00

State House: The recession and a split vote on a minor bill raise fears that global warming policies may stall.

By JOHN RICHARDSON, Staff Writer
March 23, 2009
Maine's Legislature will soon take up some landmark proposals to combat climate change, starting with a public hearing Tuesday.

If the bills pass, developers could face new anti-sprawl limits on construction in rural areas and fees for the right to cut down trees. Passage also would ensure that Maine's Legislature remains one of the most aggressive in the nation when it comes to addressing climate change.

The bills, coming in the midst of a deep recession, are sure to test the state's commitment to the issue. And a preliminary vote last week suggests lawmakers may be losing their appetite for new climate policies.

The Legislature's Natural Resources Committee surprised observers when it supported the creation of a new climate-change planning group in an 8-5 vote that split along party lines. Democrats voted for it, and Republicans against.

This legislation was supposed to be the easy one.

"We didn't think that was a controversial bill," said David Littell, commissioner of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. "It's frankly a bad foreboding for how things might go this session."

The split vote creates a measure of doubt about the bill's fate and will at least delay the group's initial meeting. If global warming becomes a partisan issue in Augusta, some advocates fear, the more ambitious efforts to slow global warming could be in trouble.

"I didn't see it (climate change) as a partisan issue here," said Sen. Deborah Simpson, D-Auburn, sponsor of the bill.

In past years, the committee has generally given bipartisan support to climate legislation, including participation in the nation's first carbon dioxide cap-and-trade system.

And, Simpson said, her bill didn't ask lawmakers to take a stand on what is causing warming or how to stop it, only to plan for it so that roads, for example, aren't washed away by coastal flooding as sea levels rise.

"We need to make some kind of long-term strategy," Simpson said. "That (vote) was weird. There was nobody that opposed it. It doesn't cost any money."

Sen. Doug Smith, R-Dover-Foxcroft, who sits on the Natural Resources Committee and voted against the bill, said he agrees that planning makes sense.

"The substance of what they were proposing to do was not of great concern, but there were some procedural aspects that were of concern," he said. "There's a concern on the part of many people that when the Legislature (creates) a stakeholder group that it's buying into the underlying idea behind the stakeholder group."

Smith said the vote was not a sign of a new partisan split on climate change or a decision by Republicans to oppose climate legislation in general. But he also said Republicans are generally more reluctant to take big regulatory steps, given the costs and remaining questions about the science.

Although there is no doubt climate change is happening, "there are those who are not entirely convinced that human activity is entirely at fault in creating current climate change," Smith said.

"Everybody in the Legislature realizes that there is a certain state commitment to do what is reasonable to deal with climate change and to be prepared for climate change," he said. "But I think there are questions beyond that about how much cost should we build into the economy."

Ray Sirois, a Republican climate-change activist from Harrison, said the vote on a planning study was disappointing.

"This is not the kind of thing that's healthy for Republicans to be opposing, in my opinion," he said. "The fact of the matter is that even in the most optimistic scenarios, we're looking at damage to our infrastructure.
"This is not something that should be a partisan issue. It's an issue that's affecting all species, Republicans and Democrats."

Simpson's resolve to create the planning group could reach the floor of the Legislature this week. Because of the split committee vote, it is now likely to undergo some floor debate. Although it is still expected to pass, the doubt created by the split vote caused the DEP to postpone an organizational meeting of the new group from April to May.

In the meantime, at least three more controversial proposals related to climate change are taking shape in the State House. The first of those bills will be presented to the Natural Resources Committee at a public hearing Tuesday at the State House.

It would make Maine one of the first states to take into account greenhouse-gas emissions when issuing state permits for large development projects. Massachusetts has a similar policy, and California requires municipal governments to consider global-warming impacts as part of their land-use planning.

The proposed Maine law would go a step further, authorizing the state to charge greenhouse-gas compensation on large developments. A developer who cuts down an acre of forest, for example, could be required to pay a corresponding fee that would be used to promote energy efficiency.

A similar, but broader, proposal being drafted by conservation groups would also require the state to consider climate-change impacts in other laws and planning activities.

A third bill related to climate change – and clearly one of the most controversial proposals – could require state-permitted development projects covering 20 acres or more to be located within locally designated growth areas or where there already are sewers.

The proposal, which also has yet to be finalized and printed, is intended to slow sprawl, which contributes to global warming by encouraging the cutting of trees and increasing car travel, among other things.

Smith, the Republican senator, said he already has been hearing a lot of opposition to the anti-sprawl bill.

And although Republicans aren't necessarily opposed to climate-change legislation, there is a lot of concern about new regulation, especially in light of the poor economy, he said.

Chris Jackson, a lobbyist for the Maine State Chamber of Commerce, said the business community shares the Republicans' concern about adding regulation, especially now.

"You want to be mindful of the fact that the economy is struggling out there, and if we don't have to put up unnecessary hurdles that employers have to clear, I think we should avoid those," he said.

The chamber didn't take a position on the climate-change planning group, which would include business representatives as members. Jackson said time will tell if the vote is a sign of a new partisan split on global warming.

"It's early yet," he said, "and the most contentious issues haven't really been dealt with."

Staff Writer John Richardson can be contacted at 791-6324 or at:

jrichardson@pressherald.com

Copyright © 2009 Blethen Maine Newspapers

FREEDOM Wind-turbine firm wants tax shelter

2009-03-27T04:00:00.001-07:00

Kennebec Journal

FREEDOM -- A consulting firm will propose a tax-increment financing zone for representing Beaver Ridge Wind during a meeting tonight.
Selectman Ron Price said Tuesday that the select board and the public alike will be able to comment on the proposals. The meeting in the basement of the Freedom Congregational Church begins at 6.

Price said that Eaton Peabody of Augusta has put together TIF plans on behalf of the town.

The company built three 400-foot energy-generating turbines last year on Beaver Ridge, on land it leased from Price.

"They're going to make a proposal with several different scenarios as to how it could be beneficial to the town," Price said.

TIFs are tax shelters that protect communities from valuation. The communities, in turn, provide a certain portion of the tax rebates to developers that bring in jobs. Often, town or cities offer TIFs to attract companies to locate there, in the interest of economic development.

Last summer, following a lengthy process, Beaver Ridge got the go-ahead to build its wind turbines. Residents voted 159-112 to reject a commercial-development review ordinance that might have hampered the company's plans to build the turbines.

Opponents of the turbines complained that they would disrupt the scenery and quiet of the rural lifestyle.

Mat Eddy, executive director of the Eaton Peabody Consultants Group, will make tonight's presentation.

"I will be speaking on behalf of the town, to work them through the thought process of the TIF, whether it serves the town's interests, the developer's interests or both interests," he said.

Eddy said communities and developers normally split TIF tax rebates in a range of 40 to 60 percent, either way.

"This is a little unusual in that the turbines are already in place," he said. "Usually, the TIF proposal happens before the development takes place."

Beaver Ridge Wind's turbines have a value of about $10 million, Eddy said. Over each year of the 30-year period of the TIF, he said, the town might realize $170,000 in reimbursed taxes.

Eaton Peabody would help the town and the company negotiate how to split that money, Eddy said.

The town must use its share for economic development, such as revolving loans for new businesses or road construction, Eddy said.

Larry Grard -- 861-9239

lgrard@centralmaine.com

Home-Grown Power

2009-03-09T05:32:00.000-07:00

NY Times

March 7, 2009
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

By IAN BOWLES
Boston

PRESIDENT Obama has laid out an ambitious agenda for dealing with our energy needs and climate change: he proposes to double the supply of renewable energy within three years, establish a cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions and use federal stimulus dollars to help homes, businesses and governments use energy more efficiently. This is the right blueprint for increasing the number of green jobs, encouraging economic growth, ensuring that the United States has the energy it needs at reasonable prices, and reducing the risk of global climate change.

But as Congress translates this grand plan into legislation, lawmakers should resist calls to add an extensive and costly new transmission system that would carry electricity from remote areas like Texas, the Great Plains and Eastern Canada to places with high energy demands like Boston, Chicago and New York. This idea is being promoted by energy companies and by elected officials who see it as an economic development opportunity for their particular state or region. Long-distance transmission lines are needed, they argue, to ensure that the president’s energy goals are met.

But there are better — and cheaper — ways to get more clean power flowing to the big cities.

Renewable energy resources are found all across the country; they don’t need to be harnessed from just one place. In the Northwest, the largest amount of green power comes from hydroelectricity. In the Northeast, the best source may be the wind over the ocean, because it blows harder and more consistently there than on land. Offshore wind farms have been proposed for Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island. In the Southwest, solar energy can be tapped on a large scale. And in the Southeast, biomass from forests may one day be a major source of sustainable power. In each area, developing these power sources would be cheaper than piping in clean energy from thousands of miles away.

Unlike our federal highway system, which is needed to transport goods across the country, or the “information superhighway” of the Internet, which is the fastest way to carry information around the world, long-distance transmission lines have no inherent value. On the contrary, the farther electricity is transported, the more of it is dissipated. “Line loss,” as this is called, gobbles up an estimated 2 percent to 3 percent of electricity nationally.

And of course, the longer the power line, the more expensive it is to build. In New England, we estimate the cost per mile at $2 million to $10 million. The closer electricity is generated to where it’s used, the better.

Another component of President Obama’s clean energy vision is the creation of a smarter power grid. But that has little to do with high capacity transmission lines that carry electricity in bulk over hundreds of miles. Building a “smart grid” means upgrading the local grid from a simple delivery system to an information system that can let consumers know the times when power is cheapest, thus enabling them to adjust their use to save money. This flattens out electricity loads and minimizes periods of peak demand. Smart grids will also be able to identify and fix power failures instantly, and someday may even send signals to specific household appliances like thermostats, washing machines and refrigerators to switch them on when demand is low or turn them off during times of peak energy use.

The cost of building transmission lines to connect new power plants to the grid ought to be covered the way we cover it in the Northeast, by folding it into the price of the power that the lines deliver. That allows the market to help keep prices as low as possible.

In Massachusetts, we get about 5 percent of our power from hydroelectric plants in Quebec. Our distribution utilities are negotiating to install a second transmission line for Canadian hydropower, which would be paid for through long-term power-purchase contracts approved by the New England states whose residents use that power. Developers of remote wind-power farms in eastern Canada have said they would also like to sell us electricity, but unless the combined cost of the power they could provide and its transmission is competitive with our other renewable energy choices, their projects won’t get approved. That’s the way it should be.

For a clean energy future, we need a smart grid and we need more renewable energy. The Obama administration is offering welcome support for both. Beyond that, what we need is a level playing field that enables energy providers to compete fairly with one another. The cost of transmission should be incorporated into the overall cost of bringing clean energy to market. Then let the chips fall — and wind turbines rise — where they may.

Ian Bowles is the secretary of energy and environmental affairs for Massachusetts.

Google’s Green Agenda Could Pay Off

2009-01-23T07:35:00.001-08:00

NY Times

October 28, 2008

By MIGUEL HELFT

SAN FRANCISCO — Google, the Internet search and advertising giant, is increasingly looking to the energy sector as a potential business opportunity.

From its beginning, the company has invested millions of dollars in making its own power-hungry data centers more efficient. Its philanthropic arm has made small investments in clean energy technologies.

But in recent weeks, Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, has hinted at the company’s broad interest in the energy business. He also joined Jeffrey R. Immelt, General Electric’s chief executive, to announce that they would collaborate on policies and technologies aimed at improving the electricity grid. The effort could include offering tools for consumers.

Meanwhile, engineers at Google are hoping to unveil soon tools that could help consumers make better decisions about their energy use.

And while the company’s philanthropic unit, Google.org, has invested in clean energy start-ups like one that uses kites to harness wind power, Google is now considering large investments in projects that generate electricity from renewable sources.

“We want to make money, and we want to have impact,” said Dan W. Reicher, director for climate change and energy initiatives at Google.org.

The timing could be off. With a recession looming and oil prices dropping, investors might pressure Google to curtail its clean energy ambitions.

Google’s shares have lost more than half their value in the last year, and some analysts complain that the company has a long history of dabbling in new initiatives with mixed results. It still relies on one business — small text ads that appear next to search results and on other sites — for the bulk of its earnings.

And Google’s online success does not guarantee success in the energy business.

But none of this has deterred Google from going deeper into the alternative energy business. To support its efforts, it has hired a growing number of engineers who are conducting research in renewable energy, former government energy officials, scientists and even a former NASA astronaut, whose hands-on experience with all sorts of electronic gadgets is being put to use to develop energy tools for consumers.

“They are a high-profile actor in the energy field,” said Daniel M. Kammen, a professor in the energy and resources group at the University of California, Berkeley, and an adviser on energy to the Obama campaign. “Google is in the lead in terms of human resources as well as money.”

