Wind turbines outside of Atlantic City, NJ. (Photo: Donna Connor/AP)

The recent bad news out of the state of New Jersey is that it’s proposed slashing its renewable energy budget to a mere $7.5 million in 2014. The good news is that this loss will be at least somewhat offset by a proposal to bulk up funding for energy storage specifically.

One of the key difficulties with renewable energy is that it often relies on an intermittent source of power — solar panels require sunshine, turbines require the wind to be blowing, etc. The result is often a mismatch between when demand for electricity is high and when electricity from renewables is available. (Power plants that rely on fossil fuel, by contrast, can be ramped up or down in response to demand.) But improved storage technology could go a long way towards solving this problem, since excess power generated when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing could be built up, and then provided during other times when needed.

So while New Jersey may be backing off funding for further development of renewables, the storage funding may allow it to get significantly more power out of the wind and solar installations it already has:

In a straw proposal developed in the Office of Clean Energy at the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, the staff is suggesting that the state allocate between $5 million and $10 million over the next four years for energy storage. The proposal says it may award up to $2.5 million in state fiscal year 2014. Over four years, the total could rise to $10 million.

Power storage of course largely means batteries, but the technology is still trying to catch up with the growing needs of the grid, expanded use of renewables, and electric cars. But if New Jersey wants to help push the technology along, there are a few areas the state could choose from.

Lithium-ion batteries are the obvious go-to choice, and they’re already widely used in small consumer electronics. But at larger scales they’re prone to shorts and overheating — as Boeing found out when their new Dreamliner fleet had to be grounded after the lithium batteries on board two separate planes caught fire. But there’s a new technological approach being developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee that promises to overcome these safety issues, while making the batteries lighter and far more efficient in the process. It’s still embryonic though, so it could sue a boost.

Alternatively, Bill Gates and other investors recently announced they’ll be plowing $35 million into a new battery system by Aquion that relies solely on cheap and non-toxic materials like carbon, sodium, manganese, and good old fashioned salt water. The batteries are modular and thus can be grouped as a stack, making them applicable to large and small-scale projects, and they can even withstand a wide range of temperature extremes. Aquion is hoping to have production up and running at a manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania by the end of this year.

And if New Jersey wants to get really ambitious, they could take a cue from Belgium’s plan to build an artificial island to store power from wind farms. Excess power generated by the turbines would be used to pump water 15 meters up to a reservoir on the island, and then when electricity demand was up but wind was down, the water would flow back out for hydroelectric generation.

Energy resource diversity in the electricity sector is important to any region’s energy portfolio. Having a range of energy options increases grid stability, reduces consumers’ exposure to price spikes in any energy source, and makes policy changes (including a price on carbon) easier to handle. While resource diversity is intuitively valuable, it’s often used as a catchphrase to defend the status quo or argue against renewable portfolio standards at the state level.

In a recent House subcommittee hearing on electricity diversity, Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY) spoke out in favor of a diverse energy mix, but added that “the best way to strike the right balance is through market forces – not government mandates or other market distorting policies.” In this post we’re attempting to add some rigor to the conversation by measuring the electricity generation diversity in each state over the past 20 years.

To measure generation diversity, we used the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), which is commonly used to determine market concentration in an industry as well as economic diversity. The HHI measures the extent to which an industry is dominated by a few firms. We chose to use this index because it measures the level of concentration in an industry (or, in this case, the level of concentration in the electricity sector).

The HHI is simply the sum of the square of each market participant’s market share. The resulting value, the HHI, is a fraction between 0 and 1, which represents the competitiveness of an industry. A market with only one participant — who would have 100% market share – has an HHI of 1. As more firms enter the market and each participant’s market share decreases, the HHI goes down, with extremely diverse markets having an HHI near zero. In our case, the HHI represents energy diversity within the electricity sector. We took the percentage of the generation mix from each energy resource (coal, natural gas, wind, solar, hydropower, nuclear, and others) in each state, according to Energy Information Administration data. We then squared each percentage, and added them together, repeating this calculation for every year from 1990 to 2011. If the HHI moves closer to 0 over the years measured, then the energy mix has become less concentrated and more diverse. If the HHI value increases over time and moves closer to 1, then the energy mix has become more concentrated and less diverse.

The table below shows how each state’s generation portfolio diversity has changed from 1990 to 2011 and provides two separate rankings — one based on 2011 energy diversity and one based on the change in energy diversity (found by subtracting the 2011 HHI value from the 1990 HHI value for every state).

