Sigalon's Environment/Energy Soup

Jennifer Hashley processes a chicken on her Massachusetts farm. Massachusetts poultry farmer Jennifer Hashley has a problem. From the moment she started raising pastured chickens outside Concord, Mass. in 2002, there was, as she put it “nowhere to go to get them processed.” While she had the option of slaughtering her chickens in her own backyard, Hashley knew that selling her chickens would be easier if she used a licensed slaughterhouse. Nor is she alone in her troubles. Despite growing demand for local, pasture-raised chickens, small poultry producers throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut, and even New York can’t or won’t expand for lack of processing capacity.

It isn’t only small producers who are feeling the pinch—a widespread lack of processing infrastructure appropriate for small farmers has caused supply chain problems for the big retailers as well. Whole Foods—the world’s largest natural-foods supermarket—wants to aggressively expand its local meat sourcing, according to its head meat buyer, Theo Weening. But it faces the same limitation as Hashley. Most regions of the country have “lots of agriculture but nowhere to process,” Weening told me, adding that the phenomenon is most acute in the northeast.

Whole Foods wants to change all that. In a move that has national implications, the retail giant has confirmed to Grist that it is working with the USDA as well as state authorities to establish a fleet of top-of-the-line “mobile slaughterhouses” for chicken. Starting with a single unit serving Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Hudson Valley, N.Y. area, Whole Foods hopes to offer small farmers an affordable way to process chickens as well as to vastly increase the amount of locally-sourced chicken it sells. If successful, this program could be expanded to any region of the country with similar infrastructure shortages.

Consolidation Is for the (Big) Birds

That Whole Foods would undertake a move into meat processing serves to underscore the extent of the meat industry’s consolidation. Today, 90 percent of beef processing, 70 percent of pork processing and nearly 60 percent of poultry processing are handled by the top four companies in each sector (with new mergers occuring almost monthly). As processing giants like Tyson scale up and buy competitors, they shutter smaller facilities. Farmers like Hashley have to truck their livestock dozens—sometimes up to a hundred—miles to get to the nearest slaughterhouse for the privilege of paying premium prices to process a small herd. And in some cases, small producers can’t get access to these large facilities at any price; they simply won’t accommodate small growers, often due to rigid “biosecurity” protocols.

What might be an inconvenience transforms into a Catch-22 considering the maze of requirements for the legal sale of meat—this is not an area where DIY is easy or welcome. Generally speaking only meat processed at USDA-inspected facilities can be sold to the public. About half of all states allow for state inspectors to stand in for federal inspectors, but even then, that meat may only be sold within state lines. Poultry farmers are somewhat exempted from this—they can process some of their own birds on the farm and then sell them directly to consumers. But, with a few state-specific exceptions, beef, pork, and lamb simply may not be sold—even direct farm-to-consumer—unless it has been processed at a state or federally inspected slaughterhouse.

Given the high costs and uncertain prospects of building new small-scale slaughterhouses, there is a growing interest among farmers in these mobile slaughterhouses—interest that inspired Whole Foods in the first place. Currently, only a few such units are in existence, such as the state-certified mobile unit in California recently profiled by Mother Jones, and they often end up operating in a legal gray area. That particular unit came with such severe restrictions on how the meat could be sold that it functioned under “something of a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy” with farmers. In fact, in all the U.S., there is only a single USDA-certified mobile slaughterhouse—complete with a permanently-assigned USDA inspector—in operation. It resides on a small island off the coast of Washington state.

But if Whole Foods’ mobile-slaughterhouse strategy succeeds, this farmer-friendly method of processing birds will come into its own. To some, it’s a welcome effort to increase options for farmers. To others, it’s an ominous sign that the government is siding with a powerful retailer in a way that will, intentionally or not, squeeze farmers even more.

An Italian-made mobile-processing unit, of the type Whole Foods is considering. Photo courtesy of Whole FoodsWhole Foods to the Rescue?

Whole Foods’ Weening, architect of the initiative, doesn’t see it that way. He only sees the difficulties small producers have with getting their chickens processed at large slaughterhouses. For him, if Whole Foods can help the little guy while also providing an expanded market for locally-produced meat, everyone wins.

