Trump’s Choice to Run Energy Says Fossil Fuels Are Virtuous December 15, 2024

Trump’s Choice to Run Ener­gy Says Fos­sil Fuels Are Virtuous

Chris Wright, Don­ald Trump’s pick for ener­gy sec­re­tary, says oil, gas and coal are key to solv­ing glob­al pover­ty. Some call that misleading.

 Lisa Fried­man — Dec. 12, 2024

Orig­i­nal arti­cle cita­tion, click here.http://Trump’s Choice to Run Ener­gy Says Fos­sil Fuels Are Virtuous

Chris Wright, the frack­ing mag­nate and like­ly next U.S. ener­gy sec­re­tary, makes a moral case for fos­sil fuels.

Chris Wright, the founder and chief exec­u­tive of Lib­er­ty Ener­gy, in 2018.

Cred­it Andy Cross/​The Den­ver Post, via Asso­ci­at­ed Press

His posi­tion, laid out in speech­es and pod­casts, is that the world’s poor­est peo­ple need oil, gas and coal to real­ize the ben­e­fits of mod­ern life that Amer­i­cans and oth­ers in rich nations take for grant­ed. Only fos­sil fuels, he says, can bring pros­per­i­ty to mil­lions who still burn wood, dung or char­coal for basic needs like cook­ing food and heat­ing homes.

“It’s just, I think, naïve or evil, or some com­bi­na­tion of the two, to believe they should nev­er have wash­ing machines, they should nev­er have access to elec­tric­i­ty, they should nev­er have mod­ern med­i­cine,” Mr. Wright said on the “Mis­sion Zero” pod­cast last year. “We don’t want that to hap­pen. And we sim­ply don’t have mean­ing­ful sub­sti­tutes for oil, gas and coal today.”

The argu­ment offered by Mr. Wright, who has been cho­sen by Pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald J. Trump to run the Ener­gy Depart­ment, ignores the fact that wind, solar and oth­er renew­able ener­gy are clean­er and increas­ing­ly cheap­er than fos­sil fuels. The Inter­na­tion­al Ener­gy Agency says clean ener­gy is com­ing online glob­al­ly at an “unprece­dent­ed rate” and will play a sig­nif­i­cant role in the future. In some places, renew­able ener­gy has been able to dis­place fos­sil fuels.

Mr. Wright also skates past the cli­mate impacts from burn­ing more fos­sil fuels. Cli­mate change is already hav­ing a dis­pro­por­tion­ate impact on poor nations, which are less able than rich coun­tries to han­dle the ris­ing seas, extreme weath­er, drought and oth­er con­se­quences of glob­al warming.

“It’s pret­ty self-serv­ing by the fos­sil fuel indus­try to assume the future is going to look exact­ly like the past,” said Joseph Curtin, a man­ag­ing direc­tor on the pow­er and cli­mate team at the Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion, which is work­ing on expand­ing clean ener­gy access in poor countries.

“That’s not based on any ana­lyt­i­cal rig­or,” Mr. Curtin said. “It’s per­haps based in the need to sell fos­sil fuels and shroud it in a moral framework.”

Jody Free­man, the direc­tor of the Har­vard Law School Envi­ron­men­tal and Ener­gy Law, called Mr. Wright’s posi­tion “mis­lead­ing, warped and selective.”

“It is not an intel­lec­tu­al­ly seri­ous argu­ment,” she said. “It’s about cre­at­ing a per­mis­sion struc­ture for not pur­su­ing a more respon­si­ble ener­gy policy.”

But by sheath­ing fos­sil fuels in human­i­tar­i­an lan­guage as a solu­tion to glob­al pover­ty, Mr. Wright has emerged as one of the right’s most savvy sales­men for oil and gas. “His is the newest and fresh­est point of view I’ve seen,” Jeff Peeples, the host of “Mis­sion Zero.” He said the oil and gas indus­try has been on the defen­sive when it comes to cli­mate change.

“If a lot more exec­u­tives in the oil and gas indus­try would make this argu­ment, and make this intel­lec­tu­al case for the use of fos­sil fuels, I think the ener­gy indus­try as a whole would have a lot bet­ter PR suc­cess,” Mr. Peeples said.

A self-described “nerd turned entre­pre­neur” and out­door enthu­si­ast who is often pho­tographed in a fleece vest, Mr. Wright runs a frack­ing ser­vices com­pa­ny and fre­quent­ly talks about his trav­els through Africa as inform­ing his desire to tack­le poverty.

“Peo­ple that are burn­ing wood­en dung in their huts and want to have a propane stove, they want to get off their feet, ride on a bus or a motor scoot­er,” Mr. Wright said on the pod­cast “PetroNerds” last year.

The Trump tran­si­tion team did not make Mr. Wright avail­able for a tele­phone interview.

Mr. Wright’s views on devel­op­ing nations are impor­tant; as ener­gy sec­re­tary, he would not only over­see oil and gas exports from the Unit­ed States but also part­ner­ships with poor coun­tries to cre­ate renew­able energy.

The share of peo­ple gain­ing access to elec­tric­i­ty has steadi­ly grown glob­al­ly, and fos­sil fuels are large­ly respon­si­ble. About 800 mil­lion peo­ple now lack access to elec­tric­i­ty, down from more than 1.5 bil­lion in 1998.

A new solar project in Gabon. A solar array can start pro­duc­ing elec­tric­i­ty in months, while it can take years to build a gas-pow­ered plant.Credit…Nao Mukadi/​Agence France-Presse — Get­ty Images

But Ian Muir, head of insights at Cat­a­lyst Ener­gy Advi­sors, a con­sult­ing firm, point­ed out that renew­ables were now cheap­er than fos­sil fuels in most coun­tries where peo­ple lack elec­tric­i­ty. More­over, a solar array can start pro­duc­ing elec­tric­i­ty in months, while it can take more than two years to build a gas-pow­ered plant, he said.

The World Bank has found that solar mini grids could pro­vide basic elec­tric­i­ty to 380 mil­lion peo­ple in Africa by 2030 who do not cur­rent­ly have access to pow­er. A Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion study in 2021 found that invest­ing in dis­trib­uted renew­able ener­gy like rooftop solar pan­els, small-scale wind tur­bines and home bat­tery stor­age sys­tems could cre­ate 25 mil­lion jobs by the end of the decade in Asia and Africa. That is about 30 times the num­ber of jobs that would be cre­at­ed by invest­ments in oil, gas or coal in that peri­od, the study found.

Daniel M. Kam­men, a pro­fes­sor of ener­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, who has worked on ener­gy access through­out Africa and Asia, said coal was respon­si­ble for hun­dreds of thou­sands of pre­ma­ture deaths around the world annually.

More­over, he said, big fos­sil fuel plants in devel­op­ing nations often tend to favor indus­tries like min­ing rather than peo­ple who need elec­tric­i­ty in their homes, so that their chil­dren can study at night or they can charge a cellphone.

Tech­nolo­gies like mini grids and rooftop solar can often move faster to pro­vide the elec­tric­i­ty access Mr. Wright talks about, he said.

While the coal indus­try for years pre­sent­ed its prod­uct as an anti­dote to pover­ty, Mr. Wright has become the new mas­ter of an old playbook.

His rhetoric echoes Bjorn Lom­borg, the Dan­ish author who gained promi­nence in 2001 with the Eng­lish pub­li­ca­tion of his book “The Skep­ti­cal Envi­ron­men­tal­ist,” in which he accept­ed the real­i­ty of cli­mate change but said gov­ern­ments should focus on reduc­ing pover­ty rather than green­house gas­es. Mr. Lom­borg was accused of cher­ry-pick­ing data and mis­rep­re­sent­ing sci­ence, but Mr. Wright called the book “fan­tas­tic” and has referred to Mr. Lom­borg a friend.

In 2014, Alex Epstein, who argues against cli­mate sci­ence and is a favorite of Fox News, pub­lished “The Moral Case for Fos­sil Fuels,”which described coal, oil and gas as humanity’s best chance to thrive. (Mr. Wright has appeared on Mr. Epstein’s pod­cast, “Pow­er Hour.”) That same year, Peabody Ener­gy, then one of the world’s lead­ing coal com­pa­nies, began an ad cam­paign that extolled the virtues of coal for the world’s poor.

