Eschew Obfuscation: Category Global Warming

Slight of Hand - 20 Foot Sea Level Rise

Max Dunn — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 08:58:00 -0700

There are many ways to distort the truth. One of them is to suggest something as a possibility and then let uncritical minds repeat it as a fact. This is what is happening with Al Gore’s look at a 20 foot sea level rise.

Book Review - Zoom, The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future

Max Dunn — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:03:00 -0700

ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future
by Vijay Vaitheeswaran

I wanted to like this book – I really did. With a name like "Zoom" and the promise to show the car of the future, I was excited to read it. But in the end, the book turned out to be at best a dud, and at worst misleading and harmful to the future of transportation.

Easy CO2 Calculation for Vehicles

Max Dunn — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:05:00 -0700

Sometimes you will hear that electric vehicles produce more CO2 than gas vehicles, however, this isn’t true. Let’s look at an easy CO2 calculation to see why.

Burning a gallon of gas creates 20 lbs of CO2. So a car that gets an average of 20 MPG produces 1 lb of CO2 per mile. Ok so far?

Electric cars get an average of 3 miles per kWh and 1 kWh creates an average of 1.3 lbs of CO2. So an electric car produces about 0.4 lbs of CO2 per mile. So electric cars produce only about 40% as much CO2 as gas cars. Easy, right?

3rd Generation PV

Max Dunn — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:42:00 -0700

There was an interesting talk at the Woods Energy Seminar at Stanford yesterday by Dr. Gavin Conibeer about 3rd generation photovoltaic (PV) devices.

The 1st generation are the PV cells we have now that cost around $6/watt and are around 20% efficient. The 2nd generation are the thin film cells which cost around $1/watt but are only about 12% efficient. The 3rd generation cells will use quantum dot technology created using thin-film manufacturing methods, so they will be a lot less expensive than 1st generation devices but will also use a variety of techniques to boost efficiencies up to 65% which will drive the cost down to $0.20/watt.

This sounds pretty great! However, the catch is that when asked when these 3rd generation PV cells would start going into production, his answer was “It is still a long ways away.”

Following are the notes I took during his talk:

Clouds and Gusts = Regulation Problems

Max Dunn — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:26:00 -0700

All of the major electricity generating systems in use today have a fairly steady output. Whether they are powered by nuclear, coal, hydro or natural gas, the electricity output will be fairly constant unless there is a malfunction. However, solar and wind systems aren’t consistent – clouds can dramatically affect the output of solar systems, and lulls and gusts can affect wind systems.

In our electrical grid, it is important that the supply of electricity consistently matches its demand. This will become more challenging once solar and wind systems are producing a larger percentage of the total electrical power, and there are currently no good ways to smooth out these fast fluctuations. Spreading the solar and wind units far apart helps so that clouds and gusts won’t affect all the units at the same time. Also pumped hydro (where water can be pumped up into a dam using electricity as well as letting it out to produce electricity) can help smooth things out as well as using natural gas spinning reserves.

However, we will still need more regulation that is much faster than these, and this is where Vehicle-to-Grid can help. If we can reach a level where a significant amount of electric vehicles are hooked up to the grid with fast command communication, they will be able to quickly smooth out the electrical surges and lulls from solar and wind systems. Otherwise, we will likely run into severe regulations problems with these systems due to clouds and gusts.

Friedman: Our Political Brownout on Energy Policy

Max Dunn — Thu, 01 May 2008 08:40:00 -0700

Thomas Friedman, author of ‘The World is Flat just wrote a very intelligent op-ed piece for the New York Times titled: ‘Dumb as We Wanna Be’. Here are some edited excerpts:

Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy – this is money laundering. The idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away.
Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering.
The McCain-Clinton proposal is a reminder to me that the biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the energy to be serious — the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way. We are in the midst of a national political brownout.

NanoSolar: The Company That Might Save the World

Max Dunn — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:44:00 -0700

Yesterday, I shook the hand of the man whose company might just save the world.

He is Martin Roscheisen, CEO of NanoSolar. He alluded that they are producing solar panels at about $1 per watt with a complete system cost of $2 watt when installed in municipal scale of 1MW to 50MW. This is about the same cost as a coal-fired power plant!

Furthermore, their panels can be installed at the rate of 1MW per day, and need 5 acres per MW, which means a municipal sized system of 50MW can be installed in about two months. This contrasts with coal-fired plants that can take 4 years or more to build.

Drawbacks? Their German plant is producing only about 420 MW of solar capacity per year and their San Jose plant which will open in 2009 will produce about the same. While this is very high by normal PV standards, it would help the world greatly if this went up by several orders of magnitude.

