NewEnergyNews-Butterfield Archive

The Republican clown car circus

2012-01-12T06:44:00.000-08:00

The Republican clown car circus
Anne B. Butterfield, January 6, 2012 (Huffington Post)

As backdrop to the Republican presidential primaries a brawl is erupting among GOP factions. And it's not just the philanderers and extremists who've been dubbed the clowns, it's also the right-wing media who've gone plumb too far in 2011.

The Wall Street Journal tossed a pot of hot rhetorical tar onto Congressional leaders for their tea party resistance to passing the payroll tax holiday, while the Journal itself is also falling into a circular firing squad. David Frum, a former editorialist for the Journal and speechwriter for George W. Bush, has opined on FrumForum that it's time to downgrade the Journal's editorial page, enumerating many instances of false and flip-flop arguments.

And seven studies conducted at universities and foundations have shown that viewers of fellow organization Fox News are least informed on a variety of hot-button subjects. So, a once-great newspaper falls into disrepute and millions of voters grow less informed on important matters, thanks to the rightward push of parent company News Corporation.

As Republican candidates and officials drink the News Corp. Kool-Aid, there is more circular firing going around. Former Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) was "disgusted" by his colleagues' conduct around the debt ceiling fiasco, and conservative columnist David Brooks penned the "Mother of all no brainers" about the GOP intransigence on the same matter. Former Sen. John Danforth (R-Mo.) was "embarrassed" by the Republican presidential primary debates, and a Greek chorus of Republicans came out against Newt Gingrich running for president.

But topping the ship-is-burning-and-rats-are-leaping department came the Mike Lofgren essay, "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP operative who left the cult." This lengthy and literate indictment stressed that political "rottenness" is by far the art of the GOP. The goal behind the use of the Senate filibuster, he states, has been to destroy government effectiveness itself as a way to make the anti-government GOP look like the crew to clean up that mess.

And in hating government, what could be more hated than regulations to address climate change? On this, Republican candidates trot out all manner of fancy -- such as taking it as doctrine that climate change cannot come from a "naturally occurring gas" -- even if that gas would kill you in minutes if you tied a plastic bag around your head. Better to believe that scientists who earn ordinary salaries are crafting climate conspiracies for the money (in spite of several official exonerations on "Climategate"), while fossil fuel companies earning billions per quarter can't possibly be funding so called skeptics (they are). And so Congressional Republicans voted unanimously to keep up fossil fuel subsidies, and Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) crowed our nation can't compete with China in clean tech. American exceptionalism be damned.

In a refreshing win for reality, the GOP attack on the Environmental Protection Agency has drawn resistance. A Journal editorial about reduced electric reliability stemming from new EPA mercury rules brought letters from utility executives to blast the Journal's assertions and defend the rules. David Brooks and others have shredded the Republican argument that regulations crush jobs. Manufacturers of appliances and light bulbs in line for higher efficiency regulations have squawked at Congress to be sure the regulations stay on track.

Frum's frame about the GOP being mired with too many dinosaurs is working, as the party's reply to polls seems to be "polls schmolls." In a Colorado College study, 71 percent of respondents from the tea party say that environmental regulations can coexist with a strong economy, and a League of Conservation Voters poll conducted by a Republican company also revealed that 71 percent support EPA regulation of carbon dioxide, including majority support among Republicans.

At Halloween, the planet slid into the frightening fact of having 7 billion human mouths to feed as food prices are hitting record highs and fresh water supplies are in decline. In response, Republicans in the United States, where the earth's resources are devoured at unethical proportions, have attacked Planned Parenthood. Thankfully on this we also see glimmers of pushback in ultra conservative bastions such as Mississippi, which trounced by a wide margin a personhood amendment like the one defeated twice here in Colorado.

Those who are conservationist Republicans, Independents, moderates, progressives, liberals and greens should make it their cause to turn the tables in the next election on this clown car party which seems intent on stuffing the nation into a cannon and shooting it into oblivion. The only ones belonging in the cannon are the clowns themselves.

Twenty-Somethings of Colorado With Skin in the Game

2011-12-09T05:42:00.000-08:00

Twenty-Somethings of Colorado With Skin in the Game
Anne B. Butterfield, November 22, 2011 (Huffington Post)

The people of Boulder won. The final vote tallies for 2B and 2C -- the two measures empowering the city of Boulder to delve further and perhaps finally into buying the electric delivery system from Xcel Energy and setting up a utility -- are in, and their slim winning margins were strengthened slightly.

Gone are the mind-numbing ads; gone are the phone calls and door knocking. On is the city's go-ahead to proceed.

Two campaign forces drove this election and they each have skin in the game. On one side is Xcel with its oft-stated conviction that the Boulder distribution system is not for sale. We can sniff out from their campaign efforts and the reports on their profits that the system is some kind of a money press.

The other force is not the self-muzzled city government nor its many seasoned, and reportedly hearing-aid assisted, activists. No, these ones don't have so much skin in the game in that these will be dead by the time the earth approaches or even surpasses two degrees celsius of warming, as darkly predicted two weeks ago by the International Energy Agency if nations do not curb emissions sharply in five years.

No, the powerhouse that won the election was the one with the most real skin in the game -- real, feeling skin. They are the ones who will outlive those of us who are bequeathing them this dangerous climate.

They're the ones who will outlive the retirees who buy the bulk of stocks from investor owned utilities for their dividends, as emphasized by Andy Walters of JP Morgan to a utility conference in Denver this June: "Don't forget you've got a lot of retirement funds riding on your decisions."

The group that won the election is the one that's taking the big hit in the generational war and is fighting back. It's the group that put a funky puce-colored ad online blaring, "DUMP XCEL" with a heart message for clean energy and some curlicue script beckoning, "Vote!" The group is the gifted throng of twenty-somethings in a youth oriented political engagement group called New Era Colorado.

Leading up to the election, New Era reportedlymade 25,000 voter contacts to sort out supportive voters, then in the "get out the vote" phase made another 15,000 contacts. Election day saw 65 people making calls from their office. The group has four paid staff members while everyone else on the campaign was a volunteer, hailed from New Era's quarry of hundreds of volunteers and interns plus others from multiple groups. Sporting about in New Era's emblazoned Trailways-style bus, those volunteers moved as a swarm of green and yellow shirts and on Halloween night tromped around in costume to scare out the vote. They have been hailed as the reason 2B and 2C won.

Started a few years ago by two "student government nerds" Steve Fenberg and Joe Neguse (who went on to be a CU regent), New Era was born on a big grant won with only 12 hours to spare on the application deadline, with money doled out in segments as goals were reached. Having both 501c3 and 501c4 status, the group has three priorities: voter registration, issue work for current elections and policy for legislation. The group trains up to 100 interns per year and has won new policy through the CU Regents allowing students to register to vote online when signing up for class.
So don't let the groovy campaign bus fool you; this outfit is about results.

"We want to get to these youth voters before they get feeling disenfranchised because it feels like government is too big and removed for a vote to make a difference," Steve Fenberg texted from Moscow, where he's been invited to confer with youth democracy groups. "The whole point of New Era is to get people engaged in a hands-on democracy, with the tools to impact the process before they're pissed about an issue and feel like their opinion doesn't matter."

New Era has an office in Denver, where they will need to resume efforts to address an increasingly endangered future. Their next effort could perhaps be to remind Denver City Council and Xcel ratepayers that its franchise with Xcel Energy is coming up for renewal soon. Xcel Energy has just issued its "2011 Resource Plan" indicating it intends to refurbish two coal plants and it has no firm commitment to install more renewables until 2028.

So if you're reading this with a toddler rolling around the floor, Xcel might add no more renewables to its coal and gas dominated system until your babe is in college. This as the IEA has declared our children's climate is being pushed over a cliff. This is the time to pay even more attention to Xcel's emissions, and New Era Colorado is up to the task.

2011-11-02T05:34:00.000-07:00

Occupy, Xcel, And the Mother of All Cliffs
Anne B. Butterfield, October 27, 2011 (Huffington Post)

While the nation salivates -- or trembles -- at the thought of how the Occupy Wall Street movement will affect elections for years to come (and bankers on Wall Street are already furious that Democratic politicians have murmured sweet support for the Occupy movement), an Occupy-style ballot initiative is being voted on as I type. It will be decided on November 1, up in Boulder.

It's all about transferring the keys to a centrally controlled function in our economy from the hands of a distant, multi-state, investor-owned monopoly that makes money mostly by burning coal, and putting those keys into the hands of locally elected people who can be approached from city hall to the hardware store, in a non-profit business model that lowers overhead costs, maximizes rate payer value and aims for local, distributed generation of clean energy.

2B and 2C call on the voters to allow the city to pursue, with teeth, the question of pulling away from Xcel Energy. If a favorable financial picture emerges through the inquiry, then forming a local and transparent municipal utility based on clean energy is permitted though not required, so this election is often termed a "next step" not a final step. "Munis," as they are called, give affordable, reliable service in thousands of communities in the nation, but Boulder's muni would bear the brand of clean energy as lived out by the city's many hundreds of clean energy entrepreneurs and experts. (The campaign site is here and the city's issue guide is here.)

But underneath the flair roils the same fundamental concerns felt by the so-called "99%" of Occupy Wall Street. Concerns like whether it's tolerable that decisions made by monopolies are made chiefly for shareholder profit when deadly costs are being externalized. Or whether it's tolerable that decisions made repetitively by "too big to fail" organizations are made with complacent blindness to risks that are obvious to outsiders. And, whether it's tolerable that the risky investments that do go bad are paid off by the masses while the few proceed to profit.

These worries are at the core of the Occupy movement, which Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has called "socialized losses and privatized gains." And it turns out that the silent, hulking company behind folks' power oulet has often proven to be an agent of huge social risk and and private gain.

Big utilities are the "too big to fail" entities at the end of your power cord, being monopolies that are insulated from the risks of their undertakings, be they the chanciness of a big nuclear plant investment (think of the Fort St. Vrain Nuclear Plant that ran briefly and badly and was still paid off by rate payers), or the systemic risk of spewing fossil-fuel emissions for over a century resulting in the recent uptick in unprecedented deadly storms, or the straight-up investment risk of relying on coal supplies that are nowhere near as stout as proclaimed.

Actually, our nation's coal reliance is proving to be a ticking time bomb of risk, says leading Boulder energy advocate Leslie Glustrom, whose research revealing the work of the United States Geological Survey has shown that the U.S. has maybe 20 more years of affordable coal. And the subject has been getting attention for a few years (for example here or here). Think about that -- 20 more years of the "cheap" coal that runs about 45 percent our nation's grid.

“..Our time frame for moving beyond coal is much closer to 20 years than the 200 years we've been told so often.
Once again our government has gotten it just plain wrong -- we might realize the government has just plain gotten it wrong in a number of areas (laughing) lately, and in this case the Energy Information Administration has been telling people we have 250 years of coal, but they have never analyzed that assessment for how much is actually accessible in any sort of economic or reasonable fashion.
When you look at the geologic studies that have been done by the United States Geological Survey you realize that way under 20 percent of this nation's coal is going to be economic accessible (3:48)...

(4:20) And then [if you] actually look at the coal mines, you realize that whether you look at the state level or mine specific level in Wyoming, where 40% of our country's coal comes from, you realize these coal mines are facing unbelievably serious constraints. Those are already incredibly apparent to anybody who is looking, but the problem is that no one is looking because everyone assumes we have over 200 years of coal. But if you start looking you realize the costs of coal are mounting quickly, you realize coal is not showing up at coal plants even though the coal plant has contracts; you realize like my utility in Colorado that the price they expect to pay for coal (next year) in 2010 is the price that last year they predicted they'd be paying in 2042.

So the folks who are in charge are just completely using the wrong frame for looking at coal because my utility is off by three decades. And when we asked them about their long term coal supply you get the answer back repeatedly in writing in these very legal formats, "We've no analysis of long term coal supply; we have no such thing." And so it's very important that our country come to understand that because if we drive over that cliff the way we've driven over the cliff with investment banking and the real estate industry and the big three and on and on, this is a cliff [that] is the mother of them all. Because our country doesn't understand how to function without electricity. (5:46)” From nextagenda via YouTube

The "my utility" she's referring to is Xcel, the same one Boulder is voting to separate from, the same utility that decided to complete construction of a 750 megawatt coal plant in Pueblo, after the U.S. Supreme Court decided that carbon dioxide was a hazard to human health -- also after Ms. Glustrom had been pelting the utility with questions about long term coal supplies to which they had no answers (for example, see the document called Total Amount of Coal Under Contract by Xcel 2008-2015: here).

Now we know, thanks to Glustrom, that Xcel's modeling assumed that coal costs will rise less than 2 percent a year even though between 2004 and 2009 Xcel's coal costs went up about 10 percent a year. On that she concluded, "With a [Colorado] system that's 60 percent coal, give or take, the cost of coal has an impact."

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Though coal constraints are felt here in Colorado, they are no small bore regional issue, being felt nationally and globally. This summer utilities of China faced $2 billion in losses due to coal price spikes, and India is facing weather-related coal shortages to 85 gigawatts of installed coal-burning capacity. Xcel in Colorado and all coal-reliant utilities in the U.S. are playing with a deck stacked against them as they increasingly buy from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, the motherlode coal supply of the U.S., which is headed into a brick wall -- or the cliff that's mother of them all (see pages 48-58 here).

And thus Boulder's quest was formed in leery concern about coal costs as well as for the need to sharply reduce planet-heating emissions, in a gesture that will serve as a warning to all coal based utilities and display an attractive business model to other cities for keeping more energy revenues at home. As affluent as Boulder is, it can feel the injustice of being bullied into continuing to let $114 million of its annual economic activity be owned by a multi-state corporation operating in an inherently destructive paradigm.

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Xcel just this month moved to have Glustrom ousted from her traditional standing as a citizen intervenor in a docket at the Public Utilities Commission, where her presence gives a patina of public involvement at the regulatory body. Xcel also just threatened to cut off Boulder's access to clean energy programs if 2B and 2C pass, a threat that appears to be a sham. It was done on the logic that rate payers of Colorado should not foot the bill for Boulder's use of program monies while it is seceding, though earlier, Xcel sought repayment from Colorado ratepayers for its excess expenses on Boulder's Smart Grid City. This gambit is not about logic to benefit ratepayers, it's about hardball to benefit shareholders.

These examples show one utility acting in a nasty way during an election season, since as we know power never gives up without a fight. But the larger point is that big, centrally powerful utilities are risk factories on par with the big banks that gambled with our economy at tax payers' expense. But the utilities are gambling with our energy supply as well as our planet. And Boulder is doing something about it.

This column was written in honor of Boulder activist Dan Friedlander.

Picking up the PACE for Jobs

2011-09-14T05:32:00.000-07:00

Picking up the PACE for Jobs
Anne B. Butterfield, September 4, 2011 (Daily Camera)

Labor Day is upon us and we all hope for Congress to resume actual work in Washington when it reconvenes on Tuesday. And their chief work is to help Americans get back to work. So give up your grandstanding and get on it, Congress.

Though President Obama is going to tout a highways and jobs bill, we who want a cleaner world anxiously await Congress' plans for clean energy funding, such as the loan guarantee program that has supported 70,000 new clean energy jobs in the past 2 years while costing the government under $3 billion. Meanwhile China is pounding its clean energy sector with cash and loans, with the intent to dominate the 21st century economically.

Which puts Congress in a bind. On the one hand many members are devout about slashing spending, especially on Obama's favorite energy projects while religiously protecting subsidies for dirty fuels, and on the other hand, unemployment, energy insecurity, the climate, and China's power to price-compete American products, all produce a deafening drumbeat compelling us to invest or die.

Fortunately, coming up to Labor Day, there's news of a likely rescue to a clean energy and jobs financing tool (and has a strong parentage from Boulder). The PACE lending program is back in play, through a rare bipartisan bill (the PACE Protection Act, HR 2599) introduced refreshingly by two Republicans to prevent federal regulators from interfering with the lending program passed into law in 30 states.

PACE is an elegant mechanism for deploying private monies for efficiency upgrades and renewable energy installation at the local level. It allows municipalities to float bonds and issue loans for upgrades, allowing homeowners to pay back the low-interest loans through their property tax bills, with the balance staying with the property through a sale.

If passed, the bill could prompt hundreds of thousands of construction jobs -- all paid by property owners on projects which simultaneously reduce energy bills.

In July of last year, federal lending authorities, perhaps stung by their inept complicity in the mortgage crisis, aimed to trim sails by finding fault with the popular PACE program on the complaint that the liens are paid first in the event of a default. Even as the program reportedly reduces mortgage default rates.

PACE bill is now being weighed by the House Financial Services committee, with Colorado's own Ed Perlmutter, plus colorful members such as Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, Peter King, Emanuel Cleaver, Maxine Waters, and Barney Frank. The committee can be reviewed at govtrack.us. The members deserve lots of phone calls to be reminded that their job is to create jobs.

Happily there's even more support coming to PACE, from the courts. Just days ago a federal judge ruled that the Federal Housing Finance Agency probably broke rules when deciding against PACE financing, and posed an injunction ordering the agency to invite public comments on the decision. This bureaucratic blunder will get resolved and the construction sector can heave a small sigh of relief.

On a different note, another gift of labor needs to be recognized in the recent personal sacrifice made by environmentalists who were arrested at the White House for protesting the State Department's aim to approve the completion of a pipeline for tar sands oil from Alberta Canada to refineries in the Gulf. Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post wrote with poignant naivete in support of this as a boon to American oil markets, as if the supply is assured to go to the States. Steve Kretzmann of OilChange however dug around in corporate disclosures to find that the oil will go to the international markets (as befitting the port destination). So there is no excuse not to heed climate expert James Hansen when he says that if the Alberta resource is used as intended, the emissions would be "game over" for the planet. So, a restful Labor Day is due to Coloradans Gina Hardin, Tom Weis and Leslie Weise who ventured to Washington and were arrested among many hundreds, keeping this story in the news throughout the climate-enhanced wreckage of Hurricane Irene.

Hurricane Irene taught us that uber-storms are the new normal, and that means battening down the hatches for the indefinite future, which is just what PACE financing is all about. In his address to the joint session of Congress, the president needs to commend the PACE program as a benefit for this blue green planet that is swept with hurricanes, drought and energy insecurity, with more on the way.

Boulder Can Own Its Power With Distributed Generation

2011-06-07T07:08:00.000-07:00

Anne B. Butterfield, June 7, 2011

The city of Boulder, Colorado is on the way to creating a new, clean energy future in a process that may mean breaking away from Xcel Energy and creating its own municipal utility. Conversely, Boulder could consider partnership with Xcel in a plan created by the utility to help the city meet its energy goals. Those goals are to democratize, decentralize and decarbonize the energy supply for the city.

However, it turns out that Xcel Energy may not provide a proposal to Boulder. In last week's City Council study session, City Manager Jane Brautigam said that there is no firm date for presentation of a proposal; indeed there is no assurance that there will be one. Xcel has already missed two deadlines this year after tangling with the city last year over Boulder's request for a partnership plan.

And if Xcel punts, or gives a proposal that is heavily similar to "business as usual" with all of its exposure to fossil fuels and a rate hike of 33 percent in the next nine years, then the case for municipalization becomes starkly stronger.

If Boulder creates a municipal utility, its energy system will rely on two major modes of generation. One will be natural gas-powered base load energy, provided most likely by one of the independent power producers cast off by Xcel (as it builds its own natural gas plants to replace a lot of old coal burning capacity). The second will be distributed and efficient generation of clean power around the city to push back against that use of gas.

Some have pointed out some well-known environmental threats of natural gas. It's not so clean on a life cycle basis due to fugitive emissions of methane. Only loads of research could force people to see gas as being "worse than coal," as alleged, since after all coal outgasses methane every moment that it's exposed to air -- on top of being Pigpen when it comes to releasing CO2 and toxins upon combustion. Bottom line: no one should be shocked to learn that a large increase in the use of gas is merely a side-step toward greenhouse gas reduction.

But here's why natural gas is still a necessary step:

The quick ramping capability of natural gas power units enables renewable energy to supply the grid with little or no concerns for reliability. This is how grids are stabilized now anyway in the face of intermittent loads such as appliances going on randomly. Gas is therefore the "bridge fuel" for putting a bridge between coal's rigid base load power and the dodgy ways of everyday demand; in the same way, natural gas can lead to a world heavily powered by renewables.

Therefore the picture clean energy advocates in Boulder are aiming for is one where the city gets its base load from natural gas and then the community pushes back on the gas with increasing inputs from wind and solar. Of particular interest, the cost of integrating that intermittent solar on the grid can be reduced by, get this, adding more solar! Research out of Lawrence Berkeley National Labs has shown that the cost of integrating solar power onto the grid drops rapidly as installations get dispersed, over say, a 25-mile spread. If a grid area is gifted with one solar plant, the cost of integration is four cents per kilowatt hour. If the system has five solar plants, integration costs one cent/kwhr. And with 25 plants, that cost drops to a quarter-cent per kilowatt hour.

And solar costs are plummeting. There's been a 50 percent price decline in solar modules since 2008, and a 20 percent decline in the installed price in 2010 alone, according to Climate Progress.

The recent, rapid price decline of solar is one reason that David Crane, CEO of the large utility NRG, has all but told Forbes' Todd Woody that NRG will jump into the residential solar business, the backbone of DG:

"We think over the next three to five years the solar business will migrate heavily from a utility-sized solar business to a more of a distributed solar model driven by consumer demand not by government largesse," he said. "And we expect to be out in the forefront of that."

When local generation is spread around a community of small providers, with generation placed close to loads and a bit of smart grid, what you get is distributed generation.

And to save even more on energy and integration, add demand response, which means contracting with customers to shunt their energy use at critical times. Add to that combined heat and power (CHP) which is any well-designed use of excess heat off of combustion turbines and processing plants to give extra services like hot water for heating and cleaning.

According to Sean Casten, CEO of Recycled Energy Development, Denmark gets 50 percent of its power from CHP, and the state of Maine gets 33 percent.

These efficiency solutions are most suitable to the business model of a municipally owned utility which can be in the business of reducing customer demand. By contrast, an investor-owned utility cannot sharply cut that which pays its investors, which is the sale of more electrons.

There are more known economic benefits of local power. Boulder's pals at National Renewable Energy Labs put out a study in 2009 showing a tendency for locally-owned wind power generation to proffer nearly three times as many jobs as absentee-owned resources, with a total economic boost up to three times better than absentee-owned.

More on jobs: the installation of new solar PV yields up to 14 times more jobs for coal's and natural gas' one job produced on new projects, and wind offering up to four times as many jobs also. The renewables also yield better permanent jobs, too, as reported in 2009 study from UC Berkeley.

If Xcel does not provide a plan for how Boulder can join the city in a new direction, Boulder's job is to plan out a safe transition to a natural gas-fired power provider who can keep the lights on and integrate increasing amounts of renewables and efficiencies at a price in line or less than what they'd be paying otherwise.

On the pathway to owning its own power, Boulder will need to do lots of outreach and education about the energy options in a concise and accurate way. Leaders will also need to spell out for voters the nuances among of bond ratings and the bonding instruments that are especially attractive for municipalities. Reports of "unlimited bonding authority" have created a flap among doubters, when the subject matter is revenue bonds.

But one thing is not in question, and that is whether our town can attract world class talent for a very exciting clean energy proposition.

In its still-heavy reliance on fossil fuels, Xcel may find its situation getting more precarious. David Crane put it this way: "There is reason to assume that as a post-industrial society that might be getting more serious than it has about conservation and efficiency with widespread support for more renewables, if a company like ours were to find itself as the fossil fuel power generation company, we would be in a business that is in terminal decline." David Crane perfectly voices what so many in Boulder are suspecting, and that's what they want to get free of, with the help of their home-rule rights assured in Colorado's constitution.

A version of this column ran in the Boulder Daily Camera.

The Plunging Cost of Renewables and Boulder's Energy Future

2011-04-21T21:26:00.000-07:00

Anne B. Butterfield
April 19, 2011 (Huffington Post)

The talking point about the high cost of renewable energy has become a litany for the fossil fuel crowd. Keeping up with the sacred devotion, Rep. Kathleen Conti, R-Littleton, just introduced a bill to provide more oversight on utility rates increases, particularly with what she calls the number one driver of higher utility bills -- renewable energy.

"Renewables are driving the costs up, and the more we demand from renewables, the more costs will go up," said Conti, according to Colorado News Agency. "People are struggling with their power rates, especially those that are unemployed."

Rep. Randy Fischer, D-Fort Collins, refuted Conti with the knowledge that cost increases are due to coal price hikes and capital construction by utilities to meet growth in energy demand. "The costs of renewables are going down and are on a path that will meet the costs of coal," said Fischer, also pointing to a 2009 law that established a two percent rate-hike cap on renewables, charged through the "RESA" on our XcelEnergy bills.

Fischer must have been reading recent reports out of the Public Utilities Commission, such as an Xcel report indicating that the price of wind generation fell by over 45% since 2009 (to see the report click here, click the Bid Evaluation Report, and see page 4). In response to a request for proposals for about 200 megawatts, Xcel got avalanched by bids for over six gigawatts. The projects will be ready by end of 2012 at prices so attractive that Xcel will replace an older 201 MW project from the queue with a bid from this new batch, saving customers $325 million in wind energy costs over 20 years, getting 25 percent more wind energy.

