Finite fossils, energy poverty, and other benchmarks

I will be mostly off line through Labor Day as I attempt some vacation time in northern New York with family. Upon my return, I expect to follow-up with a post about the status of natural gas infrastructure in New York, and another about highly-anticipated health studies that are purportedly key to the outcome of the shale gas decision in New York.

Meantime, I offer some raw material for reflection through a very wide lens. First, a quote, cited in my last post by President Obama during his visit to Binghamton last week:

The bottom line is those (fossil fuels) are still finite resources.  Climate change is real.  The planet is getting warmer.  And you’ve got several billion Chinese, Indians, Africans and others who also want cars, refrigerators, electricity. And as they go through their development cycle, the planet cannot sustain the same kinds of energy use as we have right now.  So we’re going to have to make a shift.

Second, a short film from a fracking skeptic about renewable energy development in parts of the developed world and Germany in particular. It’s part of a series called Shale Gas Stories by Kirsi Jansa, an independent film-maker.



Third, a clip from a multi-media project depicting energy poverty – the term for the abject absence of fundamental resources, mostly in undeveloped countries -- by Peter DiCampo, another independent filmmaker. DiCampo’s work, title Life Witout Lights, makes tangible an idea that is mostly a distant abstraction for many of us who never have lived long without power at our fingertips.

I find each of these perspectives compelling and provocative in its own right. Collectively, they provide no outline or theme that suggests a broad and simple answer, but they give plenty to think about.

Model T or Tesla: Reformers take on $3.9B NJ grid project Post-Sandy plan draws challenge to 20th Century ways

When Hurricane Sandy tore into the east coast last year, it left several million people without power – some for weeks -- and provided what is widely believed to be a preview of life with global warming.

Anticipating more extreme weather, PSE&G is pursuing Energy Strong -- a $3.9 billion plan to fortify its power grid. With funding from ratepayers, the project would raise and protect switching and substations, reinforce utility poles and overhead wires, and replace gas lines and other infrastructure in flood-prone areas. The intention, according to the plan, is to capitalize on low interest rates, cheap natural gas, and “a glut” of available labor to produce a stronger, more reliable power-delivery system that will withstand extreme weather and rising sea levels.

Energy Strong is a massive infrastructure project, but it represents something much more. It’s a critical test of how eager society is to prolong the life of a 20th Century grid designed around fossil fuels, or begin shifting to a new generation of technology that encourages power from multiple energy sources, including wind and solar.

According to an industry-generated release on PR Newswire, Energy Strong draws support from a number of municipalities, labor unions, businesses and health care providers eager for a grid that can withstand extreme weather and the promise of jobs associated with a multibillion infrastructure project.

It is also facing challenges from influential lobbies. The AARP is questioning the return on investment to rate-payers, and the Sierra Club challenges the wisdom of spending billions to shore up rather than modernize an archaic system of power-delivery. Tom Johnson, of NJ Spotlight, has been covering the proposal from the beginning. He summed up stakes of the AARP challenged in a May article.

The dispute underscores the tough choices facing state regulators and utilities, both of which are under pressure from the public to avert widespread outages, that can leave some customers without any power for more than a week. How to do so without increasing electric bills, already among the highest in the nation, is the dilemma facing state officials.

The problem became even more divisive last week, when the New Jersey Sierra Club and the New Jersey Environmental Federation filed a “motion for intervention”with the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. The motion argued that the agency should focus on energy efficiency, renewable energy, and distributed generation – where energy is produced closer to where it is consumed from a decentralized network of power sources – including  renewable sources and hybrids -- in short, more of what a 21st Century, post-fossil fuel grid would look like.

Johnson reported in a follow-up article this week:

The entry of the two environmental groups in the BPU rate case is unusual, but it underscores the concerns harbored by some who fear the state’s aggressive clean energy goals may be undermined by huge investments in making the power grid more resilient.

This is really an argument about fossil fuels versus renewable energy sources. To some degree, it reflects a broader, national and global argument about justifying capital investments necessary to build the infrastructure for shale gas delivery. Knowing what we know now about climate change, does it make sense to channel money into expanding the life of a carbon-based energy grid for resources that at best will last a few more generations (or less) and at worst make the planet less suitable for human habitation?

According to the motion filed by the Sierra Club, the PSE&G plan misses a critical opportunity to begin adapting the grid to sustainable energy, in addition to reinforcing it. “A solution that focuses solely on the physical protection of infrastructure misses a huge opportunity to address or eliminate the underlying causes of the vulnerability,” the motion states. The environmental groups seek input to the plan “to ensure that cost effective investments going forward capitalize on opportunities to reduce energy demand through energy efficiency and other demand side efforts… Also techniques such as the use of a smart grid, distributed generation and renewable energy sources can provide critical support to the delivery of reliable and cost effective power to the public.”

In a phone conversation this week, Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Chapter of the Sierra Club, told me the plan is based on an archaic model that is “like trying to make upgrades to the Model T automobile in the age of the Tesla… It’s more about reinforcing and elevating and not about being smart.” The intervening parties are not looking to stop the program, but to influence it, he said, adding that additional perspective and planning will ultimately help ratepayers.

Company officials, meanwhile, are pitching the plan as an urgent step to storm-proof the grid in the face of climate change that is no longer an abstraction projected for future generations. More than 1.9 million PSE&G customers (and millions more served by other utilities) lost power after Sandy -- some for as long as two weeks. In addition to Sandy, two other storms -- Hurricane Irene, the freak snowstorm in October 2011 – have in the last two years wrought damage unprecedented in the utility’s 100-year history. As spelled out in a company press kit for Energy Strong: “Keeping the lights on day-to-day is no longer enough. Future investments must be about increasing resiliency, which is the ability to withstand damage and quickly recover from extreme weather and events.”

Whether the economics support an appreciable shift to renewable energy is a matter of public policy as much as technology, and it begins with plans such as the PSE&G proposal. Anti-frackers in New York, where a moratorium on fracking now in its fifth year has spurred a similar discussion about the role of renewables, have seized the opportunity to showcase a plan of their own, which I wrote about in May. It’s authored by Cornell University researchers and demonstrates how the state can be run entirely on non-fossil natural resources – sun, wind, and water. Some say this looks good on paper, but does not readily translate to the real world. But if not now, when will we overcome the inertial forces of a carbon-based infrastructure? At the very least, the New York state plan provides a starting point for much-needed discussions about the empirical framework for life after carbon, and the Sierra Club challenge to the PSE&G plan begins testing our willingness to move progressively in that direction.

Can wind, water, sun satisfy NY’s huge energy appetite? Anti-fracking movement offers plan with hard numbers

Powerimg NY with renewable energy means more hydro power
like the  2,353-megawatt Robert Moses plant in Niagara Falls

New York state has become a battle ground for the country’s energy future. Do we – through shale gas development -- lay the foundation for another generation of fossil fuel production and consumption, or not?  The heat and intensity of the debate – fracking is bad, fracking is good – often overshadows an underlying reality that makes the discussion so critical to begin with. That reality is expressed in these simple numbers tabulated by the federal Energy Information Administration:

In 2010, New York state consumed more than four times as much energy as it produced (3,728 trillion BTUs vs. 867 trillion BTUs).

Although these numbers seldom if ever find their way into rallies and rhetoric, the protracted debate over shale gas in the Empire State is hopefully compelling residents to pay closer attention to where energy comes from and how they use it.  The consequences of flipping a switch should become less of an abstraction now that the on-shore drilling boom has brought the extraction energy to our collective back yards.

New York state (and the rest of the country) could make up its energy shortfall by using fracking to exploit previously inaccessible carbon reserves, such as the Marcellus and Utica shales lying under largely unexplored regions of New York between the Finger Lakes and the Catskills regions. There is now expectation that the United States will become an energy exporter after the Obama administration recently approved policy to permit liquefied natural gas exporting plants in the wake of a market glut from shale gas production. (It’s a policy that will help shareholders, but hurt wage-earners, according to a federal report, which I have written about here.)

Despite consensus that fossil fuels are not sustainable – even the fracking proponents pitch natural gas as a “bridge” to a world someday powered by cleaner alternatives – acceptance of renewable energy has, for various reasons, yet to reach critical mass.

Whether or not fracking takes us across the bridge to the next generation of energy, there are paralyzing chasms that must be crossed, one way or another, in policy and politics.  In New York state and other places, there is the gulf between the energy consumed and the amount produced – a disparity that is more unsettling as competition for cheap carbon continues to increase globally at unprecedented rates. There is also a chasm between opposing visions of our country’s future by patriots for and against shale gas development. And there is a certain disconnect between the past and future that we are unable to bridge in the present. The moratorium on shale gas permits in New York is approaching its fifth year anniversary (July 23) with little signs of advancing state policy on the broader issue of energy.

New Yorkers Against Fracking poster for rally in Albany

Anti-frackers are seizing the moment to showcase their way forward with a plan that demonstrates how New York can make up its energy shortfall with other natural resources – sun, wind, and water. New Yorkers Against Fracking, a grass roots political action group, is organizing a rally in Albany on June 17  “calling on Governor Cuomo to reject fracking and lead the nation in constructing a renewable energy economy here and now in New York.” Until now, the anti-fracking movement has put more energy into shutting down fracking than proposing concrete alternatives. It’s encouraging to see the movement harnessing its considerable grass roots punch to advance the discussion rather than simply to fortify an impasse.

While banners, placards, slogans, marches, and chants will be the natural and time-honored means for delivering political pressure at the Albany rally – called New York Crossroads -- the concept behind the rally is based on research by a group of scientists, economists, and academics. The result is a paper published in March in Energy Policy, an international academic journal dealing with political, economic, environmental and social aspects of energy. It spells out empirically how New York state can wean itself from fossil fuels and convert completely to renewable energy sources by 2050.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s hesitancy over fracking provides a stark contrast to the approach of the Obama administration, which has characterized shale gas development as “a priority” in the country’s energy future. Now the anti-frackers hope to present the ambivalent New York governor (and potential presidential candidate) with a blue print to overcome the political inertia and practical barriers to advance beyond fossil fuels.

“You have to be realistic and pragmatic,” said Anthony Ingraffea, a Cornell University engineer, former fracking industry consultant, and one of the 13 co-authors of the plan. “If you say no to shale gas, you better say yes to something else.”

The report considers the cost and feasibility of powering New York’s residential, manufacturing and transportation sectors with solar, wind, and water energy technologies -- combined with reduction through inherent efficiencies. It also accounts for known health risks associated with carbon fuels. Not surprisingly, it is drawing challenges and criticism on many fronts, including questions about the reliability of a post-carbon grid adjusting to power flows and natural cycles, and behavioral changes, capital sources, enterprise, and political shifts that will be necessary for a renewable energy plan to flourish.

Those on both sides of the fraking debate – now being recast in New York as the fracking versus renewable debate -- see Cuomo’s leadership as pivotal. He could allow fracking in New York as it has proceeded in Pennsylvania, free of a severance tax and exempt from water conservation and hazardous waste handling laws. This would channel more capital into drilling and related infrastructure and contribute to a glut of cheap fossil energy that hurts the competitive position of renewables. Or he could tilt the scales in the other direction, allowing greater incentives for renewables while discouraging shale gas development.

Authors of the report – titled  “Examining the Feasibility of Converting New York State’s all-purpose Energy Infrastructure to one using Wind, Water, and Sunlight” --have been promised an audience with Cuomo, Ingraffea said, which has yet to happen, but they are encouraged by the governor’s hesitancy to approve fracking and the mounting political pressure to provide answers.

New York is hardly starting from scratch in harnessing renewable sources. According to the same EIA report that outlined the state’s energy deficit:

The State possesses considerable renewable energy potential. Several powerful rivers, including the Niagara and the Hudson, provide New York with some of the greatest hydropower resources in the Nation, and New York’s Catskill and Adirondack mountains offer substantial wind power potential.

The EIA report notes that New York produced more hydroelectric power than any other state east of the Rocky Mountains in 2011 and that the 2,353-megawatt Robert Moses Niagara hydroelectric power plant in Niagara Falls was the fourth largest in the United States in 2010. Looking ahead, New York's Renewable Portfolio Standard requires that 30 percent of electricity come from renewable energy resources by 2015; in 2011, 24 percent of electricity came from renewable energy resources. The report also notes that residents in New York, in metropolitan areas at least, are already inclined to conserve energy. Although the state was the eighth largest energy consumer in the country in 2010, it had the second lowest energy consumption per capita after Rhode Island due in part to its widely used mass transportation systems.

Ingraffea dismisses the idea that a fossil-fuel free New York is a pipedream. “The technology is already here,” he said. “The bridge is behind us. Renewables are every bit as real as coal, oil, or gas.  The hard part is not the science. It’s the policy.”

It’s not surprising that the feasibility paper has been criticized and debated over its assumptions and practicality. Andrew Revkin, the New York Times analyst and blogger who covers energy, climate, and environmental issues for Dot Earth, summed it up this way: “To me, the analysis works best as a thought experiment, given the monumental hurdles — economic, political, regulatory and technical — that would hinder such a shift.” (You can read his full assement here.)

Two of the papers’ authors, Ingraffea and Robert Howarth, are also principal aubthors of another paper that has riled the industry with science suggesting  shale gas development is as bad or worse than coal in contributing to greenhouse gasses and global warming. The work, titled Climate Impacts of Shale Gas Development,  has been met with rebuttals and challenges (including this one by Francis O’Sullivan and Sergey Paltsev at MIT) as well as praise. That’s the fitting and proper nature of academic scholarship, the scientific method, and the hard work of blending science with policy. At the very least, it provides a starting point for much-needed discussions – one challenging the conventional wisdom that gas is cleaner than coal, and the other providing an empirical framework for life after carbon. With or without fracking, carbon reserves are finite, and New York’s share of them will last for maybe a generation or two, perhaps less. The legacy of abandoned wells may well outlast that.  What then, if not renewables? And if renewables, why not sooner rather than later?