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By Bill Becker (Part 1 can be found here)

With debate over the Keystone XL pipeline heating up, the White House has issued an update of President Obama’s “Blueprint for a Clean and Secure Energy Future“. It is the latest of White House policy pronouncements that leave us wondering whether President Obama will ever uncage his inner revolutionary to fight for genuine energy security.

At this point, it’s anyone’s guess. The blueprint’s content does not live up to the promise of its title. It contains stark contradictions. It sticks to Obama’s all-of-the-above energy strategy – a strategy transparently designed to keep all-of-the-above special interests happy. Because it supports all types of energy — including the fossil fuels responsible for global climate change — it advocates nothing.

Consider:

Oil Production: The President’s energy blueprint acknowledges that “rising gas prices serve as a reminder that we are still too reliant on oil, which comes at a cost to American families and businesses.” It “urges Congress to take up common-sense proposals that will further reduce our dependence on oil”.

At the same time, it boasts that since President Obama took office, “responsible oil and gas production has increased each year” in the United States. “Under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years,” the President said last year. “Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75% of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high.”
If we are too dependent on oil, why is the President so bullish on producing more?

Energy Research: At a time the United States is under-investing in renewable energy R&D, the President’s new budget proposes $375 million for research on “cleaner energy from fossil fuels” including “more responsible” natural gas production and more funding for “clean coal” technology and carbon capture and storage.

While some fossil fuels are dirtier than others, none are clean. They all emit greenhouse gases when they are burned. They all involve environmental disruption when they are extracted. The cleanest of the fuels from a carbon standpoint, natural gas, has been accused of contaminating groundwater and leaking so much methane that it could be a bigger contributor to climate change than coal.

Meantime, clean energy is all around us but greatly underused. As others have pointed out, the greatest power plant ever created gives us free energy with no pollution, delivers it everywhere within seconds from 93 million miles away and won’t run out of fuel for 7 billion years. Rather than harvesting energy from the sun, why are we still trying so hard to dig it up from underground?

Corporate Welfare: To his credit, President Obama has urged Congress to repeal billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies for the oil industry. But from the standpoint of an effective market, providing taxpayer money for research on “cleaner energy from fossil fuels” is no better. The coal, gas and oil industries are all grown up now and making pretty good livings. Most other businesses have to do their own R&D to remain relevant in a changing market. Why shouldn’t the fossil industries?

As for natural gas, why should taxpayers foot the bill to help the industry be more responsible? If gas companies don’t adopt more responsible production practices voluntarily, the government’s job is not to write them a check; it’s to implement regulations that protect the public. That’s what EPA is trying to do with the standards it announced last year to control methane and other air pollutants from oil and gas operations.

In the meantime gas companies aren’t showing a lot of interest in responsible production; instead they seem to be fracking and drilling as fast as they can before regulations can take effect.

Making Our Own Drug: The International Energy Agency predicts that fracking and horizontal drilling will make the United States the world’s largest oil producer sometime around 2017, surpassing even Saudi Arabia.

That would be a welcome change from nearly a half-century of dependence on foreign oil. But it also would make us the world’s biggest producer of one of the products most responsible for global climate disruption. Is that the title we want? Or, as the nation responsible for most of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere today, shouldn’t we set a more moral example as the nation that leads the world to a low-carbon economy?

Shouldn’t we at least have a national energy plan that defines how and when we’ll end our dependence on oil, foreign or domestic- a downramp that signals our commitment to other nations and gives financial markets an incentive to capitalize our transition to clean energy?

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(Photo credit: AP)

By Bill Becker

Would the Keystone XL pipeline make America more secure or less? What contribution would it make, if any, to stabilizing our energy supplies or keeping us out of messes elsewhere in the world? Would it have an adverse impact on global climate disruption, or no impact at all? Informed people want to know.

Unfortunately, some of the pipeline’s supporters are fogging up the issue with deceptive numbers and claims, including vastly inflated job estimates and assurances that the pipeline would make America more secure.

The State Department and Cornell University, among others, have deflated the job claims. But will Canada’s carbon-intensive tar sands oil increase America’s security?

Not according to the people who know security best, including high-ranking retired American military leaders who are no longer gagged by their uniforms.

Among those invoking national security are 14 Republicans from the House of Representatives who wrote to President Obama to argue that his rejection of the project would raise “dire national security concerns” by prolonging our dependence on oil from countries like Venezuela.