In Xcel's modeling, bids for new wind will also result in reduced system costs as soon as 2016 (download LWG 1.A1, and see the yellow table at the bottom). And that crossover between renewable and fossil fuel costs comes without the pressure of a price on carbon emissions. The only rational response to this is, Wooohooo!

This trend is also emerging with solar photovoltaic panels. Analysts and industrial installers are saying that solar panel installations will surge in the next two years, with Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimating that large PV projects could cost $1.45 a watt to build by 2020, half the current price. The London-based research company says solar is viable against fossil fuels on the grid in the most sunny regions such as the Middle East.

"The most powerful driver in our industry is the relentless reduction of cost," said Michael Liebreich, CEO of Bloomberg. Better cell technology and more streamlined manufacturing processes will soon make solar cheaper, even competing with coal, without subsidies, say Bloomberg analysts.

That claim was so bold I ran it by presenters in an Energy Central webinar this week. Ralph Romero of Black and Veatch all but confirmed Bloomberg's views. "We've seen this over and over, in Europe and Asia, where expansion of manufacturing brings lower costs, superior quality and incorporation of processes from other industries," adding that this is about to happen in the States.

In Colorado, plunging costs for renewables are furled against the steady upward march of fossil fuels. In March, Xcel filed for an 18 percent increase in the "electric commodity adjustment" (the ECA on your bill) which allows fuel costs to get passed through to customers. This hike would increase a typical monthly bill by about $3 -- with a resultant boost to the RESA of only six pennies. Every buck paid to fossils on Xcel's system leads to two pennies sent to cost-saving renewables.

We Coloradans cannot be surprised to read Xcel's earnings report with CEO Dick Kelly exulting about 2010 being Xcel's sixth consecutive year of meeting or exceeding their earnings guidance. Kelly made particular mention of the acquisition of two natural gas power plants and Comanche's Unit 3 in Colorado, for which we all know Xcel was granted back-to-back rate increases.

Fact is, when it comes to Xcel's earnings growth, Colorado is Xcel's Secretariat. By the end of 2008, Colorado bested Xcel's larger customer territory of Minnesota by 11 cents per share, and in 2009 by 8 cents per share, and in 2010 by 26 cents per share in a surge that outperformed every other subsidiary's improvement by a factor of seven.

So it's no wonder Boulder is taking a whole new look at how to get cleaner power at a better price, with or without Xcel. Rate stability comes through efficiency and renewables -- particularly as coal prices have surged about 10 percent a year since 2004.

Denial Is Rising

2011-02-13T11:00:00.001-08:00

Paddling Down the River Denial
Anne Butterfield, January 12, 2011 (Huffington Post)

"We are the most obese, most in debt, most medicated and most addicted adults in human history. We're also the busiest. We take less vacations, we work longer hours and we sleep less than anyone who came before us," says Brene Brown of University of Houston, newly famous for this whopper critique of American life made in a TED video in which she dissects shame and authenticity.

She explains this frenzy of addictive behavior as a way for people to numb themselves against shame, which she calls the fear that one is not worthy of connection or inclusion.

Such a familiar story by now. To feel "okay" we go deep into debt, often spending on ego pursuits like oversized homes, cars and weddings; then there's gambling, gaming, drinking, drugs and emotional eating and shopping. Often we wind up depressed and medicated when the results from these choices aren't what we like.

Throngs among us are, also, in monstrous denial of the greatest consequences that comes with this getting and spending that has laid low our economy and public health. That denial, beat into the American mind by campaigns funded by certain industries and media, persists among voters and politicians despite the increasingly obvious reality.

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We are over-consuming and despoiling our world. Many continue to numb themselves from facing the quickly worsening condition of our climate.

Even the news is in on the denial this year, under-reporting climate science to the point that researchers from Drexel University and University of Colorado have quantified the nosedive.

2010 saw extraordinary weather catastrophes, yet the obvious link to climate change has been denied by all Republican leaders and tea party candidates. Most visible of late is the about-face of the new chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Fred Upton, who recently opined in the Wall Street Journal that climate may not need to be addressed through policy, even though his website recently stated that "everything should be on the table" to reduce carbon emissions.

Let us count just a few catastrophes that should give Upton and the new climate-denying Congress pause:

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Such as the rains of biblical proportions that assailed northeast Australia, inundating a region the size of the southeast United States, bringing the regional economy to its knees.

Note also the horrendous rains that wiped out the living quarters of 8 million people in Pakistan as well as much of the nation's infrastructure (after dire temperatures up to 128 degrees.)

Note the Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 lasting about two months and killing at least 11,000 people. It brought temperatures of 99°F to Moscow with smoke from wildfires blanketing the city for a week, with carbon monoxide at about 7 times the safe level.

Note Tennessee's "Katrina" and the two Snowmaggedon events on the east coast that book-ended 2010 and are explainable by climate change's effects on weather patterns and increased atmospheric moisture.

Yet pundits use snowstorms to deny climate science like the ditzy girl who whines, "I can't be overdrawn, I still have checks!"

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Perversely, newspapers have dropped the ball on climate change too. Max Boykoff, of the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, has reported that climate reporting done in catastrophic 2010 was on par with the amount of climate reporting done way back in 2005 -- before An Inconvenient Truth and great blue expanses of sea made the arctic ice cap look small in 2007.

If news editors believed that weather catastrophes were unrelated, they have no excuse.

Climate science has outlined worsening weather for decades, and nineteen nations, comprising 20 percent of the earth's surface, saw record-breaking heat events in 2010.

Every citizen and consumer has some power to ameliorate this so long as they can see they are wasting fossil fuels and should start to get active about supporting clean energy.

So newspapers should keep up with climate news.

To add insult to injury, Congress has ignored alarming news out of science organizations.

The journal Nature published findings that higher temperatures have led to a 40 percent die off of phytoplankton, that teeny sea creature that forms the base of the oceans' food web and creates half of the world's oxygen. Most alarming, the National Science Foundation released a report this past March, well in time for the Senate to consider it in a meaningful climate bill, that stores of methane locked under Siberia's permafrost are bubbling up from the thawed depths.

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Even last February, the Pentagon, to which the Republican Party heaps all manner of honor and funding, warned strongly about climate change's powers to weaken governments. Yet the Republican Party has moved straight away from all warning like children hiding under a blanket. It's already weakening ours -- through psychological denial. Let's see if we can awaken Congress and the press in 2011.

But we are up against tough odds. On a new show called My Strange Addiction, twenty year old Samantha goes to a dermatologist to see about her skin damage after years of spending at least 60 minutes a day in tanning beds. When he tells her a litany of issues including early death to consider from this self abuse, he admits that today she has no melanoma. And she skips out of the clinic a happy girl.

That's the American mind on denial -- light as a lark thinking, "Today I haven't been wiped out by climate change, so today I don't change a thing!"

Versions of this appeared in the Boulder Daily Camera and target="_blank"the Huffington Post

The Fox (News) That Jumped the Shark

2011-01-02T19:47:00.000-08:00

Anne Butterfield, January 2, 2011

Arguing that he was dealing with "hostage takers," President Obama agreed with leading Republicans to allow extension of the Bush tax cuts even for the richest Americans, even though our nation's debt drove the Republican wave to crest in the last election.

Pushing for legislative priorities that work in opposite directions -- both tax cuts and deficit reduction in deep measure -- the much empowered Republican flank seems to have gone bonkers.

Even worse, the Republicans are flouting the will of the voters. A Bloomberg poll says that nearly two thirds of Americans do not support extending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and a recent Gallup poll revealed that by a 14 point margin, even Republicans prefer deficit reduction to tax cuts.

Bill O'Reilly at Fox News dismissed the polls saying, "I read polls all the time" and, "most Americans are relieved and happy" about the full set of Bush tax cuts being extended.

The disconnect may originate deep within the agenda at Fox. It's been America's number one cable news channel for over 100 months while steadily growing a reputation as a political organization, having been built by Roger Ailes, the former media man and political operative for Richard Nixon and two other Republican presidents. Ailes tracked with dirty trickster Lee Atwater in implementing the "Southern strategy" that lured whites alienated by the passage of Civil Rights into the bosom of Republicanism. Later, Atwater crafted the Willle Horton for George H. W. Bush, cementing an outlook among Republicans that Americans, our values, and our selves, are under attack.

To watch Fox is to feel the fear factor. Its headlines are often crafted with implications of threat to your family; even the advertisers get in on the act with ads that play up fearful threats more than you see at other stations.

Seeming to borrow a ploy from Karl Rove, Fox News has employed a "big lie" by giving itself the slogan "Fair and Balanced" while consistently framing issues for the conservative perspective. When liberals are present on Fox, they are in the minority and often poorly treated, then they walk the halls with paid commentators who also run for office on the Republican ticket. Fox's parent company, NewsCorp made a million dollar donation to the Republican Governors' Association and Fox is being sued for promoting a candidate's fundraising information.

Fox's coverage of health care reform engaged another big lie. Howell Raines, formerly the executive editor of the New York Times, pulled no punches in calling Fox News propaganda, specifically for engaging "the endless repetition of the uber-lie, Americans do not want this health care reform". Americans did want health care reform for decades before Obama's arrival, and startling majorities like many particulars of the completed reform bill. But Fox News would not parse such realities anymore than Bill O'Reilly would concede Americans' true feeling about tax cuts for the wealthy.

With two masters degrees, at least O'Reilly has an education. In the world of Palin we're supposed to defend the worth of education, which can be summed up as formalized work accruing to broad knowledge, skill and insight. Military experience and other intense activities that entail disciplined development of skill and insight are true rivals to formal education. Fox News seems unique in journalism for lending power to commentators who skipped college or wiffed on it. Glenn Beck skipped college, went straight to radio. Sean Hannity (like Rush Limbaugh) dropped out early to go to radio. Sarah Palin stumbled through five campuses, finished late, and has no respect for knowledge to show for it.

Can education matter that much? Glenn Beck and Fox News were overt boosters of the development of the tea party, so how well do they measure up? David Frum the former speech writer of George W. Bush, had his group FrumForum interview hundreds of tea partiers on the Washington Mall to discover how much they knew about the taxes they were protesting. It turned out, not much. They believed that taxes were much higher than they really were, and they were certain that federal taxes had risen under Obama when in fact they had dropped. Later, when Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert drew thousands to the mall for their "Sanity Rally", their fans turned out to have much closer grasp of the facts.

Do education and accuracy matter? Does it matter that the station that openly promotes all things Republican also ramped up a story about the President Obama's trip to India costing $200 million per day that was blatantly inaccurate?

Does it matter that management at Fox ordered on air personalities to cast doubt on climate change due to the so-called climategate scandal in which stolen emails were cherry picked to make the science look corrupt to the credulous and the craven? Don't ask the news station that makes big stars of college drop outs whether chemistry has consequences.

And don't ask Roger Ailes. When confronted by Arianna Huffington about Fox's journalism, he retorted that his job was to produce ratings and millions, not journalism.

Local power for Boulder and beyond!

2010-11-28T16:11:00.000-08:00

Anne B. Butterfield, November 29, 2010

Election day was momentous, and for the Boulder clean energy crowd, a crowning achievement. Proposition 2B, the tax to “replace the franchise fee” passed by such a strong margin (69%) it looks like a mandate for bold action. So let’s get educated – there are energy options for municipalities like Boulder to get more direct authority over the energy supply.

Just six days after 2B’s passage, Paul Fenn of Local Power Inc., came to Boulder to talk about Community Choice Aggregation, having written the law for it in California. He is also a consultant to multiple cities in and counties in California.

CCA is widely called “muni-lite” for representing a mid point between being fully captive to an incumbent utility and full municipalization, in which a city buys back its distribution system and hires a company to manage its evolving power generation. CCA empowers communities to lease rather than buy the distribution system and evolve their energy supply according to local wishes.

Community choice is a movement that’s gained a legal foothold in states both red and blue -- Massachusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, Illinois and California -- and merits serious scrutiny in Colorado. It’s not legal here, but it could be if the legislature passed it. The foundation for such a law would be strong since Colorado is a home rule state (and Boulder is a home rule city). CCA would also empower counties to form buying entities as well.

Fenn’s sharpest point in favor of CCA (which is true also for municipalization) is that renewable energy simply is not more expensive than fuel-based central power when it’s bought by a municipality that can get tax-free government financing through revenue bond authority, sometimes known as municipal H bonds.

“Municipalities can get a cheaper banker than Xcel can” Fenn put it. Seen another way, renewables don’t have enough return on investment for a big utility’s large revenue requirements.

The adage, “If you want to travel fast, then travel light” could not be more fitting for decarbonizing energy supply. The shareholder profit burden of investor-owned utilities does not jive with greening up the system. In fact, one could make a strong principle of the idea that the natural monopoly of electricity distribution can only be justified in a civically owned, minimum profit operation in which citizens know and participate as much as they please.

“The average American has an infantile relationship with electricity – you want it, and if you don’t get it you get really, really angry,” according to Fenn. The distant monopoly has everything to do with that mother-child dynamic that Mayor Susan Osborne has also mentioned. Community power however, allows communities to “penetrate the veil of opacity” to rethink the central, supply-based, fuel-based model, reinvent it with geographic, data-based realities, and rebuild the energy equation with efficiency and storage as much in mind as clean energy supply.

In Fenn’s vision, the goal is a fully integrated, interoperable, shared, geographic infrastructure that shifts with the moving tide of humans and weather around the area. Key areas for reducing waste lie in combined heat and power at big facilities and controlling the pumping of water. Figuring out the patterns of usage is critical to relocalizing power.

The City of Boulder has been requesting energy usage data from Xcel Energy; receiving it has been a point of contention as noted by City Councilors through the past year. In October, Boulder formally requested complete data on energy usage and technical specifications on installed facilities. The franchise agreement expiring this year accords Boulder this for the sake of acquisition. City leaders will need steel in their spines to bring home this knowledge.

There are many unknowns in the process of moving toward CCA, particularly getting it through the legislature and the Public Utilities Commission. Such processes provide “plenty of room for it to be corrupted and co-opted” according to energy lawyer Susan Perkins. There is strong reason for Boulder to reach for the gold-standard of full municipalization, and increasing renewable power steadily for years then selecting nascent load balancing technologies as they reach maturity.

In the meantime, CCA seems inevitable for the red and blue mix of Colorado. Why should law and regulations require our communities to export money unnecessarily through large companies that send money out for coal and shareholders, when more and more technologies are coming out to empower households and neighborhoods to provide their own power?

(Anne B. Butterfield volunteers on the board of Clean Energy Action, where Susan Perkins is also a prospective board member.)

Boulder's 2B means Progress on Clean Energy

2010-10-25T18:23:00.000-07:00

Boulder's 2B means Progress on Clean Energy
Anne B. Butterfield, October 25, 2010 (Huffington post)

In mountaineering there's a land feature known as a saddle -- a high ridge between two or more peaks from which a climber can study options for ascent or descent. The saddle is not a destination but rather a strategic place for planning. It's worth the energy spent in reaching, especially if the route or conditions are uncertain.

That's what Yes on 2B offers the City of Boulder. It allows Boulder to investigate real plans for its energy future and report back to voters in the next year or more. 2B is not an energy plan, but a mechanism to let the city have stable funding while being legally separate from Xcel Energy and its annual franchise fee amounting to about $4 million. 2B is therefore dubbed the "replacement tax."

Here is how two City Councilors put it in the Daily Camera:

“2B has the unanimous support of city council and its passage is critical. Simply put, if it fails the city will need to cut its General Fund budget by over $4 million per year. That will significantly reduce support for a wide variety of essential services, including police, human services, libraries, parks and recreation, and open space.”

To help clarify some misconceptions about Issue 2B, here is what it will not do:

- 2B will not affect Xcel`s provision of energy to Boulder customers in any way
- 2B will not change your relationship with Xcel as your energy provider
- 2B will not raise additional revenue for the city
- 2B is technically a new tax, but it will not cost you extra money
- 2B does not, in any way, imply support for replacing Xcel as the city`s energy provider
- 2B does not, in any way, affect your control, as a voter, over the ultimate decision about how Boulder will meet its future energy needs.

This "replacement of the franchise fee" could seem confusing, since a franchise fee itself is a strange creature. Why would any utility pay a city so much money rather than merely lower its utility bills? The tradition of franchise fees started as an inducement for the long term contract while giving the utility access to city property (like a lease). It was first paid out of the utility's earnings. Now utilities often collect and remit the fee directly from ratepayers. It's as if Xcel has morphed into being a taxing authority for the City, and this status will last to the end of this year when the franchise expires. 2B replaces that funding, allowing the city to provide familiar services with stable funding while exploring options for getting Boulder to a very high proportion of clean energy in the next several years.

There's no reason to assume that Boulder should hang tight with Xcel Energy and wait for its supposedly excellent plans for decarbonization to pay off -- for in fact many challenges have come against the coal plant retirement plan known as HB 1365 or the Clean Air-Clean Jobs Act. Xcel has recently stated that fulfilling its own proposal to retire up to 900 megawatts of coal capacity will risk reliability and unreasonable cost impacts on customers. The state's health department has stated that Xcel's plan cannot meet the air improvement requirements of law.

On top of that, this week, the Colorado Mining Association filed a motion to block two of three Public Utilities commissioners from ruling on the $1.3 billion plan to close several coal plants. The charge is that Chairman Ron Binz and Matt Baker are embroiled in conflict of interest having clearly negotiated with Xcel Energy on the framework for cost recovery for the utility's plan to replace coal capacity with natural gas turbines. "The Commissioners have breached their duty to the people of Colorado by making a private deal with Xcel Energy (PSCo) to allow it to 'spend itself rich,'" the motion alleges.
Xcel Energy defends its involvement by explaining that such negotiation is business as usual. But this time they're not saying it to powerless citizen intervenors, they're saying it to a major industry in the state.

So the legal challenge may devolve into a battle of the titans with limitless legal resources (Xcel's being paid for by ratepayers), and it could drag on.

Therefore it is truly fortuitous that Boulder's City Council chose not to renew its franchise agreement with Xcel, and can explore options for becoming a municipal utility or compelling Xcel to assist with legislative restraints and create for Boulder a unique business arrangement, such as it does with numerous major buyers in the state.

Boulder has the company of many communities that are breaking away from business as usual for their energy supply. Marin County in California fought its state's mega-utility, PG&E, to retain its right to form its own utility and now is the nation's first to derive 75 percent of its energy from renewable sources, with rates lower than those charged for natural gas. Winterpark, Florida, broke loose of its investor-owned utility through a five year process strongly supported by voters, resulting in higher reliability. Gainesville, Florida and Ontario, Canada have instituted guaranteed rates to buy renewable power, causing rapid installation at low rates.

These visions could be possible for Boulder, and they can be explored and vetted with no change in utility rates and no change in city services either, should 2B get passed by the voters. It's a good to get to a secure place where options can be thoroughly explored.

Vote yes on 2B.

Real Growing Pains and the Clean Air-Clean Jobs Act

2010-10-25T18:21:00.000-07:00

Real Growing Pains and the Clean Air-Clean Jobs Act
October 13, 2010 (Huffington Post)

Colorado's Clean Air-Clean Jobs Act (HB 1365) is crafted to take Colorado past its coal intensive glory by ordering Xcel Energy (and Black Hills) to retire or retrofit a significant portion of their coal burning capacity and supplant it with natural gas. For Xcel, that means about 900 megawatts - all of Valmont's 186 MW in Boulder, and most of Cherokee in Denver. This law was passed to protect the state from top-down intervention expected from the US Environmental Protection Agency in compelling compliance with clean air standards.

And the Front Range needs to comply. To listen to doctors from National Jewish Health speak -- of the effect of ozone and particulates on the lungs of Front Range residents at the public hearing at the Public Utilities Commission on September 23 -- is to lose all doubt.

Through four and a half hours, roughly one hundred people gave sworn testimony that fell largely into two camps -- one on the costly health effects of the particulates and ozone-laced air, and the other camp spoke of the economic ruin that mining communities fearfully expect.

(Full disclosure: Yours truly testified of her history with mild asthma and lung surgery to correct a rare lung disorder needed while living close to the Valmont plant.)

A mom from Golden spoke with three children; she told of her youngest child's asthma, its impact on his life and hers, of the trips to medical appointments and other efforts.

Perhaps most jarring was a pediatrician citing a study on healthy children -- one group growing up in air laced with small particulates and ozone, and a second group living in clean air. The former group reportedly had five times more measurable lung damage than the latter. A doctor for Physicians for Social Responsibility described the smallness of airborne particulates enabling them to pass through the blood-brain barrier, contributing perhaps to a noted trend of lower IQs in children in the most polluted areas.

The commissioners also heard from railroad executives and truck drivers, hotel owners in Craig, a power plant operator and dozens of miners and their relatives opposing the plan to retire rather than retrofit coal plant capacity. The level of emotion for all but the executives was palpable. Most emphasized the many generations their families had lived in Colorado and how they adored their communities; many exclaimed the pristine air of northwest Colorado, thanks, reportedly, to top-notch scrubbers on their nearby large coal plant.

So much was said of the extraordinarily deep blue of the sky around Craig, one could not help but wonder about the solar energy potential.

It certainly seemed that the area, and the niceness of the people, must make a terrific destination for a weekend visit.

Along with the local pride was evidence of the coal community feeling downtrodden. One woman, near tears, showed the portraits of members of her family, sure that HB 1365 would dislocate them. One man introduced himself as "one of those dirty coal miners everyone's been talking about." Many seemed shaken by the seriousness of air quality issues, remarking how "no one wants bad air quality."

In preparation for the public hearings, the Commission posted an economic impact report on HB 1365 by the LEEDS School of Business, which some opponents criticized. However its predictions indicate that Colorado's coal country can prevail -- with assertions that two-thirds of coal produced in Colorado now is sold out of state, and the portion going to Valmont and Cherokee is only 7 percent. Net jobs in the coal industry would supposedly remain constant.

Colorado Conservation Voters paid for a public opinion poll on HB 1365 that was conducted by two polling firms, one Democratic and one Republican. It found that nearly 80 percent of voters prefer their power to be generated by natural gas and renewable resources instead of coal -- and are willing to pay for it, as reported by the Denver Business Journal.

The pain of the coal miners and their families was distressing to watch. As often as they spoke of rising demand for energy, some must have guessed their product would see no slump in demand if Cherokee and Valmont stopped burning coal. Indeed, Peabody Coal has been announcing its vision for greater salesthrough exports to China, with intent to get ports in the Northwest expanded. Maybe the large number of t-shirts emblazoned with "Clean Coal Technology - It Works" had something to do with the miners' selection of information.

Nonetheless, clean energy leaders in the Front Range should take a look at Colorado's coal mining areas, their beautiful natural resources, their labor market and community colleges, and the Workforce Investment Act's ability to help workers through transitions that we on the Front Range are all too willing to cause and profit by. Colorado's coal country also needs to profit in the New Energy Economy, instead of being so dominated by one industry.

Pay the Same, Get More: No New Boulder Franchise Agreement

2010-08-09T07:12:00.000-07:00

August 9, 2010 (NewEnergyNews)

(The Boulder, Colorado, City Council recently voted not to put a franchise agreement with Xcel Energy on their Novemer ballot. In this advocacy piece, columnist Anne Butterfield explains why it was the right decision.)

If Boulder makes a commitment to get more information to voters for November's ballot, it has a real chance to pay the same but get more from its energy supply. And "more" means freedom to examine options for lots more clean energy either from Xcel Energy or by way of creating a municipal utility.

And according to former City Council member Steve Pomerance, who spoke for the Decarbonization Tech Team at the July 13 City Council meeting, energy providers are already expressing interest in helping Boulder get clean energy apart from Xcel Energy.
(The video is on the city`s Web site under "Council," so check it out. Scroll down to July 13 and hit "load meeting" and play.)

With the Xcel franchise coming to an end this year, the City Council will soon vote on what to put on November's ballot to let Boulderites vote their preferences.

The city has already begun to speak. Polling done by Tamley-Drake Research with 625 respondents has shown the city is divided about the franchise proposition -- and that people are under-informed. Early in the polling process, respondents lined up 43 percent in favor of franchise renewal, 23 percent opposed and 33 percent undecided.

But when given more information during the poll (described as being "for Xcel" or "for the city" by various people), undecided respondents switched to opposing franchise renewal -- by 35 percent (with only 2 percent gain on the opposing side). This is perhaps the most meaningful result: With information, voters move to seeing renewal as a bad deal and municipalization as good.

Also, with more information, voters increase their support for the idea of a utility tax to replace the $4 million the city would lose from Xcel's franchise fee after it expires. Xcel's Craig Eicher indicated that without a franchise the company lacks the authority to collect and remit the money -- however, the company does have the authority to extend the franchise, as evidenced by Xcel's choice to extend Boulder's franchise from August to December this year. It seems the company is willing to push Boulder by refusing to extend the franchise further, as requested.

Another important sign from the poll was a preference for fast addition of renewable energy so pronounced it was called "lopsided" by Bob Drake.

In the muddled results of the poll there seems to be a pathway: With more information, Boulderites tend to favor the tools for life without a franchise. So, it makes sense to aggressively promote the replacement tax and allow the franchise to lapse. The lights stay on, going back to Xcel remains an option, and monthly bills would be the same as under a franchise. And next year, the city would proceed to research and educate the public on the options for getting much more renewable energy that they clearly want.

