San Jose, California, 400 kilowatt ballasted roof array.
I am a solar contractor. I own and manage a business that designs and builds commercial and industrial photovoltaic systems, and when we can win them public works projects such as schools, libraries, fire stations and visitor centers. I have been doing this for about a decade now. As I write this we have one crew laying out over one thousand six hundred panels on a factory roof the size of one and a half football fields in Hayward, CA. Below us a row of enormous injection molding presses tended by robots produces plastic parts for Tesla. These make their way along conveyor belts to yet more robots that inspect them and then are loaded on to pallets and then trucks that take them to Tesla’s assembly plant a few miles away.
A second crew is building solar canopies over parking stalls in the parking lot of the La Quinta Inn in Livermore, CA. This job is more challenging. The site is at the base of the Altamont Pass and above us on the hilltops huge new white wind turbines spin slowly having replaced the earlier generation of machines. Those had open lattice towers but these new giants sit atop tubular steel towers with nacelles the size of shipping containers. Our attempts to drill piers have come to naught as the holes fill up overnight with water. We have switched to spread foundations that use more concrete and require more special inspections.
As we say in this business, I ride the solar coaster. This is a volatile industry. Manufacturers, developers, contractors and installers come and go with alarming regularity. The barriers to entry are low and therefore so are margins. Solar panel prices continue to erode and despite the tariffs on China they continue their downward path in this country, as they should. Spot prices for panels as I write this are below fifty cents a watt. A decade or so back, when I entered this business on the back of the California Solar Initiative, they were three dollars a watt. Industry experts expect pricing to eventually level out at about twenty cents a watt.
My purpose in writing this is to tell you, as a practitioner in renewable energy, as an engineer, as an environmentalist, as a writer, and as an executive with a long career in manufacturing, that there is no longer any reason not to attack and solve the existential problem of our age which is the continuous rise in carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere and the consequent acidification of our oceans. The solutions are at hand today and I will bear witness here and now to that. I have children and I have a grandchild. Should my grandson live to be my age, and should we continue to evade our responsibility to avert the catastrophe we know we face, then the question I am left to ponder is this: when he visits New York City and kayaks up Fifth Avenue, will he be able to paddle through the fifth, the tenth, or the twentieth floor windows of the Empire State Building?
The greatest scientific discovery in human history is surely the control of fire, of the combustion of hydrocarbons, without which we could never have evolved from the other primates who still cling to survival in tropical forests in ever shrinking numbers foraging for bugs and berries. It has propelled our civilization from the stone age to the iron age to the middle ages to the industrial revolution. We burned wood, then coal, then oil, then natural gas. And over time we learned to use these fuels ever more efficiently in boilers, steam locomotives, steam turbines to make electricity, internal combustion engines and gas turbines to transport us by land sea or air. Today we live in a society entirely dependent on burning hydrocarbons and in so doing we are increasing the percentage of carbon dioxide, the inevitable byproduct, in our atmosphere, and, more insidiously, in our oceans.
Carbon dioxide is a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas. If we could just see it, if it were a purple gas streaming from the tailpipes of every car on the freeway, perhaps it would be easier to rally support for the enormous task of ceasing to add more of it to our atmosphere. How many people reading this can even complete the combustion equation for the octane they burn on their daily commutes? The vast majority of people are instead faced with a choice of faith. The entire world has yet to be convinced of three facts that are life or death ones for future generations. The first is that carbon dioxide levels are rising. It is difficult to visualize the idea that four hundred parts per million of anything is significantly more than three hundred parts of it. But please try this exercise: imagine a cube of atmosphere sitting on a table in front of you. Lets say it is one meter by one meter by one meter. Now lets say we can mark off the sides into centimeters, meaning we would have one hundred markings on each side. That gives us a hundred little cubes in each direction, right? So if you look at any side of the big cube you see one hundred by one hundred little cubes. The big cube is now divided into one million little cubes. (100 by 100 by 100). At the start of the rise of global warming there were three rows of little cubes along one edge that were carbon dioxide. We have added a fourth row and we are working on a fifth row.
The second truth you must grasp is that the planet is in fact heating up. In her Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert, who takes us on a literary tour de force of the ongoing scientific research into the eponymous subject, quotes one researcher as stating that every carbon dioxide molecule we add to the atmosphere causes one hundred thousand times as much global warming as the energy released when it was created powering your car or your toaster. Again, hard to visualize this. You need thousands of temperature measurements from all over the world, over and over, for decades, or better yet centuries. But this data really does exist. It has been collated and analyzed and is a verifiable fact.
