Whoo boy. Environmentalists face an uphill battle in the wilds of the Internet.

Environmentalism is no longer regarded as a dominant plank for both political parties in improving American quality of life. Has environmental protection been too successful? Has it worked its way out of a job?

Back in the early days of the EPA, the agency hired about 100 photographers to go take pictures of the nation’s environment. Now, those 15,000 photographs are finally making their way out of the National Archives’ wonky databases and onto the very-slick Flickr Commons.

I’ll have a lot more of these photos going up over the months, but I wrote up the basic story for Wired Science, including the excellent work done by archivist (and all-around good guy) C. Jerry Simmons.

The original director of the EPA project, Gifford Hampshire, hoped to recreate the success the Depression-era Farm Security Administration had in calling attention to the plight of the nation’s rural poor. The new target was the environment. The visual evidence of the nation’s various pollution problems would help justify the existence of the EPA.

But as it happened, the photographers interpreted their task in different ways. What they captured was not simply a portrait of “nature,” but the environment as people knew it and lived in it.

“Documerica’s official mission effectively focused on popular but valid environmental concerns of the early 1970s: water, air and noise pollution; unchecked urbanization; poverty; environmental impact on public health; and youth culture of the day,” wrote archivist C. Jerry Simmons, in a 2009 article on the collection. “But in reaction to the varied pollution, health and social crises, Documerica succeeded also in affirming America’s commitment to solving these problems by capturing positive images of human life and Americans’ reactions, responses and resourcefulness.”

Traffic jams, noise pollution from jackhammers and 747s, and graffiti appear alongside photos of caribou and western landscapes. Coal mining and mudslides mingle with swimming, movie theaters and greased-pig chases.

It’s a remarkable portrait of the early 1970s, when manufacturing still ruled the economy and environmental laws had just begun to regulate the air and water. The photographs show people, technology and biosphere colliding, producing both devastating consequences and innovative solutions.

Of especial interest here are Jack Corn’s photos of coal mining, Marc St. Gil’s oil field photos, Lyntha Scott Eiler’s pictures of Navajo mining, and Charles Steinhacker’s images of nasty industrial facilities. It’s good to remember that companies didn’t just magically stop polluting. Environmental protection took human work and dedication as well as the development of new technologies.

Images: 1. Lyntha Scott Eiler. 2. Jack Corn. 3. Jack Corn.

Wind comes and wind goes. It’s feral power, part of a much larger natural system that humans are just figuring out how to domesticate.

Coal, on the other hand, is a burnable rock. Like most rocks, these “solidified sunbeams” just sit there until you do something with them. They are their own storage. Gregor Macdonald has written some very interesting (and disturbing) things about the flexibility of coal and how that is its key advantage in our weirdening future.

“Requiring no special containers, and can easily be broken up into small amounts and carried by animals and wagons. It stores well, and burns slowly,” MacDonald writes. “And is quite versatile for both large scale power generation, or low tech industrial use and home heating.”

Wind, it would seem, is quite the opposite. But it’s a more similar kind of resource than you might think because it can fairly easily be converted into other types of energy. In the 19th century and well into the 20th, water-pumping windmills turned air into water. Using wells that poked down just a few hundred feet, farmers could use the power of the wind to transfer close-to-free energy into the most precious commodity west of the 100th meridian: fresh water. Linking the airborne and underground systems helped surface dwellers to take full advantage of the materials available in both.

Now, in a modern twist on this idea, modern wind farms with their gleaming sculptural turbines are about to enter a new underworld. Compressed air energy storage, I reported at Wired Science, is on the verge of breaking into the mainstream.

Compressed-air energy storage plants use compressors to store electricity generated when it’s not needed. The air, pumped into large underground formations, is like a spring that’s been squeezed and when it’s needed, it can deliver a large percentage of the energy that it received.

The first and only such plant in the United States went online in 1991, and though the technology didn’t take off, it did prove that it worked. And now, combining cheap wind energy and compressed-air storage could create a potent new force in the electricity markets.

“This is the first nonhydro renewables technology that can replace coal in the dispatch order,” said David Marcus, co-founder of General Compression, a new company that received $16 million in funding from investors including the utility Duke Energy to build a full-scale prototype of their energy storage system, which would be deployed with arrays of wind turbines.

