An international agreement that regulates the dumping of waste into the world’s oceans has been amended to allow carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants to be pumped beneath the sea floor. Australia led the effort to change the London Convention to permit carbon storage, or geosequestration, as a way to combat global warming. "These technologies are relatively new but have enormous potential to help the world reduce its greenhouse gas emissions," said Australian environment minister Ian Campbell Friday in a statement. Australia, of course, has refused to sign the Kyoto Accord and holds vast coal deposit. In fact, 86 percent of the country’s electricity is produced by coal-fired plants. Some environmentalists oppose geosequestration, saying the risks are too high and it does nothing to reduce the planet’s reliance on coal and other greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels.
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All those Prius owners on my Berkeley block got nothing on this baby: A hydrogen hybrid Prius whose fuel is produced by a wind turbine. Last week I visited EVermont, a Burlington non-profit R&D outfit that operates one of few renewable hydrogen filling stations in the country. Among the (many) stumbling blocks to the much-hyped hydrogen economy is the fact that today most hydrogen is produced by burning fossil fuels, which partly neutralizes its advantage as an abundant clean green power source. The holy grail is hydrogen produced from renewable energy. To that end, EVermont
buys power generated by a wind turbine located next door to its fuel
station (above photo) and owned by a local utility. Wind-generated electricity is used to produce hydrogen
onsite through electrolysis. The result: a truly carbon neutral car. Unlike the Mercedes (DCX) hydrogen fuel cell car
I drove earlier in the week, the Toyota (TM) Prius has a standard internal
combusion engine. The engine was converted to run on hydrogen by Quantum Technologies Worldwide of
Irvine, California.
The car has a range of about 80
miles and will be used by the city of Burlington. The fueling station
itself cost $2 million and was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy
with equipment donated by manufacturers. EVermont research director Harold Garabedian estimates that filling up the hydrogen Prius costs the equivalent of between $5 and $10 a gallon.
Outrageous? Not if you’re a European already paying $6 or $7 a gallon
for petrol. Of course, mass production and the use of solar panels and other renewable energy sources would bring those costs down.
For a good primer on the challenges and payoffs of the hydrogen economy
check out the current issue of Popular Mechanics.
As the Wombat reported yesterday, California is one of the world’s largest contributors to global warming, and 41 percent of the Golden State’s greenhouse gases come from cars and other fossil fuel-burning vehicles. In the long run, renewable hydrogen may turn out to be the bargain of the century.
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I
had a chance last week to take a spin in the Mercedes F-Cell, the hydrogen fuel cell car based on the A-Class subcompact (sold in Europe and Australia but not in the SUV-loving U.S. of A.). It’s pretty cool. Turn the ignition key and the F-Cell remains silent except for a warp-drive sound as the system revs up. The ride is smooth and quiet, though the sci-fi sounds effects get louder as the car accelerates. The F-Cell drives and handles like a conventional vehicle – which is the point Mercedes (DCX) likes to make. The fuel-cell system is totally contained in the engine compartment – no bulky tanks or other equipment in the trunk. Mercedes is mum on when F-Cell will, if ever, hit the dealerships but a second-generation version of the car is in the works.
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Two weeks ago Green Wombat first reported that Silicon Valley venture capital firm VantagePoint Venture Partners was set to invest in a large-scale solar power plant. Matt Marshall at VentureBeat followed up and has details of the deal here.
Matt reports that VantagePoint is investing in Luz II, a company that signed an agreement in August with Northern California utility PG&E to produce 500 megawatts of electricity from large-scale solar power plants. The company is a successor to Luz, which built nine solar power stations in California’s Mojave desert in in the wake of the oil shocks of the late 1970s.
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While ghouls and goblins were trick-or-treating last night, the California Energy Commission issued a scary report on the Golden State’s contribution to global warming. In 2004, California released 492 million gross metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That makes the Bear Republic the nation’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases and the 12th to 16th largest contributor to global warming on the planet.
However, when put in context the report shows that the California experience offers hope that greenhouse gas emissions be contained. For instance, while the state’s economy grew 83 percent between 1990 and 2003 and it had the largest population increase in the country, greenhouse gas emissions rose only 12 percent, due largely to energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. "This demonstrates the potential for
uncoupling economic trends from (greenhouse gas) emissions trends," wrote the report’s authors.
Texas, in contrast, has double the carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning than California, and Wyoming has the highest per capita emission of greenhouse gases.
The report makes clear, though, that Californians will have to end their love affair with the internal combustion engine if they are to achieve significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Transportation produces about 41 percent of the state’s greenhouse gases.
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I just returned from the Society of Environmental Journalists‘ annual conference, where a hot t
opic of conversation was Wal-Mart. Like nearly everything the world’s largest retailer does, its recent conversion to the green gospel will have an outsized impact on global warming efforts and the market for environmentally sensitive products and organic food. When Wal-Mart (WMT) announces it favors capping greenhouse gas emissions and creating a carbon trading market, even flat-earth politicos tend to listen. The company sent its VP for corporate strategy and sustainability, Andrew Ruben, to the SEJ conference in Burlington, Vermont, to talk about the company’s environmental initiatives. "We have a goal of using 100 percent renewable" energy, he said Friday at a panel on "Corporate Green," though he acknowledged Wal-Mart has no time line to achieve that target.
But it’s clear that Wal-Mart sees going green as good for the bottom line. Ruben said the company has retrofitted its fleet of 7,200 trucks with a device that reduces the amount of diesel they consume while idling, saving $25 million in annual fuel costs and cutting many metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions. And there’s no denying Wal-Mart’s ability to influence consumer behavior. For instance, after the company increased the amount of shelf space devoted to high efficiency light bulbs from 5 percent to 20 to 30 percent, some stores reported an immediate 10 percent jump in sales of compact fluorescent bulbs. Ruben said Wal-Mart is trying to sell 100 million such light bulbs this year, which would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 metric tons.
