This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on March 11, 2010, under the headline "Vermont must seek new energy".
Life After Vermont Yankee
Though the plant is not dead yet, Vermont Yankee is getting close. The state Senate voted, by a wide margin, not to recommend the Public Service Board look into renewing Vermont's only nuclear power plant's license for 20 years past its 2012 license term.
Though next year's Senate could change its mind, a reversal seems unlikely. Vermont Yankee currently supplies one third of Vermont's power - what will replace that power once it is gone?
One suggestion is to reuse the Vernon site: as the current reactor is taken down, a new, modern one would be built alongside it. Given the political climate in this state, this solution seems unlikely. No new plants have been built in the US since 1996, and though Washington has plans to push new plants along, no one has seriously pushed Vernon as the site for a new reactor.
Today, with the green revolution in full effect, many are pushing for Vermont to take a bold step into that revolution, creating power using the latest green technologies.
The key to these technologies is the harvesting of energy that is already there, but which is being effectively wasted. Nature provides us with energy in many forms, including the sun, the wind, even gravity itself.
Solar is a technology with a long history, and from the local Hannaford to Hinesburg's NRG Systems, solar arrays are popping up everywhere. But is solar ready to provide power for one third of the state?
Briefly, no. Vermont is notoriously cloudy, and though solar can generate power without direct sunlight, its ability to do so is greatly reduced. Without great advances in the technology, solar will not be our solution.
We have been using gravity, in the form of water flowing downhill, to supply power for over one hundred years. Hydro power has great potential, but it also can do some serious damage. One third of Vermont's power comes from hydro, but the will to build more dams in the state does not seem to be there.
Fortunately, Hydro-Quebec harnesses the power of Quebec's northern rivers. Vermont currently contracts with Hydro-Quebec for one quarter of our power, and it seems likely that these contracts will not only be renewed but expanded. With Hydro-Quebec's recent forays into harnessing wind power, these contracts could fit nicely into our power portfolio.
Wind power recently got a boost from the town of Lowell, which approved a project at its recent town meeting. While government maps of Vermont show no part of the state as being suitable for solar power generation, the vast majority of the state is suitable for wind power generation. The biggest hurdle is getting towns to buy into the plans.
The best wind is atop our mountain ranges, a fact that is hard for some residents to swallow. Wind turbines can reach skyward hundreds of feet, marring the picturesque views. Many, however, would find a skyline interrupted by wind turbines to be even more picturesque. What wind needs is the will of the next generation. Though pretty views are important, power is, too.
There is one other, very intriguing possibility for our power needs. Relatively unique today, the concept of on-site generation is slowly gaining traction. This is what NRG Systems hopes to do - to produce enough of its own power that it need draw none from the grid.
Small-scale, on-site generation could be where the future lies, using the grid only as a backup. The Observer reported just last week about the small wind turbine that will soon be installed at Allen Brook School, part of AllEarth Renewables' push into the important residential market.
Also recently in the news is the BloomBox, a pair pf tiny cubes made of advanced materials that can reportedly power the average American home. The BloomBox uses an emissions-free reaction between natural gas (or any other combustible gas, like waste methane) and oxygen to produce electricity. Enormous data centers for Google and eBay are already using large-scale BloomBox installations to produce energy, quietly, cleanly, and with a very small footprint. Could a BloomBox be in your future?
The most likely answer is theat a combination of these technologies, and others not even invented yet, will be the future of Vermont's power. What seems pretty clear, though, is that we need to be planning for that future right now. While we will be able to live without Yankee, we won't be able to live without the power it provides.
Showing posts with label renewable energy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label renewable energy. Show all posts
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Bite the bullet on gas prices
This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on June 19, 2008.
Bite the bullet on gas prices
Back in 1998, I stood at a gas station pumping gas at $1.11 per gallon and noticed that the station next door sold its gas for $1.01. I had a light bulb moment and created The GasMan website to track local gas prices.
Keeping such a thing up to date is a lot harder than it sounds, and five years later I closed the site down. The average price I was posting at the time of the site's demise was $1.65 per gallon. $1.11? $1.65? Those were the days.
Today, you can buy GPS units that provide directions to the closest, cheapest gas. Finding the cheapest gas in the area, though, might save you $70 or $80 per year. Is there anything that can be done to save $500 or $1000 per year?
