Blowin' in the wind

Sandy has me inspired this morning as I nibble my nails and nervously watch over my east coast friends in a virtual sense. A monster storm for Halloween is as scary as you can get.

In addition to great aunts and uncles, future potential in-laws, overseas visitors, friends who are moving, and cousins galore, I've been worried about something else too - windmills. To be specific, off-shore windfarms along the Eastern US seaboard, one of the most recent energy deus ex machinas widely hailed in the popular media as potentially generating enough power to satisfy all coastal demand and generate even more economic benefit. (Whether single source generation of the entire demand is wise is another discussion, and generally one where researchers and policy wonks take a more conservative view than the pundits.)

In fact, a huge consortium of 47 organizations, led by the National Wildlife Federation, recently issued the The Turning Point for Atlantic Offshore Wind Energy: Time for Action to Create Jobs, Reduce Pollution, Protect Wildlife & Secure America's Energy Future report, backing up the media hype to a large extent, and the DOI has set aside a large swath of US territorial waters for a large scale project.

The talking heads seem to agree that government support for off-shore wind development is key to overcoming obstacles, and this makes a great deal of intuitive sense as we are talking about activity occurring in US territorial waters rather than within the landscape of individual states. Contending with international law of the sea regulations and conventions could pose additional challenges, while from an economic standpoint, backing development of 140,000+ large scale wind turbines requires identifying both buyers and investors, and a lot of them.

Domestic regulations pose challenges as well, with overlapping jurisdictions and complex permitting requirements posing potential obstacles as the nation seeks to balance protection of coastal and marine wildlife with economic and energy security. Indeed, some might argue that the very complexity of the system and the delays this causes acts as a caution-signal, slowing development and allowing time to protect these resources, albeit also grinding some projects to a complete halt. In turn, speeding up the process in the interests of economic efficiency and predictable outcomes for investors could cause such concerns to be bypassed without sufficient scrutiny. The Cape Wind project, which has overcome many of these regulatory hurdles, could be an interesting demonstration of how these challenges play out.

In terms of existing examples, many of the potential obstacles and rewards have already been demonstrated by European offshore wind farm projects, well-developed and rapidly expanding to-date.

Getting back to the weather for a moment though, hurricanes and other monster storms pose a real technological hurdle to offshore wind farming, although Sandy itself is assumed not to be a potentially big risk due to its path. Analysts intentionally seek project locations that minimize the risk of loss posed by storms like Sandy. Traditionally, these would have been areas along the northeastern US seaboard, as the southern seaboard tended in the past to be most heavily hit by hurricanes. Sandy may represent a new breed of large, strong storms systems impacting coastal region further north, however, and if such storms are trending towards greater frequency, this could shift the assumptions underlying the economic models green-lighting these northern locations. There is an interplay between risk and reward inherent in any investment, and increased frequency and severity of storms shifts that burden onto the investors in potentially unattractive ways.

Of course, large scale shift in climate, generating larger, more dangerous storms, pose risks for existing energy infrastructure and production facilities already, and to some measure, a greater risk to human health and welfare when interacting with older technologies like natural gas or nuclear power. The relative health neutrality of offshore wind development once developed (manufacturing of turbines posing, perhaps, a different set of considerations) circumvents some of these obvious health and safety concerns, removing at least one potential obstacle.

Ultimately, I should probably be a lot more concerned about my friends and family who live close to on-shore power hazards than about the safety of some cold steel structures in the Atlantic.

Has there been a green tech bubble?

According to David Brooks of the New York Times, US and global investment in green energy has created a ’gigantic oversupply’ resulting in a green tech bubble, glorious in its potential about a decade ago, now poised to tragically burst.

How so? First, Brooks argues that renewable energy supporters in the US have created the greatest obstacle of all to renewable development by politicizing and polarizing the issue. This problem is compounded in his eyes when liberals try to equate green energy development with jobs creation, confounding the issues. Federal subsidies seem to have encouraged the unsustainable proliferation of startups eager to get a share and simultaneously raised concerns about ‘corporate welfare’ programs (during some of America’s greatest class struggles, no less). 