And experts in local agriculture are tempted to agree. Mary Hendrickson, a rural sociologist who specializes in regional food systems at the University of Missouri, told me that “processing capacity is an absolutely critical link that we’ve struggled to fill—mobile slaughtering has a hope of filling the gap.”

Weening is certainly trying to do just that. The mobile units aren’t designed as a money-maker for Whole Foods. While Whole Foods will have a minimum “buy” of around 500 chickens, farmers who sell chickens to Whole Foods will be able to process as many birds as they want with the unit. Since the processing cost will be included in the price Whole Food pays the farmer, processing of additional chickens will essentially be free. Crucially, Weening also intends to allow farmers who don’t sell to Whole Foods use of the mobile units (though pricing is yet to be determined). Farmers can then sell those chickens however they like—to other retailers (remember, it would be USDA certified), at farmers markets, or directly on the farm. If all goes to plan, the first Whole Foods’ processing unit will be on the road and operating by May 2010.

But support for Whole Foods effort is not universal. There is growing concern over the power large national retailers have over farmers, and the prospect of Whole Foods moving into the meat processing business does little to allay it. Fred Stokes, executive director of the Organization for Competitive Markets, a group dedicated to resisting agricultural consolidation, lauded Whole Foods for trying to provide an alternative to the large slaughterhouses, but suggested that individual farmers lacked the power to go toe to toe with such a dominant player. Hendrickson also questioned how small farmers could “maintain their competitive bargaining position” with an entity as powerful as Whole Foods.

Stokes—along with Fred Kirschenmann, a farmer as well as a leading advocate for sustainable agriculture and president of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in upstate New York—took serious issue with one significant element of Whole Foods plan: the set of very specific guidelines any farmer who hopes to sell to Whole Foods will have to follow. To Whole Foods’ Weening, this is about providing a “consistent” product to consumers; to ensure that all Whole Foods chickens—in Weening’s words—“look and taste the same.” Weening explained that the company will require participating small farmers to raise a specific breed of chicken supplied by a specific (local) breeder, feed them a specific brand of feed (no antibiotics or animal byproducts allowed) and raise them according to Whole Foods standard poultry production style, which requires “access to pasture” but does not require actually keeping the birds on pasture.

Big Buyer, Small Seller

These experts expressed concerns that, despite Whole Foods’ good intentions, such a strict set of guidelines when applied to small farmers put the whole enterprise dangerously close to “contract farming.” In contract farming, a farmer raises birds under contract for sale to a large processor like Tyson Foods or Purdue. With large processors like Tyson, the farmer doesn’t even own the birds, but is still responsible for the land, the equipment and all the infrastructure required to raise the animals, often making significant investments to satisfy the needs of the processor. But if the processor ultimately refuses the sale for whatever reason (and these contracts are very favorable to the processor), there is no backup plan. The farmer raised the birds specifically to satisfy the contract. Without the sale, it’s a total loss. In such cases, the farmer has a nasty tendency to go bankrupt. Too often, farmers “essentially become,” as OCM’s Stokes put it, “indentured servants on their own land.”

Now, Whole Foods denied that it has any interest in “contract farming”—there will be no contracts signed in advance—and the company strongly asserts that it is trying to give small farmers more options, not fewer. But Hashley, the Massachussetts farmer, painted a scenario whereby small East Coast farmers are forced by Whole Foods to compete on price with the large scale “natural” poultry growers in California that currently supply the retailer’s stores. If that’s the case, according to Hashley, farmers may find themselves pushed to expand their operations, making up on volume what they can’t make per bird, and investing large sums of money in chicks, feed, and even barns with only Whole Foods as a buyer. If Whole Foods then refuses the sale for a declared violation of one of its guidelines, the financial loss to the farmer will be disastrous.

