If the title is not obvious enough, this missive is about how various renewable energy approaches need to be tailored to the renewable resources of various regions. This seems obvious enough, but it does not seem to translate into policy very well. For example, photovoltaic systems don't make much sense on the southern Alaska coastline, which has short daylight hours for significant parts of the year, and then there is the cloudiness issue...not a lot of sunshine gets through compared to the insolation that exists in the SW USA deserts. However, this coastline (and especially along the Aleutian Islands) is one of the windiest places on earth, there are lots of places with big tidal flows, and then there are the waves that make the Gulf of Alaska one of the riskiest places on earth to work.

One way that is used to make sense of which approach makes the most sense for a type of renewable energy in a location is to figure out what the production cost is going to be for that energy approach. Then use the lower cost approaches that also can be rapidly deployed, since we really don't have all the money in the world to spend on really really pricey energy. This is not as easy as it seems, especially when all kinds of tax credits/rebates/tax deductions get thrown into the mix. Odds are, if you don't pay a lot of taxes, or at least have a high marginal tax rate (or any for that matter), tax credits are about as useful as mammary glands on a bull - hose only work well if you are well off.

As a general rule, one form of renewable energy - wind turbines at the commercial scale units - has a production cost that is fairly close to electricity made with polluting means - coal, natural gas and nukes in particular. The production cost - often very hard to figure out exactly, but pretty easy to get an approximate cost of production - is largely a function of the wind resource and the distance to the means to get the product to market - in this case, distribution and/or transmission wires. It turns out the US "capacity" is actually a function of the price that can be obtained for this electricity - not much at 3 c/kw-hr, and several times our current national consumption at 10 c/kw-hr. However, these units are big enough to supply several hundred to several thousand homes (depending upon how efficient and/or gluttonous the house residents are). Current laws provide about 4 c/kw-hr worth of "tax benefits' to those with a huge passive tax appetite (landlords, for example) and regular income for the "rapid depreciation" part of the incentive. If a large number of people pooled their resources and bought/installed a turbine where production costs were identical to one set up by those with sufficient tax appetite, the regular folks are disadvantaged by 4 c/kw-hr. However, there are some convoluted and clever ways that this can be sort of circumvented, especially if the "regular folks" can wait for a 10 year period. However, it would be nice to at least add the option of using arrangements such as the European Renewable Energy Feed-In Laws/Advanced Renewable Tariffs.....

As for the variability issue - there are two easy solutions that work best in combination. One is pumped hydro, and the other is to disperse large numbers arrays of wind turbines across large areas (like most of the country!). For areas with either no hills or no water, compressed air is also a viable way to go, though it is less efficient than pumped hydro (80 % for pumped hydro, about 50% for compressed air). The air compression can also be used to provide both heat and cooling, especially if there is a use for this (meaning that such systems should be used in metropolitan regions or in institutions and factories that can use this heating and/or cooling).

With PV solar and solar thermal electric, its very different - you need to go where the sun is unobstructed for most of the time, and where rain and clouds are less common. PV's are still much more expensive than wind, even in the best areas for PV. With installed prices near $7500 per kw of capacity, the delivered cost at best will be near 27 c/kw-hr for an area with the panels perfectly aligned, no trees or other shadows present and never any clouds. Of course, there is the storage of energy detail, as these only make electricity when the light is shining on them. Since most batteries are at best 55% efficient, you could lose more than 25% of the energy needed each day just due to that. But PV is well suited to small users, and it can help shave off demand during peak "hot times". Solar thermal electric seems to be a "big electric" concept, while solar hot water never gets any respect because it has no direct payback, only avoidance of cost (as in gas, oil or electricity to heat hot water. In areas that get enough water to sustainably support high concentrations of humans, water and vegetation tend to work at cross purposes to PV and solar thermal, especially on the residential scale.

