by Keryn

Three members of the Coalition's Steering Committee spent a day at the Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon last weekend.  Patience Wait, John Christensen and I joined a big group of folks for a bus trip to the event sponsored by Coalition partner Mountain View Solar & Wind.

According to the Solar Decathlon website:

"The U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon challenges collegiate teams to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that are cost-effective, energy-efficient, and attractive. The winner of the competition is the team that best blends affordability, consumer appeal, and design excellence with optimal energy production and maximum efficiency."

The projects are constructed at the schools over the course of the year, and then transported to West Potomac Park on the National Mall for the week-long competition.  This year's competition features 19 different homes, which are all open for tours.  The students who built the projects are on hand to explain and answer questions.  And there's lots of interesting and exciting technology on display.  If you think solar is too expensive, or inconvenient, or complicated, you need to go take a look! 

The event is free... just get yourself there.  One tip -- bring your own lunch.  West Potomac Park is in the middle of nowhere (or as close as you can get to nowhere within DC) and the DOE-contracted food concessions left a little to be desired.  How bad can it be?  Well, on Saturday, they ran out of food before they ran out of hungry people!

The event got pretty crowded by Saturday afternoon, making the lines to get into the exhibits around 30 minutes long.  A full day only allowed me to see 10 out of 19 homes, so allow plenty of time.  My favorite house was Perdue University's INHome.  What appealed to me was the complete normalcy of it.  It was a home you could actually picture yourself living in.  Pure practicality.  That's not to say the others weren't interesting (especially New Zealand's First Light), but more in a vacation home, kinda cool but I couldn't permanently live in a house with a fold out bed, kind of way.  I think the weirdest house was California's CHIP, although I didn't have time to tour that one.  If you attend, and even if you don't, be sure to vote for your favorite house on the Solar Decathlon's website (psst... Perdue!)

I think the most disappointing thing at the event (yes, even worse than the non-existent lunch) was the Department of Energy's display.  It wasn't a home, just an information tent, without much useful information at all.  I saw this as soon as I stepped into the tent.  Who can tell me what's wrong with this picture?

DOE's U.S. wind map is missing something really important.  Here's what a real map of U.S. wind potential looks like:

That's right, DOE's map doesn't show the best wind resources of all, just off both the east and west coasts and in the Great Lakes.  According to DOE's map, none of this wind potential exists.  And, I would be remiss if I didn't point out the obvious... this was the SOLAR Decathlon, not a Wind Decathlon!  Thank goodness for a bunch of bright, innovative college students who saved the DOE from their own dumbness by putting on such a great show to distract from the DOE's poor planning efforts.

Industry propaganda is sprouting up all over the internet.  It's part of a growing movement to preempt state authority and build a coast-to-coast "national grid" to produce billions of dollars of profit for investor-owned energy corporations whose value continues to fall as our society becomes more energy efficient.  Examples are everywhere. FERC's Order No. 1000 implementing interregional planning and cost allocation was just issued in Washington, DC. FERC's new plan to preempt state authority to site transmission lines has been exposed on the internet in the past week. And even Regional Transmission Planning Organization, PJM Interconnection, gets into the act with an op-ed from their Senior Vice-President of Operations attempting to sell Maryland consumers on a "national grid" to transport midwest wind power to Maryland to meet their Renewable Portfolio Standards goals. [/end Parody]

Check out the "10 pounds in a 5 pound bag" that Kormos is attempting to sell to Marylanders here.  You know you can't trust anything this guy says when he gets the location of the new TrAIL 500-kV transmission line wrong and tells Marylanders that it traverses their state, when it actually traverses Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Northern Virginia and never even enters the State of Maryland at all.  PJM's Senior VP of Operations doesn't even know where PJM-planned transmission lines get sited.

He also gets a whole bunch of other things wrong:

1. "But the expansion of these clean and green resources — and the environmental benefits and economic growth they promise — could be stymied by existing limitations on the planning process for integrating them into the nation's electrical grid... New transmission lines will be needed to move electricity from renewable sources — many in remote locations, far from existing transmission lines — across multiple states to the urban areas where the power is needed."

• New transmission lines to move renewables across multiple states to urban areas, such as Maryland, from "remote locations," such as the midwest, are estimated to cost electric consumers over $220 billion to construct.  Offshore Atlantic wind renewables are in the works and will require NO new land-based transmission lines, just an offshore "backbone" estimated to cost ratepayers $5 billion.  That will be a savings of at least $215 billion dollars on our electric bills if the coastal load centers, such as Maryland, just say "no" to long-distance renewables.  The "national grid" advocated by PJM will also restrict the "environmental benefits and economic growth" Kormos promises to a handful of midwestern states.  Offshore wind, or the development of other in-state renewables, will bring those environmental benefits and economic growth home to Maryland.

