Green Wombat

Image: Picarro

In the Green Inc. column I wrote for Monday’s New York Times and International Herald Tribune, I go hunting for greenhouse gases in the San Francisco Bay Area with Picarro, a Silicon Valley company that makes analyzers that measure CO2 and methane emissions in real-time:

SAN FRANCISCO — The recent Copenhagen climate talks faltered in part over how to verify that nations are actually reducing their carbon emissions. Likewise, the integrity of emissions trading markets, like the one under consideration by the U.S. Congress, will depend on the ability to accurately measure greenhouse gases.

That’s creating a burgeoning global business for Picarro, a Silicon Valley company that makes portable analyzers that take precise real-time measurements of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases. The machines also allow scientists to pinpoint the source of emissions.

To get a real-life demonstration of the machine’s potential to zero in on the source of carbon emissions, I went hunting for greenhouse gas emissions with Chris Rella, Picarro’s director of research and development.

Mr. Rella rolled up in a white Dodge Sprinter van and slid back a door to reveal a rack of Picarro analyzers connected to a video screen that was displaying the concentration of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere around us.

A translucent tube connected to the analyzers snaked through the roof of the van to collect air samples, while a GPS device continuously tracked the van’s location and a wireless modem transmitted all the data back to the Picarro headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. It’s all very “Mission: Impossible.”

You can read the column here.

Image: NextEra Energy

In Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, I write about how a seemingly intractable dispute about the environmental impact of a big solar power plant in California is being resolved with some innovative compromises:

A developer who proposes to cut down hundreds of trees to make way for a massive project could expect to provoke a fair amount of environmental outrage.

Not in California City. Officials in this sprawling desert community east of Bakersfield are thrilled at NextEra Energy’s move to break out the chain saws.

The firm, a subsidiary of utility giant FPL Group, is seeking to build a solar power plant in the area that would consume a large amount of water. The trees are tamarisks, a water-hungry invasive species, and removing them could help recharge the aquifer in this arid region.

“The water that normally would go into the tamarisk will go down into the basin — it’s a big environmental win,” said Michael Bevins, California City’s public works director.

The tree deal is just one way that what threatened to become another intractable fight over the environmental effect of desert solar power plants is turning into a blueprint for the resolution of similar disputes.

You can read the rest of the story here.

Artist rendering: Recurrent Energy

A couple of stories on the boom in distributed solar. As I wrote the New York Times:

As big solar power plants planned for the desert Southwest remain bogged down in environmental disputes, utilities increasingly are turning to so-called distributed solar rooftop arrays and small photovoltaic farms that can be built close to transmission lines.

Over the past few weeks, some 1,300 megawatts’ worth of distributed solar deals and initiatives have been announced or approved. At peak output, that is the equivalent of a big nuclear power plant.

Two weeks ago in California, regulators authorized the utility Southern California Edison’s program to install 500 megawatts of solar on commercial rooftops. A few days later, they recommended that Pacific Gas and Electric, the dominant utility in Northern California, be given the green light for its own 500-megawatt initiative that aims to install ground-mounted photovoltaic arrays near electrical substations and urban areas.

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District said in January that it took only a week to sell out its 100-megawatt solar program, which offers developers the opportunity to build photovoltaic projects of up to five megawatts.

And last week, the New York Power Authority announced a program to install 100 megawatts of solar arrays around the state.

“All of this is a great indication that solar prices are continuing to get a lot cheaper and that results in scale,” said Adam Browning, executive director of Vote Solar, a San Francisco nonprofit that promotes renewable energy.

You can read the rest of the story here.

In my Grist column, I took a deeper dive into distributed solar:

I spotted a rare critter on the streets of San Francisco this week—a smiling, optimistic businessperson.

Then again, Ron Kenedi is in the solar panel business.

“The big news as I see it is the demand—demand keeps growing everywhere,” says Kenedi, vice president of Sharp Solar, the renewable energy arm of the Japanese conglomerate. “What really amazes me every day is how much demand has grown throughout the world.”

Kenedi is not one for Pollyannaish optimism—he started in the business around the time Ronald Reagan took down Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the White House roof.

“I used to have to go out there with a sandwich board on to get people interested in solar,” he says. “Now I can’t even walk down the street without people talking to me about solar and wanting it on their home and businesses.”

That’s because there’s a boom in so-called distributed generation under way—placing solar panels and pint-sized photovoltaic farms at or near where electricity is consumed.

Until very recently, distributed generation just couldn’t compete on cost with Big Solar—massive megawatt solar thermal power plants usually located in the desert.

Big Solar has had the edge by the dint of the gigawatt-size deals utilities have struck with developers like BrightSource Energy, eSolar, and Solar Millennium. Large solar thermal power plants—which use mirrors to heat liquids to create steam that drives a generator—could make electricity cheaper than photovoltaic panels, which produce electrons when the sun strikes semiconducting materials.

Now that’s all changing. Over the past year, a number of Big Solar thermal projects have become mired in disputes over their impact on fragile desert ecosystems and the lack of transmission lines to connect them to cities. In December, California’s powerful Democratic senator, Dianne Feinstein, introduced legislation to ban renewable energy development on more than a million acres of the Mojave Desert she wants to protect as national monument.

Photovoltaic module prices, meanwhile, have plummeted by about 30 percent over the past year thanks to an oversupply of modules and the rise of low-cost Chinese manufacturers. Thin-film solar companies, which make solar cells that use little or no expensive polysilicon and which layer or print them on glass or metal, began to produce solar modules for less than a one dollar a watt—long considered a key milestone for making solar competitive with fossil fuels. Though less efficient than conventional crystalline solar modules, thin-film solar cells can be manufactured more cheaply, making it particularly suited for use by photovoltaic power plants.

You can read the rest of the column here.

photo: Chris Kennedy / USFWS

Late last week, the Obama administration denied endangered species protection to the American pika, which environmentalists and some scientists believe is imperiled by global warming. As I wrote Monday in The New York Times:

The Obama administration has determined that the American pika, a small rabbit-like mammal, is not threatened by climate change.

The decision underscores how the Endangered Species Act has become the latest battlefield in the fight over global warming.

Environmentalists consider the pika to be the animal most vulnerable to climate change in the continental United States due to its inability to survive even small increases in temperature.

The pika lives on alpine mountain ranges throughout the West, and as average temperatures have increased in recent decades, some populations have disappeared at lower elevations while others have moved to higher peaks, according to scientific studies.

In an initial finding issued last April, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said that protecting the pika under the Endangered Species Act “may be warranted because of the present or threatened destruction, modification, or curtailment of its habitat or range as a result of effects related to global climate change.”

But after a full review, government scientists have concluded that the pika could survive temperatures projected to increase 3 degrees Celsius in its mountain habitat as well as the loss of snow pack, which the animals depend on for shelter. “The American pika has demonstrated flexibility in its behavior and physiology that can allow it to adapt to increasing temperature,” the scientists wrote in the finding released Friday.

Greg Loarie, an attorney who represents the Center for Biological Diversity, the environmental group that petitioned to list the pike as endangered, said studies do not support the government’s position.

You can read the rest of the story here.