But even if you accept both of the above statements you are still being asked to accept that the two are related. This is no longer just a hypothesis, it is an empirical fact. The proof is in the fossil record. Fifty million years ago the amount of carbon dioxide in the air was ten times what it is now. Scientists have multiple ways of establishing this. At that time, around the end of the Eocene era, there was no surface ice, the oceans were a couple of hundred feet higher, and there were forests at both poles.
Not surprisingly, acceptance of the above, that there is a rise in carbon dioxide, that it is heating up the planet and that we are causing it, is much more highly accepted by younger people who will have to live with the consequences and is denied and obfuscated by older entrenched interests. What still needs to be communicated, very clearly, is that we hold the solution within our grasp today. We need not await any technological breakthrough, nor need we pay a painful economic penalty, nor do we need to placate so-called powerful interests to solve this problem. All that is required is an act of will by the people of the world fortunate enough to live in democracies that allow them to vote for a transformation from burning hydrocarbons to deploying renewable energy without any further delay.
Solar power represents the fastest means to transform this country’s and the world’s electrical energy away from fossil fuel. For all practical purposes there is an infinite supply. California has made the most progress so far, but thirteen years after the California Solar Initiative jump-started the industry with its tiered rebates, which are now used up and no longer necessary anyway, we still have not even reached Governor Schwarznegger’s “million solar roofs.” We are close, over 800,000 homes at last count, but at this rate it will take over a century before every home in this state is solar powered. And market penetration in California is a multiple of every other state, with the possible exception of Hawaii.
The challenge here is to compel the entire country to switch to solar immediately. There are a number of ways to do this. Here in this state we have already entered the era of intermittent electricity; the utilities have warned us that they will de-energize transmission lines in high wind, high fire danger areas so as to prevent further fatal wild fires. These interruptions could last for several days. This, of course is loud rock music to the ears of energy storage executives and really to all of us who provide distributed energy, generated at the point of use and so not dependent on miles of transmission lines.
Solar for an average home costs less than ten thousand dollars and has a payback of less than five years. It is a great investment. For those who do not have that much cash on hand there are myriad financing options. There is a type of loan called PACE — property assessed clean energy — that allows homeowners to borrow against their property taxes. the repayments are simply tacked onto the property tax. At this point PACE has been adopted somewhat randomly county by county, but if there were a Federally backed PACE program, coupled with increasing restrictions on the availability of centrally generated fossil fuel power the adoption of solar power could be dramatically accelerated.
If we also began to ration the same power for all users it would compel businesses to deploy solar on their rooftops, which in the case of multistory buildings is often insufficient, but there are always parking stalls that can have solar canopies added to them and, if there is still a deficit, vacant land all over town can be pressed into service. Distributed solar power can not only produce all of todays electricity needs it can also power the transition of all passenger vehicles to zero emission and of all space and water heating to electric heat pumps. We just need to decide to do this.
The problem of intermittency always comes up, but we are there anyway, without renewables, and if the power went off right now I could continue to work on this laptop for hours, my phone would keep working, I could drive my car, I could be careful not to open the doors of fridges or freezers, my plumbing would still function, my Arlo security cameras run on their own batteries for six months, and as the problem becomes more pervasive some intrepid manufacturers will soon sell LED lights with battery back-up and add batteries to routers, modems and even larger appliances. Your sprinkler timer has had batteries for thirty years to keep the clock right!
There is another vast resource which we know how to harness but which goes almost unused and that is wind. Solar energy is essentially evenly distributed and predictable and similar at any given latitude, but wind is not. Wind is entirely the product of temperature and therefore pressure gradients in the atmosphere which is a compressible gas. Onshore wind is best where the air accelerates over ridges or through passes. In California all of our wind farms are located in places such as the Altamont Pass, Sonora Pass, Banning Pass — the ubiquitous ones of Hollywood fame — and Tehachapi Pass connecting the higher and hotter Mojave Desert with the cooler San Joaquin Valley on the other side of the Sierra Nevada.
About ten years ago, when solar panels cost six times more than they do today there was an incentive program here called Emerging Renewables one of whose goals was to promote Small Wind, in other words backyard wind turbines. I actually sold a few of these projects but with one exception they were shot down by opposition. One would have had to run the gauntlet of a Coastal Commission and the other was in Monterey County where we would have had to prove categorically that it would never injure a California Condor. The one that made it was a case study at the annual wind get together at UC Davis, and in fact the situation was so bad that I was asked to give the same presentation the following year.