Hashley is clearly skeptical that partnering with Whole Foods is a good idea for individual small farmers. And worst of all in her view, Whole Foods guidelines will effectively preclude pasture-raised birds. With space in Massachusetts, and most of the northeast at a premium for farmers, providing adequate supply to a buyer the size of Whole Foods will inevitably lead farmers to move their birds indoors, since barn-raised chickens can be more densely packed. Aside from the financial implications, Hashley resented the idea of replicating the Whole Foods “access to pasture”-style of intensive poultry production: birds that in reality rarely if ever step outside despite an open barn door.

Tipping the Scale

There are, of course, alternatives to a reliance on Whole Foods as a local food enabler. Hashley herself has been working hard with state regulators and local boards of health to create a farmer-owned solution to the infrastructure problem, which she had hoped would be funded by a USDA Rural Development grant. As I finished reporting for this article, Hashley learned (and I confirmed) that her grant proposal will be rejected, though she continues to seek funding from other sources. Hashley passionately believes that a farmer cooperative should own the processing units, which would initially be certified by the state for direct sales by farmers (i.e. at farmers markets or on the farm) but not for sale to retailers. Small farmers would no longer have to haul their chickens halfway across the state for processing, but they would still have to sell their birds directly—something that many farmers are happy to do. Over time and with the coops having proved the model, USDA certification and inspection could follow. In any event, access to the unit would not be controlled by a private entity with a substantial financial interest in how it’s used.

Resolving these sorts of market-oriented conflicts and helping farmers is, of course, the role of state and federal regulators. Where do they stand on the Whole Foods effort? Jay Healy, Massachusetts State Director for USDA Rural Development, the office that turned down Hashley’s grant proposal, is more sanguine about Whole Foods’ effort. One obvious appeal: unlike Hashley, the retailer isn’t asking for any federal money for its initiative. Healy also praised Whole Foods “state of the art,” stainless steel, Italian-built unit, a version of which already has regulatory approval in Europe, for addressing to his satisfaction all the relevant food safety and environmental concerns. While Healy appreciates the coop’s efforts and hopes to fund them in the future, he felt that their unit still needed further refinement. The Whole Foods unit seems to him poised to get federal certification, which is the ultimate goal if mobile slaughterhouses are to become a mainstream solution.

Healy’s was exactly the response that Hashley herself feared when she first got word of the Whole Foods proposal. Aside from her concerns about the guidelines, Hashley doesn’t have a blanket objection to Whole Foods effort overall since her processing options are virtually non-existent. But she is concerned that, Healy’s statement notwithstanding, state and federal regulators will eventually lose total interest in working with farmer cooperatives as a result of the Whole Foods’ move into small-scale processing. Like the other experts I talked to, she’s also deeply skeptical of relying on Whole Foods’ good intentions. While a breakeven project now, the company’s processing units may transform into a revenue center later, which would be a threatening development for farmers.

Small is beautiful, but not always enough: Hashley’s on-farm processing unit. The good news for Hashley is that Massachusetts’ top agricultural official Scott Soares appears to share her concerns. In a recent meeting with Whole Foods, Soares strongly encouraged the company to work with the farmer coops to avoid a conflict over the dueling proposals. He wants to be “certain we have a level playing field for all the players out there.” That means balancing the concerns of farmers as well as the interests of Whole Foods. Soares has requested detailed information from Whole Foods on its inititative, including pricing and provisions for access to the units, and emphasized in his discussions that coops do have an important role to play. While Soares has a limited regulatory role in approving the unit, he will continue to seek assurances that Whole Foods will operate fairly and in good faith.

But Healy’s and Soares’ comments make clear that, while Whole Foods is neither enemy nor savior for farmers, the danger is real that state regulators and the USDA will view large processors and large retailers as their ideal partners. Ag experts like Stokes, Hendricksen, and Kirschenmann all agree that regulators should instead side with farmer coops as entities best suited to counterbalance the market power of industry giants, even well-intentioned ones like Whole Foods.

It’s also clear that no one really wants to stop Whole Foods’ move into meat processing—though that fact has more to do with the lack of processing infrastructure than with Whole Foods itself. And the retail giant’s initiative may yet collapse if the USDA proves unwilling to certify the units themselves. But should Whole Foods succeed and launch mobile slaughterhouses, regulators, farmers, and consumers will be relying on a corporate behemoth to address problems created by the existence of other, larger behemoths. While it may be the best available solution to an entrenched problem, it doesn’t seem a robust one.