“Its déjà vu all over again,” said Robert J. Brulle, a soci­ol­o­gist at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty who stud­ies fos­sil fuel mis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns. “They’re draw­ing on old tropes that have been around for 20, 30 years.”

Over the years, Mr. Wright built a rep­u­ta­tion with gim­micks like drink­ing a shot of fracked water in a toast to envi­ron­men­tal crit­ics. In 2021, he com­mis­sioned bill­boards around Den­ver to heck­le the out­door cloth­ing mak­er North Face after the com­pa­ny — whose prod­ucts, like many oth­er goods, con­tain petro­le­um — declined to brand a jack­et with an oil company.

“That North Face puffer looks great on you. And it was made from fos­sil fuels,” read the signs.

Those who have worked with Mr. Wright described him as some­one who sin­cere­ly wants to improve liv­ing standards.

“He’s a good per­son who wants to make the world bet­ter,” said Tisha Schuller, an ener­gy con­sul­tant in Col­orado and past pres­i­dent of the Col­orado Oil & Gas Asso­ci­a­tion who has worked close­ly with Mr. Wright.

After receiv­ing a diplo­ma from the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, Mr. Wright did grad­u­ate work on solar ener­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley. In 1992, he found­ed Pin­na­cle Tech­nolo­gies, which cre­at­ed soft­ware that Mr. Wright called “super nerdy” to mea­sure the motion of flu­id beneath the earth. It helped bring about a com­mer­cial shale gas rev­o­lu­tion. Mr. Wright start­ed Lib­er­ty Ener­gy in 2011, and the com­pa­ny has part­nered with oth­ers on small mod­u­lar nuclear reac­tors and geot­her­mal energy.

Mr. Wright’s stake in Lib­er­ty Ener­gy is worth $50 mil­lion, accord­ing to Forbes, and a recent SEC fil­ing put his com­pen­sa­tion last year at $5.6 mil­lion. He helped estab­lish a char­i­ty, the Bet­ter­ing Human Lives Foun­da­tion, to pro­mote cook­stoves using liq­ue­fied petro­le­um gas in Kenya and else­where. They are con­sid­ered bet­ter for the envi­ron­ment and health than tra­di­tion­al cook­ing fuels of kerosene, bio­mass and coal. Records show the foun­da­tion start­ed in 2023 with $11,450 in assets and spent all of it on admin­is­tra­tive costs. The foun­da­tion did not respond to a request to dis­cuss its work.

Some who work on ener­gy pover­ty said Mr. Wright’s views had merit.

Todd Moss, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Ener­gy for Growth Hub, a research orga­ni­za­tion, said tack­ling cli­mate change was not the respon­si­bil­i­ty of the world’s poor­est coun­tries who have done lit­tle to cause the prob­lem. In some coun­tries, fos­sil fuels may still be need­ed to pow­er fac­to­ries and indus­tries to spur eco­nom­ic pros­per­i­ty, he said. Any effort that is too strict and “puts cli­mate above devel­op­ment” would hurt poor coun­tries, Mr. Moss said.

But sci­en­tists have main­tained that Mr. Wright has selec­tive­ly used data to down­play the impacts of cli­mate change.

While he acknowl­edges that the plan­et is warm­ing, Mr. Wright has inac­cu­rate­ly said that it is a mod­est and dis­tant threat. He has denied the well-estab­lished con­nec­tion between cli­mate change and extreme weath­er, wrong­ly claim­ing that hur­ri­canes, droughts and floods are not becom­ing more intense.

“We’re impov­er­ish­ing peo­ple today, those least able to bear it and afford it, for what the eco­nom­ic work of the Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Pan­el on Cli­mate Change shows is a slow-mov­ing, mod­est impact two or three gen­er­a­tions from now,” Mr. Wright said on the “WOW Fac­tor” pod­cast last year. “That’s not a good trade-off.”

In fact, the I.P.C.C., the Unit­ed Nations’ top sci­en­tif­ic body, found last year with very high con­fi­dence that “there is a rapid­ly clos­ing win­dow of oppor­tu­ni­ty to secure a liv­able and sus­tain­able future for all.” It rec­om­mend­ed nations make an imme­di­ate and dras­tic shift away from fos­sil fuels to pre­vent the plan­et from cross­ing a crit­i­cal thresh­old for glob­al warm­ing with­in the next decade.

Mr. Wright “may not have read an I.P.C.C. report since 1990,” said Robert E. Kopp, a cli­mate sci­en­tist at Rut­gers Uni­ver­si­ty and a lead author of an Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Pan­el on Cli­mate Change report pub­lished in 2021.

Sam Miles contributes to a new assessment report, “Digitalising Innovative Finance: Emerging instruments for early- stage innovators in low- and middle-income countries” October 19, 2023

For the report, click here.

US, China [can] cooperate on green energy in rural areas October 16, 2023

For the orig­i­nal click here, or nav­i­gate to Chi­na Daily:

 https://​www​.chi​nadai​ly​.com​.cn/​a​/​2​0​2​3​1​0​/​1​6​/​W​S​6​5​2​c​9​1​0​d​a​3​1​0​9​0​6​8​2​a​5​e​8​a​e​b​.​h​tml

US, China cooperate on green energy in rural areas

Half of Americans can’t install solar panels. Here’s how they can plug into the sun. October 10, 2023

Half of Americans can’t install solar panels.

Here’s how they can plug into the sun.

Advice by Michael J. Coren, Cli­mate Advice Colum­nist, The Wash­ing­ton Post

Octo­ber 10, 2023 

(for the orig­i­nal in The Wash­ing­ton Post, click here.)

https://​www​.wash​ing​ton​post​.com/​c​l​i​m​a​t​e​-​e​n​v​i​r​o​n​m​e​n​t​/​2​0​2​3​/​1​0​/​1​0​/​c​o​m​m​u​n​i​t​y​-​s​o​l​a​r​-​r​e​n​t​e​r​s​-​a​p​a​r​t​m​e​n​t​s​-​d​i​s​c​o​u​n​t​e​d​-​e​l​e​c​t​r​i​c​i​ty/

No roof, no solar power.

That has been the dispir­it­ing equa­tion shut­ting out rough­ly half of all Amer­i­cans from plug­ging into the sun.

But sign­ing up for solar soon might be as easy as sub­scrib­ing to Net­flix. Scores of new small solar farms that sell clean, local elec­tric­i­ty direct­ly to cus­tomers are pop­ping up. The set­up, dubbed “com­mu­ni­ty solar,” is designed to bring solar pow­er to peo­ple who don’t own their own homes or can’t install pan­els — often at prices below retail elec­tric­i­ty rates.

Clean elec­tric­i­ty for less mon­ey seems a bit too good to be true. But it reflects a new real­i­ty: Solar ener­gy prices are falling as pri­vate and pub­lic mon­ey, and new laws, are fuel­ing a mas­sive expan­sion of small-scale com­mu­ni­ty solar projects.

 Find­ing a sub­scrip­tion to one, how­ev­er, can feel like try­ing to score Tay­lor Swift tick­ets: They’re on sale, but only a lucky few can buy them. At least 22 states have passed leg­is­la­tion encour­ag­ing inde­pen­dent com­mu­ni­ty solar projects, but devel­op­ers are just begin­ning to expand.Most exist­ing projects are booked.

At the moment, com­mu­ni­ty solar projects in the Unit­ed States gen­er­ate enough elec­tric­i­ty to pow­er about 918,000 homes — less than 1 per­cent of total house­holds, accord­ing to the Solar Ener­gy Indus­tries Asso­ci­a­tion, a non­prof­it trade group.

But as more states join, and the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency’s “Solar for All” pro­gram pours bil­lions into fed­er­al solar pow­er grants, more Amer­i­cans will get the chance.

Should you take it? I took a look.

What is com­mu­ni­ty solar?