Last year, Google unveiled an ambitious initiative called RE C, denoting its goal to develop renewable energy that is cheaper than coal. Since then, much of the public focus on the initiative has been in the approximately $45 million in investments that Google.org has made in wind, solar and geothermal energy start-ups.

That effort now also includes a small but growing group of engineers at Google who are conducting their own research and development in those technologies, which Google said it might commercialize in the future.

Google.org also announced a project last year to develop plug-in hybrids. To make them widely available, the electrical grid would have to be upgraded so that cars could be plugged in at multiple locations, where they could be recharged and consumers billed.

Google now says it is interested in developing technologies to support some of those upgrades, as well as other tools at the intersection of energy and information technology, like “smart” electrical meters. The partnership with G.E. is aimed in part at exploring some of those opportunities.

Google has also increased its lobbying in Washington on energy issues. And the company is looking at larger investments in renewable energy projects that would be primarily motivated by their profit potential, not their environmental promise.

How far Google plans to go with its energy efforts, the company does not yet know, or at least is not willing to say.

“We have been debating, ‘What are the business opportunities for Google in this area,’ ” Mr. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said recently. “And I think right now, we would answer the question that our primary mission is one of information.”

Mr. Schmidt said that Google would be active in “information businesses or communications businesses” related to energy. Speaking more broadly about the energy sector, he added, “As to whether we will be in these other businesses, we will see.”

Google is known for stealth. The search engine company kept its advertising ambitions under wraps for years, a strategy that helped it become the dominant tech company in Silicon Valley. And with $14.5 billion in cash in the company’s coffers, it has plenty of resources to keep making further investments in new energy ventures.

Google’s efforts in the energy area remain relatively modest. The company has long said it assigns 70 percent of its resources to its core search and advertising business, another 20 percent to related business, like various Internet applications, and 10 percent to long-term, strategic projects. Its energy work falls in the last group.

But even that may be too much for some investors.

“With the stock cut in half and shareholders becoming increasingly frustrated, a lot of these initiatives are going to be called into question,” said Ross Sandler, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. “Google is a search and advertising company. We are in a belt-tightening period. They should focus on the core business.”

And others still are raising questions about some of the company’s goals.

“The Silicon Valley guys have this idea that we are going to make solar cheaper than coal,” said John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies. “To me that’s the wrong idea. I don’t think it needs to be cheaper than coal to be successful. The focus needs to be on the investment and deployment of the technology.”

Google’s commercial and philanthropic interest in energy emerged, in large part, from the intersection of its idealism and its business goals.

“The issue globally, and particularly in the U.S., is that renewable energy is hard to come by and is expensive,” said William E. Weihl, Google’s green energy director. “But as a competitive business, we can’t afford, anymore than anyone else, to say we are going to pay more.”

Google has gone to great lengths to conceal how much electricity it uses in its data centers. For instance, Google agreed to build a $600 million data center in Oklahoma only after the State Legislature passed a law exempting public utilities from disclosing the energy use of their largest customers. Google has also vowed to be carbon neutral, but unlike its rival Yahoo, for instance, it has refused to reveal its overall carbon emissions.

Google said that its power use was information that could be used by rivals to learn secrets of its operations, which it considered a competitive advantage.

Still, a picture of the scale of its data center operations has emerged through various reports. The company is believed to have about two dozen data centers around the world of various sizes. Some, like the one it built in The Dalles, Ore., which is largely powered by hydroelectricity, are among the largest in the industry. Two people familiar with that facility, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that it was operating at about 50 megawatts — enough to power 37,500 homes — but was built to handle even more capacity.

Google’s desire to better align its idealism and business interests helped motivate the REC project.

“For us to clean our energy supply, we need renewable energy available more broadly and more cheaply than it is today,” Mr. Weihl said.

Google does not maintain a strict divide between the energy work of the corporation and Google.org. A recent status meeting included employees from both sides. Google.org was set up not as a traditional philanthropy, but rather as a Google unit that could profit from its investments and that, unlike traditional nonprofit organizations and foundations, was allowed to lobby.

Google’s business development executives, as well as some company engineers specializing in energy, work with Google.org to make investment decisions. Mr. Reicher, a former assistant secretary of energy for conservation and renewable energy in the Clinton administration, said that Google.org investments were primarily aimed at pushing an environmental agenda. But Google itself is eyeing more capital-intensive projects, including some to generate renewable energy on a commercial scale.

"If we make those investments,” Mr. Reicher said, “it would be largely from a profit motive rather than an impact motive."

Permission to Regulate Gases Is Sought

2009-01-22T13:37:00.000-08:00

NY Times

January 22, 2009

By FELICITY BARRINGER

Mary D. Nichols, California’s chief air pollution regulator, formally requested that Lisa P. Jackson, President Obama’s choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, allow California and 13 other states to start regulating emissions of heat-trapping gases from passenger vehicles by granting the necessary federal waiver. If the Obama administration grants the waiver, these states — and eventually three more that have indicated they would adopt the same policy — can begin enforcing emission standards that would eventually require automakers to put more fuel-efficient cars on the market. Together, the 17 states represent about half of the American auto market. Last year, the Bush administration, breaking with precedent, denied California the right to establish its own standards in the absence of any federal mandates. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his own separate letter to President Obama, urged him to direct the E.P.A. “to act promptly and favorably” on the request.

Gulf Oil States Seeking a Lead in Clean Energy

2009-01-14T13:22:00.001-08:00

NY Times

January 13, 2009

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — With one of the highest per capita carbon footprints in the world, these oil-rich emirates would seem an unlikely place for a green revolution.

Gasoline sells for 45 cents a gallon. There is little public transportation and no recycling. Residents drive between air-conditioned apartments and air-conditioned malls, which are lighted 24/7.

Still, the region’s leaders know energy and money, having built their wealth on oil. They understand that oil is a finite resource, vulnerable to competition from new energy sources.

So even as President-elect Barack Obama talks about promoting green jobs as America’s route out of recession, gulf states, including the emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are making a concerted push to become the Silicon Valley of alternative energy.

They are aggressively pouring billions of dollars made in the oil fields into new green technologies. They are establishing billion-dollar clean-technology investment funds. And they are putting millions of dollars behind research projects at universities from California to Boston to London, and setting up green research parks at home.

“Abu Dhabi is an oil-exporting country, and we want to become an energy-exporting country, and to do that we need to excel at the newer forms of energy,” said Khaled Awad, a director of Masdar, a futuristic zero-carbon city and a research park that has an affiliation with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that is rising from the desert on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi.

These are long-term investments in an alternative energy future that neither falling oil prices nor the global downturn seems likely to reverse. Even as the local real estate market is foundering, leaders in politics, business and research from across the globe will flock to this distant kingdom for three days starting Monday for the second World Future Energy Summit, which just one year after its inception here has become something of a Davos gathering on renewable energy.

This year’s guest list includes a former British prime minister, Tony Blair, and the European Union energy commissioner, Andris Piebalgs, as well as the oil and gas ministers of Oman, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. In attendance will also be executives representing hundreds of companies, large and small, from BP and Credit Suisse to dozens of start-up companies from Europe and the United States.

“Truth is that locally money is tight as everywhere, and the property market is certainly taking a correction downwards,” said Richard Hease, whose Dubai-based company, Turret Middle East, organized the conference. “But on the renewable energy front, it is business as usual.”

This new investment aims to maintain the gulf’s dominant position as a global energy supplier, gaining patents from the new technologies and promoting green manufacturing. But if the United States and the European Union have set energy independence from the gulf states as a goal of new renewable energy efforts, they may find they are arriving late at the party.

“The leadership in these breakthrough technologies is a title the U.S. can lose easily,” said Peter Barker-Homek, chief executive of Taqa, Abu Dhabi’s national energy company. “Here we have low taxes, a young population, accessibility to the world, abundant natural resources and willingness to invest in the seed capital.”

The vision of a renewable future in the gulf is rooted not so much in a fuzzy green sentiment — though that is starting to take hold — as in analysis of the region’s economic future and the high-end lifestyles of its citizens.

“You see what the gulf states have achieved in terms of modern infrastructure and beautiful architecture, but this has come at a very high environmental price,” said Mr. Awad of Masdar, standing in a field of 40 types of solar panels that the project’s engineers are testing, and using to power offices.

“We know we can’t continue with this carbon footprint,” he said. “We have to change. This is why Abu Dhabi must develop new models — for the planet, of course, but also so as not to jeopardize Abu Dhabi.”

The world is now consuming 80 million barrels of oil a day, and that could continue to rise steeply over the coming decades if population and consumption trends continue. That could mean having to add six Saudi Arabias worth of oil output just to keep up, according to Mr. Barker-Homek, at a time when scientists are warning that carbon levels need to be cut significantly to avoid potentially disastrous global warming.

To hedge their positions, then, an increasingly sophisticated generation of largely Western-educated leaders in the Middle East are seizing on green business opportunities, by seeding research in faraway nations.

The crown prince of Abu Dhabi, the wealthiest of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates, announced last January that he would invest $15 billion in renewable energy. That is the same amount that President-elect Obama has proposed investing — in the entire United States — “to catalyze private sector efforts to build a clean energy future.”

Masdar, the model city that will generate no carbon emissions, is tied to the crown prince’s ambitions. Designed by Norman Foster, the British architect, it will include a satellite campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as a research park with laboratories affiliated with Imperial College London and other institutions.

In Saudi Arabia, the new state-owned King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or Kaust, gave a Stanford scientist $25 million last year to start a research center on how to make the cost of solar power competitive with that of coal. Kaust, now in its first grant cycle, also gave $8 million to a Berkeley researcher developing green concrete.

And it has other agreements as well, with Caltech, Cambridge, Cornell, Imperial, La Sapienza, Oxford and Utrecht, to name just a few.

In November, the Qatari government signed an agreement with Britain’s visiting prime minister, Gordon Brown, to invest £150 million, or more than $220 million, in a British low-carbon technology fund, dwarfing the fund’s investments from home.

For the rest of the world, the enormous cash infusion may provide the important boost experts say is needed to get dozens of emerging technologies — like carbon capture, microsolar and low-carbon aluminum — over the development hump to make them cost-effective.

“The impact has been enormous,” said Michael McGehee, the associate professor at Stanford who received the $25 million Saudi grant. “It has greatly accelerated the development process.”

Director of the largest solar cell research group in the world, Professor McGehee had tried and failed to get money from the United States government or American industries to commercialize cheaper solar cells. Research money is tight, he noted.

With the Saudi money he has hired 16 new researchers and expects the new energy cells to dominate the market by 2015. “People are astonished to see how big this grant is and where it came from,” he said, noting that his past grants from the United States government were one-fiftieth that amount.

Experts say the vast investments from the gulf states have already restarted stalled environmental technologies.

Nancy Tuor, vice chairwoman of CH2M Hill, the Canadian construction firm that is building Masdar city, said that the sheer size of the investment had had a “forcing effect,” pushing polluting industries to experiment with cleaner solutions.

For example, initial plans for Masdar excluded both aluminum and conventional concrete because the production of those materials generates high levels of carbon emissions, which warm the planet. Aluminum manufacturers protested and came back with a product that reduced emissions by 90 percent compared with regular aluminum; it is now included in the project.

Proponents say Masdar goes beyond creating new materials and is in fact exploring a new model for urban life. Masdar will use one quarter of the energy of a conventional city its size (about 50,000 people) — an amount that it will produce itself.

“When people think about sustainability, they think about devices,” said Gerard Evenden, a partner at Foster and Partners, the British architectural firm that is designing the site. “But here you’re taking it to a city scale, which has much more of an impact — connecting the devices to the structure to the transportation to the people.”

The city will have no cars; people will move around using driverless electric vehicles that move on a subterranean level. The air-conditioning will be solar powered.

With no industrial history, the gulf states say they have the advantage of starting from scratch in developing green manufacturing; countries like the United States are forced to retool ailing industries, like car manufacturing.

Also, although the gulf states have previously showed little interest in green energy like wind or solar, they have another advantage, Mr. Awad noted as he stood in the shimmering desert. “The sun shines 365 days a year,” he said.

We’re In For Stormy Weather

2008-12-30T13:29:00.000-08:00

NEWSWEEK

Overshadowed by the economic headlines, serious climate trouble looms ahead.

Ban Ki-Moon

The past year will be remembered for the global financial crisis. But next year will be no less dangerous, albeit for a different reason. Lost among the economic headlines is an even more important fact: emissions of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas, rose by an unexpected 3 percent in 2007.

This revelation means that the 50 percent targets for carbon cuts set by Europe and elsewhere by 2050 are already out of date. Scientists now say reductions of 60 to 80 percent will be needed to avoid a catastrophe.