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Ever since evolution of the swine flu virus accelerated in 1998, virologists and veterinary-science have warned (PDF) that factory hog farms create the ideal conditions for generating novel viruses. They worried that three things would happen:

Last spring, with the onset of the HINI pandemic, the first two fears came two pass. As for the third one, well ....

Epidemic experts say they are investigating the apparent spread of Tamiflu-resistant swine flu virus among four patients at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., and five in a hospital in Wales. These clusters appear to be the first in which a virus resistant to the antiviral Tamiflu, a mainstay of flu treat, has spread from person to person, researchers said Friday.

...

In Wales, doctors have confirmed five Tamiflu-resistant swine flu cases
in one ward of an unidentified hospital. Three more patients on the
ward are being tested for drug-resistant virus; a ninth patient is
infected with virus that is still susceptible to Tamiflu.

And that’s not good.

if Tamiflu-resistant virus spreads widely, swine flu will become tougher to treat and may cost more lives, says Duke’s Daniel Sexton, who is leading the hospital’s investigation.

Now is it time to start seriously investigating the CAFO-swine flu link?

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Shucks, we shoulda known!Photo courtesy Andrew Ciscel via Flickr Hackers recently broke into thousands of emails and internal documents from a leading climate research center and dumped them onto an anonymous Russian server. The hacked emails
(160 MB worth, unzipped) came from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). They allegedly include 20-year’s worth of exchanges between top climate scientists who were debating the latest developments in climate research. Global warming skeptics, the internet over, are jumping on the (illegal) hacking to claim that global warming is a hoax, full of fudged data and dishonest, conspiratorial scientists. It’s “the global warming scandal of the century,” claim conservative bloggers.

A CRU spokesperson confirmed that their server was hacked; however, the spokesperson told the BBC, “Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine.”

As far as I can tell, the worst of the allegations currently circulating involves a few quotes plucked out of context, such as this one from private correspondence between CRU researcher Phil Jones and Pensylvania State University’s Michael Mann (author of the infamous “hocky stick graph” of rising global average temperatures):

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards), and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline,” wrote Jones.

I’ll save you from the science wonkery and allusions here (check out RealClimate for a more detailed explanation), but noisy climate skeptics are jumping on two parts of that sentence. Guess which ones? Yup, “trick” and “hide the decline.”
The legitimate climate scientists over at RealClimate have an indepth response to the allegations being made against the CRU folks, which include some of their own contributors. They translate the science slang at work here: “Scientists often use the term ‘trick’ to refer to ‘a good way to deal with a problem,’ rather than something that is ‘secret,’ and so there is nothing problematic in this at all.” As for the “hiding” part, they admit it is a poor choice of words. But in this case, it is an “appropriate” use of a certain kind of data that is actually “‘hidden’ in plain sight.”

RealClimate’s level-headed response to the event is worth reading, along with its active and excellently moderated discussion thread. Another point they make which is worth emphasizing in light of blog posts calling this “a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science”:

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’ [Grist note: MWP refers to “Medieval Warm Period”], no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though ...

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. But it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times.  Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person ... Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.

It appears that the original Russian FTP server, which held the illegally obtained files, has been shut down, although the files have now been uploaded elsewhere on the web.

A few things to keep in mind throughout this entire “scandal”:

As implicated researcher Michael Mann notes to the respected international scientific journal Nature: “The deniers will probably do anything they can to distract the public from the reality of the problem [of climate change], and the threat that it poses. Cherry-picked, out-of-context quotes, stolen from private e-mails, is the best they’ve got.”

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Obama takes on the anti-scientific delayers

You could make a pretty simple argument that the fate of the world rests with the United States Senate Republicans:

1. It takes 60 votes to pass a climate bill in the U.S. Senate (assuming it won’t be done through budget reconciliation). Getting the votes of all 58 Democrats and two Independents will be just plain tough, as they might say in the Blue Dog states.

