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Today’s post is by Dr. Bill Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and lead author of the forthcoming blog The Green Grok. This is the second post in a 2-part series on biofuels.

Last week’s topic was why corn ethanol is an environmental loser.

But are all biofuels losers? No. Some can be winners. One of those is called cellulosic ethanol.

What Is Cellulosic Ethanol?

All ethanol — whether it is corn or cellulosic — is the same chemical compound: C2H5OH. You might recall from elementary chemistry courses that the “OH” group at the end of the formula indicates that the compound is an “alcohol.” Alcohols can have varying numbers of carbon atoms. Alcohol with two carbon atoms is called “ethanol.” The other alcohols are generally too toxic to be ingested, and thus ethanol has been the libation of choice down through the ages. (Ethanol used as fuel is rendered nonpotable.)

So corn ethanol and cellulosic ethanol don’t signify different types of ethanol, but rather the different material (or feedstocks) used to produce them.
Read the rest of this entry »

May 1: May Day.

For the average American working for a paycheck, May Day — a pagan spring ritual where you dance around a Maypole — marks yet another, less festive occasion.

From the first of January until around the first of May, all the money many of us will earn goes to pay our share of income tax to the US government.

Kiss those months — that money — goodbye (the present tax stimulus package is really just a refund).

We followed the advice of our parents, as most children do: get a good education, go to college and get a job — a nice, secure, well-paying one, with great fringe benefits, stock options or profit-sharing. But the bimonthly paychecks — after the government gets its share for income, Social Security and Medicare taxes — aren’t enough to keep up with the bills. Even with raises and promotions, many of us feel that we keep getting further in the hole, since the more we earn in earned income, the more it’s taxed. The reality is that the system is largely devised this way, not to tax the very rich but to exact a fee on the middle class and poor to keep these wage earners on the treadmaster of a job — or “promising career.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Written by Dr. Bill Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and lead author of the forthcoming blog The Green Grok.
This post is Part 1 of a 2-part series on biofuels. Today’s post looks at corn; Part 2 will examine the most promising biofuels.

Who doesn’t want to be green? But beware of automobile ads claiming environmental benefits from home-grown ethanol. Almost all U.S. ethanol comes from corn and, as a fuel, corn just isn’t as “amaizing” as they say.

“What if we could live green by going yellow?” one TV spot asks. “What if we could lower greenhouse gas emissions,” it continues, promisingly, “with a fuel that grew back every year?” Sounds great doesn’t it? Sorry folks, it’s just not so. Read the rest of this entry »

We all know that e-mail is far superior to faxing or God-forbid, snail mail! But, how much greener is it?

That’s what a new project at Sun Microsystems is trying to find out. This new initiative attempts to measure the carbon footprint of individual e-mails with the hope of being able to quantify it for individuals and companies.

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You swap out your light bulbs for energy-efficient ones, keep your house as chilled as a meat locker in winter, bicycle to work, eat little meat and drive a hybrid — yet nagging at you is this thought: Do my small actions make a difference? Author Michael Pollan says they do.

In last week’s Sunday New York Times Magazine (4.20.08), Pollan wrote a provocative essay, “Why Bother? Looking for a few good reasons to go green.” In it, he wrestles with those lurking questions about our everyday choices to stave off global warming. Some excerpts:

Let’s say I do bother, big time. I turn my life upside-down…, but what would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who’s positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I’m struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?

He looks at the reasons we find for not doing anything: “There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing,” he writes.

And yet, he resoundingly concludes that those little things are worth the bother. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is by Dr. Bill Chameides, Dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and lead author of the forthcoming blog The Green Grok.

Everyone knows we need green energy to fight global warming. But there’s another big reason to tap renewable power sources –- not enough water.

Large swaths of the Southwest and Southeast are in the throes of debilitating droughts. North Texas and Oklahoma’s recent dry spell dragged on from 2003 to the spring of 2007 (more on U.S. droughts). Droughts have even wiped out entire civilizations like the Anasazi (see Jared Diamond’s Collapse and Eugene Linden‘s Winds of Change).

But today’s water problems are far more profound than those of the Anasazi. The huge quantities we use — unprecedented in human history — make us more vulnerable to drought. Our water woes stem from an ever-increasing demand for water to slake the thirsts of a growing population on the one hand and to irrigate crops to feed that same population on the other.

Few people appreciate that yet another sector is clamoring for more water — the power industry. Fortunately we have the technology to wean this one from our dwindling supplies. Read the rest of this entry »

The new Green Options Media discussion forums have been live for almost two weeks now… have you stopped by to join in the discussion? If not, here’s a good excuse: today, we started our first “Live Debate” with a topic sure to generate some heat: nuclear power. Forum moderator Mark Seall has pitted Rod Adams, a nuclear proponent and the founder of Atomic Insights, against Matt (no last name listed), a sustainability consultant, regular contributor to Talk Climate Change, and “vocal opponent of nuclear power.”

