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Conservatives,  let’s talk about energy — and about why so many conservatives are so wrong (so liberal, even) on wind and solar energy.

Let’s start with a recent editorial from the home of “free markets and free people,” the Wall Street Journal. Photovoltaic solar energy, quoth the mavens, is a “speculative and immature technology that costs far more than ordinary power.”

So few words, so many misconceptions. It pains me to say that because, like many business leaders, I grew up on the Wall Street Journal and still depend on it.

But I cannot figure out why people who call themselves “conservatives” would say solar or wind power is “speculative.” Conservatives know that word is usually reserved to criticize free-market activity that is not approved by well, you know who.

Today, around the world, more than a million people work in the wind and solar business. Many more receive their power from solar.

Solar is not a cause; it is a business with real benefits for its customers.

Just ask anyone who installed their solar systems five years ago. Today, many of their systems are paid off and they are getting free energy. Better still, ask the owners of one of the oldest and most respected companies in America who recently announced plans to build one of the largest solar facilities in the country.

That would be Dow Jones, owners of the Wall Street Journal.

Now we come to “immature.” Again, the meaning is fuzzy. But in Germany, a country one-third our size in area and population, they have more solar than the United States. This year, Germans will build enough solar to equal the output of three nuclear power plants.

What they call immaturity, our clients call profit-making leadership.

But let’s get to the real boogie man here: the contention that solar “costs far more than ordinary power.”

I’ve been working in energy infrastructure for 25 years and I have no idea what the WSJ means by the words “ordinary power.” But, after spending some time with Milton Friedman, whom I met on many occasions while studying for an MBA at the University of Chicago, I did learn about costs.

And here is what every freshman at the University of Chicago knows: There is a difference between cost and price.

Solar relies on price supports from the government. Fair enough — though its price is falling even faster than fossil fuel prices are rising.

But if Friedman were going to compare the costs of competing forms of energy, he also would have wanted to know the cost of “ordinary energy.” Figured on the same basis. This is something the self-proclaimed conservative opponents of solar refuse to do.

But huge companies including Walmart, IBM, Target and Los Gatos Tomatoes have figured it out. And last year, so did the National Academy of Sciences. It produced a report on the Hidden Costs of Energy that documented how coal was making people sick to the tune of $63 billion a year.

And considering that oil and natural gas had so many tax breaks and subsidies that were so interwoven into their price structures for so long, it is hard to say exactly how many tens of billions these energy producers received courtesy of the U.S. Taxpayer.

Just a few weeks ago, the International Energy Agency said that worldwide, fossil fuels receive $550 billion in subsidies a year — 12 times what alternatives such as wind and solar get.

Neither report factored in global warming or the cost of sending our best and bravest into harm’s way to protect our energy supply lines.

Whatever that costs, you know it starts with a T.

All this without hockey stick graphs, purloined emails or junk science.

When you compare the real costs of solar with the fully loaded real costs of coal and oil and natural gas and nuclear power — apples to apples, solar is cheaper.

That’s not conservative. Or liberal. That comes from an ideology older and more reliable than both of those put together: Arithmetic.

 

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Tom Rooney is the President and CEO of SPG Solar, in Novato, California, one of the larger solar integrators in the country. His commentaries have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Miami Herald, and he has appeared on CSPAN and Fox Business News recently — talking about the real costs of energy. 

Solar power and wind energy, and other saving the planet issues – join the discussions and get a bit greener.

If you attend enough cleantech events or are pitched by enough startups, you start to see the same few PowerPoint slides over and over again. Here is a collection of the best or at least the most notorious and historically significant slides in our industry.

After publishing this list to an overwhelming response, we heard from the original architects of some of these iconic greentech slides and we made sure to give them their overdue credit.  We also added a few additional slides that we left out during the first, second and third go-round.

