Green Wombat and family are in Sydney for the holidays. Posting will be sporadic over the next two weeks but keep checking in. Happy New Year to all.
cheers
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Tehachapi wind farm originally uploaded by butch19
The massive 1,500 megawatt wind power deal announced Thursday by utility Southern California Edison (EIX) and a subsidiary of Australian company Allco Finance will crank up California’s wind energy capacity by 65 percent. That will go a long way in helping the state meet a mandatory target of generating 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. But renewable energy projects like the huge wind farms to be built in SoCal’s Tehachapi region face a big hurdle: insufficient or non-existent transmission lines to connect the windy and sunny parts of California to the power grid. Yesterday, as the Tehachapi project was being announced, the California Energy Commission released a report warning that, "the lack of transmission infrastructure to access remote renewable resources is the most critical barrier to meeting California’s 20 percent target by 2010."
"Despite efforts by utilities and the renewable industry in working groups for the Tehachapi wind area and Imperial Valley geothermal and solar resources areas," the report continued, "California’s efforts to spur investments in renewable transmission infrastructure have not yet been successful. Unless these challenges are resolved, renewable transmission projects will continue to languish." The energy commission identified the Antelope Transmission Project as crucial if big Tehachapi wind farms like those envisioned by Southern California Edison are to be built. The Antelope transmission project would allow 700 megawatts of wind power to be sent to the Southern California power grid. The project has been winding its way through the regulatory approval process for several years and approval of various environmental impact statements is not expected until at least sometime in 2007. Then it will be a race to construct the nearly $2 billion project in time to meet the 2010 renewable energy deadline.
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The U.S. Department of Energy today released its annual "state energy profiles," which present a number-packed but revealing look at the divergent paths being taken by the nation’s two largest states, California and Texas, in the age of global warming. On the green path is the Golden State, home to 36.1 million people in 2005 – nearly 1 in 10 U.S. residents. Taking the brown road is Texas, with a population of 22.9 million. Despite its size California’s per capital energy consumption ranks 46 out of the 50 states. Texans, on the other hand, are power hogs, with the state the 5th biggest consumer of energy. Texas produces 10.2 percent of the country’s coal-fired electricity; California a tenth of 1 percent. California, however, generates the most power from solar, wind and other non-hydro sources, accounting for about 26 percent of the U.S.’s renewable energy. Texas’ share is about 6 percent. The Lone Star State does whip the Left Coast when it comes to wind power. With 1,600 wind farms in just west Texas, the state is the nation’s biggest wind-power generator. (Update: Southern California Edison on Thursday announced it has signed the nation’s largest wind energy deal, an agreement to buy 1,500 megawatts from wind farms to be built in the Tehachapi region by Australian wind power company Alta Windpower Development.) Still, no surprise that Texas emits 10.3 percent of the nation’s carbon dioxide from electricity generation while California is responsible for 2.2 percent.
So what gives? It’s tempting make this a Blue State-Red State thing – you know, Toyota (TM) Prius-driving, solar-powered San Francisco vegans versus Hummer-lovin’, Halliburton (HAL) -stock-owning Houstonians. Sure, cultural predilections play a role but this is more about geology and policy. Texas holds 23 percent of the country’s crude oil reserves, California has 16 percent; Texas has 4 percent of coal reserves, California zip; and Texas owns 28 percent of the natural gas reserves, California 1.6 percent. For 30 years, California has imposed energy efficiency regulations that have kept power consumption relatively low – compared to other U.S. states – even as the population soared and the economy boomed. California’s new mandate that 20 percent of electricity production come from renewable sources by 2010 and the recently enacted landmark global warming law will keep the state on the green path.
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For all the innovative uses of technology to tackle global warming and other pressing environmental problems (while making a lot of money on the road to ecotopia), there’s been relatively few green tech efforts to save endangered species. Such work, of course, usually falls to environmental groups and governments. After all, what’s the business model, not to mention the exit strategy, for a startup dedicated to, say, bringing the northern hairy-nosed wombat back from the brink of extinction? So Green Wombat is intrigued to see the Tucson, Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity offering free endangered wildlife ringtone downloads of the croaking of the California red-legged frog, the otherworldly murmurs of the Beluga whale and vocalizing from some 40 other endangered or threatened birds and animals. Sure it’s a gimmick, but it’s also an ingenious viral marketing tactic to promote awareness of what the Center calls the extinction crisis – more than 16,000 animals and plant species are listed as threatened. Nearly all of us carry a mobile phone and each ring broadcasts a message to anyone in earshot. Safe to say, even the most ardent greenies – not to mention the public at large – have probably never heard the sounds of the creatures they fight to protect. So I downloaded a call of nature, and yesterday when my mobile rang during a Business 2.0 editorial meeting, 
conversation ceased as my Nokia echoed the "whoo-whoo-whoo-whooooo" hoot of the threatened California spotted owl rather than the opening chords of X’s Los Angeles.
