Renewable Energy Is Not Always ‘Green’: Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Hydroelectric Reservoirs

Kale Roberts  ::  Mother Earth News  ::  2 July 2015

Photo by Robert Campbell, Wikimedia Commons

Hydropower is often considered a clean energy source, free of climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions. But although dams have been demonized for disrupting fish migrations and flooding valleys inhabited by families for generations, this so-called renewable form of energy has largely escaped scrutiny for its climate impacts. After all, how could the atmosphere be harmed by letting a river flow through a few energy-generating turbines encased within a 50-foot wall of concrete and steel?

Hydropower is the world’s leading form of renewable energy, accounting formore than 16 percent of global electricity generation. But dam enthusiasts who tout hydro’s climate credentials may not like the news about its emissions numbers.

Studies conducted over the past decade have shown that greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, are produced by hydroelectric systems in potentially huge amounts.

In some cases, emissions from hydropower can even exceed those that would have been produced from burning conventional fossil fuels instead. For example,a 2014 study finds that the Curuá-Una Reservoir in Brazil emitted 3.6 times more greenhouse gases than would have been emitted had the electricity come from oil.

How Hydroelectric Dams Produce Greenhouse Gases

When a dam is built for energy generation, the land upstream of the impoundment is flooded. The more than 45,000 large dams built around the world cover a combined area the size of Montana (Barros et al., 2011). For many, within their depths lies former forest land.

As the submerged trees, grasses, shrubs and soil decompose, microbes convert the carbon stored in the vegetation into gas that can bubble up to the surface and escape to the atmosphere. Carbon trapped within the soil percolates out in the form of carbon dioxide.

Age matters. Studies show that younger reservoirs may be bigger emitters than older one, because most carbon is released from drowned vegetation within the first several years of flooding.

Location matters, too. Emissions seem to be highest from dams built in the tropics, presumably because higher temperatures give decomposer microbes themetabolic boost to do their work.

Methane Matters

Methane is of particular concern. The gas is made anywhere methanogenic (methane-producing) bacteria can thrive without oxygen—so, in the guts of pigs and people, peat bogs and permafrost. Unfortunately, methane is also 25 timesmore potent a planet warmer than carbon dioxide over 100 years. And warm, tropical places can produce more of it.

Methane has plenty of opportunities to escape during the hydropower process: It bubbles up from the oxygen-free muck that accumulates at the bottom of reservoirs. It is churned out in the spray coming off spinning turbines. For miles, it wafts off the newly agitated surface of the river downstream from a dam.

So much methane is produced that studies suggest more than 20 percent of what humans are responsible for may come from dams, which may be releasing up to104 teragrams of the gas annually. (This may be more than all the methane produced per year from burning fossil fuels, according to NASA.)

A Lack of Information or Regulatory Failure?

Of course, impacts from big hydro projects go beyond greenhouse gas emissions to include altered land use, the collapse of migratory fish populations and the displacement of people. Coastal erosion can occur downstream from reservoirs when sediment becomes trapped behind dam impoundments, preventing the silty particles from reaching the sea where they build and stabilize coastlines.

Despite large hydro’s detrimental impacts on life, land and atmosphere, many nations fail to include emissions associated with dams in their total greenhouse gas reporting. This gap in information makes hydro emissions difficult to track—and to regulate.

Most hydropower is concentrated in Asia, but more than 150 countries employ the technology for at least some of their energy. The Worldwatch Institute reportsthat “in 2008, four countries—Albania, Bhutan, Lesotho, and Paraguay—generated all their electricity from hydropower,” and “15 countries generated at least 90 percent of their electricity from hydro.”

Moreover, when nations have made steps to report hydro emissions, the international hydroelectricity industry has attempted to muddy the waters bydownplaying the amount of carbon degassing from their projects.

Take Down the Dams?

Before you think tearing down all dams is the answer, consider this: Taking down a large dam may actually release more greenhouse gases from the newly exposed, carbon-rich soil than were produced throughout the entire life of the dam.

For example, decommissioning Arizona’s Glen Canyon Dam in the United States, which provides power from Lake Powell, would theoretically produce nine timesmore methane following takedown than all the methane produced during Glen Canyon’s 100-year operation.

What is the Solution?

What many believe would be a good first step is for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s foremost scientific authority on the subject, to ask all participating nations to report greenhouse gas emissions from hydroelectric reservoirs. Can that happen with so many questions left unanswered?

More research on the climate impacts of hydropower is needed, in more places and at all stages of big dams’ lifecycles. Until then, policymakers may be overlooking a potentially significant contributor to climate change, perhaps difficult to calculate but ever present, hidden at the bottom of a placid reservoir.