A study commissioned by the company that wants to build the pipeline — TransCanada Corp. — makes a similar statement, concluding that the pipeline would give America greater energy independence with more oil from a neighbor who’s friendlier than Saudi Arabia or Venezuela. Jack Gerard, the president of the American Petroleum Institute, argues that building the pipeline will show the world that the United States is “serious about securing its energy future.”

They are wrong. There is only one certain way for the United States to achieve sustained national and domestic security related to energy. Rather than increasing our supplies of fossil fuels, we have to begin leaving them in the ground. It makes no difference what country they come from.

Listen to Army Brig. Gen. Steven M. Anderson, who oversaw logistics for allied troops in Iraq in 2006 and 2007. In an interview last December, he said, “all Americans should be outraged” about the national security liabilities of the Keystone project because it “keeps us hopelessly addicted to oil.” He continued:

I want to stop paying big oil and I want to start seeing a green economy in this nation. And big oil is pushing Keystone, and Keystone is essentially going to maintain the status quo for another 25 years. And during that time I can only imagine the impact it’s going to have on our environment and, indeed, our national security.

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By Adam James, via the Center for American Progress

America in the 21st century will look radically different than it did in the 20th century. There are two interesting trends worth noting that will account for at least part of this difference. First, women are now a majority in the workforce, although progress is uneven, with fewer women in leadership positions. Second, the clean energy economy has begun to take off, currently accounting for 2.7 million U.S. jobs — or 2 percent of all employment — and growing.

At the intersection of these two trends is a real urgency to ensure that gender equity is at the forefront as our nation transforms to become more low-carbon, resilient, and sustainable. Placing gender equity as a priority in the clean economy could help rapidly transition our overall workforce, as the clean economy continues to grow at a rapid pace, taking up a larger and larger portion of total jobs within a variety of sectors.

Embedding gender equity into the booming clean energy market does not necessarily require new policy solutions. The fact is that we already know how to create strong, progressive workforce standards and how to put safeguards in place that prevent discrimination in all its forms. But as we think about the gender gap that exists more generally throughout the economy, it is incredibly important that we continue to consider its impact on the sectors within the clean economy.

This way of thinking has two components. First, we need to make sure that the clean economy does not replicate or reinforce gender inequality. Second, the transition to a clean economy will be faster, stronger, and more sustainable if women are participating equally. As these sectors continue their rapid growth, the incorporation of best practices and standards will ensure that the future is much more equitable, sustainable, and vibrant than the economy of yesterday. The clean economy should be considered an opportunity to model the principles of gender parity that we seek to demonstrate in economic development more broadly.

Below, we examine the gender gap in employment before looking at the sectors that are most commonly employing clean economy workers to give some sense of why it is important to apply best practices and undo some of the damage inflicted by the chronic under-representation of women.

Looking At The Gender Gap And Implications For The Clean Economy

Hard data on the participation rate of women in the clean energy economy is hard to come by. The best studies on calculating jobs in the clean energy economy — or “green goods and services” — do not disaggregate male and female employment. But as the global Clean Energy Ministerial noted when launching its initiative to involve women more in clean energy:

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By Chris Mooney and Julia Whitty

The latest cover story of Mother Jones magazine — and, relatedly, the latest Climate Desk Live briefing, occurring this Wednesday in D.C. — are focused on one of the “good news” energy stories that we don’t hear often enough: How the U.S. military in general, and particularly the Navy, are taking the energy challenge head-on for good, strategic reasons.

The piece begins, memorably enough, with environmental correspondent Julia Whitty’s gut-tightening high speed landing on-board the USS Nimitz. A 1,092 foot aircraft carrier, the Nimitz was involved last summer in the “Great Green Fleet” demonstration, in which five ships and 71 aircraft were operated using biofuel blends or nuclear power. As Whitty reports, the Defense Department uses over 12 million gallons of oil daily in its operations. About a third of that use is attributable to the Navy. That makes thinking about the global energy future — and where affordable fuel is going to come from in the future — a national security necessity.

As Navy Secretary David Mabus, a biofuels champion, has put it, “Too many of our platforms and too many of our systems are gas hogs.” In particular, the lesson of past oil price spikes has been a telling one — Navy fuel costs can rise by dollar amounts in the billions because of market fluctuations. That’s a reality impossible for strategic planners to ignore. So while Washington fights endlessly over climate and energy, the Navy just starts solving problems.

Whitty’s piece goes into great depth about how the Navy has, historically, been an energy and navigational technology innovator. This is not the first time: the Great Green Fleet descends from Teddy Roosevelt’s “Great White Fleet,” which back in 1907 sailed around the world in newfangled ships made of steel and powered by coal. Before that, there were those who resisted (yes) switching from sails to steam engines. The Navy was on the right side of that fight, too.