While projects exist in most states, they are high­ly con­cen­trat­ed: More than half are in Mass­a­chu­setts, Min­neso­ta and New York. These might be on a con­do roof, or on open land like the 10-MW Fres­no com­mu­ni­ty solar farm, on a city-owned plot sur­round­ed by agri­cul­tur­al land. Most are small: 2 megawatts of capac­i­ty on aver­age, about enough to pow­er 200 to 400 homes.

Devel­op­ers tend to finance their projects through investors or banks, and sign up cus­tomers dur­ing con­struc­tion. If there are projects in your utility’s ser­vice area, you can sub­scribe to elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­at­ed by a cer­tain share of the project’s solar panels.

The elec­trons that ulti­mate­ly flow into your home aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly from your pan­el. They are fed into the local grid, which pow­ers house­holds through­out your ser­vice area. Most allow sub­scribers to start or can­cel their solar sub­scrip­tion at any time, or some­times with a few months’ notice. The renew­able ener­gy mar­ket­place Ener­gySage and the non­prof­it Solar Unit­ed Neigh­bors con­nect cus­tomers to com­mu­ni­ty solar projects in their region.

Peo­ple gen­er­al­ly receive month­ly cred­its for elec­tric­i­ty pro­duced by their share of solar pan­els. These are sub­tract­ed from their total elec­tric­i­ty bill or cred­it­ed on future bills. If cus­tomers pro­duce more than they con­sume, those cred­its roll over. If they pro­duce less, cus­tomers pay the dif­fer­ence. Sub­scribers on aver­age save about 10 per­cent on their util­i­ty bill (the range is 5 per­cent to 15 per­cent).

These eco­nom­ics are pro­pelling the indus­try to record heights. Between 2016 and 2019, com­mu­ni­ty solar capac­i­ty more than quadru­pled to 1.4 gigawatts. By the end of this year, ener­gy research firm Wood Macken­zie esti­mates, there will be 6 GW of com­mu­ni­ty solar. And the Ener­gy Depart­ment wants to see com­mu­ni­ty solar reach 5 mil­lion house­holds by 2025.

“The eco­nom­ics are strong­ly on the side of doing this,” says Dan Kam­men, an ener­gy pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at Berke­ley. “It’s now cheap­er to build new solar than to oper­ate old fos­sil [fuel plants]. … We’re at the take­off point.”

Who should get it?

Com­mu­ni­ty solar, also called “solar for renters,” is for any­one. But if you’re a home­own­er, it won’t max­i­mize your savings.

On aver­age, sav­ings from com­mu­ni­ty solar amount to about $100 per year for the aver­age ratepay­er. Rooftop solar arrays may save home­own­ers more than $1,000 annu­al­ly, esti­mates EnergySage.

But it brings oth­er advan­tages. It’s a sub­scrip­tion you can walk away from at any time with no upfront invest­ment. And your fixed rate or dis­count off pre­vail­ing elec­tric rates is usu­al­ly locked in for at least a decade. Res­i­den­tial elec­tric­i­ty rates, mean­while, have jumped about 17 per­cent since 2018.

The biggest ben­e­fit may be expand­ing access to clean ener­gy to the rough­ly half of U.S. con­sumers and busi­ness­es not able to install their own solar pan­els. “The great promise of com­mu­ni­ty solar is it allows every­one to be part of the ener­gy tran­si­tion,” says Bran­don Smith­wood of Dimen­sion Renew­able Ener­gy, a com­pa­ny that has financed more than 1,000 MW of solar projects, “and not feel they’re being left behind.”

How to buy

If you live in a state with a robust com­mu­ni­ty solar mar­ket, sub­scrib­ing is easy.

Mar­ket­places like Ener­gySage aggre­gate projects sign­ing up new sub­scribers. I typed in a Zip code in St. Paul, Minn., a hotbed of com­mu­ni­ty solar activ­i­ty, and was pre­sent­ed with six projects offer­ing sav­ings of $68 to $135 per year, along with 10 tons of green­house gases.

The mar­ket­place allows you to quick­ly com­pare details such as fees, loca­tions and billing. Once I select­ed a project, I could cre­ate an account, link this to my util­i­ty and start a subscription.

To get the best terms, say project devel­op­ers and non­prof­it groups, you should look for con­tracts that uphold a few key terms:

• Get a dis­count­ed elec­tric­i­ty rate: Com­mu­ni­ty solar projects tend to offer 5 per­cent to 15 per­cent off pre­vail­ing elec­tric­i­ty rates.
• Ensure you can can­cel any time: Sell­ers should allow you to can­cel your sub­scrip­tion imme­di­ate­ly or with­in a few months to final­ize cred­its on your bill.
• Avoid can­cel­la­tion fees: Choose a plan that doesn’t force you to pay if you want to end your subscription.
• Source close to your home: Ide­al­ly, projects should be with­in 10 or 15 miles of where you live, says Jeff Cramer, CEO of the Coali­tion for Com­mu­ni­ty Solar Access. This ensures that you decar­bonize your local grid.

For mil­lions of peo­ple liv­ing in places with abun­dant com­mu­ni­ty solar such as Min­neso­ta, Col­orado, New York and Mass­a­chu­setts, find­ing projects is rel­a­tive­ly easy.

But I live in Cal­i­for­nia, where the mar­ket has stag­nat­ed amid unfa­vor­able poli­cies and fierce oppo­si­tion from util­i­ties. While that may change — Cal­i­for­nia, like many oth­er states, is poised to enact poli­ciesenabling more com­mu­ni­ty solar — I need to buy elec­tric­i­ty now.

I still have options — they’re just not as attrac­tive. Green pow­er plans, or retail elec­tric­i­ty plans sold by third par­ties in about 20 states, are often prici­er, and most don’t finance new renew­ables direct­ly since they often just buy renew­able ener­gy cred­its from exist­ing projects.

Com­mu­ni­ty choice aggre­ga­tion is anoth­er one. Cities or local gov­ern­ments buy pow­er inde­pen­dent­ly for local res­i­dents and busi­ness­es, and rely on util­i­ties to dis­trib­ute the elec­tric­i­ty, which is often clean­er than the stan­dard mix. CCA can be less expen­sive, but not always. It served about 5 mil­lion cus­tomers in 10 states in 2020, accord­ing to the EPA.

ERG COLLOQUIUM — The Power of Health: Accelerating the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals September 19, 2023

—————————————————————-ERG Col­lo­qui­um————————————————————

Sep­tem­ber 20, 2023

Loca­tion: 141 Gian­ni­ni Hall, Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berkeley

Time: 16:00 — 17:30 PDT

Title: The Pow­er of Health: Accel­er­at­ing the 2030 Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment Goals

Sum­ma­ry: Clean ener­gy is under­go­ing a cost and per­for­mance rev­o­lu­tion, and health, social and­gen­der-jus­tice crises across Africa are explod­ing. With that back­ground, how do we rapidlyand with resilience accel­er­ate progress on the Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment Goals? To explorethis ques­tion on basic the­o­ret­i­cal and very prac­ti­cal applied grounds, HETA, (Health­Elec­tri­fi­ca­tion and Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Alliance) has emerged as a new tool. This talk will­ex­plore the ear­ly evo­lu­tion and fram­ing ide­al of this clean ener­gy-health-gen­der nexus. Wewill also cov­er HETA+, the inte­gra­tion of indige­nous knowl­edge and tra­di­tion­al med­i­cine intoth­is via a large-scale ‘pilot’ learn­ing project that was advanced sig­nif­i­cant­ly last week at theAfrica Cli­mate Sum­mit in Nairo­bi, Kenya.

New USC The Business of Green podcast August 29, 2023

https://​www​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​f​1​Q​O​-​u​B​c​x​1​g​&​t​=​1​10s

Why what happened to Oppenheimer then is relevant now August 2, 2023

Timed for pub­li­ca­tion with the release of the movie Oppen­heimer, we pub­lished an arti­cle on pub­lic ser­vice by sci­en­tists, a the I‑M-P-E-A-C‑H let­ter when Prof. Kam­men left the Trump Admin­is­tra­tion, a piece in The Bul­letin of the Atom­ic Sci­en­tists, is now avail­able (open access):

https://thebulletin.org/premium/2023–07/why-what-happened-to-oppenheimer-then-is-relevant-now/

The full col­lec­tion of arti­cles is online at:

https://thebulletin.org/magazine/2023–07/

To down­load a pdf of the arti­cle: click here.