One really great use for both PV and solar thermal is desalinization of ocean water to provide EXPENSIVE but potable water. Yes, this water would be enough to get by on, but it would not be cheap, and a landscape appropriate to new England might be really costly for the San Diego area. In such approaches, PV provides electricity for controls and pumps, while solar thermal provides the heat and incoming ocean water acts as the condensing medium (also pre-warming some of the brine) to produce drinkable vacuum distilled water. Perhaps worth revisiting by next fire season....

Of course, geothermal is very location specific, especially for zones with sufficient temperatures to make steam/large quantities of electricity. For regions with groundwater or nearby surface waters (Great Lakes, ocean coasts, a lot of the Northeast/midwest/south), heat pumps can be a great way to provide heat to keep the winter at bay, but these are expensive (~$10,000 per house) and makes the greatest sense environmentally if the electricity used to power them comes from renewable sources. And again, there is that analogy the the usefulness of ceratin parts of the bull for tax credits/deductions for people with minimal taxable income/taxes paid...

Then there are the liquid and gaseous fuels. Any biomass derived liquid fuels can't help matters much if our insanely gluttonous usage rates are continued. However, as the quantity of oil and oil products used is lowered by increases in efficiency, a given amount of biofuel actually starts making an increasingly greater impact. For example, if 2 million barrels per day of biofuels and 12 million bbls/day of oil and gasoline are used, the biofuel contribution is 14% of the total. But if the oil and gasoline used amounts to 3 million bbls/day, then the biofuels are 40% of the mix. You could get down to those levels with a mix of partly or totally electrified cars, lots of electrified passenger rail replacing much of the airlines and a lot of car traffic, efficient cars and more sensible housing arrangements, though there presently does not seem to be much will power to do so. And there are a surprising number of ways (for most people) to manufacture such fuels with minimal or no fossil fuel input, but these would result in higher fuel prices than $3 to $4/gallon petrofuel prices. It's one of those "what's it worth?" questions, especially since the "Peak Export Oil" (and not just Peak Oil) is going to force most people in the U.S. to ask that question to themselves in the near future (say 1 to 4 year time period).

In fact, if there is the rub to any of these and other energy approaches, it is the matter of collective will. Concepts like "sustainability", "save the planetary climate control system", "plan for the future", "plan for less oil" and "plan for no oil" are great, but they only move a small fraction of those who elect our fearless and/or fearful leaders. Due to dire economic circumstances for enough of the country, we are in a frightful mood, and a "circle the wagons"/"think short term" mode.

So, what price The Will? Actually, there is a simpe way to get around this predicament, and that is to make this a job creation issue, with added benefits of less foreign oil import/export of money for said oil, and a more sensible societal arrangement/some sanity back in the planetary climate control system and ecological stability as side benefits. While these may be the main refrain for a lot of us Energizers, in general, the job creation is the trumping card, the one that works. And a future that replaces hordes of low paid service workers with lots of people who manufacture devices to capture renewable solar (light, heat, wind, and flowing water) and gravitational (tidal) energy and well as those to translate this into stored/storable chemical energy and chemicals is one that we can live with. Or at least, that's my hunch.

So anyway, what's your approach to this other aspect of "energy regionalism". For example, does this give more value to Appalachian mountains (wind and pumped hydro) than the present rape and pillage ways of mountaintop decapitation. Can you live with electricity that comes at a delivered price of 15 to 20 c/kw-hr? Or how about where food crops get their car's scarfed for biofuels, leaving less sugar, starch and fat for cows, pigs and chickens, which then get pricey enough to result in lower per-capita carnivorous activity among us humans. Can we move many of the electricity intensive industries to the mid-west wind belt? And what about pricing water so that the population servicing the gambling palaces in the desert starts shrinking, not increasing. Are we willing to say "Adios mofo" to the cushy zone of security that is the burbs, and those insidiously evil SUckV's?

Finally, there is an ironic rub to it all. Even though as a country we are probably now high on the most hated list, we still get imitated en masse. Setting a good example to the rest of the world (as well as allowing imports based also on their Global Warming behavior, among other things) has to be done. Besides, we need the extra jobs; that official unemployment rate is one of the greatest cloaking devices since the Romulans and Klingons made an appearance on Star Trek....

Energetically yours,

Nb41