Xcel's view is that under its franchise, Boulder would have no restriction for rapid decarbonization: We can invest in solar gardens (helpful, but the program is capped), or subscribe to WindSource (helpful, but the rates shield customers from the protections and price advantages that renewables will give down the road). Eicher asserted that Boulder could push for more clean energy policy through the Legislature, or by intervening at the Public Utilities Commission -- as if that were a haven of democracy and choice.

Under former Gov. Bill Owens, commissioners at the PUC literally ousted any intervenor who mentioned the phrase "climate change," and climate science papers introduced as evidence were all excluded. Under chairman Ron Binz who was appointed by Gov. Bill Ritter, admission for science documents was nearly as grim. Imagine the PUC under a Scott McInnis administration, which is to say, a governor who has demonstrated by trivializing his plagiarism fiasco that he doesn't value research. Working through the PUC is not democracy and choice, it's a brain damage.

Staying with Xcel means paying a hefty premium for being an asset to an investor-owned utility with exorbitant overhead. People worried about "redistribution of wealth" should be fiercely opposed to a 20-year contract with a monopoly in which ratepayers are assets to be leveraged for profits and payouts to investors.

However, a municipal utility, which Boulder could form with providers already making calls, could save the city money over time. According to the American Public Power Association, investor-owned utilities charge roughly 17 percent more in rates than munis. The free market is great, but being part of an investor-owned utility is no free market. Better to push for local control over our power, and the ballot this fall should provide us those options at stable costs.

Versions of this column have appeared at Huffington Post and in the Boulder Daily Camera

Boulder's PACE brought to a halt

2010-07-22T16:01:00.001-07:00

July 22, 2010

Just as the economy is poised to slump into the second dip in the W, along comes a federal housing agency to give our economy a little butt-kick into the abyss by thwarting an attractive funding mechanism for home energy retrofits and the jobs that come with them. The decision deprives twenty-two states that have passed laws in support of property assessed clean energy financing (PACE).

It's a little personal here in Boulder because our county was the first in the nation to fully implement PACE in our program called the Climate Smart Loan Program. And our community has seen $13 million in the past two years, just for the residential program, flow through the economy with this financial instrument that helps a community burn less money by burning less fossil fuels.

However the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) which regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which own or guarantee most of our nation's home mortgages) has determined that PACE programs "present significant safety and soundness concerns."

When Fannie and Freddie issued ambiguous warnings about PACE weeks ago, Country Commissioner Will Toor said the mortgage moguls would resolve this in support of PACE "because their position makes so little sense."

The housing giants' objection has been stubbornly focused on the senior status of the lien, meaning in the event of a home default the local land tax authority gets paid prior to the mortgage lender. In reality, in a default, only the delinquent amount of tax would be senior, being say, a thousand dollars, rather than the whole retrofit assessment of, say, $15,000. The remaining debt stays with the property.

"The FHFA memo is the classic solution looking for a problem" says Alice Madden of Governor Ritter's office. "One of the reasons PACE bonds get such high ratings is that the debt stay with the property; these are not personal loans and lenders are simply not at risk."

At the behest of the Department of Energy and its intent to leverage PACE upgrades with stimulus funding, PACE programs have developed best practices such as aiming for energy savings to exceed the amount of assessment, a retrofit cap which can be no more than 10 per cent of property value, only delinquent amounts of the assessment get paid in foreclosure, and positive equity requirement amongst borrowers.

These standards sure beat subprime mortgages that Fannie and Freddie gladly gobbled up on houses that spill energy in every direction. But the FHFA alleges, without analysis, that PACE financing presents only downsides. Though the agency was lobbied with generous explanation (available through PACENOW.org) showing that new standards nearly assure cash benefits for borrower and lender, the FHFA has determined as if only downside risks are noteworthy.

Most likely, PACE projects would bolster lenders' profit margins by easing borrowers' monthly expenses and risk of default. And it's not just the lender, borrower, retrofitter and solar manufacturer shall benefit from PACE. Over in wobbly Wall Street, sellers of municipal bonds also want in to this highly attractive bond market made safe by the senior lien status. Barclay's Capital has asserted that "there would be little to no meaningful bond buyer interest" in PACE liens without the senior status.

Lenders have routinely tolerated senior liens for property-assessed additions such as sidewalks, sewers and schools. But reducing a community's exposure to coal and natural gas prices? FHFA has deemed this to "not have the traditional community benefits associated with taxing initiatives".

They better be careful. These lenders got at least $160 billion in bailout for their excellence in "safety and soundness" during the sub prime disaster that laid our nation low. And now as unelected bureaucrats they try to tell us, their taxpayer benefactors, what is what in community benefits?

Toor minces no words: "It's an outrageous assault on state and local authorities."

This federal versus local drama makes a taxpayer get a very long memory. Going back to 2003 let's recall that FHFA's cohort, the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, preempted all 50 states' laws against predatory lending and sued to stop local investigations of abusive practices, according to Eliot Spitzer.

Do these banking giants works for the American people? Or do they suffer the cloistered groupthink that infected BP and Mineral Management Services?

Two states already are suing the lenders for obstructing states' ability to finance efficiency and clean energy.

This is a big political story. Prior to their determination FHFA received a barrage of appeals in favor of PACE from governors, senators, congressmen and advocates. From Colorado, Senators Mark Udall and Michael Bennet, Representatives Jared Polis, Betsey Markey and John Salazar as well as Governor Ritter all wrote in favor of PACE. Watch for more litigation and legislation.

Make Oil Obsolerte by Turning It into Salt

2010-07-02T06:31:00.000-07:00

Anne Butterfield, July 2, 2010

In response to President Obama's Oval Office address on the Gulf oil spill which pivoted to clean energy legislation, Senator Lindsay Graham stumped for"expanded offshore drilling cause we're gonna need more domestic supply to break our dependency on foreign oil."

Little problem: the ballyhooed link between domestic drilling and breaking our dependence on foreign oil is a myth.

Here in Boulder, oil industry veteran Anita Burke describes the delivery of oil as being set by "complex set of politics, back door deals, highest profit and market considerations - it has little to do with where the oil was drilled."

Once oil is drilled it belongs to the driller not the nation of origin, and from there it's on to a market dominated by players like OPEC. In that market we're a mouse among big cats, and according to Burke our domestic drilling gives us a stake but no assurance in trade outcomes.

Domestic drilling give us no leverage over world affairs, no oil to call our own, no leverage over price, plus all the risk of drilling here. It does net us domestic jobs, some royalties, profits for oil companies leading to tax revenue (and politicians' campaign coffers), as well as the important softening of our nation's trade imbalance. But it does not bring energy security.

Miscasting this market truth so brazenly, as Newt Gingrich did in asserting that drilling in Alaska would reduce prices at the pump, politicians' rhetoric is as responsible as BP's care over drilling. The truth to memorize is this:

“Experience over the past three decades shows that whenever non-OPEC producers increase their production, OPEC decreases supply accordingly, keeping the overall amount of oil in the market the same - if we drill more OPEC drills less.”

This quote comes from Gal Luft and Anne Korin of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in their seminal book, Turning Oil into Salt.

The figure of salt could be a play on Lot's wife being stuck in the past, but the comparison with oil is grimly contemporary. The authors retell the history of salt as a once strategic commodity for having had a monopoly on food preservation. This made salt an "irreplaceable enabler of economic, geopolitical and cultural behavior." Nations were built on access to salt and wars waged for it. Sound familiar?

Salt's monopoly now is lost to refrigeration, canning and jarring. We still buy and enjoy salt, even for industrial purposes, but we don't build foreign policy around it.

And that's where we need to get with oil.

The point of Turning Oil in Salt is not to exit world oil markets (a ruse they deride as autarky) but to develop a dynamic market of many oil alternatives -- both alcohol fuels and electricity -- so that we may import oil for the mix if we want but stay resilient to the shocks that oil markets provide.

The vision is completely like a diversified stock portfolio which makes investors stable in rough economic times. Sound familiar?

The answer is to be independent not just of imported oil but oil generally. But how to get there?

One key tactic to sidestepping OPEC is through electricity; it's too cheap for OPEC to compete with and that pricing also attracts investors toward electric drive systems. To avoid the threat that grid events can bring to an all electric transportation sector, the authors explore and commend a wide range of alcohols for flex fuel plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. They mightily defend ethanol and in particular emphasize methanol which can be made from a wide host of fuel stocks including algae and the natural gas toxically flared at oil drilling rigs.

The key is for Congress to mandate that cars sold in the US be flex fuel ready the way cars are already sold with seat belts and air bags, by legislating an Open Fuel Standard.
Also key is to welcome all competitors to critical alcohol and biodiesel markets by establishing blend specifications, as well as dicing the heavy tariff on ethanol imports from friendly countries. Also key is for environmentalists to accept mining for the minerals needed for high performance car batteries.

Flex fuel plug-in hybrid electric vehicles could reach 500 miles per gallon of gasoline, while allowing consumers to make choices for environmental and national security concerns.

Price per gallon of oil is the pivotal metric, because oil doesn't just give us price shocks with devastating economic downturns as in 2008, and now threatens lasting damage to the economy in the Gulf of Mexico, it also runs our politics and foreign affairs. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pointed out that the politics of energy has warped diplomacy around the world, reducing otherwise free nations of all sizes into kowtowing to oil producers that harshly restrict human rights, so they can keep access to oil. That humdrum purchase at the corner gas station now has lethal leverage.

Shunning both the drill-baby-drillers of the right and the conserve-your-way-out enviros of the left, the authors clarify, "Neither efficiency nor drilling will strip oil of its strategic status." And one politician who understands flex fuel plug-in hybrids sponsored a bill for their development when he was Senator from Illinois: Barack Obama. Let's help him get back to this goal by letting Congress know we're not fooled about drilling and energy independence.

For a great 8-minute intro to the oil-to-salt case, watch Anne Korin on Energy Independence. Here, she take a big stab at politicians who allege that energy independence can be found by way of renewables or nuclear power, as if new forms of electricity cannot be fungible with oil. Well, that's true in a narrow near-term sense but as she makes the case for electrical transportation, she shows that indeed electricity can be significant at pushing back at oil demand. Her sharp criticism would be better aimed at politicians who pander about drilling our way out of oil -- the shibboleth of this new century.

Paying the IOU: Boulder and its Expiring Xcel Franchise

2010-06-25T06:29:00.000-07:00

Anne Butterfield, June 25, 2010

Since Boulder is now parsing its options on whether to renew its franchise with Xcel Energy, let's take a minute to review what it really means to pay out so much every month to an investor-owned utility, an IOU.

Amusing and clear it is for me.

Years ago I found some stocks that offered a great "yield" which is the cash dividend expressed in ratio to the current price. I'd found some doozies. They were utilities.

In a line she remembers to this day, my stockbroker snorted, "Only blue haired ladies invest in utilities; they need the cash pay out - you're young, so get something that can grow in value for you!"

Ever since, I've looked at utilities as the slow moving cash cows of the equities field - low on innovation, heavy in capital and regulation, glacially slow on market penetration, but grimly certain in revenues. A boring business model -- but now one increasingly vulnerable to erratic pricing of fossil fuels and climate based lawsuits due to their use of coal. As monopolies, big utilities are steered by cumbersome regulation and in turn steer regulatory staff and lawmakers with compelling force; their revenues fund lavish executive compensation, eye-catching PR and marketing, legal teams that are the envy of small countries, with plenty left over for shareholders.

This is the business model that we in Boulder fund through our monthly utility bills to Xcel which last month announced its eighth straight year of increased dividends to shareholders, with company projections indicating even higher profits for the coming year. The Denver Business Journal just reported that Xcel's CEO Dick Kelly's pay doubled over the previous year, pocketing $11 million and change.

Investor owned utilities are the most expensive way to get electricity, according to the American Public Power Association, with IOU electric residential rates being 17 percent above rates charged by publicly owned municipal utilities, or "muni's" (with commercial rates in an IOU also being 9 points higher than in "muni's").

So, when or if we renew our franchise with Xcel this year, we shall pay higher costs and gain no energy sovereignty, as compared with being our own municipal utility. True, becoming a muni does incur special costs in the first years in buying down the local distribution system, but it's not clear if said costs would be much more than the premium we now pay for Xcel's IOU status.

With Xcel, we pay Cadillac prices to cruise at the clean edge of the fossil fuel pack, but with a muni, we could be in a thrifty Prius zooming towards lots of wind and solar, shielded from coal's various costs.

In Boulder's struggle to find new ways to do business with Xcel, first came the idea to form a Boulder/Xcel partnership to scale up rapid decarbonization, with hopes of using the wisdom of National Renewable Energy Labs and other labs to promote and track methods of integrating large amounts of renewable energy on the grid.

This hope was panned by Xcel as being outside the scope of what a franchise or regulation would allow.

There has been talk of Community Choice Energy Aggregation as a way for Boulder to select its own energy mix through power purchase agreements with wind or solar farms and other resources, and the distribution would be "rented." This option is sometimes called "muni'-lite". Though many communities in Colorado have passed CCEA status for themselves, the Legislature has not authorized it. California has put Community Choice on the map and is showing others how to follow.

Another option proposed by Xcel is for Boulder to aggressively promote the use of Windsource, where the majority in Boulder do not subscribe (even in a city which voted to tax its carbon emissions). The program provides wind power for every kilowatt hour sought in that scheme (actually it's a mix of mostly wind and other clean fuels). But the program has no leverage on the overall carbon-intensity of Xcel's power generation -- and Windsource customers pay for that also in their rates. Some have shunned this option has being too many black electrons in green clothing.

That leaves Boulder with many muddled options that deserve professional analysis. We could pass a CCEA and then work on the Legislature to authorize it; we could work to have more people use Windsource -- and still pay large premiums to Xcel for its IOU status as well as its brand new coal plant in Pueblo that provides excess power for the first few years; we could aim to become a muni which would incur both costs and savings and give us energy sovereignty.

All of the options merit research and community education, and for this fall's election we need to see an item on the ballot that authorizes the city to collect a small tax in case the franchise falls out and lops off the franchise fee which Xcel now reimburses Boulder and reaches about $4 million per year. It's a collect-and-pay-back scheme that Boulder voters should be glad to replace as a way to explore options.

An interesting twist: Boulder's choice is highlighted this month with the defeat of California's Proposition 16, in which the big utility PG&E proposed that in order for a municipality to take charge of sourcing its electricity (or even expand its range) it would have to get two-thirds vote of support by the citizens. Here we see, as if in Aesop's fables, how nakedly IOU's strive to protect their monopoly status. Fortunately, the grassroots opposition defeated PG&E and its $46 million effort with a budget of about $100,000, or less than a quarter of a percent as much money.

People can stand up to a big utility and win -- even with a quarter penny in the pocket for every dollar of the big company. And whose $46 million was it that PG&E spent? The rate payers'? The shareholders'? Whichever -- file it under W for Waste. That's life when paying the IOU.

As good as Xcel has been cleaning up its future energy portfolio here in Colorado, staying with this investor-owned utility and failing to leverage our values and technical passions could be Boulder's costliest choice.

Versions of this have appeared at the Daily Camera and the Huffington Post.

Will Gusher Trauma Lead Us to National Energy Goals?

2010-06-12T08:57:00.000-07:00

Anne B. Butterfield, June 12, 2010

As the gusher in the Gulf continues to traumatize the nation, the 20,000 attendees at this year's largest wind energy conference called WINDPOWER just held in Dallas, felt anguish about the need for national renewable energy standard (RES).

The industry is experiencing a drop in the construction of wind projects (from last year's record breaking strides). This will bring direct job losses and thin the arrival of new components makers. Industry and its allies are calling for a national RES, as well as and enduring production tax credit and streamlined rules for transmission, to support a robust American wind industry that will shield rate payers from fuel price spikes as well as power plug-in vehicles to offset our oil dependence now running amok in the Gulf.

Yes, even in Texas, home to some the nation's richest history for oil drilling, Pat Wood, former Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and member of the National Petroleum Council, admitted that the longer the gusher goes, the greater the chance that tax credits to big oil will get plugged.

And that means the nation is getting ready to embrace big change.

Addressing a packed arena, Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota described a double standard in energy policy: over a century of tax credits have been there for oil and gas development, with awesome success as the result, while the production tax credit for wind has proceeded with a stutter step.

The attitude was, in Dorgan's words, "Real men dig and drill, and you dreamers with wind and solar, you get a pat on the head." Instead of capricious approval, Dorgan called for national goals of at least 20% renewable energy by 2025.

Dorgan emphasized that this nation needs a plan, a goal.

Oh right -- goals! Those things that keep you from being swept into others' agendas! And for lack of them, here we are, the most powerful nation in history kneeling to big corporations deemed to be "persons" and feudal societies made into tough guys by their oil exports.

We are bent prone over the proverbial barrel of oil. And the Bush-Cheney Administration, with their unending talk about "liberty," helped to put us in this fix. Ironically, WINDPOWER's keynote speaker was none other than former president George W. Bush, invited due to his being the governor who signed Texas' RES that has led that state to be the world's sixth largest producer of wind power. To him our number one threat was not our own runaway consumption of fossil fuels but those "evil doers" around the world, as if they weren't funded by our vast oil consumption. Nor did he mention Dick Cheney who, according to Robert F Kennedy Jr., reconfigured Minerals Management Service in 2003 to where it no longer required the low-cost acoustical switches on deep sea drilling rigs that are required in other deep sea drilling nations like Brazil and Norway. And the lack of that switch had everything to do with our southern shores being invaded by a toxic substance.

With friends like Dick Cheney in our government, who needs enemies like bin Laden?
To get out of this humiliation, we need to adopt a pioneering spirit that sees our vast landscapes at home as something to be mapped with new purpose. And that means committing to large scale renewable power as well as transmission lines, another theme of the conference.

The nation needs a stout network of high voltage power lines to connect its rich sun and wind energy resources to population centers. But according to Dorgan, since 2000 our nation has sited up to 11,000 miles of natural gas pipeline but only 668 miles of high voltage transmission. The asymmetry is due to the lack of durable clean energy policies which would firm up investor commitments on projects... and then there's a teeny problem with people not liking transmission lines, even though they are necessary for a sound grid carrying energy of any type.

Colorado, with its high renewable energy standard of 30 percent by 2030, is one of many areas facing the tension between building transmission and reaching a real goal for clean energy. And at the conference, Governor Ritter admitted that transmission could impact our progress toward our goal.

In Colorado, two major arteries for routing clean energy to the Front Range seem to be stalled. On one transmission project tapping wind from southeast Wyoming, Xcel Energy chose to reject 1000 megawatts of proposals, preferring the wind of the eastern edge of Colorado for its trait of blowing more during the day. Xcel's choice is not wholly objectionable as Colorado is already sending enough energy dollars out to of state, by way of our unreasonable coal commitments.

However, the wind transmission line needs to get built, particularly as another Xcel transmission project(shared with Tri-State) is also blocked. A 235 kilovolt line to connect the rich concentrating solar power potential of the San Luis Valley is hung up by some land holders, and one ranch is so big it envelopes three fourteeners. The rancher has reasonable objections, but the utilities' aims are quite advantageous for Colorado, and the commissioners of all related counties also favor the line as proposed by Xcel.

Ritter nonetheless expressed confidence that Colorado could reach its renewable energy goals in spite of these transmission standoffs. That's a lot of confidence, and his view deserves scrutiny. But his bold faith is important, and he brought it to Congress to testify for the value of a national RES, with his conviction that clean tech is the sector in Colorado's economy that's done best through the recent downturn. Twenty-six states have joined Ritter to tell Congress of the need for an RES; this is a battle plan to save jobs and build more jobs, as the group is joined by Governor Strickland of Ohio, the coal reliant industrial giant. That's a bellwether.

But for the moment, our nation's thoughts are transfixed on a hole at the bottom of the ocean and the Bush Administration's regulatory fiasco, which helped BP, in its greed, to blow open this volcano of oil. Too much of our energy policy is like that hole -- gushing with risk. We need to look skyward for our energy sources, and set high national goals. Ask your Senator for an RES now.

Colliding tragedies and the missing pie slice

2010-05-28T18:56:00.000-07:00

Anne B. Butterfield, May 20, 2010 (NewEnergyNews)

While the blame game proceeds in Capitol Hill seeking the cause of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, some voices are adamant on the larger picture: we demand this product to be cheap so that we can waste it. All of us caused this monstrous accident.

The problem is so much worse than this visible tragedy.

Few are admitting that the amount of oil from offshore drilling, which could offer up to 15 years of American supply, is swallowed in the shadow of financial uncertainty in producing such oil. The capital risk of exploring and tapping those fields cause great pause to energy companies. Oil companies should be even more hesitant now that deep sea operations have proven to be like space adventures requiring ceaseless dedication and accountability. That sterling standard is not a great match for companies which have been earning billions per quarter after getting what they want from regulators by having their lobbyists literally sleep with them.

While oil companies have great access to government regulators paid with public funds, they do seem to enjoy great privacy concealing the many strategic vulnerabilities of our oil based life.

Fox News recently refused to run an ad by VoteVets.org calling for the passage of a climate and energy bill based on a well known link between oil markets and Iran’s invention of sophisticated weaponry against our armed forces. Partly owned by a Saudi interest, Fox dismissed the ad as too “confusing”.

The press was also notoriously silent about a small earthquake of news on the oil front that appeared nine days before the platform explosion, which was shared by the Guardian of UK: The U.S. Joint Forces command issued a Joint Operating Environment report warning that surplus oil production capacity could vanish as soon as 2012, leading to serious oil shortages by 2015.

That grand omission might stem from the denial of the Energy Information Administration, which forecasts that the world could be producing millions of more barrels of oil per day within two decades if the capital investments get made. That’s a big “if” when such capital would be better spent on technology that could reap renewable, clean energy.

More mischief from oil’s privacy: the EIA’s nation-by-nation analysis of resources relied on proprietary data that cannot be released for further scrutiny. What nation doesn’t inflate their strategic, competitive advantages? Saddam Hussein taught us that lesson, luring us into war to our lasting financial plight.

Another problem with the EIA’s sunny optimism is that it’s upstaged by its own preceding pessimism, shown in a 2009 graph showing a glaring and widening gap between supply and demand for liquid fuels starting in 2012. If someone offered you a pie slice at Thanksgiving as wide as that oil supply gap, you’d say “Oh no, no, that’s too much.”

A major part of that missing pie slice shall come in part from the burgeoning demand for oil in China, which produced a 41 percent leap in sales for gas-powered vehicles in just the past year, according to the New York Times.

The blunt truth is we are idiotically dependent on inefficient internal combustion engines, and our waste of energy has brought the world to this moment of declining supplies foreseen by so many insider analysts such as Matthew Simmons.

As world oil prices rise, energy companies can commit capital to more dangerous and energy-intensive modes of extraction, resulting lately in environmental tragedies of biblical proportions. Consider tar sands extraction, in which hundreds of square miles of Canada’s boreal forest have been scraped to get up the gooey bitumen that can be turned into crude oil with the help of huge amounts of natural gas and water for heating. About 5 percent of our fuel in Colorado comes from Alberta’s tar sands.

Also energy and water intensive, Congress concocted mandates and incentives for corn ethanol, the making of which sends runoff to the Gulf of Mexico that prompts blooms of algae that rob the water of oxygen, sending marine life fleeing – and this year they will go into oil tainted water.

Our reliance on oil of all types, not just imported, has created many tragedies, two of them now colliding in the Gulf with direct threat to our supply of seafood. The next hit will clobber our larger food supply with price hikes that won’t stop. What’s your family’s plan for transportation and food production, when the next oil shock comes? It could be sooner than expected.

A greener, level playing field: Boulder's SmartRegs

2010-05-06T06:55:00.000-07:00

Anne B. Butterfield, May 5, 2010

"In 1974…we discovered that Western Europe and Japan were using only a third as much energy as the U.S. for each dollar of gross domestic product, yet they certainly weren’t 'freezing in the dark' as the saying went."
~ Art Rosenfeld, Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2010

Dr. Rosenfeld helped found the center for Building Science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab that developed lighting and coatings for windows for more efficient buildings, plus tools for state building codes. Starting in 1978 California’s per capita energy use has stayed flat -- while the rest of the nation’s per capita consumption has leaped by over 50 percent. California has saved about $56 billion in electricity and natural gas expenses.

So Boulder, when it comes to SmartRegs, what are we waiting for?

The proposed SmartRegs would require rental property owners to update their residential properties on a points system, through measures such as installing efficient light bulbs, dishwashers, insulation or solar heating. Many properties will meet the standard as compliance with ten year old code is sufficient; but many units, which have been written up as being downright windy inside, would need to have lots of work done.

Sheila Horton of the Boulder Area Rental Housing Association has been a vocal opponent of SmartRegs, scoffing that they are “irresponsible” for not accounting for banks which are not loaning money.

Uh, remember a little thing called the ClimateSmart Loan Program? It was authorized by Boulder voters in 2008 so the County could sell bonds and make loans to property owners for efficiency and renewable energy upgrades, with their debts being repaid through property tax bills. (It’s also known as a “Property Assessed Clean Energy” or PACE program.)

Oh right, the ClimateSmart Loan Program for energy retrofits! D’oh!

In fact, Boulder’s CSLP is so highly regarded it’s being imitated in fifteen other states. The Colorado Legislature has passed two bills to allow the program to be replicated across the state. Also, partly because of CLSP, Boulder County won a $25 million “Retrofit Ramp Up” grant from the Department of Energy, on Earth Day. The grant was won in partnership with Denver, Xcel Energy, and Garfield County.