From Sun to Sustainability: The Journey of Solar Panel Recycling June 14, 2023

https://​penin​su​la​press​.com/​2​0​2​3​/​0​6​/​1​3​/​f​r​o​m​-​s​u​n​-​t​o​-​s​u​s​t​a​i​n​a​b​i​l​i​t​y​-​t​h​e​-​j​o​u​r​n​e​y​-​o​f​-​s​o​l​a​r​-​p​a​n​e​l​-​r​e​c​y​c​l​i​ng/

Climate Change is an Energy Problem. Here’s How We Solve It.

For the Cal­i­for­nia Mag­a­zine arti­cle, click here.

Count on come­di­ans to nail the zeitgeist.

I’m think­ing of comics like Marc Maron, whose act riffs off exis­ten­tial pain points like mor­tal­i­ty, anti­semitism, the delam­i­nat­ing geopo­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion, and, of course, that multi­gi­ga­ton car­bon ele­phant in the room, cli­mate change.

“The rea­son we’re not more upset about the world end­ing envi­ron­men­tal­ly, I think, is that, you know, all of us in our hearts real­ly know that we did every­thing we could,” Maron dead­pans. “We brought our own bags to the super­mar­ket,” he says, then paus­es a few beats.

“Yeah, that’s about it.”

No sur­prise that come­di­ans are able to play our eco-dread for yuks. Com­e­dy is often root­ed in the fer­tile manure of uncom­fort­able truths: we laugh so we don’t sob. And that’s all fine and good; laughter’s a good anti­dote to the malaise that comes from doom­scrolling our news­feeds day in, day out.

But are we real­ly ready to throw in the tow­el and laugh our­selves into obliv­ion? And is Maron cor­rect? Have we real­ly done noth­ing to con­front our fore­most envi­ron­men­tal cri­sis? Hard­ly. True, we haven’t yet reversed the upward trend in green­house gas emis­sions, and the chal­lenge of tran­si­tion­ing away from fos­sil fuels often seems insur­mount­able. Is it, though?

Accord­ing to Berke­ley experts inter­viewed for this sto­ry, there’s rea­son for hope that we’ll make it through the bot­tle­neck yet. The tech­nol­o­gy is already here and improv­ing all the time. It won’t be easy, but it is doable. Now, let’s see how:

SOLAR

If you’re look­ing for a peg to hang your hopes on, start with ener­gy eco­nom­ics and, in par­tic­u­lar, the price of solar pan­els. Costs have dropped by near­ly 90 per­cent since 2009, dri­ven by both improved tech­nol­o­gy and glob­al pro­duc­tion (par­tic­u­lar­ly from Chi­na). In 1976, solar elec­tric­i­ty cost $106 a watt; today, it costs less than 50 cents per watt. Bot­tom line: Solar is now com­pet­i­tive with fos­sil fuels as a means of ener­gy production.

While solar still only accounts for 3.4 per­cent of domes­tic ener­gy con­sump­tion, pro­duc­tion has been grow­ing by more than 20 per­cent annu­al­ly over the past five years, and like­ly would have been high­er if not for ship­ping and sup­ply chain dif­fi­cul­ties stem­ming from the pandemic.

Pro­duc­tion isn’t every­thing, how­ev­er. For wide­spread adop­tion, an ener­gy source must be avail­able on demand. And it’s here that fos­sil fuels have a big leg up. Nat­ur­al gas or coal can be burned at any time to gen­er­ate elec­tric­i­ty as required. Solar pan­els pro­duce only when the sun shines. Stor­ing ade­quate ener­gy for lat­er use—i.e., at night or on cloudy days—has long posed a major obstacle.

Not any­more, says Daniel Kam­men, the found­ing direc­tor of Cal’s Renew­able and Appro­pri­ate Ener­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ry and a pro­fes­sor in the Ener­gy and Resources Group and the Gold­man School of Pub­lic Pol­i­cy. A coor­di­nat­ing lead author of the Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Pan­el on Cli­mate Change since 1999, he shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

“I don’t see stor­age as a major prob­lem at this point,” Kam­men says. “It’s not a sin­gle break­through that makes me think that way, but more that we’re see­ing the same trend in price and per­for­mance for stor­age that we saw with pho­to­voltaics. A vari­ety of approach­es are com­ing to mar­ket, and they’re scal­ing real­ly fast. Things that used to take sev­er­al years to devel­op now take a year, and that’s almost cer­tain to continue.”

The stor­age of the future will serve two dif­fer­ent sec­tors, observes Kam­men: trans­porta­tion (think elec­tric vehi­cles) and every­thing else (homes, office build­ings, fac­to­ries, etc.).

EVs

From a cli­mate change point of view, an elec­tri­fied vehi­cle fleet is desir­able because it dove­tails nice­ly with a green elec­tric grid—i.e., one fed by sus­tain­able ener­gy sources. Cur­rent­ly, cars burn­ing gaso­line or diesel spew about 3 giga­tons of car­bon into the atmos­phere each year—about 7 per­cent of total human-cre­at­ed CO² emis­sions. Just elec­tri­fy­ing rough­ly a third of China’s vehi­cle fleet could slash car­bon emis­sions by a giga­ton a year by 2040. So there’s a lot at stake with elec­tric vehi­cles, and every­thing con­sid­ered, Kam­men is pret­ty san­guine about their progress.

“It’s real­ly been pick­ing up, par­tic­u­lar­ly over the last year,” he says. “It’s prob­a­bly not a coin­ci­dence that gaso­line and diesel prices have been spik­ing at the same time, and I hate to think that the war in Ukraine is part of that, but it prob­a­bly is.” EVs are now the best-sell­ing cars in Cal­i­for­nia, Kam­men con­tin­ues, “and it’s the same in Nor­way, and it’ll soon be the same in New York. Prices on EVs are com­ing down. The trend is strong and accelerating.”

EVs gen­er­al­ly store ener­gy in bat­ter­ies that use lithi­um, a rel­a­tive­ly rare ele­ment that charges and dis­charges rapid­ly and is lightweight—an essen­tial qual­i­ty for auto­mo­biles, where excess weight is anath­e­ma. Lithi­um bat­tery tech­nol­o­gy is well advanced, and some EVs can now go 400 miles between charg­ing, alle­vi­at­ing ear­li­er anx­i­eties about lim­it­ed range.

The next chal­lenge to over­come is a pauci­ty of charg­ing sta­tions, a real­i­ty that still gives Tes­la dri­vers pause before embark­ing on a long road trip. But that’s being reme­died, Kam­men says, thanks in sig­nif­i­cant part to the 2022 Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act (see side­bar), which pro­vides gen­er­ous home and busi­ness tax cred­its for new and used EV pur­chas­es and fast-charg­ing EV sta­tions. A cen­tral goal of the Biden admin­is­tra­tion is the con­struc­tion of 500,000 new EV charg­ing sta­tions dis­trib­uted across all 50 states and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia and Puer­to Rico by 2030. For a lit­tle per­spec­tive on how ambi­tious that num­ber is, con­sid­er: There are cur­rent­ly few­er than 150,000 gas sta­tions in the entire Unit­ed States.

“Wor­ries over charg­ing sta­tion access are real, there’s no deny­ing it,” says Kam­men. “But this leg­is­la­tion, cou­pled with the fact that recharge times are now very fast, will make a huge dif­fer­ence. The one thing that we still have to address, though, is the social jus­tice com­po­nent,” as not all zip codes will see the same resources. With­out poli­cies to ensure oth­er­wise, San­ta Mon­i­ca will like­ly have charg­ing sta­tions aplen­ty; South Cen­tral Los Ange­les not so much.

“We real­ly need to ensure that doesn’t hap­pen,” says Kam­men. “First, it’s wrong. Sec­ond, to make a real dif­fer­ence, both ener­gy pro­duc­tion and trans­port must progress across a broad scale. That’s an eas­i­er case to make when every­one benefits.”

