Craig Miller

The California coast near Pigeon Point.

When ocean explorer and documentary filmmaker Jean-Michel Cousteau brought his environmental message to Silicon Valley, I caught up with him to discuss climate change; President Obama’s energy policy efforts; and AB 32, California’s response to climate change.

Jean-Michel Cousteau is the son of legendary ocean explorer, Jacques Cousteau, and chairman of Ocean Futures Society, a non-profit dedicated to exploring, protecting and educating people about the world’s oceans. He was vocal in condemning BP for its Gulf oil spill and has frequently highlighted the link between climate change and the state of our oceans and coastline.

A native of France, he now calls Santa Barbara home and describes California’s response to climate change – its Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) and proposed cap and trade system – as steps in the right direction. But he also explained why we need to do a lot more.

“It’s an issue of understanding and changing our ways,” he said. “Creating new ways of serving our needs and taking care of the environment at the same time.”

He’s talking specifically about renewable energy and points out that algae are fueling US Navy ships and commercial airliners. He emphasizes the advances being made in solar and wind energy and even cites a hotel in Bora Bora that is using temperature differences in the ocean depths to power its air conditioning system — all this without petroleum and its hefty environmental impact.

Alison van Diggelen / Fresh Dialogues

The son of Jacques Cousteau considers himself the "voice of the ocean."

Surprisingly, despite his dives to examine the BP oil spill devastation in the Gulf of Mexico, Cousteau still had good things to say about Big Oil, pointing out that oil companies like Shell, Total and BP are investing in renewable energy.

“Traditional industries are coming to understand that whether it’s nuclear [or] traditional oil and gas, in the end it’s going to be in their best interests to slowly adopt other ways of collecting energy, renewable energy,” he said.

He also emphasized that Americans are consuming more energy per capita than anywhere else in the world and that before we criticize other heavy CO2 emitters, like China, we must look closer to home.

So, in the ocean explorer’s view, is President Obama doing the right thing in response to climate change?

“He really has to convince our decision makers, in government and in industry, that things have to change,” he said and even offered his assistance to the president.

“If I can help I will do that,” he said.

He’s done it before. Cousteau made former President George W. Bush an unlikely environmental hero, at least in the mid-Pacific. In 2006, Cousteau showed Voyage to Kure, his documentary about the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, (co-produced by KQED Public Television) at the White House. Shortly after, Bush designated the 140,000 square mile stretch the world’s largest marine conservation area.

If he gets to revisit the White House this year and discuss climate change and energy policy with President Obama, he might be wise to repeat his father’s mantra: “The impossible missions are the only ones which succeed.”

What some have billed as the world’s largest solar project in the Mojave came under fire again today. This time a baby desert tortoise led the charge with a cohort of environmentalists. While the tortoise provided a slow-motion picket around downtown Oakland, protestors lined up in front of BrightSource Energy’s corporate headquarters, determined to preserve the Mojave desert and keep solar projects local.

A baby desert tortoise stakes out a position outside BrightSource Energy headquarters in Oakland. (Photo: Chris Penalosa)

At risk of habitat loss from the project, the tortoise is becoming the iconic image for preservation of the Mojave. The Bureau of Land Management put the brakes on two-thirds of the Ivanpah solar farm when field biologists found more tortoises than initially expected. Tortoises found on site are being relocated and fenced off, preventing their gradual return.

Karen Rusiniack, member of the Oakland non-profit preservation group Desert Survivors, claims that relocation of the animals presents risks of its own. “Think about it,” she said. “These are creatures that have very limited resources in the desert. They are set up in their little burrows, they know where their little supermarket is, where they can go and get plants, they make little depressions in the landscape to get their water. They’re at home in their land.”

Activists in front of BrightSource Energy headquarters also targeted Google, which is investing more than $160 million in BrightSource. (Photo: Chris Penalosa)

Two segments of the Ivanpah solar farm are on hold until the federal Fish and Wildlife Service issues a plan for relocating the tortoises. Despite the controversy, BrightSource maintains that the project will finish on schedule in 2013.

Google announced it would invest $168 million in the project. The Department of Energy announced $1.6 billion loan guarantee. And on Friday, the company announced it plans to go public with a $250 million initial public offering. But a recurring issue has popped up: the desert tortoise.

A Mojave desert tortoise. (Image: USGS)

“It’s an endangered species. No project that is sited out there in within their habitat can negatively impact the population,” says Erin Curtis, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Land Management. As anyone following the battles over solar farms knows, prime desert tortoise habitat also happens to be prime solar territory and has been targeted by a number of proposed solar farms.

BrightSource Energy agreed to mitigate the impacts their solar farm would have on the tortoises by capturing and relocating them to new habitat. Fences are being constructed to prevent the tortoises from returning.

In all, biologists are allowed to relocate or handle 38 tortoises over the lifetime of the project. But they’ve been finding more tortoises than expected and have already hit that limit.

