Renewable energy is bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands. Achieving a goal of getting 20% of our electricity from wind would require moving large amounts of power over long distances, from the windy, lightly populated plains in the middle of the country to the coasts where many people live. Solar-power stations in the nation’s deserts  pose the same transmission problems.

Many transmission lines, and the connections among them, are simply too small for the amount of power companies would like to squeeze through them. The difficulty is most acute for long-distance transmission, but shows up at times even over distances of a few hundred miles. Today’s grid is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power across small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads. What we need, as FERC member Sudeen Kelley says, is “an interstate transmission superhighway system.”

But the grid is balkanized, with about 200,000 miles, or 322,000 kilometers, of power lines divided among 500 owners. States have traditionally exercised authority over the grid but have little incentive to push improvements that would benefit neighboring states. Big transmission upgrades often involve multiple companies, many state governments, and numerous permits. Construction costs are astronomical, and every addition to the grid provokes fights with property owners who do not want to look at a line of power pylons marching across their landscape.

Our rickety grid would have to be transformed if we are to ever achieve  an all-electric automobile fleet.  But that’s just one problem with the dream.

As Richard Heinman points out, cars are inherently inefficient. We can make them smaller and lighter. We can power them with renewable electrons instead of nasty old hydrocarbons. But in the final analysis, pushing a ton or three of steel down the highway just to move a two-hundred pound person to and from a shopping mall is both wasteful and plain stupid in a multitude of ways.

Heinberg consider just two: tires and asphalt.

“Tires are made largely of non-renewable petroleum, and after 40,000 miles or so they tend to wear out. Americans discard them at a rate of one tire per person per year.

“Then there’s the stuff that roads are made of. We build roads compulsively so as to give our precious cars more places to roam, but those roads also soon wear out, so we have to constantly repair them; this requires enormous amounts of asphalt (25 million tons annually in the US). But asphalt is, once again, a petroleum product, and as oil gets scarce the building and maintenance of roads becomes unmanageable.”

“Electric cars are a sparky idea if you consider only what they are designed to replace. But we really need to be thinking about how to reduce our need for motorized transport altogether by redesigning our cities and shortening our supply chains. And where something more than a scooter is necessary, we should move people and freight by rail or water rather than by highway.”

Two solar power plants are slated for construction in California that together will put out more than 12 times as much electricity as the largest existing plant.

OptiSolar, a company that has just begun making a type of solar panel with a thin film of active material, will install 550 megawatts in San Luis Obispo County. The SunPower Corporation, which uses silicon-crystal technology, will build about 250 megawatts at a different location in the same county.

The plants will cover 12.5 square miles with solar panels, and in the middle of a sunny day will generate about 800 megawatts of power, roughly equal to the size of a large coal-burning power plant or a small nuclear plant.

The power will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The utility said that it expected the new plants, which will use photovoltaic technology to turn sunlight directly into electricity, to be competitive with other renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and solar thermal plants, which use the sun’s heat to boil water.

Ikea recently announced it will invest $77 million into research and product development of solar panels, efficiency meters, and energy-efficient lighting. The company hopes to make the products available in the next three to four years.

Here’s the challenge: how to make the installation of a solar panel easy for anyone who can carry a pack of solar panels out of the store? Ikea has 283 stores in 36 countries around the globe. 22 more locations are scheduled to be open by the end of fiscal year 2008.

Yale Environment 360 has an article about a study commissioned by the National Association of Engineers n which Ray Kurzweil and a team of analysts predict that solar could meet 100% of the U.S.’s energy needs within 20 years.

Young companies around the world have developed flexible thin-film solar panels with inexpensive metal or plastic substrates that could be simply and cheaply installed. To date, most p.v. installations have been relatively small arrays attached to individual houses, schools, or commercial buildings. But utility scale installations are also growing. The biggest p.v. technological promise may lie in systems that use mirrors or lenses to concentrate light on highly efficient multi-junction solar cells, vastly leveraging the power of the sun.