The County Commissioners have estimated that the DOE award could help leverage $180 million for energy upgrades – this is ten times the $18 million that city staff estimated for updating all 19.6 thousand rental properties in the city, and far surpasses the $35 million cost that was grimly estimated by SmartRegs’ opponents who see the program as an unjustified burden.

Lack of loans is not a problem -- particularly as about one third of the DOE grant is allocated to buy down interest rates. Jonathan Koehn for the City of Boulder has said that grant shall also help with micro loans starting at $300.

The Climate Smart Loan Program costs the taxpayer nothing. This needs to be understood so the program’s expansion cannot be voted down in future elections over fiscal worries, as it was last November.

Former County Commissioner, Paul Danish, wrote valiantly of how he used CSLP funding to replace his old furnace and saw his natural gas bill cut in half. The financial payoff of any retrofit is a function of how deplorable the situation was beforehand, so energy audits need to be conducted and interpreted with care to prioritize the biggest bang for the buck. Meanwhile, critics of SmartReg’s puff up the “unknowns” – the sames fear based logic which keeps people from marrying or having children.

One thing we know for sure is that rental property owners cannot feel how deplorable their properties may be; it is the job of the renter to suffer, often silently, in leaky dwellings as they blast away at their utility bills and our children’s future. This is the “split incentive” that’s been an enduring policy logjam enriching no one but fossil fuel sellers.

It’s too bad Colorado’s legal tradition is not inclined to allow counties to mandate that owners pay for all average energy costs of their tenants; this would be an elegant way to unite incentives in a snap. But with SmartReg’s instead, owners should not fret – research out of the state of Washington shows that environmentally certified housing sells much faster and at higher prices per square foot than ordinary housing, suggesting that SmartRegs in Boulder can not only create local jobs that cannot be outsourced but they can also allow the free market to compete on a greener, level playing field.

Coal’s long flight now in turbulence

2010-04-25T08:44:00.001-07:00

There is a moment in the progress of any high altitude flight when the engines let off and the craft pitches down slightly; that is the beginning of the long descent for landing. In the past three weeks, our nation crossed a line in how we think about coal, and it now seems coal’s long flight of dominating how we produce electricity has embarked on a final decline.

A pivotal lightning strike hit the industry on April 5, in a probably avoidable explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia. Lit up in the glare of the news cycle was Don Blankenship, CEA of of Massey Coal whose union busting and campaign of appealing safety violations has likely enabled to the explosion in his mine.

Preceded by 53 safety violations in March and over 450 the previous year, the accident launched two federal investigations sought by West Virginia Senators Rockefeller and Byrd who are otherwise quite protective of the industry, plus a campaign of inspecting all mines in West Virginia was ordered by Governor Manchin.

A Wall Street law firm has joined the pushback posse by seeking to know if Massey violated SEC regulations by failing to disclose risk properly to investors. Another investor group dubbed CtW is calling for the ouster of Blankenship and is joined by New York State’s Comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli who has direct control of over 300,000 shares of Massey stock through that state’s common retirement fund.

There is nothing like a mass casualty incident to focus our politics, and the small chance of coal state pol’s voting for clean energy jobs and a climate bill is inching higher, especially as the national focus on coal’s danger may lead eyeballs to stumble upon a recent study by Downstream Strategies showing that the region’s coal reserves are in decline and the region needs diverse economic development immediately.

Severe local turbulence can lead to loss of altitude, but more distant control can call for descent, too, in the form of federal regulation.

Just days before the Montcoal catastrophe, the Environmental Protection Agency issued new rules to curb the practice of mountain top removal mining that is poisoning waterways and flattening Appalachia. It was denounced by Friends of Coal as a big job-killer, their usual line as the industry hates all job losses that they do not effectuate themselves from corporate offices. Also, later this month the EPA is scheduled to release new regulations for the handling of coal ash waste, the comeuppance for the spill of biblical proportions that cloaked eastern Tennessee, and this could impose serious costs onto the industry.

As these forces converge to reduce some hazards of coal they could push the price of the black rock appropriately upward.

We need coal to be priced according to it costs, and politics is moving in that direction, particularly as we look west. Citing the city’s home rule authority as their clout, Chicago’s City Council has joyfully presented an ordinance to regulate the emissions of two coal plants inside the city limits, and if that fails, to call for the plants’ retirement. Chicagoans suffer twice the asthma-related hospitalizations than the national average.

Here in Boulder we too have home rule authority and are feeling a strong push to delay the signing of a new franchise agreement with Xcel Energy in favor of a new business arrangement crafted for decarbonization. This week all nine members of the City Council opined in a study session that times are changing and so must our energy production. Focusing on how coal is becoming less reliable, Susie Ageton put it forcefully: “We’ve got to make the shift – we’ve GOT to do it.”

Maybe she knows that Colorado’s coal fields are faltering; the state hit peak production six years ago and “force majeure” has shut down mines four times since 2007. So industry should not be surprised that Governor Ritter will sign legislation calling on Xcel Energy to reduce by 80 percent of the nasty pollutants of key coal plants along the Front Range, with overt instruction to consider natural gas and low emitting sources as replacement for coal.

We’re seeing the decline of coal; there may be air pockets to bump the industry back up and sharply down in its trajectory, but the fact is that the 150 year flight is just plain running out of gas. Many American communities are preparing for a smooth landing.

Deniers’ delay game

2010-04-16T21:41:00.000-07:00

Anne B. Butterfield, April 16, 2010 (NewEnergyNews)

Those who deny that climate change is real and human caused have a position that is irrational and insubstantial. They have no robust theory, peer-reviewed or otherwise, that comes close to explaining why the planet is warming, even as the last decade has proven to be the warmest on record. Labeling climate science as “junk science” one dear friend and denier told me he had no interest in learning the simple chemistry of ocean acidification -- as if he had authority on the former while being unwilling to grasp the latter.

We need to keep these odd notes in perspective. Republican pollster Frank Luntz recently surveyed 1000 Americans and found that 57 percent say it doesn’t matter if there is or isn’t climate change, it is still in America’s best interest to develop new sources of energy that are clean, reliable, efficient and safe.

With that baseline view felt in the nation, we can guess that deniers are spinning “debate” and claims of a climate bill “wrecking the economy” to avoid bringing the bitter end to America’s founding conviction: maximal consumption as a birthright (particularly where fossil fuels are concerned).

We don’t particularly need more perfectly presented scientific evidence, no matter how flamboyantly deniers denounce some errors in scientists’ conduct and proofreading. What we need is to meet Americans where they like and frame this around national security, jobs and good health.

Colorado is the evidence of these principles: House Bill 1365 just passed 10 to 1 in a House committee with strong bipartisan backing. The lure for the bill, which proposes to rehab or retire 900 megawatts of coal capacity along the Front Range, is to clean up Denver’s brown cloud ahead of the EPA’s plan to do it for us. But there is little doubt the Governor’s office, which negotiated the bill for a year, was pressured by voters clamoring against Comanche 3’s 750 megawatts of new coal capacity.

Recently, also, a new standard for 30 percent renewable energy by 2020 was also passed.

Wonderful! But even with this regional progress, we need to screw up our courage and pass a federal climate and energy bill because there is no going back to plentiful coal and oil and virginal coral in every tropical cove. So let’s review a few studies that show that the climate protection is won’t “wreck the economy”.

According to Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, a recent McKinsey report outlines the potential to reduce consumer demand of energy by about 23 percent by 2020 and reduce emissions by 1.1 gigatons each year — at a net savings of $680 billion. (The potential savings were calculated assuming a 7% discount rate, no price on carbon and using only “net present value positive” investments. A full report can be downloaded from McKinsey.com.)

Likewise, the National Academies found in 2009 that accelerated deployment of cost-effective technologies in buildings could reduce energy use by 25-30 percent in 2030.

And we know that making buildings more efficient is work that cannot be shipped overseas.

Nonetheless, on President Obama’s proposed climate bill, members of the GOP have been claiming a $3,100 per household cost increase, a figure that has been openly refuted as misleading by researchers at MIT whose work the conservatives claim as their source. The MIT study puts the cost around $800 per year. Even the pro-Republican Heritage Foundation figured the average family would see its energy bill increase by $1,500 a year under Obama’s plan, but Factcheck.org, says these figures don’t account for energy rebates as proposed. If the government did use revenue from cap and trade to rebate households, a CBO expert said, "lower-income households could be better off."

On the Waxman-Markey bill passed in the House last summer, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates the average cost per household at $98 to $140 per year, the CBO cites $90 in the short run and an average of $455 over 40 years, and the EIA puts the cost hike between 3 percent and 15 percent in 2020.

These numbers are not likely to “wreck’ the economy when we know that peak coal, peak oil and $120 billion per year in health costs related to burning fossil fuels are already wrecking the economy, with more acute attacks to come. The oil spike of 2008 has been claimed by Hunter Lovins as being the trigger of our economic collapse.

At a time of great risk, such as we now face, the riskiest choice of all is to make no move at all, and don’t let the deniers cause anymore distraction or delay.

Sunlight, greenery and electric co-ops

2010-04-03T14:36:00.003-07:00

Anne B. Butterfield

This decade is the warmest on record, and all that warmth can pull all the more moisture from the seas to dump it on our nation’s capital, as if trying to deliver a message.

The climate has spoken but skeptics have misunderstood. But also the burgeoning clean energy industry in China should also strike us as an emergency.

At a recent Rotary meeting in Boulder, Alice Madden, Climate Change Advisor of the Governor’s Office, said last week, “While the United States dithers debating the existence of climate change, the Chinese are investing nine billion dollars per month and have surpassed the States in patents -- imagine a world where the Chinese own all of our debt and all emerging technologies.” Pretty horrifying.

Fortunately, a bill to assure that Colorado’s largest utility will produce 30 percent of its power from renewables by 2020 was firmly supported by Xcel Energy’s Paula Connelly this week in a senate committee. Also the retirement of two small coal plants in Xcel’s portfolio are slated for closure; however the closure of the big kahuna –- Cherokee at 717 megawatts -- keeps being mentioned furtively, the way the fattest, beautifullest carp in the pond comes to surface from time to time. Let’s hope the high level rumors come true.

Back in DC, senators received calls by the thousands this week to urge them to power ahead for a comprehensive climate and clean energy bill. The seas are choppy, but all engines are “go”.

However, among Colorado’s electric co-op’s (REA’s), a culture of business-as-usual has become so calcified as to attract legislative attention. The governance in the REA’s concerns us for putting a drag on the national effort to get competitive on the use and manufacturing of technologies for producing clean domestic power. Colorado’s REA’s only need to meet a standard of 10 percent renewables by 2020, and many REA ratepayers would like to pick up the pace.

Representative Claire’s Levy has written a bill for transparency in governance (HB 1098) which spells out election procedures to open up a culture of incumbency among the REA boards. It would require REA’s to publicize the dates of elections and deadlines for entering the race, place candidates’ names randomly on ballots, disclose employee contributions to campaigns, and prohibit the use of co-op money to back any particular candidate. The bill is successfully moving through the legislature.

Mona Neely, publisher of the co-op publication Colorado Country Life has claimed that the bill is an attempt to muzzle co-ops so they can be taken over by a group with “a different agenda,” and asks, “why would you keep those who actually know what’s going on inside the co-op from speaking out?”

Methinks she swaps the interests of the co-op with that of the incumbent leadership. Transparency should be an utmost concern even if that means (gasp) losing out to duly elected directors who can provide new direction.

Our neighbors to the north, Poudre Valley REA, has been running regular small newspaper ads all year about their green credentials, having won an award from the Governor’s Energy Office. However, this expense of ratepayer money is hard to cipher since such material could be stuffed into monthly utility bills. Tellingly, the ads have increased to now half page in size in the run-up to the election for board of directors on the 27th of this month. A healthy skeptic might say that the co-op is telling voters (and newspaper editors) to support the incumbents.

That celebrated green REA has gotten up to one percent renewable power generation, with solar panels on 40 rooftop across their service area, according to Mark Daily of PVREA.

Most concerning, Colorado’s REAs have an imbedded commitment to coal, with long term contracts with Tri-State Generation and Transmission which has been financing the Sunflower coal fired plants in Kansas, a multiphase project that has defaulted several times to the federal Rural Utilities Service. It’s a long range money sink to reckless management and a depleting and dangerous fuel.

And how did the defaults of the Sunflower plants come to light? Through the perusal of 10,000 pages of legal documents by some hard nosed environmentalists.

When PVREA customers learn about Tri State’s effort to build three new coal plants, they are almost unanimously surprised and opposed, says Jan Petersen, candidate for the board at PVREA. His view is that REA’s need to stop acting “like middle management that implements Tri-State’s edicts” and go back to their roots of being face-to-face democratic and grassroots organizations. The sunlight that comes with diversity is a pretty great thing, too.

Cities on the forefront of energy freedom

2010-02-07T22:48:00.000-08:00

Anne Butterfield, January 14, 2010 (NewEnergyNews)

Critics of the coming climate bill say it would cripple our economy, restrict personal freedom, attack property rights, ignore real pollutants, create corrupt political bureaucracies for offsets and trades, and put billions into research and technologies that won't improve our lives.

In such coded speech we hear the sound of the thick-skinned species known as talkingpointapotamus, those undying creatures of sci-fi which thrive in echo chambers and have no viability apart from the money-fueled fictions which drive them.

Telecom, tobacco and insurance interests fund the FreedomWorks organization, headed by former Speaker for the House Dick Armey, who alleges that the Tea Party movement is all about grass roots in its opposition to health care reform and a cap and trade bill. In reality it's Astroturf and it's very appealing to pundits such as Glenn Beck who has woofed: "They are going to take our financial systems, and then they are going to nationalize industry, and then they are going to nationalize energy."

Beck got it backwards. The threat with real ballast behind it is not nationalization of industry but the longstanding corporate manipulation of government.

Boulder's radio pundit Duncan Campbell paints the picture as one in which we need to go beyond both major parties and (the compliant Big Media) that are in collaboration with the eight other "Bigs" that are preventing the change needed to prevent the nation's ongoing decline. Those Bigs are finance, military, oil and gas, coal, utilities, pharmaceuticals, insurance, and agribusiness. Campbell adds, "our U.S. Congress and

Government are not included among the Bigs -- the ignorant angry citizens' nostrum -- as Big G is already subsumed, owned by, the controlling other, agenda-setting Bigs.. ."

In "Gangs of America," Ted Nace shows that the political power of corporate interests is greased with old-fashioned money, but not usually cash in the cloakroom. Instead, "smart lobbyists direct contributions strategically rather than tactically, giving year in and year out to the members of the crucial committees of both political parties and sometimes to a politician's pet causes..." It's not hard to see how the lever works: when the politician misbehaves, funding is withdrawn.

It is against this backdrop that we should consider the most privileged corporate sector of all, investor owned utilities which, unlike the other "Bigs," do not even face competition.
They are monopolies grandfathered in from the dawn of the last century on the pretense that being regulated would render justice to communities. With the municipally owned utility, on the other hand, the wealth and the choices of how to produce power stay in the community. But with the investor owned utility, the wealth is transferred to shareholders anywhere in the world with the decisions made at a corporate office, then often rubber stamped in the regulators' office, with priorities that do not match those at home.

Investor-owned utilities traditionally pay a high dividend due to being granted a guaranteed return on investment for their installed generating plants. It is those central, thermal, fossil fuel burning plants that utilities most want to build -- and which have put our oceans, climate, energy security, and our politics into a stranglehold.

So how to we democratize our energy supply and bring power generation closer to the functioning of the internet with its dynamic delivery of goods from multitudinous providers?

It is not easy, but the legal pathway does exist through a construct called community choice aggregation. The most successful example of this model is in Ohio where 800,000 customers decide through their cities what their mix of electricity shall be based on their energy policy goals.

For a home rule city like Boulder, with its moral and civically endorsed commitment to reducing its fossil fuel emissions, and with its franchise agreement with an investor-owned utility up for renewal this summer, the pathway to becoming a community choice energy aggregator should be compelling. According to Susan Perkins, a 34-year veteran of energy law, to make the new status as an "aggregator" operational is not automatic, but it is a credible pathway to self rule. And it brings the legal assurance of continued stable electric service due to the utility's obligation to serve well past the expiration of the franchise.

Many have said that federal climate legislation can only improve the trailing edge of policy change, while the cities, counties and states are out in the forefront exerting the true leadership that is needed. For communities such as Boulder to know and assert their legal rights as home rule cities is a very good thing. And it sure beats listening to the morbid calls of talkingpointapotamus.

A Big Answer to the Planet’s Peril: It’s All About the Girl

2010-01-07T07:35:00.001-08:00

A Big Answer to the Planet’s Peril: It’s All About the Girl
Anne Butterfield, January 4, 2009 (Huffington Post)

Through the din of Copenhagen, and beneath the glitz of Christmas and the tinny horns of the New Year, there is a small voice speaking of hope and truth, in a tiny video playing tirelessly on YouTube. In a parched voice, over the images of so many wind-strewn faces, a girl speaks:

I dare you to look at me and see only a statistic. Someone you'll never meet --

a tragedy, a commodity

A child bride.

I dare you to look at me

Without pity, fatigue, dismissal.

I dare you to look at me

as more than a poster for your cause

A promise you won't keep.

I dare you to rethink

what it means to look at a girl --

Not a burden, not an object

But the answer.

How audacious, this claim written by Jessica Vacek for the Nike Foundation's campaign to empower girls. The girls of the planet are the answer to the most critical dimension of the world's humanitarian crises, with direct effect on the climate crisis. That dimension is galloping human birth rates.

Nike's claims go on:

A girl with 7 years education marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children. Her region's HIV rate goes down and malnutrition decreases 43 percent. When 10 percent more girls go to secondary school the country's economy grows three percent. When an educated girl earns an income she reinvests 90% of it in her family, compared to 35 percent for a boy. Yet, over 99 percent of international aid is not directed to her.

To be clear, the people coming to earth through the galloping birthrates do not lead in greenhouse gas emissions as they use the least fossil fuels per person. But they do amplify the crisis by adding to fossil fuel demand as well as by being too politically weak to fight the most polluting methods of fossil fuel extraction near their homes. They have their own direct use and abuse of the earth's resources, and in the end, they are the vulnerable masses who will migrate away from climate-ravaged areas.

And their numbers matter, as Boulder's own Professor Al Bartlett has put it most famously: "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

But we see the math every summer in the humble morning glory. As surely as the rim of the morning glory spreads sumptuously and suddenly beyond its narrow bud, so too population growth can be the sudden multiplier of climate change and the depletion of the earth's bounty.

The problem boils down to girls not knowing what they can do with their lives apart from tending hearth and giving birth, with many family members enforcing that ignorance by preventing them from getting education. Journalist Michelle Goldberg has observed that "conservatives of all religions see women's equality as a threat to established order while in one society after another, we see the absence of women's rights creating existential dangers." Those dangers spill to environment, public health and even political stability, as noted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In the seminal work Half the Sky, about the catastrophe felt by females around the globe, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn commend the effects of micro finance, business planning, literacy and health care for women, concluding that uneducated girls are an untapped gold mine of economic potential and political stability.

Colorado having so many forms of wealth including affluence, let's consider charities which empower women. Here are a few of the many:

Based in Louisville, the Colorado Haiti Project supports a center in Haiti's Petit Trou de Nippes with a K-6 school, comprehensive education for reproductive health, and a center teaching women trade and business skills.

Based in Arkansas, a leader in empowering women for 60 years, Heifer International has been giving the gift of livestock to impoverished people. With a focus on gender equality Heifer trains women in sustainable farming, who in turn train others with the gift of their animals' offspring.

No less than the fight against extremism is the aim behind Greg Mortenson's campaign to educate teens, particularly girls, through the Central Asia Institute. Conceived during his outsized mountain adventure described in Three Cups of Tea, the Institute's approach is to develop projects that are community based and initiated through consensus.

At this time of the year and in this point in history, let's refocus when seeing that idealized view of the family, depicted so poignantly in the Christmas nativity scene. Right now, the promise for the earth is not about the wise men, and it's not about the baby. It's about the girl.

The Trouble with Geniuses: They Forget to Reach High Schoolers

2009-12-11T12:28:00.000-08:00

Anne B. Butterfield, December 11, 2009 (NewEnergyNews)

The trouble with geniuses is they missed some high school lessons. My father was nicknamed Honest John of Philadelphia due to his gawky, ramrod earnestness which he unleashed routinely while being (reputedly) the finest, meanest, most erudite and exacting legal mind in the city. A cult-like group admired him and his work throughout his life, but in the end my father's genius did not outshine his disruptive social gaffes which delivered gnawing disappointments to himself and others.

By him I learned that you can be a genius intellectually and still lack crucial smarts for success, and that is knowing how to empower your allies and to see and ward off your enemies. It's called social intelligence.

Judging from the advent of "Climategate" in which some emails of climatologists were stolen, cherry picked out of context and published on the eve of the climate talks in Copenhagen, I would say that the climate researchers and their allies have had some failures in this regard.

Knowing your audience means conceding that not everyone cares if you're an elite, or a hard worker, or a genius, because to some, genius looks like guile and guile looks like dishonesty. (Note the reaction to the term "trick" in handling data.) A simple story and a spotless appearance of probity are crucial when your aim is to change how people get to work and consume electricity -- in a process that disturbs major industries who will lash out as your enemies.

Therefore climate defenders need a simple, concrete, and plausibly undeniable frame of knowledge for the masses that captures the CO2 crisis, hopefully one that can be grasped with a high-school education.

We have that frame; it is ocean acidification, described through this formula:

Carbon dioxide plus water yields carbonic acid

It's discernible to all who were even slightly academic in high school, including honest skeptics. And regular folks who can still hear their mothers clucking, "Don't drink too much soda, it'll rot your teeth!" understand, too, that carbonic acid damages calcium compounds like teeth -- and shells and coral and plankton. And those calcium-based marine creatures are the big story.

Last week Jane Lubchenco, Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, demonstrated this acid principle when she defended climate science to a congressional committee by putting sticks of chalk into glasses of water, some of them tainted with vinegar, to show the impact of rising acid levels in our oceans as they absorb CO2. The chalk, with the same chemical make-up as shells and plankton, dissolved in the acidic water while the other chalks did not.

The acid story is the straight shot that cuts through all the mysteries of climate science and stuns the mind with the gravity of our carbon emissions. If we don't rapidly reduce our CO2 emissions we could lose our bountiful oceans in like 40 years. It is no coincidence that Lubchenco gave this science lesson in response to "Climategate" and the partisan outcry about the stolen emails.

The acid story should have been out in force years ago because acidification is already sickening our seas as reported in the Portland Press Herald. Noting that baby clams are already dying in their mud nests due to acidity, marine scientists of Maine are now saying acidification threatens to do more harm than global warming by attacking plankton which are the base of ocean food webs and produce half of all atmospheric oxygen.

Drifting at surface where the CO2 mixes in, plankton's demise could lead to a "complete collapse of our biosphere" said Professor Robert Steneck. "These are not academic things, these are real," he added, as if saying this is no elite climate science.

Straight up high school science.

Honest skeptics, are you listening? And XcelEnergy, determined to boost your coal burn by 25 percent soon with Comanche 3, are you listening?

Had the acid story been pushed by climate advocates when it came out in 2004, the fishing industries of the world could have become the climate's personal Teamsters Union as allies.

With friends like the Teamsters defending a science as simple as chalk in vinegar, how far could enemies of climate science get by stealing a few emails? But the real, simple acid story has been left underplayed, so on the eve of Copenhagen the enemies of the green economy were able to score a few points playing gotcha with emails that exploited the science's all too complicated glory.

Any nerdy seventeen year old whose journal was stolen by rivals could have told them this would happen. Like my mom said: "If you don't want your secrets shouted from the rooftops, don't put them in print."

We should all write our emails as if they were going to be stolen and broadcast. And when lives are on the line, never rely most on a complex idea when a simple one can clinch the deal.

Now that's social intelligence that passes the acid test.

The first rule of holes - Stop digging

2009-11-22T11:22:00.000-08:00

Anne B. Butterfield, November 22, 2009 (NewEnergyNews)

"The supply of cheap coal is no longer abundant. Seventy percent of Colorado`s electricity comes from coal plants and that is too much today, and over time it will become an impediment to economic growth." - Tom Sanzillo.

Most experienced investors know that the way to invest safely is through a diversified portfolio of stocks picked across a variety of market sectors, with options to keep money in cash, bonds, metals or land. That`s diversity. It spreads the risk and allows flexibility to respond to changing market conditions.

If any stockbroker saw that your portfolio on which you will utterly depend in the future, were 70 percent in one sector, that would be the fist thing he would tell you to change. Too much exposure. Too risky. Too rigid.

Now look at Colorado`s power generation: it comes 70 percent from one fuel type: coal, a fuel source documented by the United States Geological Survey, plus the Departments of Energy, Agriculture and Interior, have all estimated our days of cheap coal ending in as little as two decades.

In Colorado, vaunted as a "coal state" by so many politicians, production of the black rock peaked in 2004 and fell off about one-fifth in four years, according to the Energy Information Administration. On top of that, documents from Xcel Energy show that four mines in Colorado entered "force majeure" status in the past eighteen months meaning they were hampered by exogenous difficulties that freed them from contractual obligations.