There is other bad news. Everyone knows about the accelerated melting of Arctic sea ice. Now recent U.N. reports offer evidence of less visible but equally troubling changes. Our planet's species are going extinct at an unprecedented rate, according to the U.N. Environment Program. Massive "dead zones" are multiplying in the oceans as pollutants are absorbed, killing off coral reefs and decimating fisheries. Incidents of extreme weather, such as the hurricanes that devastated Haiti and Myanmar, have grown more frequent. Insurers predict that 2008 will set yet another record for economic losses. Meanwhile, U.N. refugee agencies believe that as many as 50 million people will be displaced by climate-related disasters by 2010, and the figure could hit 200 million by 2050.

All this points to a stark truth: though we can overcome the financial shocks of 2008, we will not overcome the climate-change crisis unless we act fast. This means 2009 will be the critical year for the critical challenge of our era.

In early December, world leaders gathered in Poznan, Poland, to chart a shared vision for the future. Then in another year comes a long-awaited summit in Copenhagen, where nations hope to reach a comprehensive new deal on climate change. Getting there will require a clear plan with specific goals within an agreed institutional architecture; a serious commitment to green-technology transfers; and, above all, a readiness by both developing and developed nations to do their part.

Nothing can happen without global leadership and unity of purpose. So far, however, we have fallen short. Narrow differences paralyze us. The United States and other developed nations insist that no accord is possible without the participation of rising powers such as China, India and Brazil. Yet many in the developing world blame the industrialized nations for creating the problem—and insist that they should therefore solve it.

This impasse is a prescription for disaster. To break it means accepting two realities. First: the world is waiting for the United States to lead, and rightly so. The United States remains among the world's most vibrant, entrepreneurial economies. Thanks in part to rising fuel prices, U.S. capital has flooded into "green" energy ventures in recent years. Slowing growth may affect this trend, but won't reverse it. And the new U.S. administration will have climate change high on its agenda.

The second reality is no less obvious: there can be no progress unless the newly developed nations also play a key role. China has surpassed the United States as the largest greenhouse-gas emitter. India will likely soon become the third-largest emitter. Fortunately, many of these nations have already begun moving to combat climate change. China has set national goals for reducing energy use by 2010. It has become one of the world's largest producers of wind power, and it leads in the development of solar energy. Brazil has already built one of the world's cleanest economies, with more than 80 percent of its electricity coming from hydropower, and has become a pioneer in biofuels and hybrid transportation. Meanwhile, Mexico has put more than 1.5 million people to work better managing its forests as a crucial buffer against future climate shocks.

True, the most advanced developing nations have not yet fully shouldered their responsibilities. Yet neither have developed nations. Both things must change before it is too late. Facing this great collective challenge, world leaders cannot wait for others to move. We must act together with the same urgency shown in the financial crisis.

Looking forward to Copenhagen, we should remember the proverbial truth that many roads lead to Rome. Some experts advocate strict emissions limits. Others favor voluntary targets. Still others debate the pros and cons of "cap and trade" carbon markets versus taxes and national conservation regulation. In truth, there is no one solution to climate change. We need all of the above. The important thing is to act, and to act now. When it comes to climate change, it's make-or-break time.

Ban is secretary-general of the United Nations.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/177224

Gas prices bottoming out?

2008-12-30T05:59:00.000-08:00

For the most part I do not pay attention to gas prices. Yesterday I was running back home from downtown Freeport and noticed the Irving station was selling regular gas for $1.56 per gallon. I was shocked. I remember paying $4.20 back in July. I can not imagine the price of gas will go much lower or stay where it is much longer.

On this topic and posted in the Wall Street Journal today:

By BENOîT FAUCON

LONDON -- Members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries are experiencing their own form of oil shock from lower prices. In Angola, that means reassessing the rapid expansion of its oil sector that has formed the basis of its recovery from a civil war that ended in 2002.

Angola, home to OPEC's incoming president and one of its fast-rising, most recent members, was able to take advantage of high oil prices by ramping up production, becoming Africa's largest producer at one point this year.

Now that oil prices have plummeted from their July high above $145 a barrel, Angola faces a quandary. It needs higher prices to realize the potential of its still mostly untapped reserves. But applying the brakes on production would also further cut export revenues for its oil-driven economy.

"We will wait for the price to go up" before Angola ramps up production, José de Vasconcelos, Angola's oil minister, said as he prepared to head OPEC on Jan. 1. "We need this revenue [from a high price] to develop our industry. We need to maintain our production [in the future] and our reserves. We need to attract investment."

Much of Angola's oil wealth is more expensive to tap than reserves in the Middle East, where oil projects require a price of about $10 a barrel to be economically viable, according to the International Energy Agency. By contrast, a price of about $70 a barrel is needed for it to make economic sense to develop the fields located in the deep waters far off the coast of Angola, according to OPEC's departing president, Chakib Khelil, who is also Algeria's energy minister.

Projects up and running still turn a profit at that level, but Jim Campbell, vice president in charge of project execution at BP PLC's Angolan unit, said in November that oil prices of $50 would complicate its assessments of future projects in Angola.

In Monday trading, crude-oil futures were trading about $30 below that level. Intraday, prices rose as high as $42.20 a barrel amid the first signs of OPEC's production cut and the specter of wider Middle East tensions as Israel continued its airstrikes in Gaza for a third day. Light, sweet crude for February delivery settled up $2.31, or 6.1%, at $40.02 a barrel in thin trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

The lower oil price also may hurt Angola's state spending. Oil accounts for 90% of the country's exports, bringing in revenue needed to rebuild a country devastated by nearly three decades of civil war. According to state agency Angola Press, economy minister Manuel Junior suggested in mid-December that Angola might revise its budget next year if oil prices remain under the official assumption of $55 a barrel.

Production cuts under OPEC's quota system will compound the pain. At the end of 2006, when oil-rich nations were under pressure to produce more oil, Angola decided to enter OPEC. But as the financial crisis suddenly accelerated late this summer, oil prices -- and demand -- collapsed.

Angola faces one of the most difficult challenges among OPEC members in implementing its share of the 4.2 million barrels a day in cuts the cartel has announced since September. The country has agreed to reduce its output by 244,000 barrels from 1.9 million barrels a day. The cuts conflict with expansion plans drafted when prices were higher. Mr. de Vasconcelos said after the December OPEC cuts that Angola now plans to shave off an additional 145,000 barrels a day.

"We have some problems [with lower oil prices] just now but that's for the short term," Mr. de Vasconcelos said. "In our medium- to long-term planning, production must go up."

Solar Meets Polar as Winter Curbs Clean Energy

2008-12-30T04:31:00.000-08:00

NY Times

December 26, 2008

By KATE GALBRAITH

Old Man Winter, it turns out, is no friend of renewable energy.

This time of year, wind turbine blades ice up, biodiesel congeals in tanks and solar panels produce less power because there is not as much sun. And perhaps most irritating to the people who own them, the panels become covered with snow, rendering them useless even in bright winter sunshine.

So in regions where homeowners have long rolled their eyes at shoveling driveways, add another cold-weather chore: cleaning off the solar panels. “At least I can get to them with a long pole and a squeegee,” said Alan Stankevitz, a homeowner in southeast Minnesota.

As concern has grown about global warming, many utilities and homeowners have been trying to shrink their emissions of carbon dioxide — their carbon footprints — by installing solar panels, wind turbines and even generators powered by tides or rivers. But for the moment, at least, the planet is still cold enough to deal nasty winter blows to some of this green machinery.

In January 2007, a bus stalled in the middle of the night on Interstate 70 in the Colorado mountains. The culprit was a 20 percent biodiesel blend that congealed in the freezing weather, according to John Jones, the transit director for the bus line, Summit Stage. (Biodiesel is a diesel substitute, typically made from vegetable oil, that is used to displace some fossil fuels.)

The passengers got out of that situation intact, but Summit Stage, which serves ski resorts, now avoids biodiesel from November to March, and uses only a 5 percent blend in the summertime, when it can still get cold in the mountains. “We can’t have people sitting on buses freezing to death while we get out there trying to get them restarted,” Mr. Jones said.

Winter may pose even bigger safety hazards in the vicinity of wind turbines. Some observers say the machines can hurl chunks of ice as they rotate.

“It’s like you throw a plate out there and that plate breaks,” said Ralph Brokaw, a cattle rancher in southeast Wyoming who has 69 wind turbines on his property. When his turbines ice up, he stays out of the way.

The wind industry admits that turbines can drop ice, like a lamppost or any tall structure. To ameliorate the hazard, some turbines are painted black to absorb sunlight and melt the ice faster. But Ron Stimmel, an expert on small wind turbines at the American Wind Energy Association, denies that the whirling blades tend to hurl icy javelins.

Large turbines turn off automatically as ice builds up, and small turbines will slow and stop because the ice prevents them from spinning — “just like a plane’s wing needs to be de-iced to fly,” Mr. Stimmel said.

Mr. Brokaw says that his turbines do turn off when they are too icy, but the danger sometimes comes right before the turbines shut down, after a wet, warm snow causes ice buildup.

From the standpoint of generating power, winter is actually good for wind turbines, because it is generally windier than summer. In Vermont, for example, Green Mountain Power, which operates a small wind farm in the southeastern part of the state, gets more than twice the monthly production in winter as in August.

The opposite is true, however, for solar power. Days are shorter and the sun is lower in the sky during the winter, ensuring less power production.

Even in northern California, with mild winters and little snow, solar panels can generate about half as much as in the summer, depending on how much they are tilted, according to Rob Erlichman, chief executive of Sunlight Electric, a San Francisco solar company.

Operators of the electrical grid do not worry much about the seasonal swings, because the percentage of production from renewable energy is still so low — around 1 percent of the country’s power comes from wind, and less from solar panels. In addition, Americans use slightly less electricity in the winter than in the summer because air conditioners are not running. This is especially true in sunny areas, so solar panels’ peak production matches the spikes in demand.

But as renewable energy becomes a bigger part of the nation’s power mix, the seasonable variability could become more of a problem. Already, power developers are learning that they must make careful plans to avoid the worst impacts of ice and snow.

Trey Taylor, the president of Verdant Power, which has put small turbines in the tidal East River in New York City and plans more for the St. Lawrence River in Canada, said that ice chunks could slide over one another “like a deck of cards,” pushing ice below and harming turbines. That may rule out parts of otherwise promising sites like the Yukon River in Alaska, he said.

Kevin Devlin, the vice president for operations of Iberdrola Renewables, a wind developer, said that winter was probably the hardest time of year to maintain turbines, because workers must go out in snow and ice. Occasionally, he said, the turbines will shut down or set off alarms if it is too cold, and workers must brave the elements to fix them.

For homeowners, the upkeep of their power sources can also be a bother.

Mr. Stankevitz keeps his panels tilted 40 degrees or higher, but they still become covered with snow — and experts say that if even one cell in a panel is covered, the panel will not produce power.

On the other hand, the panels can get extra power from sunlight reflected off nearby snow. And like other electronic gear, solar panels work better when cold.

Mr. Stankevitz said that on some rare winter days, when the Minnesota sky is clear, the weather is freezing and the sun is shining brightly, his panels can briefly churn out more electricity than they were designed to produce, more than on the balmiest days of summer.

Time to Reboot America

2008-12-24T06:57:00.000-08:00

NY Times

December 24, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I had a bad day last Friday, but it was an all-too-typical day for America.

It actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend’s Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.

Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.

The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.

All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out — that’s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.”

My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.

To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.

For all these reasons, our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us.

That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.

It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants. Generally, I’d like to see fewer government dollars shoveled out and more creative tax incentives to stimulate the private sector to catalyze new industries and new markets. If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us.

America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society — in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage. China may have great airports, but last week it went back to censoring The New York Times and other Western news sites. Censorship restricts your people’s imaginations. That’s really, really dumb. And that’s why for all our missteps, the 21st century is still up for grabs.

John Kennedy led us on a journey to discover the moon. Obama needs to lead us on a journey to rediscover, rebuild and reinvent our own backyard.

Merry Christmas!

Maureen Dowd is off today.

Carbon auction nets Maine, other states $106.5 million

2008-12-22T06:04:00.000-08:00

Portland Press Herald

The proceeds from selling emissions allowances will be used for clean energy technologies.

The Associated Press
December 20, 2008

ALBANY, N.Y. — The nation's second auction of carbon dioxide emissions allowances will bring $106.5 million to Maine and nine other Northeastern states in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

Pete Grannis, the organization's chairman, said the results prove that distributing allowances through auctions in a carbon dioxide cap-and-trade program can be successful. RGGI is seen as a blueprint for a national program to curb global warming by reducing carbon emissions.

All 31.5 million allowances, each representing 1 ton of carbon, were sold in Wednesday's auction for a clearing price of $3.38 per allowance, RGGI reported Friday.

RGGI includes Maine, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont.

RGGI reported that 69 bidders from the energy, financial and environmental sectors participated in the auction run by World Energy Solutions, which operates online exchanges for energy and green commodities.