The most important point of Whitty’s article is that when the Navy moves — and it is moving — the rest of the world follows. It is such a massive institution — the Great Green Fleet exercise required a government purchase of 900,000 gallons of 50-50 biofuel blend — that when it demands innovations, the civilian world and industry quickly come to heel, asking for their orders.

On Wednesday in D.C., the Climate Desk Live will focus on Whitty’s article and the significance of the Navy’s transformation, featuring the author herself and three additional speakers: Dr. David Titley, the retired naval officer who led the Navy’s Task Force on Climate Change, Capt. James Goudreau, director of the Navy’s Energy Coordination Office, and Dr. D. James Baker, who is the former administrator of NOAA, the current director of the Global Carbon Measurement Program of the William J. Clinton Foundation, and the co-author of a new report on the relationship between weather extremes and national security. You can learn more about the event at these links — and watch a live stream if you can’t attend in person.

Chris Mooney is a science and political journalist at Mother Jones. Julia Whitty is an award-winning author and a former documentary filmmaker.

by Matt Kasper and Tom Kenworthy, Center for American Progress

States’ adoption of renewable energy standards—which require electric utility companies to produce a portion of their electricity from wind, solar, and other renewable sources—has considerably driven clean energy advances in recent years. Though Congress has failed to enact a nationwide standard, policymakers at the state level have enthusiastically filled the void, with 29 states and the District of Columbia adopting hard targets for renewable energy production and another eight states setting renewable energy goals. Standards place an obligation on electricity-supply companies to reach set targets, while renewable energy goals are voluntary for companies—although states might incentivize a utility for reaching a set goal.

Those mandates have brought a wide range of benefits, ranging from robust clean energy economies to lower carbon emissions and improved public health. Since the beginning of 2009, eight states—California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Kansas, Nevada, New Jersey, and New York—have increased their standards, while three states—Indiana, Oklahoma, and West Virginia—have established voluntary goals. Six other states—Colorado, Maine, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, and Washington state—have beaten back attempts to repeal their standards. Most of the states with renewable energy standards on the books are meeting or are close to meeting their interim targets.

Nonetheless, conservative attacks on state renewable energy standards are on the rise.

Two conservative organizations looking to repeal state renewable energy standard policies are the Heartland Institute and the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. These two organizations worked together to write model legislation—the Electricity Freedom Act—to roll back state standards. The policy, which ALEC’s board of directors adopted last October, argues that “a renewable energy mandate is essentially a tax on consumers of electricity that forces the use of renewable energy sources beyond what would be called for by real market forces and under conditions of real competition in generation resources.”

ALEC is known for helping advance corporate interests by writing and pushing for passage of conservative legislation at the state level. The organization has been a force in shaping conservative agendas, including voter identification laws and right-to-work policies. In the environmental sphere, ALEC has targeted states that regulate greenhouse gases and has promoted bills supporting hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”; offshore drilling of oil and natural gas; and nuclear energy. Tax documents show that Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and other energy companies pay membership fees in order to help write legislation repealing carbon-pollution reduction programs in states across the country.

The Heartland Institute is a think tank that promotes skepticism about climate change. Recently, the organization launched a billboard campaign that linked people who care about global warming to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, murderer Charles Manson, and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. One specific billboard featured a mug shot of Kaczynski with the words, “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” In a statement, the president of Heartland unapologetically called the billboard campaign an “experiment.”

With ALEC’s ability to successfully pass conservative legislation at the state level and the Heartland Institute’s intentions to attack policies that combat climate change, the threat that state renewable energy standard policies could be repealed needs to be taken seriously and aggressively contested. Read more

by Daniel J. Weiss

Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was built on “hope and change.” Millions of Americans went to the polls hoping that the federal government would change its approach to many of the nation’s challenges after eight years of retreat, neglect, and inertia under President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. This was particularly true for concerns about providing greater public health protection from climate change and air pollution, while also increasing security of our energy supplies. The Bush administration gave scant attention to these challenges, and instead pursued policies designed by Big Oil and coal companies for their economic benefit—policies that ignored growing threats from climate change.

In December 2008, during President-elect Obama’s transition, the Center for American Progress proposed the “Top 10 Energy and Environment Priorities for the Obama Administration and 111th Congress.” This progressive agenda was designed to protect public health from carbon and mercury air pollution, reduce oil consumption, and simultaneously boost the economic recovery. Four years later the administration accomplished nearly all of these goals despite the worst economy in nearly 80 years and strong opposition from Big Oil, coal, and other energy interests. Unfortunately, the priorities that required congressional action did not occur, though some progress was still made in each of these areas.

