local considerations

in the California desert. Per the Riverside County Press Enterprise, green efforts. See also the work of Berkeley professor Tad Patzek on ethanol and energy.

grasping at straws

Over $100 million has been spent on Proposition 87 on California's ballot, a large sum. Bill Clinton and Al Gore have been featured in ads favoring the cause. One such ad states:

Imagine if we can stop being dependent on foreign oil. Brazil did it.
They made a simple change to their cars. Switched to ethanol, grown from their own crops.
If Brazil could do it, so could California.

Mr. Clinton promulgates similar themes with his Global Initiative, a recent meeting of which was critiqued thusly in TNR.

How true are the above claims? I've looked at them before, in Brazil and ethanol and ethanol, the panacea. Recently, Robert Rapier, at The Oil Drum, points out:

Brazil’s energy independence miracle was 10% ethanol and 90% domestic crude oil production.

This is astonishing and at such great odds with the basic pro-87 premise, especially when one considers that:

• Brazilian ethanol is also subsidized by government
• Enriching the well-connected
  
• Sugar cane grown in a tropical clime captures much more solar energy than anything in California and
  
• The environmental destruction is great
  

Tad Patzek of U.C. Berkeley also seriously doubts the pro-87 hype. Mr. Patzek took part in an ezine discussion about ethanol about which he comments:

My 1-hour working meeting with Mr. Khosla was *not* a debate. We both tried to establish points of mutual agreement and disagreement. While certainly there was agreement on several key issues, there was also significant, one might say fundamental, disagreement on biofuels. I find the biofuel focus of Proposition 87 to be inconsistent with the very survival of life diversity and key ecosystems on the Earth and, consequently, I do not favor Proposition 87.

Scientific American this year devotes its September special focus issue, as with part of last, to Energy's Future - Beyond Carbon. Again the emphasis is on global warming rather than fossil fuel depletion. Daniel M. Kammen (a Berkeley professor like Mr. Patzek) is author of the article, The Rise of Renewable Energy, in which he writes:

When all the inputs and outputs were correctly factored in, we found that ethanol has a positive net energy...

Mr. Patzek would strongly dispute that contention and others by Mr. Kammen.

Update (06-11-09): California Proposition 87 was defeated 55% to 45%. Also, from an analyst local to my area, Ethanol experiment goes off track.

Update (07-1-2): Scientific American publishes article Is Ethanol for the Long Haul?
summarized thus. The author, Matthew L. Wald, is a reporter for the N.Y. Times; puzzlingly, his scientific credentials are not listed in Sciam. Here's another article of his on the subject.

local efforts

where I live

First, a hydrogen bus

It [the plant] produces hydrogen by reforming natural gas and converting solar and wind energy through electrolysis.

Then, an agreement between a California desert city and California utilities doing their part by sending their esteemed officials to the Baltic in August, when back home the temperatures got to 120 DegF.

August 2005: Palm Desert Mayor Buford Crites and City Councilman Jim Ferguson meet with representatives from Southern California Edison and the Southern California Gas Co. in Tallinin, Estonia. Along with John Phillips of the Energy Coalition and Mike Peavy, chairman of the California Public Utilities Commission, they write and sign an agreement - called the Estonia Protocol - to cut the city's energy use by 30 percent.

Of course, it takes time to come up with measures such as this, perhaps a decade, and the authors went to places like Sweden, Aspen, San Francisco, Italy and Estonia. The city plan refers to the 30% thusly:

While considered by many to be "stretch goals', we are firm in our commitment to demonstrate something really meaningful.

The big boys have their Uppsala , Rimini and other Oil Depletion Protocols. We have our own.

As a followup on this plan, here's one development that's supposed to come under its rubrick. The building industry balks at any extra expense:

But Ed Kibbey, executive director of the Building Industry Association's Desert Chapter, said the city has no proof that the extra costs of its new standards will be balanced by long-term savings.

Developers comply, he said, because "their concern is with time, 'cause time costs money. They've got a market that is good, and they want to get their sticks in the air to sell them."

Conlon [director of the city's new Office of Energy Management] replied that the new standards are only interim proposals and will not be written into an ordinance until the city completes a cost-effectiveness study, which will have to pass muster with the California Public Utilities Commission.

A followup piece describes a retrofitted energy-efficient house with an air conditioning system that is supposed to cut

energy use from the 7,000 watts most air conditioners run on to about 300 watts, about the same as three light bulbs, said Virginia Nicols, communications manager for the Energy Coalition.

The quote is mostly likely incomplete, since the calculation leaves out the energy used to create ice (energy storage) at night. For California homes, energy rates are not cheaper at night. Such an incentive could help, but energy demand would still be great.

8/25/06 Update: per Desert Sun followup , Buford Crites states it's:

stuck in the deep sand of the California regulatory labyrinth.

and regarding the 'thermal-storage air conditioning system, which makes ice at night to cool their house by day':

The couple's electric bills zoomed. May's bill was $205, compared to $66.73 last year, said Dennis Hanks. And the couple's June and July bills showed similar increases. The problem, Hanks said, is that the system, made by Ice Energy of Colorado, runs all night, outweighing any daytime savings. "We don't know what to expect; it's a prototype," Hanks said of the system.'

Update (06-12-01): Palm Desert set to approve plan.

And a bit farther afield, here's a piece about electricity demand in the American West. Note the reference to the Tragedy of the Commons.

An update: California Connected on PBS tv presents one energy researcher, Peter Lehman.