Photovoltaics has a competitor in solar thermal, a technology that uses mirrors to concentrate solar heat to produce steam, which can drive a conventional generator. Solar thermal today can provide power for about three times the cost of the cheapest fuel – coal – but with growing manufacturing efficiencies, it should drop in price.

And of course the cost of coal and other fossil fuels doesn’t account for externalities. We face a gathering global warming storm and a host of other problems brought on by combustion run amok.

Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European commission’s Institute for Energy says the deserts of the Sahara and Middle East could supply all of Europe’s energy needs.

EU scientists are calling for the creation of a series of huge solar farms – either photovoltaic cells or concentrating solar – and the construction of a new supergrid which would transmit electricity along high voltage direct current cables. The grid would allow European countries such as the UK and Denmark to export wind energy at times of surplus supply and import electricity from green sources including solar from Africa’s deserts.

Scientists calculate an area slightly smaller than Wales could generate enough solar energy to supply all of Europe with clean electricity.

And the U.S.? A study by Ausra, a solar energy company based in California, finds that over 90% of fossil fuel–generated electricity in the United States and the majority of U.S. oil usage for transportation could be eliminated using solar thermal power plants – and for less than it would cost to continue importing oil. But all our politicians can manage to do is blather about opening more areas to offshore drilling. Pathetic.

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So now the Portland City Council has unanimously approved a so-called “green” version of the $4.2 billion Columbia River Crossing. The city wants a toll bridge that will accommodate a light rail system and have three automobile lanes in each direction, with a “postcard-worthy design” that will “aesthetically enhance the world-class grandeur of the Columbia River and Mount Hood.”

The Metro Council had earlier approved a version that would include light rail and tolls. The June 5 vote was 5-2, with Carl Hosticka and Robert Liberty voting no.

Conservation groups had argued the bridge would promote sprawl, boost driving and vehicle emissions, and divert transportation money from other local priorities.

But what nobody seemed to realize, friends or foes alike, was that the bridge is already a white elephant. The fuels necessary to power the cars and trucks that it is assumed will be using the bridge simply won’t be there, at any price, at least not in the quantities necessary to support the projected traffic.

The realities of peak oil and depletion rates are unforgiving. It’s notoriously difficult to calculate accurate depletion rates given the lack of good production data about wells, particularly in the Middle East. But it is appearing increasingly likely that production decline rates will prove much greater than expected. The example of Cantarell, the world’s second-greatest oil field ever behind Ghawar, should be sobering. Production at Cantarell is dropping at a rate of 14%. Ironically, horizontal production wells enhance short-term output, but at the cost of precipitous decline rates once peak production is reached.

It is likely that oil will be much more scarce than almost anyone anticipates, and this could be accompanied by unexpected shocking consequences. We need to appreciate that oil, which makes up about 35% of all our total energy consumption, is vital. The electricity produced worldwide needs the indirect input of oil to support and maintain the extraction and transport of ores, fuels, and machinery for our electricity generating infrastructure. One consequence of oil scarcity could be electricity blackouts becoming permanent.

We can’t afford to be wasting precious resources on infrastructure that is already obsolete. If we are to successfully transition to a new energy paradigm, we need to be investing our capital and using our remaining oil to build the new infrastructure.

As Robert Rapier points out at R-Squared Energy Blog, solar is a good place to start.

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The big news on the eve of the Fourth of July holiday has to be a week of inexorable increases in the price of crude oil with the week ending at a record high. Futures today (Thursday July 3) touched $145.85, the highest since trading began in 1983. Both futures and spot prices have been bouncing around above $144 all day. Brent crude, anomalously, is trading at a premium above $145.

The dramatic abandonment of gas guzzlers by American consumers continues.

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Peak oil isn’t just a theory any more. One consequence may be the extinction of the American automobile industry.