The money, which is to be used for energy efficiency and clean energy technologies, will be distributed to the states in January.

"Until now, we've essentially been giving power plant owners freedom to pollute," said Dan Sosland, executive director of Environment Northeast, a regional nonprofit research and advocacy group. "Now states can use the funds from these carbon allowances to make our homes, schools and businesses more energy efficient."

The first auction, on Sept. 25, sold 12.5 million allowances at a clearing price of $3.07 each, raising nearly $38.6 million for the six RGGI states participating. All 10 states were in the second auction.

RGGI is the first mandatory, market-based cap-and-trade program in the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Energy producers are required to buy enough allowances to cover every ton of carbon dioxide they emit.

The total number of allowances is capped and will be gradually reduced in future years. The idea is that power plants will have to invest in cleaner technology or switch to cleaner fuel as emissions limits tighten.

"RGGI sets a national precedent for addressing global warming," said John Rogers, an energy analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "To ensure the initiative fulfills its potential, however, participating states must make sure that the region's utilities don't buy additional coal-based electricity from outside the region."

Copyright © 2008 Blethen Maine Newspapers

Proposed Gas Drilling Upstate Raises Concerns About Water Supply

2008-12-19T07:48:00.000-08:00

NY Times

December 19, 2008

By MIREYA NAVARRO

For most of the 30 years that they have lived in the West Village, Buck Moorhead and his family have driven north a few times a month to their other home in the Catskills to enjoy the forests, the wildlife, the peace. And for the last several months, they have attended meetings with scores of other upstate residents who fear that those attractions will be marred by pollution, new roads and plummeting property values if ambitious plans to expand drilling for natural gas proceed.

“We effectively risk ruining our drinking water and turning a pristine area into an industrial landscape,” Mr. Moorhead, 55, an architect, said of the effect both upstate and downstate. “The whole thing is like a nightmare.”

But when Mr. Moorhead, whose second home is in Sullivan County, spoke out against drilling this month at a hearing of the City Council’s committee on environmental protection, he was among fewer than two dozen private citizens who showed up and the only one to testify, even though the city has a considerable stake in such drilling north of the city line.

Upstate, the push by energy companies to explore drilling under a broad swath of western and southern New York State have provoked alarm and protest among environmentalists and others.

But in New York City, opponents say that city residents and leaders have been slow to react, despite New Yorkers’ stake: not only do many have weekend homes, but the area under consideration for drilling includes the watershed that supplies most of the city’s drinking water.

“In the absence of a real rallying cry coming from the city to vigorously protect the water supply, we’re going to get rolled,” said James F. Gennaro of Queens, chairman of the Council’s environmental committee, which has been holding the hearings.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has made the environment a focus of his administration, has yet to weigh in publicly on the issue. “The mayor appreciates the need for energy, but believes it must be obtained in a responsible way,” said one of his spokesmen, Marc La Vorgna.

“The watershed’s protection must be guaranteed before any drilling moves forward.”

The City Department of Environmental Protection has held off taking a position until it hears from a consultant it hired to analyze any threats that drilling may pose to the water supply.

But Mr. Gennaro, environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and others are calling for an outright ban on drilling in the million-acre watershed. They say that such operations represent an inherent risk to the water, which is so pure that it does not require filtration before arriving in the taps of more than 8 million people in the city and another million residents in Westchester and other counties. Any contamination, they note, would require the investment of billions of dollars in a filtration plant and would result in higher water rates.

New York State has a history of gas and oil drilling going back to the 1800s, with 13,000 active wells now in operation. Energy companies are now showing interest in the Marcellus Shale, part of a sequence of layered rocks stretching from New York to Tennessee, that runs as deep as 7,000 feet below ground and requires pumping huge volumes of water laced with chemicals — one to five million gallons per well — into the earth to break the rock and extract gas.

Because the process raises new issues about the use and disposal of wastewater, the State Department of Environmental Conservation is revising its regulations to address those matters before approving any new permits.

The agency says that protecting all watersheds is a priority, but that talk of a ban is premature until every environmental effect of the expanded drilling is determined. A final plan on where and how drilling will be allowed is expected as early as spring.

Exploration in the Marcellus Shale, a step that has became more attractive because of new technology and the nation’s push to find its own sources of energy, comes with such high expectations that it has unleashed a gold rush for land.

Companies are paying property owners millions of dollars for leases to drill thousands of wells if the shale in New York proves bountiful.

“It’s almost like placing bets,” said Val Washington, deputy commissioner of remediation for the state environmental agency, which is getting pressure from some counties to act more quickly to allow the drilling, so as not to miss an economic bonanza. “A lot of people are interested in it as a revenue source.”

Robert Homovich, a member of the Delaware County Board of Supervisors, said the board opposes a ban on drilling in the New York City watershed. Not only does he trust that the state can ensure responsible drilling operations, he said, but a ban would also rob an economically depressed area of significant revenue.

“If we don’t have this or something similar, New York City is going to bankrupt us,” he said, noting that the city has been acquiring more and more land in the area to keep it off limits to farming or development to protect the watershed.

But environmental watchdogs say that concerns about contamination and public health should prevail in the decision.

Steven W. Lawitts, the acting commissioner of the city’s environmental agency, said drilling on the scale now envisioned posed “great risks” and could hamper his department’s ability to keep the water clean.

One major concern is the use of benzene and other chemicals used in drilling that have contaminated groundwater in other states. The state environmental commissioner, Alexander B. Grannis, has said that applicants for permits would have to disclose all components in drilling fluids.

But Mr. Lawitts said there were also questions about the dangers of leaks, spills, soil runoff and other contamination from the water used in drilling.

The city’s moves to keep its water supply pristine by buying up more land in the watershed could also be jeopardized by competition with natural gas companies that are offering landowners lucrative deals. Most land in the watershed is privately owned, although the city and state own about one-third.

Mr. Lawitts said the city had no plans to sell drilling rights. But the state has not ruled it out, Ms. Washington said, although most of the state-owned land is a protected “forest preserve” in the Catskill Park, and off limits to drilling, said Yancey Roy, a spokesman for the State Department of Environmental Conservation.

Though state officials maintain that they have the ultimate say on drilling, Mr. Lawitts said city regulations “can still govern what activity is permissible or not permissible” on watershed lands.

He rejected criticism that the city was not being assertive enough. “Our top priority is the watershed,” he said. “That’s unequivocal.”

Among those seeking a state ban on drilling in the watershed are environmental groups like Riverkeeper and Earthjustice. The city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., sent the state a letter this week warning that drilling could have “crippling implications” for customers if it reduces the quality of the unfiltered water. He said a filtration plant would cost $6 billion to $10 billion just to build, requiring at least a 30 percent increase in water and sewer rates.

Meanwhile, in hopes of getting more New Yorkers involved, Councilman Gennaro is gathering signatures on petition in support of a drilling ban. And Mr. Moorhead, the West Village architect, said he planned to talk to his community board and send an e-mail message to his city friends to drum up interest among the unaware.

“This is a mammoth construction project,” he said. “It’s stunning this is under consideration, when one looks at the risks.”

A Corner of Indonesia, Sinking in a Sea of Mud

2008-12-19T07:47:00.001-08:00

NY Times

December 19, 2008
RENOKENONGO JOURNAL

By SETH MYDANS

RENOKENONGO, Indonesia — Her children insist, so every week or two Lilik Kamina takes them back to their abandoned village to look at the mud.

“Hey, Mom, there’s our house, there’s the mango tree,” she said they shout. But there is nothing to see, only an ocean of mud that has buried this village and a dozen more over the past two-and-a-half years.

The mud erupted here during exploratory drilling for natural gas, and it has grown to be one of the largest mud volcanoes ever to have affected a populated area. Unlike other disasters that torment Indonesia — earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis — this one continues with no end in sight, and experts say the flow of mud could go on for many years or decades.

The steaming mud keeps bubbling up, spreading across the countryside, driving people from their homes, burying fields and factories. It has forced the relocation of roads, bridges, a railway line and a major gas pipeline.

As the earth disgorges the mud and the lake of mud grows, the land is sinking by as much as 40 feet a year and could subside to depths of more than 460 feet just one hour’s drive from Indonesia’s second city, Surabaya, according to Richard Davies, a geologist at Durham University in Britain who is an expert on mud volcanoes.

Siti Maimunah, an environmental advocate, said people who lived nearby had begun getting sick, with about 46,000 visiting clinics with respiratory problems since the mud eruption.

Ms. Siti, who is national coordinator for the Mining Advocacy Network of Indonesia, said the gas that emerged with the mud was toxic and possibly carcinogenic. “We worry that in the next 5 to 10 years people will face a second disaster with health problems,” she said.

Attempts to stem the flow have failed.

These have included a scheme to drop hundreds of giant concrete balls into the mouth of the eruption; the concrete balls simply disappeared without effect. A project to divert some of the mud into the nearby Porong River has raised fears that the buildup of silt on the riverbed could cause severe flooding, possibly in Surabaya itself.

The disaster has become an embarrassment to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who faces a new election next year, with groups of displaced people demonstrating in the distant capital, Jakarta.

The drilling company that critics say caused the disaster, Lapindo Brantas, is indirectly owned by the family of one of Indonesia’s richest and most influential men, Aburizal Bakrie, who is a major financial backer of President Yudhoyono and serves in his cabinet as coordinating minister for the people’s welfare.

The victims say compensation has been slow, with only a portion of promised funds delivered to them. Sixty-thousand people have fled their homes and many, like Ms. Lilik, now live in nearby shelters and in a marketplace.

This is a particularly forlorn class of displaced people who mostly fend for themselves because, as victims of what is being called a man-made disaster, they receive little assistance from the government or from international aid agencies.

“So we live without hope,” said Ali Mursjid, 25, who was in college studying to be a teacher before the mud volcano made him destitute. “Nobody is willing to help us.”

His village, Besuki, was only partly buried in mud, and it is now a ghost town of empty houses and hard, cracked mud where children fly kites and shout to hear their voices echo.

The steaming mud erupted from the ground on May 29, 2006, as Lapindo Brantas was drilling near the industrial district of Sidoarjo. Its tunnel pierced a pressurized aquifer 9,000 feet underground.

Experts on mud volcanoes say the drilling and inadequate safeguards in the borehole set off the eruption of water, gas and mud that continues to flow, at about 100,000 cubic meters a day.

Lapindo says that it was itself a victim, blaming vibrations from a major earthquake that struck two days earlier with an epicenter 186 miles away.

After listening to new evidence about the eruption, 74 petroleum geologists attending an October conference in Cape Town concluded that the drilling had been the cause.

“There is no question, the pressures in the well went way beyond what it could tolerate — and it triggered the mud volcano,” said Susila Lusiaga, a drilling engineer who was part of the Indonesian investigation team, according to a report on the conference by Durham University.

The debate over responsibility has severely limited the payments, said Elfian Effendi, executive director of Greenomics Indonesia, an environmental advocacy group.

After paying out 20 percent of a promised compensation package, Lapindo agreed this month to begin monthly payments equal to $2,500 to 8,000 families it said were eligible. But as part of the Bakrie family holdings, Lapindo has been severely affected by the current economic downturn and some experts question whether the full amount will ever be paid.

Since the first eruption in May 2006, there have been more than 90 others, most of them small but some explosive, said Jim Schiller, a political scientist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, who has published a study of the disaster.

He described what he called the horror-movie progress of the mud, which continues to burst from the ground at unexpected times and places. “I’ve got pictures of them popping up in people’s living rooms,” he said.

The village of Renokenongo was buried during the biggest of these eruptions, in November 2007, when the weight of sinking earth burst a major natural-gas pipeline, killing 13 workers and sending a fireball into the sky.

Ms. Lilik, 30, who teaches kindergarten, said the visits to the levee by her former village calm her children, Icha Noviyanti, 11, and Fiqhi Izzudin, 5.

“People say it’s not a good idea to take the children there, but I think the opposite,” she said. “I think it’s very important for them to see their home and express their anger. They throw rocks at the mud and shout, ‘Lapindo!’ ”

Cars, Kabul and Banks

2008-12-17T14:40:00.002-08:00

NY Times

December 14, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

If there is anything I’ve learned as a reporter, it’s that when you get away from “the thing itself” — the core truth about a situation — you get into trouble. Barack Obama will have to make three mammoth decisions after he takes the oath of office — on cars, Kabul and banks — and we have to hope that he bases those decisions on the things themselves, the core truths about each. Because many people will be trying to throw fairy dust in his eyes.

The first issue will be whether to bail out Detroit. What is the core truth about Detroit? Auto executives will tell you that it’s the credit crisis, health care, retirement costs and unions. Sure, those are real. But the core truth is that for way too long Detroit made too many cars that too many people did not want to buy. As even General Motors conceded in its apology ad last week: “At times we violated your trust by letting our quality fall below industry standards and our designs become lackluster.” Walk through any college campus today. You don’t see a lot of Buicks.