 

Lawrence Livemore’s classic Energy Flowchart:  A good slide provides a wealth of information in an intuitive, understandable way — and this slide certainly does that.  This one slide shows energy inputs and outputs and really drives home the tiny foothold that renewables have in the American energy mix.

By the way — Americans are using less total energy and more renewable energy, according to LLNL.  The U.S. used less coal, petroleum, and natural gas in 2009 than in 2008, and increased its use of wind, solar, hydro and geothermal according to the LLNL energy flow charts.  This has a lot to do with reduced economic activity as much as it does a shift in energy sources.

EPRI’s Prism Chart.  EPRI, The Electric Power Research Institute, is almost entirely funded by incumbent power companies, so their information has to be viewed through that lens.  Nevertheless, the “Prism” slide has found its way into many greentech presentations, mine included.  It conveys the challenge involved in reducing CO2 emissions from the electric sector down to 1990 levels.  According to EPRI, this task will require significant amounts of CCS (Carbon Capture and Sequestration), as well as another 64 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2030.

 

Carbon Wedges.  Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative and the NRDC can both play the EPRI CO2 reduction game, as well.  The NRDC, though, does it without the nuclear wedge.

 

 

The Keeling Curve.  Regardless of the flaws of An Inconvenient Truth, the movie, or those of Al Gore, the man, the movie and the man present this CO2 data in a variety of compelling ways.  The graph shows the variation in concentration of  CO2 in the atmosphere over the last fifty years based on Charles Keeling’s measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Even if you don’t subscribe to the theory of anthropogenic global warming, this chart is pretty stark evidence that something is happening and it’s happening fast.

 

 

This slide from the CEC illustrates the “Rosenfeld Effect.” California’s per-capita electricity consumption stayed flat while consumption in the rest of the U.S. went up.  Why? Largely because of the California Energy Commission leadership of Art Rosenfeld.  During his tenure, California instituted utility efficiency programs, appliance standards and building standards that saved the state billions of dollars, millions of kilowatt-hours, and avoided the building of a large number of power plants.  It’s not all about high technology.

The wind power flying spaghetti monster. If you’ve ever attended an event pertaining to energy storage, it’s not unheard of for every presenter to flash this one.  It’s originally from a 2007 CAISO (California Independent System Operator) report on Integration of Renewable Resources and shows the scary variable nature of wind power.  It speaks volumes on the intermittent nature of wind and the challenges of integrating renewable energy onto the grid without energy storage or fossil-fuel backup.

 

The solar variability slide is just as scary in terms of the ramp-up and ramp-down rate, with cloud cover causing voltage sags.  This slide makes the rounds and comes originally from Jay Apt and Aimee Curtright’s Working Paper, “The Spectrum of Power from Utility-Scale Wind Farms and Solar Photovoltaic Arrays.”

 

The McKinsey Efficiency Study “finds that the U.S. could reduce annual GHG emissions by as much as 3.0 gigatons in the mid-range case to 4.5 gigatons in the high range case by 2030. These reductions from reference case projections would bring U.S. emissions down 7 to 28 percent below 2005 levels, and could be made at a marginal cost less than $50 per ton, while maintaining comparable levels of consumer utility.”

The thrust of the McKinsey study is that there are pollution reduction choices that can be achieved at “negative cost.”  This flies in the face of economic theory, which would have us believe that companies and consumers would not willingly pass up profits by making changes in lighting, fuel efficiency, industrial process improvements, etc.  Turns out consumers aren’t always entirely rational.

 

 

NREL’s solar cell efficiencies slide.  The slide that launched several hundred solar startups is also partially responsible for the great concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) scare of 2008.  It does show the lag between hero experiment efficiencies and real-world PV performance and must be included in every solar presentation — by law.

 

There are a lot of complicated ways to graphically illustrate the consumer side of the smart grid. This concise slide is not one of them.  EPRI claims authorship of this one.

 

The cubic mile of oil. The world uses about 30 billion barrels of oil per year. That is 1.2 trillion gallons, which works out to just about 1 cubic mile of oil.