BATTERIES

In addi­tion to trans­porta­tion, urban infra­struc­ture must tran­si­tion to sus­tain­able, car­bon-free ener­gy as well. That will require com­bin­ing clean ener­gy with ade­quate stor­age to pro­vide “grid reliability”—that is, sys­tems that will keep the juice flow­ing in all sea­sons, even when the sun is absent or the wind stops blow­ing. In short, you need real­ly, real­ly big batteries.

But what kind of bat­ter­ies? Lithi­um-ion bat­ter­ies, already well estab­lished, are one option, says Kam­men. But the qual­i­ties that make them ide­al for vehicles—lightweight, fast charg­ing capabilities—aren’t as crit­i­cal when you’re try­ing to light a city at night. For sta­tion­ary pow­er needs, bat­ter­ies can be indus­tri­al scale—heavy, with a large footprint.

Anoth­er prob­lem with lithi­um is its scarci­ty. The Unit­ed States cur­rent­ly con­trols less than 4 per­cent of glob­al reserves. For that rea­son alone, researchers are look­ing for alter­na­tives: bat­ter­ies that employ cheap­er and more read­i­ly avail­able elements.

One of the most promis­ing approach­es, accord­ing to sev­er­al sources, is iron-air bat­ter­ies. And one of the lead­ers in the tech­nol­o­gy is Form Ener­gy, a com­pa­ny head­quar­tered in Mass­a­chu­setts with satel­lite facil­i­ties in Berkeley.

Zac Jud­kins ’06 is the company’s vice pres­i­dent of engi­neer­ing. He stress­es that Form was obsessed with find­ing a way to address the prob­lem of mul­ti­day stor­age, not enam­ored of a par­tic­u­lar technology.

“When we start­ed up in 2017, we saw that the world was rapid­ly mov­ing to renewables—mainly solar and wind—and set­ting increas­ing­ly ambi­tious grid reli­a­bil­i­ty and decar­boniza­tion goals.” With­out effec­tive stor­age, how­ev­er, progress was going to hit a brick wall, Jud­kins says.

Ana­lyz­ing the mar­ket, Form’s engi­neers arrived at a tar­get. They need­ed to build a bat­tery that could con­tin­u­ous­ly dis­charge for 100 hours at a total cost of $20 per kilo­watt-hour and had a round-trip effi­cien­cy (the amount of ener­gy stored in a bat­tery that can lat­er be used) of 50 percent.

Those para­me­ters, Jud­kins says, would allow for very high adop­tion of renew­ables with no sac­ri­fice to grid reli­a­bil­i­ty and min­i­mal increase in cost to con­sumers. “That was the bench­mark we had to hit.”

Jud­kins and col­leagues eval­u­at­ed a wide array of can­di­date chemistries before set­tling on iron-air bat­ter­ies, which work by rust­ing and unrust­ing thou­sands of iron pel­lets with every cycle. Says Jud­kins, “We didn’t invent the iron-air bat­tery. It was devel­oped by West­ing­house and NASA in the late ’60s and ’70s. They’re not good for cars—they’re not light, and they don’t dis­charge rapid­ly. But there are advan­tages. For one thing, iron is abun­dant. It’s cheap. We don’t have to wor­ry about sup­ply constraints.”

What you also get with iron, says Jud­kins, is low cost and high ener­gy density—i.e., the amount of juice you can put into the bat­tery. The trade­off is low­er pow­er density—how fast you can pull the ener­gy out rel­a­tive to volume.

“It’s rough­ly 10 times low­er on pow­er den­si­ty than lithi­um-ion, but for our needs it’s fine,” says Jud­kins. “This is stor­age for large-scale, grid-tied projects.” Take the exam­ple of a large pho­to­volta­ic array like those on California’s Car­ri­zo Plain. One array there has a 250-megawatt capac­i­ty, enough for about 100,000 homes, but only when the sun is shin­ing. At night, dur­ing storms, there’s no elec­tric­i­ty. But, says Jud­kins, with the addi­tion of a Form plant with a foot­print of 100 acres or so, you could store enough ener­gy to keep the elec­tric­i­ty flow­ing for a four-day period.

The com­pa­ny is now tran­si­tion­ing from proof of con­cept to full pro­duc­tion. Iron­i­cal­ly, the first com­mer­cial rust/​unrust bat­tery sys­tems will like­ly come out of the Rust Belt. “We’re build­ing a fac­to­ry in West Vir­ginia on a 55-acre site—a for­mer steel plant—that will have approx­i­mate­ly 800,000 square feet of pro­duc­tion space and employ 750 peo­ple at full oper­a­tion.” Green jobs. Once the plant is ful­ly on its feet, Jud­kins says, it will pro­duce 50 gigawatt-hours of stor­age capac­i­ty every year.

MICROGRID

Large, cen­tral­ized util­i­ty grids are nat­u­ral­ly the focus for decar­boniz­ing devel­oped countries—but they don’t real­ly apply to parts of the world where access to elec­tric­i­ty is still rare. In sub-Saha­ran Africa alone, 600 mil­lion peo­ple live with­out elec­tric­i­ty, which doesn’t mean they don’t want it. Pro­vid­ing car­bon-free pow­er to these com­mu­ni­ties will require micro­grids: small sys­tems that serve neigh­bor­hoods, ham­lets, or even mul­ti­ple vil­lages. But while the micro­grid con­cept has been kick­ing around for years, its full real­iza­tion has been elusive—until recently.

“What we’re see­ing is a mesh­ing of enabling tech­nolo­gies,” says Dun­can Call­away, an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of Ener­gy and Resources at Berke­ley and a fac­ul­ty sci­en­tist at Lawrence Berke­ley Nation­al Laboratory.

For starters, he points to cheap solar. “With the pro­found price drop in pan­els, it’s a tru­ly afford­able resource that’s ide­al­ly suit­ed for mid-lat­i­tude coun­tries,” which expe­ri­ence less sea­son­al­i­ty. “In gen­er­al, you can serve elec­tric demand with solar bet­ter in those lat­i­tudes than in coun­tries [clos­er to either pole], where there’s just less sunlight.”

Anoth­er dri­ver is cheap­er, bet­ter stor­age options, Call­away says. For micro­grid-scale, lithi­um-ion bat­ter­ies work well. And these, too, have grown more afford­able. “The explo­sive growth in elec­tric vehi­cles real­ly pushed things along,” Call­away says. “Ten years ago, it cost $1,000 for one kilo­watt-hour of stor­age. Now it costs less than $100.”

Final­ly, says Call­away, “smart grid” tech­nolo­gies have been devel­oped that make micro­grids, once noto­ri­ous­ly balky, high­ly efficient.

“We now have ‘big buck­et’ con­trol sys­tems that allow for the smooth coor­di­na­tion of ener­gy pro­duc­tion, stor­age, and demand,” Call­away says. “That makes these small grids both low-cost and real­ly reli­able. The goal is to make sys­tems that are tru­ly mod­u­lar, so you can plug var­i­ous com­po­nents into larg­er sys­tems. That will allow easy cus­tomiza­tion and scaling.”

More than 150 micro­grids already are deployed in the Unit­ed States, pow­er­ing every­thing from indi­vid­ual build­ings in large cities to small, remote vil­lages in Alaska.

As far as wide­spread adop­tion goes, Call­away doesn’t fore­see many tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties. It’s social and polit­i­cal road­blocks that need to be over­come. “The great thing about micro­grids is that they work well in remote, under­served areas and they can be man­aged local­ly. But in less devel­oped coun­tries, there are often cor­rupt gov­ern­ments that want their cut from any project. And if that’s the case, you’d have an inher­ent bias toward cen­tral­ized grids with base­line pow­er plants.”

It’s a chal­lenge that must be met, says Call­away. “Some­how, some way, small grid tech­nol­o­gy must be put on a lev­el play­ing field with the old sys­tem, the large, cen­tral­ized grid—or it’s unlike­ly to make it, even where it’s clear­ly the supe­ri­or choice.”