Over the years, Detroit bosses kept repeating: “We have to make the cars people want.” That’s why they’re in trouble. Their job is to make the cars people don’t know they want but will buy like crazy when they see them. I would have been happy with my Sony Walkman had Apple not invented the iPod. Now I can’t live without my iPod. I didn’t know I wanted it, but Apple did. Same with my Toyota hybrid.

The auto consultant John Casesa once noted that Detroit’s management has gone from visionaries to operators to caretakers. I would say that they have now gone from caretakers to undertakers. If they are ready to bring in some visionaries and totally restructure — inside or outside of bankruptcy — so they can make money selling cars that people will want to buy, then I say help them. I’d hate to see the Detroit auto industry go under. But if all we are doing is prolonging auto undertakers, then we have to let nature take its course.

After Detroit, Mr. Obama will be asked to bail out Afghanistan. Watch out. The tide has turned against us there because too many Afghans don’t want to buy our politics, or, more precisely, the politics of our ally, the corrupt government of President Hamid Karzai. That is “the thing itself.”

The main reason our Iraq bailout — a k a “the surge” — has had a positive effect is because Iraqis voted with their own guns and their own lives, taking on both Al Qaeda and pro-Iranian Shiite militants. Iraq has avoided bankruptcy for the moment — a total meltdown — because enough Iraqis wanted what we were selling: freedom from extremists. That is the thing itself, and right now I’m not seeing enough of that thing in Afghanistan. Beware of a Kabul bailout.

But maybe the most flagrant area where we continue to avoid looking at “the thing itself” is with our banks. What we are dealing with there is the effect of a credit bubble that began in the late-1980s with the advent of global securitization — the chopping up and bundling into bonds of everything from home mortgages to student loans to airplane leases, and then selling them around the world.

When you take this much leverage and this much globalization and this much complexity and start it in America, and then blow it up, you have a nuclear financial explosion. The deflating of this credit bubble is so wealth-destroying that even the most prudent banks have been ravaged by it.

What to do? The smartest people I know in banking are praying that Obama’s Treasury Department will tackle “the thing itself.” That is, do a real analysis of what the major banks are worth in a worst-case scenario. Then determine, if, on that basis, they have viable, survivable equity-to-asset ratios.

Those that do should get more government investment. Those that are close should be forced to find new investors and merge. And those not viable should be shut down and have their bad assets bought by a government-owned body (which would sell them over time) and their deposits shifted to healthy banks to make those banks even healthier. Some experts believe we still need to close 1,000 banks.

This process will be painful, but probably by the end of a year the market will clear, investors will come in, and the surviving banks will be ready to lend to each other and you and me. The “thing itself” here is that banks still don’t want to lend because they still don’t know the true value of their own balance sheets, let alone anyone else’s.

The market has to clear. We can do it painfully and quickly, as we did with the dot-coms, or we can be Japan and drag it out.

So whether it's cars, Kabul or banks, we have to stop wishing for the worlds we want and start dealing with the things themselves. If Obama does, his first year will be excruciatingly painful, but he could have three years after that to be creative. If he doesn’t, I fear that cars, Kabul and banks will dog his whole presidency.

While Detroit Slept

2008-12-17T14:40:00.001-08:00

NY Times

December 10, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

As I think about our bailing out Detroit, I can’t help but reflect on what, in my view, is the most important rule of business in today’s integrated and digitized global market, where knowledge and innovation tools are so widely distributed. It’s this: Whatever can be done, will be done. The only question is will it be done by you or to you. Just don’t think it won’t be done. If you have an idea in Detroit or Tennessee, promise me that you’ll pursue it, because someone in Denmark or Tel Aviv will do so a second later.

Why do I bring this up? Because someone in the mobility business in Denmark and Tel Aviv is already developing a real-world alternative to Detroit’s business model. I don’t know if this alternative to gasoline-powered cars will work, but I do know that it can be done — and Detroit isn’t doing it. And therefore it will be done, and eventually, I bet, it will be done profitably.

And when it is, our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the mail-order-catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into the CD music business on the eve of the birth of the iPod and iTunes. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into a book-store chain on the eve of the birth of Amazon.com and the Kindle. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into improving typewriters on the eve of the birth of the PC and the Internet.

What business model am I talking about? It is Shai Agassi’s electric car network company, called Better Place. Just last week, the company, based in Palo Alto, Calif., announced a partnership with the state of Hawaii to road test its business plan there after already inking similar deals with Israel, Australia, the San Francisco Bay area and, yes, Denmark.

The Better Place electric car charging system involves generating electrons from as much renewable energy — such as wind and solar — as possible and then feeding those clean electrons into a national electric car charging infrastructure. This consists of electricity charging spots with plug-in outlets — the first pilots were opened in Israel this week — plus battery-exchange stations all over the respective country. The whole system is then coordinated by a service control center that integrates and does the billing.

Under the Better Place model, consumers can either buy or lease an electric car from the French automaker Renault or Japanese companies like Nissan (General Motors snubbed Agassi) and then buy miles on their electric car batteries from Better Place the way you now buy an Apple cellphone and the minutes from AT&T. That way Better Place, or any car company that partners with it, benefits from each mile you drive. G.M. sells cars. Better Place is selling mobility miles.

The first Renault and Nissan electric cars are scheduled to hit Denmark and Israel in 2011, when the whole system should be up and running. On Tuesday, Japan’s Ministry of Environment invited Better Place to join the first government-led electric car project along with Honda, Mitsubishi and Subaru. Better Place was the only foreign company invited to participate, working with Japan’s leading auto companies, to build a battery swap station for electric cars in Yokohama, the Detroit of Japan.

What I find exciting about Better Place is that it is building a car company off the new industrial platform of the 21st century, not the one from the 20th — the exact same way that Steve Jobs did to overturn the music business. What did Apple understand first? One, that today’s technology platform would allow anyone with a computer to record music. Two, that the Internet and MP3 players would allow anyone to transfer music in digital form to anyone else. You wouldn’t need CDs or record companies anymore. Apple simply took all those innovations and integrated them into a single music-generating, purchasing and listening system that completely disrupted the music business.

What Agassi, the founder of Better Place, is saying is that there is a new way to generate mobility, not just music, using the same platform. It just takes the right kind of auto battery — the iPod in this story — and the right kind of national plug-in network — the iTunes store — to make the business model work for electric cars at six cents a mile. The average American is paying today around 12 cents a mile for gasoline transportation, which also adds to global warming and strengthens petro-dictators.

Do not expect this innovation to come out of Detroit. Remember, in 1908, the Ford Model-T got better mileage — 25 miles per gallon — than many Ford, G.M. and Chrysler models made in 2008. But don’t be surprised when it comes out of somewhere else. It can be done. It will be done. If we miss the chance to win the race for Car 2.0 because we keep mindlessly bailing out Car 1.0, there will be no one to blame more than Detroit’s new shareholders: we the taxpayers.

The Real Generation X

2008-12-17T14:38:00.000-08:00

NY Times

December 7, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Tom Brokaw’s book “The Greatest Generation,” that classic about our parents and their incredible sacrifices during World War II. What I’ve been thinking about actually is this: What book will our kids write about us? “The Greediest Generation?” “The Complacent Generation?” Or maybe: “The Subprime Generation: How My Parents Bailed Themselves Out for Their Excesses by Charging It All on My Visa Card.”

Our kids should be so much more radical than they are today. I understand why they aren’t. They’re so worried about just getting a job or paying next semester’s tuition. But we must not take their quietism as license to do whatever we want with this bailout cash. They are going to have to pay this money back. And therefore, we have an incredibly weighty obligation to make sure that we not only spend every stimulus dollar wisely but also with an eye to creating new technologies.

We not only need to bail out industries of the past but to build up industries of the future — to offer the kind of big thinking and risk-taking that transforms enormous challenges into world-changing opportunities. That is what made the Greatest Generation great. This money can’t just go to patch up our jalopies.

“Remember, this money will not be neutral,” said Andy Karsner, a former U.S. assistant secretary of energy. “We are talking about directing an unprecedented volume of cash at our housing, energy, transportation and infrastructure industries. This cash will either fortify the incumbent players and calcify the energy status quo, or it will facilitate the economic transformation we seek. The stimulus will either be white blood cells that will heal us or malignant cells that will continue to sap our strength.”

Let’s get specific. When it comes to Detroit, my views are clear: I think we should be talking about “bail,” not “bailouts,” regarding the people running the Big Three car companies and the lawmakers who mindlessly protected them for so long. Still, I do not want to see jobs destroyed. But if taxpayers are going to give Detroit money, we must not entrust the spending to people who have run their businesses into the ground.

You want my tax dollars? Then I want to see the precise production plans and timetables for the hybridization of all your cars and trucks within 36 months. I want every bailed-out car company to move to hybrid electric drive trains, because nothing would both improve mileage and emissions more — and also stimulate a whole new 21st-century, job-creating industry: batteries.

Big batteries that can store electricity for transportation and wind and solar generation are the indispensable enablers of the Energy Internet of the future. Any Detroit bailout has to serve that goal.

A major electrification of drive trains in U.S.-made vehicles “would induce explosive growth and investment in a domestic battery business,” said Karsner. Europe, Japan and China are already dominating this industry. It’s the key to clean-tech — and ultimately our national competitiveness. We can’t allow ourselves to be battery importers in the 21st century the way we were oil importers in the 20th.

The same applies to Barack Obama’s plans for a green stimulus in energy efficiency and infrastructure. It makes no sense to spend money on green infrastructure — or a bailout of Detroit aimed at stimulating production of more fuel-efficient cars — if it is not combined with a tax on carbon that would actually change consumer buying behavior.

Many people will tell Mr. Obama that taxing carbon or gasoline now is a “nonstarter.” Wrong. It is the only starter. It is the game-changer. If you want to know where postponing it has gotten us, visit Detroit. No carbon tax or increased gasoline tax meant that every time the price of gasoline went down to $1 or $2 a gallon, consumers went back to buying gas guzzlers. And Detroit just fed their addictions — so it never committed to a real energy-efficiency retooling of its fleet. R.I.P.

If Mr. Obama is going to oversee a successful infrastructure stimulus, then it has to include not only a tax on carbon — make it revenue-neutral and rebate it all by reducing payroll taxes — but also new standards that gradually require utilities and home builders in states that receive money to build dramatically more energy-efficient power plants, commercial buildings and homes. This, too, would create whole new industries.

Let us not mince words: The Obama presidency will be shaped in many ways by how it spends this stimulus. I am sure he will articulate the right goals. But if the means — the price signals, conditions and standards — that he imposes on his stimulus are not as creative, bold and tough as his goals, it will all be for naught.

In sum, our kids will remember the Obama stimulus as either the burden of their lifetime or the investment of their lifetime. Let’s hope it’s the latter. I like that book title much better.

Coal Mining Debris Rule Is Approved

2008-12-03T10:23:00.000-08:00

NY Times

December 3, 2008

By ROBERT PEAR and FELICITY BARRINGER

WASHINGTON — The White House on Tuesday approved a final rule that will make it easier for coal companies to dump rock and dirt from mountaintop mining operations into nearby streams and valleys.

The rule is one of the most contentious of all the regulations emerging from the White House in President Bush’s last weeks in office.

James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, confirmed in an interview that the rule had been approved by the White House Office of Management and Budget. That clears the way for publication in the Federal Register, the last stage in the rule-making process.

Stephen L. Johnson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, concurred in the rule, first proposed nearly five years ago by the Interior Department, which regulates coal mining.

In a letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, dated Tuesday, Mr. Johnson said the rule had been revised to protect fish, wildlife and streams.

Mining activities must comply with water quality standards established by the federal government and the states, Mr. Johnson said.

But a coalition of environmental groups said the rule would accelerate “the destruction of mountains, forests and streams throughout Appalachia.”

Edward C. Hopkins, a policy analyst at the Sierra Club, said: “The E.P.A.’s own scientists have concluded that dumping mining waste into streams devastates downstream water quality. By signing off on this rule, the agency has abdicated its responsibility.”

Mr. Bush has boasted of his efforts to cooperate with President-elect Barack Obama to ensure a smooth transition, but the administration is rushing to complete work on regulations to which Mr. Obama and his advisers object. The rules deal with air pollution, auto safety, abortion and workers’ exposure to toxic chemicals, among other issues.

The National Mining Association, a trade group, welcomed the rule, saying it could end years of uncertainty that had put jobs and coal production in jeopardy.

The coal industry could be the largest beneficiary of last-minute environmental rules.

“This is unmistakably a fire sale of epic size for coal and the entire fossil fuel industry, with flagrant disregard for human health, the environment or the rule of law,” said Vickie Patton, deputy general counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund.