But prominent environmental author Bill McKibben said such efforts, while
praiseworthy, do nothing to change the consumerist culture that’s the root cause of global warming.
"Climate scientists tell us we need an immediate 70 percent reduction in the use of fossil fuels" to avert catastrophic climate change, he said. Thinking that you can solve global warming by "taking the American middle class, high consumption lifestyle and rejigger it a little….is a fantasy. What’s the purpose of getting people to use energy efficiency light bulbs? So people will have more money to spend at Wal-Mart. That model won’t work."
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I look at the face of renewable energy and it looks back at me with big brown eyes and says, "Moo."
Meet the cows of Blue Spruce Farm in Bridport, Vermont. Each of the 2,000 cows produces not only milk but 200 watts of power a day. Cow manure is fed into a anaerobic digester on the farm, where bacteria strip away pathogens and produce methane gas. The gas powers a generator that produces electricity, which is fed into the grid operated by Central Central Public Service, the local utility. Cows are king in Vermont and about 75 percent of the state’s agricultural revenue come from dairies. But cow poop releases methane, a particularly powerful greenhouse gas, and creates a huge waste management headache for dairies like Blue Spruce Farm, owned by the Audets family. "We weren’t thinking of global warming when we dd this, we needed to do deal with the waste problem," says Marie Audets, a no-nonsense woman who has worked on farms most of her life, as she showed me and a group of environmental journalists around Blue Spruce Farm.
Vermont is not the only state experimenting with cow power – California is home to some 2 million cows and this month Pacific Gas & Electric signed a deal to buy methane gas from Microgy, a company that will build four digesters on Big Ag dairy farms. What’s different about Vermont cow power is that it’s connecting consumers to family farms that are struggling to cut costs as milk prices fall. CVPS customers who sign up for cow power pay a 4 cent kilowatt-hour premium, or about $5 to $20 more a month for their bovine-sourced electricity.
The Audets financed the methane digester shown above. It captures the methane that would be released into the atmosphere and turns it into electricity that Blue Spruce sells 
to CVPS, effectively reducing the farm’s net power costs to zero. The digester’s byproduct is sterilized manure (shown at right), which is used as cow bedding instead of increasingly expensive sawdust. That saves the dairy as much as $100,000 annually. Cow power is another example of what’s good for the environment is often also good for the bottom line. The effort got a big boost Thursday when a local environmental liberal arts school, Green Mountain College, agreed to power its campus with cows. CVPS is working with four other farms to install methane digesters.
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Be sure to check out "Here Comes the Sun" in the November issue of Business 2.0 now hitting the newsstands. The feature written by my colleagues Michael Copeland and Tom McNichol (and edited by the wombat) takes an in-depth look at the solar gold rush now on in Silicon Valley. I love being a magazine editor, but one of the frustrations of working at a monthly in the Internet age is finishing an edit of a good and exceedingly timely story and then waiting weeks before it gets into readers’ hands.
Click on the link above for the full story. Here’s an excerpt:
The rapidly expanding alternative-energy economy promises to shake up the way power is produced and consumed as profoundly as Silicon Valley’s computer and Internet companies upended global communications and commerce in the late 20th century.
The signs of world-changing transformation are everywhere: Venture capitalists are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into Valley solar startups pursuing technological breakthroughs to make sun power as cheap as fossil fuel. Three of the largest tech IPOs of 2005 were for solar companies, including San Jose-based SunPower, a spinoff of chipmaker Cypress Semicond
uctor (CY).
Other old-line Valley tech companies are also jumping into the market. Among the most significant is Applied Materials (AMAT). The world’s largest chip-equipment maker will begin producing machines to manufacture solar wafers, laying the groundwork for an industrial infrastructure that should lower the cost of producing solar cells. For the first time in many years, high-tech manufacturing plants – yes, factories – are being built in Silicon Valley.
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The Australian government’s decision to award Solar Systems a $A75 million (about $US57 million) to build the world’s largest solar power station in the Australian state of Victoria is a big setback for rival EnviroMission. The Melbourne company is seeking to build a 50-megawatt, 1,600-foot-high solar tower power plant in the state of New South Wales, just over the border from Victoria. EnviroMission had competed for the grant, which it was counting on to jump-start construction of the solar tower next year and attract additional investors. The grant, part of the Australian government’s Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund, is intended to give renewable energy companies enough cash to get their projects off the ground and demonstrate their technology’s feasibility on a large scale.
I chronicled EnviroMission’s six-year quest to build a solar tower on the edge of the Australian Outback in "Tower of Power," which appeared the August issue of Business 2.0. EnviroMission on Wednesday requested the Australian Stock Exchange suspend trading in its shares pending an announcement on Friday. Originally proposed as a 1-kilometer-high, 100-megawatt plant, the solar tower was redesigned with an eye to winning the government grant. EnviroMission CEO Roger Davey told me in late June that if the company lost the grant it would re-evaluate the tower’s design to ensure its commercial viability and would arrange alternative financing. Meanwhile, EnviroMission’s joint venture with Chinese investors to build a solar tower near Shanghai is proceeding.
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Just a quick post before I get on a plane: Australian company Solar Systems announced it will build a 154 megawatt solar power station in the state of Victoria. The company on Wednesday received a $AUS 75 million grant from the Australian federal government to fund construction. The Victorian state government is kicking in an additional $AUS 50 million.
Solar Systems’ plant, to be completed by 2013, will use Heliostat Concentrator Photovoltaic technology, developed in part with a subsidiary of Boeing. More on this when I land.
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Green Wombat 
