Energy Security: Way more than just changing lightbulbs

Changing lightbulbs is a step, but a mini-step, toward meeting energy security. Far bigger steps are needed. Below, reasons why, and some ideas from Blue Planet Foundation on how.

Switching to fluorescent or LED lights can save a few bucks, and reduce the amount of oil-burning for which you're responsible.

But the state spends $6 to $7 BILLION on oil each year. That's roughly $5,000 for every human on the archipelago. Figure $10 grand for a couple—and for a larger family, you can do the math.

How are you using that?

About a third is electricity, of which 90 percent or so is produced from oil. It's the power we burn at home, at work, and the power that's being used at the store, the doctor's office and all the other places that are a part of our lives. Directly or indirectly, we're paying for all of that.

Another third is your family cars. That $50 you pump into your tank every week? Hello! That, and the fuel for barges that haul our supplies here from the Mainland, and then inter-island.

The other third? That trip your neighbor took to Vegas? A really big proportion of that airline ticket was the price of jet fuel. Your inter-island trips to visit auntie, or to shop, or to see a UH football game—a third of fuel use in Hawai'i is for air transport.

It adds up to huge money, huge addition to our global climate change load, and a huge security risk--a couple of tankers don't show up for whatever reason, and Hawai'i goes dark. Whether you're an environmentalist wacko, a national security nut or a suburban homemaker, that's a spooky scenario.

To change the dynamic, the Hawai'i-based Blue Planet Foundation has outlined some recommendations in its Clean Energy 2010 report.

The foundation would implement a $5/barrel tax on oil. Somewhere slightly north of 10 cents a gallon (42 gallons in a barrel). In theory, the increase would encourage efficiency and conservation, and the $150 million the tax would raise would be used for energy programs and to add some cash to the strapped state general fund.

Blue Planet says a December survey indicated two-thirds of residents support a tax of this kind.

One of the issues with getting your own house in energy order is the up-front cost—the few hundred bucks for efficiency improvements, several thousand bucks for solar hot water, the tens of thousands for photovoltaics, as examples. Blue Planet recommends Property Assessed Clean Energy or PACE funding. The government gets a bond to pay for such improvements, and to the degree that you borrow some of it, you pay it off through your property tax bills.

The Blue Planet energy plan would pump up the state Public Utilities Commission with some extra cash, so it can hire the resources to better study and manage the state's move toward improved energy security.

It would put an immediate ban on new fossil fuel power plants. It calls for more energy efficiency built into new homes, including wiring them to ease the installation of photovoltaic power.

And a tax credit for biofuel plants. And a tax credit for electric vehicle charging stations.

Used to be, every service station had free air right next to the gas pump. Often today, there's no air available, or you need to pump coins to get air. The Blue Planet plan calls for free air and gauges at all gas stations. The theory: Car tires that are properly inflated have less resistance, and reduce gas consumption.

The plan would place a Public Benefits Fee on electric bills to pay for more aggressive energy efficiency. The theory: “Energy efficiency is the fastest, cheapest, and most effective method of reducing Hawaii’s dependency on imported oil.”

One final step: Blue Planet calls for a state constitutional amendment on energy security. Here's the proposed language:

Energy Security
For the benefit of present and future generations, the State and its political subdivisions has the obligation to ensure the provision of clean, indigenous, and renewable sources of energy and shall promote the development and utilization of these resources in a manner consistent with their conservation and in furtherance of the energy self-sufficiency of the State. It shall be the goal of the State to become energy independent.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

Odd connection: Hawaiian suntans and near-Earth asteroids

Like a Hawaii visitor to Alaska, near earth asteroids approach our planet with a tan, and depart looking pale.

(Image: The asteroid Itokawa, viewed from the Japan spacecraft Hayabusa. Credit & Copyright: Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.)

For the human tourist, it's about the sun, or the lack thereof.

For the asteroid, it appears to be the Earth's gravity, according to a team of astronomers that inclkudes two from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

Schelte Bus and Alan Tokunaga, of the university's Institute for Astronomy, are part of an international group looking into the change in the shade of asteroids.