The Environmental Protection Agency is trying to finish work on a rule that would make it easier for utilities to put coal-fired generating stations near national parks. It is working on another rule that would allow utility companies to modify coal-fired power plants and increase their emissions without installing new pollution-control equipment.

Joan M. Mulhern, a lawyer at Earthjustice, an environmental group, denounced the mining regulation.

“With less than two months left in power,” Ms. Mulhern said, “the Bush administration is determined to cement its legacy as having the worst environmental record in history.”

At issue, she said, is a type of mining in which “coal companies blast the tops off mountains to reach the seams of coal and then push the rubble into the adjacent valleys, burying miles of streams.”

Administration officials rejected the criticism.

“This rule strengthens protections for streams,” said Peter L. Mali, a spokesman for the Interior Department office that wrote the regulation. “Federal law allows coal mine waste to be placed in streams, and the rule tightens restrictions as to when, where and how those discharges can occur.”

The rule gives coal companies a legal right to do what, in the past, they could do only in exceptional circumstances, with special permission from the government.

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama expressed “serious concerns about the environmental implications” of mountaintop mining.

“We have to find more environmentally sound ways of mining coal than simply blowing the tops off mountains,” Mr. Obama told one environmental group. At the same time, he proposed a major federal investment in clean coal technology.

Gov. Steven L. Beshear of Kentucky and Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, both Democrats, had urged the Bush administration not to approve the rule. Mr. Beshear said he feared that it would lead to an increase in pollution of “Kentucky’s beautiful natural resources.”

Several members of Congress also opposed the rule, including Representative John Yarmuth, Democrat of Kentucky.

In giving his blessing to the new regulation, Mr. Johnson, the head of the E.P.A., noted that Mr. Bush had promoted the use of clean coal technology as a way to reduce dependence on foreign oil.

“Americans should not have to choose between clean coal or effective environmental protection,” Mr. Johnson said. “We can achieve both.”

But environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council see the mountaintop mining rule and pending changes in air pollution regulations as part of a final effort by the Bush administration to cater to the needs of energy industries.

The proposal that would give more leeway to coal-burning power plants, to increase their emissions when they make repairs and renovations, was on the original wish list of the energy task force convened by Vice President Dick Cheney in 2001.

In 2006, a federal appeals court struck down an effort by the Bush administration to loosen the rules on such coal-burning plants.

Panel Seeks Changes in E.P.A. Reviews

2008-12-03T10:22:00.001-08:00

NY Times

December 4, 2008

By CORNELIA DEAN

The Environmental Protection Agency must revise its approach to assessing environmental health hazards and other risks, because current practices hinder useful and timely regulation, an expert panel of The National Research Council is reporting.

The council, the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, said the agency should scrap some of the assumptions on which its decisions have been based, reduce its focus on individual chemicals and other hazards to consider how they act in combination. And it should accept that uncertainty is always going to be an issue and aim to providepractical information to policy-makers as quickly as possible.

The report, which the panel produced at the behest of the E.P.A., is being made public Wednesday and is online at www.nas.edu.

Risk assessment — determining whether something is a hazard and, if so, how great and to whom — is a crucial step in devising appropriate environmental regulations and other decisions, the panel said, and the field is advancing as testing systems and other technology advance.

But assessing environmental risks is highly complex and full of uncertainty, it continued, and at the E.P.A. “the regulatory risk assessment process is bogged down,” with some assessments taking a decade or more. For example, the report cited an assessment of trichloroethylene, a commonly used solvent, that has been under way since the 1980s and is not expected before 2010.

The environmental agency’s conclusions about risk are usually crucial in establishing regulatory goals. As a result, they are often subject to intense political or economic pressure. When the Bush administration proposed changes it said would streamline risk-assessment procedures, critics called the proposal an attempt to weaken environmental regulation. In a 2007 report, the academy dismissed the proposal as “fundamentally flawed” and the administration withdrew it.

Thomas A. Burke, an epidemiologist at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, said the new report focused on the use of “defaults,” assumptions that are made about one factor or another in the face of uncertainty.

“Many of them are founded on good science, but there are some hidden assumptions,” he said. “Right now when we don’t have information on a pollutant we treat it as if there’s no risk. That’s a so-called hidden default.”

He added, “We really need to address these gaps.”

Another issue the report cited was the effect of cumulative exposures to a variety of environmental hazards. Usually these hazards are studied one by one. But Dr. Burke said, “You have to consider not just the one compound but you have to ask broadly, because people are exposed to many, many thousands of substances.” Even drinking water is “a rich mixture,” he added.

A spokesman for the American Chemical Society said it would have no comment on the report until members had had time to read it.

Joel Tickner, a professor of environmental health at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who studies chemicals in the environment, said that while he had not seen the report, its focus on speeding environmental review and consideration of cumulative effects was overdue.

“We put a lot of effort into finding more complex ways to characterize the problems while we don’t put nearly as much resources into studying solutions,” he said. He too cited trichloroethylene. “Given that we know trichloroethylene is a neurotoxin and a carcinogen and that there are very good alternatives it makes no sense to put so much resources into studying it.”

He said that by focusing on safer alternatives for processes like degreasing, industries in Massachusetts had reduced their use of the compound by 90 percent.

“But as long as we are uncertain we assume there is no problem,” he said. “That provides almost an incentive to having scientific uncertainty.”

Hawaii’s Moon Shot

2008-12-02T08:13:00.001-08:00

NY Times

December 2, 2008
Editorial

Jeffrey Mikulina, a longtime environmental activist in Hawaii, jokes that his home state, which is almost completely dependent on imported oil, is one supertanker away from being Amish. It also is one superheated ocean away from being underwater.

There, in a nutshell, is the motivation behind a new campaign to wean Hawaii from fossil fuels in 10 years. The project is Hawaii’s own moon mission, led by the Blue Planet Foundation and not by the state’s political establishment, which tends to prefer the slow and tortured way to change (a long battle over a new commuter rail system was bogged down by a ferocious debate over whether it should have steel or rubber wheels).

Blue Planet, a private foundation, is the creation of Henk Rogers, a software entrepreneur who made a fortune in Tetris. Reassessing his life after a heart attack two years ago, he decided to pursue a goal that for decades has been as elusive as it is drop-dead obvious.

Hawaii is as energy-hungry as any state, but it has no oil, natural gas, hydroelectric dams or nuclear plants. It needs imported crude to keep the lights on, but it also has an abundance of clean-energy sources: sunshine, wind, powerful tides and waves and cold ocean depths.

A green consciousness is beginning to take root in Hawaii. In January, the state approved a plan to cut its reliance on foreign oil by 70 percent by 2030. Mr. Rogers doesn’t want to wait that long, so his foundation is trying to turbocharge the effort. Mr. Mikulina, the foundation’s executive director, says this will mean more than just throwing up lots more solar panels and windmills and making lavish investments on exotic technologies.

Wind-farm relics from the 1980s are now languishing on Hawaiian hillsides or as forgotten proposals in desk drawers. The foundation plans to seek structural changes, like pushing the state government and Hawaii’s main utility, the Hawaiian Electric Company, to revamp an obsolete electrical system to increase efficiency and to allow customers with solar panels to easily sell power back to the grid. An agreement to do just that was signed last month but has not been enacted into law.

Advances like these, plus a concerted push for conservation, may be just the steps needed to complete the state’s transformation from blue to green. Hawaiians have a long tradition of self-sufficiency, community action and a deep attachment to the land that sustains them — leadership in a clean-energy movement could powerfully reaffirm those values and perhaps spread them to the rest of the nation.

Save the Economy, and the Planet

2008-12-02T08:10:00.001-08:00

NY Times

November 27, 2008
Editorial

Environment ministers preparing for next week’s talks on global warming in Poznan, Poland, have been sounding decidedly downbeat. From Paris to Beijing, the refrain is the same: This is no time to pursue ambitious plans to stop global warming. We can’t deal with a financial crisis and reduce emissions at the same time.

There is a very different message coming from this country. President-elect Barack Obama is arguing that there is no better time than the present to invest heavily in clean energy technologies. Such investment, he says, would confront the threat of unchecked warming, reduce the country’s dependence on foreign oil and help revive the American economy.

Call it what you will: a climate policy wrapped inside an energy policy wrapped inside an economic policy. By any name, it is a radical shift from the defeatism and denial that marked President Bush’s eight years in office. If Mr. Obama follows through on his commitments, this country will at last provide the global leadership that is essential for addressing the dangers of climate change.

In his first six months in office, Mr. Bush reneged on a campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide and walked away from the Kyoto Protocol, a modest first effort to control global greenhouse gas emissions.

Still two months from the White House, Mr. Obama has convincingly reaffirmed his main climate related promises.

One is to impose (Congress willing) a mandatory cap on emissions aimed at reducing America’s output of greenhouses gas by 80 percent by midcentury. According to mainstream scientists, that is the minimum necessary to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and avoid the worst consequences of global warming. Mr. Obama’s second pledge is to invest $15 billion a year to build a clean economy that cuts fuel costs and creates thousands of green jobs. That includes investments in solar power, wind power, clean coal (plants capable of capturing and storing carbon emissions) and, as part of any bailout, helping Detroit retool assembly lines to build a new generation of more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Mr. Obama has surrounded himself with like-minded people who have spent years immersed in the complexities of energy policy.

His transition chief, John Podesta, was an early advocate of assisting the automakers and of finding low-carbon alternatives to gasoline. Peter Orszag, his choice to run the Office of Management and Budget (where environmental initiatives went to die during the Bush years) is an expert on cap-and-trade programs to limit industrial emissions of greenhouse gases.

Success is not guaranteed. Last year, a far more modest climate-change bill fell well short of a simple majority in the Senate. At least on the surface, it seems counterintuitive to impose new regulations (and, in the short term anyway, higher energy costs) on a struggling economy. Mr. Obama will need all his oratorical power to make the opposite case.

The historical landscape from Richard Nixon onward is littered with bold and unfulfilled promises to wean the nation from fossil fuels, especially imported oil. What is different now is the need to deal with the clear and present threat of global warming. What is also different is that the country has elected a president who believes that meeting the challenge of climate change is essential to the health of the planet and to America’s economic future.

U.N. Reports Pollution Threat in Asia

2008-11-25T04:50:00.001-08:00

NY Times

November 14, 2008

By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — A noxious cocktail of soot, smog and toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun, fouling the lungs of millions of people and altering weather patterns in large parts of Asia, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations.

The byproduct of automobiles, slash-and-burn agriculture, cooking on dung or wood fires and coal-fired power plants, these plumes rise over southern Africa, the Amazon basin and North America. But they are most pronounced in Asia, where so-called atmospheric brown clouds are dramatically reducing sunlight in many Chinese cities and leading to decreased crop yields in swaths of rural India, say a team of more than a dozen scientists who have been studying the problem since 2002.

“The imperative to act has never been clearer,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, in Beijing, which the report identified as one of the world’s most polluted cities, and where the report was released.

The brownish haze, sometimes in a layer more than a mile thick and clearly visible from airplanes, stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to the Yellow Sea. In the spring, it sweeps past North and South Korea and Japan. Sometimes the cloud drifts as far east as California.

The report identified 13 cities as brown-cloud hot spots, among them Bangkok, Cairo, New Delhi, Tehran and Seoul, South Korea.

It was issued on a day when Beijing’s own famously polluted skies were unusually clear. On Wednesday, by contrast, the capital was shrouded in a thick, throat-stinging haze that is the byproduct of heavy industry, coal-burning home heaters and the 3.5 million cars that clog the city’s roads.

Last month, the government reintroduced some of the traffic restrictions that were imposed on Beijing during the Olympics; the rules forced private cars to stay off the road one day a week and sidelined 30 percent of government vehicles on any given day. Over all, officials say the new measures have removed 800,000 cars from the roads.

According to the United Nations report, smog blocks from 10 percent to 25 percent of the sunlight that should be reaching the city’s streets. The report also singled out the southern city of Guangzhou, where soot and dust have dimmed natural light by 20 percent since the 1970s.

In fact, the scientists who worked on the report said the blanket of haze might be temporarily offsetting some warming from the simultaneous buildup of greenhouse gases by reflecting solar energy away from the earth. Greenhouse gases, by contrast, tend to trap the warmth of the sun and lead to a rise in ocean temperatures.

Climate scientists say that similar plumes from industrialization of wealthy countries after World War II probably blunted global warming through the 1970s. Pollution laws largely removed that pall.

Rain can cleanse the skies, but some of the black grime that falls to earth ends up on the surface of the Himalayan glaciers that are the source of water for billions of people in China, India and Pakistan. As a result, the glaciers that feed into the Yangtze, Ganges, Indus and Yellow Rivers are absorbing more sunlight and melting more rapidly, researchers say.