Compressed air turns wind into a gas that we can let expand and run a turbine in much the same way that burning natural gas executes the same maneuver in current plants. In other words, this technology turns the motion of the atmosphere into a fuel. Fuels can be stored; they are not evanescent energy flows. By taking advantage of the underground — abandoned limestone mines and cavities in salt domes — wind developers gain access to gigawatts of flexibility. At the flick of a switch, you can turn on the energy from the wind.

The best part is that we already know that it works. A plant in sleepy McIntosh, Alabama has been storing coal-fired energy inside a salt dome since 1991.

I’ve been obsessed with what Molly Wright Steenson calls “air and its realities.” Not just air as the stuff you breathe, but air as a substance, as a carrier of power.  We should understand how this works. Who hasn’t stuck their hand out of a car window and marveled at the changes in the force of the air you can affect by small tilts of the palm? But somehow because air is invisible, we don’t take it seriously. Until it comes spinning down from a thunderhead — what is a tornado but nature’s awesomest wind visualization? — we don’t want to believe that air’s structure can be as complex as it really is.

But… Imagine if you had a real-time sensor network across the globe measuring wind’s force and sending it some arch-data center. There, a spinning holograph of the globe would show this new air-topographic map of the earth, shifting and moving every second of every day forever. For almost all of civilization, we’ve had nearly the exact opposite amount of data. We’ve known almost nothing about how the wind blows, except that it does.

The top image, drawn from Department of Energy documents, shows how scientists actually knew about the wind’s properties in 1975. At first the wind looked just as flat and shiny as the hopes of wind entrepreneurs. By 1985, the mirror had cracked and deformed. Harnessing the wind was going to be difficult! All but one U.S. wind company had gone out of business by 1996.

I also love an idea that David Marcus, co-found of the compressed air energy storage company General Compression, put into my head. The problems with wind — the cracked mirror — are actually fractal. The wind’s intermittency exists at all time scales, he said. And so does its structure.

Illustration from Raghu Garud and Peter Karnøe’s 2002 Research Policy paper, “Bricolage versus breakthrough: distributed and embedded agency in technology entrepreneurship”

In a controversial piece on nuclear power a few months ago, I pointed out that people’s views about nuclear power are embedded in their broader attitudes about science and equity and the trustworthiness of experts.

Turns out, much the same is true of climate science. How people feel about the trustworthiness of a technical analysis is only kind of linked with the quality of the work. Today’s Green, Inc., links to Harvard professor Sheila Jasanoff’s essay on the “trust deficit” climatologists face. Here’s the New York Times summary:

Sheila Jasanoff, professor of science and public policy at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, says that climate scientists face two significant challenges: to produce and communicate the best information about climatic changes, and to build public trust. The trust part, she says, does not necessarily flow from the quality of the science, as many scientists hope or believe.

The entire modern scientific enterprise, she argues, requires the lay public to place faith in strangers, to have confidence in the experts who understand specialized knowledge that untrained citizens do not share. The public must also believe that those experts — the scientific priesthood — are not conspiring to dupe them.

“It’s not just a function of information, but an ongoing relationship with the public, a willingness to show why you should be believed,” Professor Jasanoff said.

“A willingness to show why you should be believed” is something that has always proven difficult for technical folks involved up-and-down the energy industry. They tend to have the attitude: “Why believe me? Because your frigging lights are on, that’s why!” And they aren’t totally wrong. Keeping the system running is an accomplishment that should be respected, even by those who want to change it.

But for energy folks trying to get people to understand where they are coming from, “because I said so” is just about the least effective rhetorical strategy.

Front page image from: Your Friend the Atom, a Walt Disney film.

You know that one of my favorite sports is bagging on forecasts of all types, so when I come across one that’s pretty decent, I think it’s worth highlighting. Here, we see that the Department of Energy’s 1996 forecast (drawn from here) does pretty well. They overprojected the price declines up until 2000, but as you can see in the bottom graph (from Ryan Wiser’s 2007 Berkeley Lab report), the wind industry quickly caught up as the price of wind electricity dropped from 6 cents a kilowatt hour to 4 from just 1999 to 2002.