1. "A new approach to the planning of the transmission grid is necessary to address this problem. Reforming transmission planning will enable renewable electricity sources to more fully contribute to meeting the nation's electricity needs."

• A new approach to planning is not necessary to address Maryland's renewable goals.  Maryland is willing and able to meet its own goals without PJM's strong arm tactics to forcibly build new transmission lines to supply renewables to Maryland from thousands of miles away.

1. "For PJM Interconnection and other regional transmission organizations (RTOs), which plan and manage the electric transmission system serving two-thirds of the country's population, the challenge is that rules governing the system generally restrict the transmission-planning focus to preserving grid reliability and relieving bottlenecks on the system that raise electricity prices...  FERC, which provides regulatory oversight for RTOs, recognizes the problem and recently issued an order related to what can be done to make it easier to build lines that aren't strictly for reliability and providing for those who benefit from those lines to help pay for them."

• The existing rules provide for "needed" grid additions and already cost electric customers billions of dollars a year.  Changing the rules to allow building of purely speculative, gigantic, transmission lines intended only to benefit a few companies in a handful of states at the expense of the rest of us is not economically or physically prudent.

1. "Delays related to permitting and siting have affected the industry's ability to build new transmission infrastructure for a number of years, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the nation's electric reliability watchdog."

• Those "delays" are caused by states, who have statutory authority to site transmission lines within their borders and are the only authorities who consider the needs and rights of their citizens, as well as local issues, when evaluating a transmission application.  PJM and FERC want to preempt state authority, take over siting of transmission lines and grant private, investor-owned utilities the right to eminent domain over your property.

1. "Consumers and businesses will face an unreliable electric grid and higher electricity prices — and renewable energy goals could be hindered — if not enough transmission is built. On the other hand, everyone could end up paying for unneeded transmission infrastructure if we build too much."

• If we allow PJM to plan and FERC to permit new transmission lines now to transport renewables from other regions to meet our local needs, then everyone will end up paying billions for transmission infrastructure that will quickly become obsolete once offshore wind and local renewables come online in the near future.  

1. "PJM has been working with stakeholders to improve the flexibility of the transmission planning process, which is essential to bolstering America's electric transmission system to meet the nation's economic and environmental goals.  Reforming the process for planning and building transmission now will enable power to be delivered where it's needed tomorrow."

• PJM has been working with energy corporations and the federal government to meet corporate profit goals at our expense and fool electric consumers nationwide into accepting their plan and not asking questions.  Be smart, just say no to PJM's "national grid" and industry-driven propaganda.

Someone just sent me this link to the US Dept. of Energy's publication A National Offshore Wind Strategy: Creating an Offshore Wind Energy Industry in the United States published in February 2011.

The report provides an excellent factual analysis of the huge offshore wind resource and its massive potential to produce electricity for major population centers in the US.  The report also identifies the challenges involved with developing this industry from scratch with the US now ten years or more behind countries like Denmark, Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, Spain and the Netherlands.

If you want to understand the current pathetic situation with offshore wind power development in this country, this report is a good place to start.

by Bill

The US Dept. of the Interior announced yet another rule reform that is supposed to help the construction of US offshore wind farms.  Meanwhile, Cape Wind remains just a plan.  Here’s the story.

The article states clearly how far behind the US is falling in this crucial energy transformation:

In Europe, which is currently the clear leader in offshore wind power, installed offshore wind power capacity grew from 4 MW in 2000 to 883 MW in 2010. Approximately 1,000 MW to 1,500 MW worth of offshore wind are expected to be added in 2011; wind farms totaling 4,000 MW are under development; and wind farms with a total capacity of 19,000 MW have been approved.

China had 103.5 MW of installed offshore wind power capacity at the end of 2010 but it’s got big plans and is projected to have 30,000 MW worth of offshore wind by 2020.

Now, that brings us to the U.S., which has tremendous offshore wind resources — offshore wind farms along the Atlantic coast could reportedly power up to one third of the nation — but doesn’t have a single offshore wind farm up yet. What will probably be the nation’s first offshore wind farm, Cape Wind, was approved by the U.S. Department of the Interior in April 2010 after a decade-long permitting battle.

Cape Wind officials say completion of the wind farm will take about two years after construction begins in late 2011.

By 2013, when Cape Wind might be in operation, Europe will have more than 5000 megawatts of installed capacity.

That beautiful jack-up rig in the picture at the EcoPolitology link shows just how far ahead of the US the Europeans are.  This ship carries an entire turbine assembly (you can see the blades on the deck and the tower sections sticking up) out to the foundation and the self-contained construction platform can construct an entire turbine in less than two days.  If offshore wind farms are ever built in US waters, we will have to import all of these babies, because we can’t make them ourselves.