Kale Roberts is the Blogging Coordinator for MOTHER EARTH NEWS and a Rachel Carson Scholar at the Bard Center for Environmental Policy. His interests include renewable energy, real food and sustainable rural development.

References

Barros et al. (2011). Carbon emission from hydroelectric reservoirs linked to reservoir age and latitude. Nature Geoscience, 4, 593-596.

Demarty, M. & Bastien, J. (2011). GHG emissions from hydroelectric reservoirs in tropical and equatorial regions: Review of 20 years of CH4 emission measurements. Energy Policy, 39, 4197-4206.

International Energy Agency [IEA]. (2010). Renewable Eenergy essentials: Hydropower. Free publication. Accessed May 11, 2015, from http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/hydropower_essentials.pdf.

IPCC. (2006). Appendix 3: CH4 emissions from flooded land: Basis for future methodological development. 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories.

Magill, B. & Climate Central. (29 October 2014). Methane emissions may swell from behind dams. Scientific American. In Energy & Sustainability. Accessed May 09, 2015, from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/methane-emissions-may-swell-from-behind-dams/.

NASA. (2010). Education: Global methane inventory. GISS Institute on Climate and Planets. Accessed May 11, 2015, from http://icp.giss.nasa.gov/education/methane/intro/cycle.html.

Pacca, S. (2007). Impacts from decommissioning of hydroelectric dams: a life cycle perspective. Climate Change, 84, 281-294.

Worldwatch Institute. (2013). Use and capacity of gobal hydropower increases. In Vital Signs. Accessed May 09, 2015, from http://www.worldwatch.org/use-and-capacity-global-hydropower-increases-0.

Yang, L., Lu, F., Zhou, X., Wang, X., Duan, X., & Sun, B. (2014). Progress in the studies on the greenhouse gas emissions from reservoirs. Acta Ecologica Sinica,34, 204-212.

And the Cheapest Electricity in America Is … Solar

John Rogers, Union of Concerned Scientists  ::  EcoWatch  ::  15 July 2015

A Nevada utility and a solar developer have just struck a deal for solar electricity at a price that stands out compared not just to other solar deals, but also to just about any other option for new electricity. Here’s what it and other recent deals say about the future of solar.

Costs for large-scale solar projects dropped by 7 percent last year,
and are down by way more than half since 2009.
Photo credit: John Rogers

Bloomberg’s story on the Nevada deal opens with this (emphasis added):

Warren Buffet’s Nevada utility has lined up what may be the cheapest electricity in the           U.S., and it’s from a solar farm.

“Cheapest” and “solar” aren’t words some folks might expect to see together in something coming out of a financial outfit like Bloomberg. But folks who have been paying attention to solar’s incredible recent price drops in recent years know that the times they are a-changin’.

Best deal in town NV Energy, part of Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway company, is buying output from a project being developed by solar photovoltaic (PV) manufacturer First Solar at a price of 3.87 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). That’s probably a lower price than you’d get from just about any other source out there, except for wind or energy efficiency.

Utility leaders need to keep signing the contracts that keep getting us to
ever-greater scales and ever-lower prices on solar.
Photo credit: Sarah Swenty/USFWS

No doubt about it: this power purchase agreement (PPA) is a deal. A utility analyst at Bloomberg says it’s “probably the cheapest PPA I’ve ever seen in the U.S.” Note the lack of qualifiers: no “solar,” no “renewable energy.” Just “cheapest.”

And it’s clear that this deal, for 100 megawatts (enough for more than 15,000 households’ worth of electricity), isn’t a one-off. It’s part of a suite of recent deals that testify to how far solar prices have dropped:

• Another 100-megawatt NV Energy agreement in the same utility proposal, involving a project developed by PV manufacturer SunPower, came in at 4.6 cents/kWh.

• Just a week earlier, Austin Energy signed a deal for solar at under 4 cents/kWh.

On the solar resource issue, you can remind the naysayers that solar is actually much more widespread than they might think. Some might dismiss these deals by pointing to the sunniness of the states in question or the incentives (federal or state) that are buying down the cost. Don’t let ‘em.

On incentives, you can invite them to do the math on what it would cost even without the federal tax credit, for example (still under 6 cents for the lowest-cost ones). And have them look to see what solar is achieving elsewhere—5.85 cents/kWh in Dubai, for example. Or just get them to do the math on what fossil fuels like coal really cost.

Keep making it happen

And, while the sun might not be getting brighter, the future of solar certainly is. Costs for large-scale solar projects dropped by 7 percent last year, and are down by way more than half since 2009.