The coal situation is a sword of Damocles over Colorado`s prosperity, particularly because when XcelEnergy fires up its new 750 megawatt coal plant soon in Pueblo, it will increase the utility`s coal burn by 25 percent on coal brought in from Wyoming. That means exporting our dollars on fuel we don`t need.

Sending our fuel dollars out of state adds insult to the basic injury of our largest utility increasing its basic rates on people already being disconnected at 5,000 per month, plus passing on coal costs that are will jump by 25 percent this year, both in cost and volume.

Up at our northern fuel source, Wyoming`s Powder River Basin is now producing 40 percent of our nation`s coal from mines that mostly have life spans of less than twenty years. The PRB`s future mine sites shall be much deeper underground than today`s mines, that means escalating costs. Generally all other states producing coal have gotten past their peak production.

"What`s not understood is how expensive it`s going to be to get that coal out of the ground," says Tom Sanzillo, the former acting Comptroller of the State of New York who was responsible for his state`s pension plans, some of the nation`s largest. He made it his calling after retirement to examine the investment case for coal fired power and he now he gives testimony to numerous states` governments. His testimony is that investing in coal power generation in general, and in Colorado in particular, is a sinking ship.

Sanzillo has seen a side of the coal industry that occasionally burps out truth. Attending the World Coal Conference in London in late October, he saw coal executives respond to mini instant polls in which they used hand clickers to vote anonymously. To one question "Do you believe coal reserve assessments to be accurate?" their answer was "No" -- to the tune of 89 percent.

No one is thinking that coal reserves are underestimated, but no one in the business is discussing the problem aloud, either. Sanzillo explains: "It takes a while for people to wrap their heads around this knowledge which means decades of common wisdom being overturned."

And here we are, increasing instead of reducing Colorado`s 70 percent coal profile while the climate bill coming out of the U.S. Congress proposes to intensify our nation`s investment in coal through carbon capture and storage schemes.

That`s sending good money after bad. You don`t invest in a costly, unproven infrastructure to service a fuel source that is fast depleting anymore than you put fancy improvements onto a house that`s been claimed by eminent domain.

Fortunately this week, twenty Colorado state lawmakers asked the U.S. Senate to limit funding for coal and nuclear energy in the energy bill so as not to prevent diversification into efficiency, wind and solar, which even Xcel`s own projections have shown can pay off in savings in as little as four years.

Boulder Start-up to Profit on Atmospheric CO2 in Manufacturing

2009-11-11T17:58:00.000-08:00

Boulder Start-up to Profit on Atmospheric CO2 in Manufacturing
Anne B. Butterfield, November 9, 2009 (Huffington Post)

Everyone loves chemistry; it's the difference between Pero and real coffee, Morton's and sea salt. It's the magic between Tracy and Hepburn.

But on the larger scale, we take chemistry for granted and it's killing us. The earth has an insidious chemical change going on through the vast majority of its surface area where the oceans meet, belly to belly, with the sky. Our skies, now laden with unusually high and accelerating levels of carbon dioxide, are tainting our oceans with carbonic acid in a process called acidification. It's a reaction we learned about in high school chemistry class, so there's no real debate about it. And some forms of sea life are already beginning to falter.

In the Monaco Declaration, marine scientists revealed that in as little as four decades our oceans may be too acidic to support the formation of shells, or even the plankton and corals on which our oceans' food webs rely.

Our problem with burning fossil fuels really is the carbon dioxide, not just the climate havoc it creates, and this harm cannot be mitigated by much ballyhooed notions of geo-engineering.

Now, aren't you ready for a little good news?

How about a plan to reduce atmospheric CO2 at industrial scale in a safe and economically attractive scheme? At New Sky Energy, a new start-up here in Boulder, a Fairview High graduate named Deane Little has developed a technology for converting waste salt (from agricultural runoff or flue gas desulfurization), processing it with water electrolysis to yield oxygen, hydrogen, a strong acid and a strong base. That last one is the key -- the base naturally attracts CO2 out of the air and traps it in crystals which can be used as high-value filler for countless common products like glass, plastics, dry wall, bricks, asphalt and concrete. Those crystals can make products which are up to 40 percent stored CO2.

NewSky's CO2 collection comes with the production of four marketable products. The sale of the oxygen, acid and base (and its CO2 compounds) can subsidize the production of the hydrogen to one-third of the price point goal set by the Department of Energy, according to Little.

And hydrogen is the Holy Grail of a clean energy economy, that liquid energy storage device able to power cars and motors without emitting pollution.

All the New Sky plan needs for perfection is clean electricity to power its reactor. Fortunately, as many grid operators will glumly tell you when discussing DOE's plan for 20 percent wind by 2030, there are times when there is too much wind power for the grid to happily accept. That is when operators do something called "curtailment" of the turbines, and that is when New Sky's technology can and should run.

Wouldn't we like to have the problem of excess carbon-free power on the grid to clean up brackish waste water, recycle batteries, sequester CO2 and store energy?

It's a virtuous cycle, one that Little says "seizes on a missed opportunity that's been sitting right in front of us." And it has come just as our atmospheric level of CO2 has gone well past the level of 350 parts per million that can safeguard healthy climate and oceans.

Policy makers should be considering CO2-reduction technologies like New Sky's (and like Natural Terrestrial Sequestration another Boulder brand of atmospheric CO2 reduction that your humble scribe has covered). Both beat the scheme known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS, as touted by the coal industry.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and the Center for American Progress are pressuring the Obama Administration to push money into CCS, the abstruse plan to draw CO2 out of smokestacks, pressurize it into a liquid and inject it into stone formations over a mile underground, a process that requires up to one-third extra coal-fired energy and leaves communities vulnerable to explosions, earthquakes and leaks of CO2 which can produce fouled waters and asphyxiate humans and animals.

Oh, and CCS is really expensive, too, and most CCS proposals have been shelved for that reason. Nonetheless there is a proposal for a new 750 megawatt coal plant in Linden, New Jersey, with a plan to pipe its CO2 70 miles offshore to be injected into the seabed.
If it leaks, it leaks into the ocean, acidifying it, perhaps catastrophically, at astonishing cost to rate and tax payers.

Because underwater leaks of CO2 are likely to go undetected, a CCS installation near any ocean is the apex of stupidity.

Carbon dioxide should be stored as a solid not a liquid. Now that is better living through chemistry.

New Sky's technology does not lessen our need to decommission coal plants as soon as possible. It just gives us a hope to get our atmospheric CO2 levels which are now at 390 parts per million back below 350ppm as Dr. James Hansen has strongly urged.

New Sky Energy has been named as a finalist for the Rocky Mountain Clean Tech Open. We wish them well and hope they'll be up against many other terrific problem solving ideas. We need all we can get.

The wind for new energy is stiffening

2009-10-26T11:23:00.000-07:00

In Colorado, we're at the leading edge of a clean-energy revolution… We've created a model strategy for every state in the country to follow. We've built a template for a comprehensive national strategy that marries energy policy with climate policy…

Anne B. Butterfield, October 26, 2009 (NewEnergyNews)

On the beautiful and gusty Monday, October 19, Governor Ritter appeared in Boulder at the wind site of the National Renewable Energy Laboratories to celebrate the commissioning of the new Siemens 2.3 megawatt wind turbine, installed as a test facility in our nation’s largest government-industry cooperative venture for wind energy.

At over 40 stories high and moving gently with the wind, the turbine seemed natural in its setting, a giant redwood of the plains or a leviathan of the air. Its grandeur was cited by most of the dignitaries as a sign of Colorado’s accomplishments in the renewable energy field.

But Henry Kelly, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Department of Energy, warned of the magnitude of our nation’s energy predicament in which we to seek to reduce our emissions by 80 percent by 2050, saying, “We will need to be incredibly bold and audacious. And even to reach 20 percent wind power by 2030, we will need to learn a lot.” Looking every bit the bureaucrat in his white shirt with dark tie and suit, Kelly used language you’d expect from a race car driver: “One would generally wish a fair wind at the back of a new venture such as this, but in these times this test turbine should face winds that rip at its foundation, torture its blades and baffle its controls.”

On the next day at Colorado’s New Energy Economy Conference, the Governor did not mention that there was any test of character in store for people and commerce, but instead he kept to sunny superlatives: In Colorado, we're at the leading edge of a clean-energy revolution… We've created a model strategy for every state in the country to follow. We've built a template for a comprehensive national strategy that marries energy policy with climate policy…

In spite of the Governor’s enthusiasm there was a slightly suppressed feeling to the conference, as if everyone was going through the motions. In none of the sessions did anyone mention the elephant in the middle of Colorado’s New Energy Economy: Comanche3, the 750 megawatt new coal plant coming online perhaps as soon as next month.

Comanche3 will run on coal from Wyoming, sending our fuel dollars out of state for coal that will, according to a 2008 report from the United States Geological Survey, come at increasingly lower grades and higher costs in as little as two decades.

To capture this travesty, one needs Henry Kelly’s way with metaphor: Comanche 3 is not just the elephant stomping on the Governor’s New Energy Economy, it’s also the proverbial white elephant, that gift from Hindu lore that’s part sacred cow and part trophy wife to make the perfect gift that keeps on taking.

We don’t need it. Comanche 3’s energy in the first years of operation will be excess capacity through 2015, as much as 500 megawatts above the 16 percent margin, according to Xcel’s formal notice to the Public Utilities Commission in early 2009

Still, we Xcel ratepayers of Colorado will have to feed that white elephant through elevated base and fuel charges (known as the ECA on your bill), even customers having 100 percent subscription to Windsource. This was explained last week at the Meadows Library by Steve Mudd, Manager for Windsource.

Meanwhile, by Xcel’s own numbers the cost of newly installed renewable energy, particularly a “wind heavy” mix as analyzed in the 2009 “All Source Solicitation 120-Day Report”, is forecast to bring real savings to Xcel’s service as soon as 2013.

Still, with the logic of shopaholics , Xcel and Governor Ritter continue to defend Comanche 3’s contribution as “low cost energy”.

It just so happens the National Academy of Sciences doesn’t agree with this “low cost” notion in its book-length study just released: “Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use”. It sums up the unpaid costs of fossil fuels at about $120 billion per year.

Shouldering an extra $120 billion every year can add up to real money – exactly the kind that has been breaking our nation’s health care system and state and federal budgets. The costs the NAS report finds are mostly health related.

Henry Kelly got it. We are facing a wind that is ripping at our foundations and baffling our controls. The process is well underway.

Necessary but not sufficient

2009-10-14T07:27:00.000-07:00

Anne B. Butterfield, October 14, 2009 (NewEnergyNews)

We have all heard about the woman who marries her live-in sweetheart, even though he was known to be a womanizer. Even two weeks before the wedding day Rosie found Mark in bed with another woman, but she was too invested in his wealth to break the engagement. Also his community, so elegant with traditions that she`d not remotely known in her childhood, had become her home. If not marry him, where was she to go?

Rosie and Mark are a parable for every player in Washington toiling away on the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACESA) intended to wean us off of fossil fuels. Mark can`t stop womanizing, Rosie has long been giving favors for advancement; leaders like these do not have the mettle to pinpoint and pursue the very finest solutions.

But we might be wise to see the bill as Thomas Friedman did when he said of ACESA: "It is appalling, a mess. I detest it. Now hurry up and pass it."

Even the illusion of fidelity can provide some leverage. The bill`s existence for December`s climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen is pivotal; America is the world`s worst emitter and our failure to bring a comprehensive bill to Copenhagen, even a pockmarked unfinished stinker, will send exactly the wrong signal.

Those who rationally protest the ACES bill, such as the members of Climate SOS, describe the bill as inadequate for its low targets and, "worse than doing nothing" due to itscap-and-trade structure plus its allowances, offsets, permission for coal plants, plus-size funding for chimerical carbon capture and storage, and reliance on biomass combustion. Worst of all is the waiver of the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases, in the version passed by the House of Representatives.

SOS prefers direct regulation to bring nearly 100 percent carbon emission reduction in 20-30 years through an energy efficiency portfolio standard as well as extreme ramp-up of renewable energy, zero waste, sustainable agriculture, and more. This would be paid for through a carbon fee or a carbon tax and dividend scheme that pays out most of its resources directly to citizens.

The problem is that they at SOS seem to believe that Congress can do better. And, behold, our government is still in bed with the other the woman, subsidizing fossil fuels.
Only last month did the prominent voice of President Obama call for a worldwide stop to such nonsense.

That`s a little like Mark canceling the Playboy Channel the day before the wedding.

One prominent supporter of the ACES bill, former Deputy of the Department of Energy and renowned climate blogger, Joseph Romm, advises:

"And for those who say this doesn`t do enough -- I agree 100 percent. But then the original Clean Air Act didn`t do enough." He cites also the 1987 Montréal protocol as inadequate to save the ozone layer, continuing, "but it began a process and established a framework that, like the CAA, could be strengthened over time as the science warranted.
The painful reality of climate change is going to become increasingly obvious in the coming years, and strengthening is inevitable."

In short, the ACES bill is necessary but not sufficient. We have seen this before. Did women earn full citizenship just after suffrage was passed? Did blacks enjoy social equality just after slavery was abolished, or even after the civil rights movement? Did most states impose best available control technologies on updated power plants just because the Clean Air Act said so?

No, no and no.

Environmentalists are in no way fooled by the ACES bill`s failure to deliver the needed emissions reductions. The planet`s survival relies partly on a climate bill but mostly on continued grassroots assault on coal plants and other offenders, plus disruptive clean technologies to take our markets by storm.

It would be nice to have a sterling market signal in the form of a carbon tax, but with only ExxonMobil strutting in favor of this, people are reasonable to look on philanderers as more trustworthy friends.

The trick is to keep the EPA vested with authority to regulate emissions, as, according to Climate SOS, some biomass and trash incineration schemes portend to have emissions much worse than burning coal.

Our work will not be finished with a climate bill; it only will begin, just as Rosie and Mark, once married, finally get to learn what fidelity can mean. And if we don`t like this climate bill, we can take our chances on ExxonMobil.

Tort reform: Go big, Obama!

2009-09-14T07:39:00.000-07:00

Tort reform: Go big, Obama!
Anne B. Butterfield, September 14, 2009 (NewEnergyNews)

President Obama and Democrats: flummox and rearrange your opposition. Go big on medical malpractice reform.

The nod the president gave to the cause of tort reform in his address to Congress would begin in what he termed "a few pilot projects" as once described George W. Bush. Republicans who were slumped in their seats, some glowering into Blackberries, rose up to give wildly approving applause. But what would really cause Republicans to rethink their existence would be if Democrats went after tort reform loudly to the effect of taking this pet cause away from them.

Vigorous tort reform from the Democrats would be like taking the surfboards away from Republicans and turning up the waves. The strong could get back to a board and surf, but the weak would flail and drown. The Dems needs to impose this disruption on a party whose chairman Michael Steele barked, "I don`t do policy" when asked if he felt it was right for all Americans to be required to pay for insurance. A party that snoozed on the chance to reform health care when it had the majority and now panders to deathers and birthers.

For these mad dogs baying, their cause needs to be stolen and their bluff needs to be called.

According to Republican talking points, and there is research to back up the hype, there are billions of dollars per year wasted in "defensive medicine," that practice in which doctors order marginally or wholly unneeded tests, procedures and hospital admissions, to protect against a later suit. Up to a quarter of health care costs are "defensive," and some research says they could tally $200 billion per year. So claims conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer.

Into that treasure trove of financial value a smart liberal should say: "Drill baby drill."

"Anyone who denies there is a crisis in medical malpractice is probably a trial lawyer," said Barack Obama in 1996. Trial lawyers have long been the ally of Democrats, but, in the estimation of Bob Beckel, Walter Mondale`s campaign manager, they would have nowhere to go if the Democrats reduced their hunting grounds through malpractice reform.

American medical negligence is the most hazardous in the developed world with around 195,000 unnecessary deaths per year. All of our docs` super costly defensive medicine hasn`t given us good results.

Some cling to the notion that the way to improve outcomes from doctors is to sue them for errors. In reality, dangerous doc`s should be censured or expelled by an authoritative body. Some suggest that medical complaints be heard by expert "medical courts" which can quickly award damages on a predictable scale to patients and families -- and for the community would reprimand or strip the license from dangerous doctors.

For me this is familiar story: When my mom had a needle biopsy to find the meaning of a shadow in her lung, the doctor failed to get a medically diagnostic sample. So when he said to her, "I have good news and bad -- you don`t have cancer, also, I collapsed your lung so you have to stick around," he had no basis for saying the former, and he failed to use the latter to get a proper sample. He wrote her warrant to an early and merciless death, and wrote himself a ticket to a whopping malpractice suit. But my mom decided she "doesn`t dance on worms" and simply wrote him up for the state`s medical board and died in peace. He was reprimanded, put on probation, and the decisiveness of the process proved useful when auditors later questioned her estate.

Not only is it silly to talk about lowering costs of care without medical malpractice reform -- we probably cannot get greenhouse gas emissions under control without tort reform. Businesses and municipal governments think they cannot turn down the lights for fear an intruder will sue for their ankle sprained in the dark.

The threat of suit has been robbing our society with a paper gun for decades making trial lawyers a parasitic force in our economy. How far we have come from the brave and self-reliant people who founded this country. All of this has to change, as well as our caustic political landscape.

Xcel takes aim at Boulder’s solar

2009-07-27T07:06:00.000-07:00

Anne B. Butterfield, July 27, 2009 (NewEnergyNews)

Xcel Energy is presenting Colorado with the second of two rate increases, in an unprecedented back-to-back timing, which may land us with up to 13 percent more in fixed, base-rate costs. This is to pay off Xcel’s new coal plant in Pueblo called Comanche 3, plus its gas fired turbines at Fort St. Vrain. So says Xcel’s Vice President Karen Hyde.

The rate case also presents a hit against net metering by imposing a charge of about 2 cents per kilowatt hour produced, or $22 per year for the average rooftop solar installation. Net metering was passed into law by our state legislature to direct electric utilities to pay distributed energy producers for their net energy given back to the grid. By far and away this charge will impact Boulder most of all counties of Colorado.

When observing utilities or reading the language of their rate cases, it is useful to keep in mind that the arguments you hear might be precisely backward, as if seen through the wrong end of a looking-glass.

One such backwardism is found in Scott Brockett’s testimony in which Xcel’s stockholders are absorbing a 5 cent per kilowatt-hour revenue loss from Colorado’s net metering. But his real concern is the future customers who will pay off those losses “for fixed costs over fewer sales” implying that Comanche 3 will fall to those who don’t invest in solar -- and that there is no daylight between Xcel’s ask and our PUC’s grant. That’s funny; between 2006 and 2008 Colorado ‘s contribution to Xcel’s earnings increased from 41 percent to 52 percent, in spite of the fact Colorado has 18 percent fewer rate payers than Xcel’s next largest contributor, Minnesota.

But what really grabs your eyeballs is Brockett’s assertion that net metering under current rates is “particularly unfair because customers have subsidized the installation of renewable generation through the Renewable Energy Standard Adjustment.”

Oh, my. Exhibit A in looking-glass logic. Let’s see if we can relish all of its irony. The Xcel energy planner sees it as unfair for ratepayers to subsidize renewable energy at 2 percent of their bills while it’s wonderful to subsidize the excess coal capacity of Comanche 3 at 13 percent! Never mind that we the people actually voted in the renewable energy standard, or that for each of those rooftop installations we actually put in thousands of our own dollars, or that through our rooftop solar we produce some of the utility’s most valuable peak-use energy of the year, or that it pushes back some of our local coal plant’s dirty emissions which have graced our town with a failing grade for ozone in the view of the American Lung Association.

Cough, cough.

This “minimum bill” for net metered customers is touted as being for transmission and distribution costs. Never mind that distributed resources such as solar defer costs of operation, maintenance, and capital improvements by reducing load growth, according to almost a dozen studies, especially two by National Renewable Energy Laboratories and Sacramento Municipal Utility District.

On PV’s benefits, Boulder’s County Commissioner Will Toor adds, “At the very least, these benefits should be quantified and included before any net metering rate adjustments are considered. A net metering penalty would be a big step in the wrong direction. I hope that Xcel chooses to withdraw this proposal.”

As one might expect in Alice’s Wonderland, there are moments of beauty and hope in Xcel’s new rate case, which can be found in its new rate structure called inverted block rates. This can be powerful at sending customers price signals that meaningfully enhance conservation. Bravo!

Also on the upside is one purpose for this case: offering changes in bill format. And lookie here, there’s information that we rate payers need: fuel mix ratios and public health impacts of fossil fuel based power. Food products tell us their ingredients, cigarette packages state their hazards, and coal based power can harm the way we breathe. Labeling is normal, and providers of electricity can step up with this accountability to public health.

I can be reached at annebbuttterfield@yahoo.com. “PSCo Electric Rate Case Proposed May 1” can be read at Xcel’s website. There is a public hearing for this case at the PUC on August 5 from 4-6 pm. Comments can be emailed to pucconsumer.complaints@dora.state.co.us

Selfishly seeking clean energy

2009-07-13T07:26:00.000-07:00

Anne B. Butterfield, July 12, 2009 (Daily Camera)

It's the cocktail banter of Boulder: We're so selfish in Boulder, because we're seeking to convert or retire the Valmont coal-fired power plant so it will no longer burn coal. Other communities, like the city of Commerce are more deserving of relief from the emissions of their local coal plants, and those other plants are older. So the banter goes.

On the City Council's hotline Web site, Ken Wilson has written up how other coal plants around Xcel's service territory would have to produce more power if Boulder succeeds at knocking out the coal-fired power from Valmont. He adds, with fine ethics if not complete analysis: "Reducing carbon emissions is not something we in Boulder can feel good about 'winning' if it means pushing our problems to other communities."

If Xcel's generating capacity weren't overbuilt in the next few years due to the addition of 750 megawatts of new coal starting this fall in Pueblo, Wilson's view would have more merit, mathematically and ethically. But facts are stubborn things -- and a new coal plant changes everything: it means that every coal plant in Xcel's system is now on the chopping block for parents fighting night and day for their children's world.

Many also lean on the notion that Valmont is one of Xcel's most efficient coal plants. This is a little like referring to thin Sumo wrestlers, or gentle Mafia men. Coal plants just are not efficient enough to warrant the adjective, especially for a plant such as the Valmont coal unit that provides under 5 percent of base load generation for the area.

The reason Valmont is on the hit-list is that our town has an informed, active populace, which has imposed a carbon tax on itself and whose utility franchise is coming up for renewal. This is a rare moment of leverage that combines with a moment in history when utilities everywhere are committing to coal plant conversions.

In Ohio, First Energy decided this year to convert 312 MW of coal power to burn fuel crops grown for the purpose. Three years ago, the Public Service Commission of New Hampshire decided to convert 50 MW of coal capacity to burn biomass. DTE Energy of Wisconsin agreed to buy a 50 MW coal unit with plans to convert it to burning wood waste. A 24 MW coal plant in Pepeekeo, Hawaii, is being converted to burn biomass, and
Georgia Power has announced a plan to covert a 96 MW coal unit to run on wood fuel.

Here in the West, we have wood. Lots of beetle-killed timber that can be brought into plants on the trains that typically carry coal from Wyoming, returning there with our heard-earned dollars. In the past few months. Valmont itself is burning lower-grade, dirtier Wyoming coal. Instead, we could make power and carbon-sinking bio-char with beetle-kill trees.

Also, here in the West we have sun. Matching our solar sensibilities, Xcel Energy itself has committed to a pilot project of augmenting the 39 MW of coal power of the Cameo plant near Grand Junction with the steam of a new concentrating solar assembly. Even more bravely, the Electric Power Research Institute is partnering with Tri State Power and Transmission to integrate concentrating solar power into the 245 MW Escalante coal plant in Prewitt, N.M., and with the legendarily pro-coal Southern Company to do likewise for the 742 MW Mayo plant in Roxboro N.C.

According to EPRI, these hybrid power plants will demonstrate a near-term, reliable, cost-effective way to use solar energy at commercial scale for power that is greatly cleansed of the emissions that threaten public health and climate.

In Boulder, ironically, we often have worse air quality than Denver due to the bowl effect of our valley, in which our air is tainted with heavy metals and ozone. The American Lung Association has given Boulder a grade of "F" for ozone, which contributes so much to asthma and other chronic ailments. This Tuesday evening at the Boulder County Courthouse there is a hearing for Valmont's air permit, which is an important chance to speak to regulators about these toxins impacting our community unnecessarily as cleaner options exist.

There is nothing exotic about converting coal plants now. It's a matter of political will and we have a chance with Valmont. The plant is a great candidate, Boulder is the right town, and Xcel is the right utility.

The big ka-ching in our health care wallets

2009-06-21T11:21:00.001-07:00

Anne B Butterfield, June 19, 2009 (NewEnergyNews)

While Americans wonder with noisy drama what the Obama Administration will do to our current health care system, wouldn’t it be great if we could materially reduce the cost of health care in our country by tackling climate change?

Virtually all of the power for our transportation and electric utilities comes from petroleum, coal, and natural gas, the combustion of which emits the toxins that are heavily involved in costly degenerative diseases such as cancer, heart disease, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), to name a few. Rural or urban, we are sitting in a faint bath of toxic chemicals that can exacerbate our symptoms or hasten acute suffering and death, and when that happens it is a big ka-ching in our health care wallet.