Here are brief descriptions of these top 10 energy and environment priorities outlined by CAP in 2008, and their status at the end of President Obama’s first term. Shortly, we will propose the top 10 energy and environment priorities for President Obama’s second term and the 113th Congress.

Let’s look at each of the above priorities in greater detail.

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by Barry Fischer, via Opower’s Outlier Blog

Sometimes energy makes headlines, sometimes it doesn’t.  But it almost always has important implications for the global economy, the environment, and our day-to-day lives.

Here are 10 energy statistics from 2012 that capture some of the most noteworthy trends of the year, and that will shape the energy world in the years to come.

Natural gas, one of the three key fossil fuels in our energy economy (along with coal and petroleum), continues to ascend as a major force.

One prominent example: during the month of April, for the first time ever documented in the US, the amount of electrical generation from natural gas was equal to the amount generated from coal, which has historically been the country’s predominant fuel for power plants. This moment has been on its way for a few years now, as natural gas’ share of electricity generation has been steadily increasing, while coal’s share has been steadily declining (now around 42% on average, down from 52% in 2000).

The fuel’s growing role in the US is tied to the recent boom in gas production from previously untapped shale formations (e.g. in North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Texas), which as of September 2012 account for 35% of the country’s dry natural gas production (compared to just 2% ten years ago). The plentiful supply of natural gas helped cause the fuel’s price to dip to a ten-year low earlier this year ($2.75 per thousand cubic feet), making it more competitive relative to other energy supply sources, including renewable energy (which now accounts for 13% of US electricity generation, mostly in the form of hydropower).

Smartphone sales volumes in 2012 were huge  – estimated at 717 million retail shipments worldwide (a 45% lift over last year).

But their energy consumption is minuscule.

A study by Opower in September revealed that charging the iPhone 5 costs just $0.41 per year, and charging the Droid Galaxy SIII costs just $0.53.

The collective energy demand of all those phones is nothing to sneeze at, but in the bigger picture, a global increase in smartphone usage is likely to cause lower overall energy consumption…

How so? Many consumers now use their smartphones to do things (e.g. internet, media, games) that they used to do on bigger, energy-hogging devices (e.g. computers, televisions, and game consoles).

by Daniel J. Weiss

New projections released by the Department of Energy show a mixed — but mostly scary — picture for America’s energy and environmental future.

This week, the Energy Information Administration released its “AEO 2013 Early Release Overview.” It is the preview version of its complete Annual Energy Outlook 2013 due next spring.  This updates AEO 2012 by factoring in newly adopted policies – such as the 2017-2025 fuel economy standards for light duty vehicles – for EIA’s projections of energy production, consumption, and carbon pollution between now and 2040.

AEO 2013’s “reference case,” which assumes no future policy changes, includes good, bad, and ugly predictions for our energy system. Efforts to limit carbon pollution responsible for climate change fall into the ugly category. EIA’s estimates make it shockingly clear that under existing energy policies there will only be a small decrease in carbon pollution from the energy sector between now and 2040, condemning us to increasingly deadly climate change.

Here are some of the highs – and lows – of the AEO 2013 Early Release.

First, the good news. EIA predicts a sizable drop in gasoline consumption due to more stringent corporate average fuel economy standards. The agency estimates that liquid fuel consumption (mostly gasoline) will be 7 percent lower in 2020 compared to 2011, or about 600,000 barrels per day less.  As you can see in the graph below, these reductions continue until the early 2030’s when nearly all of the cars on the road are built with an average fuel economy standard of 54.5 miles per gallon.

Along with a decrease in liquid fuel consumption, EIA also projects that “crude oil production, particularly from tight oil plays, rises sharply over the next decade.”  Growing development of shale oil fields in North Dakota and Texas will help increase domestic oil production under current energy policies by 2 million barrels per day between 2010 and 2020 – a 36 percent increase.

The improved fuel efficiency, combined with this growing domestic oil consumption, means that foreign oil imports will fall by one quarter between 2010 and 2020. From a narrow energy security perspective, this means less money sent overseas to buy foreign oil. However, from a climate perspective, this keeps us on a path toward disaster: according to the International Energy Agency, we need to keep 2/3rds of proven carbon reserves in the ground through 2050 in order to avoid catastrophic climate change.

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