Costly Solar

Solar power is on my mind a lot these days.

We’ve looked into a simple solar kit for our camper, and think we could get into one for less than $500. It wouldn’t be the same as plugging into an electrical outlet, but it certainly would help us keep the battery charged on a long-term vacation, if ever such a thing were undertaken.

Solar for the house is something else. To be able to generate that kind of power, we’d have to install a roof-full of solar panels. And they simply cost just too much at that scale. I’ve seen prices ranging from $20,000 to $35,000 per home – and that’s just for one house. Can’t imagine being a utility and trying to install a massive solar project and recoup the costs. On an individual basis, even with the potential savings in electricity, it’s a no-brainer: It would take longer than your typical 30-year mortgage period to recoup the solar investment.

Once in a while, I get excited when I read something like this, one of a trickle of stories I see on companies like SunRun, which installs solar panels for you without an up-front payment, but then trickles the money out of you and subsequent homeowners over time. I suppose it’s good that the up-front costs disappear, but when I read things like this . . .

In Buller's case, his new solar panels (which SunRun paid for entirely) cut his $200-a-month electricity bill by $140, or 70%. Buller gets to keep $50 of the savings and pays the balance to SunRun, which uses it to cover the cost of buying the solar system and hiring a contractor to install and maintain it.

. . . I get less excited about the concept. How hard, I wonder, is it to “maintain” a solar panel system? I guess I’d have to find that out.

And as for leasing the equipment – that’s just trading paying money to the electric company to the leaseor. That’s not saving me money. I guess it’s a feel-good thing, however. And you avoid the up-front costs. But the up-front costs demonstrate how horribly expensive it is to “go green” on the individual scale.

So perhaps the idea is to start small – as with the kit we’re looking at for the camper. If that works out well enough, then we get a similar kit and hook it up to the house. If that works well, another kit. Bit off the energy savings a bit at a time, rather than trying to do everything at once. That’s slow-term energy independence, but at a much more manageable, incremental cost.

SOTU and Energy Policy

President Barack Obama continued to deliver good news for folks who want to see changes in the nation's energy policies as he outlined continued support for nuclear power, electrical cars and other innovations and programs in the State of the Union address.

Full text of the address may be found here.

First of all, the president wants to eliminate taxpayer dollars going to the oil companies:

We need to get behind this innovation. And to help pay for it, I'm asking Congress to eliminate the billions in taxpayer dollars we currently give to oil companies. I don't know if you've noticed, but they're doing just fine on their own. So instead of subsidizing yesterday's energy, let's invest in tomorrow's.

To that, all I can say is hear, hear. This nation has no business offering these companies any subsidies or handing over this nation's resources cheaply, especially when these companies are enjoying record profits.
Of course, we'll be presented with the bugaboo of increased gasoline prices because surely the oil companies will pass on any increased costs that show up in the elimination of government subsidies to the consumer.
I'm not thrilled at the prospect, but if that means money being put into other areas of energy research and innovation, I'll put up with higher gasoline prices for that. Here's where the President would like to see that money go:

Now, clean energy breakthroughs will only translate into clean energy jobs if businesses know there will be a market for what they're selling. So tonight, I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal: by 2035, 80% of America's electricity will come from clean energy sources. Some folks want wind and solar. Others want nuclear, clean coal, and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will need them all – and I urge Democrats and Republicans to work together to make it happen.

Add to this the goal of having 1 million electric cars on the streets by 2015, and I see good things coming.
Of course what's going to happen if this can come to pass – and that's a big if, because there are a lot of people who want the status quo – is that a lot of people are going to see their cheese moved, and not be happy about it. I guess what I'm saying is that it's time our cheese be moved. And some of that cheese is going to have to move in Congress, with politicians putting politics aside. So, in other words, I'm not really holding my breath.

The President talked about America facing another Sputnik moment. I believe we are facing that moment. I can hope that we can find the courage to pursue another grand project on the scale of Apollo or Manhattan. Money will be easier to find -- finding the courage to do what it takes to get the programs planned and implemented will be much harder to do.

BP: Get Safe or Get Out

Given that the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is now the nation's worst spill ever, doesn't it make sense to completely ban ofshore oil drilling?

No?