Just think – instead of building more coal plants we can start building clean solar power systems at about the same cost!

Feed-in Tariffs

Max Dunn — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:27:00 -0700

Wind power can now produce energy as cheaply as coal, about 5c per kilowatt hour (kWh). Solar power is almost to the point where it can produce energy at the marginal electrical rate of about 10c kWh. So with oil prices over $100 barrel, natural gas prices doubling, and all the concern about CO2 and other noxious emissions from coal plants, why aren’t more wind and solar projects being built?

GreenVolts Seminar

Max Dunn — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 09:59:00 -0700

Last night I attended a seminar put on by the Going Green! meetup group and the speaker was Craig Lewis who is VP Government Relations with GreenVolts. GreenVolt’s goal is to “deliver power to utility companies at fossil fuel costs”.

Craig talked a little about the GreenVolts product, which is a concentrating solar collector system with advanced tracking and is designed to be interconnected at the 12kv distribution level in sizes ranging from 1 to 20 mega-watts (MW). However, his main topic was “Accelerating the Transition to Smart Energy.” His conclusion was that to make alternative energy sources take off, the government needs to shift the subsidies paid to oil companies into long-term feed-in tariffs, i.e. requiring the electric companies to buy power at a set price for the next 10 to 15 years. This would allow alternative energy projects to have a guaranteed return and thus enable them to get long-term financing.

While Craig wouldn’t divulge the cost of their system, he did say it was about half of a typical flat-panel installation, so I am guessing that the cost is about $4 per watt, which would mean they could produce power at less than 9.5c per kilowatt, which is the rate they would be selling it to the utilities.

He also threw out some other interesting numbers:

Their system requires 3 acres per MW or 100 MW per square mile, which is a higher power density than other systems
Oil imports comprise more than half of the U.S. deficit
Oil companies received about $17 billion last year in subsidies while solar industry only got $200 million.

Here are the complete notes:

Cost of a Solar Nation

Max Dunn — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:36:00 -0700

How much would it cost to build a solar nation? Here are some interesting numbers:

The IEA estimates that it will take a worldwide investment of $5.4 trillion dollars in oil exploration and development in order to meet the demand for oil in 2030, if oil usage continues to grow at its current rate. Since the U.S. uses about 25% of the worlds oil, our cost would be about $1.35 trillion.

Scientific American estimates that if we provide less than a third of this amount as a subsidy – $420 billion – then we can build a solar collection, storage and distribution system that would provide 69% of America’s electricity and 35% of it’s total energy by 2050.

So, can anyone say that building a solar nation is too expensive?

China's CO2 Explosion

Max Dunn — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:02:00 -0700

China has overtaken the U.S. as the world’s biggest contributor to CO2 emissions, and a new study shows it growing much faster than expected.

Previously, experts put growth at 2.5% to 5% per year, but the real rate may be 11%, according to a new study. If this is the case, then between 2000 and 2010, the increase in China’s CO2 emissions will be more than 5 times greater than all the reductions that were expected under the Kyoto Protocol.

(From BusinessWeek, March 24, 2008)

Farting Along With Air Cars

Max Dunn — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:32:00 -0800

I was trying to explain to my wife how an air car worked, and with a smile on her face she said “So it farts as it moves forward?” Well maybe that sums it up nicely.

But do air cars really make sense? The information from the manufacturers seem like they are the solution to our energy crisis, and to everything else too [1]. But there are several fundamental problems with air cars.

Independent Summary For Policymakers (ISPM)

Max Dunn — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:07:00 -0800

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the scientific body that researches climate change for the United Nations (UN) and released their Fourth Assesment Report (AR4) in 2007. There are numerous experts participating in the IPCC, and a lot of good science is contained in these reports.

However, there is a big problem with the summary that is included with the IPCC report – the Summary For Policymakers (SPM). This summary is not written by the scientists themselves but by unnamed bureaucratic delegates from the participating countries. As such, they tend to oversimplify and bias the actual results contained in the full report.

So I found that the Independent Summary For Policymakers to be more balanced and representative of the actual report than the SPM itself. The ISPM was prepared by qualified experts, but who were not themselves IPCC chapter authors. The ISPM was subject to expert review and the reviewer’s responses are tabulated so there is a clear record to the extent that the reviewers agreed or disagreed with the ISPM.

Bike Riding for Errands

Max Dunn — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:30:00 -0800

I should ride my bike more. It is good exercise and saves the environment. However, I don’t like to ride my bike on everyday errands.

