Monday night, in Google’ swanky San Francisco office, the company hosted an event on energy innovation with a slate of heavy hitters including Lynn Orr, head of Stanford’s Precourt Energy Institute, Berkeley’s Dan Kammen, MIT’s Ernie Moniz, and Google’s Dan Reicher. Venture capitalist Tim Woodward of Nth Power ably moderated.

Few groups have more or broader experience with energy innovation issues than these guys and they were all in agreement on the R&D funding increase and even the $15 billion annual number. A couple interesting funding mechanisms for clean energy R&D were discussed, too, including a very small “line charge” on electricity sold, which would send money into a pool for R&D. Apparently, a similar system worked for natural gas. (Random historical footnote: the money was managed through a non-profit called the Gas Research Institute, which apparently was wildly successful. It’s now called the Gas Technology Institute.)

I also loved this quote from Kammen because it’s true: “The markets for energy need to reflect the values we want, not the ones we inherited.” It’s hard to find a better summary of the problems of technological momentum. The way we make, sell, and buy power were all passed down to us and it takes a lot of work to think of new ways of doing things.

A few other bits from my notes.

• There was one noticeable flashpoint. While all voiced half-hearted to full-throated support for nuclear power, in the press briefing preceding the event, Dan Kammen said that he’d heard that the cost and timeline of a new nuclear plant is running $10 billion and 100 months. Moniz cut in, saying, “I’m going to have to disagree with that.” And they had a brief jab contest on how long actual plants might take to build before returning to their corners.
• Kammen is heading a group within the IPCC that will release a report on renewable energy that, as he emphasized over and over, will contain the first “zero carbon scenarios for 2030 and 2040.”
• Moniz — and others — warned that most of the new energy funding came from the stimulus package, and that after the next year and a half, there was a danger of energy R&D falling off a cliff. This happened, of course, in the 1980s and was very destructive.
• Google’s Reicher was the most specific. The Googlers have coined a new phrase to describe their approach: Lightbulb to Lightbulb. That is, government needs to help from the new idea to the actual product. He pushed enhanced geothermal, solar thermal, and off-shore wind for the East Coast of the U.S. He pushed for a Federal renewable portfolio standard and — intriguingly — repeatedly voiced support for the Clean Energy Deployment Administration. In fact, he noted that deployment should be one of the government’s key roles. Keep in mind, this is a major reversal from Reagan’s renewables policy.
• All of the panelists said they spent a lot of time in China and were heartened by recent climate negotiations between Beijing and Washington. Kammen called them “increasingly intertwined and nuanced.” Moniz predicted that what we’d see out of Copenhagen was an agreement between developed and developing countries on technological cooperation
• I asked Moniz about what kind of nuclear reactors he expected to see in the future, if any. He said, “If nuclear is going to expand, it’s going to be light water reactors.” He said it’d be decades before we saw new nuclear plant designs (like the Internet-favorite, liquid flouride thorium reactor).
• Kammen called Art Rosenfeld, “the father of energy efficiency.” Which is nice. He was the progenitor of California’s landmark energy efficiency regulations, which have kept the state’s energy needs far below what was once projected.
• Undersecretary of Energy Kristina Johnson’s presentation was a bit underwhelming. They beamed her in from Washington, D.C., and I think the technology setup was bad. Still, she could have delivered a slightly less safe and bureaucratic talk.

The top graph shows constant change in the energy supply over the last one hundred years. The bottom graph shows no change in energy supply over the next 20+ years.

“While the Nation’s energy history is one of large-scale change as new forms of energy were developed,” the DOE writes, “the outlook for the next couple of decades (assuming current laws, regulations, and policies) is for continued reliance on fossil fuels (with coal growing faster than liquid fuels and natural gas), modest growth in hydroelectric power and nuclear electric power; and a doubling of non-hydroelectric renewable energy by 2030.”

Let’s paraphrase: even though the history of the nation’s energy usage shows constant change, we’re predicting no further change. I guess when you’ve been burned by past forecasts, you get a little gunshy. Still, is it really the most credible scenario that almost nothing would change in our nation’s energy mix?

In the late 70s, Denis Hayes, then director of the Solar Energy Research Institute, was pushing hard to market solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources. Under his direction, SERI produced all kinds of people-friendly outreach documents as well as some films. I haven’t been able to track down many of them, but this one happened to get uploaded to YouTube. It’s probably from late 1979 or 1980.