(The scales of the charts above are different: One is cents per kilowatt hour, the other in $ per megawatt hour. Basic conversion: $10/MWh = $0.01/KWh. My apologies. I’d love to play Remake the Chart today, but I’ve got a few thousand words to write.)

Note, too, that the DOE projection shows the cost reduction curve flattening out around the 3-4 cent range, which is exactly what’s happened. What they did miss is that the price spread for different projects is wide. They anticipated that wind power projects would only vary half a cent up or down from the average. In reality, the variance is 1.5 cents either way, so the range extends from some projects making power at 2 cents a kilowatt hour to other projects that make electricity at 5 cents a kilowatt hour.

It’s worth noting that all of the costs cited here for wind are easily competitive in the wholesale electricity market. For example, in 2005, a good year for wind and bad one for natural gas prices, wind was off-the-charts cheap:

Back in 1993, it wasn’t the Bloom Box that was going to make clean energy “competitive with fossil fuels” but a new wind turbine from Kenetech.

The 33M-VS, which the company promoted as the “5 Cent Turbine,” was going to be the technological savior that would make wind energy as cheap as fossil fuel generation. In an American policy environment that was as streaky as the wind, these machines Were going to make the government irrelevant. Cranking out electricity at five cents per kilowatt hour, these machines wouldn’t need no stinking subsidies, no messy talk about externalities, or social goods. They’d be able to compete anywhere there was a good wind resource, company executives told Wall Street investors ahead of their late 1992 IPO. They raised $92 million and saw their stock shoot up as analyst after analyst foresaw huge growth for Kenetech.

The new turbine was a “marriage of aerodynamics and microelectronics” that allowed it to pull more energy out of the wind. The key was supposedly the introduction of a “variable-speed rotor,” which allowed the turbine to create nicely conditioned electrical power at a greater range of speeds than previous machines, supposedly from 8 miles per hour all the way up to 65 miles per hour. Over $70 million had been spent on its development, and it was implicitly endorsed by the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility-backed group.

“Sitting atop a 90-foot tower, its 54-foot-long blades facing into the breeze, the 33M-VS looks like any other wind machine. But it isn’t,” Business Week wrote. The turbine, Kenetech president Dale Osborn averred, “has been tested in the lab and in the field. It has worked beyond our wildest imagination.”

Noting the 130 patents that Kenetech received for the 33M-VS, the Christian Science Monitor bought the company line that “after 10 years of development and a year of field tests, the 33M-VS wind turbine will produce electricity for 5 cents per kilowatt-hour, making it competitive with natural gas.”

An EPRI report testified the turbine “is less vulnerable to wear and tear from wind action, lighter weight, and less expensive than a comparably sized constant-speed machine.”

Sounds great! But the problem was that this was not really true.

The machines may have been a tiny bit more efficient than their competitors, but what they gained there, they more than lost in operations and maintenance difficulty. Blades cracked. The hydraulics broke down. The list of problems was long. In August 1994, financial analyst Hank Hermann visited the site and reported “the loud groaning, clanging, whining noises emitting from several of the machines strongly suggested to my untrained unscientific ear that meaningful problems may exist with some of these machines.” The next month, Wind Power Monthly reported on what the buzz had long been in the industry. It turned out the turbines stunk.

But even before Hermann’s report was published on August 22, talk throughout the wind industry was of most of the 33M-VS blades in Palm Springs being cracked or damaged, of times when most 33M-VS turbines in Palm Springs were apparently shut down when the wind reaches about 35 mph, of most of the blades on Buffalo Ridge having cracked roots, of problems with generators and hydraulics systems, and of availability lower than usual in a wind plant — about 60%-80% compared with the normal 95-99%. For example, on August 18, out of 80, 33M-VS turbines on Kenetech’s larger wind farm in Palm Springs, 28 turbines were stopped at 08.00 in winds of 18 mph, and 18 were not operating at 11.30 in winds of 15 mph, according to a long time wind expert who says he has frequently noted that kind of low availability at the plant.

Years later, after Kenetech had gone bankrupt, the Wind Power Monthly was still bagging on the renamed turbine, then known as the KVS-33. “Operating the Kenetech KVS 33 wind turbine was likened to “life in a high maintenance environment” by Bill Barnes of LG&E Power Inc, speaking at the American Wind Energy Association’s annual conference in Austin, Texas, in June. LG&E is the largest owner and operator of the KVS 33M model, said Barnes.”

