Call me an optimist.  Coal is king, tar sands oil is booming, the arctic is melting, tropical cyclones keep setting new records, and my own city is still flooded.  Yet, in these times, a revolution in both energy and electrified transportation is taking place right beneath our noses, and perhaps nowhere are we seeing the seeds of this being planted more than on the island of Oahu.

Read on to learn more about the world you may be leaving to your grandchildren and the role Hawaii's third largest island may play in bringing it about.

Hardly a day goes by without a new announcement for the development of a new large utility scale wind farm or solar project.  From a huge solar project in Arizona to a recently announced first of it's kind offshore wind farm off the coast of Delaware.  Tens of thousands of megawatts of new renewable capacity is in the pipeline in various stages of development, but it could all come to a screeching halt.  More below the fold.

Never forget that the DOE is currently being run by the same environmentalists who have been doing such a bang-up (so to speak) job in Iraq.

Why are we feeding machines with fuel/energy from organic surces?  Machines are not alive and can be fed with non-organic energy sources.

Wind, geothermal, hydro and solar energy/fuel harnessing systems have been with us almst as long as organic energy/fuel systems. This accounts for less than 2% of all energy consumption.

The Greeks built windmills on Mykonos. The Romans built bathhouses that tapped into the earth's geothermal heat.   I made SUN-TEA in large glass jars filled with spring water & exotic loose-leaf teas.  This is a flour mill near my home - where I was born.  http://flickr.com/...

Non-organic fuel use should be expanded.

Whenever we use organic matter as fuel/food we leave a carbon footprint.   Whether it's pile of carbon-rich feces or CO2 released to the atmosphere, it's still a carbon footprint or more colorfully, carbon-droppings.

If we are tired of the carbon 'feces' from our machines as CO2, we have to put our machines on a carbon-free diet.

It's as simple as that.

Larry Page, co-founder of Google, announced this morning the company is launching a new initiative whose goal is to develop a 1 gigawatt renewable energy source that will produce cheaper energy than coal.  The new initiative is called RE<C (Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal) and will be a collaborative project between Google and two renewable energy companies: eSolar and Makani Power.

eSolar main focus is developing easily scaled solar power architectures at the lowest possible cost.  They believe by doing so, they can take advantage of the economies of scale at a much lower entry point in the public utility market  Makani Power's focus is in collecting energy from high altitude wind sources. The initiative also plans to research geothermal energy sources.

Google is committing to spending "tens of millions" of dollars in research and development related costs and is forecast budgeting "hundreds of millions" of dollars to be spent on those technologies that "generate positive returns".

One of the oldest operating large geothermal plants in the world is Cerro Pietro, near Mexacali, Mexico, which has a capacity of about 630 MWe.   It produces 71% of Baja California's electricity and also exports electricity to the Southern United States.

Mexacali, a city of about 600,000 citizens relies almost entirely on the Cerro Pietro geothermal fields.

I am looking at a report on the field and although the geothermal plant is the greatest thing in the universe, I am troubled by reports that isotopes have been found at the plant.   Here's some stuff on Cerro Pietro:

Oil barons really know how to dig holes in the ground. And they need a better place to put their money than trying to confuse the public about how serious global fever has become. I think they are missing a old-fashioned business opportunity, and a giant one at that.

Drilling wells is exactly what deep geothermal energy is all about: drill down 5 km, pressure-fracture the rock down there, then drill another well into the fracture zone.

At that, they are the experts. The other use of this technique, invented at Los Alamos in 1972, is what the oil barons ought to be embracing: Aim for a deep rock layer (say, granite) that is dry but hot. Push water down one well, harvest the steam up the other. Then run an old-fashioned steam turbine to generate electricity for the plug-in hybrids.

Works anywhere on earth, though some places will require fewer or shallower wells. Hot Fractured Rock goes under various names such as heat mining; it's nothing like the traditional geothermal plants situated at hot springs.

I recently stood next to an electrical generator, big enough to power a city the size of Seattle (about 1,000 megawatts, known as a gigawatt). It was surprisingly small, no larger than a classroom with a tall ceiling.

      The generator’s spinning shaft could be seen where it connected to the steam turbine, next in line. And backing it up were three more turbines, helping to keep that long shaft spinning at 1,800 revolutions every minute.

      The generator doesn’t spin freely because every electrical light and appliance in that gigawatt-sized city is resisting it. It takes a lot of push from the four steam turbines to keep it up to speed. Some power plants create the steam in a boiler heated by burning coal, others by using nuclear fission of uranium-235 to generate the requisite heat. The cleanest method of all is harvesting steam from water sprayed on hot granite a few miles [5 km] underground.

This aphorism by Yogi Berra, the Baseball Hall of Fame philosopher, used to be a funny example of a tangled arrow of time. But now it means that, thanks to global warming and ocean acidification, our kids and grandkids cannot have the kind of future that we had; they can count on a future of high risk, both directly from climate change and, perhaaps, from a regional collapse of civilization.