There is one rare sign of sanity from D.C. today. The Bureau of Land Management reversed its earlier decision to impose a two-year moratorium on new solar developments on public land. BLM has relented and will process applications while at the same time studying the environmental impacts of large-scale solar development on public land in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.

What about the deserts of Oregon? Southeast Oregon and southwestern Idaho have great potential.

We’ll be heading for Sacramento (via Amtrak) over the holiday, so posting will be light or even nonexistent until Tuesday.

A posting titled “Energy Transitions Past and Future” by Cutler Cleveland at The Oil Drum contains a sobering tidbit about the scale of the challenge we face in replacing fossil fuels:

“Consider what it would take today to replace even just one-half of U.S. fossil fuel use with renewable energy: we would need to displace coal and petroleum energy flows of 2.9 TW, or 32 times the amount of coal used in 1885. Current global fossil fuel use is about 13 TW, so we need more than 6 TW of renewable energies to replace 50% of all fossil fuels. This is a staggering shift.”

But there is a ray of sunshine:

“The only renewable energy that exceeds annual global fossil fuel use is direct solar radiation, which is several orders of magnitudes larger than fossil fuel use.”

Energy quality is key – and energy density is a key measure of quality. Power density is the rate of energy production per unit of the earth’s area, usually expressed in watts per square meter (W/m2). Fossil fuel deposits are an extraordinarily concentrated source of high-quality, high-density energy. The high power densities of energy systems have enabled the increasing concentration of human activity.

A solar-based system will require “a profound spatial restructuring with major environmental and socioeconomic consequences.” That’s our challenge – to anticipate those consequences as best we can and develop policies and programs to ease a transition compelled by climate change – and, of course, the peaking of oil production, soon to be followed by natural gas and coal.

From MIT Press:

“A team led by MIT students this week successfully tested a prototype of what may be the most cost-efficient solar power system in the world–one team members believe has the potential to revolutionize global energy production.

“The system consists of a 12-foot-wide mirrored dish that team members have spent the last several weeks assembling. The dish, made from a lightweight frame of thin, inexpensive aluminum tubing and strips of mirror, concentrates sunlight by a factor of 1,000–creating heat so intense it could melt a bar of steel.”

Such dishes could be mass produced by the thousands and set up in huge arrays to provide steam for industrial processing, or for heating or cooling buildings, as well as to hook up to steam turbines and generate electricity. Once in mass production, such arrays should pay for themselves within a couple of years with the energy they produce. One of the keys to an inexpensive design is smaller is better. Unlike many technologies where economies of scale dictate large sizes, a smaller dish requires so much less support structure that it ends up costing only a third as much, for a given collecting area. The key in scaling it globally is that all of the materials are inexpensive and accessible anywhere in the world.

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 Mish’s Global Economic Trends Analysis images

The New York Times reports that the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years.

Much of the 119 million surface acres of federally administered land in the West is ideal for solar energy, particularly in Arizona, Nevada and Southern California, where sunlight drenches vast, flat desert tracts.

Joseph Romm at Climate Progress comments:

• Drilling for oil and gas, even in pristine areas — hey, we’re former oil company executives.
• Leveling mountains in beautiful West Virginia — we’re all for it.
• Toxic metals from mining — bring ‘em on!
• Logging old-growth forests — what so you think forests are for?

Solar companies have filed more than 130 proposals with the Bureau of Land Management since 2005. They center on the companies’ desires to lease public land to build solar plants and then sell the energy to utilities. According to the bureau, the applications, which cover more than one million acres, are for projects that have the potential to power more than 20 million homes.

All involve two types of solar plants, concentrating and photovoltaic. Concentrating solar plants use mirrors to direct sunlight toward a synthetic fluid, which powers a steam turbine that produces electricity. Photovoltaic plants use solar panels to convert sunlight into electric energy.

The industry is already concerned over the fate of federal solar investment tax credits, which are set to expire at the end of the year unless Congress renews them. The moratorium, combined with an end to tax credits, would deal a double blow to solar power.