“A Road Not Taken” — Tracking Carter’s Solar Panels

In the wake of the energy crisis and impending collapse of the nuclear power industry, Jimmy Carter installed some solar hot water panels on the roof of the White House. When Reagan came to power, he pulled them down, like all symbolically. But, wait, then what happened to them?

Turns out that both Google and a couple of Swiss filmmakers, Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller, are now on the case.  A Google clean energy advocate put together this post, while the filmmakers made A Road Not Taken, trailer embedded above. The short answer? They ended up at tiny college in Maine. Alice Ryan of Google:

In 1992, Unity College located the panels and transferred them from a General Services Administration warehouse to their campus in Maine. After restoration,16 panels provided their cafeteria with hot water for the next 12 years. In cooperation with Unity College, Google was able to bring one of these panels down to our Washington DC office for display throughout the next year.

Frank Laird, of the University of Colorado-Denver provides some pretty sophisticated analysis for how and why the panels become such a symbol of the left/right divide over green energy is his book, Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values. It’s an excellent book — and well worth checking out.

Via > Huffington Post

 

The Middle Ages of the Electric Utility Industry

The utility industry has been in decline for half a century, according to a mid-80s book by a Merril Lynch analyst, Leonard S. Hyman.

In America’s Electric Utilities: Past, Present, and Future (which, now would be distant past, past, and recent past, of course) Leonard S. Hyman lays out a narrative for America’s electric utilities that goes roughly like this:

1900 or so: Edison and Westinghouse put the industry together, but there’s substantial competition on all fronts, including the customers themselves, who might very well choose to make their own power.

1907: The utilities get regulated, supposedly because they were a “natural monopoly.” Utilities, in effect, get the government to guarantee that their investors will get a “fair rate of return,” which no one defines. The interesting thing about Hyman’s argument here is that he thinks the utilities allowed/pushed for regulation largely as a way of reducing risk so that they could borrow money more cheaply. It’s yet another way in which financing the kinds of huge project that is an energy plant has affected the structure of the industry.

1915: Things settle down. The electric utility model we know is firmly established. Now, it’s just a matter of making more demand, so that plants can get bigger and run more efficiently.

1915-1935: Holding companies grow as a form of leverage and an easy asset with which to swindle sucker investors. Actually, the form of these companies look a lot like our real estate investment vehicles.

1935-1945: Roosevelt Administration smashes through the holding companies, requiring that they actually have a reason to exist aside from skimming money off the public good. It takes a while to break up all those companies. And there’s a lot of other stuff going on.

1945-1965: These were “the good old days,” Hyman says. “The industry increased the size of power plants, and those new plants utilized fuel more efficiently.” Coal prices went up but were swamped by efficiency increases. Demand rises steadily, something like 7-8% each and every year. All you do to plan is say, “Well, Bob, I say we build more.” Bob assents, each and every time.

1960-1973: The use of oil for electric generation skyrockets. Growing from just 6.1% of generation in 1960 to a peak of 16.9% of generation in 1973. Utilities were trying to get away from burning all that nasty sulfur-heavy coal. Meanwhile, conventional coal plants stop getting more efficient. Demand stops growing. Nuclear power sucks up all the money in the industry as huge plants hit major cost overruns. BUT, here’s the bright side: the use of coal falls to about 44% of the electric mix. And right in the middle of this period, power goes out for 30 million northeastern customers. Everyone says, “WTF? I thought you had this figured out.”

1973: Energy prices skyrocket, consumers pull back. The utilities are stuck with all this excess capacity and cost overruns and all that noise. It’s important to note here that the ‘73 embargo was just the match that lit the powder keg.

1974: Investors start to realize that perhaps utilities are a little riskier than they thought. Too big to fail, but certainly small enough to lose money. That heavily influences how much money they have to pay to borrow more money.