The 5 Cent Savior had become the industry scapegoat. Turned out, the turbine didn’t work nearly as well as anticipated.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. The story was: drop in the variable-speed rotor and — bang! — the energy problem would be solved. For historians of technology, this idea is flabbergasting and frustrating. The Danish turbines that now dominate the world market didn’t make huge leaps in performance. They just got better and better, incrementally, like things do.

“American designers constantly sought breakthroughs. They wanted to bypass the drudgery of incremental development and bat a home run,” Gipe wrote in his book Wind Comes of Age. “Americans leapt from one size to the next with little transition.”

The idea that technological breakthroughs visit engineers like gods from a nerdier dimension and change everything pervades American society. It’s a TV movie-quality narrative, but things don’t work like that. And the weird thing is that people who run technology companies often think that it does, or at least that the American public should be fed that line in order to build interest in their company.

As I was drinking too much coffee this morning, I hit on a new analogy for this mode of thinking: it’s the Al Davis approach to technology development. Davis, which you know if you watch football, is the owner of the Oakland Raiders. He’s famous for meddling with his team’s talent evaluators and coaches. He looks for quick fixes, thinking that if he can just get that one player, it will transform his team.

The classic Davis move was his signing of back-to-back Super Bowl MVP players to his roster with lavish contracts, though the two players (Desmond Howard and Larry Brown) were just mediocre. Neither player stayed with the team for more than a year.

A better analogy for how good technological development goes is Bill Belichick’s management of the Patriots. They are famous for getting older, undrafted, and otherwise unheralded players to work together within the overall scheme. They don’t look for one player who can transform their fortunes, but build the team as a team. Of course, they try to make each individual better, but they also find ways to put the players in positions where they can play their best.

Of course this is just an analogy, but I think there is a nugget of truth to it. We recognize that hit-seeking behavior in complex enterprises is kind of stupid, but with technology, we think that’s just the way it works.

One of the consistently strange things about the green tech world is that people continue to believe that science and technology are all that matter.

It’s just not true. Innovation in business models and in the political realm are at least as important as coming up with a slightly more efficient solar cell — or delivering a slightly improved fuel cell like Bloom Energy appears to have done.

For example, marketing matters! As I noted here on this post about air conditioners and iPhones, advertising and the like can help generate demand for a product that far exceeds how much better something makes your life. And what we saw today was a clinic in marketing. They lined up starpower to appeal to all kinds of audiences from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Google’s Larry Page to Colin Powell. John Doerr might have been asked if Bloom Energy was the next Google, but what that extravaganza really looked like was an Apple event.

In any case, once a new product has succeeded, it begins to reshape buyers’ expectations about future products and services. (There were plenty of touchscreens before the iPhone’s.) Technological momentum builds and next thing you know, there’s a touchscreen on your coffee mug. So, perhaps the greatest service that the Bloom Box could do for green tech would be making distributed generation an expectation for more companies and people. That would be a big societal shift — and one that has always struck me as tougher to make than people think. You grow up with your own well, like I did, and you see the virtues of centralized services. Doing it yourself is a pain in the ass, even if it’s cheaper and/or better in some way.

Of what I’ve seen, Todd Woody’s writeup in the New York Times covered the news best, and this Lux Research post on the “economics of the Bloom Box” is the best analysis piece so far.

Bloom’s Stu Aaron told us that the company intends to produce electricity from natural gas at a lower cost to the customer than the grid. Stu claimed the cost of electricity over the fuel cell’s 10-year life is $0.08/kWh to $0.10/kWh (when running as base-load for 24 hours a day), including government incentives and assuming a $7/mmBTU natural gas long-term contract. Stu also confirmed that the 100 kW fuel cell system’s price without incentives is in the range of $700,000 to $800,000.

The only other piece of analysis I’ll add is a tidbit from the eBay blog post on their boxes. I’ve been wondering about the operation and maintenance costs/difficulties associated with the boxes. eBay says that their five boxes generated 2 million kilowatt-hours in the first six months of operation. That works out to about 93 kilowatt hours per machine per hour. That’s pretty good, falling just a bit short of their 100 kilowatt ratings.