“Therefore we needed to suspend activities so we didn’t touch another tortoise until we have a new biological opinion. You’re trying to manage wild animals and they don’t act in a predictable fashion. It’s adaptive management and we learn new things all the time,” says Curtis.

BLM has shut down construction on two sections of the solar thermal farm, until the Fish and Wildlife Service can issue a new decision on how many tortoises are in the area and where they could be relocated to. Biologists are now estimating that roughly 140 tortoises could live in the 3,500 acre project footprint.

That decision is expected to take three to four months and surveys are currently underway. BrightSource Energy has said they don’t expect the solar farm to be delayed.

A key component of new solar panel technology being tested at Stanford. (Photo: Nick Melosh)

In a kind of cruel paradox, heat has always been the enemy of solar panels.  At higher temperatures, photovoltaic cells become less efficient, which is problematic in an industry where efficiency is the name of the game. That heat also represents wasted energy.

Today, researchers at Stanford University announced that they may have helped solve that problem. Nick Melosh of Stanford’s Materials Science & Engineering department set out to make use of the wasted heat. He and his colleagues created a solar cell technology that uses both light and heat to generate electricity. It’s called “photon-enhanced thermionic emission” (or PETE for short). “This is the first time that a process has been reported that can use the heat and the photons together harmoniously,” says Melosh.

Traditionally, solar power falls into two camps; those that make solar power from sunlight, which is what photovoltaic (PV) panels do, and those that make solar power from heat, which is what concentrating solar power plants collect. Melosh is hoping that this technology would bridge the gap between the two.

The PETE process is designed to work at temperatures above 400 degrees F, much hotter than silicon solar panels can stand. For that reason, Melosh sees the panels being used in solar farms in the desert. “It’s probably not something that you would  put on your rooftop, but out in the desert, they would be perfect,” he said. Melosh hopes to see the efficiency eclipse 50%, which would be double that of most solar panels today.  The panels could also be added to existing solar thermal farms, since the high-temperature waste heat from the PETE process could be fed into system.

The technology is still confined to the lab, but Melosh hopes to see a prototype in three years. In the meantime, his lab will be testing different semiconductor materials that could boost the efficiency of the process.

Wind farm: Windmills dwarf a dairy barn in upstate New York. Photo: Craig Miller

We saw it first-hand in Rob Schmitz’s series on “green gridlock” in California’s southeastern deserts. Trepidation there turns more on the transmission lines that would have to go up, to connect solar, wind and geothermal fields to population centers where the power is needed.

We’ve seen it at work in efforts to license wave power projects along the West Coast.

In Marin County, it took the McEvoy Ranch nine years from concept to completion, to get one 150-foot windmill up and running, to power the olive operation. Objections from the neighbors forced them to move the site more than a half-mile, and downsize the turbine to three quarters the proposed height and one third the power output (more about this in the next Quest/Climate Watch special, to premiere on August 25).

Now, as James Glanz reports in the New York Times, seismic fears are causing tremors in geothermal fields north of San Francisco.

Glanz writes that with venture funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Google, Sausalito-based AltaRock Energy is deploying “enhanced” geothermal technology to wrest more steam from the earth. But fears over the potential for unleashing earthquakes in the process are not enhancing their prospects.

*For the truly uninitiated: “Not in My Back Yard”

They’re being egged on by the President-elect, who offered this nugget in a recent pre-election interview with Time magazine:

“…we are just going to completely revamp how we use energy in a way that deals with climate change, deals with national security and drives our economy, that’s going to be my number one priority when I get into office, assuming, obviously, that we have done enough to just stabilize the immediate economic situation.”

That’s a whopping assumption. Nevertheless the advocacy group Environment California has released its own vision, asserting that clean energy is “the foundation of America’s economic future.” The group’s Blueprint for Economic Recovery and Environmental Protection Through Clean Energy Solutions is not groundbreaking but rather an aggregation of ideas and studies that have been put forth already, leading to the same general conclusion.

The report attempts to bundle the potential of renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and geothermal, coupled with aggressive conservation measures, which it says could alone cut the nation’s electric use by a quarter.

For example, Environment California suggests that we might set aside 9% of Nevada (that’s about 10,000 square miles–imagine Massachusetts covered border-to-border with solar panels) for solar-thermal installations or harness the wind potential of five interior states (the Dakotas, Kansas, Montana and Texas), either one could cover the nation’s entire electric bill. Of course, either of these approaches would require massive, intrusive distribution networks to get the power where it’s needed, so I these ideas may be intended as inspirational, not literal.

Another idea, which requires very little distribution infrastructure, is carpeting the nation’s rooftops with photovoltaic solar panels. The group says that would provide about 70% of our energy needs.

The report also advocates for cutting our oil consumption in half, though it does not specify by when.

How does all this translate to economic redemption? By creating “millions of jobs.” According to the report:

“…repowering America will plant the seeds of economic growth and revitalization across the country. And by creating the world’s largest market for renewable energy and energy efficient technology, we will give American companies a leg up in the most important economic competition of the 21st century – the race to supply environmentally sound technologies to the rest of the world.”