FUSION

Micro­grid or macro­grid, we’ll need a lot of clean, sus­tain­able ener­gy flow­ing through the wires if we’re going to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly sus­tain an advanced civ­i­liza­tion and cool the plan­et. Kam­men is con­vinced it will large­ly come from fusion. But by that he means fusion in all its forms, includ­ing, as not­ed, the sun: that mas­sive reac­tor in the sky that con­tin­u­al­ly fus­es hydro­gen into heav­ier ele­ments, releas­ing 3.8 x 10²6 joules of ener­gy every second.

But there’s also that will‑o’-the-wisp that’s been tan­ta­liz­ing futur­ists and physi­cists for decades: ter­res­tri­al fusion reac­tors. These would use hydrogen—the most com­mon ele­ment in the universe—as feed­stock to gen­er­ate gigawatt-hours of cheap ener­gy, pro­duc­ing harm­less, inert heli­um as the pri­ma­ry by-prod­uct. (Radioac­tive tri­tium would also be gen­er­at­ed, but it has a short half-life and it’s con­sumed by the reac­tor in a closed-loop process.) Fusion tech­nol­o­gy remains the Holy Grail of clean, Earth-friend­ly ener­gy pro­duc­tion, but it’s also the butt of wag­gish com­ments. The most com­mon is that it looks promis­ing, but it’s 20 years away. And it’s been 20 years away for 60 years.

But after a break­through on Decem­ber 5, 2022, at Lawrence Liv­er­more Nation­al Laboratory’s Nation­al Igni­tion Facil­i­ty (NIF), it now seems high­ly pos­si­ble that a com­mer­cial fusion reac­tor actu­al­ly could be avail­able in, uh, well, 20 years. Maybe sooner.

Most fusion efforts to date have involved toka­mak reactors—toroidal vac­u­um cham­bers that cor­ral hydro­gen atoms via mag­net­ic coils, sub­ject­ing them to heat and pres­sure until they become plas­ma, a super­heat­ed (as in 150 mil­lion degrees Cel­sius) gas that allows the hydro­gen to fuse. This releas­es ener­gy that trans­fers as heat to the cham­ber walls, where it is har­vest­ed to pro­duce steam to dri­ve tur­bines for elec­tric­i­ty production.

Toka­maks have been able to coax hydro­gen to fuse for brief periods—indeed, progress has been steady, if plod­ding, since the first machine was built 60 years ago. But to date, they haven’t been able to achieve “ignition”—that point at which sus­tained fusion occurs, and more ener­gy is pro­duced by the device than it consumes.

NIF took a dif­fer­ent approach. Researchers there fab­ri­cat­ed a minute pel­let from frozen deu­teri­um and tri­tium (both hydro­gen iso­topes). They then placed the pel­let in a small gold cap­sule known as a hohlraum, which in turn was sit­u­at­ed on an arm in a cham­ber bristling with 192 lasers. The sci­en­tists then fired the lasers simul­ta­ne­ous­ly at the hohlraum, caus­ing the inner cap­sule to com­press. The result: tem­per­a­tures and pres­sures exert­ed on the deuterium/​tritium admix­ture were extreme enough to pro­duce igni­tion. For the first time on this planet—other than dur­ing a ther­monu­clear explosion—a fusion reac­tion was cre­at­ed that pro­duced more ener­gy than was required to ini­ti­ate the process.

True, the sus­tained yield was mod­est. The reac­tion last­ed less than a bil­lionth of a sec­ond and released 3.15 mega­joules of ener­gy, or slight­ly less than one kilo­watt-hour. Not very much, in oth­er words; the aver­age Amer­i­can house­hold uses about 900 times that every month. Still, it was 50 per­cent more ener­gy than was expend­ed by the laser bursts. Progress! But here’s anoth­er catch: While the actu­al laser beams rep­re­sent­ed only around two mega­joules of ener­gy, it took about 300 mega­joules to pow­er up and oper­ate the mech­a­nisms that fired the beams.

So, there’s still a lot to be done before we’re microwav­ing our frozen bur­ri­tos with fusion pow­er. Nev­er­the­less, Kam­men, ever the opti­mist, is fair­ly sure we will be soon.

“Giv­en the trends, I think I’m pret­ty safe in pre­dict­ing that we’ll derive about 70 per­cent of our pow­er from fusion by 2070,” Kam­men says. “Half of that will be from the sun and half from fusion pow­er plants.”

And while NIF’s laser-blast­ed pel­let approach points to future suc­cess, don’t rule out toka­maks. Kam­men says he’s “expect­ing some excit­ing announce­ments about toka­mak reac­tors pret­ty soon.” You heard it here first.

Solar fusion, too, will fol­low mul­ti­ple avenues toward fuller implementation.

“It’s not just rooftop pan­els in cities and solar farms out on the land­scape,” he says. “There’ll also be marine solar—large arrays out in the ocean.”

Also: orbital solar. Live tri­als are now under­way at Cal­tech and the Jet Propul­sion Lab­o­ra­to­ry, says Kam­men, to estab­lish large, autonomous­ly assem­bled (i.e., no live astro­nauts required) solar arrays in space. The ener­gy would be beamed down as microwaves to ter­res­tri­al col­lec­tors, where it would be con­vert­ed to elec­tric­i­ty. That may raise the specter of a loose-can­non death ray immo­lat­ing cities from orbit if some­thing goes awry—but not to wor­ry, says Kam­men. “The watt-per-square-meter dose is pret­ty low, so there’s no dan­ger of any­one get­ting fried if they’re hit by it.”

He also thinks the fusion tech­nol­o­gy now under devel­op­ment for ter­res­tri­al reac­tors will have appli­ca­tions for space trav­el. “There’s a dual angle on fusion that’s real­ly cat­a­pult­ing the tech­nol­o­gy,” Kam­men says. “For bet­ter or worse, it’s imper­a­tive that we col­o­nize the solar sys­tem so our fate as a species isn’t com­plete­ly tied to one plan­et. Fusion propul­sion will be an excel­lent means for get­ting us to the moon and Mars and beyond, and fusion—solar, reac­tor, or both—will also serve as a base-load pow­er source when we get there.”

FISSION

With all the fuss over fusion, the oth­er “nuclear” pow­er source, fis­sion, seems to have fad­ed into the back­ground. That’s illu­so­ry. Fis­sion is still quite hot, so to speak, with increas­ing num­bers of erst­while foes in the envi­ron­men­tal com­mu­ni­ty now embrac­ing it—or, at least, tac­it­ly sup­port­ing it. The rea­sons are clear. First, fis­sion can gen­er­ate a great amount of ener­gy on a small foot­print. Dia­blo Canyon, California’s sole oper­at­ing com­mer­cial fis­sion plant, pro­duces almost 10 per­cent of the elec­tric­i­ty con­sumed in the state and does it with­in a con­fine of 600 acres. And from a cli­mate change per­spec­tive, nukes are peer­less: they emit zero CO².

Of course, peo­ple remain wor­ried about oth­er kinds of emis­sions, such as intense radioac­tiv­i­ty from long-lived waste iso­topes. And old­er gen­er­a­tion plants—that is, most of the ones oper­at­ing today—are sus­cep­ti­ble to core dam­age to vary­ing degrees, with cat­a­stroph­ic results à la Cher­nobyl and Fukushima.

Those con­cerns are entrenched, espe­cial­ly in the Unit­ed States, where envi­ron­men­tal issues, reg­u­la­to­ry red tape, and sim­ple cost often con­spire to scotch large infra­struc­ture projects in the pro­pos­al phase.

“We’re pret­ty bad at megapro­jects in this coun­try,” says Rachel Slay­baugh, for­mer­ly an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor in nuclear engi­neer­ing at Berke­ley and now a part­ner at ven­ture cap­i­tal firm DCVC. “For one thing, it’s incred­i­bly easy for them to go over bud­get. Just look at the new Bay Bridge, which ran triple the orig­i­nal estimates.”

That prob­lem is com­pound­ed for nuclear plants, giv­en height­ened safe­ty con­cerns and the reg­u­la­tions and lit­i­ga­tion they engen­der. But there has been an upside to the imped­i­ments imposed on tra­di­tion­al nuclear pow­er, Slay­baugh says: Out of neces­si­ty, more efficient—and per­haps more social­ly acceptable—technology has been developed.

