Comments: Michael Kroon

Scared to care

Excuse the irony of hogging the share of comments on my own blog, but I couldn't resist quoting our own government on this. Setting aside details of private equity investment, the US Department of Energy explains Photovoltaics and the aspirational baseload:

"PV technology can meet electricity demand on any scale. The solar energy resource in a 100-mile-square area of Nevada could supply the United States with all its electricity (about 800 gigawatts) using modestly efficient (10%) commercial PV modules.

"A more realistic scenario involves distributing these same PV systems throughout the 50 states. Currently available sites—such as vacant land, parking lots, and rooftops—could be used. The land requirement to produce 800 gigawatts would average out to be about 17 x 17 miles per state. Alternatively, PV systems built in the 'brownfields' —the estimated 5 million acres of abandoned industrial sites in our nation's cities—could supply 90% of America's current electricity.

"These hypothetical cases emphasize that PV is not 'area-impaired' in delivering electricity. The critical point is that PV does not have to compete with baseload power. Its strength is in providing electricity when and where energy is most limited and most expensive. It does not simply replace some fraction of generation. Rather, it displaces the right portion of the load, shaving peak demand during periods when energy is most constrained and expensive."

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/printable_versions/myths.html#1

Scared to care

I think the interviewee focuses on the dollars and cents (indicated in the original title "$cared to ¢are") of renewable energy equity investment, as opposed to the technical plausibility of the utility projects. And though the market has begun to swing, coal sadly remains the best investment -- in the short-term at least.

I agree that she expresses investors' anxieties with exaggerated pessimism, and the present funding of enormous alternative energy projects contradicts her.

But with her arguable assertions, she plunges an interesting cultural thermometer into a gun-shy financial sector biased against its better judgment.

The logic of convincing environmental concerns has consistently fallen victim to the irrationality of conventional wisdom, especially among the decadent "experts" of Wall Street. This misguided flock -- thinned by self-predation in recent days -- presents a fortunate opportunity for independent investors interested in making money after an inevitable pricing of carbon emissions. Failing to recognize such overarching patterns promises to punish those beholden to a blindly anti-ecological bias.

Finally, and arguably her best point, she bemoans a wasteful culture of consumption and consequently fears future power shortages in this country. This double-edged sword demands both responsible investment -- in SmartPower for greater efficiency and battery technology for better storage -- and universal energy efficiency education, from neo-natal to the nursing home.

We Don’t Care About the World’s Poor, Do We?

Thanks for raising this important alert, Ben.

One additional note: even if China technically surpasses "US" in greenhouse gases, a huge portion of their emissions (one third according to a recent report [link below]) come from their Western-bound production lines: arguably our fault and -- at least in part -- our emissions (see "carbon leakage" also below).

Ah. There's that familiar pang of guilt. Now what to do about it? Perhaps in a carbon economy -- where we pay the real co(2)st of our economic activity -- we wouldn't consume more than 10 times the energy of the average Chinese. Conversely, the incentive might help these out-sourced factories afford the proper environmental controls and thus eat away emissions from both sides.

That kind of makes sense, but I really have no idea. That's the whole point. Why fire the smartest people working towards the smartest solutions?

It might seem a cheap shortcut now, but good luck when this bill arrives, taxpayers: http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/cost/contents.asp.

Source: http://tinyurl.com/6j48xy

Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_leakage

Animal Farm, Thai Style

I totally agree with you, Courtney. Though an apparent oxymoron, a "volunteer vacation" can prove more pleasurable than its patently hedonistic counterpart. In high school, I volunteered a summer on a mountainous Amerindian reservation in Costa Rica. Somewhere between ten hour days' manual labor alongside the locals, I learned Spanish, carpentry, indigenous mask carving, and fell for an obscure but invaluable culture and landscape. I returned home to the scary culture shock of over-consumption, and molted into a molten environmentalist. My friends' summer vacation: truth or dare behind the baseball dugout. Well, I guess we all learned something about ourselves that year...