Even more importantly, maybe, is the fact that a big chunk of cost reductions depend not on dropping the costs of solar panels (which are way down already), but on building up local capacity to install (or approve) such systems. That build-up comes only with experience and installations. That price trajectory could lead some to think about waiting till prices come down even more, but that would be a mistake. Solar may keep getting better, but it’s a good deal now, and even more drops in costs aren’t guaranteed. (Neither is the future of the very successful federal tax credit.)

Photo credit: UCS, Solar Power on the Rise

We also need utility leaders to keep signing the contracts that keep getting us to ever-greater scales and ever-lower prices. These contracts are a driving force for the fierce competition in the solar industry.

So go forth—sign, build, thrive. And then repeat, repeat, repeat.

How a German Village Created an Independent Grid and a Renewable Energy Future

Laurie Guevara- Stone  ::  Rocky Mountain Institute  ::  February 20, 2014

Regardless of debate about the success of Germany’s renewables revolution, there is no denying that a small town in the corner of rural eastern Germany, 40 miles south of Berlin, may be one of the best examples of decentralized self-sufficiency.

Feldheim (population: 150), in the cash-strapped state of Brandenburg, was a communist collective farm back when Germany was still divided into East and West. Now, it is a model renewable energy village putting into practice Germany’s vision of a renewably powered future.

In 1995, a local entrepreneur paid for Feldheim’s first wind turbine. As farmers started to worry when prices for their milk, potatoes, and beets began to fall and energy prices started to rise, they learned they could earn cash by renting their land to energy companies wanting to install a wind turbine. A local renewable energy company, Energiequelle GmbH, saw the potential as well, and decided to install a wind farm in Feldheim. Forty-three wind turbines with an installed capacity of 74.1 megawatt (MW) soon dotted the Feldheim landscape, providing income to farmers who leased their land to the energy company.

Renewable fervor was catching on, and in 2008 Energiequelle bought a 111-acre former Soviet military site about five miles from Feldheim, cleaned up the toxic military waste and hidden ammunition and constructed a 284-panel solar farm that produces over 2,700 MW hours per year. Its power is fed into the grid at the feed-in-tariff rate.

Photo credit: Energiequelle

That same year, the town of Feldheim and Energiequelle established a joint venture, called Feldheim Energie GmbH & Co. The new company built a biogas factory that converts pig manure and unused corn into heat, taking advantage of the community’s 700 pigs and 1,700 acres of arable farmland. The biogas plant is fed from the town’s agricultural cooperative and produces of electricity a year. A 400-kilowatt, wood-chip furnace fueled by the byproduct of forest thinning helps to firm the power from wind and biogas.

By 2009 Feldheim was producing all its own energy with renewable sources. Residents then wanted to take things a step further and free themselves from the large utility company, E.on, which was supplying the grid.

E.on refused to either sell or lease the part of its energy grid that ran through Feldheim. So the people took the matter into their own hands, and decided to build their own. Each of the 150 residents contributed 3,000 Euros (~$4,000 at today’s exchange rates) so that they could build their own smart grid. With help from Energiequelle and financing from the European Union and government subsidies, the smart grid was completed in 2010, making Feldheim then the only town in Germany with its own mini-grid. This allows the locally produced heat and electricity to be fed straight to consumers and gives them control over their electrical prices, which are set at community meetings.

They now pay 31 percent less for electricity and 10 percent less for heating than before. The town consumes less than one percent of the electricity produced annually by its wind turbines and solar panels, selling the rest back to the market. This lowers their electricity bills to around half the national average. The biogas plant not only sells electricity back to the market, but also supplies the entire community with heating, saving over 160,000 liters of heating oil each year. As an added benefit, the plant produces over three million gallons of high-quality fertilizer annually that the agricultural cooperative uses.

Feldheim has also installed a plug-and-pay EV charging station in the town center, and next plans to install a 10-MW battery later this year. The storage will help balance the community microgrid’s generation and load.

There are now more wind turbines than houses in the town. While residents don’t mind the noise or aesthetics of the wind turbines, there has been some opposition from neighboring towns, which didn’t—until recently—directly benefit from the wind farm. “In order to make neighbors feel more at ease with the wind farm, we are offering power at a special rate,” Energiequelle spokesman Werner Frohwitter told Rocky Mountain Institute. “Our aim is to let as many people as possible directly benefit from our turbines, thus encouraging social acceptance for renewable energies.”