Rod and Matt have started their discussion, and your invited to join in by 1) voting in the poll at the top of the forum, and 2) starting your own discussion on the topic in the Renewable Energy forum. While they’re focusing on a potential British-French partnership to ramp up the production of nuclear power, the topic and arguments have implications for all of us. So, whether you’re in London or Lincoln (any Lincoln), stop by and weigh in on this critical topic, regardless of where you stand on the issue.

This is exciting stuff: Xcel Energy is going to test 80-ton batteries the size of two semi-trailers to capture the power generated from its wind turbines.

The utility is testing 20 such batteries with an 11-megawatt wind farm in southwestern Minnesota. There’s a test phase set for this spring and then the batteries are expected to go online in October.

The challenge with wind power, explained an Xcel Energy representative, isn’t that it blows and stops but that the speed of the wind varies. So the system will work like this: When the wind is blowing, the spinning turbines will help charge the batteries. When the wind slows, the batteries will help even out the flow of electricity to the grid. The batteries discharge one megawatt of power, which is enough energy to power about 1,000 homes. The Japanese-made batteries have a life expectancy of 15 years.

This is the first time a utility has used batteries in conjunction with a wind farm to help with peak power demands. By 2020, Xcel Energy is required by Minnesota to get 30 percent of its energy from renewable sources.

BusinessGreen
St. Paul Pioneer Press

Renewable energy generates clean power, and the fuel is often free: There’s no cost to make the wind blow or the sun shine. But just as many people advocate for considering the full cost of fossil fuels in the price of electricity (the cost of the pollution, mining, etc), so too must the full cost and impact of renewable energy be accounted for.

A new life-cycle assessment study from the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York examined the four most common types of photovoltaic (PV) solar power cells — multicrystalline silicon, monocrystalline silicon, ribbon silicon and thin-film, if you were wondering — to find out how much energy and waste was involved in their creation.

“Emissions from Photovoltaic Life Cycles” found that even when accounting for the metals required to build PV cells, the efficiency of the cells, and the waste produced, PV cells still emit less global warming pollution throughout their life cycle than the fossil fuels needed to produce the same amount of power. Actually, most of the pollution from the solar power comes from the indirect emissions of the fossil fuels used to generate the electricity of the PV manufacturing facilities.

The most energy-intensive type of PV cell to make — the monocrystalline silicate cells — only emits 1.8 ounces of global warming pollution per kilowatt hour, compared to 2.2 pounds by a coal-fired power plant. All told, the construction and use of PV power would cut air pollution about 90 percent if it replaced fossil fuels.

The best-case scenario, of course, would be for solar manufacturing facilities to be powered by solar. Researchers concluded that 30 percent of the energy used to make PV cells could come from solar power installed on the roofs and parking lot of facilities.

While some people point out that the study only partly takes into consideration the transportation of PV components (most of which are made in China), the researchers want to broaden their work further to include end-of-life and recycling data of the PV cells. They believe this expansion could further improve overall emissions calculations.

Nanowerk
Scientific American
Treehugger

Illinois Representative Karen May (D-Highland) has introduced a bill calling for a system of renewable energy “feed-in tariffs” (FITs) like those used in Germany to spur the development of electricity from renewable sources. After its initial reading, HB 5855, The Illinois Renewable Energy Sources Act has been reported to the House Rules Committee for initial action.

Feed-in tariffs have proven remarkably successful throughout Europe, and especially in Germany, where some 55% of the world’s solar power capacity resides. I have covered the nuts and bolts of the FIT here and I have made a short argument for them here (but for a more comprehensive treatment of how and why the policy mechanism works, I recommend visiting the World Future Council’s PACT website, which is a powerful resource for advocates, policymakers, environmentalists, tech geeks and regular folks).

In a nutshell, a feed-in tariff offers a long-term guaranteed price contract (usually about 15-20 years) to any entity that contributes electricity to the grid via renewable sources like solar, wind, biomass, landfill gas, small hydro, geothermal and methane. Whereas existing policy mechanisms like the production tax credit favor large corporations with sizable tax liability, and investment tax credits favor those folks who can afford a large upfront cost that comes with a 20-30 year payoff, this policy tool encourages the distributed generation of renewable energy and it levels the playing field by providing long-term investment security for small businesses, homeowners, churches, schools and others, so they are more willing to make the financial commitment that is necessary for installing renewable energy themselves. This is not to say that our existing RE policy tools of choice (including renewable energy standards) are inherently bad, but they may be insufficient to spark the kind of growth in clean energy the public seems to be demanding.

The diffusion of renewable energy FITs has extended from Northern Europe to include some 47 countries worldwide, but the mechanism has yet to gain much political traction in the United States. The bill is modeled after the legislation proposed in the fall of 2007, when Rep. Kathleen Law introduced HB 5218 into the Michigan House of Representatives.

Ironically, while the eyes of renewable energy policy wonks (yes, there are such a thing) have been looking to California, Michigan and Minnesota for a successful German-style feed-in tariff, Rep. May’s bill took people by surprise. Read the rest of this entry »