In the interest of pulling its content into my SERI “archive,” I transcribed it for your inspection. Of particular interest are the brief interviews with Marcellus Jacobs and Ted Finch, both serious wind pioneers. The story of Jacobs is told very well by historian Robert Wrighter in his mid-90s book, Wind Energy in America. Finch was a major force in getting net metering legally established.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

The sun converts five million tons of matter into energy every second. This energy from nuclear reactions within the sun is sent out into the solar system as light and heat. The Earth receives only a small part of this energy, which we see and feel in different ways.

As the sun warms the Earth, the air is also warmed. The warm air rises and cool air rushes in below causing the conversion of sunlight into another form of solar energy: wind.

Today, this turbine harnesses wind to provide some of the energy for running an amusement park near Allentown, Pennsylvania. Another example of wind used today is this turbine which helps light Clayton, New Mexico.

Use of wind energy will increase in the future and help the UnitedSTaets to become more energy independent. But wind energy is nothing new in America. The idea of windmills was brought here by early European settlers and used in many ways: to power grinding mills and later to pump water for the steam locomotives that connected New York and San Francisco and to supply water for farming.

These early windmills were mechanical, often using a series of gears to harness energy. This energy could be stored by using the wind to pump water into an elevated storage tank. Gravity delivered the water whether the wind was blowing or not. This system was used for irrigation and household water supplies.

With the coming of electric lights and appliances, wind systems were designed to generate electricity. A series of batteries was used to store this energy. Wind Energy reached its peak in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s when 2 million windmills were in operation, providing an important source of energy for rural America. Many households had their own windmill and generator. Most of those generators produced 1 or 2 kilowatts of electricity. A kilowatt is 1000 watts and can light 10 100-watt light bulbs.

During the 1940s, large wind generators, which could provide power to many users, were introduced. This power was distributed through a utility grid, a network of transmission liens which sent electricity from a central source to individual users. Towering above Grandpa’s Knob near Rutland, Vermont, the Smith Putnam Turbine fed electricity to a Vermont utility company. This system was designed to produce up to 1.25 megawatts of electricity. One megawatt is 1 million watts or enough electricity to light 10,000 100-watt light bulbs.

But a cheaper, more convenient source of energy was sweeping the country. One that didn’t require batteries, water storage tanks, or maintenance. Electric power liens from centralized coal and gas fired power plants brought cheaper electricity to outlying areas and wind energy was neglected.

Today, increasing cost and other problems associated with conventional fuel make wind again a promising part of America’s energy resources

In theory, it is possible to harness about 60% of the energy in the winds. This potentially usable power the wind blowing across he United States in one year is more than the country’s total power needs for that same period.

Meet Marcellus Jacobs whose work with wind spans the period from the peak of wind energy use in the 30s and 40s to the present revival of interest.

MARCELLUS JACOBS: We just started off on our wind plan on the ranch there in Montana, 40 miles from town. We had no electricity and there was no hope of high line for a good many years. So we started to deice a machine to make electricity from the wind, of which there was plenty.

And, uh, we built several test plants using Ford Motel T [unintelligible] we built about a dozen and put them on ranches for about 50 miles around there. After 3 or 4 years they proved so successful we decided to make a business of it.

Our past experience in developing and building wind energy systems proved that with the increase in energy costs, a new and improved type of wind energy systems would be very practical and competitive with the energy cost of fossil fuel systems now being used.

There are problems with wind energy. It doesn’t always blow when and where you want it. And quality machines are expensive.

But solutions are being sought. The Department of Energy is testing small systems for individual use and large machines for centralized utility needs.

The number of commercially available wind turbine models has grown from fewer than 20 in 1976 to 72 in 1979.

Several of today’s small wind machines are undergoing tests at the Department of Energy’s rocky flats facility in Colorado.

These tests are meant to provide valuable information to consumers wind turbine manufacturers, and organizations affecting the use of wind machines such as banks, zoning commissions, and insurance companies.

There’s also a Rocky Flats program to develop new, advanced designs that increase the lifespan and reliability of wind machines and lower their manufacturing costs. The Department tof Energy is working with NASA to develop large-scale wind machines.

Four large-scale turbines are generating power for electric utility companies. They are operating in New Mexico, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, and North Carolina.

Another department of energy/NASA project is this giant machine. Because it will produce 2.5 megawatts of power, even in areas having more moderate winds, it will be more widely usable than previous experimental models.