The emissions and other by products of fossil fuel use are so ubiquitous, and often well hidden, that they slip from our awareness. Their presence and health effects have become “just the way life is.” Here are a few of our fossil fuel chemical friends:

Nitrous oxide (NOx) is a precursor to smog, that brown smear of ozone and particulate matter that collects over cities under high air pressure conditions. Smog alerts are accompanied by higher than average hospital admissions and deaths.

Particulate matter excerbates asthma, COPD, bronchitis, cardiac events as well as congestive heart failure. When smog mingles with very small particles (known as PM 2.5) the risk of mortality for men over 65 rises to 24 percent above average; for women of this age the death rate is 80 percent above average.

Three hundred counties in the US are designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as clean air non-attainment areas, being perpetually outside of the recommended air quality standards. Pass the nebulizer!

Coal fired power plants emit about a third of all human-caused release of mercury, a neurotoxin so widely spread that women and children are advised to limit their eating of fish. In Colorado one-fifth of waterways have mercury-based fishing advisories.

Another health cost of using coal as heavily as we do is the ash waste. All over our country, ash waste is dumped in unlined pits in or near the water table. A 2007 report of the EPA found that poorly lined waste sites (60 percent of all) pose a cancer risk through ground water that is 900 times what is acceptable.

Environmental groups have fought for national standards for the handling of coal ash waste, to keep state officials from competing in a “race to the bottom” for corporate clients’ sake. But rather than put coal waste under the EPA’s regulation, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security has just announced that the locations of 44 coal ash dumps cannot be disclosed; their toxicity and precarious engineering make them attractive terrorist targets. Meanwhile two senators are seeking support to make sure that coal ash waste is treated less rigorously than household trash.

Ontario, Canada released a report finding that each kilowatt hour of coal-fired power creates 12.7 cents of health and environmental effects. The next time you get your electric bill, picture two-thirds of your kilowatt hours each causing 12 cents of medical and other costs. Utilities like to talk about delivering low-cost energy, but that sector’s emissions of known toxins, at 722 million pounds each year, dwarfs all other industrial competitors. A large part of our health care costs belong on our utility bill and other energy related costs.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger put it best: “We pay for the fuel we burn but not for the pollution we emit. That pollution causes serious damage to our world, and in the long run, we all pay for it...Imagine if we decided to let everyone dump their garbage on their neighbors' lawns instead of being forced to pay for trash pickup. Sure, it would be cheaper, but it would be disastrous to public health.”

The climate bill coming through Congress is guaranteed to be inadequate, so our path to the post-fossil fuel era will be long. We should keep up the support for local communities, like Coal River Valley in West Virginia, which is fighting to stop mountain top removal mining, and our own effort in Boulder to rapidly decarbonize our electric supply.

It takes a Governor

2009-05-30T07:07:00.000-07:00

Anne B Butterfield, May 24, 2009

When a public official offers a public opinion ostensibly as a private citizen, his view should be subjected to a special smell test. And when the Deputy Director of the Governor's Energy Office Seth Portner took aim at Boulder’s desire to retire the coal portion of the local power plant called Valmont ("Tilting at power plants" Daily Camera May 9) his writing gave a whiff that was disturbingly off-base.

Portner asserted that coal emissions could be deeply reduced by customers’ vigorous household efficiency efforts, the way that SUV factories got shuttered when people stopped buying SUV’s.

Hello? If lower demand affected utilities, the two gas-fired turbines at Fort St. Vrain and the coal fired plant called Comanche 3 would never have been built because they are excess and expensive capacity. (And the only thing shuttering SUV plants is the lack of car loans and bailouts.)

Let’s be clear: every American household needs to trim its energy use to the admirable extent of Portner’s personal example, and doing so, our economy would flourish from fuel savings and job creation. Efficiency is the least cost energy and the fastest emission reduction plan, no contest.

But even if most of Boulder’s buildings reached Portner’s level of efficiency, his curiously unnamed utility might not quickly respond by shutting down coal plants, since that utility is bringing another large coal plant on line now, because utilities get paid for their asset base.

So our predicament is not about choosing either efficiency or political force to shut down coal plants, this is a time for both-and.

Far from being “quixotic” as described by Portner, shutting down coal plants (or hybridizing them) is a part of utility planning in today’s world. In 2012, Xcel will shut down 229 megawatts of older coal capacity as indicated in its resource plan, and even China has begun requiring power companies to retire an older, more polluting power plant for each new one they build. But in Colorado’s New Energy Economy we are not doing even as well as China, because our shut-down rate of old coal is knocked out by the ramp-up rate of new coal in Xcel’s 500 MW portion of Comanche 3.

Therefore if Boulder can convert Valmont with clean generation plus organized efficiency we should do it, because Xcel is expanding its coal and gas capacity in excess of the 16% reserve margin, and exposing us to fuel and carbon costs.

Rather than alluding to these issues, Portner’s essay painted Xcel into a corporate fairy tale with Exxon, where both vendors could not exist without consumers. Really? Tell that to the city planners who want a trolley line in their city but Standard Oil, predecessor to Exxon, joined with other companies to buy out 88 percent of our nation’s trolley lines, tore up all the tracks and resold the franchises as bus lines, resulting in anti trust violations and whopping fines of $5,000.

With smelly, noisy buses making suburbs and cars more attractive, we are now stuck in auto-addled suburbia, often overweight. So while it’s true that Americans are wasteful, none of us wanted our efficient systems to be switched out with wasteful ones by companies that grew to obviate our local powers.

It takes a corporation to do that.

Xcel does much more than meet our voracious needs, it shapes them by controlling information and crowding around our legislators. Ask Nancy La Placa, who was lobbying Colorado legislators to support a bill to put fuel mix disclosure on utility bills so that consumers could be more conscious and less voracious. She was brow beaten for it so rudely by a senior Xcel lobbyist that she documented the abuse with CEO Dick Kelley. Xcel doesn’t want customers being conscious of their fuel mix because to do so might trim the use of those fuels in which the company has the most equity for rate-basing.

With monopolies, markets are not free. And if legislators and regulators were able to protect the market and the public interest, Nancy’s bill would have passed by now. We need more political force.

It takes a Governor.

Insulating and sealing our buildings is necessary, but not sufficient. We need larger goals, like getting complete and functional transparency from our utility and reducing the coal burning capacity in Colorado.

For that, it takes a Governor.

And it is going to take all of Boulder's efforts, too.

Want a job? Think Wind.

2009-05-14T07:18:00.000-07:00

Anne B Butterfield, May 10, 2009 (Daily Camera)

New graduates emerging soon from high schools and colleges always want to hitch their wagon to a star -- and the star most visible now on the American horizon is a three-bladed turbine rotor.

Our new graduates may be glad to know that in this economy that's squalid with bad news, wind power is making jobs like crazy while drawing people and industries together. This was particularly evident at the recent WINDPOWER Conference held this week in Chicago which drew a record breaking 23,000 people, 10,000 more than last year.

Striding across the millions of square feet of the exhibition hall of the conference, I caught wild glimpses, like a 6-foot diameter ring gear framing the white-blonde heads of men with Danish accents leaning in to chat with developers in cowboy hats, their pointed boots peeking out from good trousers.

Passing by a man yelling German into his phone, I heard snatches of English on various levels of tech: "The finishing removes asperities while reducing the surface less than a thousandth of an inch and doesn't change the geometry of the gear," and, "We can retrofit commissioned turbines," and, "Hey check out those temperature sensors!"

Many of the new conference exhibitors were from the auto supply industry, having broadened their mission to serve the wind industry as it rises to the protean task of supplying 20 percent of the nation's energy in the next 20 years.

Having added eight gigawatts of capacity to the grid in 2008 (a 60 percent surge over the prior year) and inventing 35,000 jobs, the industry is promising to match that contribution again this year.

While our country is being slammed with plant closings and layoffs, the wind industry is countering by opening plants every few months, with the German company Siemens announcing this week it will open a 300,000 square foot nacelle manufacturing plant in Hutchinson Kansas. Meanwhile the industry is scrambling with community colleges to ramp up degree and certificate programs to produce the sorely needed technicians to work on brand new wind farms.

"We need welders, pipe fitters, all kids of vocational skills really, and I would gladly pay a few cents per hour on each laborer's work to fund the education of young people to be able to do this work," said Carole Engelder of Horizon Wind, a prominent wind development company based in Texas.

New technicians need to be ready to work where the wind is and that can mean living in remote locations; they also need to be comfortable in the confined space of a nacelle propped 400 feet in the air. Wind recruits need to love cross-cultural communication because wind energy brings people together from around the world and often plunges them into backcountry areas steeped in proud tradition. Different customers require different approaches.

To work in manufacturing, strong candidates will have the math skills to grasp tolerances of 2/1000th of an inch on a 14-foot diameter gear, and if they get it wrong that means scrapping the piece.

These requirements challenge employers to the point of poaching other companies' workers or hiring kids out of training too early.

College educated candidates will need training in combinations of engineering and physics, finance, business, tax, and law, to seize the toughest creative challenges like transmission, business development and supply chain management. It doesn't hurt to know some Chinese, either, with China opening a huge drive toward wind as well.
The best chance for Americans to seize these domestic and international jobs is to call Congress and declare "YES on RES" to support the Renewable Electricity Standard that would require a national benchmark of about 20 percent of our power coming from renewables by 2020.

America better call, because the fossil fuel lobby is paying top dollar to lobbyists to keep business going as usual, and that means more nuclear waste, more toxins from coal, and more hundreds of billions going overseas for oil.

The conference was spangled with the star power of governors and federal figures cheerleading our renewable energy future. Featured most of all was Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens, who abandoned oil drilling for the greater promise of energy independence through wind power, with his children and nation in mind. He had this to say to new graduates who are interested in wind: "This is the year that new legislation is coming. So get self-educated about energy to find out what fits you. And on my Web site you'll find the best information anywhere."

Just Say No to Xcess Energy

2009-04-28T18:01:00.000-07:00

Anne B Butterfield, April 28, 2009

We’re grown ups, right? So do we sit by idly when a car speeds the wrong way onto the freeway? No. We grab that cell phone and call the authorities.

The car now racing against the flow of history is Xcel Energy, ramping up their legalistic stonewalling to force Coloradoans to pay for their new billion dollar 750 megawatt, unneeded, coal-fired power plant in Pueblo called Comanche 3, to be paid through a series of rate hikes.

The first proposed rate hike of 5% was tentatively and privately settled last week to start being charged to us this July for a plant that fires up in November. It doesn’t matter if you buy all WindSource; it’s in the basic service.

But there’s more: the coal costs will get passed straight through as an extra "ECA" charge. Remember, the United States Geological Survey and other federal agencies have stated that America's supply of cheap coal will last as little as 20 years, and this year the spot price of coal doubled. So we can expect volatility and not price comfort from coal.

Before coal prices can maim our economy though, Comanche 3 will lure big office buildings and more to continue wasting energy by staying lit up at 4 am on a Saturday or 8pm on Easter. Don’t you want to pay more, and add 130 pounds of mercury to the world each year, so we can light up outer space?

Comanche 3 is estimated to cost a billion dollars per decade to run, with most of that cash going to Wyoming for the coal, Minnesota for Xcel’s executive compensation, and Washington DC for the carbon costs when they kick in. We could use that money instead to reap power from wind, solar and demand reduction to the point where Colorado could export clean energy to other states, but no, we’re being saddled up to export oodles of cash.

Yeah that’s dumb in a state crimped by TABOR, and you haven’t heard the best part yet:

Even by Xcel's documentation, for the first several years Comanche 3 will provide many hundreds of megawatts of excess capacity over the 16% safety margin required by law. Xcel announced in March that with the shrunken economy and efficiency measures power demand will drop by nearly 500 megawatts until 2015, and thus Xcel will delay acquisitions of 900 megawatts of solar and wind.

More effectively, Xcel just proved that we don’t need Comanche 3.

To add emphasis to the excess, the Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Jon Wellinghoff, has boldly stated that new coal and nuclear base load plants are unneeded generally, and that the craze for rigid base load power is a sacred cow that will be beat out by the flexibility of efficiency and renewable power.

So far, our appointed representatives in Colorado have been lifting compromise with Xcel to a sacramental art, allowing Xcel to argue in motions language that is often incoherent that the 2003 permit to build the plant should have “closure” and never be subjected to evidence of its imprudence. Xcel has even argued that in spite of rules to the contrary, evidence brought by scores of savvy ratepayers at a Public Utilities Commission hearing last week should be stricken from the record.

All of this gives such a warm feeling, don’t you want Boulder to renew their franchise agreement with Xcel?

Governor Ritter has ventured to say that Comanche 3 is not Xcel’s best choice. But we put him into office for his New Energy Economy -- and part of that means saying no to a power plant that runs on rocks while exporting our wealth.

It’s not unheard of to stand up to a company saying, “Your venture is a mistake and we’re not adding a penny to its operation.” It’s the same courage mustered by the bride who’s paid dearly for a lavish wedding only to cancel because her groom resumed his addictive and risky ways.

It’s sad but it’s what real grown ups do. They make tough calls when terrific plans are proven to bring costly peril. The least Xcel could do, and the Governor should demand, is to delay the start of Comanche 3 and its rate hikes until many of Xcel's small coal plants have be retired, as they plan to do in the next few years.

People can alert the Governor of their concerns about Comanche 3 by calling his office at 303-866-2471

NREL’s history of fickle funding

2009-04-12T12:25:00.000-07:00

Anne B. Butterfield, April 12, 2009 (Daily Camera)

Announcing $1.2 billion of stimulus funding last month, Energy Secretary Dr. Steven Chu said that leadership in science is “vital to America’s prosperity, energy security, and global competitiveness.”

Dr. Chu’s aims are timely and focused, but let’s pause to look at some details because when we run billions through an out-sized federal bureaucracy, such as the Department of Energy, there is always a chance for error.

And we have little room for error in light of our nation’s dire situation. Late last year the International Energy Administration announced that they project an annual nine-percent decline in output from existing oil fields — that could be offset only a bit by hundreds of billions of sustained, annual investment in drilling capacity.

The oil gods are throwing us off a cliff.

And the coal gods are next in line. Reports by the United States Geological Survey and other agencies show us that our nation’s supply of cheap coal may last us as little as another twenty years. So coal is unlikely to help much as we electrify our transportation sector.

We are in a perfect crisis where hard choices must be made. We should start to divest from coal and oil, dead ends that they are, and run hard to non-food biofuels, advanced batteries, coal plants converted to burn beetle-kill biomass, and hundreds of gigawatts of wind and solar. And Lookie here –they’re all championed for large scale application by the researchers at NREL who helped bring the cost of wind energy down to being competitive with coal at 4-7 cents per kilowatt hour.

Does Dr. Chu’s disbursement through his Office of Science lend strength to NREL? Well, the publicity on DOE’s stimulus funds for science makes much to-do about solar and biofuels and other energy modes — Check.

Wind — No mention.

Houston, we may have a problem.

Or we can hope that Dr. Chu’s other $1.2 billion disbursement, through his Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, will make fine choices. But we can’t know; over two months after the stimulus bill was signed, this allotment remains undesignated.
We have an interest in sound funding and more jobs coming here to Colorado where our renewable energy policy leads the nation, brings new industry, and where NREL has made breakthrough energy solutions for 32 years. It has done this in spite of funding that has swung from boom to bust with the shifting winds of politics, energy crises and the parasitic power of earmarks.

The New York Times has often noted how NREL’s budgets have been hammered. Former Camera reporter Todd Neff investigated two years ago how NREL’s National Wind Technology Center has struggled with flat funding and outgrown facilities for years. Fortunately the wind site will soon receive two utility-scale turbines (1.5 and 2.3 megawatts) for installation and study, but this investment is in no way proportional to the challenge of a National Renewable Portfolio Standard or reaching 20 percent wind by 2030.

Today’s wind power is many ways mature, but new efficiencies need to be reached. It would be impossible for our nation to embark on ambitious installation plans without wind’s A-team being tooled up, staffed up and ready to test the new blades, gear boxes, and drive trains that will be needed by a nation crazed to back off of coal and oil.

Happily NREL’s main campus, where solar and bio energy are advanced with award-winning and record breaking results, has enjoyed new buildings and 400 new hires. “The main campus had been neglected for most of three years,” explained Bob Noun, NREL’s Director of External Relations. On the recent infusion of support, he added, “We’ve seen this before.”

“At the dawn of the renewable energy age we have here in Colorado the world leaders of the past 30 years,” says Noun, explaining the need for budgets that are much more stout and steady if the nation is to hope for transformative energy products and global competitiveness.

Tiny Denmark is the model to follow. Due to the ¤’70’s oil crisis and in contrition for their heavy coal emissions, Denmark committed strong public support to its fledgling wind power industry and now commands 38 percent of the world market. In the same period, our “strong on defense” president Ronald Reagan cut in half our renewable energy research and abetted wasteful use of energy; this has proven to be a betrayal of our national defense and global competitiveness. Now, finally, let’s get this right.

(Anne B. Butterfield is married to the Chief Engineer of NREL’s wind center.)

Wagons firmly circled: Governance at REA’s and Tri-State

2009-03-25T21:04:00.000-07:00

Anne B Butterfield, March 26, 2009

We don’t go around trying to restrict people’s autonomy do we? The inner libertarian balks at that. So why should Coloradoans support the Public Utility Commission in its quest to extend its regulatory reach to that big rural electrical company known as Tri-State?

The PUC is taking comments until April 6th on whether it should regulate the resource plans of Tri-State and any rural electric co-op directly involved in power generation. Tri-State is a wholesale power and transmission company which produces 75% of its power from coal plants and owns interest in a few coal mines. It is owned in turn by 44 rural electric associations, many of whose leaders like to smear renewable energy and efficiency. Tri State and the REAs are not regulated because of their supposedly democratic governance, being owned by their members.

The problem is that owner-members mostly don’t understand their status and don’t get involved in governance, allowing board members to grab plenty of power. Nationwide, REA governance is so bad that Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) wrote “Electric Co-operatives: from New Deal to Bad Deal?” On our neighbors here in the Front Range, Poudre Valley Rural Electric Association and Intermountain Rural Electric Association, here are a few stories.

The board of IREA spent $100,000 of member money to support the anti-global warming propaganda of Dr. Patrick Michaels, a professor of climate science at the University of Virginia. One-sided propaganda is richly provided on the co-op’s website and is always mailed to IREA members even though about half of them voted in favor of Amendment 37, Colorado’s renewable energy standard. The board also addresses its members as member-consumers, as if to de-emphasize their role as owners. The board doesn’t seem intent on honoring the members’ values and status, does it?

In its coup de grace of over reach, the IREA board in 2006 quietly committed $366 million of member money to a one-quarter share of the new Pueblo coal fired power plant known as Comanche 3, which will put the membership at risk if carbon costs get legislated. This move was such a shock to some members that they invented an advocacy group called IREA Voices; the utility tried to intimidate them with a cease and desist letter for using the term IREA.

Member-owners who wish to explore IREA’s governance can be met with a wall of opacity. Neil Priester of IREA Voices says that at annual meetings the board members don’t wear nametags and they sit up front with their backs turned to the audience. When he approached one of them, the board member said he was simply not interested in meeting with him.

PVREA is another fast growing co-op in the state, its membership having nearly doubled in 15 years. So it’s with alarm that its members should greet the new Articles of Incorporation which propose allowing the board to reduce its minimum number of members from eleven down to seven. This notion arrived in the mail this month without comment in a teeny change hidden nicely in several dozen mark-ups in a five-page, single-spaced document. Some think it’s a strategy to close down the diversity of the board just when the membership is at its largest, most diverse, and closest-ever to voting in new blood.

The president of PVREA’s Board, Keith Croonquist, has insisted that the small board option is for cost reduction. (Board members are paid about $20,000 each year.) How ironic it is for him to mention costs, since the PVREA board has spent up to $177,000 on an annual member shindig with live bands, paid speakers and lavish meals – and ballots mailed out only when specifically requested. This last foible was corrected at the request of a “new blood” candidate Steve Szabo who has been keeping PVREA on its toes.

The members of IREA and PVREA should resolve their governance issues by voting new blood into their boards in elections this month. With diversity, issues actually get debated rather than rubberstamped with the power of incumbency. As for the rest of us, let’s recall that the increasing coal emissions of our REA neighbors are indeed our business because they waft into our lungs, food supply and our children’s future. There is no reason for REAs to go on operating as de facto unregulated monopolies trying to hide behind filmy skirts of democracy.

Please write to the PUC by April 6th at puc@dora.state.co.us; the docket number is 09i-041e.

A new migratory pattern: Colorado youth go to Washington

2009-03-12T22:10:00.000-07:00

Anne B. Butterfield, March 12, 2009

Like swallows arriving at San Juan Capistrano from Argentina, thousands of young activists flew in from around the world to the Powershift Conference in Washington DC early this month. Since 2007 they have flocked there to nourish their minds, tell their stories and lobby their representatives to change the world toward sustainability and clean energy. After all, it’s their world, which is under the threat of acidic oceans and climate change, that they intend to secure.

Reaching over twelve thousand in number, they rivaled the attendance of the largest ever renewable energy conference -- WindPower ‘08 in Houston which drew 13,000, as well as the Solar Power ‘08 conference in San Diego which drew 12,000. They provided the political muscle to match what investors are offering on the business end. This is a blow-out for clean energy compared with the last Clean Coal Conference, in Clearwater Florida which drew 300 registrants.

Visualize college kids in standing room only for a panel talk on cap-and-trade vs. cap-and-dividend, or a session on natural gas supplies that went over time by 30 minutes due to prolonged questions, and full attendance all around was in action for the 9 am morning sessions on Saturday. This is motivation.

Beware of young people who become early birds in pursuit of their goals – they will not only get the worm, they are likely to skewer it. And from our laid-back nest of Colorado, we delivered 50 souls to Powershift to build up advocacy skills to match their proven energy.

Jesi Vandeputte, a Master’s candidate in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at CU, was galvanized by lobbying. “Representative Jared Polis was so in tune with our opinions. We were under-prepared, we realized, because we went to convince him to lead in a way that he's leading now. Our big take-home is he needs our help, so we are going to go back in the fall prepared to lobby some of his opponents.”

Victoria Watson-Nava, 23, a senior at CSU-Pueblo and an activist for a very Latino network, Democracia, added a deeply global perspective. “At Powershift we explored how racism, segregation, and lack of social justice have exacerbated the industrialization, capitalism, and individualism in our nation. There is great despair that exists between social classes; not only have we lost our connectivity to the Earth but also with each other. We have fallen into the addiction of filling our lives with consumer pleasure at the expense of exploiting other peoples, their countries and resources. When we throw something "away", we are throwing "away" people, a forest, a river, an ecosystem.”

Another such soul was Dan Omasta, age 21, who is involved in several environmental groups through the University of Colorado and beyond. He reflected measured excitement on the decision by House Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to switch the Capitol’s steam plant from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas:

“Although the plant will be switching to a less-polluting resource, natural gas is still a finite commodity and has significant consequences where it is extracted, including the Roan Plateau here in Colorado!”

The decision was reached before a planned protest was held at the plant, which proceeded with 2,500 protesters and no arrests. Dan Omasta said it symbolized more than a protest on one coal plant “it is a parable for the necessity to place a moratorium on all new coal plants -- and to stop the Comanche 3 plant about to open in Pueblo!”

When Colorado’s beloved Ken Salazar, now Secretary of the Interior, addressed the crowd and called for thousands of young people to “resurrect the treasured landscapes of America in a new student conservation corps like the world has never seen,” the room erupted with applause for almost two whole minutes, according to Omasta.

When Ken Salazar can bring down the house, you know the world has changed. The passion and vision shared by all at Powershift were palpable and contagious, with connections being forged among the generations.

As we have seen with the success of the Obama campaign, young people can and will spread the seed of new thought and energy into their parents’ homes and now the halls of Congress. And as we recall from the ‘60’s, those who oppose the young cohort carelessly can be met with something out of a Hitchcock film. The motivated young are not to be messed with.

The key speeches can be found at Jenkins-Sights and Sounds

Even coal is in for a revolution

2009-02-23T07:03:00.001-08:00

Anne B. Butterfield, February 22, 2009

Even in an uncertain world, you think you know a few things. You know that adjustable rate mortgages are the devil's playground and that a man who is kind to the waitstaff is the right kind to marry. And you know that the United States has two hundred years of coal and we will never be hurting over its price.

And on that last one, you would be wrong.

A trained scientist and a true contrarian at heart, boulder's own local activist Leslie Glustrom decided to check out those brave claims about how America is the "Saudi Arabia of coal," made by every politician and coal supporter (as if those two were fully separate), and above all, by the Energy Information Administration. She reported her findings in a paper posted at Clean Energy Action which planners, voters and consumers should see.

It turns about the EIA has been stating our nation's coal "reserves" strictly in terms of quantity. Jeff Goodell, author of "Big Coal," says this happened because "up (until) 10 years ago or so coal was viewed as a fuel of the past so no one really cared how much we had."

And the grasshopper said to the ant: Oops I could have done better planning.

The metric for coal that matters is "economic recoverability." It's the marketplace and not magic that gets the crumbly, heavy, non-liquid black rock of the mines and onto trains for delivery around the nation. And 40 percent of our nation's coal (or 20 percent of our nation's electricity) comes rumbling out of the Powder River Basin in Wyoming starting on one over-subscribed rail corridor.

