Over the last year, Japan’s long economic doldrums have been used as a cautionary lesson for stimulus spending in Washington policy circles. While there is little doubt that Japan has overspent on public works projects, it is also clear that Japan invested mainly in the same old projects: dams, roads, and airports. Today’s release of the smart grid stimulus grants shows that the United States does not have to repeat the Japanese experience.
Announced by President Obama during a visit to a solar energy facility in Arcadia, Fla., the grants consist of $ 3.4 billion for smart grid projects, spread across 49 states and the territory of Guam. This is three quarters of the amount announced initially in the stimulus package. The money will go directly to private companies, utilities, or equipment manufacturing. The private sector guarantees an additional $ 4.7 billion to finance 100 projects aimed at demand management and technological update of the electricity grid.
A quick look at the spatial distribution of the grants shows that most of funds will go to companies located in the top 100 metros. Two-thirds of the projects and 85 percent of the funds will be managed from these areas. They will invest most of the money in crosscutting systems, a combination of demand response programs, smart grid technologies, and appliances. A quarter of all the money will be spent on smart meters projects. The utilities in the top 100 metros will also spend $148 million on improved reliability of transmission lines.
Over the past few days, the Internet burped up three noteworthy energy-related studies that I kept meaning to blog, but never found the time. Thankfully, that's why some visionary on the Internet invented link dumps:
It's fairly well-established that people could save money over the long run by making their homes more energy-efficient—better insulation, say—or even, in some cases, putting solar panels on their roofs to generate their own electricity. But many of these upgrades never happen, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the incentives are misaligned, if, say, the landlord owns the building but the tenant pays electricity and heating costs.
Score another one for German engineering. Out on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., this week, the Energy Department has been hosting its fourth-ever Solar Decathlon—a competition among 20 designs for solar-powered houses from around the world.
In 2001, an entrepreneur named Tom Casten traveled down to southern Louisiana, near the small town of Franklin, with a clever idea. For decades, the area had sustained a pair of chemical plants that produced carbon black, a grimy powder used in printer ink and tire rubber. But the owner of one of the plants, Cabot Corporation, was struggling to compete against cheap tire imports from abroad, and desperately seeking ways to cut costs. That’s where Casten came in. He pointed out that the gas left over from the carbon-black process was just getting wasted--burned off and flared up into the sky. He proposed building a recycling facility that could capture the gas and use it to generate electricity. Not only would this make the plant slightly cleaner--carbon-black plants are notorious polluters--but there’d be enough juice to run Cabot’s operations, and for less than it cost to buy power from the local utility. In all, the company could save up to $1.3 million per year.
It's not considered the height of political savvy here in the United States to point out that European lifestyles are greener than our own. Don't expect that line in an Obama speech anytime soon. Too many facets of European life—the cramped apartments, the clotheslines for drying laundry—would likely strike suburbanites as inconvenient, burdensome, or even downright primitive.
Earlier this month, the Economist discussed the subject of electric cars, making the point that policy has to change if they are to become a successful avenue toward cleaner cars. Beyond regulating vehicle emissions, government also has to develop the electricity grid to accommodate the new vehicles.
Is modern finance more like electricity or junk food? This is, of course, the big question of the day.
If most of finance as currently organized is a form of electricity, then we obviously cannot run our globalized economy without it. We may worry about adverse consequences and potential network disruptions from operating this technology, but this is the cost of living in the modern world.
On the other hand, there is growing evidence that the vast majority of what happens in and around modern financial markets is much more like junk food--little nutritional value, bad for your health, and a hard habit to kick.
Back in June, during the House debate over climate legislation, three Democratic swing votes—Reps. Kathy Dahlkemper, Chris Carney, and Tom Perriello—all received letters that appeared to be from local organizations opposing the bill. Perriello got multiple letters from the local NAACP in Virginia, urging him to vote no. Dahlkemper and Carney both got letters from local senior citizens’ centers in Pennsylvania, all of which professed deep concerns about the bill’s effect on their electricity bills.
What with all that hot sun beating down on the Sahara Desert day after day, it's no surprise that energy planners have suggested lining the sands of North Africa with mirrors and building vast concentrated solar plants to deliver lots and lots of carbon-free power to Europe. It's not just an idle fantasy, either: One $573 billion proposal, known as Desertec, has attracted a dozen finance and industrial companies, and its backers claim that the solar arrays could one day satisfy up to 15 percent of Europe's electricity needs.
On paper, at least, "enhanced" geothermal is an incredibly alluring concept. The idea is to bore down, really deep down into the Earth's crust—say, 12,000 feet below the surface—and then pump water through the cracks in the hot bedrock, creating steam to generate electricity.
Does rooftop wind power have a future? Preston Koerner reports today that four new wind turbines are going up atop a 22-story building in downtown Portland. At first glance, it doesn't sound like a great deal: The turbines cost $40,000 in all and will satisfy just 1 percent of the building's electricity needs. But the developers at the helm of the project say they're mostly just interested in testing out the concept at this stage.
China, it's rapidly becoming clear, has a trash problem. As the country has gotten wealthier, it's become the world's largest producer of household garbage. Packaging, old electronics, newspaper, bottles, plain old junk—all of it's piling up and there's increasingly no place to dump it.
To recap, natural-gas deposits appear to be a lot more plentiful in the United States than previously thought. And natural gas produces far fewer carbon-dioxide emissions than coal, which presently provides half the country's electricity. So it would be rational for the gas industry to push for a strong carbon cap that prods electric utilities into switching fuels.
Peter Behr and Christa Marshall of ClimateWire have an important story today about how the natural-gas industry may start flexing its muscle when the Senate gets around to debating the climate bill this fall. That could end up being a huge deal.
Could the coal-burning heartland actually fare better under the House climate bill than less carbon-intensive coastal states like California and New York? In some respects, yes, according to a new Reuters report, especially when one takes into account the ways in which the bill distributes carbon allowances to different states:
During a Senate hearing on clean energy earlier this week, Republicans Lamar Alexander and Mike Crapo caused a minor stir by hinting that maybe, just maybe they'd consider the idea of a climate bill with a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions—as long as the bill had strong support for nuclear energy.
Of all the questions about climate policy, one of the biggest is whether a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases will even work. Will it actually and tangibly reduce emissions? The only real-world example we have is the EU's Emissions Trading System, set up in 2005.
In the winter of 1984, a young scientist named Steven Chu was working as the new head of the quantum electronics division at AT&T's Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. For months, he'd been struggling to find ways to trap atoms with light so that he could hold them in place and study them better. It was an idea he'd picked up from an older colleague, Arthur Ashkin, who had wrangled with the problem all through the 1970s before finally being told to shut the project down--which he did, until Chu came along.
Here's something I never would have predicted: When the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing this morning on permit allocations, of all topics, the room was totally packed—hardly an empty seat to be found.