Private industry is also designing and building large-scale machines. On Cutty Hunk Island in Massachusetts, the municipal utility has lowered its fossil fuel use by replacing some diesel-generated electricity with wind power. This 200 kW machine was developed entirely with private funds.

Public utilities too are interested in wind. This turbine served as a prototype for development of a megawatt-scale machine, part of SCE’s $2 million wind energy development program.

Much is being done to develop cost effective reliable equipment, but what about the need for storing excess power for low wind periods. Batteries work in some cases, but today another option exists.

Martin Greenwald of Thomas Ridge New York gets some of his electricity form a 2 kW windmill on his farm. The Greenwalds use what energy they need and any excess generated by the windmill is fed into the utility grid building up a credit on their account.

A similar situation exists in another part of New York, New York City. While the urban environment is generally not conducive to wind machines because of high and unpredictable turbulence caused by tall buildings, it was here that the legal precedent was established to tie in small systems with the utility grid.

Ted Finch, wind energy engineer, explains the importance of this action.

TED FINCH: We established the right for people to produce power from decentralized wind systems and interconnect that wind energy conversion system with the utility company. It’s much more expensive with small wind energy conversion systems to ave battery storage. So especially with small installations, it’s important ot interconnect with the utility company to serve as the backup when the winds are low and also where they buy back your surplus wind-derived electricity. This will enhance the economics of wind machines and it’s an important wind energy policy area to pursue.

The problems are being examined and solved. And wind is being used today. This rubine in Texas heats water. These ridge top turbines light this cross above Denver, Colorado. And this eggbeater turbine, a joint Department of Energy and United States Department of Agriculture research project supplies energy for irrigation near Garden City, Kansas. And this one provides energy to refrigerate milk on a dairy farm near Fort Collins, Colorado.

These three turbines convert sea breeze into power for a newspaper in St. Petersburg, Florida. Wind has great potential as an energy source in America. A potential that is in the process of being realized.
As manufacturing costs decrease with mass production, as new technology and stronger and lighter materials are developed and as the cost of conventional energy continues to rise, wind energy will find an even more important place under the sun.

Both graphs are from Pacific Northwest National Lab analyst James Dooley’s excellent report, “US Federal Investments in Energy R&D.” It’s these ridiculously low levels of research spending that make me wary of writing off any particular technology. Say carbon capture and sequestration or enhanced geothermal or wave power. The truth is that we haven’t put in the resources to know which technologies are a good idea.

Perhaps, given the top graph, we need a new measure of investment. Perhaps stealth bombers? They cost $831 million a piece in 2005 dollars ($530 million back in 1989).

If you’re doing the math at home — which I wasn’t doing very well, as Jason pointed out below — the cumulative budget for the DOE’s energy R&D program from 1961-2008 was about 215 stealth bombers. The annual energy R&D budget rarely exceeded $3 billion (in 2005 dollars), or not even enough change to build four bombers.

Here, we’ve just got a video produced by the Energy Research and Development Administration, the precursor to the Department of Energy. It’s actually quite a good summary of American energy usage up through the mid-70s while the film was made, but the pre-20th century bits are bizarre fiction. Watch for the  little boy in period costume staring into a fire wondering how to harness that energy and all the excellent mustaches on most of the unnamed characters.

But beyond this gems, it also reminds us that we’ve gone through energy transitions before — and that they actually have made lives better. Perhaps not uniformly (we’ve certainly lost some cultural stuff) but in terms of life expectancy, average nutrition, and leisure time, I’d take our era over any other.

We’ve got energy problems to solve, but the worst energy problem of all is not having any at your disposal. Because what that means is that humans are most valuable for their muscle, not for their minds.

In America’s Electric Utilities: Past, Present, and Future (which, now would be distant past, past, and recent past, of course) Leonard S. Hyman lays out a narrative for America’s electric utilities that goes roughly like this:

1900 or so: Edison and Westinghouse put the industry together, but there’s substantial competition on all fronts, including the customers themselves, who might very well choose to make their own power.

1907: The utilities get regulated, supposedly because they were a “natural monopoly.” Utilities, in effect, get the government to guarantee that their investors will get a “fair rate of return,” which no one defines. The interesting thing about Hyman’s argument here is that he thinks the utilities allowed/pushed for regulation largely as a way of reducing risk so that they could borrow money more cheaply. It’s yet another way in which financing the kinds of huge project that is an energy plant has affected the structure of the industry.

1915: Things settle down. The electric utility model we know is firmly established. Now, it’s just a matter of making more demand, so that plants can get bigger and run more efficiently.