Their assessment is that the darker color is the color of ancient, weathered rocks that have been passing through space for a very long time. The paler color appears to be that of unweathered stone. And they found that paler asteroids appeared to be those that had survived a near-miss with the Earth.

Their conclusion is that the Earth's gravity causes landslides on the asteroids, burying the dark rock and exposing new stone surfaces.

"We now suspect that most asteroids are loose conglomerations of rocks and boulders, rather than strong, monolithic objects," Bus said.

“Landslides on the asteroid cause the dark weathered areas to be covered by fresh, lighter colored rocks. Hence the asteroid's color, after the encounter, will appear paler than before."

Their paper, in the Jan. 21 issue of the journal Nature, is entitled, Earth encounters as the origin of fresh surfaces on near-Earth asteroids.

The researchers studied the color of the asteroids. Rocks that have been rolling around in space for as little as a million years “weather” to a redder color than normal. But some rocks that have passed near our planet don't have that same reddish tint.

“Tidal stress, strong enough to disturb and expose unweathered surface grains, is the most likely dominant short-term asteroid resurfacing process,” the team wrote in Nature.

“Although the seismology details are yet to be worked out, the identification of rapid physical processes that can produce both fresh and weathered asteroid surfaces resolves the decades-long puzzle of the difference in colour of asteroids and meteorites.”

How is this information useful?

For most of the public it may be the stuff of science fiction movies, but it could play a role in some future threatened impact of the Earth by an asteroid.

"The more we can learn about what holds an asteroid together, the better chance we have to reduce or eliminate damage to Earth," Tokunaga said.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

Urban green ain't so green

That little patch of grass in an urban Honolulu or Wailuku or Hilo setting, breathing out a little oxygen, it's a good thing, right?

Sure, for any number of reasons, but not because it helps improve air quality.

Actually the opposite is true.

It may cool the area, may be nice to sit on, and might even make you feel better, but a new piece of research suggests that it ain't doing anything for the atmosphere.

Indeed, it's a big negative—largely because of the amount of effort trimming and mowing with gas-powered appliances that pump greenhouse gas into the air, plus the use of fertilizer, which also releases greenhouse gases.

“Lawns look great — they're nice and green and healthy, and they're photosynthesizing a lot of organic carbon. But the carbon-storing benefits of lawns are counteracted by fuel consumption,” said Amy Townsend-Small, Earth system science postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Irvine.

She and co-researcher Claudia Czimczik conducted a study on the issue, which has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

The scientists studied both ornamental picnic areas and actively managed athletic fields. They evaluated soil samples over time to determine how much carbon was being sequestered. They sampled the air above the grassy areas to determine emissions of nitrous oxide from fertilizer. And they calculated the carbon dioxide cost of these lawns from the groundskeeping procedures, from irrigation to mowing.

In general, all that active management releases four times more greenhouse gas than the lawns are capable of sequestering, they found.

“It's impossible for these lawns to be net greenhouse gas sinks because too much fuel is used to maintain them,” Townsend-Small said.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

More CO2 means noisier deep oceans: UH researchers

Among the weird effects of our continued dumping of carbon-dioxide into the environment is that oceans are getting noisier.

(Image: Waves are among the sources of low-frequency ocean noise. Credit: SOEST.)

Here's how that works:

Researchers are finding that as carbon-dioxide is absorbed into the ocean, the ocean is getting more acidic. A more acidic ocean absorbs less sound at certain wavelengths—essentially low-frequency sound. That may mean noise is louder, farther.

Oceanographers Tatiana Ilyina and Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawai'i's School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, and Peter Brewer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, described the phenomenon in a recent issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

“If we continue to emit carbon dioxide at business-as-usual rates, the pH of surface seawater will drop by 0.6 units by the year 2100. As a result, the absorption of 200 Hz sound would decrease by up to 70%”, Ilyina said.

