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Progress and pitfalls in California's clean energy quest

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February 16, 2012 | 12:13 PM | By

Golden Gate National Recreation Area Gets Wind Turbines Spinning

The National Park Service is expanding its renewable energy efforts

By Thibault Worth

Alison Taggart-Barone/National Park Service

Frank Dean, General Superintendent of Golden Gate National Recreation Area, speaks in front of one of the new wind turbines at Crissy Field.

The Crissy Field Center, an environmental education center operated by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, the Park Service and the Presidio Trust, erected three out of an eventual five wind turbines Wednesday. The event highlighted the expanding mission of the National Park Service to use more renewable energy in powering park facilities.

While the Center’s turbines will be used for mostly educational purposes, the ceremony took place on the same day that the National Park Service reached an interconnection agreement with Southern California Edison to bring 20 dormant renewable energy projects in California online.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Power, National Parks, wind
February 9, 2012 | 5:49 PM | By

Job and Climate Concerns Driving Support for Large-Scale Solar

For the five desert counties polled, the economy is the top concern, “solar” leads energy choices

Courtesy BrightSource Energy

When it's complete, the Ivanpah Solar Complex will be one of the largest solar projects on earth.

Here’s the fine print up front: this survey, conducted during December and January, was underwritten by BrightSource Energy, the company that’s building one of California’s largest solar projects at Ivanpah, northwest of Needles in the Mojave Desert. Private capital for Ivanpah came from Google and from CalSTRS, the state’s teachers’ retirement system. It’s an enterprise that’s been lauded by Governors Schwartzenegger and Brown, by U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and President Obama.

But just this week, Ivanpah came under fire in a Los Angeles Times story boldly titled “Sacrificing the Desert to Save the Earth.” BrightSource took to its own website to refute the charge that their utility-scale solar effort is responsible for “razing the desert” and pointed to their “low impact design,” a native plant nursery on site and a “Head Start” program for juvenile desert tortoises.

All that said, the phone survey conducted by Probolsky Research, LLC and released today by Vote Solar, a non-profit advocacy group, shows jobs and the economy leading the list of concerns among 52.3 percent of those polled, horse lengths ahead of a host of other woes which only garnered single-digit responses, including “environmental issues.” Only 5.5 percent put that at the top of the list. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Power, solar
January 28, 2012 | 1:26 PM | By

War of Watts: Neighbors Compete for Lowest Energy Use

Pitting neighbors against one another isn’t always a bad thing...is it?

Hear the companion radio feature to this post on KQED’s The California Report.

“Keeping Up With the Joneses,” the 1920s-era comic strip that inspired the catch-phrase of the same name, is a classic reminder of the ridiculous lengths we sometimes go to just to impress our neighbors. The need to “keep up” has driven plenty of neighborhoods into frenzies of conspicuous consumption—fueling spending sprees on everything from pink socks and fur-lined miniskirts, to microwaves and McMansions.  But can that same impulse really inspire a trend in “non-consumption?”

According to a growing body of research [PDF download] by environmental economists and behavioral psychologists, the answer is a resounding: Yes! Here are some of interesting nuggets to come out of that research. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Get Involved, Power, Energy efficiency
January 26, 2012 | 3:29 PM | By

Requiem for Yucca Mountain: Federal Commission Says to Move On

The problem of where to put nuclear waste goes back to the drawing board

US Dept. of Energy

Dead End? The giant boring machine pokes through a rock face at Yucca Mountain.

In its final report, a federal blue-ribbon commission suggests that it may be time to throw in the towel on Yucca Mountain, the embattled project to store high-level nuclear waste in Nevada. Billions have already been spent on the project, which appears to have reached a dead end.

But the urgency to find a safe, permanent home for nuclear waste in the U.S. was tragically underscored last March by the destruction of three Japanese reactors and their storage pools of spent fuel rods, after an ocean tsunami overwhelmed the Fukushima plant’s coastal defenses. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Government & Business, Power, nuclear power, nuclear waste, Yucca Mountain
January 24, 2012 | 7:45 PM | By

SoCal Shines Brightest in Solar Rankings

The Bay Area likes to tout its clean, green reputation, but when it comes to installing solar, Southern California shines brightest. San Diego and Los Angeles lead the state in rooftop solar installations, according to a report released today by Environment California’s Research & Policy Center.

Lisa Aliferis / KQED

Rooftop solar panels on a home in Oakland.

San Jose comes in third with more than 2,700 rooftop installations, while San Francisco comes in fourth with more than 2,400 (though it’s fifth in terms of overall capacity). San Diego leads with 4,500-plus installations producing almost 37 megawatts of electricity.

“I think the story with San Diego is that the city was an early and very consistent adopter of solar power,” says Michelle Kinman, clean energy advocate with Environment California Research & Policy Center. “San Diego also has a really well coordinated working relationship between the local elected officials, the utility, the solar industry and the advocacy community.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Power, California, distributed power, rooftop solar, solar, solar leasing
January 18, 2012 | 2:08 PM | By

Jerry Brown Braves the Big Chill in Talking Climate

But the California governor relies largely on existing programs for progress

Justin Sullivan/Getty

Governor Jerry Brown spent much of his State of the State address on California's environmental goals.