2. It takes 67 Senate votes to ratify an international climate treaty. That requires Republican votes.

3. The international community isn’t likely to pass a climate treaty without the cooperation of the United States.

4. The world needs the Senate Republicans.

The hope is that enough of the most (relatively) independent-minded ones can be peeled away from the obstructionist line and cajoled into supporting a first-step climate bill. That’s why it’s problematic that John McCain (R-Arizona) is acting like anything but a maverick on the issue.

There’s been some interesting reporting on the McCain front today.

Before his most recent presidential run, McCain had long been a leader on taking climate change seriously and doing something about it. He and Joe Lieberman authored the first major climate bill in the Senate in 2003 and introduced new versions in 2005 and 2007. 

POLITICO summarizes his about-face:

Now the Arizona Republican is more likely to repeat GOP talking points on cap and trade than to help usher the bill through the thorny politics of the Senate.

McCain refers to the bill as “cap and tax,” calls the climate legislation that passed the House in June “a 1,400-page monstrosity” and dismisses a cap-and-trade proposal included in the White House budget as “a government slush fund.”

The shift even has former McCain aids “mystified.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), the only Senate Republican who’s shown real interest this fall in working with Democrats to craft a climate bill, tells POLITICO, “I wouldn’t be here on this issue without him … He’s the guy that introduced me to the climate problem.”

More bad news: McCain is vulnerable to a primary challenge from the right, according to a new Rasmussen poll. Matt Yglesias concludes:

This seems like pretty much terrible news for the world. The most likely path between Point A and Senate passage of a reasonable climate bill is for McCain to rediscover his interest in the issue. But that’s not the sort of thing a Senator worried about a right-wing primary challenge is likely to do.

For more on the way it used to be: Grist’s interview and overview of McCain’s environmental record from last year’s campaign show how he’s changed his position on a climate plan.

And don’t expect the Republican dynamic to change soon, according to Greenwire. Reporter Alex Kaplun takes a look at upcoming primaries and finds candidates courting the Republican base by taking hard-line positions against a climate bill. His sources say “the general trajectory of the Republican Party as whole for the foreseeable future will be toward opposition of the climate bill.”

All this still amounts to reading tea leaves on where McCain will be if the Senate ever gets around to voting on a climate bill. Maybe he’s still working through some post-election blues. Maybe, over time, he’ll be drawn to playing a constructive role again.

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Reflecting on the lameness of my profession

I have a huge, huge soft spot for Paul Simon. Simon & Garfunkel was one of the first bands I ever got into (like when I was eight) and I still love virtually everything Simon’s ever done. My musical tastes were shaped by his catchy melodies, pretty harmonies, and wry, literate lyrics. I’m one of the 12 people that bought the soundtrack to his Broadway play.

So I was both excited and trepidatious about the musical debut of his son (with his first wife) Harper Simon. Needless to say, a lot can go wrong with these musical legacy artists. They tend to ... try too hard. Happily, Simon escapes that trap—his eponymous debut is a short (30 minute), modest, likeable affair. It doesn’t stray to far from his father’s template, perhaps with a little less folk and a little more steel-guitar americana. Promising.

This track may be the most Paul-like, perhaps because he co-wrote it with Paul. It’s called “Tennessee.”

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FOX News evidently agrees with Global Warming Skeptic Trollcat (see above):

Thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit were hacked recently and dumped on a Russian web server. Fox News and right-wing bloggers believe the illegally obtained emails prove that “global warming is a MYTH.”

Oops, that’s Global Warming Skeptic TrollCat. Here’s the take from FOX News.com (actual screenshot):

Here’s an unscientific sampling of the reasoned analysis from prominent right-wing bloggers:

Evidently due to this email conspiracy, Arctic sea ice is at historically low levels, Australia is on fire, the northern United Kingdom is underwater, and the world’s glaciers are disappearing. Oh yeah, and it’s the hottest decade in history.

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Energy Self-Reliant States [PDF], a flawed study on local Renewable Energy availability from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ISLR) found that 18 of the 50 states could not meet their electricity
needs with local renewables. In fact, no state can meet its
electricity demand through local renewables without expensive
electricity storage. On a national basis, such storage would cost an
estimated $13 trillion, or over 65 times the cost of the transmission
investments they oppose.