1915-1935: Holding companies grow as a form of leverage and an easy asset with which to swindle sucker investors. Actually, the form of these companies look a lot like our real estate investment vehicles.

1935-1945: Roosevelt Administration smashes through the holding companies, requiring that they actually have a reason to exist aside from skimming money off the public good. It takes a while to break up all those companies. And there’s a lot of other stuff going on.

1945-1965: These were “the good old days,” Hyman says. “The industry increased the size of power plants, and those new plants utilized fuel more efficiently.” Coal prices went up but were swamped by efficiency increases. Demand rises steadily, something like 7-8% each and every year. All you do to plan is say, “Well, Bob, I say we build more.” Bob assents, each and every time.

1960-1973: The use of oil for electric generation skyrockets. Growing from just 6.1% of generation in 1960 to a peak of 16.9% of generation in 1973. Utilities were trying to get away from burning all that nasty sulfur-heavy coal. Meanwhile, conventional coal plants stop getting more efficient. Demand stops growing. Nuclear power sucks up all the money in the industry as huge plants hit major cost overruns. BUT, here’s the bright side: the use of coal falls to about 44% of the electric mix. And right in the middle of this period, power goes out for 30 million northeastern customers. Everyone says, “WTF? I thought you had this figured out.”

1973: Energy prices skyrocket, consumers pull back. The utilities are stuck with all this excess capacity and cost overruns and all that noise. It’s important to note here that the ‘73 embargo was just the match that lit the powder keg.

1974: Investors start to realize that perhaps utilities are a little riskier than they thought. Too big to fail, but certainly small enough to lose money. That heavily influences how much money they have to pay to borrow more money.

1979-1983: Three Mile Island. Oops. Even if it didn’t kill a whole bunch of people, it sure scared everyone. Another strike against nuclear power. The bigger one, though, was the costs. Here’s an amazing quote, written like a truly outraged analyst, “On October 5, 1983, Cincinatti G&E shocked investors by announcing that the Zimmer nuclear station, supposedly 97% complete, would required $2.8-3.3 billion in additional investment and two to three years of work to be finished. That news was the first of many disastrous nuclear crises that followed.” $6 billion in construction was “written off to oblivion” and stock prices plunged 60-80%.

What went wrong? Here’s Hyman’s short list:

The nuclear crises of 1983-1984 pushed a number of utilities close to bankruptcy. Demand for power was unpredictable. Development of nuclear power had been arrested. Many utilities had excessive capacity. The concept of central station power was under attack. New methods of regulation [he means environmental regs] seemed to put a premium on discouraging demand for central station power… Many utility executives and government officials concluded that electric utilities must turn to smaller power stations (some owned by non-utilities) and must exchange power from surplus to deficit regions as much as possible… Utilities could no longer run as monopolies.

Who won in all this? There’s really no one to cheer for but the anti-hero: Coal.

And now, things look just as grim as they did back in the 70s and early 80s. All those coal plants that provide baseload power for the U.S.? Well, they’re getting old. The Edison Electric Institute says the industry will have to spend between $1.5 and $2.0 TRILLION over the next 22 years just to keep the lights on. Who is going to pay for all that? Probably not the utilities themselves. Take a look at Xcel: they had net income of about $500 million. That’s not much. And Xcel is one of the big utilities.

On the other hand, as they like to say in Silicon Valley, it’s the big problems that present the big opportunities.

The Department of Energy released a new, by-way-of-introduction report on The Grid, which as you can read below, can “appropriately” be called “an ecosystem.”

Our century-old power grid is the largest interconnected machine on Earth, so massively complex and inextricably linked to human involvement and endeavor that it has alternately (and appropriately) been called an ecosystem. It consists of more than 9,200 electric generating units with more than 1,000,000 megawatts of generating capacity connected to more than 300,000 miles of transmission lines.

Via > Greenbiz

Image: flickr/sjalex

Want to find interesting green tech innovations? Just look for periods with high positive acceleration.

Source: Energy Information Administration

“[Mr. Chu] is an indication that Obama really is committed to pursing renewable energy, which the Energy Department has been subsidizing and researching for 30 years,” Ebell told the Washington Times. “It’s a boondoggle.”

Well, for the best-known alt energy technology, solar photovoltaics, here’s what that “boondoggle” has cost the taxpayer: less than $75 million a year since the early 80s. That’s nothing!

I’d be willing to be that our government probably spent more than that on beer for the military.

Via > National Renewable Energy Laboratory