Good. You're using your head.

Don't get me wrong: What's happened in the gulf is nasty and should not have happened. BP's deplorable safety record:

The violations are determined when an employer demonstrated either an "intentional disregard for the requirements of the [law], or showed plain indifference to employee safety and health."

OSHA statistics show BP ran up 760 "egregious, willful" safety violations, while Sunoco and Conoco-Phillips each had eight, Citgo had two and Exxon had one comparable citation.

shows that the company, at least in the United States -- I don't see this kind of thing going on in England, though it's quite possible I'm grossly misinformed -- thumbs its nose at safety and environmental law. I don't know how they can do this and stay in business, unless, as has been shown, the regulatory bodies are in bed with them.

Shutting down oil drilling and exploration isn't the right idea. It's knee-jerk, it's short-sighted and does absolutely nothing to fill the need for raw materials for plastics, pharmaceuticals and other products, forgetting about gasoline.

So what do you do?

Obviously, BP needs a safety culture. I won't say a better safety culture, because it's clear the company doesn't have one.

Private enterprise can have excellent safety cultures. I work for a subcontractor to CH2M Hill at the Idaho National Laboratory, where the company is engaged in digging up and repackaging legacy nuclear waste to ship it to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. A lot of the work we do is hazardous, given the radioactive and chemical hazards that are buried out here. And yet I've seen time and again that the company and its workers have an excellent, almost paranoid, safety culture. If one little thing goes wrong, it's not brushed under the rug. It's investigated. It's fixed.

A few weeks ago, for example, we had a fire at work. Repeated drills on fire emergency procedures showed we know what to do. Even better, after the fire was out -- there was some kind of electrical fault in a piece of heavy equipment that started a fire inside one of our waste retrieval tents -- work was shut down for a few days so those in the know could figure out what went wrong and try their best t make sure the event wouldn't be repeated. Yeah, it cost the company some money to shut down operations for a few days, but that it makes subsequent operations that much more safe is worth the money. I'm proud to work with such a company, and proud that I've been involved in writing the emergency procedures that were followed so well.

We even get things like this to reinforce our safety culture:

So I know a safety culture is possible.

So what needs to change at BP? They need some safety-minded folks in charge. Other oil companies are obviously able to do this kind of work safely. BP needs to look at what these other companies are doing.

And if they don't, they need to be regulated to the point that they either engage good safety culture or are disinvited from drilling in the United States. Shutting down oil drilling carte blanche is a stupid idea. Cutting BP out of the game if it can't improve its safety record makes much more sense.

Bleating on the Energy Soapbox

This oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a terrible thing.

Worse yet, it’s being used by all sorts of people to promote their own energy agendas.

I was almost one of them. I was halfway done preparing a screed on why the disaster in the gulf should be pushing us toward more reliance on nuclear power for energy production when this came across my desk.

The relevant quote: “We just haven’t seen a wind spill yet.”

And it’s hilarious. Off-the-wall. Pithy and oh-so-easy to print on a bumper sticker.

Of course it’s not true. Tornadoes and hurricanes are obviously wind spills on gargantuan scales. It was a stupid thing to say in the face of the environmental calamity taking place in the gulf. Which is why my nuclear screed went into the garbage can.

This kind of position posturing does nothing to help energy agendas. It just makes the people making the comparisons look foolish. Because here’s the reality:

Off-shore oil drilling, and on-shore oil drilling, will not only continue but increase until large-scale viable alternatives are found. And this won’t happen as long as blowhards like Bill Maher are telling us countries like Brazil are relying completely on sugar cane ethanol when they aren’t, and when we can say sugar cane ethanol production isn’t displacing other crops, which in turn displace that Amazon rain forest which is of course another environmental disaster caused, in part, by the alternative fuels industry.

We don’t needs bumper sticker mottoes. We need people and ideas for long-term energy independence. We need companies that are more committed to safety and ecology. We need political parties who will stop using their pet energy generators as footballs and put them in the business of finding alternative energy sources – solar, wind, nuclear – that are less threatening to the environment. We need less of the “Drill, baby, drill” mentality from the right and the “Iceland’s volcano is pooping emeralds because we’re flying less” mentality from the left.