All the renewable projects also created jobs. While other villages in the economically depressed state of Brandenburg have roughly a 30 percent unemployment rate, Feldheim virtually erased its unemployment. Most residents work in the biogas plant or maintain the wind and solar farms. And the town, which has not a single museum or restaurant, has seen an influx of visitors. Three thousand people visit the small town of 150 each year. This has prompted the foundation of a new organization, Förderverein des Neuen Energieforums Feldheim (Friends of the New Energies Forum Feldheim), which is converting an old inn into a renewable energy information and training center. The hope is that when the center opens in the fall of 2014 it will bring even more visitors to Feldheim, generating more jobs and income for the villagers.

Feldheim has proven that a high-renewables energy future is possible today. “There have been and are still occurring remarkable changes (in Feldheim),” says Frohwitter. The small town is thriving thanks to its confidence in renewable energy technologies.

Elon Musk: Tesla Battery Will ‘Fundamentally Change the Way the World Uses Energy’

Cole Mellino   ::  EcoWatch  ::  1 May 2015

 Renewable energy sources like solar and wind have always been limited by their intermittency, but now Tesla CEO Elon Musk has unveiled a suite of batteries to store electricity for homes, businesses and utilities, saying a greener grid furthers the company’s mission to provide pollution-free energy, reports Bloomberg.

“We’ve obviously been working on building a world-class battery, a super-efficient and affordable way to store energy,” Khobi Brooklyn, a Tesla spokeswoman, told The New York Times. “It’s just that we’ve been putting that battery in cars most of the time.”

The Tesla P85D just won the 2015 AAA Best Green Car Award, marking the second year in a row an all electric Tesla Model S has taken top honors from AAA. But Tesla has been disrupting more than just the auto industry for a while now. In February, Musk announced a partnership with SolarCity to use rooftop solar panels fitted with Tesla’s batteries to allow customers to keep that energy in-house. It’s all part of Tesla’s plans to revolutionize the energy grid.

“Our goal here is to fundamentally change the way the world uses energy,” Musk told Bloomberg. “We’re talking at the terawatt scale. The goal is complete transformation of the entire energy infrastructure of the world.”

Tesla’s home battery, the “Powerwall,” is a rechargeable lithium-ion battery that mounts on the wall and comes in 7 kilowatt-hour or 10 kilowatt-hour versions, the company said in a statement. A larger product, the “Powerpack,” can store more energy to power businesses. Deliveries will begin in late summer at prices starting at $3,000.

“Our goal here is to fundamentally change the way the world uses energy,” says Elon Musk.

Battery storage for renewable power is finally coming of age. “The battery is designed to enable so-called ‘load-shifting’ by charging during times when electricity prices are lower due to less demand, and discharging when demand and prices are high,” says Bloomberg. It can also store solar power generated during daytime and release it at night, and serve as backup during outages, Tesla says.

Tesla hopes that its $5 billion “gigafactory” under construction near Reno, Nevada will drive down the cost of the batteries for both cars and energy-storage products through mass production. More such factories will be needed to help make the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, Musk said.

Tesla’s batteries are already being used by companies such as Wal-Mart, Cargill and Jackson Family Wines, and Green Mountain Power plans to sell its home batteries to customers. Tesla has also partnered with Southern California Edison to install batteries for utilities, while Amazon and Target will pilot the batteries.

Tim Cook: New Solar Farm Will Be Apple’s ‘Biggest, Boldest and Most Ambitious Project Ever’

Anastasia Pantsios   ::  EcoWatch  ::  11 February 2015 

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced yesterday that the company will partner with First Solar to build 1,300-acre, 280-megawatt solar energy farm in Monterey, California.

Apple already has three solar farms including this one in North Carolina. Photo credit: Apple

“We know at Apple that climate change is real, and our view is that the time for talk has passed and the time for action is now,” Cook told the audience at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco as he announced what he called Apple’s “biggest, boldest and most ambitious project ever.”

He said the new development, which First Solar will build with a $850 million investment from Apple and their commitment to purchase the power generated, will generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of 60,000 homes. It will be able to provide renewable energy for Apple’s new campus in Silicon Valley, all of its other California offices, all 52 of its retail stores in California and its data center in Newark. The work will begin in a few months and the farm should be operational in 2016.

“Apple is leading the way in addressing climate change by showing how large companies can serve their operations with 100 percent clean, renewable energy,” said Joe Kishkill, First Solar’s chief commercial officer. “Apple’s commitment was instrumental in making this project possible and will significantly increase the supply of solar power in California. Over time, the renewable energy from California Flats will provide cost savings over alternative sources of energy as well as substantially lower environmental impact.”