According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, these glaciers have shrunk by 5 percent since the 1950s and, at the current rate of retreat, could shrink by an additional 75 percent by 2050.

“We used to think of this brown cloud as a regional problem, but now we realize its impact is much greater,” said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, who led the United Nations scientific panel. “When we see the smog one day and not the next, it just means it’s blown somewhere else.”

Although the clouds’ overall impact is not entirely understood, Mr. Ramanathan, a professor of climate and ocean sciences at the University of California, San Diego, said they might be affecting precipitation in parts of India and Southeast Asia, where monsoon rainfall has been decreasing in recent decades, and central China, where devastating floods have become more frequent.

He said that some studies suggested that the plumes of soot that blot out the sun have led to a 5 percent decline in the growth rate of rice harvests across Asia since the 1960s.

For those who breathe the toxic mix, the impact can be deadly. Henning Rodhe, a professor of chemical meteorology at Stockholm University, estimates that 340,000 people in China and India die each year from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases that can be traced to the emissions from coal-burning factories, diesel trucks and wood-burning stoves. “The impacts on health alone is a reason to reduce these brown clouds,” he said.

Andrew C. Revkin contributed reporting from New York.

Bernard Weinstein, Who Studied Causes of Cancer, Dies at 78

2008-11-17T05:23:00.001-08:00

NY Times

November 16, 2008

By JEREMY PEARCE

Dr. I. Bernard Weinstein, a researcher and top administrator at Columbia University who advanced the study of how pollutants and other environmental factors can cause cancer, died on Nov. 3 in Manhattan, where he lived. He was 78.

The cause was kidney disease, his family said.

At Columbia, where he headed the Comprehensive Cancer Center from 1985 to 1996, Dr. Weinstein investigated chemical sources of cancer and how cancers can progress in stages and over time at the molecular and cellular levels.

A former student, Richard Axel, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2004, said that as early as the 1970s, Dr. Weinstein had made an important connection in recognizing that carcinogens in the environment would most likely have molecular targets in the body.

Dr. Weinstein and others investigated the cancer-causing properties of a common chemical, benzo(a)pyrene, which is found in tobacco smoke, car exhaust and charbroiled foods. He later studied cancers related to the class of compounds called nitrosamines, which are used in processed meats and pickled food products.

Dr. Axel, now a professor of biochemistry, molecular biophysics and pathology at Columbia, said, “Bernard Weinstein’s knowledge of emerging molecular genetics was combined with his research on the chemical causes of cancer to help in the creation of a new field, the field of molecular epidemiology.”

In the 1990s, Dr. Weinstein and others looked at the mechanism of a gene, known as cyclin D1, and its role in encouraging the growth of cancers of the stomach, breast, prostate and esophagus. The researchers found that irregularities of the gene could lead to a rise in cancer cells and the formation of tumors.

Their findings led to a theory that drugs might be developed to curtail the expression of cyclin D1 and to control abnormalities in cells that could otherwise result in cancer. Such drugs have yet to be found.

I. Bernard Weinstein was born in Madison, Wis. He earned his undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Wisconsin before conducting research at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Weinstein was named an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia in 1961 and a professor in 1973. He also directed the division of environmental sciences at Columbia’s school of public health from 1978 to 1990 and continued to hold appointments at Columbia in medicine, genetics and public health until his death.

He was a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and in 1990 and 1991 was president of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Dr. Weinstein is survived by his wife of 54 years, the former Joan Anker.

He is also survived by a son, Matthew, of Manhattan; two daughters, Claudia, of Manhattan, and Tamara, of Atlanta; and two grandchildren.

How to Fix a Flat

2008-11-12T08:46:00.000-08:00

NY Times

November 12, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Last September, I was in a hotel room watching CNBC early one morning. They were interviewing Bob Nardelli, the C.E.O. of Chrysler, and he was explaining why the auto industry, at that time, needed $25 billion in loan guarantees. It wasn’t a bailout, he said. It was a way to enable the car companies to retool for innovation. I could not help but shout back at the TV screen: “We have to subsidize Detroit so that it will innovate? What business were you people in other than innovation?” If we give you another $25 billion, will you also do accounting?

How could these companies be so bad for so long? Clearly the combination of a very un-innovative business culture, visionless management and overly generous labor contracts explains a lot of it. It led to a situation whereby General Motors could make money only by selling big, gas-guzzling S.U.V.’s and trucks. Therefore, instead of focusing on making money by innovating around fuel efficiency, productivity and design, G.M. threw way too much energy into lobbying and maneuvering to protect its gas guzzlers.

This included striking special deals with Congress that allowed the Detroit automakers to count the mileage of gas guzzlers as being less than they really were — provided they made some cars flex-fuel capable for ethanol. It included special offers of $1.99-a-gallon gasoline for a year to any customer who purchased a gas guzzler. And it included endless lobbying to block Congress from raising the miles-per-gallon requirements. The result was an industry that became brain dead.

Nothing typified this more than statements like those of Bob Lutz, G.M.’s vice chairman. He has been quoted as saying that hybrids like the Toyota Prius “make no economic sense.” And, in February, D Magazine of Dallas quoted him as saying that global warming “is a total crock of [expletive].”

These are the guys taxpayers are being asked to bail out.

And please, spare me the alligator tears about G.M.’s health care costs. Sure, they are outrageous. “But then why did G.M. refuse to lift a finger to support a national health care program when Hillary Clinton was pushing for it?” asks Dan Becker, a top environmental lobbyist.

Not every automaker is at death’s door. Look at this article that ran two weeks ago on autochannel.com: “ALLISTON, Ontario, Canada — Honda of Canada Mfg. officially opened its newest investment in Canada — a state-of-the art $154 million engine plant. The new facility will produce 200,000 fuel-efficient four-cylinder engines annually for Civic production in response to growing North American demand for vehicles that provide excellent fuel economy.”

The blame for this travesty not only belongs to the auto executives, but must be shared equally with the entire Michigan delegation in the House and Senate, virtually all of whom, year after year, voted however the Detroit automakers and unions instructed them to vote. That shielded General Motors, Ford and Chrysler from environmental concerns, mileage concerns and the full impact of global competition that could have forced Detroit to adapt long ago.

Indeed, if and when they do have to bury Detroit, I hope that all the current and past representatives and senators from Michigan have to serve as pallbearers. And no one has earned the “honor” of chief pallbearer more than the Michigan Representative John Dingell, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee who is more responsible for protecting Detroit to death than any single legislator.

O.K., now that I have all that off my chest, what do we do? I am as terrified as anyone of the domino effect on industry and workers if G.M. were to collapse. But if we are going to use taxpayer money to rescue Detroit, then it should be done along the lines proposed in The Wall Street Journal on Monday by Paul Ingrassia, a former Detroit bureau chief for that paper.

“In return for any direct government aid,” he wrote, “the board and the management [of G.M.] should go. Shareholders should lose their paltry remaining equity. And a government-appointed receiver — someone hard-nosed and nonpolitical — should have broad power to revamp G.M. with a viable business plan and return it to a private operation as soon as possible. That will mean tearing up existing contracts with unions, dealers and suppliers, closing some operations and selling others and downsizing the company ... Giving G.M. a blank check — which the company and the United Auto Workers union badly want, and which Washington will be tempted to grant — would be an enormous mistake.”

I would add other conditions: Any car company that gets taxpayer money must demonstrate a plan for transforming every vehicle in its fleet to a hybrid-electric engine with flex-fuel capability, so its entire fleet can also run on next generation cellulosic ethanol.

Lastly, somebody ought to call Steve Jobs, who doesn’t need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he’d like to do national service and run a car company for a year. I’d bet it wouldn’t take him much longer than that to come up with the G.M. iCar.

New pellet technology boiling Fort Kent diner

2008-11-03T07:18:00.000-08:00

Bangor Daily News

By Julia Bayly

Special to the NEWS

FORT KENT, Maine â€” Peter Pinette is not the least bit disturbed that his new pellet stove seems smarter than some people. In fact, he finds it a bit comforting.

â€œIt was created by some smart people,â€ Pinette said of the newly installed Bosch Thermotechnologies pellet burner and boiler system. â€œItâ€™s a result of the evolution of technology in this country thatâ€™s now being directed toward alternative fuels and energy.â€

Pinette, owner of Rockâ€™s Diner, knew he had to do something about his heating bill when oil began flirting with $5 a gallon in northern Maine.

At the time, he was considering converting his system to coal-fired when a customer suggested he check out a new line of pellet burners and boilers coming out of Maine Energy Systems in Bethel.

â€œI went down [in July] to look it over and saw one in [Maine Energy Systemsâ€™] founderâ€™s home running all by itself,â€ Pinette said. â€œIt was just a sweet unit.â€

The level of automation is what makes the Bosch system so attractive, according to Pinette.

The system itself is really two units married into one â€” a pellet burner manufactured by the Swedish firm Janfire and the boiler made by the German company Bosch.

â€œNine months ago this system did not exist,â€ Pinette said. â€œNow itâ€™s Maine Energy Systemsâ€™ vision to bring them into Maine and New England.â€

Les Otten, former ski industry mogul and part owner of the Boston Red Sox who invested $10 million of his own money to launch the company, founded Maine Energy Systems in 2007.

Maine Energy Systems began importing the pellet-fueled boilers and burners from Europe last summer.

For Pinette, it was love at first sight.

â€œI asked right off how to get one,â€ he said.

Turned out, since there were no dealers of the systems north of Portland, Pinetteâ€™s best option was to step up and fill that void.

So earlier this fall he and local plumbing contractor John Plourde traveled to Bethel for a training program on the systemâ€™s technology and installation procedures.

â€œThe first 50 units that arrived in this country were sold right away,â€ Pinette said. â€œIn early September we got one of them.â€

The unit sits in the basement of the diner several feet away from a homemade hopper capable of storing up to 1 ton of wood pellets.

Given the Janfire burnerâ€™s track record, once Pinette fired it up for the first time heâ€™ll never need to touch it again for six months.

Pinette explained that the burner has an automatic augur-feed system, automatic self-cleaning feature, and in the event of power loss, it rapidly restarts itself when the power comes back on.

â€œWe use a lot of hot water here for cooking, doing dishes and cleaning,â€ Pinette said. â€œWe are already seeing a savings.â€

Based on his own analysis of oil needed to heat the dinerâ€™s water, Pinette said he was spending up to $17 a day this summer when oil hit its peak price.

That figure dropped to $7 a day once he converted to wood pellets.

â€œEven if oil goes down below $2 a gallon, this system will save me money,â€ he said. â€œThe way prices are right now, Iâ€™ll probably see a payback in two years.â€

Pinette said there has been a fair amount of interest in his new boiler-burner unit, and his new venture â€” Aroostook Energy Alternatives â€” is working with Maine Energy Systems to bring the units into the area.

A unit large enough to supply his businessâ€™ hot water needs now runs around $10,000. A residential unit would cost around $9,000.

â€œA typical home installation and setup would probably run around $12,000,â€ Pinette said. â€œI know itâ€™s pricey, but once itâ€™s in, the unit is completely automatic and clean with no dust and little ash produced.â€

In the event of a power outage, the unit shuts itself down and, once power is restored, runs a self-diagnostic and restarts on its own.

As far as any maintenance, Pinette said accumulated ash must be cleaned out, and the inside of the boiler vacuumed periodically.

â€œThis is something the homeowners can do themselves or call in a technician,â€ he said. â€œIt should be done every two or three tons of pellets.â€

Pinette is relying on John Plourde for all plumbing installation needs for the system and his own training plus firsthand knowledge of the unit.

â€œWe are able to set these up as a team,â€ he said.

As for pellets, despite widespread concerns of shortages, Pinette said he has done the research, and there are plenty of pellets to go around.

In fact, he sees the day in the not too distant future when a truck loaded with pellets backs up to a homeownerâ€™s basement door and delivers bulk pellets directly into a dry storage hopper.

Maine has approved the units for use with approved chimneys used with oil furnaces, and they are both ASME-certified and UL-approved.

â€œThis is not new technology, but it is new to the state of Maine,â€ Pinette said. â€œIn many ways we are behind the rest of the world, [and] we need to catch up.â€

For information on the units, visit www.maineenergysystems.com.

UMaine gets more work for its watts

2008-10-17T08:22:00.000-07:00

Bangor Daily News

Cyclist teams power new supercomputer in demonstration of efficiency

By Emily Burnham
BDN Staff

ORONO, Maine — Muscle met machine at the University of Maine on Wednesday morning when the UM department of computer science unveiled its new ecofriendly supercomputer, recently purchased from Massachusetts-based computer company SciCortex.

The supercomputer was powered during the presentation by a team of cyclists from the UM Cycling Club and from a race team organized by Rose’s Bike Shop in Orono. The 10 cyclists hooked their bikes up to generators, which were connected to a battery on the computer, a SCO72 model that houses 72 processors, each of which uses just a half-watt of power. By comparison, a typical processor on a personal computer uses 100 watts of power.