"What’s that?" quizzed editor Josh Quittner, providing the opening for a short soliloquy on the old-growth forest-dwelling bird. "The main purpose is to get people interested in the species, raise awareness, and familiarize people with our work to protect endangered species and wild places," Jeff Miller, the Center for Biological Diversity’s Bay Area Wildlands Coordinator, told Green Wombat. "There is no fundraising aspect." (Though the Center does collect your name and email address before letting you download a ringtone.) But why not create a business model to leverage mobile technology, Web 2.0 widgets and social networking in the service of wildlife pushed toward oblivion by deforestation, development and climate change. If Green Day gets a cut from ringtones, why not the Bengal tiger? It’s disturbing to think that one day somewhere in the wilds of Bolivia, the last blue-throated macaw will expire, leaving only the bird’s raspy shriek as the ghost in the machine of millions of mobile phones.
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This morning Green Wombat spoke to a CEO whose startup tech company’s
revenues have shot up from $400,000 to $4 million in two years. Verdiem
isn’t about Web 2.0, it doesn’t do online video or mobile
social networking for Generation Z. It makes software that – wait for
it – manages corporate personal computer networks to lower energy usage. Sounds as sexy as, oh, selling CRM or SQL server database
software, right? But to companies looking to save money and enhance their enviro cred
as global warming concerns escalate, Verdiem’s software is a justifiable buy, and the 25-person Seattle startup has carved out a high-growth niche as Big Business goes green. "The whole ethos of integrating an environmental or sustainability strategy as a corporate objective is the single biggest change we’ve seen over the past year," says Verdiem chief executive Kevin Klustner.
Verdiem began selling its Surveyor
software in 2004 to school districts and other public institutions and
non-profts that need to keep costs under control. "But we saw very
little interest on the corporate side," Klustner says. "We save energy
on a PC network. The IT guys are the ones that manage the network and
they don’t pay the energy bill." But with more and more Fortune 500
companies appointing VPs for sustainability and environmental policy,
demand for Verdiem’s software has grown, according to Klustner. He says corporate clients – currently about 15 percent of Verdiem’s customer base – include Quad/Graphics, the big Wisconsin printing company, and several Wall Street firms he said did not want to be identified at this time. Verdiem sells seat licenses to the software and charges a yearly maintenance fee, which includes updates and an annual energy audit. That gives customers hard data on how much money they’re saving by lowering electricty usage – a figure that can be translated into how many fewer tons of greenhouse gases they’re emitting. Verdiem has also cut deals with 25 utilities that will rebate part of the seat license if companies can show they’ve lowered electricity use.
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It’s that time again, when editors everywhere trot out their end-of
year lists – The Most Beautiful People, the Top 10 Trends, etc. etc.
Frankly, the Green Wombat couldn’t be bothered coming up with a list of
his own but we will pass on the 2006 One Degree Hot List:
The Year’s Most Influential in Global Climate Change. One Degree is a
Web spinoff of the Weather Channel that focuses on climate issues.
Taking the No. 1 position is, no surprise, Al Gore. "If global climate
change reached a tipping point in the public consciousness in 2006,
former Vice President Al Gore may well have pushed it over the top,"
the list editors wrote. "With his unlikely hit film An Inconvenient
Truth, Gore became the official climate change spokesman for millions
across the globe, presenting possibly the most widely distributed (and
highest grossing) science lecture in history." British Prime Minister
Tony Blair gets props for making global warming a policy priority while
George W. Bush’s fierce opposition to such policies is credited with
inspiring California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and other Golden
State politicians (No. 4) to enact a landmark global warming law.
Others making the list include evangelist Richard Cizik for taking
climate change to the pulpit; NASA global warming expert James Hansen; and Wal-Mart for its conversion to the green agenda and efforts to
promote environmentally sustainable products and practices.
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As Green Wombat reported Thursday, California utility Pacific Gas & Electric will invest in forestry projects to neutralize greenhouse gas emissions from its customers’ energy use. Today, scientists presenting research at a San Francisco conference said, in effect, don’t bother. At least not in North America and Europe. The reason: computer modeling shows that while trees indeed do remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, in the planet’s mid-latitudes their dark leaves also absorb heat and thus have a marginal benefit in reducing global warming, according to Govindasamy Bala, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. If the scientists’ findings are confirmed by further research, it could
spell trouble for corporate efforts to mitigate companies’
contributions to global warming by planting trees rather than taking
action to actually reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases. "This suggests that planting forests would not slow down global
warming," Bala told fellow scientists attending the big American
Geophysical Union confab as he showed slides depicting the results of
the study he co-authored.