It’s not Apple’s first foray into solar, although it is one of its most ambitious. The company already has two solar farms in North Carolina and another in Nevada. Apple also has investments in wind, hydropower and fuel cells. Cook said in yesterday’s conference presentation that all of Apple’s data centers already run on renewable energy and that the new headquarters it’s building will be state-of-the-art green.

He assured the audience of investors that Apple’s large investment in solar isn’t just some feel-good move but also good for business.

“I know this is a financial conference and some of you are interested in, is that a good use of funds or not,” he said. “Quite frankly we’re doing this because it’s right to do, but you may also be interested to know that it’s good financially to do it. We expect to have a very significant savings because we have a fixed price for the renewable energy, and there’s quite a difference between that price and the price of brown energy. So we’re thrilled to continue on this course of doing things that leave the world better than we found it.”

Last May, Greenpeace issued a report called Clicking Clean: How Companies Are Creating the Green Internet, rating 19 Internet companies and naming Apple a “green leader” for its commitment to renewable energy.

“It’s one thing to talk about being 100 percent renewably powered, but it’s quite another thing to make good on that commitment with the incredible speed and integrity that Apple has shown in the past two years,” said Greenpeace senior IT sector analyst Gary Cook in response to Tim Cook’s announcement.

“Apple still has work to do to reduce its environmental footprint, but other Fortune 500 CEOs would be well served to make a study of Tim Cook, whose actions show that he intends to take Apple full-speed ahead toward renewable energy with the urgency that our climate crisis demands.”

UN Climate Chief: Carbon Bubble Is Now a Reality

Anastasia Pantsios  ::  Eco Watch  ::  20 January 2015 

The so-called “carbon bubble” is no longer a concept, it’s a reality, according to UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, who will oversee the crucial UN climate conference in Paris in December.

Investments in fossil fuels are becoming a losing bet as the so-called “carbon bubble” bursts.Photo credit: Shutterstock

Investors who sunk their money into the fossil fuel sector are going to come up losers, she suggested, as plummeting oil prices have made new extraction projects too costly to continue to pursue and concerns about global warming have made them too risky.

“A lot of the stranded asset conversations we’ve been having for a long time are now coming true,” she told RTCC, speaking from the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi. “Those expensive oil projects—deep sea, Arctic, tar sands—those are actually beginning to be taken off the table because of the low oil prices.”

That’s good news for the environmental groups that have long warned about “stranded assets”—coal, oil and gas that would have to be left in the ground to slow climate change—and how that was leading to an overvaluation of these reserves.

RTCC cited a number of expensive exploration and extraction projects that have already been cancelled. Chevron has delayed plans to drill in the Canadian Arctic. Norway’s Statoil has returned three licenses to explore for oil off the Greenland coast. And Shell and Qatar Petroleum announced last week they were scrapping a planned $6.5 billion petrochemical project in Qatar, saying it was “commercially unfeasible, particularly in the current economic climate prevailing in the energy industry.” Qatar’s state-controlled petrochemical company Industries Qatar abandoned plans for another $6 billion plant last September. Many of these projects were planned when oil was $100 a barrel. It’s now under $50.

In the U.S., Texas is feeling the brunt of the oil bust, as extraction companies lay off workers.The New York Times reported yesterday, “With oil prices plummeting by more than 50 percent since June, the gleeful mood of recent years has turned glum here in West Texas as the frenzy of shale oil drilling has come to a screeching halt. Every day, oil companies are decommissioning rigs and announcing layoffs. Small companies that lease equipment have fallen behind in their payments.” And the once seemingly unstoppable growing of fracking in North Dakota’s Bakken shale region has also come to a screeching halt.

Carbon Tracker Initiative, a independent nonprofit think tank that analyzes energy from both an environmental and financial standpoint, coined the term “carbon bubble” and has continuously warned investors about the risks of sinking money into fossil fuel-related businesses, due to the 2c target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees to stave off the worst impacts of climate change.

“If the 2C target is rigorously applied, then up to 80 percent of declared reserves owned by the world’s largest listed coal, oil and gas companies and their investors would be subject to impairment as these assets become stranded,” the group said in its report Unburnable Carbon.

Figueres told RTCC she believed investors and investment firms would be taking notice, opening up the possibility that investment assets might begin to shift more decisively to renewables.

“When you begin to see very specific examples of a concept that was previously only a concept, I do think it’s going to be taken much more seriously on the part of investors,” she said. “That volatility in prices is one that incrementally and gradually makes investment in oil and gas more risky than investment in renewables, where it is very predictable what the upfront cost of infrastructure is, and then the price of fuel from then on is very predictable and certain.”