And another way of illustrating the same concept:

 

This slide from the leading renewable energy utility PG&E of Northern California (by way of Nissan) shows that fast charging a plug-in electric vehicle places a load on the grid equivalent to the average peak summer load of a single home.  Except that these loads move around from place to place and charge up whenever they feel like it, in the middle of the day or the middle of the night.  It means that widespread EV usage can’t happen without a smart grid vehicle infrastructure.

 

Germany has the same solar insolation as the U.S. state of Alaska.  Yet Germany is the global leader in solar installations.  Why is that?  Three words — policy, policy, policy.  Mr. Colin Murchie Director, Federal Government Affairs at SolarCity and performer at Washington Improv Theater originally produced this slide for SEIA.

 

Khosla Ventures’ Green Portfolio.  This slide was immensely improved when the VC firm got a new graphic designer and got rid of the light bulb design.  In any case, it shows what you can do if you have a grand vision, sizable cojones and several billion dollars of your own and other people’s money.  And time for board meetings, lots of board meetings.  The slide lists 35 green startups, intelligently parsed, and we would bet there are a few more not being shown.  One of these might be the black swan.  Vinod only has to be right one time out of ten or twenty to reinforce his genius status.

 

Bonus shameless self-promotion slide: Downloaded tens of thousands of times, this slide from Greentech Media’s smart grid analysts smartly lays out the layers and players in the smart grid ecosystem:

 

And a final word on PowerPoint from Mr. Tufte…

 

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Michael Kanellos contributed to this article.  Actually, he thought up the title and then went on vacation.

NextEra Energy has reduced its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 33 percent over the past decade due to significant investments in low- and no-carbon power generation, according to the company’s 2010 Sustainability Report (PDF). In 2009, 93 percent of its power comes from low- and no-emission fuel sources including wind, solar, natural gas, and nuclear.

From 2000 through 2009, NextEra Energy’s CO2 emissions rate declined from 985 pounds per megawatt-hour to 657 pounds per megawatt-hour. The company has invested billions of dollars to build the largest wind energy business and third largest nuclear power fleet while also adding a significant amount of new combined-cycle natural gas capacity. As a result, the company’s CO2 emissions rate is nearly 50 percent below the U.S. electric power sector average of 1,297 pounds per megawatt-hour.

According to NRDC, NextEra Energy is the nation’s fourth largest electric power producer, yet its overall emissions and emission rates for CO2, SO2 and NOx are significantly lower than many of its peers, which it attributes to the company’s expanded wind power generation. A Ceres reports ranks NextEra 86th among the 100 top power companies for its CO2 emissions rate, 77th for NOx, and 75th for SO2 emissions, based on 2008 data.

Since 1990, the company has increased its electric power generation by 230 percent, while reducing its emissions rates of CO2 by 31 percent, NOx by 88 percent, and SO2 by 87 percent.

At the end of 2009, NextEra Energy remained the nation’s No. 1 producer of wind energy, with more than 7,500 megawatts of installed capacity (a typical nuclear plant has about 1,000 megawatts of capacity). The company estimates that it will avoid more than 14 million tons of CO2, nearly 31,000 tons of NOx, and more than 33,000 tons of SO2 from wind generation alone.

The company was also the No. 1 operator of solar power with 335 megawatts in service, including the largest solar power plant in the world in California’s Mojave Desert. Some of the projects include a contract to sell 250 megawatts of solar thermal power from its proposed Genesis Solar Energy Project to Pacific Gas and Electric Company.