I was reminded of this today when I got new tires for our car. Like usual, I threw my bike in the back and rode home after dropping off the car. It isn’t far, about 2.5 miles, but I was hot and sweaty when I got home. I was smart this time and brought a piece of string to wrap around my pant leg. Usually I forget this and wind up getting chain oil on my pant leg.

When the car was ready, I rode back to the shop to pick it up, and I was a bit tired.

So it certainly worked out fine to ride my bike, but it isn’t something that I would normally do. Also, for the same reasons, I don’t think we can expect many Americans to forgo their cars and start doing a lot more bike riding either. Good thing I have my electric scooter to scoot around on!

My Global Warming Beliefs

Max Dunn — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 07:36:00 -0800

I have been reticent to publicly state my beliefs about global warming for a few reasons. One is that some of my friends are global warming believers and I don’t want to offend them. Another is that the global warming movement has gained so much momentum that it has becoming a core-belief of our society and to speak against it often makes a person seem crazy.

But the time has come for me to state my beliefs, and here they are:

Many parts of the world are experiencing rising temperatures or other climate changes
Man’s activities are increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere
This increased CO2 is contributing in part to climate changes
The effects from man’s contribution to climate change will not be as bad as many claim

On the other hand, I do believe that peak oil is going to be a gigantically huge problem and will be a major inflection point in the development and lifestyle of all civilization on this planet.

Conveniently, the actions to reduce CO2 are almost exactly the same ones that will help with peak oil. So I don’t mind riding the global warming train for now since it leads to the same place eventually!

Are Buses Bad for the Environment?

Max Dunn — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:05:00 -0800

It is common knowledge that buses are energy efficient, right? I mean shouldn’t we all ride the bus rather than drive a car? Well a study looked at this more closely and found out something interesting. Here are some figures for passenger miles per gallon (PMPG) for various forms of transportation:

Light rail – 120 PMPG
Trolley bus – 104 PMPG
Commuter rail – 86 PMPG
Intercity rail – 66 PMPG
Car, average trip – 44 PMPG
Transit bus – 33 PMPG

Wow, look at that: city buses only get about 33 PMPG – this is even less than a normal car with 2 people which gets 44 PMPG! I guess to be more green, we should all avoid the bus and drive our cars instead. :-)

Reference: Comparison of Energy Use & CO2 Emissions From Different Transportation Modes

Which Alternate Energy Vehicle is the Most Efficient?

Max Dunn — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:33:00 -0800

There are several better energy alternatives to power cars than using gas. The top ones are hydrogen, air or battery. However, it turns out that there are big differences in the efficiencies of these technologies. For 100MJ of input electricity, this is how far each of these cars could go: [18]

133 km: Lithium-ion battery vehicle
46 km: Compressed air car
42 km: Fuel cell vehicle

So it turns out that battery electric vehicles are 3 times more efficient than either compressed air or fuel cell vehicles!

Can Battery Backups Make Money?

Max Dunn — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:12:00 -0800

I don’t have a lot of confidence in PG&E. It seems that every time we have a big storm, our power goes out. Once, it took 3 days for them to get the power back on! So I have been considering installing a battery backup system for my house to get through these power outages.

If I install a battery backup system, I was wondering if it would be profitable to charge up the batteries at night when electricity costs are low, at $0.05/kWh, and then use it during the day when electricity costs are high, at $0.11/kWh to $0.29/kWh [9]?

Oil Usage

Max Dunn — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:29:00 -0800

What do we use all our oil on? Here is a breakdown from the year 2000:

From: DETAILED BREAKDOWN OF U.S. PETROLEUM USE

In summary, cars use about 41%, trucks 13% and planes 7%. So if we want to reduce the amount of oil we use, then reducing our transportation usage will be effective, since transportation comprises about 60% of all oil usage.

Strangely, Power Company Rebates Make Sense

Max Dunn — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:17:00 -0800

It seems awfully strange that a company that sells power would subsidize compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) that use less energy, and give rebates for energy efficient appliances. This would be like Starbucks giving awards to people who cut down on their coffee drinking! But even though this seems strange, power companies trying to cut power consumption actually makes sense.

Hot Tub Energy: Electric vs Gas

Max Dunn — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:38:00 -0800

Nowadays, if you are looking to install a hot tub, your only option is likely to be a hot tub that heats with electricity. The salesman will tell you that they are very well insulated (which they are) and that it will only cost about $30 per month of electricity to heat it (which is possible but optimistic.) Let’s look at the math and physics behind this.