Solar Is Creating Jobs Nearly 20 Times Faster Than Overall U.S. Economy

Anastasia Pantsios  ::  EcoWatch  ::  15 January 2015 

All those senators currently debating in Washington D.C., calling the Keystone XL pipeline approval bill an urgent “jobs creation bill,” are looking for jobs in all the wrong places.

Solar installation alone added more jobs in 2014 than both the oil and natural gas sectors—jobs that can’t be outsourced. Photo credit: The Solar Project

They should be perusing the National Solar Jobs Census 2014, the fifth annual such report compiled by the nonprofit Solar Foundation. What they’d find there puts the pipeline project to shame. Despite attacks on clean, renewable energy around the country, creating uncertainty in the sector,  job creation grew dramatically. It outperformed the slowly improving U.S. economy, creating jobs at nearly 20 times the rate of the overall economy.

Last year, jobs in solar increased by 21.8 percent, adding up to 31,000 new jobs in 2014 and bringing the total number of solar-related jobs in the U.S. to 173,800. That’s an increase of 86 percent since 2010. The vast majority—approximately 157,500— work 100 percent on solar activities.

“The solar industry has once again proven to be a powerful engine of economic growth and job creation,” said The Solar Foundation’s president and executive director Andrea Luecke. “Our Census findings show that one out of every 78 new jobs created in the U.S. over the past 12 months was created by the solar industry—nearly 1.3 percent of all jobs. It also shows for the fifth consecutive year, the solar industry is attracting highly skilled, well-paid professionals. That growth is putting people back to work and strengthening our nation’s economy.”

And despite attacks in states like Ohio, which froze its renewable energy standards last June and is talking about permanently eliminating them, The Solar Foundation projects that growth will continue. Its employer survey, which collected data from more than 7,600 U.S. businesses, found that the next year solar is likely to see a similar increase of almost 21 percent, bringing the total number of workers in the industry to 210,060.

“Demand for clean renewable power is growing,” said Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. “Solar exists at the critical intersection between energy, the economy and the environment. As the nation’s fastest growing energy source, solar is adding thousands of new jobs each year. Its growth will almost surely continue to be robust in coming years.”

The survey also found that installation remains the largest source of domestic solar employment growth, more than doubling since 2010 and that those workers are more and more diverse, with more African-Americans, Hispanics, women and veterans than in the 2013 report. Solar installation jobs have already blown past employment in the shrinking coalindustry, which is now down to only 93,185 jobs. And while the oil and gas pipeline construction and extraction added 19,217 jobs in 2014, the solar installation sector created almost 50 percent more jobs.

Those jobs are that can’t be outsourced, won’t disappear in two years like the Keystone XL construction jobs and don’t come with negative health impacts or harmful impacts on the environment.

“The tremendous growth in the solar industry last year is further evidence that we can clean our air and cut climate pollution while also growing the economy,” said former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “The more data we have about the renewable energy industry, the better positioned policymakers and investors will be to make informed decisions. The Solar Jobs Census has the potential to help make that possible.”

And with jobs in the wind sector increasing  rapidly as well, supporting fossil fuel industries at the expense of renewables seems like bad economic as well as bad environmental policy.

“Americans want greater clean energy deployment, and conventional electricity generation is among the largest sources of air and water pollution in the U.S.,” said Lyndon Rive, CEO of Solar City, the largest solar employer in the U.S. “As the Census underscores, solar is providing a tremendous boost to our economy while meeting public demand for choice, competition and cleaner, more affordable energy.”

Can Shoes Generate Renewable Energy with Every Step We Take?

Anastasia Pantsios  ::  EcoWatch  ::  8 January 2015

Maybe he hasn’t figured out all the details to make them technically feasible for mass production yet. But a concept for shoes that generate electricity has earned 22-year-old Vancouver university student Taylor Ward, who describes himself in his resume as “an aspiring experience designer looking to learn, grow and take the world by storm,” a slot as one of the five finalists in the Interaction Design Association (IXDA) 2015 Student Design Challenge. He and the other finalists will go to the Interaction15 conference in San Francisco next month to present his idea to a panel of judges. The winner will receive access to research and design tools to help them further develop their idea.

This year’s theme was “Envisioning the Wearable City.” And while other contestants came up with ideas for clothing that helped guide visitors to places of interest, connect people or enhance women’s safety, Ward was thinking green. His idea involves creating clean, renewable energy through something most people do every day: walk.

Inspired by Vancouver’s goal to become the greenest city in the world by 2020, Ward proposed a shoe he calls Step. It features insoles that produce energy as the wearer walks through a system of piezoelectric nano-generators and capacitors that capture and store the energy. As the shoes collect energy—over 100w with each step, Ward says—the wearer would go to a transfer station where they would discharge it into wireless charging pads. That energy could then be used to power homes, schools and businesses. Ward proposes placing them in high-traffic areas like transit stations, parks, schools, busy street corners and hockey arenas (this is Canada, after all!) 