There are many factors that affect the price of gasoline. The most basic, though, is increasing demand. In places like China and India, car ownership is skyrocketing. In the past few years, oil production has little changed, but demand continues to rise. Basic economics tells us that rinsing demand with no change in supply leads to rising prices.
The reality is that I will probably never see $1.65 gas ever again in my lifetime. When you're on a budget, that's a hard reality to face.
When reality raises its ugly head, politicians smell blood. Every politician wishes they could come up with a way to tax us back to $2 gas, or to force Saudi Arabia to open the floodgates and let the oil pour forth, or to drill holes in the Alaskan tundra or the continental shelf to extract our own oil. Something, anything, to reduce the price.
The problem is that some of these "solutions" will only work in the short or medium term, but help us not one whit in the long term.
There is almost nothing the current president, nor the next president, nor the Congress can do to manipulate gas prices.
One idea is to cut the federal gas tax -- a tax holiday. Cutting the federal tax of 18.4 cents per gallon, though, hardly seems worth it. Remember good old supply and demand? Increased demand for something in short supply means higher prices. That 18 cents will disappear in a week, and the deficit will do nothing but grow.
Some members of Congress want to impose windfall profits taxes on oil companies. This is an idea that I can support, but the new money should have a dedicated purpose having nothing to do with gas prices because such a tax will do nothing to lower the price of gas, and could make it go up.
Midwest farmers see the alternative fuels market as a great way to get paid more for their crops. They get more money when their corn is converted to ethanol than if it is sold as food. But if food costs rise as fuel prices go down, have we gained anything? And who's to say more ethanol means lower prices?
Increased domestic supply is also touted as a solution, extracting oil from shale or drilling at ANWR or off shore. But as environmental consciousness rises, more people don't see solutions in exploiting nature this way, they only see folly.
No, the real solutions are all long-term. We are going to have to bite the bullet.
The best solution is to decrease our need for oil. Higher CAFE standards, so that new cars get better mileage, are a start, but only just. What we really need is alternatively fueled vehicles.
We need bio-fuels, especially from non-food sources like switch grass, and they need to power hybrids that can eke out 100 or 200 miles per gallon. We need to develop hydrogen. We need better electric cars. Something. Anything!
What we need is an Apollo project for fuel. We need to invest time, money, and brain power in the problem. There is a solution out there, and I can guarantee you it has nothing to do with petroleum.
One day, there will be a need for the GasMan web site again, but instead of tracking the price of a gallon of gas, it will track the price of a liter of hydrogen or the cost to top off a quick-charge battery. The day cannot come soon enough.
Bite the bullet on gas prices
Back in 1998, I stood at a gas station pumping gas at $1.11 per gallon and noticed that the station next door sold its gas for $1.01. I had a light bulb moment and created The GasMan website to track local gas prices.
Keeping such a thing up to date is a lot harder than it sounds, and five years later I closed the site down. The average price I was posting at the time of the site's demise was $1.65 per gallon. $1.11? $1.65? Those were the days.
Today, you can buy GPS units that provide directions to the closest, cheapest gas. Finding the cheapest gas in the area, though, might save you $70 or $80 per year. Is there anything that can be done to save $500 or $1000 per year?
There are many factors that affect the price of gasoline. The most basic, though, is increasing demand. In places like China and India, car ownership is skyrocketing. In the past few years, oil production has little changed, but demand continues to rise. Basic economics tells us that rinsing demand with no change in supply leads to rising prices.
The reality is that I will probably never see $1.65 gas ever again in my lifetime. When you're on a budget, that's a hard reality to face.
When reality raises its ugly head, politicians smell blood. Every politician wishes they could come up with a way to tax us back to $2 gas, or to force Saudi Arabia to open the floodgates and let the oil pour forth, or to drill holes in the Alaskan tundra or the continental shelf to extract our own oil. Something, anything, to reduce the price.
The problem is that some of these "solutions" will only work in the short or medium term, but help us not one whit in the long term.
There is almost nothing the current president, nor the next president, nor the Congress can do to manipulate gas prices.