The new­er reac­tors are smaller—some much smaller—than the behe­moths of yore, and pilot projects are underway.

“A good many of these designs orig­i­nat­ed from basic con­cepts devel­oped in the 1950s or 1960s, but their refine­ment and com­mer­cial deploy­ment is being dri­ven in large part by our inabil­i­ty to con­struct large projects,” Slay­baugh says.

Dif­fer­ent reac­tors have been designed for dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions, Slay­baugh observes, employ­ing var­i­ous fuels, coolants, and con­fig­u­ra­tions. Some “breed­er” reac­tors could even burn their own byprod­ucts, great­ly reduc­ing radioac­tive waste.

“What’s the pri­or­i­ty?” Slay­baugh asks rhetor­i­cal­ly. “Eco­nom­ics? Pro­vid­ing high-tem­per­a­ture heat, or bal­anc­ing renew­ables on the grid? Min­i­miz­ing nuclear waste? A com­bi­na­tion of dif­fer­ent goals? These new designs can be stan­dard­ized or cus­tomized and scaled for the site and require­ments, and all involve con­sid­er­able engi­neer­ing to ensure safety.”

Some of the reac­tors will be large enough to pow­er a city, or sev­er­al cities. “And oth­ers will be tee­ny,” Slay­baugh says. “Those will be per­fect for remote mil­i­tary bases or research facil­i­ties, say Antarc­ti­ca or the Arc­tic. You’d elim­i­nate sev­er­al major prob­lems with one of these very small reac­tors. Think of the logis­ti­cal dif­fi­cul­ties involved in get­ting diesel fuel to an arc­tic base, not to men­tion the heavy pol­lu­tion it pro­duces and, of course, the CO² that’s emitted.”

Fis­sion tech­nol­o­gy also has some pro­found advan­tages over renew­ables, she says. “There are real lim­its to how many solar farms and wind tur­bines we should or even can build,” she observes. “A lot of mate­ri­als are required for their pro­duc­tion, and a lot of min­ing is need­ed to get the nec­es­sary ele­ments. And these facil­i­ties tend to have very large foot­prints. I’m actu­al­ly wor­ried that we’re going to see a strong solar and wind back­lash as peo­ple real­ly start to under­stand all the impacts.”

Every ener­gy source has strengths and weak­ness­es, con­tin­ues Slay­baugh, “and we need to have sophis­ti­cat­ed con­ver­sa­tions on what they are and where each can best apply. Ulti­mate­ly, my view of fis­sion is that it’s a nec­es­sary tool that we must use in con­junc­tion with oth­er avail­able tools to get the job done as well and as quick­ly as pos­si­ble. No sin­gle solu­tion is going to work for all scenarios.”

CARBON REMOVAL

Reduc­ing car­bon emis­sions is not the com­plete solu­tion to glob­al warm­ing, say sci­en­tists. To real­ly get a han­dle on the prob­lem, we’ll also need to remove exist­ing CO² from the atmos­phere and sequester it per­ma­nent­ly in the ground. One option, direct air cap­ture (DAC), is the basis for a small but grow­ing indus­try: Cur­rent­ly, there are about 20 DAC pilot plants oper­at­ing, in total cap­tur­ing and seques­ter­ing around .01 mega­ton of atmos­pher­ic CO² annu­al­ly. Accord­ing to the Inter­na­tion­al Ener­gy Agency, that stor­age could grow to 60 mega­tons a year by 2030, assum­ing large-scale demon­stra­tion plants pro­ceed apace, cur­rent tech­niques are refined, and costs drop as the tech­nol­o­gy scales.

But those are a lot of assump­tions for min­i­mal ben­e­fit. Grant­ed, a 60-mega­ton mass of any­thing is impres­sive. But from a cli­mate-change per­spec­tive, 60 Mt is neg­li­gi­ble, giv­en ener­gy-relat­ed car­bon emis­sions hit an all-time high of over 36.8 bil­lion tons in 2022. Many researchers think there are bet­ter options, and we don’t have to do any­thing to devel­op them because they already exist. They point to nat­ur­al car­bon sinks: forests, wet­lands, grass­lands, and, most sig­nif­i­cant­ly, the oceans. These nat­ur­al sys­tems are part of the Earth’s car­bon cycle, which absorbs and releas­es about 100 giga­tons of car­bon a year. A plan­e­tary mech­a­nism of that scale might seem more than ade­quate to han­dle car­bon emis­sions, and it would, if atmos­pher­ic CO² only orig­i­nat­ed from nat­ur­al emis­sion points such as vol­ca­noes and hydrother­mal vents. As not­ed recent­ly by MIT pro­fes­sor of geo­physics Daniel Roth­man, nat­ur­al sources con­tribute ten times more car­bon to the atmos­phere than human activ­i­ties, but it’s the anthro­pogenic car­bon that is push­ing the cycle over the edge. The plan­et can’t process the extra atmos­pher­ic car­bon back into a sta­ble earth­bound state fast enough.

This deficit is exac­er­bat­ed by the fact that we’re degrad­ing our car­bon sinks even as we’re pump­ing more CO2 into the sky.

“The eco­log­i­cal ser­vices car­bon sinks pro­vide are real­ly price­less,” says John Harte, a pro­fes­sor of the Grad­u­ate School in Berkeley’s Ener­gy and Resources Group. Harte, who con­duct­ed pio­neer­ing work on the “feed­back” effect a warm­ing cli­mate exerts on nat­ur­al car­bon cycles in high-alti­tude mead­ows, observes that car­bon sinks were poor­ly under­stood 35 years ago.

“But we now know they absorb 18 bil­lion tons of CO2 a year. Real­is­ti­cal­ly, we should be putting more of the mon­ey we’re devot­ing to the devel­op­ment of car­bon seques­tra­tion tech­nol­o­gy into enhanc­ing nat­ur­al car­bon sinks. At the very least, we need to stop their degradation.”

Harte’s work in the Col­orado Rock­ies entailed arti­fi­cial­ly heat­ing plots of land and track­ing changes in veg­e­ta­tion types and car­bon seques­tra­tion rates. In plots that weren’t heat­ed and expe­ri­enced cli­mate change in real time, he found that wild­flow­ers dom­i­nat­ed, cycling large vol­umes of car­bon into the soil dur­ing the short alpine grow­ing sea­son; when the plants died back each fall, the rate of car­bon stor­age dropped off dra­mat­i­cal­ly. But as Harte warmed spe­cif­ic plots over a peri­od of years, woody shrubs replaced the flow­er­ing annu­al plants ear­li­er than on non­heat­ed land. These slow­er-grow­ing plants sequestered car­bon at a much slow­er rate than the wildflowers.

“The ‘mon­ey,’ the car­bon, in the bank account shrinks,” says Harte. But after about 100 years, you begin to see div­i­dends. “The car­bon com­ing into the soil from woody plants is stored longer, so you even­tu­al­ly still have car­bon in the soil.”

The goods news: This sug­gests nat­ur­al sinks could be man­aged for opti­mal stor­age. But if emis­sions remain high, they’ll strain and ulti­mate­ly over­whelm the seques­tra­tion capac­i­ty of the sinks, negat­ing their value.

“If cli­mate change con­tin­ues, if we don’t cut back on emis­sions,” says Harte, “there’ll be no way to buffer the effects.”

And real­ly, that’s the crux of the whole issue. At this point in the cli­mate change cri­sis, we know what we must do to turn things around. Even bet­ter, we have the tech­nolo­gies and tech­niques to do it. But we need to deploy them. That means every­thing: solar in all its forms, from rooftop pan­els to orbital microwave arrays; wind tur­bine farms, both on land and at sea; fusion reac­tors; fis­sion reac­tors; micro­grids; mas­sive­ly dis­trib­uted stor­age sys­tems. And we must enhance, not debase, the nat­ur­al sys­tems that sequester car­bon. We need to plant many more trees and man­age work­ing forests more sus­tain­ably, cal­cu­lat­ing car­bon stor­age as a prod­uct equal to or exceed­ing board feet of lum­ber. And we need to pro­tect the great­est car­bon sink of them all: the ocean.

