Showing all posts tagged: energy

Ethanol From Corn Is Bad Policy, Especially In A Drought

Colin Carter and Henry Miller, Corn for Food, Not Fuel

The drought has now parched about 60 percent of the contiguous 48 states. As a result, global food prices are rising steeply. Corn futures prices on the Chicago exchange have risen about 60 percent since mid-June, hitting record levels, and other grains such as wheat and soybeans are also sharply higher. Livestock and dairy product prices will inevitably follow.

More than one-third of our corn crop is used to feed livestock. Another 13 percent is exported, much of it to feed livestock as well. Another 40 percent is used to produce ethanol. The remainder goes toward food and beverage production.

Previous droughts in the Midwest (most recently in 1988) also resulted in higher food prices, but misguided energy policies are magnifying the effects of the current one. Federal renewable-fuel standards require the blending of 13.2 billion gallons of corn ethanol with gasoline this year. This will require 4.7 billion bushels of corn, 40 percent of this year’s crop.

Other countries seem to have a better grasp of market forces and common sense. […] Our government could learn from the Brazilian approach and direct the E.P.A. to waive a portion of the renewable-fuel standards, thereby directing corn back to the marketplace. Under the law, the E.P.A. would first have to determine that the program was causing economic harm. That’s a no-brainer, given the effects of sharply higher grain prices that are already rippling through the economy.

The price of corn is a critical variable in the world food equation, and food markets are on edge because American corn supplies are plummeting. The combination of the drought and American ethanol policy will lead in many parts of the world to widespread inflation, more hunger, less food security, slower economic growth and political instability, especially in poor countries.

[…]

Any defense of the ethanol policy rests on fallacies, primarily these: that ethanol produced from corn makes the United States less dependent on fossil fuels; that ethanol lowers the price of gasoline; that an increase in the percentage of ethanol blended into gasoline increases the overall supply of gasoline; and that ethanol is environmentally friendly and lowers global carbon dioxide emissions.

The ethanol lobby promotes these claims, and many politicians seem intoxicated by them. Corn is indeed a renewable resource, but it has a far lower yield relative to the energy used to produce it than either biodiesel (such as soybean oil) or ethanol from other plants. Ethanol yields about 30 percent less energy per gallon than gasoline, so mileage drops off significantly. Finally, adding ethanol actually raises the price of blended fuel because it is more expensive to transport and handle than gasoline.

But do you hear any of our leaders calling for these sensible policy changes? Not with the energy and agribusiness lobbies throwing money at them.

Edward Humes on Garbage

Edward Humes was interviewed by Stephen Dubner at the Freakonomics blog, as a result of Humes new book, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash. I have garbage-picked some juicy factoids:

  • American communities spend more on waste management than on fire protection, parks and recreation, libraries, or schoolbooks.
  • The single largest component of trash going into landfills today is packaging and containers — instant trash that could be recycled, but isn’t.
  • Making energy out of trash is a far less wasteful alternative — which is why Germany, for example, recycles 66 percent of its trash, makes energy out of the rest, and landfills virtually none. By contrast, America sends 69 percent to landfills,  25 percent to recycling, and the little left over to energy plants.
  • The average American is making twice as much trash today as in 1960.
  • Wal-Mart has cut its landfilling 80 percent, and between recycling, composting, and systematic reduction in packaging, the company has turned trash into revenue stream instead of a cost.
  • They [plastic grocery bags] are 100 percent recyclable with the right equipment, but the cost of doing so exceeds the price anyone is willing to pay for the reclaimed polymers; only about 5 percent actually get recycled.
  • Right now, 85 billion pieces of taxpayer-subsidized junk mail are clogging our mailboxes every year — representing one out of every 100 pounds of trash Americans send to the landfill.
  • The amount of disposable plastics that find their way into the world’s oceans is approximately 4 million tons every year.
  • California has the most robust container deposit law in the country. It also has the highest recycling rate.

Cities’ Cost Cuttings Leave Residents in the Dark - Monica Davey via NYTimes.com

Newest sign of austerity: cutting back on street lights.

Monica Davey via NYTimes.com

Cities around the nation, grappling with what is expected to be a fifth consecutive year of declining revenues and having exhausted the predictable budget trims, are increasingly considering something that would once have been untouchable: the lights.

Highland Park’s circumstances are extreme; with financial woes so deep and long term, it has extinguished all but 500 streetlights in a city accustomed to 1,600, utility company officials say. But similar efforts have played out in dozens of towns and cities, like Myrtle Creek, Ore., Clintonville, Wis., Brainerd, Minn., Santa Rosa, Calif., and Rockford, Ill.

What distinguishes these latest austerity measures is how noticeable they are to ordinary residents. If health care cuts, pay cuts, layoffs and furloughs — and even limits on enforcing building codes or maintaining parks — are most apparent to the people inside city halls, everyone notices when his streetlights go dark (and some cities, like Colorado Springs, where the issue boiled over, have already resumed some lighting when revenues allowed).

Turning off the lights has drawn grumpy crowds to city council meetings, stirred jealousy among neighborhoods and neighbors, and set off conversations about crime.

The cost savings seems to be the sole motivator of this trend, but what about the green dimension? Should we be burning all that oil to make the dark hours of night light? Even when people aren’t around? Is it sustainable? Probably not.

If cities were on a solar set-up — charging during the day to run lights at night — it would be a different story. But the majority of cities simply have been buying electricity from utilities, the majority of which is fueled by coal and natural gas: unsustainable sources.

Can’t people carry flashlights?

Data Furnaces Could Bring Heat to Homes - Randall Stross via NYTimes.com

Data centers create big heat: couldn’t it be used to heat offices, homes, or dormitories?