This range of sound frequency is used by some marine animals, and is produced by weather effects like rain and wave action, as well as by human action like shipping, ocean construction and some sonar systems

What all this might mean to marine creatures, or to the military's use of sonar, is not entirely clear, the authors said.

“We don’t fully understand what the impacts of these changes in ocean acoustics will be. Because of decreasing sound absorption, underwater sound could travel farther, and this could lead to growing noise levels in the oceans. Increasing transparency of the oceans to low-frequency sounds could also enable marine mammals to communicate over longer distances,” Ilyina said.

The paper:

Future ocean increasingly transparent to low-frequency sound owing to carbon dioxide emissions. Ilyina, T., R. E. Zeebe, and P. G. Brewer. Nature Geoscience. Advance Online Publication, Dec 20, 2009, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo719

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

New county energy sustainability plan draft released

The County of Kaua'i has a new draft plan designed to guide us to a sustainable energy future.

Of course, it's got some issues.

There are the things that are going to make it hard to adopt—like a proposed $.50-per-gallon county gas tax. That's designed to promote energy efficient cars, drive people to buses, and fund energy solutions.

And there are things that seem overly hopeful—like producing 45 megawatts from hydroelectric power. It'll be tough to find enough streams without endangered freshwater creatures and waterfowl in them to meet that goal.

And the draft plan seems to miss the boat on several pieces of the energy puzzle. It walks away from wind power and waste-to-energy, and, for some folks who talked at a recent public meeting, it doesn't spent near enough time on energy conservation and efficiency.

But it's a draft, and it should be and will be tweaked before it's final.

The draft Kauai Energy Sustainability Plan's most controversial proposal, based on testimony at a public meeting last week, is this one: “The Kaua`i County Fuel Tax should be raised an additional 50¢/gallon on gasoline and diesel to disincentivize their consumption, while building a Sustainable Ground Transportation Fund to provide incentives for alternative transportation, more efficient vehicles, and an integrated refinery for the Island, etc.”

(As a writer, I can't pass up the opportunity to comment on the use of the horrific word disincentivize. We all occasionally make an unfortunate choice of words or use a word in an unfortunate way. But, I think what the author means here is discourage, which would have been a much better choice. Disincentivize, an ugly word and a waste of syllables, suggests that you're removing a previously existing incentive—and it's not clear here what that incentive is. So much for this neoantidisestablishmentarianistic rant.)

The plan promotes hybrids and electric cars, and is a big, big supporter of biofuels—growing crops for energy production, through biomass conversion to electricity and the development of liquid fuels like ethanol and biodiesel.

Its assessment about the amount of hydropower available on Kauai is likely to be cut, we would think by as much as half.

The plan assumes the island has such great potential for renewable fuels that it will have a glut of power at low-usage hours—the middle of the night—and that hydro and biomass could then conveniently charge up thousands of plug-in hybrid electric cars.

It recommends the county adopt Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards for commercial buildings and the 2009 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) for new homes. It recommends the county hire three new experts to promote efficiency in government and commercial buildings. They would be a County Energy Efficiency Manager, a County Facilities Energy Manager and a County Policy Manager.

And the draft plan strongly promotes feed-in tariffs for the local utility, the Kaua'i Island Utility Cooperative. This system, which provides higher-than-normal prices for alternative energy production, is designed to promote renewable energy development.

The plan downplays waste-to-energy as a power source like O'ahu's HPOWER plant, saying there are questions about its potential on Kaua'i. It also dismisses wind power, asserting that wind development is on hold due to bird strike issues, even though small wind plants are actively being developed, and developers are working hard on finding technological and regulatory ways to get wind projects approved.

To help ensure that the plan moves forward, it identifies a sponsor: a new energy panel charged with enacting its recommendations. The Sustainable Energy Coordination Team (SECT) would include representatives of: Kaua'i County, the energy utility, the Kaua'i Economic Development Board, state Department of Business, Economic development and Tourism, energy investors, environmental groups, and members of the committee that helped develop the energy sustainability plan itself.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010