This rapid growth in American green energy development, and it seems here that Brooks means specifically the solar panel production industry, was matched by equal development around the globe (specifically, China), generating the so-called ‘gigantic oversupply’ that has created the potential for a green bubble. Brooks’ arguments about the political barriers to renewable energy development in the US that have been created by polarizing the issue might be spot on, but his conclusions about the green bubble seem narrowly focused on one aspect of the renewable energy sector and quite reactionary.

Brooks does raise the interesting issue of the race between renewables and fossil fuels development as a potential obstacle to their success, especially with natural gas development seeming to outpace renewables in terms of return on investment and low energy costs.

It may be, however, that this reflects an underlying American mentality about energy consumption that presents one of the most intractable obstacles to renewable development: the entitlement to cheap, reliable access to energy at a level of consumption that could not realistically be sustained worldwide. Combined with the American tendency to view the energy sector as a group of private businesses depending on profitability to continue service (only partially accurate due to government regulation and subsidies) , the idea that market forces constrain renewable development (that is, that renewables can never be profitable enough to justify sufficient development to meet American demand) creates a sort of circular argument that in fact might actually constrain their development by limiting the options we consider as a nation.

Alte Duine Calling

Getting a global perspective on renewable energy development could be a daunting task. Fortunately, the United Nations has already thrown its considerable resources into the venture to turn out the Renewables 2011 Global Status Report.A sound starting point both for understanding the global renewable energy situation and for beginning to get a sense of some of the factors that will be critical to identifying public policy barriers to wind development.

Meanwhile, my research partner keyed me into the proposed windfarm in the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland. My initial reaction, fueled by found memories of the Scottish highlands, was to pack my bags and go investigate in person. What more pleasant research project is there than one fed by scenic vistas of unfathomable lochs, warmed by a sampling of local scotch whiskies?

[That's about the best you can do for a photo from behind a dirty train window as you fly by the Cairngorms in the dead of winter!]

But I digress... The Allt Duine windfarm has already been curtailed to fewer than 34 turbines in response to public concerns about spoiling the scenery of the 3800+ square kilometer Cairngorm National Park, against which the windfarm is expected to be sited, highlighting one of the usual objections to wind energy development from a social perspective. The case also illustrates the challenges posed by overlapping jurisdictional scales as the developer,  local interest groups, local government, and the national government of Scotland discuss and negotiate the appropriate outcome here.

Tying this back to the UN report I'm digesting right now, in 2007, Scotland set a national renewable energy portfolio target of 31% by 2011. Currently, they are on track to exceed that target, which raises a number of questions. Do smaller, more economically, socially, and geographically uniform nations have an advantage when it comes to adopting renewable energy? Or is the ability to reach the target more due to Scotland's vast renewable energy resources?

Politically and economically, what is driving this scheme, and how strategic were the 2011 targets (was there an expectation of exceeding the target from the outset)? With a goal of 100% by 2020, there seems some evidence of sincere commitment to the cause at least. Current progress exceeds expectations, making achievement an exciting possibility, but once the low hanging fruit has been harvested, perhaps projects like the Allt Duine farm become more challenging from a social and economic standpoint. Scotland boasts the advantage of having funding set aside for such development in the Climate Change Fund, but how far will GBP18.8 million really take them (by comparison, San Fransisco in the United States alone has set aside USD$100 million simply in their solar power initiatives).

One further interesting line of thought raised in both this UN report and on the Scottish government's own website is how to identify properly what are renewables. When it comes to the big traditional power sources, it seems fairly easy to reach consensus about what is not renewable (oil, gas, and coal). It can be more difficult, however, to define what is renewable, especially when economic sustainability and energy independence overlay as separate but related concerns.The Scottish government includes wind (onshore and offshore), hydro, wave, tidal, biomass, solar, and geothermal, but for some of these, there is room to argue. At what scale and over what time frame these renewable resources exist, and how quickly they are able to pay back both the financial investment and the offset the resources consumed to produce these facilities (both in development and long term maintenance), may become major questions in understanding the overall impact of renewable development as well as the obstacles to it.

Welcome!

A woman of many hats (environmental scientist, lawyer, editor), I find myself involved in a project to assess barriers to renewable energy development in various countries. This blog will serve this purpose of gathering news and data, along with my analysis, as we research the project. Feedback and conversation would be excellent, as dialect always sharpens the blades of thought!

"We must always change, renew and rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise, we harden." - Goethe