“It’s all about energy, and the importance of doing more with less,” said UM computer science professor George Markowsky. “Computer science has always been at the forefront of energy efficiency. And there’s definitely an initiative at UMaine to keep things as green as possible.”

Markowsky and fellow computer science professor Phil Dickens were instrumental in bringing the supercomputer to UMaine. Dickens secured a grant from the National Science Foundation to purchase the machine, which will be housed in the High Performance Computer Lab that he runs on campus.

Processor speed has grown by leaps and bounds since the early days of supercomputing — when computers were the size of a school bus, and in some cases used up to 150,000 watts of power to run programs and cool the computer. The SCO72 uses 300 watts of power.

While the computer will be run in the future by a standard electrical current, Wednesday’s demonstration was designed to show how little power it actually uses.

“The fact that this computer can be powered by a team of cyclists underscores how efficient computers have become,” said Markowsky.

The computer will be used to share some of the groundbreaking research conducted at the university, including the school’s world-renowned programs in climate change and glacial modeling, in the new UM Science Grid Portal created by Dickens and his students. Animations and real-time visualization of scientific data will become accessible to the public — from scientists and academics to interested community members and middle school students.

“This is a way to share some of the outstanding research conducted here with the community,” said Dickens. “It’s a gateway to a large collection of scientific results.”

During the presentation, a TV screen displayed two sets of numbers showing the amount of energy being generated by the bicycles and the amount of energy being used by the computer. As the cyclists increased the force with which they pedaled, they eventually were able to power the computer by themselves. By the end of the presentation, most were red-faced and sweating.

“It was definitely a lot harder than I was expecting. It was pretty tough,” said cyclist Abe Furth, a member of the Rose’s Bike Shop race team. “It was comparable to biking up a short, steep hill, just for about 15 straight minutes. It was really fun — I wish there was some way I could power my house like that.”

James Bailey, marketing director for SciCortex, attended a similar presentation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. According to Bailey, the UM cyclists had a little more power in their pedaling.

“At MIT we didn’t get as much,” he said. “We’re not used to Maine standards of energy. It’s quite impressive.”

eburnham@bangordailynews.net

990-8270

Fort Kent residents want windmill moratorium

2008-10-03T05:47:00.001-07:00

Bangor Daily News

By Kevin Miller
BDN Staff

A group of Fort Kent residents is proposing a moratorium on industrial wind turbines within town limits until local officials can develop ordinances governing the enormous structures.

The group has gathered roughly 220 signatures on a petition seeking a 180-day moratorium on construction of commercial wind power facilities as well as processing of any applications. The petition would allow the Town Council to extend the moratorium or cancel it once Fort Kentâ€™s zoning and land-use ordinances have been amended to address wind power facilities.

The petition is a response to a Texas-based company, Horizon Wind, which has been negotiating lease agreements with landowners in the Fort Kent area and in other parts of Aroostook County.

Horizon has yet to file an application with state or local authorities, but company officials have said they hope to build as many as 400 wind turbines in Aroostook. Using todayâ€™s technology, 400 turbines could generate enough electricity to power one-third of Maineâ€™s homes on a hot summer day, although wind turbines rarely function at maximum capacity.

But the prospect of hundreds of 400-foot-tall wind turbines dotting the farm fields and forests of Aroostook County has generated considerable concern among some residents.

Members of the group Citizens for Responsible Wind Development plan to present the petition to Fort Kent officials today. The petition demands a special town referendum on the proposal, although the Town Council could impose a moratorium without voter action, group members said.

â€œMost of the people who signed the petition want this [development] done right or not at all,â€ Dr. Michael Nissenbaum said.

Horizon Wind, which operates locally under the name Aroostook Wind, has been quietly developing plans for large wind energy facilities in The County for several years. Company officials are aggressively negotiating with landowners willing to have a turbine, transmission line or other infrastructure on their property.

Company representatives have declined to disclose publicly how much landowners would be compensated. Annual payments apparently range from a few thousand dollars for roads or lines to several times that for each turbine, according to numerous sources.

Dave Soucy, a Fort Kent lawyer and one of the organizers of the petition drive, said industrial wind turbines have the potential to permanently alter the â€œquality of placeâ€ that makes Fort Kent special. While Soucy is increasingly convinced the massive turbines are inappropriate for the ridgelines and river valleys surrounding Fort Kent, he said it is important for people to make up their own minds.

â€œGiven the size of the proposal and the effect it will have on the community, itâ€™s not too early to get startedâ€ on that conversation, Soucy said. â€œNow, how we choose to deal with it remains to be seen.â€

The petition states that Fort Kentâ€™s land use laws are inadequate to deal with industrial wind power developments and that the town has a duty to protect the health, safety and welfare of residents.

â€œSuitable sites and methods for wind power development need to be reviewed and identified,â€ the petition states. â€œFailure to carefully review and plan for wind power development will reduce options available to the town and may result in devaluation, blight, issues that affect public health and welfare, and environmental degradation.â€

Horizon officials could not be reached for comment Thursday. In past interviews, company representatives have said they do not plan to propose wind turbines near downtown areas and that the public would have ample opportunities to comment on any proposal.

Horizon plans to build the wind facilities in stages, with the first project slated for areas west of Bridgewater. That project is expected to involve more than 100 turbines.

Marcia Spencer-Famous, a planner with the Maine Land Use Regulation Commission, said this week that she expects Horizon to file applications with state regulators for the Bridgewater-area projects in December or January.

A moratorium on wind power facility also has been proposed for the nearby town of Wallagrass.

New York probes Mass. wind-power developer

2008-10-03T05:44:00.000-07:00

Bangor Daily News

By Nick Sambides Jr.
BDN Staff

LINCOLN, Maine â€” As First Wind of Massachusetts finishes building a wind farm on Stetson Mountain and prepares applications for another on Rollins Mountain, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo continues probing allegations that the company dealt improperly with public officials in upstate New York.

Begun in July, Cuomoâ€™s investigation probes whether First Wind and another company based in Connecticut improperly sought or obtained land-use agreements with residents and public officials; whether public officials received improper benefits to influence their actions; and whether they entered into anti-competitive agreements or practices.

â€œThe use of wind power, like all renewable energy sources, should be encouraged to help clean our air and end our reliance on fossil fuels,â€ Cuomo said in a statement released in July. â€œHowever, public integrity remains a top priority of my office and if dirty tricks are used to facilitate even clean-energy projects, my office will put a stop to it.â€

The investigation is continuing, said Cuomoâ€™s spokesman, John Milgrim. He declined to comment further.

First Wind is cooperating fully with the investigation, company spokesman John Lamontagne said. The company denies any wrongdoing. In fact, it tries to be a good neighbor, occasionally assisting community relief efforts.

This week, First Wind split a $30,000 donation among four county-based community programs to help Maine residents handle home heating costs this winter.

The four programs receiving donations are: Aroostook County Action Program Inc.; Community Concepts; Penquis Keep ME Warm Fund; and the Washington Hancock Community Agency THAW Fund. All of the programs are members of the Maine Community Action Association Inc.

â€œFirst Wind strives to be a good corporate citizen in all of the communities in which we work. Part of that is giving back to these communities,â€ LaMontagne said Thursday.

Cuomo sought all documents concerning any benefits conferred on any individual or entity in connection with wind farm activity, plus all agreements, easements or contracts with individuals regarding placement of wind turbines, agreements between wind companies that may indicate anti-competitive practices and all documents pertaining to any payments or benefits received from local, state or federal agencies.

First Wind has seven wind farms operating, in development or under construction in New York, according to its Web site, www.firstwind.com.

Steel Winds I, a 20-megawatt farm of eight 2.5-megawatt Clipper Liberty wind turbines, generates enough to power about 9,000 New York homes in Lackawanna, on the shore of Lake Erie. A 125-megawatt farm, Cohocton I, is under construction in Cohocton, N.Y.

In Maine, First Wind has the 42-megawatt Mars Hill farm operational and a 57-megawatt wind farm on Stetson Mountain in Washington County under construction.

Another 25-megawatt farm for Stetson Mountain is being planned, as is the 60-megawatt Rollins Mountain farm, which is slated to be built in Burlington, Lee, Lincoln and Winn if approved. The megawatt listings represent peak outputs.

Survey raises wood-heating concerns

2008-10-03T05:37:00.000-07:00

Portland Press Herald

This winter, many Mainers will use outdated stoves or heat underinsulated buildings, a study reports.

By TUX TURKEL, Staff Writer
October 3, 2008
Nearly half of Maine households plan to burn wood to help stay warm this winter, but many will be using outdated, less-efficient stoves or heating buildings that aren't insulated to modern standards, according to initial findings of a new statewide survey on energy use.

The state-funded study, done for the American Lung Association of Maine and the Maine Centers for Disease Control, will be used in part to study the degree to which air pollution from increased wood burning might be harmful to public health in Maine.

On a national level, the American Lung Association has been expressing concern about the potential impact of wood smoke – especially from fireplaces – on people with asthma and pulmonary disease.

Initially, researchers wanted to explore possible links between increased wood burning, air pollution and public health.

But the survey was expanded to gather other energy-related information and to act as a baseline to study fuel burning, weatherization efforts and public health impacts in different parts of the state.

"We wanted to get a sense of how behaviors were changing in response to high energy prices," said Norman Anderson, the association's environmental health adviser. The survey of more than 3,000 Maine households will be complete by the end of the month.

Initial results were scheduled to be presented today at the lung association's annual meeting by MaryEllen FitzGerald, president of Critical Insights, the Portland research firm that is conducting the survey.

Record oil prices earlier this year set off a stampede to buy stoves and boilers that burn wood and pellets.

Mainers who burned wood in past years also have reportedly been reinstalling older units.

That concerns health officials, who say they recall neighborhoods choked with wood smoke in the 1980s, when energy costs soared.

The survey, Anderson said, could help track health risk factors over time.

Among those risk factors is the amount of wood being burned, the equipment being used and the possible improper weatherization of homes, which can lead to mold, carbon monoxide buildup and poor ventilation.

The survey also asked about preventative measures. Most respondents said they did not plan to have a professional energy audit, in which a trained contractor uses special equipment to find air leaks and heat loss.

More than half of those surveyed said they didn't see the need for an audit.

That suggests that people think they've done enough to weatherize their homes, even if they've taken only small measures, or that those polled may not be familiar with energy audits.

"If you don't know what it is," said Kevin Fay, the research director at Critical Insights, "it's hard to see the value of it."

Despite concerns about air quality, the survey findings generally are consistent with what officials are seeing and represent a positive direction for Maine, according to John Kerry, the state's energy director.

The move toward greater wood burning is cutting the state's dependence on costly, imported oil and reducing emissions associated with climate change, Kerry said.

The responses to weatherization questions, however, suggest that many Mainers might not appreciate the difference between taking elementary steps to tighten their homes and the more subsantial savings that can be realized through comprehensive insulation and air sealing.

"There's a distinct difference between winterization and weatherization," he said.

Staff Writer Tux Turkel can be contacted at 791-6462 or at:

tturkel@pressherald.com

Copyright © 2008 Blethen Maine Newspapers

Google and General Electric Team Up on Energy Initiatives

2008-09-25T03:42:00.000-07:00

NY Times

September 17, 2008, 10:09 pm

By Miguel Helft

Google and General Electric said on Wednesday that they would work together on technology and policy initiatives to promote the development of additional capacity in the electricity grid and of “smart grid” technologies to enable plug-in hybrids and to manage energy more efficiently. The companies said their goal was to make renewable energy more accessible and useful.

Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, and G.E.’s chief executive, Jeffrey R. Immelt, alluded briefly to the partnership in a joint appearance at Google’s Zeitgeist conference, which is taking place at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

The two executives gave few details of their planned collaboration. In an interview after their presentation, Dan Reicher, director of climate change and energy initiatives at Google.org, an operating unit of Google, said the effort was in its planning stages and did not have a set budget.

“All this talk about renewable energy will not be realized if we do not build substantial additional transmission capacity,” Mr. Reicher said.

Without additional capacity, Mr. Reicher said, it would not be possible, for example, to get power from a solar plant in the Mojave Desert to Los Angeles, or from a wind farm in the Dakotas to Chicago. Mr. Reicher said that environmental standards, overlapping state and federal regulations and other policy issues were among the biggest impediments to building additional transmission capacity.

Google and G.E. are also discussing how to combine their respective software and hardware expertise to enable technologies like plug-in hybrids on a large scale and to accelerate the development of geothermal energy.

For Google, the partnership with G.E. is part of larger set of energy initiatives, including direct investments in green technology to help develop renewable energy that is cheaper to produce than coal-generated power. For its part, G.E. has made a large bet on green energy technologies, an initiative the company calls Ecomagination.