Tree-planting also is being used by so-called carbon offset services
that promise to neutralize consumers’ personal emissions of carbon
dioxide from driving, flying and their consumerist lifestyle. It makes more sense, Bala said, to plant trees in the southern hemisphere as tropical forests also absorb more water vapor, creating clouds that cool the planet. Bala cautioned that his conclusions come from a preliminary investigation based on computer modeling of what would happen if the planet was deforested – temperatures would drop slightly, the scientists found – and not on actual on-the-ground measurements. "Forests have a lot of value in our economy and for ecosystems," Bala emphasized.
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photo from calcars
Not content to wait for Detroit and Tokyo to get with the plug-in car program, the California Energy Commission has allocated $3 million to establish a Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle Research Center at the University of California, Davis. The center is charged with developing plug-in hybrid technologies and promoting their commercial viability. Plug-In Hybrids use larger and higher capacity batteries than conventional electric-gasoline hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius. The rechargeable batteries allow them to travel further without using the gas engine, nearly doubling the car’s fuel efficiency and cutting greenhouse gas emissions. In California, vehicles account for about 40 percent of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions and plug-in hybrids are seen as a key in combating global warming. As Green Wombat reported earlier this week, a U.S. Department of Energy study found the nation has sufficient off-peak electricity capacity to replace 84 percent of its vehicle fleet with plug-in hybrids. California Energy Commission officials weren’t immediately available for comment but Green Wombat will provide an update once we get more details on the plans for the plug-in hybrid research center.
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headwaters forest photo by Greg King
Pacific Gas & Electric (PCG), one of the nation’s largest utilities, will calculate its California customers’ individual greenhouse gas emissions based on their energy usage, giving homes and businesses the option to go carbon neutral by paying a small surcharge on their monthly bill that corresponds to how many pounds of carbon dioxide they acutally emit. PG&E will then use that money to finance environmental projects that reduce greenhouse gases by an equivalent amount. The ClimateSmart program – the first of its kind – differs markedly from other "green guilt" programs that allow people to pay extra to support a utility’s purchase of renewable energy. In this case, PG&E customers are paying for real-world reductions in their actual contributions to global warming, according to the utility. PG&E will initially invest in California forestry projects. That’s because trees act as carbon sinks, absorbing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. PG&E spokesman Keely Wachs said the utility will preserve forests in danger of being logged as well as pay for new tree planting. "Not only are these projects great ways of reducing CO2 emissions but there are many great environmental co-benefits associated with them," he told Green Wombat. "If we preserve an old-growth forest area with a stream running through it, we also can preserve salmon and other wildlife."
He said ClimateSmart will launch in mid-2007 and PG&E will soon begin taking bids from landowners, non-profits and others for forest preservation projects. While tree-planting and forest conservation can prove effective in cutting greenhouse gases – just how effective is a subject of scientific debate – the benefit disappears if fire or disease destroy the woodlands. And of course the full impact on global warming from planting 
new trees will be years off. Still, PG&E expects ClimateSmart will take at least 2 million tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in its first three years, which would be like removing 350,000 cars from the road for 12 months. If the program is successful PG&E will expand ClimateSmart to include other carbon neutral projects, though Wachs
wouldn’t specify what those might entail.
Leading the green charge in a brown industry, PG&E itself will commit $1 million to the
program and expects to raise at least $20 million from customers in its first three
years. The non-profit California Climate Action Registry and independent auditors will
certify that ClimateSmart results in actual reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the utility said. The ClimateSmart surcharge will average about $4.31 a month and participating customers’ utility bills will show their monthly greenhouse gas emissions. "It educates our customers and the broader public about the impact of their energy usage," says Wachs.
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Wondering where the hell you’re going to find a biodiesel filling
station at 10 p.m. on Saturday night? Your plug-in hybrid running low
on electrons far from home? One of the big challenges of driving an alt energy car is finding fuel. It’s not like there’s a compressed natural gas station on every corner, even here in the green car capital of California. But where there’s a wiki there’s a way, and the MapMuse service plots the location of various renewable energy fueling stations across the country, from biodiesel and ethanol to hydrogen (few and far between). Just enter your zip code or destination and the map will show the nearest locations, whether the station is public or private and other info. MapMuse is interactive, letting the public plot the latest additions to the alt energy network. (Fuel station owners can also pay $10 a year for listings.) The Washington, D.C. company started the service six months ago but is now calling on consumers to provide updates.
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