Randall Stross via NYTimes.com

Two researchers at the University of Virginia and four at Microsoft Research explored this possibility in a paper presented this year at the Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing. The paper looks at how the servers — though still operated by their companies — could be placed inside homes and used as a source of heat. The authors call the concept the “data furnace.”

They acknowledge that it is more likely that data furnaces, if adopted, would be placed first in basements of office and apartment buildings, not in individual homes. But as a “thought-provoking exercise,” the authors give homes the bulk of their attention.

If a home has a broadband Internet connection, it can serve as a micro data center. One, two or three cabinets filled with servers could be installed where the furnace sits and connected with the existing circulation fan and ductwork. Each cabinet could have slots for, say, 40 motherboards — each one counting as a server. In the coldest climate, about 110 motherboards could keep a home as toasty as a conventional furnace does.

The rest of the year, the servers would still run, but the heat generated would be vented to the outside, as harmless as a clothes dryer’s. The researchers suggest that only if the local temperature reached 95 degrees or above would the machines need to be shut down to avoid overheating. (Of course, adding a new outside vent on the side of the house could give some homeowners pause.)

According to the researchers’ calculations, a conventional data center must invest about $400 a year to run each server, or about $16,000 for a cabinet filled with 40 of them. (This includes the costs of building a bricks-and-mortar center and of cooling the machines.)

Having homes host the machines could reduce the need for a company to build new data centers. And the company’s cost to operate the same cabinet in a home would be less than $3,600 a year — and leave a smaller carbon footprint, too. The company’s data center could thus cover the homeowner’s electricity costs for the servers and still come out way ahead financially.

THE machines would remain under the remote control of the company’s centralized data center, and their workings would remain opaque. Network traffic and data would have to be encrypted. Sensors would warn if the cabinet was opened. If a server failed, its tasks would be automatically reassigned to another — in cloud computing, software is built with the expectation that an individual machine can break at any time.

I see this as an inducement for mixed-use live/work spaces. Imagine a downtown mixed use building, with offices used primarily during the day and living space used principally at night. A server farm in the basement — supporting the work in the business side of things — could be configured to heat the entire building to the benefit of all.

Obviously immediately applicable in colleges, where computing resources could be configured to heat dormitories and class rooms.

Studies Clash on Impact of Indian Point Shutdown - NYTimes.com

Two studies on Indian Point, one for shutting down, one that says we can’t afford to shut it down, divided ideologically by making different assumptions.

But if we have a meltdown, 100% of the people will want to know why we let it stay running.

Artificial Leaf via Science

Today, humans consume an average of 15 trillion watts of power, 85% of which comes from burning fossil fuels such as oil, coal, and natural gas. That massive fossil fuel consumption produces some nasty side effects, including climate change, acidified oceans, and oil spills. These problems are likely to grow far worse in coming years, as worldwide energy use is expected to at least double by 2050.

Robert F Service,  Solar Fuels Take Two Steps Forward

smarterplanet:

Is Thorium the Biggest Energy Breakthrough Since Fire? Possibly. - Forbes

For the past several months, a friend of mine has been telling me about the potentially game-changing implications of an obscure (at least to me) metal named Thorium after the Norse god of thunder, Thor.

It seems he is not the only person who believes thorium, a naturally-occurring, slightly radioactive metal discovered in 1828 by the Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius, could provide the world with an ultra-safe, ultra-cheap source of nuclear power.

Last week, scores of thorium boosters gathered in the United Kingdom to launch a new advocacy organizing, the Weinberg Foundation, which plans to push the promise of thorium nuclear energy into the mainstream political discussion of clean energy and climate change. The message they’re sending is that thorium is the anti-dote to the world’s most pressing energy and environmental challenges.

So what is the big deal about thorium? In 2006, writing in the magazine Cosmos, Tim Dean summarized perhaps the most optimistic scenario for what a Thorium-powered nuclear world would be like:

 

What if we could build a nuclear reactor that offered no possibility of a meltdown, generated its power inexpensively, created no weapons-grade by-products, and burnt up existing high-level waste as well as old nuclear weapon stockpiles? And what if the waste produced by such a reactor was radioactive for a mere few hundred years rather than tens of thousands? It may sound too good to be true, but such a reactor is indeed possible, and a number of teams around the world are now working to make it a reality. What makes this incredible reactor so different is its fuel source: thorium.

Though utterly without merit, the bill stands a fighting chance in a legislative body where ideology now routinely trumps common sense.

Dim and Dimmer

Paul Rand actually said “you favor a woman’s right to an abortion, but you don’t favor a woman or a man’s right to choose what kind of light bulb.”

The GOP wants to repeal an energy bill that requires light blubs to use 25 to 30% less energy by 2012 — that manufacturers already have in production — based on a ‘you can’t tell me what to buy’ ideology?

These people are hopeless.

Germany to Close All Nuclear Plants by 2022 - Judy Dempsey and Jack Ewing

The German government on Monday announced plans to shut all of the nation’s nuclear power plants within the next 11 years, a sharp reversal for Chancellor Angela Merkel after the Japanese disaster at Fukushima caused an electoral backlash by voters opposed to reliance on nuclear energy.

The plan calls for phasing out all of Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors — eight of which are offline — and expanding the use of renewable resources. The decision was based on recommendations of an expert commission appointed after the Japanese disaster to study an industry that generates 23 percent of Germany’s electricity.

“It’s definite — the latest end for the last three nuclear plants is 2022,” said Norbert Röttgen, the environment minister.

The announcement, which still faces legislative approval, was applauded by environmentalists and expected to be popular among voters. But it was greeted skeptically around Europe and within German industry. Some predicted it could harm economic growth, force Germany to import nuclear power from France, or even inflate the cost of energy across the continent.

We will likely see the same trend in the US, as we get closer to 2012.

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