People take sensible precautions when the risk is high. Ask a roomful of people if they have fire insurance. Almost all will raise a hand. Ask how many have had a fire in the last ten years, and almost none will respond. Yet people pay for insurance because, should a fire happen, they could lose everything—and still have to pay off the mortgage.

But uncertainty is another matter. Those with money to loan will worry about ever getting it back, and so loan rates will soar.

Suppose I told you that, in this time of energy uncertainty, the Federal Government is planning an alternative energy development.

Suppose I told you that this geothermal development was to be located near major military facilities, and that the troops from those locations are knee deep in Iraq problems.

Suppose I told you that in the communities surrounding the bases there’s a movement to stop the development.

To really make it good, suppose I told you the reason there’s resistance to the idea is because the location is part of an off-road vehicle recreation area.

That’s right, this is literally a fight between supporting our troops, improving our National Security posture, and fighting global warming on the one side; and driving SUVs that tow other vehicles to the desert for recreational oil burning on the other side.

And you kinow what?
That’s not even the biggest irony in this story...

There is an energy source that is abundant, clean, renewable, and locally available.  It's also almost entirely untapped, even though the technology to tap a lot of it already exists.  It's enhanced geothermal, which involves tapping the Earth's heat with deep mines (miles deep).  A panel at MIT wrote about it, and I'm impressed.  The full report (400 pages) is at this site

More below

I am no expert on this, but I searched and didn't see this diaried, so I am putting this up.

Perhaps it will encourage comments from people who ARE experts.  I hope so.  

In the latest New Scientist there's a short piece indicating that geothermal energy could play a much bigger role than I thought in solving the energy problem.  So while it may not be THE answer, I think it should be a big PART of the answer

details below the fold

All that was missing Tuesday night was talk about a "light at the end of the tunnel."  But at least the president did talk about tunnelling.

MIT Technology Review has an interview with Jefferson Tester, a chemical engineer at MIT who has been researching new technologies for accessing geothermal energy sources almost anywhere on earth, to generate electricity at costs competitive with using fossil fuels.

While Iceland and California have exploited easy-to-use geothermal energy for decades, technologies developed for oil extraction can be adapted to make practical geothermal facilities anywhere.  In total, there is so much available energy that harnessing a small fraction of 1% of it could supply enough electricity, near where it is needed, to run everything that could connect or run off a battery.  As a bonus, this is a virtually pollution-free energy source.

Tester has co-authored a technical article containing lots of quantitative information with a friend of mine, another chemical engineer, who works at NREL in Golden, CO.  I've seen and commented on a draft, as an "educated ignoramus", since they want their paper to be a little more widely accessible.  IMHO, this is A Big Deal.

As President Bush and his friends at OMB decided to put programs under the chopping block, even the most ardent Bush critic wouldn't think he would terminate a major renewable energy program.  But, as we can see from his piss-poor record of achievement, Bush and his Administration are not prone to making the best choices.

So what was terminated, you ask?  The Geothermal Technologies Program at the U.S. Department of Energy.  

[written in collaboration with Jerome a Paris and Devilstower]
(with a hat tip to Doolittle Sothere.)

Almost three weeks ago, Jerome a Paris put together the first draft of what we hope to transform into a bold, consistent, easy-to-understand Democratic energy agenda. Readers were asked to offer your own ideas, and your response was gratifying. Today, we're presenting the Second Draft, in which we've added some of your ideas, further honed ours and polished some of the language, with your assistance.

We're not done yet. This draft won't be the last. So we're asking for your help again, both for content and style. We don't mind if you nitpick. We want to hear your ideas and objections, big and small. Ultimately, of course, somebody has to decide what the Final Version will look like, and that will be the three of us. But for now, every word, every idea and the format itself are fair game for critiquing.

 

Lately interest seems to be high on dKos in energy conservation technology.  Just so happens I've been googling a lot about this subject over the past couple of months, so I thought I would pull together some links -- and turn the discussion upside-down.

Most people focus on vehicles, which is understandable since gas prices are something we have to face up to on a weekly basis or worse.  Our home energy bills, though, only hit us once a month and often someone else in the household handles them.  We don't get the jolt as often.

In addition a lot of folks focus on electricity.  While your electricity bill may be higher, here are some very good reasons why your attention needs to be on hot water, winter heating, and air conditioning instead.

Had a builder client of mine ask me what I thought the demand would be for new homes built using geothermal heating to provide the heating/cooling for the home. I had learned a little bit about these systems a while back, but completely forgot all about it. Not being an expert, but having some knowledge, I told him that it would be an excellent selling point and highly recommended it.

Having had an opportunity to do a little research today, I can't see why most homes built today aren't relying on this renewable resource for heating and cooling.

More below.