After Gutenberg

Subtitle: But Very Little Account Ability

UN Dispatch, On Day One, and Grist “are partnering to discuss ideas the next president can adopt to take on climate change.” As After Gutenberg readers can tell you, such discussion is critical if we are to make any effort to save life on the planet as we know it and get off coal.

Centralized power production in the United States and throughout the world historically has used a “sledgehammer” approach to power production, i.e., two-thirds of the energy consumed to create electricity is lost in the conversion process. And, the ongoing thinking would seem to be, “No matter. We just will blow the tops off some more mountains and keep on polluting the atmosphere with Green House Gases.”

“It’s gone before you even knew it was there: As energy is unlocked from fuels at power plants, two-thirds of the energy consumed to create electricity is lost.”

The introduction to the discussion made only indirect inference to the climate crisis brought about by anthropogenic emissions, e.g., referring to Dr. Jim Hansen as a “New Age Paul Revere” because 20 years ago he attempted to warn federal policy makers. The first talking point was decentralized energy production.

Decentralized energy production through use of renewables (roof-top solar as well as solar farms, together with geothermal, tidal, and wind) can be transferred across our national grid to areas where it is needed from areas with higher productivity and/or lower need, which would change on a dynamic basis. This would eliminate centralized generating facilities as “targets” for terrorists, and eliminate the “control mentality” of large, centralized for-profit utilities.

On Day One user Wise Old Owl

A panel of experts, i.e., Grist writers Kate Sheppard and David Roberts; President of Climate Advisers Nigel Purvis; and Timothy B. Hurst of Red, Green and Blue and EcoPolitology, responded. Kate Sheppard started the discussion with an observation that farmers along the Delaware Bay, where there is “great wind capacity”, “would love to build wind turbines and start selling back to the grid, but they’re prevented by state laws.”

Although some states, notably California, have taken initiative to establish more environmentally sound energy policies, in her example, state policy prevents “not only a tremendous opportunity to become energy independent and to curb emissions, but also an economic opportunity for individuals and small businesses.” Shepperd does acknowledge some lack of federal policy, yet her focus primarily is on incentives.

Our ‘elected representatives’ in Congress repeatedly have failed to pass tax credit extensions for renewable energy. Indeed, important tax incentives for renewable energy are set to expire at the end of 2008. Proposed renewal includes a 6-year extension of the investment tax credit for solar energy; a 3-year extension of the production tax credit for biomass, geothermal, hydro power, landfill gas, and solid waste; and a 1-year extension of the production tax credit for wind energy… “The House has passed a $54 billion tax package repeatedly, but it’s failed in the Senate six times now,” carps Kate Sheppard.

Subsequent discussion picks up on this theme. Grist writer David Roberts improves the discussion by suggesting, “What is needed is a combination of regulatory reform and investment.” More importantly, he refines the discourse by discriminating between types of decentralized energy production.

Keep in mind that there are two kinds of decentralized energy. One is solar panels, small wind turbines, combined heat and power systems, geothermal heat pumps, and other sources of energy that can be owned and operated by communities, business, or individuals.

The other is utility-scale renewable power farms, mostly wind and concentrated solar (CSP). These are large and centralized insofar as they clustered together, but they are decentralized in that they are made up of multiple independent units. They are, in the jargon, modular.

Both have their merits — 207 merits, according to Amory Lovins. A system based on some mix of the two would get you graceful failure (individual units can go out without imperiling overall supply), safety (it’s difficult for terrorists or natural disasters to take out power plants that are spread out), dispatch-ability (it’s almost always windy or sunny somewhere in a large geographical area), and speed (units are smaller and cheaper and thus can be built more quickly).

Speaking of merit, I have yet to see a suggestion of merit on how to keep the crackers hap-hap-happy, while performing an ‘ecocidal‘ intervention, a.k.a., Sustainable Utility-Scale Energy Supply. Nor did the idea of Explicit Carbon Accounting enter into the discussion.