One of the study authors, John Farrell, has been promoting the study as a “Heresy on Transmission.” Rather than a heretic attacking misguided establishment shibboleths,
this flawed study attacks a simplistic misunderstanding of why we need
transmission. Farrell and his co-author David Morris are either
intentionally promoting this misunderstanding, or
they simply fail to grasp the reasons behind long distance
transmission’s necessity.

Their straw man is the false choice between states relying on local
renewables such as PV on rooftops which supposedly would require only
“minimal transmission upgrades” and far-off wind farms requiring
expensive long distance transmission.  They say, for example,

[I]f Ohio’s electricity came from North Dakota wind
farms—1,000 miles away—the cost of constructing new transmission
lines to carry all that power and the electricity losses during
transmission could result in an electricity cost to the consumer that
is about the same, or higher, than local generation with minimal
transmission upgrades.

This ignores most of the benefits which would flow from new
transmission lines connecting North Dakota and Ohio. A 1,150 mile
transmission line from Bismark to Cincinnati would also connect Fargo,
Minneapolis, Eau Claire, Madison, Chicago, and Indianapolis running
along Interstate Highway corridors (Google maps.)
It also ignores the study’s own finding that Ohio would only be able to
generate 29 percent of the electricity it needs with local renewables. 

Incidentally, their national map shows Ohio being able to generate
33 percent of its electricity from local renewables, but adding up their own
numbers for the renewables they identify gives 29 percent. I looked closely
at their numbers for only six states, so there may be other arithmetic
errors as well.

The states along this hypothetical route are North Dakota,
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. The study found
that these states can generate the following percentages of local
demand with in-state renewables:

If each of these states attempted to meet their local electricity needs
with the renewables in the study, Ohio and Indiana would still need to
import some electricity from other states. Although Ohio would not
need to import power from as far away as North Dakota, they would have
to tap into Minnesota’s wind resources if demand were to be satisfied
along this corridor. An attempt to meet that demand with the nearest
resources might look like this:

You’ll note that the total above exceeds 600 percent because the states
with renewable energy surpluses have much lower local demand. The
magnitudes of this demand are my best guess. Keep in mind that I did
not choose this corridor to make my example work; the suggestion came
directly from the transmission example in the study.

The Consequences of Timing

By the study’s own methodology, both Ohio and Illinois need
interstate transmission, because they cannot generate all their
renewable electricity locally.  Yet, as I will demonstrate, even though
North Dakota and Minnesota would be generating electricity for export,
they will often need to import renewable electricity as well.  

Using the Correlation Maximization tool on Energy Timing (note: Energy Timing has been taken down, see comment here.),
I generated the best portfolio of North Dakota wind and solar farms to
meet the needs of Square Butte Electric Coop, an electric utility in
Grand Forks, N.D.  The results are shown below:

Composition of Optimal Portfolio of North Dakota Renewable Energy: 

This combination of three wind farms represents the best fit between
electric output from existing wind farms and solar sites in Energy
Timing’s database, and local demand.  Even though this is the best fit,
the correlation between supply and demand is only 13.2 percent. Solar sites
do not appear in the optimal portfolio because they do not lead to a
better fit.

As you can see from the bottom graph, wind output is strongest
in the morning, when demand is relatively low, and falls off in the
afternoon, as demand rises.  Hence, unless North Dakota builds far more
wind farms than it needs to supply local demand (an expensive
proposition which could only be justified by electricity exports), they
would not have enough electrify in the afternoon and early evening,
when the wind typically dies down.  This would be the situation on a
typical day.  On any given day, wind power is even more variable than
it is on average, leading to large and frequent swings from oversupply
to undersupply.

In the case of Minnesota electrical demand, solar sites turn out to
be a better fit than wind sites.  In reality, if Minnesota were to
attempt to meet local demand with renewable energy, a mix of wind and
solar sites would be used, since wind is so much less expensive than
solar.  But since solar sites are the best fit for local demand, a mix
of wind and solar would produce a worse match than the 24.5 percent
correlation we see in the scenario above.