1979-1983: Three Mile Island. Oops. Even if it didn’t kill a whole bunch of people, it sure scared everyone. Another strike against nuclear power. The bigger one, though, was the costs. Here’s an amazing quote, written like a truly outraged analyst, “On October 5, 1983, Cincinatti G&E shocked investors by announcing that the Zimmer nuclear station, supposedly 97% complete, would required $2.8-3.3 billion in additional investment and two to three years of work to be finished. That news was the first of many disastrous nuclear crises that followed.” $6 billion in construction was “written off to oblivion” and stock prices plunged 60-80%.

What went wrong? Here’s Hyman’s short list:

The nuclear crises of 1983-1984 pushed a number of utilities close to bankruptcy. Demand for power was unpredictable. Development of nuclear power had been arrested. Many utilities had excessive capacity. The concept of central station power was under attack. New methods of regulation [he means environmental regs] seemed to put a premium on discouraging demand for central station power… Many utility executives and government officials concluded that electric utilities must turn to smaller power stations (some owned by non-utilities) and must exchange power from surplus to deficit regions as much as possible… Utilities could no longer run as monopolies.

Who won in all this? There’s really no one to cheer for but the anti-hero: Coal.

And now, things look just as grim as they did back in the 70s and early 80s. All those coal plants that provide baseload power for the U.S.? Well, they’re getting old. The Edison Electric Institute says the industry will have to spend between $1.5 and $2.0 TRILLION over the next 22 years just to keep the lights on. Who is going to pay for all that? Probably not the utilities themselves. Take a look at Xcel: they had net income of about $500 million. That’s not much. And Xcel is one of the big utilities.

On the other hand, as they like to say in Silicon Valley, it’s the big problems that present the big opportunities.

 

Required Reading: “A Golden Thread” and “Wind Energy in America”

Happily, in just the last 72 hours, I’ve received two key books for my research: Ken Butti and John Perlin’s A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology and Robert Righter’s Wind Energy in America: A History. These texts, along with the Canadian Center for Archictecture’s Out of Gas exhibit book, are absolute must-reads about the history of alternative energy.

I’m the farthest in Righter’s book and I’m immensely pleased with how well-researched and fanatically sourced it is. He’s particularly good at combing through the agricultural journals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to ferret out the story of the small wind-electric plants installed on farms across the country. He argues that most farmers got their first exposure to the pleasures of electricity through these small units produced by Jacobs and Wincharger and Aero-Electric. The section on Marcellus Jacobs and his turbines is one of the finest pieces of alt energy history that I’ve read.

He traces this reliable, excellent wind power generator through its various ups-and-downs, including a unit’s travel to Little America in Antarctica with Byrd, the explorer. (That’s the image). That picture was borrowed from the still-operating Jacobs Wind Electric Co.

Perlin and Butti’s book, first published in 1980, is fascinating not just for the history it covers but as a piece of history itself. On the back we find sparkling reviews from a host of high-level publications.

The New York Times calls it, “A clear and evocative account of the 2,500-year history of a technology–solar energy–that many people thought was a purely 20th century development.” The Washington Post provides an even better review calling it a “careful, thoughtful”  book that touches on “an awesome range of solar uses and issues.”

And now this seminal book is basically out-of-print and hard-to-find as hundreds (thousands?) of lesser “green” books flood the shelves. It’s a shame.

 

The DOE’s Solar Photovoltaic Budget 1975-2002

I recently read Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute spouting nonsense about how much funding the Department of Energy has wasted on renewable energy.

“[Mr. Chu] is an indication that Obama really is committed to pursing renewable energy, which the Energy Department has been subsidizing and researching for 30 years,” Ebell told the Washington Times. “It’s a boondoggle.”

Well, for the best-known alt energy technology, solar photovoltaics, here’s what that “boondoggle” has cost the taxpayer: less than $75 million a year since the early 80s. That’s nothing!

I’d be willing to be that our government probably spent more than that on beer for the military.

Via > National Renewable Energy Laboratory