The company also commissioned the DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center in October 2009, bringing commercial scale solar photovoltaic (PV) power to Florida for the first time. NextEra touts the 25-MW plant as the largest solar facility in the nation. Over 30 years, the plant is expected to avoid 575,000 tons of greenhouse gases and decrease fossil fuel use by 277,000 barrels of oil and 7 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

A second Florida solar facility was commissioned in April 2010 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, which has added 10 megawatts to Florida’s solar PV capacity. Over 30 years, this facility will prevent the emission of more than 227,000 tons of greenhouse gases, and decrease fossil fuel use by approximately 122,000 barrels of oil and 2.8 billion cubic feet of natural gas. The company also completed a 1-megawatt solar array for NASA that is helping power the U.S. space program.

Construction is also underway at its Martin Next Generation Solar Energy Center, with completion scheduled for December 2010, and the new Cape Canaveral Next Generation Clean Energy Center, which will be capable of generating 1,250 megawatts of electricity, is expected to open in 2013.

The 75-megwatt Martin facility will be the world’s first hybrid plant that adds solar power to an existing combined-cycle natural gas turbine and will be the second largest thermal solar plant in the United States, according to the company. The Martin facility will avoid more than 2.75 million tons of greenhouse gases and decrease fossil fuel use by approximately 600,000 barrels of oil and 41 billion cubic feet of gas over 30 years, according to the company.

In addition, NextEra is the nation’s largest generator of electricity from natural gas, operates eight nuclear power units in four states, and is a leading producer of hydroelectric power in Maine, with 81 generating units totaling approximately 359 net megawatts of power.

In 2009, the company generated 15.8 million megawatt-hours of electricity from its wind farms, compared with 12.2 million megawatt-hours from its largest nuclear plant. Overall, 4.2 percent of the company’s electricity was generated from coal, compared with an industry average of 45.4 percent.

The company’s investor-owned utility, Florida Power & Light, was No. 2 in the nation in cumulative electricity saved through demand-side management programs through the end of 2009. Through its investments in combined-cycle natural gas generation, FPL has also reduced its emissions profile. The utility alone has a carbon dioxide emissions rate 35 percent below the national average.

Under the World Wildlife Fund’s PowerSwitch! program, NextEra is committed to a 15 percent improvement in electric generation efficiency by 2020 from a 2002 baseline. As a result of its investments in high-efficiency combined-cycle natural gas electric generating plants, which displace electricity generated from older and less efficient plants, the company exceeded its 15 percent efficiency improvement goal in 2009, 11 years ahead of its target date.

The company estimates that the increased efficiency will avoid nearly 6.5 million tons of CO2 in 2009. Based on current projections, NextEra estimates that its power plant efficiency will be improved by more than 25 percent by its target date of 2020, resulting in the avoidance of more than 14 million tons of CO2 per year.

NextEra also is working to decrease its carbon footprint beyond the electric system infrastructure. As an example, the company has 250 hybrid cars and trucks including plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) — on the road today, with plans to convert one-third of its 2,400 company cars to hybrids by the end of 2010.

According to the report, the company has doubled the size of its hybrid vehicle fleet each year for the past three years, saving more than 149,000 gallons of fuel in 2009, reducing its carbon footprint by 1,325 metric tons of CO2.

The company is also greening its facilities. As an example, the company installed three solar arrays in 2009 and 2010 on the rooftop of its corporate headquarters in Juno Beach, Fla. The company expect to have 25 kilowatts of solar capacity in operation by the end of 2010, which will help NextEra prevent more than 40,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.

The company is also converting interior office lighting to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) approved units, which is expected to improve energy efficiency by 30 percent, and has installed waterless urinals, which is saving up to 2.1 million gallons of water per year.

The company also has reduced its water withdrawal rates, excluding the water that passes through its hydroelectric facilities. In 2009, the company withdrew approximately 1.9 trillion gross gallons of water from different sources. This represents a withdrawal rate of 11,900 gallons of water per megawatt-hour of electricity produced, down from 13,600 gallons in 2008 and 13,900 gallons in 2007.

The company attributes the reduction to an increase in renewable energy sources and the commissioning of several new combined-cycle power plants that withdraw substantially fewer gallons of water per megawatt produced than older conventional power plants.