One idea is to cut the federal gas tax -- a tax holiday. Cutting the federal tax of 18.4 cents per gallon, though, hardly seems worth it. Remember good old supply and demand? Increased demand for something in short supply means higher prices. That 18 cents will disappear in a week, and the deficit will do nothing but grow.
Some members of Congress want to impose windfall profits taxes on oil companies. This is an idea that I can support, but the new money should have a dedicated purpose having nothing to do with gas prices because such a tax will do nothing to lower the price of gas, and could make it go up.
Midwest farmers see the alternative fuels market as a great way to get paid more for their crops. They get more money when their corn is converted to ethanol than if it is sold as food. But if food costs rise as fuel prices go down, have we gained anything? And who's to say more ethanol means lower prices?
Increased domestic supply is also touted as a solution, extracting oil from shale or drilling at ANWR or off shore. But as environmental consciousness rises, more people don't see solutions in exploiting nature this way, they only see folly.
No, the real solutions are all long-term. We are going to have to bite the bullet.
The best solution is to decrease our need for oil. Higher CAFE standards, so that new cars get better mileage, are a start, but only just. What we really need is alternatively fueled vehicles.
We need bio-fuels, especially from non-food sources like switch grass, and they need to power hybrids that can eke out 100 or 200 miles per gallon. We need to develop hydrogen. We need better electric cars. Something. Anything!
What we need is an Apollo project for fuel. We need to invest time, money, and brain power in the problem. There is a solution out there, and I can guarantee you it has nothing to do with petroleum.
One day, there will be a need for the GasMan web site again, but instead of tracking the price of a gallon of gas, it will track the price of a liter of hydrogen or the cost to top off a quick-charge battery. The day cannot come soon enough.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Our choice: delay the inevitable, or hasten it
This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on April 24, 2008.
Our choice: delay the inevitable, or hasten it
Our lives are full of unstoppable cycles: the sweeping of a second hand on a clock, the rising and setting of the sun, the waxing and waning of the moon, the orbit of the earth around the sun. Of each of these we will all, hopefully, see many.
Some others, we could live an entire, full life, and never see - Halley's Comet comes every 75 or 76 years, and some born after its last visible visit in 1986 may not make it to the next, in 2061.
Other cycles are so vast that, practically speaking, they may as well happen only in theory. Our solar system, for example, rotates around our galactic core every 250 million years.
One cycle is of particular interest to us today. Our planet has a regular cycle of ice ages, one of which we are, scientifically speaking, still in the midst of. An ice age in underway as long as significant icing exists over land masses, such as we have in Greenland and Antarctica.
Within an ice age, we cycle still more finely between glacial and interglacial periods. Ice cores taken at Antarctica give evidence for at least the last four of these cycles, spaced roughly 100,000 years apart.
100,000 years may as well be 250 million for the average human, blessed with, perhaps 100 years of life. In our planet's past, though, the cycles have progressed naturally, without any outside influence (save the odd massive volcanic eruption or asteroid strike).
Presumably, the current cycle would continue undiminished and unhurriedly, but this time, the world has a new variable. Scientists, known much more for coming to contemplative conclusions than with wild leaps of faith, agree that the climate is warming quicker than it would naturally - the new variable, of course, is us.
The pictures of future shorelines, which you may have seen in An Inconvenient Truth, either the book or movie, are scary. Under another three feet of water, some South Pacific islands will disappear. Much of San Francisco Bay, submerged. New Orleans deluged by more water than any levee could handle. Florida, Boston, Washington DC, New York City, all in danger.
These things will happen eventually, no matter what we do. What we are doing is hastening the process. Occurring at nature's pace, we might be able to cope. If New Orleans was under water in 3000 years, we would surely have time to move things about. But if it happens in 300 years, or 100, or 10, then can we possibly move fast enough?
We don't know exactly how much we're hastening the inevitable, but what's clear is that we are hastening it. Some argue that the damage has already been done, and nothing we do can reverse it. Maybe. But, is it a chance we can take?
One challenge is convincing everyone, and I mean everyone, that there is a problem. If the United States and Europe stopped all greenhouse gas emissions, the problem would not go away. Emissions would continue from Asia and Africa.
But like trying to convince teenagers that they should begin saving for retirement, it is very hard to balance a far-off concern with immediate concerns. Even if we could prove that Manhattan will be under water 150 years hence unless we stop using cars today, would that cause anyone to bicycle to work tomorrow?