We need less people chirruping about wind spills and voodoo-caused earthquakes and more people willing to say, yeah, we need cleaner energy. Here’s money to do it. Here’s ways to do it. Here’s places to do it – hear that, Nantucket Sound?

Obama’s Presumed Pick for Energy Sec’y Bodes Well for Energy, Idaho

If President-Elect (my wife hates that phrase, but so it is) Obama follows through in selecting Steven Chu as his Secretary of Energy, the White House will gain a strong advocate for alternative energy that includes a ringing endorsement for nuclear power and nuclear fuel recycling, two bits of information that bode well for eastern Idaho’s nuclear industry.

Chu, a physicist and currently head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, looks to be a good fit for the post, given his background in research into alternative energy, specifically solar and biofuels from waste products rather than food products.

This is what Chu had to say about nuclear power and fuel recycling in 2005 (yes, it’s old, but still heartening; red the entire article here):

Q: Should fission-based nuclear power plants be made a bigger part of the
energy-producing portfolio?

A: Absolutely. Right now about 20 percent of our power comes from
nuclear; there have been no new nuclear plants built since the early '70s. The
real rational fears against nuclear power are about the long-term waste problem
and [nuclear] proliferation. The technology of separating [used fuel from
still-viable fuel] and putting the good stuff back in to the reactor can also be
used to make bomb material.

And then there's the waste problem: with future nuclear power plants,
we've got to recycle the waste. Why? Because if you take all the waste we have
now from our civilian and military nuclear operations, we'd fill up Yucca
Mountain. [Yucca Mountain, which sits on federal land in Nevada , is under
consideration as a long-term storage facility for spent nuclear fuel.] So we
need three or four Yucca Mountains. Well, we don't have three or four Yucca
Mountains. The other thing is that storing the fuel at Yucca Mountain is
supposed to be safe for 10,000 years. But the current best estimates - and these
are really estimates, the Lab's in fact - is that the metal casings [containing
the waste] will probably fail on a scale of 5,000 years, plus or minus 2. That's
still a long time, and then after that the idea was that the very dense rock,
very far away from the water table will contain it, so that by the time it
finally leaks down to the water table and gets out the radioactivity will have
mostly decayed.

Suppose instead that we can reduce the lifetime of the
radioactive waste by a factor of 1,000. So it goes from a
couple-hundred-thousand-year problem to a thousand-year problem. At a thousand
years, even though that's still a long time, it's in the realm that we can
monitor - we don't need Yucca Mountain.

I like his dual approach – fuel recycling, which reduces the amount of waste, and then research into cutting down the radioactivity. I believe it can be done, if we can get past the political obstacles. Chu’s interest in nuclear should keep that avenue open in the White House, as long as Obama is willing to listen to those he’s appointed, rather than the chicken littles in the Democratic party who would rather see Ed Begley-inspired alternative energy rather than nuclear. And though Republicans might grumble that Chu is a believer in global warming, I say at this point that global warming deniers in the party need to set those political prejudices aside and figure out that the Drill Baby Drill attitude is, at best, a short-term, short-sighted fix to our energy dependence on other nations. Let’s find out what we can do here to produce the energy we need – and find ways to do so not at the expense of the environment.

Chu’s stance on biofuel research also bodes well for states like Idaho, where there are ample supplies of crop waste products (anything from corn stalks to wheat stalks to grasses) that could be converted into biofuels.

Some in political circles grumble that Chu is politically inexperienced, and that a politically-savvy person, like Colin Powell or (heaven forbid) Arnold Schwarzenegger should be Obama’s pick for Energy Secretary instead. Color me funny, but I think the top nob in Washington concerned with energy ought to be someone who knows about energy. Powell has lots of good going for him politically, but I don’t know that he’s all that knowledgeable on energy. And then there’s Scwarzenegger. Do we really want Ah-nold in the Cabinet? Sure, he’s promoted alternative energy in California, but every time I listen to him talk about it I’m reminded of Ratbert the consultant making up for his lack of knowledge about computers by being exuberant. Could Scwarzenegger do anything than dart about shouting “Alternative energy! Wahoo!” We need someone who understands this stuff, can talk with others who understands this stuff and can leave the politicking to others. We don’t need a cheerleader.