The report cites several studies to support this conclusion. Some were done several years ago and may contain assumptions that don’t quite hold up in today’s recessionary, capital-constrained environment. The more recent work includes a University of Tennessee study from 2006, which projected that converting a quarter of U.S. electric production and transportation fuels would, over about 20 years, yield more than five million jobs.

You are guaranteed to hear a great deal more on this theme, as a new administration takes charge with it’s “number one priority.” Still unanswered is who will provide the capital–and the incentives to steer capital–into the clean, green economy of our dreams.

Photo: Installing solar panels on the roof at KQED.

There’s a lot of people going to solar companies to work because it’s a really exciting industry. It’s growing so much in California, so it’s attracting some of the best and brightest. I’ve told all of my staff that they have to sign 10-year contracts to work for me but so far most of them have stayed because it’s a really exciting time to be in government, to be able to run the largest solar program in the country.

In 2002, California established its Renewable Portfolio Standard Program “…with the goal of increasing the percentage of renewable energy in the state’s electricity mix to 20 percent by 2017.” Then the Energy Commission bumped the deadline up to 2010, and the 2004 Energy Report Update further recommended increasing the target to 33 percent by 2020.

Whatever the deadline, numerous incentives and rebate programs funded by the state and utility ratepayers are fueling an explosion of solar.  Sterkel says it’s growing at a rate of 40-50% a year.

But installing solar is still not cheap. Even now, all the solar in California adds up to 350 MW (one big power plant generates about 500 MW).

In part, that’s because most of the people taking advantage of the subsidies are residential utility customers, and most of those are installing systems of 4 KWs. That’s not a bad thing, per se.  Any kilowatt that home doesn’t siphon off of the grid is a kilowatt that can be used elsewhere. But slow and steady is a little too slow and a little to steady for some. Never mind that California is way ahead of other US states.  That just makes it easier to compare us to other countries, like Germany and Spain, that have invested even more in solar.

There’s no argument it takes subsidies to make solar financial feasible.  The question for advocates and regulators alike is how much subsidy helps solar thrive without spurring a ratepayer revolt? And how long should those subsidies last?  A report from McKinsey & Co. concludes:

“…regulators must adjust incentive structures over time and phase them out when grid parity is reached.”

Grid parity is the point at which there’s no difference between the price of solar and the market price for (less environmentally preferable) “brown power.”
Sterkel says:

(That) is the point at which everybody gets solar. Just like there was a moment when everyone got a cell phone and everyone got a car. And this year, we’ve already installed more megawatts than we did in all of 2007, and we’re not even all the way through the year. The policies are all pushing towards solar. The businesses are growing. The venture capital is here. You know, all signs point to “yes” for solar here in California.

That’s even though incentive levels in California have been dropping.
Where’s it all going?  Some say we could see a repeat of the 1980s, when oil prices tanked after spiking and green energy projects went “poof.”  It took them well over a decade to begin the long, slow climb back to economic and political viability.  Oil prices appeared to be sliding after a long, hot summer in 2008–until yesterday, anyway.  But green advocates say they won’t be caught out in the cold this time around. That’s because renewable energy advocates can point public attention to something that goes well beyond consumer price protection: climate change.

Rachael Myrow hosts The California Report. She reported on rooftop solar installations for Climate Watch on September 23, 2008. Listen to her story here.

But one of the thornier realities of utility-scale solar is that it has its own footprint. In fact, in terms of the sheer real estate that it gobbles up, you could say it’s the Sasquatch of renewables.

David Gorn begins our series on Monday morning’s edition of The California Report. Here’s a page from his reporter’s journal:

My girlfriend couldn’t believe it. “You’re going WHERE? The middle of the Mojave Desert? In August?”

And she looked up the temperature out there in Kramer Junction, California. She’s so helpful that way. The web page said it would be a high of 121 degrees Fahrenheit. But the reality was much better; the area was going through a “cold snap” the week I went, and it was only 106.

Still, that’s hot enough to fry eggs on the hood of your car, and it’s hot enough to power some of the largest solar reflectors in the world. In fact, because of the dearth of cloud cover, the searing heat and the higher elevation (~2,500 feet), the Mojave is one of the best places on Earth for solar power generation.

Out at Kramer Junction, the solar power-generating plant uses solar troughs to collect the heat. There are about 10,000 of these modules, 20 mirrors to a module, spread out over a million square meters.  That’s about 1,000 acres.

The new plant that’s proposed for the Mojave city of Ivanpah, near the Nevada border, will be about three times that size. The entire thing would cover about 5 square miles.  When it’s built, it may be the largest solar power generating site in the world, depending on the pace of some other planned projects.

There are actually three other proposals for even larger solar plants in California, but those are not yet under review by the Bureau of Land Management. And one of them is out in the Imperial Valley, where there are currently no transmission lines in place.

You can peruse the major Mojave sites on our interactive map. The California Energy Commission has the complete list of existing and proposed large solar arrays.

Listen to David’s story on super-sized solar sites here.