Wyoming's coal outperforms the next best producer of West Virginia by a factor of three. About 15 states produce coal, but except for the top four, they all produce less than one-tenth of Wyoming's prowess. West Virginia peaked in production over ten years ago. Kentucky peaked 19 years ago, with its current yield off by a third. Pennsylvania peaked in 1918 and now produces 22 percent of its peak. Ohio peaked in the '60's, now producing less than half what it used to in high-sulfur coal which utilities do not prefer. Illinois produces high sulfur coal at about half the rate of its glory days in the '80's.

See a trend here? America's coal future depends on Wyoming, but all coals are not equal. Wyoming's sub-bituminous coal means it has less heat quotient than other coals, so more of it needs to be dug, transported and burned to make the electricity that's needed.

As if that weren't enough, over 70 percent of Wyoming's coal is under more than a 10-to-1 stripping ratio, meaning that 10 tons of rock need to be cleared for every ton of coal. That ratio is unattractive; for every doubling of overburden of rock over the coal, the more staff are needed -- by a factor of five.

These truths are readily available to thinkers who are willing to look past the EIA for information; Leslie Glustrom's findings are from a coal inventory report drafted by the Departments of Energy, Agriculture and Interior, and most stinging of all from the United States Geological Survey. It says that economic coal reserves of the Wyoming's PRB -- that portion which can be mined, processed, and marketed at a profit -- is 6 percent of the original resource total. That translates to about 20 years left of PRB coal produced and used as we know it, while elsewhere production peaks are leading steadily to valleys.

Oh but we can import coal from Brazil, some say. We can gasify it and send the electrons over transmission lines from Wyoming. These rescue plans leave the geologic mayhem out of sight and remind us that coal gained its hegemony quietly by hiding in impoverished, distant communities and is burnt on the outskirts of town where the powers plants' tall stacks can more thinly disperse the toxins.

With half of our power in this nation coming from coal, and here in Colorado up to 88 percent, we should be as alert to coal as we are to the creepy neighbor. If you turned on a light or ate out of a fridge lately, coal's as much a part of your life as your spouse.

As geologist Alison Burchell points out, this sobering news clarifies our need for efficiency, conservation and long sighted renewable-energy policies. It provides political figures with the cover they need to expedite our long overdue transition to a sustainable future.

High Flyers and the Commons

2009-02-12T20:12:00.000-08:00

Anne B. Butterfield, February 11, 2009 (NewEnergyNews)

Within days of the State of California sending out IUO checks in place of tax refunds, Nadya Suleman gave birth to octuplets. She already had six children under age six (one of whom is autistic), and all the 14 were conceived artificially. She is single and lives with her mother who recently declared bankruptcy and promises to vacate the scene when Nadya and the new ones come home.

Nadya’s “big gamble” as she calls it is rationalized strictly on her unresolved needs of her childhood. Oh, please. She will take help from church and friends, she admits, but can they agree to everything that’s in store? She says she will seek no welfare, which is very unlikely. Meanwhile, how do her fellow policyholders feel about her hospital bill of perhaps $3 million?

She is a freakshow, transfixing in her narcissism and acquisitiveness; an example of all of us in our wish to defy the laws of nature and fly high on fantasy or drugs (or IVF in this case), and then rationalize the costs to be felt by everyone.

She’s as all-American as the Masters of the Universe who blew out our banking system on their brew of risk-defying tricks: subprime mortgages, credit default swaps, securitized debt, all compounded by stratospheric executive compensation. Their scheme failed as surely as the wings of Phaeton, and when they came crashing down they asked for a bailout leading to even more bonuses. Freaks.

Nadya and the bankers are the most extreme ones that drive the “tragedy of the commons” in which exuberant actors pursue their self-interest past the point where the commons -- be it a pasture, the air, the river, or the banks -- can respond resiliently and profitably.

In the famous 1968 essay “Tragedy of the Commons” author Garrett Hardin, an ecologist and microbiologist, explored the various flows of impacts that happen when geometric rates of growth propel one species to dominate a commons. Short version: it spells doom, unless, for humans, economic and legal arrangements impose costs onto users and abusers.

Appealing to peoples’ conscience to trim their impacts on the commons is pointless according to Hardin; to do so just emboldens the high flyers to use the freed-up access. Conscience has a role in leading people to conserve energy in our tainted climate commons, (no one wants to burn coal or oil per se), but the use of conscience is a sucker’s game when applied to the mortgage lenders who were instructed to peddle subprime mortgages so their companies could stay competitive bundling them into securities.

No Chairman Greenspan, the market does not just self-correct, it also implodes.

Ethics didn’t entice Nadya Suleman. She thinks she’s pro life -- even though many of her children will be impaired by their birth drama and inevitable neglect. Other costs or regulations will need to be imposed for us to be sure there won’t be similar broods bound for a bailout.

To protect the commons, Hardin recommends mutual coercion, such as regulation, impact taxes, or the elimination of commons generally.

“Who enjoys taxes?” Hardin quips, “But we recognize that voluntary taxes would favor the conscienceless, so we support taxes and other coercive devices to escape the horror of the commons.”

Hardin’s work is enjoying a resurgence as a frame of a new economics which accounts for the laws of nature, known variously as "dynamic equilibrium," "steady-state" or "biophysical" economics. One leader in this new field is Boulder’s own Hunter Lovins, who teaches Ecological Economics. And it’s about time.

In cahoots with our rate of consumption, population growth worldwide is bringing commodities brokers and investment advisors to describe food and fuel scarcities as a function of planetary limit. Last year we paled at the news of a dead zone the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico where the Mississippi confers its chemically riddled waters from the corn fields of our heartland, which are growing not so much to feed people but cattle, on which we get heart disease, and to replace the oil we buy from overseas, for which we have militarized operations to protect from terrorists and even other buyers. You get the idea.

We’re being buffeted by coercions and it’s coming from the commons, instead of from our purposeful design. It’s time for attaching costs to those things that infect the vitality of our common life. Either that, or let’s hope for a plague.

Come on Baby, Sit by Me

2009-01-27T21:48:00.000-08:00

Come on Baby, Sit by Me
Anne B. Butterfield, January 25, 2009 (Daily Camera)

In Boulder we live in a sea of mostly white faces, and with over 70% of us voting for Obama in November, we helped make this Inauguration be a teeming sea of brown, deliriously happy faces. And in the midst of that national group hug, I was there.

In spite of growing up answering to monikers like “punkinhead”from the African Americans who took care of my family’s home, and going to school with many black students including our new president, my chances of being close with people of color have been the same as most whites’ -- few and far between.

So it was with excitement that I entered Reagan Airport and its sea of relaxed, happy, brown faces. I was giddy for their initiation to come with this Inauguration, but I was anxious whether the communing would be blunder-free.

To this day I wince at my blunder trying to befriend a strongly dignified black girl in 7th grade, whom I complimented as I might anyone my age: "Hey Gina you have weird hair". She replied icily that's the hair that black people have and strode away. I was mortified and never spoke with her again.

In Los Angeles in the 90’s I called out to a woman in a restroom who was heading into trouble; she shot me a dirty look and bustled by. I tapped her again, insistent.

“What?” she demanded.

“I am sorry -- but the back of your skirt is tucked into your panty hose!”

When she saw that all of her rear end was about to be sashayed through a large restaurant, she melted her hands onto my shoulders, saying, "Oh my honeychile, I am sorry!"

I have stayed leery of the trap door of misunderstanding that creaks beneath all people in inter-racial settings. So when the reservation lady at Super Shuttle at Reagan swooped down to pick up my coat where it had slid to the floor, a gesture that from a black person to a white person might seem a bit too servile, I was hopeful that the times had been a-changin’.

Gentleness among strangers kept coming through the Inauguration festivities as if the metropolis had been sprinkled with fairy dust. Going to a run-down part of DC for National Service Day, I was led nine blocks by a young white woman who I met on the bus. Then, waiting at the bus stop to return, I was exhorted by an older black man about the values he’d been teaching in his “hood”. To every black male passerby he bellowed, “To God be the Glory!”

On a previous night my friend Kellie and I landed up at the wrong Smithsonian building in search of that night’s ball, and in our fussing over finery forgot our papers. With much effort the staff tracked down our ball and when it was known to be several blocks away, a building engineer named Vaughn Judd offered take us there. We thought he would walk us a bit and point it out. No. He drove us right to the door in his outsized pick up truck.

On Inauguration, Day I spied a Metro seat next to a woman who had splayed out her belongings; I asked her about it, as it would be the last sit for a long day. Dressed in seven shades of red down to her oversized glasses, she said, “Come on Baby, sit by me.” She told me about her grandchildren, her health issues, her journey from South Carolina. I told her about mountaintop removal mining and the pollution that comes with flicking on the lights. She had me write down notes for her of my reminders.

Where we exited at L’Enfant Plaza, movement in the crush of bodies soon came to a halt. Fully packed trains sped through in search of space to unload. We were several thousand people jammed wall to wall in a dimly lit crypt. An announcement implored us not to push as there was a medical emergency ahead. Twenty minutes later no movement. A few began a chant of Let Us Go, and an elder man gave his sonorous voice to warn us to quell any sort of panic. A woman was led up beside me crying with chest pains. Another woman collapsed. An elderly woman fell into the track behind us. It was a full hour until we trudged up two stories worth of paralyzed escalator stairs to the open street.

Out on the Mall, the crowds were every bit as tight. But the air was open and the cold was tempered by our packed bodies. Men let women lean up on their shoulders, binoculars were passed around, and women took turns stepping up on barricades to gain height. I was completely unconcerned about my wallet in my pack on my back. Among the 1.8 million people there, no arrests came that day. Our numbers made for danger in the most packed spaces, but each person assured safety and welcome.

Elizabeth Alexander’s poem foretold the esprit de corps: “In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun…walking forward in that light.”

Hiding in plain sight: the guilt over our nation's management of coal ash waste

2009-01-13T21:22:00.000-08:00

Hiding in plain sight: the guilt over our nation's management of coal ash waste
Anne B. Butterfield, January 11, 2009 (NewEnergyNews)

As the nation wakes in a groggy haze in response to the coal ash spill at the Kingston plant in Tennessee, we slowly learn that it's not just the avalanche of coal ash pouncing on the unlucky that should hold our attention; it's also the ash-based heavy metals leaching quietly into ground and surface waters, at up to 70 sites over our nation, that call us to horror and action.

“The regulation of coal ash waste, known to be laden with toxins such as arsenic, chromium and more, has fallen through the cracks. In 2000 the Environmental Protection Agency leaned toward a moderate but helpful standard for regulation calling it ‘contingent hazardous waste.’ The EPA lurched back in response to industry attack that came because the waste can in some uses do real benefit and make real profit as a construction material. Now the states take care of all the regulation.”

Many state officials and the utility professionals which share in the "policing" of waste management have adopted a laissez-faire attitude that's laced with psychological denial, stupidity and even criminality.

All over our country, but especially in the Midwest and Southeast, coal ash is being dumped into open pits and quarries, unlined, often right at the water table. To save costs, coal ash is stored wet in above-ground impoundments allowing toxins greater leach effect. Many hazards have come from this shoddy and short-sighted stewardship.

The surface impoundment at Kingston was given jury-rig repairs when its earthen dam leaked in recent months and years, rather than being overhauled into dry landfill at greater expense. That expense would be less than a tenth the cost of the eventual catastrophic spill.

Jeff Stant, a noted geologist who's been tracking coal ash for years, has reported that officials in Montana purposefully choose wet storage for their coal ash knowing it would contaminate groundwater. They decided they would pipe in city water once residents got sick or complained.

Utility executives in Indiana tested water near an ash waste site near Town of the Pines in which the ash was mingling with the water table, They knew that water was toxic and filed the reports, but the state ignored the reports. The guilt was hiding in plain sight. Company memos revealed executives discussing how to conceal toxicity from residents.

The leach effect in nature can be orders of magnitude worse in nature than in the lab.

Zoologist Donald Cherry from Virginia Tech studied the interaction of coal ash on aquatic environments of three types in twenty states and found pollutants in groundwaters at hundreds and even thousands of times EPA's maximums. Even small amounts of selenium (10 mg per liter) can bio-accumulate up the food chain with fish species in Belews Lake in North Carolina dying off -- with the remaining survivors being either sterile or swimming along with S-shaped spines.

Here in Colorado, the Department of Public Health and Environment has been getting calls from all over the nation about our standards for coal ash storage, probably due to our state's reputation. Reports on the state's standards are hard to find on the Web and an investigation of Colorado's authority structure and standards for clean management of coal ash waste is in order.

We in Boulder can be pleased that our local plant, Valmont, stores its coal ash waste on site, dry, compacted into a glassy surface, and for the most part up to 60 feet above water level of nearby Legget Lake. A portion of the ash in the 45-acre landfill is very close to water level. The landfill is on top of a hard rock strata known as Pierre Shale, which likely protects deep groundwater but not Legget Lake itself. Xcel is responsible to test the runoff from the ash landfill.

The collapse of the Kingston ash impoundment is to coal ash management what the collapse of Lehman Brothers was to the era of the unfettered free markets. Sound federal regulation has been missing for too long. The party is over.

A return on investment

2009-01-05T21:19:00.000-08:00

A return on investment
Anne B. Butterfield, January 3, 2009 (Daily Camera)

This new year arrives doused in crises and scandals, but it is not without small signs of progress to address one additional gathering threat. That threat is a likely increase in the cost of coal-based electricity.
Power companies that use coal to generate electricity will face billions of dollars of new costs each year if new regulation is enacted over how they store the ashy remains of the black rock. The Christmas spill of a billion gallons of watery gunk laced with heavy metals that cloaked 300 acres in eastern Tennessee is a shameful mandate for new regulation. Though the Bush Administration stalled efforts to tighten rules on this waste management, utilities and ash recyclers are expecting new federal regulation.
So there really is no such thing as a free lunch; coal is slowly becoming as expensive as it is dangerous. And in Colorado, about 80 percent of our power comes from burning coal.

Coal ash spills waiting to happen -- cont'd below. (from a 2006 study - click to enlarge)

The good news that will help protect Colorado from price spikes comes from a concerted change of thinking about efficiency. This week, our state's largest utility Xcel announced plans to launch an aggressive efficiency program that will save up to 670 megawatts, or the equivalent of one large scale power plant. The plan includes demand side management which involves programming air conditioners to turn off briefly during peak demand periods with virtually no impact on comfort levels and big savings on usage. It can save up to $450 million of net economic benefits to customers, according to Xcel.

Coal ash spills waiting to happen -- cont'd from above. (from a 2006 study - click to enlarge)

And we can hope that the part of Colorado not served by Xcel will also see improvements in efficiency due to the expertise of Dr. Steven Chu, the new Secretary of Energy designate. He has directed the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which developed a lion's share of the efficiency technologies known to have yielded profound return on investment, like 40 to 1.
At this moment of cascading crises in our economy, we can use some that action: profound return on investment. How sweet the sound.

Mr. Secretary, we're watching you

2008-12-28T22:09:00.000-08:00

NewEnergyNews will end 2008 with a new feature. In addition to permanently posting columnist Anne Butterfield's contributions down the left column, her fine bi-weekly think-pieces will be posted in the main column to kick them off from now on.

Mr. Secretary, we're watching you
By Anne Butterfield
Sunday, December 28, 2008

As our new Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar will take a job that will test his fiber. He loves the Rockies and has protected Colorado's Roan Plateau from drilling. As a top water law expert, he has protected our state's water rights. Many champion his ability to protect our nation's resources which have been battered and insulted by the Bush Administration's campaign on behalf of industry.

However, Salazar does not have a spotless record. Along with voting against higher fuel efficiency for vehicles, he was also one of a handful of Democrats to vote against a bill that would require the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to consider global warming when planning water projects -- two very weird votes in light of important threats.

He also went out of his way to support the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as U.S. Attorney General and Gale Norton for Interior Secretary who both later stepped down during scandals.

The most likely explanation of these choices is that Salazar moonlights as a weather vane.

If he becomes Secretary, Salazar will have to stiffen his resolve and face an agency scalded by scandal for having dealt in sex, drugs and back door arrangements with the industries it is created to regulate. One such arrangement was the very recent rule change favoring industry on dumping mining debris in streambeds.

This month Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified to the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming to decry the Interior Department's recent rule change to make coal mining's worst practices fully legal. He flew over Appalachia to see the big picture.

"If people could see what I saw on that trip there would be a revolution. We are literally cutting down the Appalachian Mountains."

From RepMarkey via YouTube.

What Kennedy saw were the chalky-white remains of mountains blown away from their coal seams, 400,000 acres in all. To do this, the industry uses explosive power each week that equals a Hiroshima bomb, and draglines that stand 22 stories high and minimize the need for labor.

West Virginia's coal mining used to employ 140,000 union workers; now there are 11,000 workers left, very few in unions. With so few jobs there is little revenue to build up the local economies.

"Ninety-five percent of the coal in West Virginia is owned by out of state interests which are liquidating the state for cash, literally," according to Kennedy.

The economic truth does not stop mining supporters from killing the pets or sabotaging the vehicles of those who protest the mining, on the ruse of protecting "jobs." This truth did not stop Interior from ignoring the vast majority of 43,000 comments opposing the rule change proposed by industry to legalize the customary dumping of mining debris into streams.

Back in 2002, a group for Kentucky sued the coal companies before a conservative federal court judge named Charles Hayden, who asked, according to Kennedy, "You know this is illegal. It says so in the Clean Water Act. How did you write these permits to allow the companies to engage in this criminal activity?" The Colonel testifying for the Army Corps of Engineers answered, "I don't know your honor, we just kind of oozed into it."

Judge Hayden declared it all illegal and enjoined all mountaintop mining.

Two days later, according to Kennedy, lobbyists for Peabody coal and Massey coal met in the back door of the Interior Department with Gale Norton's first deputy chief Steven J. Griles, himself a former coal lobbyist, and they re-wrote one word of the Clean Water Act, "fill," to make it legal in every state to dump rock, debris, rubble, garbage, any solid material into any waterway without a Clean Water Act permit.

"All you need today is a rubber stamp from the Corps of Engineers, which in some districts you can get through the mail or over the telephone," said Kennedy.

Remember, this is the Corps of Engineers that Salazar voted to protect from having to consider climate change in their construction plans.

The fact remains that with his say-so, Salazar as Interior Secretary will determine the well-being of mountains and their streambeds all over the nation.

Coloradans, who clearly love mountains, should watch him like a hawk, because it is to us he will return should he wish to win an election again.

Canary in the Coal Mine

2008-12-13T21:38:00.001-08:00

Canary in the Coal Mine
December 13, 2008 (NewEnergyNews)
Anne B. Butterfield

A canary flies into an edifice of boldface type with various facts about coal, then falls splat to the ground. This is on the website of the Reality campaign which has been televising ads about the nonexistence of “clean coal”. The signature bird has an “x” for an eye to suggest, no doubt, being banged upside the head.

We get it: our reality is the canary in the coal mine.

Reality is also taking a beating from politicians representing us here in Colorado.

Last week, our Senator Ken Salazar and his brother Congressman John Salazar made reassuring remarks about the future of coal to the mining people of Craig up in Moffat County. Through Commissioner Tom Gray, the county offered a public outcry about how, with all the new Democrats in power in Washington, renewable energy was going to knock the stuffing out of coal’s domination in the electric power business – and that they in turn would “suffer”.

It is hard to see how an industry fueling half the nation’s electricity supply might suffer anytime soon, but if it does, the moral atrocity of mountaintop removal in Appalachia should end first. The people of Craig seem to be jumping to conclusions, with themselves mostly in mind.

Let’s talk about suffering. Polar bears are already drowning and starving as the sea ice they need to survive disappears. And small islands around the globe are predicted to be swamped soon by seas rising from global warming, triggered by atmospheric carbon levels as low as 400 parts per million. Our current level is 385 ppm; at 2ppm gain each year; that means less than ten years until islands like the Maldives become uninhabitable. When extreme weather renders coastal zones around the world uninhabitable, as happened in New Orleans, twice the population of the United States can face suffering. Consider the suffering when oceans become more acidic by absorbing CO2, with coral reefs and fisheries continuing to die off.

Let’s hope that the good people of Craig will think of suffering globally as they consider their own.

Because of the grim link between burning coal and the climate crisis, John Salazar reassured Moffat County by saying he wanted to make sure the federal government fully funds “clean coal” technology, which would inject captured, compressed CO2 miles underground. This is the “clean coal” technical system that is used at no power plant yet in the United States. It’s safe to say it won’t be broadly deployed soon enough to address the warming crisis or be much help to coal miners’ prospects.

It is ironic that John Salazar spoke bravely for clean coal, because just last month, he wrote to Governor Ritter about the well-founded panic of the people of Huerfano County where extraction of coal bed methane has led to explosions and water contamination. Until ordered to stop last year, the Petroglyph Company was pumping out ground water to get at the methane, which in turn seeped into wells and water lines. The seepage continues. John Salazar needs to reflect that the crisis in Walsenburg (and everywhere that new gas drilling has led to a rash of public health complaints) is what communities might face if injection of compressed CO2 is tried broadly. There are always mishaps when messing with geology, and when CO2 gets loose in concentrations it is toxic and lethal.

The Salazars’ assurances about coal’s long run viability through “clean coal” are in line with the contributions they have taken from the industry – over $90,000 for Ken the Senator, and $28,000 for John the Representative. While their totals are less than the worst, they are more than many senators’ from bigger coal states. The Udall brothers’ takes are $13,000 for incoming Senator Mark Udall, and $6500 for Representative Tom Udall. Campaign funds from the coal lobby can be tracked at Follow the Coal Money.

Emily Dickinson said; “Hope is the thing in feathers that perches in the soul.” If reality can be featured as a feathered being that is knocked senseless with an x for its eye, it can also seize on terrific, healing outcomes, flying to new heights. Surely our nation can decide that when it comes to coal it should no longer be simply burned, and burned away -- instead it should be transformed into steel and oh so many wind turbines.

Break aways:

When extreme weather renders coastal zones around the world uninhabitable, as happened in New Orleans, twice the population of the United States can face suffering.

It is hard to see how an industry fueling half the nation’s electricity supply might suffer anytime soon, but if it does, the moral atrocity of mountaintop removal in Appalachia should be first. The people of Craig seem to be jumping ahead fast, and with only themselves in mind.

Crash test dummies

2008-12-13T21:35:00.000-08:00

Crash test dummies
Anne B. Butterfield
November 16, 2008 (Daily Camera)

On Nov. 4, we the people threw off the chains of our racist past by electing Barack Obama. It's good to kick off an evil master -- but it's imperative to note that in this election we gave up racism more easily than our obedience to big oil and other big shots in the drama of crony capitalism. We've been flailed around like crash test dummies, asked to do what big oil and gas and the big three auto companies tell us.

Consider a few voter issues:

Last week Coloradans obeyed the $11 million ad campaign put forth by oil and gas companies to defeat Amendment 58, a measure in which our severance tax on oil and gas would no longer be offset by credits on property taxes. It was assailed by claims that the tax would be passed "straight through" to grocery bills and prices at the pump. It was never true. And in the off-chance that wholesale market would allow the small cost to bleed through to retail, the cost would have been well spent leveraging our soon-to-end fossil fuel economy toward a new clean energy economy. It went down by a 16 percent margin.

We were warned -- in a Camera opinion by former Boulderite and renowned oil researcher Antonia Juhasz, writing about California's Prop 87. Offered just two years ago, Prop 87 aimed to impose a small fee per barrel of oil drilled within that state and direct the funds to investments in alternative energy. Starting with a strong popular advantage, it lost by a 10 percent margin after a $100 million campaign funded by Big Oil.

How did our nation's most assertively green state succumb to the snake oil of Prop 87?

Happily, 24 months later, California saw through a ruse presented by T. Boone Pickens in Proposition 10 that would have made California sell bonds to subsidize the sale of cars and trucks powered by natural gas, a fossil fuel produced by a Pickens company. Pickens has been good at promoting wind energy and even scoffing at more drilling for oil, but Prop 10 nonetheless aimed to shift our automotive sector from dependence on one declining fossil fuel to another. Electrification of transportation continues to be the best move, especially for freight which needs to be reborn on a refurbished rail system.

Barack Obama has been reminding us that power never gives up without a fight, which we can see in these fights put up by fossil fuel interests. Recently also, the Big Three automakers have wielded their power in a way that begs new terms to describe stupidity. Denying the obvious signs that peak oil is upon us, the Big Three have perversely continued to badger Congress and the White House against higher CAFE standards, even litigating against states' clean car mandates. The money spent could have gone to innovation. General Motor could be profitable now had it not killed its popular electric car program in California in 2003. Instead, it is going belly up because suburbanites no longer want Suburbans.

We can't blame the United Auto Workers. In a poll in 2002, 80 percent of UAW households blew off industry fumes about higher CAFE standards costing jobs and adding hundreds to the price of cars. Most Michiganders and 84 percent of UAW households favored a new average standard of 40 miles per gallon by 2012. Why did elected officials crony up to big Auto and let Michigan and the whole nation down?

We the people have awakened to the benefits of a new energy economy, with virtually all Democrats, three-quarters of independents and 58 percent of Republicans indicating in a new Zogby poll that clean energy is important to lifting the nation's economy. Yet we are waiting for our leaders to do the right thing with the automakers' crisis and the climate crisis; we are even waiting for ourselves to get the courage to tax Big Oil so we can fund our future. It's time to tell these industries, "You're not the boss of me."

