Energy Vulture

The Perils of Green Tech's Pixiedust--Neodymium

Lisa Margonelli — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:48:00 -0400

The Atlantic just published a story I did on neodymium--the rare earth mineral that makes Prius motors run, and some wind turbines generate electricity. The US used to be the world's largest producer of the stuff, but in the 90's the Chinese won the entire market with lower cost minerals--at least partly as a result of lower environmental standards.

The strategic and competitive challenges posed by electric cars are something that policy makers need to deal with soon, before we mandate millions of electric vehicles. Just because a car doesn't use oil doesn't mean its sustainable.

What I want to watch is the growth of green nationalism--as environmentalists and nationalists start rowing the same boat. It's going to make for some strange--and necessary--partnerships, and it might break through some of the logjams around regulation as, say, US mining interests and anti-global warming activists, and auto companies hook up. And then, it's bound to have a lot of unanticipated consequences, including inspiring backlashes of resource nationalism from supplier countries.

California Tries to Say No to TeleVampires

Lisa Margonelli — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 06:06:00 -0400

California has announced a plan to create standards for plasma TV's, which are part of a suite of household appliances the California Energy Commission refers to as "vampires." Vampires include just about anything with a charger--cellphones, computers, cordless phones, etc--and collectively they may devour as much as 10 percent of a household's electricity consumption without actually doing anything. (Actually, they are doing something. They produce heat. It's nuts, but the best way to figure out if your appliances are sucking you dry is to walk around the house and touch the transformers. If they're hot, they're Nosferatu.)

Two thoughts.

One: The manufacturers association is fighting the standards, perhaps because they're aware that California's efficiency standards usually change norms around the world. In the 1970's, California began regulating the electricity consumption of refrigerators, which lead to the imposition of national standards. It also lead to bigger, better, cheaper fridges that use a third of the energy they did before. More importantly, those fridges proliferated around the world. In China, for example, they're saving half the electricity produced by the Three Gorges Dam.

Two: Why only plasma TV's and not the more popular LCD's, as well as all of the phone chargers and the annoyingly hot transformer on my apple laptop right here?

Using Cars as Time-Release Piggy Banks

Lisa Margonelli — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:38:00 -0400

Buried in Joseph White's interesting Wall Street Journal piece about the enormous power of incremental improvements in auto fuel economy (versus so-called moonshots) sits an interesting statistic:

"Mr. Fedewa estimates auto makers can deliver 10% or better fuel efficiency improvement for about $500 a vehicle." (That is Eric Fedewa, described as "a vice president with the automotive consulting firm CSM Worldwide.")

$500 for 10 percent improvement!

What if the government just paid the costs upfront as part of the stimulus package? Could we invest in fuel economy standards as a sort of time-release piggy bank?

Last year Americans bought 7.87 million light trucks. Paying an extra $500 per vehicle would cost about $3.9 billion and at last years prices of over $3 a gallon and this years of over $2, the investment would paid off in two years. By year three, we would have saved more than a billion gallons of gas on that model year alone, and it would free up a billion dollars in gasoline money to be spent on other things that year (if gas were merely $2.65 a gallon.) In other words: we could pump the $500 into cars now, and the stimulus money would hit the auto industry now, but in three years the benefits of the savings on gasoline would be hitting the economy as a whole in increased disposable income.And every year after that, too.

Want to stimulate without adding to the deficit? The government could finance the $500 at 0 percent interest rate to the manufacturers, who then pass the cost along (again at zero percent) as part of the financing for auto consumers.

India's DIY Totally Scrappy Unintentional Smart Grid

Lisa Margonelli — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:45:00 -0400

In the US, everybody (including President Obama) loves the Smart Grid, but somehow the political and regulatory will to make it happen is still coalescing. Putting so-called Smart Meters on our homes would allow us to control when we buy electricity and how much we use, institute "time of use" pricing, and enable us to cut demand rather than throwing the switch on coal -fired power plants when electricity demand is at its peak. Down the road, it will encourage the development of battery-like appliances that draw electricity when it's cheap (aka at night); facilitate the sales of late-night power such as wind; and reward people who produce power and feed it back onto the grid. All good, but even though the technology is mostly available, the US is moving at a snail's pace. And India is dashing forward...

Check out this article in the Times of India about the entreprenuers who have gone into the business of making electrical inverters that enable people to charge batteries from the grid and then run their appliances on DC power from the batteries. India's utilities spend much of the summer stressed out, aggressively "load shedding"--ie scheduling rolling blackouts to neighborhoods and businesses daily. To accomodate this, people have started installing batteries and inverters so that they can run their TV's, lights, and fans during regular brownouts. Demand for the inverters has grown so rapidly that autorickshaw drivers who don't know anything about electricity are getting in on the act! (For some dazzling drawings of inverter complexity, see the wikipedia entry.) But by installing inverters, they're making a rapid, uncoordinated bass-ackwards transition to a low-functioning Smart Grid. I think it's the way of the future.

This is an example of how quickly the paradigm for energy use can change from plugs to batteries.

But wait, there's more: the transition to a smart grid could set off a wave of entrepreneurialism in the US. Remember those batty Ronco devices like the Inside the Shell Egg Scrambler? Imagine if Ronco started designing devices combining wacky convenience and green-tinged penny pinching.

And India's experience points out other opportunities for non profit entreprenuers. The efficiency and safety of inverters seems to vary wildly. NGO's could help the cottage industry of inverter producers by creating a kit or prototype of the safest, most efficient ones and then helping entrepreneurs build them. In the meantime, facilitating this kind of energy storage could make some cost-effective wind, solar, and recycled power more feasible in India and across the developing world.