“I’m ter­ri­bly wor­ried about the trend toward seabed min­ing,” says Kam­men. “It’s the least reg­u­lat­ed of all the new fron­tiers, some very large com­pa­nies are push­ing it, and it’d be absolute­ly dev­as­tat­ing. If we don’t stop activ­i­ties like that and if we don’t use all the sus­tain­able ener­gy options that are avail­able, we are risk­ing extinction.”

That may not be a very opti­mistic note to end on, but then, opti­mism only gets us so far, doesn’t it? What we need now is grit and determination.

A Fruitvale Microgrid Could Inspire Resiliency if Approved June 8, 2023

A Fruitvale Microgrid Could Inspire Resiliency — if Approved

Two dozen homes in Oakland’s Fruit­vale neigh­bor­hood are band­ing togeth­er to give their block a first-of-its-kind sus­tain­abil­i­ty makeover. The EcoBlock, a UC Berke­ley research project col­lab­o­rat­ing with the com­mu­ni­ty, aims to afford­ably retro­fit urban neigh­bor­hoods to have small­er car­bon foot­prints and more reli­able energy.

Dur­ing its sev­en years in the mak­ing, the EcoBlock project has pushed through sky­rock­et­ing costs, per­mit­ting red tape, and com­pro­mis­es with Pacif­ic Gas and Elec­tric. Although researchers antic­i­pat­ed bring­ing upgrades to res­i­dents’ homes this spring, the lin­ger­ing effects of the pan­dem­ic on sup­ply chains and costs are still hold­ing the project back. “Between COVID and infla­tion, our bud­get was just wal­loped,” says Therese Pef­fer, the prin­ci­pal inves­ti­ga­tor on the EcoBlock research team.

If the project is even­tu­al­ly imple­ment­ed, the 25 Fruit­vale homes par­tic­i­pat­ing in the EcoBlock can look for­ward to improved air qual­i­ty, low­ered water usage, and green­er ener­gy with new effi­cient elec­tric appli­ances, air ven­ti­la­tion, water-recy­cling laun­dry, and a shared elec­tric vehi­cle. The EcoBlock cen­ters around a key piece of infra­struc­ture: a small, local­ized ener­gy sys­tem known as a microgrid.

By con­nect­ing to solar ener­gy, a micro­grid could pro­vide the neigh­bors with elec­tric­i­ty dur­ing black­outs or PG&E’s pub­lic safe­ty pow­er shut-offs dur­ing extreme weath­er events. And it’s been proven to work: In 2022, a micro­grid com­mu­ni­ty in Flori­da kept the lights on even as mil­lions of homes lost pow­er dur­ing Hur­ri­cane Ian.

The Fruit­vale loca­tion was cho­sen out of a pool of self-nom­i­nat­ed blocks by the UC Berke­ley Research team, PG&E, and the City of Oak­land based on vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, lev­els of pol­lu­tion, and the block’s posi­tion on the city’s elec­tri­cal grid.

Daniel Hamil­ton, the Sus­tain­abil­i­ty and Resilience Direc­tor for the city of Oak­land, says that choos­ing a less wealthy area of Oak­land was a pri­or­i­ty. “There’s huge poten­tial to help the front­line com­mu­ni­ties that are already suf­fer­ing the effects of cli­mate change and have few­er resources to do the work,” he says.

Also crit­i­cal to the suc­cess of the project, say Hamil­ton and researchers, are the inter­est and col­lab­o­ra­tion of res­i­dents. In 2019, with the sup­port of Peo­ple Pow­er Solar Coop­er­a­tive, neigh­bor­hoods in Oak­land were invit­ed to apply to be the EcoBlock. “The Fruit­vale site was the one where the com­mu­ni­ty was most orga­nized and already most sup­port­ive” but still vul­ner­a­ble to cli­mate impacts, says Hamilton.

Com­mu­ni­ty liai­son Cathy Leonard, a long-time Oak­land native, says that the Oak­land EcoBlock serves as a micro­cosm for the rest of the city. Res­i­dents range in age from 1 to 80 years old, speak four dif­fer­ent lan­guages, and are of “all dif­fer­ent races and eth­nic­i­ties for a tru­ly diverse block.” For the project, Leonard has orga­nized block par­ties and infor­ma­tion ses­sions for the Fruit­vale neighbors.

“In order for soci­ety to real­ly address cli­mate change,” says Leonard, “we have to wor­ry about the homes that are already here.”

Since the project’s launch in 2015, the UC Berke­ley research team has had to over­come a series of hur­dles. The first site cho­sen failed due to neigh­bor­ly dis­agree­ments. Then, while work­ing on the Oak­land neigh­bor­hood, the nation­al cost of con­struc­tion sky­rock­et­ed. In 2020, the pan­dem­ic came, bring­ing with it infla­tion and sup­ply chain issues. Some parts of the EcoBlock, such as a res­i­den­tial charg­ing sta­tion for the neighborhood’s shared elec­tric vehi­cle, are a first for the city of Oak­land and a stream­lined per­mit­ting process has not yet been estab­lished. Oth­er reg­u­la­tions, such as state-wide build­ing codes, turn over reg­u­lar­ly before the project can begin construction.

Although per­mits have been applied for, the project is in lim­bo while they are being processed. “I think the com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers right­ful­ly expect­ed this to move much faster,” says Hamil­ton, not­ing the com­plex­i­ty behind EcoBlock, which has over a dozen part­ners and inter­sects with dif­fer­ent reg­u­la­to­ry bodies.

Among the red tape, the EcoBlock has had to con­tend with per­mit­ting and reg­u­la­tions by PG&E, which has a monop­oly on util­i­ty man­age­ment in the Bay Area. “I would say every step for­ward has been a bat­tle against the iner­tia of slow-mov­ing util­i­ties,” says Dr. Daniel Kam­men, the co-prin­ci­pal inves­ti­ga­tor for the EcoBlock.

Ener­gy researchers say that while micro­grids are a promis­ing solu­tion to an unre­li­able Unit­ed States ener­gy sys­tem, they are still uncom­mon. “Util­i­ties are in no rush to pro­mote clean ener­gy that’s dis­trib­uted, and not in their con­trol,” says Kam­men. ”Which cer­tain­ly might be an out­come of a world full of microgrids.”

Orig­i­nal­ly, the researchers envi­sioned giv­ing the res­i­dents a mas­ter meter, allow­ing them to “island” the block’s micro­grid from the city’s grid, for tru­ly self-man­aged solar ener­gy. “PG&E did not like that,” says Pef­fer. Instead, each home is now planned to be equipped with its own solar meter, that feeds into the city’s ener­gy sup­ply as well as the EcoBlock microgrid.

PG&E has two pro­grams for defray­ing the costs of micro­grids. The Com­mu­ni­ty Micro­grid Enable­ment Pro­gram pro­vides up to $3 mil­lion towards PG&E‑related costs of installing a micro­grid. A forth­com­ing Micro­grid Incen­tive Pro­gram has $200 mil­lion of fund­ing from the Cal­i­for­nia Pub­lic Util­i­ties Com­mis­sion and is antic­i­pat­ed to be launched joint­ly by PG&E and oth­er region­al util­i­ties across the state in ear­ly 2023.

Paul Doher­ty, a spokesper­son for PG&E, says that the EcoBlock is not eli­gi­ble for this sec­ond pro­gram as it is not, “‘vul­ner­a­ble to out­ages’ by our def­i­n­i­tion, not in a high fire-threat area, and not in our worst per­form­ing cir­cuits list.” Accord­ing to PG&E, out of the three dozen com­mu­ni­ties cur­rent­ly apply­ing for micro­grids, only one — The Red­wood Coast Air­port — has received fund­ing through their incen­tive programs.

With the help of the Tut­tle Law Group hired by the UC Berke­ley researchers, the EcoBlock res­i­dents have formed a demo­c­ra­t­ic com­mu­ni­ty asso­ci­a­tion through which they will co-own their micro­grid, which includes a solar-pow­er bat­tery stor­age system.