Needless markup

2008-11-17T22:39:00.000-08:00

Needless markup
Anne B. Butterfield
November 2, 2008 (Daily Camera)

This week the Republican National Committee opened a $5 million line of credit to support its senatorial candidates -- a real eyebrow raiser when seen against its choice on Labor Day to underwrite the $150,000 wardrobe for Gov. Sarah Palin, spent in high-end stores like Neiman-Marcus, which is widely known as Needless Markup.

If you like Sarah Palin's campaign wardrobe, you'll really like John McCain's energy plans. In it he always prioritizes nuclear energy, "clean coal" and offshore drilling. Each of these presents a most costly energy resource as well as a high risk of not delivering as hoped (kind of like his running mate).

The core flaw in McCain's energy scheme is his acceptance of industry's self-serving premise that our demand for energy shall grow by 30 percent in the next 20 years. No independent researcher writing about our nation's transition to clean energy omits efficiency and conservation as crucial to solving our predicament. To accept growth of demand is to consign us to a needlessly tough challenge while insulting the example of frugality set by our parents and grandparents during the wars of the 20th century. Do some of our leaders think we cannot do better?

McCain wants to build 45 new nuclear plants, which Bloomberg has conservatively estimated to cost $315 billion (or up to $540 billion). We the taxpayer will be on the hook for the loan guarantees for those, as banks will not invest in nuclear plants without guarantees, and they are estimated by the Government Accounting Office to have a failure rate of 50 percent. So for McCain's initial push of 45 plants, we might bail out $126 billion on the low end. The plants could not under the best of circumstances deliver power before 10 to 15 years' effort from permitting to final inspection.

"Clean coal" is another siren song. On account of high costs, developers keep canceling the high-tech precursor coal plants (known as IGCC) that are "carbon capture-ready." Nine such plants were canceled in 2007 including the flagship "Future Gen." The technical and siting challenges of "clean coal" promise roll-out delays that will make new nuclear seem easy.

McCain's proudest energy directive, "Drill, baby, drill!" would put our nation's coasts at risk for the sake of new oil that will go onto the open market where the highest foreign bidder can push the price out of reach.

When it comes to oil, we Americans can only play a sucker's game, because we have no leverage over supply. Plugging in electric vehicles, on the other hand, gives us access to myriad energy resources through electricity, which is the most efficient delivery system in every way, at about 75 cents per gallon equivalent. Such choices can include roof top solar which is true independence.

Barack Obama's energy plan favors aggressive expansion of wind, solar, plug-in electric hybrids, efficiency and conservation in every sector, plus new drilling if coupled with higher CAF standards, and new nuclear and "clean coal" as lesser solutions. That's a cost-effective list.

This week in Denver, Boulder's own Claudine Schneider (former congresswoman of Rhode Island and author of our nation's first efficiency policies) led a conference full of energy executives to chant the mantra "least cost energy" as the best way to address our energy crunch. She dismisses nuclear energy as our most expensive option, adding, "Given our financial constraints, it's imperative that policy makers guide policy with principles such as 'Least Cost' and 'Life Cycle Cost' -- rather than which industry will line some pockets. Energy efficiency and site-appropriate renewables are guaranteed to deliver more power for the buck."

Getting energy costs down soon will be hard and take new thinking -- but that's exactly what Americans have shown at their times of greatest challenge. This is no time to choose the leader who is lured, time and again, by pretty women and expensive, old-fashioned plans.

The flap about 58

2008-11-01T07:45:00.000-07:00

The flap about 58
October 19, 2008
By Anne B. Butterfield

The televised arguments about Amendment 58 are have been noisy about semantics: It's a new tax, No it removes a subsidy! It is all a poor effort to clear up the tangled severance and tax credit arrangement bequeathed to us by legislators of 1977. Governor Dick Lamm tried to get a severance tax through the legislature, which is standard to charge to an industry which permanently removes a mineralogical resource from a state. The Republican dominated Senate favored the oil and gas industry and killed it, but in 1977 lawmakers sat down with industry and crafted a compromise in which what they took with one hand (the severance tax) they gave back with a credit on the local property tax (to the tune of 87.5 percent).

Sausage anyone?

Amendment 58 is a sound effort to restore state tax policy back to equal rates of taxation, allowing communities to set their local taxes according to their values and needs and it will help bring Colorado's severance tax revenues up from the bottom of the list of big oil and gas producing states.

Nonetheless big oil and gas companies and their front groups have advertised scare tactics such as an alleged direct pass-through of this severance tax onto to our utility bill enabled supposedly by the Energy Commodity Adjustment you see on your Xcel bill. That's lying with facts taken out of context. The ECA doesn't kick in until after Xcel feels the price change, and prices are set regionally and nationally. Two thirds of the natural gas drawn out of the crust of Colorado goes to a market stretching from Ohio to California, and what stays home also is set on a regional index. There is no direct path between the restored severance tax and what we pay in our consumer expenses.

The ads have also shown people complain about their gasoline expenses being raised by the small tax increase of Amendment 58. Our oil products in to Colorado come mostly from the surrounding region, and prices paid at the pimp are set at on a national level which consider factors like refining capacity and more. To suggest there's a direct link between 58's severance tax and our price at the pump is like suggesting you can raise the water level in the local river by tossing in a few stones.

Amendment 58 is a way to tax an industry so that no one else pays the tax but the industry itself. That's why ExxonMobil, Chevron, EnCana, Anadarko and others have amassed $10 million to try to defeat this measure which may cost them $300 million per year and scarcely feel it. Remember, these big companies are bound by legal tradition to maximize profits even if the people at the helms of these companies see real value for Colorado in Amendment 58.

The opponents also complain that producers will be shopping around. They won't. In oil and gas markets impacted by unprecedented demand for product coupled with declining reserves world wide, big producers don't move equipment that's installed over productive wells. The producers will stay where the fossil fuel is coming out of the ground. And Colorado is sure to enjoy a boom particularly in natural gas production for years to come.

So we have an opportunity; let's make hay while the sun is shining and pass Amendment 58 to leverage money for our kids' educations. The natural gas and oil that we use today is fossil fuel that our children will not be able to use at all. This is the most important fact we need to face. As that resource leaves the ground we should leverage that economic activity by transferring value to resources which are renewable -- our kids' minds, wildlife viability and renewable energy that will replace fossil fuels when they are gone.
And that day is coming.

A fine source of analysis is at the Web site of the Bell Policy Center.

Hip towns and a clever measure

2008-10-18T21:59:00.000-07:00

From Anne B. Butterfield
Hip towns and a clever measure
October 7, 2008

We in Boulder have so many reasons to see Berkeley, Calif. as our rival; in worldclass research and education, in natural beauty and liberal views bordering on wackiness, and for leadership with new ideas. And now the rivalry comes down to Boulder's vote coming up to allow property owners to finance green improvements on their properties with county bond money, and to pay the debt through their land tax bill. Pretty clever: no taxes, low interest, low risk, low or no money down, lower utility bills and the loan goes with the property.

The concept was first dubbed "the Berkeley financing plan" for the idea that was approved by Berkeley's council just 11 months ago. Berkeley's Mayor Tom Bates received hundreds of phone calls from around the world to inquire about it, and Boulder's County Commissioner Will Toor immediately received 17 emails about it. Many dozen cities are carefully watching Berkeley's progress, and Boulder is jumping in to join its western twin through the ballot issue cleverly called 1A.

Voters, please memorize this drab little name, 1A (picture the kid who sits in the front of the class and brings an apple for the teacher), because that item will be near the bottom of our unusually long ballot this November. If it passes we stand to join Berkeley in leading the nation in cutting back our use of fossil fuels.

And 1A is happening in the nick of time. The fuels that power and heat our homes (coal and natural gas mostly) are under severe market and production pressure, with prices rising steadily.

A senior geoscientist who has testified on the natural gas market to Colorado's Public Utility Commission, Dave Hughes explains that our natural gas today comes out of the earth from about three times as many drilling rigs as was needed ten years ago for about the same amount of gas. And those rigs cost up to $10 million each. Our current state of production is widely called "treadmilling" -- meaning we're working harder for the same production. Just last winter, the price on natural gas nearly doubled. Hughes says, "prices will be volatile and upward moving for the foreseeable future."

In coal, we can see extreme increase of demand. On the global market coal has doubled in price in the past three years, with India and China both producing heavily as well as importing more. In the United States we are producing and consuming heavily but the energy content of our coal is decreasing so we should not be surprised that utilities have paid more for coal for seven straight years, with the price of coal futures skyrocketing in 2008.

And such prices get handed straight through to us the ratepayers through a little rule called the energy commodity adjustment, or ECA. Just this summer the ECA increased from under four cents to just under five cents per kilowatt hour, translating to about a 10 percent increase in the average bill -- in three months. Imagine that keeping up. This is the type of financial havoc that can be pushed back by adding new windows, insulation and maybe some solar panels onto one's home or business.

Spin and corporate self-interest are dominating the national discussion of our energy and climate security, with T. Boone Pickens backing a plan that's just wacky to natural gas experts like Dave Hughes; and now a group called " Lights out in 2009?" warns illogically about more brown outs which they claim can only be cured by building 120 gigawatts of new capacity. In the face of this noise, passing 1A will provide a high quality investment to a recovering bond market and a steady path real to energy solutions for Boulder. Thanks, Berkeley.

Cheney in a chignon

2008-10-07T19:56:00.000-07:00

From Anne B. Butterfield
Cheney in a chignon
Sunday, September 7, 2008

With intense fanfare, crowds at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul roared "Drill here! Drill now!" Some wore hardhats and safety vests emblazoned with images of caribou nestling up to pipelines. It was a drilling cult festival with Gov. Sarah Palin, her hair done up in a high, puffy chignon known as a beehive, as their newly crowned princess.

John McCain was just this guy they could interrupt during his speech to keep up the roar for more drilling.

When it comes to oil that lady is Dick Cheney in a chignon. She tackled big oil in Alaska by threatening to evict major companies from their leases because they had sat on them fruitlessly for decades. She then slapped a windfall profit tax on them and rejected their plans to own the new natural gas pipeline.

Palin's colleagues have worried that she drove too hard a bargain, making it not profitable enough for the companies which can build big enough to draw out large supplies, and which also require high profits to stay in the high risk ventures. But Queen Sarah has also given large incentives to drill for more oil, up to half a billion in "contribution" from Alaska to the company winning the license.

Thomas Freidman of the New York Times sums it up dryly, "Palin's much ballyhooed confrontations with the oil industry have all been about who should get more of the windfall profits not how to end our addiction."

He's right. Palin's windfall profit tax has added $1,200 into the pocket of each Alaskan to help them meet oil prices, which is how many Alaskans still tragically heat their homes. Even Palin's Republican critics have complained this rebate provides no incentive to economize or make changes.

The handouts are cash in hand for Alaskans so they can stay committed to carbon-based fuels, and no renewable portfolio standard exists in Palin's state. On the up side, the state has created a weatherization rebate and programs to promote efficiency. To serve her cities and remote villages, Palin should use every legislative tool of Colorado's to reap the state's rich wind energy, fast.

If you put together Palin's record with McCain's you get bats in the belfry: tax incentives and gifts for fossil fuels as well as high consumption of same, but no tax credits for renewable energy, and a bunch of technical lies or ignorance. Like McCain, Palin is woefully out of date, dismissing alternative energy solutions as "far from imminent and would require more than ten years to develop."

She's got it backwards. The new sources of fossil fuels take serious time to get to market, and wind turbines are the fastest way to get new megawatts onto the grid. A drive on I-80 through Iowa will surprise any regular driver (like your humble scribe) in its town of Adair which has been transformed in the 31 days of this August with 11 new wind turbines, or a megawatt a day.

Our panhandle prophet T. Boone Pickens has paid a bundle in television ads to remind us that the fast way out of our energy crunch is with wind and natural gas to power homes and cars. On oil, he drawls: "Drill, drill, drill but the debate misses the point -- you're still dependent on oil." He knows that any effort to enable oil at the center of our lives is fooling around.

In spite of delivering product a good ten years from now, Palin's new pipeline is in fact a boon because natural gas, the cleanest of the fossil fuels, can provide the quick-start reserve power that partners well with the variability of wind and solar on the grid, and it can power existing, converted cars. Natural gas is one key lubricant of our energy transformation.

Palin has contributed to the future of energy, but overall she's favoring the past as she does with her hairstyle. And John McCain is still muttering about nuclear energy even as the technology for "new nuclear" has been stayed for lack of hundreds of design certifications and always has been the slowest to install. Nuclear and its party date clean coal are as slow and unpromising as John McCain's athletic future. It you want fast results, focus on wind and natural gas, and tell the Governor of Alaska.

Don’t tick off the blonde

2008-09-08T16:22:00.000-07:00

From Anne B. Butterfield

Don’t tick off the blonde

August 10, 2008 (Daily Camera)

This week we were reminded not to pick on the blonde. She might, like sleeping beauty, wake to realize she has something to say and, lookie here, she can say it to a bank of cameras.

We first learned this from Princess Diana who knew she could get cameras to follow her anywhere, and she led them to the landmines of Africa, revealing the ravaged lives of innocent civilians. Her efforts resulted, after her death, in the signing of the Ottowa Treaty to ban landmines.

Early on, Diana was widely seen an imbecile, but by the end with her brilliant use of publicity she spanked the House of Windsor.

Paris Hilton may be smartening up likewise with a comic video launched this week at the expense of John McCain whose recent ad tried to insult Barack Obama by lumping him with celebrities like herself and Britney Spears. And lo, Paris the impish heiress pushed back, showing McCain as "the oldest celebrity alive," replete with rotting face. Then, to everyone's amazement, she dissected energy policy.

Many thought Paris did a fine job of discussing policy. Actually, she got the sequence backwards. Her scheme foresaw hyper-efficient vehicles coming to our rescue after new oil might flow from new, limited offshore drilling. In reality hybrid and electric car technologies are on the rise right now, and we can't wait for new oil to arrive as a pretext to step up our efficient technologies as well as our mass transit.

If we can get new oil to flow in reasonably safe ways from domestic sources -- great, bring it on -- but it better go into cars that get over 100 miles per gallon. Our use of oil from any source should be as cleverly efficient as Paris's peekaboo swimsuit.

Stretched like linguini upon a plastic chaise lounge to discuss energy policy, Paris is living up to my long-held view of her potential. She should use her campy comedic ways as well as her platinum card contacts to speak out about energy and climate for the sake of her family's fortune which is tied up in beachfront properties around the world. A room at the Hilton would be hard to enjoy at several hundred dollars per night when high tide is lapping around the legs of the concierge desk.

If Paris wants to get back in the good graces of her granddaddy Barron Hilton (who disinherited her last year for her juvenile antics), a fruitful path might be by inventing a joint effort between the hotel industry and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder (note to Paris: it's also headed up by a man named Barron). For the lack of a measly half-a-million dollars per year in funding, NCAR just shut down a program that focuses on strengthening poor countries' abilities to forecast and withstand droughts and floods stemming from climate change. Yet, with 630 hotels in the spectacular settings most threatened by climate change -- from Quito and Cameroon to Algeria and Abu Dhabi -- Hilton Hotels is uniquely positioned to need climate change forecasting and help its immediate and very poor neighbors as it helps itself.

In lobbying for such a cause Paris could fly around the world in all manner of skimpy and glorious attire and get it photographed for Vogue. A girl can't rely just on comedy web sites to make a difference in the world. But using any of these tools is nothing Princess Diana wouldn't do.

Buying us time on global warming

2008-08-10T21:52:00.000-07:00

From Anne B. Butterfield

Buying us time on global warming

July 27, 2008 (Daily Camera)

For those who seriously worry about the twin threats of climate change and ocean acidification and pale at the thought of costly geoengineering schemes to save the planet, a powerful and cost effective form of relief is in the works. And like Rolaids, it comes in a simple seven letter word: Biochar.

Now all the buzz in gardening blogs, biochar (aka char or agrichar) is studied in about a dozen institutions around the world as a soil amendment to enhance moisture retention and productivity for our overworked agricultural soils. It's an old practice, dating back to pre-Columbian Indians who charred their trees and organic waste and buried it in the poor soils in the Amazon basin. Now seven-thousand years later, the black "Terra Preta" soils still yield high fertility with a carbon content of 9 weight-percent compared with neighboring soils having only 2 percent or less.

Applied globally and organically, the ramifications of agrichar for our food-stressed, toxified world are immense. The practice may end the use of costly fossil fuel based fertilizers whose run-off has caused a dead zone the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico. Crop yields could rise by 20 percent. Most tantalizing, but still under study, is the potential for a scaled up agrichar practice to be a carbon sink. With the burial of carbon in this persistently stable form, plus its tendency to attract and bond with carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, plus the resulting heavier plant growth, agrichar could capture nearly twice our current annual emissions from fossil fuels (5.4 billion tons per year) while creating bio-oil for our projected demand for renewable fuels by 2100. (Source: Scientific American May 2007)

Pragmatically, this agricultural and bio-fuel scheme has challenges. We need to assess what agrichar would do over the long term to our foods. Also, we need policy on how to find large amounts of dead biomass for feedstock, lest we deface our forests to run our cars. Also, the ashy char coming from bio-oil production is not as effective at storing carbon and enhancing soils as char made at low temperature, so are we to choose again between great market approaches or showing loving kindness for the Earth?

Enter stage west, my friend, our local geologist, Alison Burchell. Three years ago she tripped on a rock near a Silverton mine reclamation area and tumbled into a nest of loamy soil topped with ferns, mosses, mushrooms and trees -- a Shangri-la amid the dry grass and barren tailings piles. Digging in and testing her samples Burchell found bits of biochar left over from ancient forest fires. She had landed in a natural biochar lab, and it was sequestering carbon to over 30 weight-percent; that's three times what the agrichar experts are claiming for their niche of this emerging market.

With partners at three federal agencies plus experts such as Cornell's soil scientist Johannes Lehmann, Burchell has been advancing research on her scheme of Natural Terrestrial Sequestration (NTS) for reclaiming mining areas here in the Rockies where certain of our volcanic soils present a "secret recipe" for drawing more carbon into soils than noted anywhere else. The total sequestration that Burchell suspects could be achieved through NTS (applied to mine areas, forests and agriculture) in the American west could be 15-30 weight-percent. That represents one or two of the so-called "wedges" coined by Socolow and Pacala in their seminal work on climate mitigation.

With carbon trading likely in the near future, states like Colorado could make money enriching its climate-stressed soils.

This ministry to help the Earth do what it can is what Burchell calls "geomimicry." It may be labor-intensive, but it's not unsophisticated or unmechanized, and the idea of widespread NTS and agrichar brings images of a revitalized agrarian age that could slowly reverse the legacy of centuries of coal mining. Logically, Burchell is also sketching out plans to help heal the wreckage left by mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. Not bad for a penitent planet.

Anne Butterfield has known Alison Burchell for a year of watching her give papers and talks on NTS.

Hint from Heloise – It’s the pH, stupid!

2008-07-27T20:48:00.001-07:00

From ANNE B. BUTTERFIELD

Hint from Heloise – It’s the pH, stupid!

July 13, 2008 (DAILY CAMERA)

Let's say you are flat-out opposed to the notion that human activity is warming the climate. And let's say that somehow your view gets vindicated as the objective truth.

Then there's no need to shut down any coal plants, right?

Wrong. We still have to shut down coal plants whether or not they are heating our globe, because atmospheric CO2 is poisoning our oceans through a chemical pathway that's devoid of mystery or controversy; it's called ocean acidification.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has estimated that the oceans have absorbed 118 billion metric tons of CO2, about half of the total we've released into the atmosphere, with 20 to 25 million more tons being added daily. While this has guarded us from worse climate impact, the absorbed CO2 has lowered the pH of ocean water a tenth of a unit. The oceans are roughly 30 percent more acidic now than has been true for millions of years, before our species started to specialize in transferring geological carbon into a gas.

Marine biologists are alarmed that sea creatures will not adapt to the sudden chemical change of their world as the oceans become progressively more acidic. Down the road this new seawater will prevent sea life from forming the calcium compounds needed for vertebrae, shells, plankton, and coral. Shells have literally dissolved off the backs of organisms under the ocean conditions predicted for 2050. Ocean water pH may drop catastrophically in a few decades, not centuries.

As sea life populations collapse they will be replaced by weeds and jellyfish, yielding ocean life composed mostly of slime.

It sounds like science fiction except that it's not fiction. "Unlike the situation with other aspects of climate change, there is no controversy over ocean acidification," writes Adrienne Sponberg of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. Also self-evident is the traffic jam effect: the acidity is most intense at the oceans' lit up surface, which is where the edible goodies like shrimp, crab and lobster live.

The science is down to earth; even non-science majors can grasp the chemistry in the kitchen. Club soda, which is CO2 in water (aka carbonic acid), is great for getting stains out of carpets. This acid can be compared with vinegar, the kind you eat in your salad, which can in an hour cut through the shell-like calcium gunk that lines the saucers under our house plants. Or, consider sandstone patios that are marred by lime deposits that rise up like dandelions in the spring. A weak solution of hydrochloric acid (and water) that you can find at any hardware store gets it off -- but if you need it to work really fast, mix a tiny bit of hydrochloric acid into club soda. The bubbles attack the calcium aggressively.

With terms like carbon forcing, isotopes, volcanic and solar activity, apogees, perigees and cosmic rays all taking part in a complete debate of climate change, most of us trying to figure it out realize, it's too hard. As parents and citizens we are confronted with the call to respond to truly elite knowledge and we are outdone, like Indiana Jones cornered by a sword master majestically showing off his skill.

But Indiana's got a gun and uses it, cutting through the foe's sophistication with blunt force. That's what ocean acidification does for our understanding: it's a conceptual short cut that tells us bluntly that while we "can debate climate change," we can't adapt to the loss of our oceans' food supply. (Nor can we risk topping off the oceans' carbon sink services.) When it comes to ocean acidification at it fullest extent, there are no upsides, no mystery, no controversy, and no room for failure in how we act.

Nukes: the position ridiculous and the expense damnable

2008-07-15T21:38:00.000-07:00

From ANNE B. BUTTERFIELD

Nukes: the position ridiculous and the expense damnable

June 29, 2008 (DAILY CAMERA)

"The nuclear power that we have invariably gotten from the Washington sausage machine demands licenses without an impartial licensing process, public acquiescence without public involvement, spent fuel without a waste repository, multi-billion dollar projects without analysis of alternatives, nearly separated plutonium (per the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership) without adequate safeguards -- in short, a renaissance without masterpieces." -- Peter A. Bradford, former Commissioner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and senior utility commissioner. June 2007.

A vocal group of people in Boulder, and columnist Bob Greenlee in particular, have been crying out for a nuclear energy renaissance to stop the flow of carbon emissions now heating our globe. Some of these proponents even rant: "Anyone who doesn't want nuclear energy shows that they aren't serious about climate change."

Nuclear power has no carbon emissions! It's proven, and safe! Uh, well, never mind the oil-intensive efforts of mining and reprocessing uranium, or the chlorofluorocarbons coming out of refinement, or the transport of waste out to Yucca Mountain for burial.

Do we have mad hatters opining on mercury here? Why do conservatives like those at the Heritage Foundation complain about the subsidies going in to renewable energy like wind and solar, but love nuclear energy, which is nothing if not a pathway to socialized energy?

And the costs and subsidies of nuclear energy need to be weighed. The Economist Magazine observed, "Nuclear power, once claimed to be too cheap to meter is now too costly to matter." This riposte came out before the recent cost escalation of power plant construction as cement, steel and copper skyrocketed. Nuclear Engineering International Magazine published construction costs for nuclear plants ranging from $1,400/kw up to $6,000/kw installed.

The electrical power from nukes has been subsidized in recent years between 1-5c per kwh, and in 2005 it was raised to 5-9c per kwh for new plants. These new subsidies (along with loan guarantees that protect the Wall Street investors from construction delays and run ups) still do not entice investors such as Warren Buffet who recently got out of a nuclear project because it did not make economic sense. Buffet likes to invest in true free market scenarios, eschewing industries like the airlines, which are hammered by costs run up by regulation and unions.

Our local Rocky Mountain Institute issued an insightful report, "Forget Nuclear" revealing that what really matters is the most affordable way to displace coal power. Nuclear ranks sixth out of the seven options in the study, the most cost effective ones being end-use efficiency and recovered heat cogeneration. The cheaper modes (wind, gas turbines, cogen etc.) are more quickly deployed than nuclear, also they do not demand the excessive water of nuclear energy. Just last year the drought in the Southeast caused reactors to be shut down temporarily in Alabama and North Carolina for lack of cooling water.

Dr. Marty Hoerling of NOAA has outlined the high likelihood of long range drought afflicting the West as the planet warms. With our sun and wind and great technologies like thermal storage for dispatchable solar power, I don't see how we can justify nuclear here. Some complain that CSP's storage is not proven -- but it's certainly more proven than nuclear waste management.

Peter Bradford says it best: "Those who assert, 'Nuclear energy just may be the energy source that can save our planet from catastrophic climate change,' are inviting us into a dangerous la-la land in which nuclear power will be oversubsidized and underscrutinized while more promising and quicker responses to climate change are neglected."

The RMI study can be read at Rocky Mountain Institute and a complete report on subsidies can be downloaded from EarthTrack.