Benefits of Transmission

We can now see how both Minnesota and North Dakota would benefit
with a high capacity transmission connection between the states. In
the early morning, before the sun rises, Minnesota will not be
producing any domestic renewables, so it makes sense to import
electricity from North Dakota, where production is far in excess of
demand all morning. Minnesota will in turn be able to supply excess
solar power to North Dakota in the afternoon before the sun gets low
and cuts solar output.  

In short, even though both Minnesota and North Dakota can easily
produce enough local renewable electricity for their needs, the timing
of that electricity causes problems of both oversupply and unmet
demand. If we build transmission connecting states regions, these
problems are reduced, and less storage is needed to make up the
difference.

As we increase the interregional connections, we will be able to
bring in power from farther afield that better meets demand.  For
instance, both these states don’t have enough local renewables in the
evening, even when combined. The worst period is just around dusk,
from about 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. CST, before the wind begins to pick up
at night in North Dakota. But in the sunny Mojave Desert of southern
California, the sun is still up (it’s two hours earlier, Pacific Time),
and large Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants can use relatively cheap thermal storage to continue producing power for hours after sunset.

We can also see that both North Dakota and Minnesota typically have
spare production capacity in the summer months, so they could export
electricity back to the Southwest during these months, when Southwest
electricity demand peaks due to air conditioning loads.

As we increase the length of regional transmission networks, each
state along the path gains, both as an electricity exporter and as an
importer depending on the season and weather conditions. Ohio does not
need to pay for giant transmission lines from North Dakota to import
which “could result in an electricity cost to the consumer that is
about the same, or higher, than local generation.”  North Dakota,
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana would also benefit from
such a line, and all could be asked to contribute.

Costing Storage vs. Transmission

The study’s authors also invoke electricity storage to “solve” the problem of timing, saying

Some renewable fuels, like sunlight and wind, are
variable. Thus, the estimates, especially for wind, assume a
significant level of storage or on-demand distributed generation.

Unfortunately, they make no attempt to account for the price tag of such storage. They state only, 

This report does not examine storage and its
implications, but in our analysis of variable renewable energy
potential, we assume that sufficient storage is available.

“On-demand distributed generation” could come from natural gas or
biomass. Renewable generation relies on the availability of the
natural resource, few of which can be stored. Even incremental
hydropower is typically not on-demand, because it is usually the result
of adding generation to existing dams and comes with obligations to
maintain flow rates.

Biomass based power is typically baseload, not on-demand.
Furthermore, the study authors explicitly rule out the large scale use
of biomass for electricity because they expect the amount of
biomass-based electricity to be “modest.” Even if large scale,
on-demand distributed biomass based generation were available, it would
only be available in those states with a large biomass resources.  See
the map below.

Natural gas is an incomplete response to climate change in that it is a fossil fuel, may not even be available in the necessary quantities,
and must be imported by the vast majority of states.  What is the point
in pushing for reliance on locally generated renewable electricity if
it only increases our dependence on imported natural gas which may not
be available and produces greenhouse gas emissions? 

Given the not only daily, but seasonal mismatches between local
electricity production and demand, states which are locally
self-sufficient in electricity would have to invest in a month or more
worth of storage. While electric vehicles may be able to provide some
daily or hourly storage, they will not be available for seasonal
electricity storage, since the vehicle owners will need to drive them,
and so cannot keep them fully charged for months or even days on end.

The cheapest large scale electricity storage solutions,
(Pumped Hydropower, Compressed Air Energy Storage, and Molten Salt
Thermal Storage) typically cost $10 to $50 per kWh of storage. 
Unfortunately, all three of these options are limited in where they can
be located, so restricting transmission will also restrict the use of
these cheaper forms of storage. The cheapest battery and flow battery
storage technologies cost about $100 to $150 per kWh. To be generous,
I will assume that all states can build as much electricity storage as
they want at $50 per kWh, or $50,000 per MWh. I will also assume that
geothermal, hydropower, combined heat and power, and efficiency gains
will mean that solar and wind will need to supply only 50 percent of our
current electricity usage. 