The Vancouver walkers could be producing renewable 

energy with each step. Photo credit: Shutterstock

“Simply walking up to a station and standing in the transfer area would tap out your current raised energy and send it back into our city,” he wrote in his proposal. “We could also incentive giving power. Transferring enough power to the right station could land commuters a free coffee, movie tickets, or even a discount to the game.”

He said that the shoes wouldn’t cost more than a pair of high-end athletic shoes, although the charging stations would require a major funding source.

“Normally piezoeletric sensors are quite inexpensive,” he told City Lab. “The difficult part comes down to the capacity that a small capacitor (or series of capacitors) could hold and the cost for those parts. In the end, I would assume that the wearable itself would still be moderately priced, but the real cost would come from transfer stations. Similar charging stations using inductive charging do exist, but to impact a full city with these stations would be the larger investment from city council and urban planners.” 

The Step would capture energy and store it for 

discharge at a transfer station. 

Image credit: Tyler Ward

The Simon Fraser University student described how Vancouver’s density and walkability make it the idea location for his concept.

“Vancouver is one of the only North American cities that does not have a major highway cutting through its center,” he said. “This has caused our city to develop a high density of urban living and nomadic culture. Within our core, there are 13,000 residents per square mile, the highest in Canada. Additionally, for the millions that are just outside the city, there are 48 skytrain stops that all lead downtown. So what if we could use our crowded streets of commuting passengers to our advantage?”

“We take approximately 150 million steps in our lifetime,” said Ward. “Let’s capture that power.”

UK Wind Power Smashes Records As Scotland Eyes Fossil-Free Future

Gabrielle Bailey  ::  TckTckTck  ::  5 January 2015

Wind power went from strength to strength in the UK in 2014, with new figures from the National Grid showing the sector smashed its previous energy generation record last year.

Across the board, UK wind power generation is breaking records. December generation broke records, with wind’s contribution to the electricity mix rising to 14 percent. Photo credit: Creative Commons / André van Rooyen, 2009

It was revealed this week that the wind power in the UK climbed 15 percent in 2014 and now powers a quarter of British homes.

Wind power generation rose from 24.5 terawatt hours to 28.1TWh—enough to supply the needs of more than 6.7 million households across the UK.

Across the board, UK wind power generation is breaking records. December generation broke records, with wind’s contribution to the electricity mix rising to 14 percent.

In Scotland too, energy generation from wind broke records—in November alone, energy from Scottish wind farms provided power for 107 percent of homes in the country.

Maf Smith, deputy chief executive of RenewableUK, said:

It’s great to start 2015 with some good news about the massive quantities of clean electricity we’re now generating from wind, with new records being set month after month, quarter after quarter, and year on year, as we increase our capacity to harness one of Britain’s best natural resources.

He noted the importance clean energy would play in the forthcoming general elections:

We’re now into a general election year so we know that the political temperature is set to carry on rising over the next few months. The cost of energy has become an important political issue, so now would be a good time for voters, prospective parliamentary candidates and MPs to take account of the fact that onshore wind is the cheapest form of renewable energy we have at our fingertips.

The news of wind power’s great success comes as a new World Wildlife Fund (WWF) study predicts that Scotland’s power grid could viably become entirely fossil-free by 2030.

The study found the Scottish government’s policy goal of decarbonising Scottish power generation by 2030 was technically possible, due to the country’s abundance of wind and wave energy resources.

Paul Gardner, lead author of the WWF report, said:

Our technical analysis shows that a system with an extremely high proportion of renewable electricity generation located in Scotland can be secure and stable.There is no technical reason requiring conventional fossil and nuclear generation in Scotland.

What’s more, while the Scottish government’s current decarbonisation plan to 2030 relies on untested carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, the latest research shows this is not needed to ensure a fossil-free future.

It states that “a renewables-based, efficient, flexible, electricity system is perfectly feasible by 2030”

To become entirely renewable-dependent would be a cheaper and safer option for the country.

Renewable energy is more than 50 percent cheaper than installing carbon capture and storage in thermal plants, while renewables would be replacing dangerous fossil fuels that have negative effects on the planet and on public health.

Moreover, WWF stated that renewable projects in the pipeline are more than adequate for the country’s electricity needs.

Gina Hanrahan, climate and energy policy officer at WWF Scotland, said:

Pursuing this pathway would allow Scotland to maintain and build on its position as the UK and Europe’s renewable powerhouse, cut climate emissions and continue to reap the jobs and investment opportunities offered by Scotland’s abundant renewable resources.