There is really no case for distributed wind. The physics of wind energy is such that a doubling of wind speed produces eight times the output; it is proportional to the cube of the speed; hence the concentration of wind farms in those windier locations. If you search on line using the keywords “NREL” and “wind map” you will find an image of The United States color-coded according to average wind speed. If this the first time you have looked into wind energy resources the results are astonishing. The darker colors represent higher wind speeds. There are three distinct locations that possess the best wind: The Great Lakes, an area off the California Coast around Humboldt County and then the waters off the entire eastern seaboard, from New Hampshire to Florida.
There are of course other micro-climates throughout the country that are being exploited: the foothills of the Rockies, the Dakota Badlands and just about any ridges and passes that obstruct and channel air flow. These should all be pressed into use but the glittering prize is the Atlantic offshore. Studies easily show that there is more than enough wind accessible with todays technology to power not just the electricity of every state bordering the Atlantic, but all of their future needs as they too migrate to zero emission vehicles and electric heating.
The largest offshore wind turbines today have a nameplate rating of about 10 Megawatts. The swept area of the blades approaches six hundred feet in diameter. To keep the bottom of the blades about one hundred feet above the ocean surface in one hundred feet deep water they need towers about five hundred feet tall. That is about the length of the long axis of the large factory my crews are working on. We are the Lilliputians here. But ever since people have set to sea they have realized the opportunity to create far larger structures than would be possible on land.
About fifty thousand of these turbines would be needed to accomplish the goal of converting the east coast to a zero carbon economy using wind alone. The generators, controllers, gearboxes and nacelle enclosures could be built anywhere and staged at shipyards up and down the coast. The towers, foundations and blades are so large they would have to be built at shipyard-type locations from where they could be loaded onto barges, brought to their final destinations and then erected with special purpose ships, cranes and work platforms. Large switchgear, combiner boxes and hundreds of miles of underwater cabling would be needed to get the electricity back to shore.
None of this is insurmountable. This is not the Apollo moonshot, and certainly not the Manhattan project, both of which called for the implementation of theories that pushed the boundaries of human knowledge. This is more the Transcontinental Railroad. By the eighteen-fifties there were already railroads crossing the Appalachians and in theory their locomotives could also cross the Sierra Nevada. Abraham Lincoln was convinced and campaigned on it in the eighteen-sixty election. What had never been done was to build such an enormously long railroad across such a desolate wilderness. Delayed by the Civil War it was started in eighteen-sixty-three and completed in eighteen-sixty-nine.
Perhaps though we should apply the allegory of the Transcontinental Railroad to the transformation of the entire United States electrical grid to zero carbon and look at the similarities between this Atlantic offshore wind initiative and the building of Liberty Ships during World War Two. Between April nineteen-forty-two and the late summer of nineteen-forty-five, with the war over, the United States launched over two thousand seven hundred of these ships, an unprecedented shipbuilding feat and one that has never again been matched. The Liberty ship itself was not an American design. To speed up construction the war office licensed a proven British design. They made two major changes: the ships would run on oil and not coal, and they would be built in large sections brought to the slipways for final assembly.
Such an approach is perfectly reasonable to manufacture and deploy fifty-thousand offshore wind turbines over the next decade. License a Danish or German or Spanish design and begin manufacturing an initial batch of ten thousand of them. Within a couple of years, with some of these in production, engineers from all points in the supply chain will come up with hundreds of improvements and will be able to answer the most intriguing question — should we try to build even bigger wind turbines?
From time to time the question arises as to what effect the saturation deployment of banks and banks of offshore wind turbines, separated only by shipping channels, would have on the weather itself. The answer is: absolutely nothing. The atmosphere, as anyone who has hiked the High Sierra knows, only begins to really thin out above ten thousand feet. That is two miles above sea level. Our technology today only harnesses the bottom few per cent of this column of moving air. There are ideas afoot to harness high altitude wind — thinks kites, cables, regenerative braking, — but they are not relevant to our immediate plight. The wind simply fills back in, from above and from the unswept areas, a few turbine blade lengths downstream. The concept is intuitively clear to anyone who sails competitively: stay out of the guy ahead’s dirty wind.