In a speech described by one Orange County Republican as “vintage Jerry,” Governor Jerry Brown tried to re-conjure the image of California as a can-do state. Brown also devoted a large portion of his annual State of the State address to environmental and climate-related topics.

Showing none of the climate timidity that has overtaken national politics, Brown declared that, “fossil fuels, particularly foreign oil, create ever rising costs to our economy and to our health.” By contrast, President Obama avoided using the word “climate” even once in last year’s State of the Union message, and gave global warming only the slightest nod in a recent address to science-friendly staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Government & Business, Power, Water, Governor Jerry Brown
January 13, 2012 | 5:02 PM | By

Gov. Brown Signs Agreement to Fast-Track Renewable Projects

Brown and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar are expanding a state and federal partnership to expedite large-scale renewable projects.

Craig Miller/Climate Watch

The partnership between the Department of the Interior and the state of California expedites the approval process for large-scale solar, wind, and geothermal projects.

The partnership originates from an agreement then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed in 2009. Now Brown and Salazar are extending it, and broadening the scope of the agreement, to include not only energy, but also transmission projects. They signed a memorandum of understanding (pdf) at a solar project being built in Elk Grove this morning.

According to a press release from the state, the projects now being fast-tracked, which are the Bureau of Land Management’s seven priority projects, plus other projects on private land, will generate enough renewable energy to meet the state’s 33% by 2020 goal.

The MOU signed today doesn’t guarantee they’ll all be built, rather, it’s a move towards expediting the lengthy permitting process these large-scale projects require.

FILED UNDER: Government & Business, Power, Dept. of Interior, Governor Jerry Brown, renewable energy
January 3, 2012 | 6:30 PM | By

Making Hay While the Sun Shines: A Flap over Solar Panels in Farm Country

The same things that make the San Joaquin Valley ideal for growing crops, plenty of sun and land, is also attracting large-scale solar power developers.

Hear the companion radio feature Wednesday morning, on The California Report.

Sasha Khokha/KQED

Aaron Barcellos and his yellow lab, Maddox. Barcellos hopes to plant rows of pomegranate trees next to rows of solar panels.

Farmer Aaron Barcellos bristles at the idea that putting solar panels on his land is “paving it over,” as some critics have contended. Harvesting electrons, he says, is not the same as pouring concrete to build houses or a shopping center. Solar isn’t permanent: he can simply pull out the posts holding up the panels when he wants to plow the land under again. In the meantime, using a small part of his farm to generate power for the grid is a good way to bring in some guaranteed income, helping him weather the ups and downs of drought and crop prices.

But on Barcellos’s farm, the ground closest to a PG&E substation is considered “prime” farmland. That means he has to get permission from county supervisors to take his land out of the Williamson Act, which gives farmers a tax break for keeping prime farmland in agriculture. I explore that controversy in my radio story on today’s California Report.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Power, Agriculture, solar
December 22, 2011 | 3:09 PM | By

End is Near for Solar Tax Credit

Solar companies in the Bay Area are asking Congress to extend a popular renewable energy tax program that expires at the end of the year.

Craig Miller/Climate Watch

The 1603 program reimburses companies for a portion of the cost of installing solar projects.

Solar companies benefit from a 30 percent tax credit, but there’s a problem: most companies developing solar projects don’t have enough income to take the deduction. That’s where the 1603 treasury grant program comes in. It gives companies a cash grant up front in place of the tax credit.

“This program really was a fix that brought liquidity back to the market and enabled developers to move forward with their projects,” said Arno Harris, the CEO of Recurrent Energy, a San Francisco-based solar developer. “It’s definitely going to have an impact, if it’s not extended, on our appetite to continue investing in the US solar market.”

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Power, solar, tax credits
December 9, 2011 | 1:43 PM | By

Build a Better Wind Farm and the Watts Will Beat a Path to Your Door

High-tech imaging helps Colorado researchers catch the wind

Craig Miller

Wind power has come a long way but maximizing the output of even modern wind farms is still a challenge.

It isn’t enough to buy a slew of multi-megawatt turbines and stake them on a windy hillside. You have to know how the wind behaves, not only going into the turbine but the “wake” coming out the backside. Otherwise, you can get more windstorm than wattage. It’s a new area of research and it got help this week from scientists who literally “look” at the wind.

Speaking at the American Geophysical Union (#AGU11) here in San Francisco, Julie Lundquist from the University of Colorado, Boulder, offered up her team’s images of a wind turbine’s wake. Using Doppler Lidar — think police radar gun — she showed us the color-coded flow: a slower, cool-colored wake at the center just behind the turbine, surrounded by the warmer-colored fast flow swirling around it. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Power, The Science, NREL, wind power, wind turbines