According to the Energy Information Administration, total electricity production in 2007 was 4,156,745 thousand MWh. An average monthly production was thus 346,395,000 MWh, and the cost of
a month’s worth of national electricity storage to meet half of a
month’s demand would be $8,665 billion under the assumptions above. In
contrast, the ILSR study states that “FERC, Congress, and environmental
groups ... rush to accelerate the construction of a new $100-$200 billion
interregional transmission network.”  

If such a network cost $200 billion, and reduced the need for
storage by only 10 percent, then it would have paid for itself more than eight
times. Given less conservative (and I think more realistic)
assumptions of reducing the need for storage by 50 percent, and a per MWh cost
of storage of $75,000, a regional transmission network would pay for
itself in reduced storage needs by 65 to 1.

Conclusion

To me, 65-to-one, or a savings of approximately $13 trillion, seems worth the price of stringing wires. For comparison, $700 billion has been spent on the war in Iraq since 2001. In other words, the ILSR study is suggesting that we pay for eighteen
wars in Iraq in order to avoid building an interregional transmission
network, costing about as much as we spent in Iraq in 2008. 

In fact, the price for local self-reliance on renewable energy would
likely be higher. Thirteen trillion dollars does not include the cost
savings that the report’s authors tried to address: Transmission allows
us to exploit less expensive renewable generation. Furthermore, the
variability of both wind and solar generation can be vastly reduced by
combining the output of dispersed wind and solar farms. Less
variability reduced the need for costly spinning reserves to stabilize
the grid if wind power suddenly drops or a cloud passes above a solar
farm.

Not all self-styled heretics are fighting a just cause against an
oppressive consensus.  To the extent that a consensus exists in favor
of an improved national transmission grid, it is based on sound science
and economics.  It is unfortunate that so many environmentalists are
seduced by the mirage of renewable energy self-reliance.

Related Links:

Solar’s rapid evolution makes energy planners rethink the grid

Gore on the Daily Show: extended dance remix

Blowing up our clean energy future

Global warming is melting 18,000 Himalayan glaciers—the largest
concentration of glaciers outside the great polar ice sheets. If the
present melt rate continues, many of these glaciers will be gone by the
middle of this century, disrupting the perennial water supply to
hundreds of millions of people.

To explore this growing collection of glacier images from the “roof
of the world”—including a must-see video made by mountaineer and
filmmaker David Breashears, Founder and Project Leader of Glacier
Research Imaging Project (GRIP)—go to the Asia Society’s “On Thinner Ice” website.

For some of the underlying science, see my November 2008 post, Another climate impact comes faster than predicted: Himalayan glaciers “decapitated.” It discussed an important paper by leading international cryosphere
scientists, including American’s own Lonnie Thompson, “Mass loss on
Himalayan glacier endangers water resources,” which concluded ominously:

If Naimona’nyi is characteristic of other
glaciers in the region, alpine glacier meltwater surpluses are likely
to shrink much faster than currently predicted with substantial
consequences for approximately half a billion people.

The study notes that Naimona’nyi is the highest glacier (3.7 miles above sea level) “documented to be losing mass annually.” MSNBC reported:

Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University and a team of
researchers traveled to central Himalayas in 2006 to study the
Naimona’nyi glacier, expecting to find some melting ... But when the team
analyzed samples of glacier, what they found stunned them ...

In fact, the glacier had melted so much that the exposed surface of the glacier dated to 1944 ...

“At the highest elevations, we’re seeing something like an average of 0.3 degrees C (0.54 degrees F) warming per decade,” Thompson said ...

“I have not seen much as compelling as this to demonstrate how some
glaciers are just being decapitated,” Shawn Marshall of the University
of Calgary said ...

“You can think of glaciers kind of like water towers, ” he
said. “They collect water from the monsoon in the wet season, and
release it in the dry season. But how effective they are depends on how
much water is in the towers.”

The time to act is now.

Thanks to the Asia Society for providing me that awesome sliding “then and now” photograph of Mount Everest.

Related Posts:

Related Links:

Uber-ironic 1962 ad touts oil’s ability to melt glaciers!

The U.S. Chamber needs to get its story straight

Oil: enough energy to melt glaciers!