The Trouble with Lithium

Max Dunn — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 11:39:00 -0800

It turns out that lithium is not very abundant or easy to mine, and that the price is going up. In this paper, the author even argues that there is not enough lithium available in the world to convert all cars over to plug-in hybrid (PHEV) if we expect to use lithium batteries in them:

The Trouble with Lithium – Implications of Future PHEV Production for Lithium Demand

Lithium Silicon Nanowire Battery - 10 Times As Much Energy!

Max Dunn — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 10:16:00 -0800

An revolutionary new technology is being developed by Stanford researcher Yi Cui that could could generate 10 times more energy from lithium-ion batteries. The trick is that instead of using carbon anodes, they use silicon nanowires because silicon can hold large amounts of lithium atoms. The nanowire technology allows these small wires to swell to four times their normal size without breaking. [1]

When Cui’s paper was originally submitted six months ago, they had only achieved 30 charge-discharge cycles. Since that time however, Cui’s team has pushed the battery through 1000 cycles. [2]

Ultimately, these batteries should be cheap to build. However, they are probably 5 years away from being commercialized. [3]

In reality though, the “10 times more energy” figure is just the theoretical charge capacity increase in the silicon anode, so a real production battery won’t see that much improvement. But even if it improves the overall energy density of a lithium ion battery by 2 or 3 times, that would still be very significant.

[1] Nanowire battery can hold 10 times the charge of existing lithium-ion battery

[2] New Nanowire Battery Life Reaches From iPods to Electric Cars

[3] GM-Volt.com: Interview with Dr. Cui, Inventor of Silicon Nanowire Lithium-ion Battery Breakthrough

Antarctic Cooling

Max Dunn — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 19:31:00 -0800

In my son’s 7th grade social studies class today, he was given an article that discussed how the warming of the Antarctic was melting ice sheets and reducing the population of some penguin colonies. However, while the breakup of the Larsen B ice shelf was unexpectedly rapid, the Antarctic as a whole has actually had stable or decreasing temperatures and the overall ice pack has probably been growing. Even the IPCC recognizes this by stating:

“Antarctic sea ice extent continues to show interannual variability and localised changes but no statistically significant average trends, consistent with the lack of warming refl ected in atmospheric temperatures averaged across the region.” [1]

Another source confirms that:

“it is also clear from satellite data that surface temperatures decreased during the years 1982 through 2002” and “the Antarctic ice sheet had gained enough mass between 1992 and 2003 to slow sea level rise at a rate of about 1 cm/century” [2]

And one source states:

“over the past four decades, and during the time of the greatest build-up of greenhouse gases, Antarctica has been cooling!” [3]

These observations in no way disprove global warming in general. However, they do clearly show is that climate change is very complex science and that you can’t draw simple or universal conclusions based on it.

[1] IPCC AR4 Summary for Policymakers (Page 9)

[2] Is Antarctic climate changing?

[3] Antarctica: Warming, Cooling, or Both?

Food versus Fuel - Which Wins?

Max Dunn — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 07:04:00 -0800

Here is a very long and detailed analysis of food-based biofuel production and how it could cause problems with the food supply:

Fermenting the Food Supply

The scary point about this article is that it illustrates how profitable it is to make biofuel when oil prices are high and how this could lead to devastating consequences if we have a bidding war between the gas tanks of the roughly one billion middle class people on the planet, and the dinner tables of the poor.

Cheap Solar Panels to Save the World

Max Dunn — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 09:22:00 -0800

Nanosolar announced that is is starting to ship its thin-film solar panels that cost less than $1 per watt! Could these panels save the world?

Maybe, but Nanosolar is being very tight about information, citing patent concerns:

“Technical Data Sheet? We presently share product data sheets only under Non-Disclosure Agreement with qualified volume customers. This is so we can extend the period of protection for certain proprietary features we have developed.”

Their first 12 months of production is already sold out and is going to commercial installations, so maybe it isn’t efficient enough to put on a house. But there was one tidbit where Nanosolar’s CEO said they could produce about as much energy as the a silicon wafer.

It also received Popular Science’s Green Tech product of the Year award

Solar vs Coal: Who Wins?

Max Dunn — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 16:09:00 -0800

A new solar power plant just opened up at Nellis Air Force Base in southern Nevada [1]. Currently it is the largest solar photovoltaic system in North America with a capability of 14 megawatts (mW) of peak power, and producing about 25 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per year [2].

However, it cost $100 million to build, which is about $7,000 per kilowatt (kW). This is a lot more than a coal-powered plants which costs about $3,000 per kW to build [3]. But since the sun is free and coal-powered plants have to pay for the coal, shouldn’t this make up for the additional cost of solar systems?