The naysayers will parrot that the warming trends we see are natural ones; that we will see disaster coming long before it gets here; and that we can plan to deal with the adverse effects in enough time to avoid dire consequences.
But the warming trends are far from natural - they are accelerated. We already have seen some effects - Katrina, the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf, heat waves in Europe, disappearing islands in Kiribati. As for planning, government is loathe to request money from taxpayers to fund projects to staunch the effects of rising sea levels, and taxpayers are loathe to hand the money over.
Humans will adapt. Our ancestors withstood the last glacial period, and our progeny will withstand the next interglacial period. There will inevitably be costs, both in blood and treasure. But the costs to the future generations can be limited if we are willing to change our behaviors. I don't expect us to be totally selfless, but I do hope and expect that we won't continue to be totally selfish.
Our choice: delay the inevitable, or hasten it
Our lives are full of unstoppable cycles: the sweeping of a second hand on a clock, the rising and setting of the sun, the waxing and waning of the moon, the orbit of the earth around the sun. Of each of these we will all, hopefully, see many.
Some others, we could live an entire, full life, and never see - Halley's Comet comes every 75 or 76 years, and some born after its last visible visit in 1986 may not make it to the next, in 2061.
Other cycles are so vast that, practically speaking, they may as well happen only in theory. Our solar system, for example, rotates around our galactic core every 250 million years.
One cycle is of particular interest to us today. Our planet has a regular cycle of ice ages, one of which we are, scientifically speaking, still in the midst of. An ice age in underway as long as significant icing exists over land masses, such as we have in Greenland and Antarctica.
Within an ice age, we cycle still more finely between glacial and interglacial periods. Ice cores taken at Antarctica give evidence for at least the last four of these cycles, spaced roughly 100,000 years apart.
100,000 years may as well be 250 million for the average human, blessed with, perhaps 100 years of life. In our planet's past, though, the cycles have progressed naturally, without any outside influence (save the odd massive volcanic eruption or asteroid strike).
Presumably, the current cycle would continue undiminished and unhurriedly, but this time, the world has a new variable. Scientists, known much more for coming to contemplative conclusions than with wild leaps of faith, agree that the climate is warming quicker than it would naturally - the new variable, of course, is us.
The pictures of future shorelines, which you may have seen in An Inconvenient Truth, either the book or movie, are scary. Under another three feet of water, some South Pacific islands will disappear. Much of San Francisco Bay, submerged. New Orleans deluged by more water than any levee could handle. Florida, Boston, Washington DC, New York City, all in danger.
These things will happen eventually, no matter what we do. What we are doing is hastening the process. Occurring at nature's pace, we might be able to cope. If New Orleans was under water in 3000 years, we would surely have time to move things about. But if it happens in 300 years, or 100, or 10, then can we possibly move fast enough?
We don't know exactly how much we're hastening the inevitable, but what's clear is that we are hastening it. Some argue that the damage has already been done, and nothing we do can reverse it. Maybe. But, is it a chance we can take?
One challenge is convincing everyone, and I mean everyone, that there is a problem. If the United States and Europe stopped all greenhouse gas emissions, the problem would not go away. Emissions would continue from Asia and Africa.
But like trying to convince teenagers that they should begin saving for retirement, it is very hard to balance a far-off concern with immediate concerns. Even if we could prove that Manhattan will be under water 150 years hence unless we stop using cars today, would that cause anyone to bicycle to work tomorrow?
The naysayers will parrot that the warming trends we see are natural ones; that we will see disaster coming long before it gets here; and that we can plan to deal with the adverse effects in enough time to avoid dire consequences.
But the warming trends are far from natural - they are accelerated. We already have seen some effects - Katrina, the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf, heat waves in Europe, disappearing islands in Kiribati. As for planning, government is loathe to request money from taxpayers to fund projects to staunch the effects of rising sea levels, and taxpayers are loathe to hand the money over.
Humans will adapt. Our ancestors withstood the last glacial period, and our progeny will withstand the next interglacial period. There will inevitably be costs, both in blood and treasure. But the costs to the future generations can be limited if we are willing to change our behaviors. I don't expect us to be totally selfless, but I do hope and expect that we won't continue to be totally selfish.
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