energy

Walk down the street of any community in America and look up - what do you see? A mass of tangled wires that comprise the high-voltage transmissions lines of the nation's power grid. If you're like most people, the wires are almost invisible to you in everyday life -- the only time you might notice them is when there's a down power line after a massive thunder storm. But the idea of buying electricity that has been stored and then transmitted over hundreds of miles of power lines by a monopoly power provider (i.e. your local utility) is, quite frankly, anachronistic.

While a number of leading technology companies (IBM, Cisco, HP) have launched impressive Smart Grid initiatives, the broader public still doesn't really understand why the "Smart Grid" is so important to our nation's energy future. IBM has been somewhat successful in explaining the concept via its Smarter Planet initiative, but the concept is - I'm sorry - still a bit too wonkish for most people. (It's a bit like trying to explain Quantitative Easing to investors concerned about their portfolios - they know the concept is important, but their eyes glaze over as soon as you start mentioning the finer points of monetary policy.) So what would it take for the concept Smart Grid to really take off in the public mainstream?

I recently became acquainted with the work of Danny Harvey, Prof. of Geography and a climate scientist at U. Toronto. Over the last few years, Danny has been putting together a large-scale energy plan that might be called a Renewable Electron Economy, to which a portion of this website is devoted. I believe Danny’s work is invaluable because he presents a great deal of detail about a wide range of technological solutions and also links these to climate scenarios.

A couple weeks ago, I sketched out an Oil Independence Plan for the United States that was based on a combined move to more efficient uses of petroleum as well as a much more aggressive move to oil- (and natural gas-) independent infrastructure, than is currently proposed in existing legislation in the US Congress. [Since posting that plan, Craig Severance has written an equally ambitious and more detailed plan which can seen here.

In the first part of this piece, I discussed how the fractured structure of cap and trade is either non-functional or marginally functional.  In the second part, I pointed out how cap and trade, due to its structure, is largely non-responsive to the ethical power of the climate action movement and concerned political leaders. Here I offer a context within which individual effective policy instruments can fit together.

In the first part of this post, I outlined how the components of cap and trade don’t work together to cut emissions.

2. Cap and Trade’s Perverse Ethics Threaten Climate Policy Effectiveness

In this 3-part post, I will outline how cap and trade’s composite structure contains within it fault lines that help defeat its and the climate action community’s goals.  In this first part, I will sketch out the components of the cap and trade hybrid

I've been trying over the past few days to find some Hopenhagen in Copenhagen — that is, to see some positive outcome to the COP15 climate summit just concluded. The two-week event ended with a whimper, not a bang, a not-altogether-surprising conclusion to an overhyped event in which all parties had anticipating the entire world coming together to solve a single, critical issue affecting — well, the entire world.

Here is one not commonly known fact, we know massive data center use up tons of energy just for cooling, in any typical data center only 40-45% of energy use is for the actual computing -- the rest is used mostly for cooling down the servers. Data centers' emissions of carbon dioxide have been running at around one third of those of airlines, but are growing 10% a year and now approach levels of entire countries such as Argentina or the Netherlands.

Our world these days seems to be a succession of forks in the road, points at which decisions need to be made about which pathway we collectively must take. In nearly every case, there's an unsustainable "business as usual" scenario (often shortened, unappealingly, to BAU) along with one or more alternatives.