It turns out, that it doesn’t. To see why, let’s look at the numbers.

Electric Vehicles Produce a Lot Less CO2

Max Dunn — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 09:35:00 -0800

When I talk about how clean electric vehicles are, people sometimes ask if they really do reduce greenhouse gases since burning coal to produce electricity creates a lot of CO2. My standard answer to this question is that even in the worst case, electric cars are twice as clean as gas powered cars. However, while reading an article in Forbes about vehicle-to-grid (V2G) systems. I realized that in general, electric cars are much cleaner than even this.

This article had an interesting chart that said electric cars produce about 1.1 tons of greenhouse gases a year while gas powered cars produce 6.3 tons – over 6 times more! Let’s see if we can verify these numbers.

The average car is driven 15,000 miles per year and electric vehicles normally get 4 miles per kWh, so it takes about 3,750 kWh of electricity a year to power an electric car. In California, the mix of electricity production produces about 0.6 lbs of greenhouse gases per kWh so this would produce 2,250 pounds, or 1.1 tons of greenhouse gases – right on the money with the Forbes chart.

A gas car, on the other hand, produces about 1 lb of CO2 for every mile driven (based on producing 20 lbs per gallon and getting 20 mpg). So 15,000 miles would produce 15,000 lbs of greenhouse gases, or about 7.5 tons – which is more than the Forbes estimate of 6.3 tons (maybe they are using a higher mpg).

So electric cars are even cleaner than I had thought, producing about one sixth as much greenhouse gases as a gas car.

Sources of Scientific Bias: Both Money and Beliefs

Max Dunn — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:03:00 -0800

When trying to discredit a scientist’s work, critics sometimes simply note: “They received funding from XYZZY corporation.” It is interesting that often nothing more is said, as if it is apparent that taking any money from a party with a vested interest will inevitably skew the results. This seems like a pretty harsh position, but there is some basis to this claim.

For instance, new research looked at drug studies and found that while the results of the study were not likely to be biased, the conclusion from those results were. In particular, they found that studies funded by a single drug company have a 55% rate of favorable results that is transformed into a 92% rate for favorable conclusions, representing a 37% gap. The gap shrinks to 21% (57% to 79%) when two or more drug companies provide support. Yet the gap vanishes entirely for studies done by non-profit institutions alone or even in conjunction with drug companies. These findings suggest a disconnect between the data that underlie the results and the interpretation or “spin” of these data that constitutes the conclusions.[1]

So it is apparent that receiving funding from a particular source that has a vested interest in the outcome will likely affect the conclusion of a study.

But are there other biases besides funding sources that can affect the results or conclusions of scientific work? What if a researcher isn’t taking any outside funding but has a passionate belief about what they are researching – will this affect their work as well?

Global Temperature Reconstruction

Max Dunn — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 09:43:00 -0800

The global temperature graph that appears in An Inconvenient Truth and also the one that the IPCC uses is usually referred to as the Mann or MBH98 graph.

However, this temperature reconstruction is controversial. One of its problems is that it doesn’t show the Medieval Warming Period or the Little Ice Age (LIA).

More recently, Loehle put together another temperature reconstruction that doesn’t use tree rings and this reconstruction does show the MWP and LIA.

Beliefs and Global Warming

Max Dunn — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 09:36:22 -0800

When talking to people about religion, you have to be careful. Many people don’t want to hear facts or ideas that contradict their point of view; they are only interested in hearing things that reinforce what they already believe.

This same phenomenon also happens when talking about global warming – most people have their minds made up on this issue and aren’t willing to consider any evidence that would challenge their beliefs.

When to Buy an Electric Car?

Max Dunn — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 09:09:00 -0800

That is the question – whether to buy a low-speed electric vehicle now, or wait for a high-speed electric vehicle later? Here are the factors I am looking at:

What type of transportation do I need?
When will high-speed electric vehicles really arrive?
How much will they actually cost?
When will the severe oil shortages start?
Will there be subsidies for electric vehicles?

The short answer is that I am going to buy a low-speed NEV now and wait for later to buy a freeway capable electric car. Here is the long answer:

The True Cost of Carbon Offsets

Max Dunn — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 20:29:00 -0700

There is a growing interest in buying carbon credits to offset our carbon footprints. However, there is evidence of widespread failings in the market for carbon offsets. Some of these failings include:

Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.
Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.
A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.

In addition, many carbon offset projects don’t pay for the whole cost of CO2 removal projects they just kick in a little money and claim all the carbon credit of the project. Is this really going to significantly reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere?