In some cases, it is not a lack of incentives but the existence of precise impediments. In Chicago, the city buys power at a fixed price, not per kW, so it doesn't have incentives to save incrementally. Along with the low price for unmetered power was a requirement that the city not allow home or small business power generation.

This has recently changed, perhaps as a quid pro quo for the state allowing the electric utility to raise rates and buy power at auction. So now it is legal to install solar or wind generators.

A call for policy wonks here. There is a huge amount of energy savings and new energy hiding in old contracts, regulations and laws.

Another example is sensible restrictions on drilling wells in urban environments. Good for health and protecting the groundwater where it is clean, but exemptions that permitted groundwater use for heating and cooling would not risk health and would yield huge savings. City water is not legal for this use, once again sensibly, to preserve its availability for drinking, and to keep flow-through demand lower.

We don't get tons of sun here, and contrary to the politics-derived moniker of Windy City, we are 18th on the list of highest average wind speeds--New York tops us. But we have lots of very close groundwater, which is a great resource for providing low-cost heat in winter and nearly free cooling in summer.

The best example of effective regulations is New Source Review, which, if implemented, would push coal plants into installing secondary boilers in their smokestacks, cutting their fuel use by something like 50%. Since the utitility can't ask for a rate increase after doing this, it has no incentive to install the equipment. But if forced by New Source Review or more direct regulation, there is at least 200 gigwatts of wasted energy simply going up the flue. To put that in perspective, it is equivalent to about 200 nuclear power plants.

Want some free energy? It's all around us. And many small companies are trying to get into it right now. There are millions of jobs waiting for installers and in manufacture of the frames, brackets, plumbing parts, fan and pump motors, battery systems, etc., that we can make use of right now. There is no need for new technology; what is need is simply engineering for production instead of bench testing.

think about how much heat goes out of your head if you aren't wearing a hat....

This article claims that you lose 20 to 40 percent.

And don't forget about those charcoal chimney starters.

Because of the "up draft," I can start a charcoal fire with a few pieces of paper and waiting about 10 or 15 minutes to get it going.

I don't think this is well enough thought out. There are indeed times when the market does not encourage enough innovation, although (as libertarians stress incessantly) innovation is what markets do well. Such issues as equity or shared values, not so well.

Before we ask what we want incentives to fund, we have to ask what we're trying to achieve. Mass transit already has the technology one would seek. Enforcing or giving incentives for mpg in cars is also easy, if we dare. But, in post after post, I keep thinking that Reed is seeking some other answer that he cannot define and cannot exist, one permitting the status quo (including the profits status quo).

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

I have truly not been clear: I am seeking that the status quo be the one thing we don't accept. These comments I find terrific, by the way.

A groundwater system could be as simple as one 1" pipe well, a small pump, and a spray nozzle to wet the condenser (hot side) of an air conditioner. Or, alternately, the cold side of a heat pump. Spend a little more on plumbing and surround the radiators with a jacket and efficiency goes way up.

Many commercial properties already exploit highly efficient water systems, so the big increase is in private dwellings, both house and aprtment. 

Check out the Geothermal Heat Pump Consortium. It has progressed beyond highly custom engineering to installers doing business now.

Actually, solar is feasible, just expensive, in Chicago. If Chicago covered something like one-quarter of the commercial properties within the city limits it would satisfy all the electric demand for the city. (Storage in some kind of battery would allow constant supply.)

Here's an easy upgrade for a house, wth no unsightly roof installation: Simply get enough battery to run your house during the day, and buy power at night, when it is generated at the highest (current) efficiency and lowest price. The system would pay back in a couple of years, with expected rate increases, and you get the benefit of not losing power in a storm. And you will be burnng less carbon right away. 

Then, of course, you are already set up for the improved generating systems being developed. 

What you describe sounds far simpler than the systems I had seen described in the past. What I had understood is that the well depth was something around 50 feet, and the installation of the vertical piping to that depth required some finesse and specialized experience, making up-front costs for a such a system significantly higher. And then there are individual site variables, such as the condition of the soil, etc. to consider as well. Perhaps there are different types of systems, or maybe the technology has improved in the few years since I was looking into it.

One obvious barrier to wide acceptance of geothermal (or geo-exchange) is the high housing costs we've had in many areas recently, that act as a significant disincentive for anything that leads to higher mortgage costs. Even though these systems do pay for themselves with cost savings down the road, people so often are stretching to qualify for the house they want as it is, that they just will not or cannot spend the extra money. Many government energy incentive programs just don't offer enough money to offset this problem.

I appreciate the link to the Geothermal Heat Pump Consortium. Since it relates to the thread's topic, I'm posting a link from the site that describes the existing federal energy incentives and there are individual state links on the same page (scroll down). Sadly, not all the incentives seem like they would do much at all to recoup the costs, and some others remain unfunded with no money available.

The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning. ~~Adlai E. Stevenson

I don't see any technical reason why all housing can't have sufficient electrical generating equipment, such as solar cells on the roof, to do without central powerplants. The only weaknesses I see are the areas that experience long dreary dark winters, when the demand for energy is high, and the desirability of using electric vehicles for transportation, thus increasing the demand for power.

It is hard to believe that these problems are not just engineering design problems, which can be solved. Of course the electric power industry would be shut down, but is that so bad?

Hoppy in Sacramento

Yes, I think a key technology is more efficient batteries and/or fuel cells. Under current technology, I suspect the best efficiency might be to store simply as potential energy, but that has limitations compared to batteries (like size and mobility). I'm skeptical that the parts of the world not currently on the AC grid are getting there anytime soon, with the partial exception of rural Chindia. And DC means failures are not concentrated. You may run out of power, but your city will not be plunged into darkness.

Transmission is a bigger problem than it seems, in a number of areas. Originally, it was an unusual circumstance, often for emergencies, when grids interconnected.

Large-scale deregulation put the utilities in a position where they had to show short-term profitability, so there was little incentive to build more generating capacity, when power could be bought from neighboring utilities. Unfortunately, there was also little incentive to build a more rugged grid that would serve under stress.

At least in Texas, regulators did require modern grid technology, which uses DC, not AC, interconnects and long-range hypervoltage transmission lines. While AC makes perfect sense inside a utility, since you can step down the voltage for local transmission, if the frequency or phase are different on both sides of an AC interconnection, you get reactive surges that can make things blow up.

As are so many technological catastrophes, the 2003 Ohio Valley blackout involved multiple factors. It started with weather causing failures, and more power brought in from neighbors, with unfortunate surges.

Controlling the utilities, and, in particular, giving the ability to amputate failing sections to save the overall transmission system, are System Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) computer networks. These are utterly critical networks that never should be exposed to the Internet.

I've heard two plausible explanations of how it happened, involving human misconduct and inadequate security in one case, and human stupidity and inadequate security in the other, but the Slammer worm got into the SCADA network, and slowed it down so much that it was impossible to shed failing sections fast enough.

Unfortunately, there is no visible national initiative to harden the grids, which would have no immediate effect on the bottom line. There has been precedent to have federal subsidies to protect critical infrastructure, as with the long-haul telephone circuits in the Cold War. Right now, the grid is a tempting terrorist target, especially if one could get engineers or operators into critical roles.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

A very good analogy, Tom!

The creative part is what's missing: the proliferation of hundreds and thousands of start-ups that with huge funding and explosive entrepreneurship will wean the world off carbon-emitting energy generation and distribution.

Generally, the energy sector's entrepreneurship is underfunded by a 10x factor relative to, for instance, the communications and technology sector.

For many years the mindset of government has been that public money should be spent to fuel the R&D of energy, and that horizontally and...

..vertically integrated energy conglomerates -- the major oil firms -- should be urged to adopt the new alternative energy technologies that government money paid for.

********************************************

I should start by mentioning that I work in a consulting company that assists clients in environmental permitting and licensing of large infrastructure projects. We do roads, pipelines, airports, transmission lines, but the group I am working with focuses on power generation.

I have to disagree with Reed Hundt about the rate of change in the industry. There are so many innovative projects rolling now by both large and small players it is just amazing. For some reason these don't get much play in the media. I remember a post Hundt put up a few weeks ago saying how much better off we would be if we had spent the money for the Iraq War on a "Manhattan Project" for energy technology. The technology is here now and is being applied both due to government mandates and the rising cost of conventional energy.

I have a client who is a giant oil company whose name you would instantly recognize - one of those awful vertically integrated outfits Hundt talked about. Their project is based around using refinery waste products - stuff they pay to haul away now - as an energy source for electrical generation. The carbon dioxide generated during this process will all be collected (called carbon sequestration) and piped to an oil field and reinjected for enhanced recovery. There is other good stuff in this project that I can't tell you about.

Carbon sequestration is the wave now. My colleagues are doing siting studies for a major utility to identify oil fields or suitable geologic formations that they can pipe their carbon dioxide to. I remember 20 years ago we had oil company clients who were actually drilling for carbon dixoide in formations in the Four Corners area so they could pipe it to Wyoming to inject in wells there. They can get it "free" now

We have clients building thousands of MW of solar thermal generation in the desert. The BLM is telling us that most of the good sites for solar generation in the Mojave desert are already leased. Our clients are start-up companies but have big-time financial backing.

I interviewed with a company a couple of years ago that is manufacturing small mini-generating turbines. These are about the size of a large automobile engine. These will run off of any gas source They have an experimental program running now, where they have a dozen turbines generating electricity from the methane emitted from a single landfill. They will go gangbusters once they get into production mode. Again this is a small start-up with big financial backing.

A colleague of mine quit the firm a short while ago to become COO of a company that will generate electricity from cow manure. Its formed by a consortium of dairy operations that have had horrid problems figuring out what to do with their waste. Now they are going to make money with it.

This is billions of dollars being spent on real projects right now. Open your ears and eyes - it's out there.

I heard Capstone Turbines (presume that's who you refer to) was in talks with a car maker. Those are great designs, I hear, air bearings and all.

Howard, you may not know there are flywheel systems available for fast-acting backup. Typical unit is 80 kW, with power delivered over the course of one or two minutes. These are high-tensile steel, running in near-vacuum on air bearings, at about 7000 rpm.

Pumped hydro is a familiar technique, and so profitable that a Missouri company was pumping too much into its mountaintop reservoir. (It eventually caused a dam failure.)

My partner in our astrophotography business made his living selling systems to recover otherwise wasted value, like oil-contaminated wash water. Fair to say, the companies that now make more money by saving that value had to be kicked in the butt by the recent dumping restrictions. Similarly, power companies probably could install secondary boilers and come out ahead by negotiating with state utility boards. Inertia keeps them stuck in the old way of adding costs and passing it on with rate increases. They have fought New Source Review doggedly.

So Reed is putting perhaps too much emphasis on government action, but appropriate regulations and incentives are very effective in motivating changes.

Very good catch, Tom, that is Capstone. I talked to them about a job helping them cross the engineering to production divide, one of the hardest things in the world to do. Having lived the pain of that once, there wasn't enough money to make me relive it. You're right, it is a good design.

I agree that the government needs to be involved with some sticks and carrots. What we are seeing is that the increased energy costs are giving a new level of urgency to the business.