If the distributed solar and concentrated wind initiatives above were implemented the remaining major source of carbon dioxide would be transportation. This too can be addressed with a combination of education, policy and consequences. Electric vehicles, whether powered by batteries of fuel cells, are cheaper and better than those that use internal combustion engines. A Tesla has the same acceleration as a Porsche. Electric vehicles have no hot gas path — air intake filter, fuel injectors, radiator, cooling jacket, fans, oil pan, cylinders, pistons, flywheels, catalytic converters, mufflers or exhausts. Their gearboxes are simpler. They are silent. And because they are digitally controlled they are capable of self-driving. Moreover, in an era of widespread renewables they can be refueled and operated for a fraction of the cost of fossil fuel vehicles.
The migration to zero emission vehicles could be and should be as swift as the adoption of smart phones or flat screen TV’s or the demise of the CRT, print media, videotape, compact cassettes, floppy disks and every other analog or inferior digital technology we have successfully consigned to history. A few weeks after the outbreak of World War Two the last passenger car rolled off an assembly line in Detroit. The American automotive industry morphed into the arsenal of democracy and did not produce another passenger car until the war ended. When we bailed this industry out in two thousand and eight we missed an opportunity. Let’s not miss it this time.
If we cease all production of light passenger internal combustion engine powered vehicles, as we should, at the stroke of a pen, we are still left with the problem of heavy transportation. How do we power the aviation industry, marine transport, rail and perhaps trucking? The answer to this is the most intriguing and possibly most controversial part of a strategy to stop the send-up of carbon dioxide and implement the drawdown of the excess carbon dioxide that is heating up our planet and acidifying our oceans.
Biofuels are not new. Biodiesel is widely used as an additive in Europe, as is ethanol derived from corn, soy and rapeseed in the United States. The feedstocks for these are controversial since it is not clear the entire greenhouse gas cycle is carbon positive. But there are many other candidates as feedstocks. Hemp, which was once grown prolifically to make cloth, rope, paper and lamp oil, is finally making a comeback with the legalization of cannabis. It has huge potential as a biofuel.
Jatropha is a perennial plant that grows in tropical or sub-tropical climates. It can produce up to one thousand six hundred gallons of biodiesel per acre per year from its nut fruit or be used to produce aviation fuel. Researchers say that the entire aviation industry could be converted to this biofuel by planting an area about twice the size of France (or California). Because this is a perennial the very act of planting it represents reforestation and its greenhouse gas cycle clearly draws down carbon dioxide.
But an even more enticing way to grow biofuels is to again take to the sea. Bren Smith, who is featured in Leonardo Di Caprio’s new documentary, Ice On Fire, and who wrote an essay on the subject in the book Drawdown, edited by Paul Hawken, has successfully started an oyster business in Long Island Sound whose byproduct is seaweed. He quotes truly mesmerizing statistics. According to the DOE, an area just one percent of all the agricultural land in the USA would produce enough algae (derived from kelp) to replace all of the diesel in use in this country today. Seaweed biofuel could yield thirty times as much biofuel per acre as land crops. Again, not only would this be the final step in transforming our entire energy supply to renewable energy it is a giant carbon sink, restorative of the oceans, a new habitat for shellfish and other animals, needs no fertilizer or desalinated irrigation, and does not divert any arable land from future food production.
Perhaps it would be very naive to believe that all of the above will be done over the next decade. But it is not right or true to say that it could not be accomplished in ten years, or that if we fell behind on this program we could not take other evasive actions to avoid further climate and ocean damage. The picture of what is happening and what we can do about it is clearer than ever. This transformation will be the next great societal leap. Every day we delay just adds to the inevitable human suffering, environmental damage, social upheaval, and the length of time and scale of effort needed to walk back the damage done already.
I have focused on what the USA must do. This will not put us at a disadvantage to any other countries who lag behind us. In fact it will do the opposite. The payback on the proposed investments here are very rapid and very low risk. The new green economy will outperform the old fossil fuel one. We now spend about six percent of GDP on energy. That will drop to nearly zero. Not only are zero emission vehicles far less expensive to operate, but we will usher in the driverless ride sharing economy over this time as well with further enormous productivity gains, with less vehicles moving more people from point to point at higher speeds, all while they work at other tasks. The health benefits are incalculable. Plus whoever gets to zero carbon first gets to dominate energy intensive industries, from food processing to data processing.
As I said at the outset I do not want it said by future generations, my family, or their families, that I knew what we should do and said nothing. This is the time to act and I look forward to continuing to be a part of this and to hearing from readers who I am sure can add to this ongoing story.