The report has given the Scottish government a number of policy recommendations to be implemented if the target is to be met, suggesting  Westminster and Holyrood  should work together to support initiatives to reduce the demand for energy.

Nukes Fade As Wind and Solar Soar

Paul Brown  ::  Climate News Network  ::  30 December 2014

With nuclear power falling ever further behind renewables as a global energy source, and as the price of oil and gas falls, the future of the industry in 2015 and beyond looks bleak. 

Investors are increasingly skeptical about putting their money into nuclear—whereas renewables
promise an increasingly rapid return on investment, and may get a further boost if the governments of the world finally take climate change seriously.

Renewables now supply 22 percent of global electricity and nuclear only 11 percent—a share that is gradually falling as old plants close and fewer new ones are commissioned.

New large-scale installations of wind and solar power arrays continue to surge across the world. Countries without full grids and power outages, such as India, increasingly find that wind and solar are quick and easy ways to bring electricity to people who have previously had no supply.

Developed countries, meanwhile, faced with reducing carbon dioxide emissions, find that the cost of both these renewable technologies is coming down substantially. Subsidies for wind and solar are being reduced and, in some cases, will disappear altogether in the next 10 years.

Speed of installation

The other advantage that renewables have is speed of installation. Solar panels, once manufactured, can be installed on a rooftop and be in operation in a single day. Wind turbines can be put up in a week.

Nuclear power, on the other hand, continues to get more expensive. In China and Russia, costs are not transparent, and even in democracies they hard to pin down. But it is clear that they are rising dramatically.

Building of the proposed twin European Pressurised Water reactors, called Hinkley Point C, in Britain’s West Country is due to start in 2015, but the price has risen several times already. Estimated construction costs have now jumped from £16 billion to £24 billion—before the first concrete has even been poured.

The other problem with nuclear is the time frame. Originally, Hinkley Point C was due to be completed by 2018. This has now slipped to 2024, but even this is optimistic judging by the performance of the two prototypes in Finland and France, both of which are late and over budget.

The Finnish plant was due to open in 2009, but is still at least three years from commissioning. The French plant is five years overdue.

In many countries, there are plans on paper for new nuclear stations, and China, South Korea and India are among those that are continuing to build them. Other countries, particularly where private capital is needed to finance them, are putting their plans on hold.

A solar power project developed on a 750-metre stretch of canal by Gujarat State
Electricity Corporation in India. Photo credit: Hitesh vip via Wikimedia Commons

Extend life

The U.S., which still has the largest number of reactors of any country in the world, is opting instead to extend the life of its plants. Many operators are considering applying for such extensions from 60 to 80 years. Provided they are up to modern safety standards, there seems no barrier to this.

Many other countries, including the UK, are extending the lives of their plants as long as possible, so the industry won’t be disappearing any time soon.

But one of the key problems for the nuclear sector is that reactors have been designed to be at full power all of the time. With renewables taking an increasing share of the market, a combination of nuclear, wind and solar can produce more electricity than required—leaving a problem of what to turn off.

A way round this problem being developed in Britain is large, strategically-based batteries. A five-megawatt battery, the largest in Europe, has just been commissioned in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, in the middle of England.

This is charged up when there is too much power in the grid, and releases its energy when there is a surge in demand. 

If, during a two-year trial, this works to smooth the peaks and troughs of demand, and cuts the costs of switching on expensive gas turbines, then a network of batteries will be installed across the country to harvest the intermittent supplies of renewables.

The only bright spot for nuclear at the moment is the development of small nuclear reactors. These are from 30 megawatts upwards and are designed to be built in a factory and assembled on site—a bit like wind turbines are.

These can be installed singly or in a series, depending on the demand. Their two greatest selling points are that they would be good in remote locations far from other power sources, and are said to be much safer than their larger cousins.

Price tag

However, a drawback is the price tag of around $3 billion dollars. Both the U.S. and UK are supporting private firms in research and development, but commercial operation is a long way off.

Whether a small nuclear power station would be any more welcomed than a wind or solar farm to provide power in a neighbourhood is a question still to be tested.

Nuclear enthusiasts—and there are still many in the political and scientific world—continue to work on fast breeder reactors, fusion and thorium reactors, heavily supported by governments who still believe that one day the technology will be the source of cheap and unlimited power. But, so far, that remains a distant dream.

In the meantime, investors are increasingly sceptical about putting their money into nuclear—whereas renewables promise an increasingly rapid return on investment, and may get a further boost if the governments of the world finally take climate change seriously.