Historic Hawai'i energy agreement; no promises

The state of Hawai'i and the U.S. Department of Energy on Monday (Jan. 28, 2008) signed a historic agreement to move the Islands aggressively down the path toward energy efficiency and self-sufficiency.

(Photo: Karsner and Lingle sign agreement. Governor's office image.)

Clearly, something needs to be done. The Islands get more than nine-tenths of their electrical power from oil and coal—more than any other state in the union. And as fuel prices spike, we're paying a dear price for our fossil fixation.

What's needed, the agreement says, is “a fundamental and sustained transformation in the way in which renewable energy efficiency resources are planned and used in the State.”

The new agreement contains a lot of good ideas and directions, but no promises. More on that later.

The overarching goals are two: Increase energy efficiency, which reduces power demand; and increasing the role of renewable energy, which should replace fossil fuels as the prime source of the state's power.

Here's how the Department of Energy (DOE) introduces it in a press release (Warning: The federal government is involved, so there will be a lot of acronyms.):

“DOE Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Alexander Karsner and Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) establishing the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative (HCEI), a long-term partnership designed to transform Hawaii’s energy system to one that utilizes renewable energy and energy efficient technologies for a significant portion of its energy needs.

“The partnership aims to put Hawaii on a path to supply 70% of its energy needs using clean energy by 2030, which could reduce 72% of Hawaii’s current crude oil consumption. This type of clean energy transformation will continue to help sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

What does the federal government get out of this deal? A laboratory. Hawai'i is small, and it has lots of wind, sun, a heck of a lot of former sugar cane and pineapple acreage where you could grow energy crops, and readily accessible ocean for wave and thermal energy systems and so on. If you can't do this here, where can you?

“Hawaii’s success will serve as an integrated model and demonstration test bed for the United States and other island communities globally, many of which are just beginning the transition to a clean energy economy,” Karsner said.

The energy department will provide its policy and technical expertise, and presumably will back that up with cash, although it is not promising to provide any money at all.

The agency says it will hire experts in clean energy technology and launch multiple projects with both government and private industry. Some of those projects are amorphous, like “designing cost-effective approaches for the exclusive use of renewable energy on smaller islands.”

Others are a little clearer. For instance, one of the problems with wind and solar energy is that they are only intermittently available, and it's hard to run a stable power grid with sources that surge and ebb. The goal here: “designing systems to improve stability for electric grids operating with variable generating sources.”

The agreement promises to employ cutting-edge technologies for energy efficiency and renewable energy in new military housing projects. It would expand the use of crops for making fuel and power.

And it would seek to alter the arcane language of government permitting and regulation to support clean energy.

The agreement between the feds and state is only six pages long, and it's available here: www.eere.energy.gov/pdfs/hawaii_mou.pdf.

It proposes demonstration projects in clean energy, as well as systems to convince people to accept the new technologies. It seeks to ensure that folks up and down the economic scale get benefits from it. It would have the technologies readily available for use in other locations. And it would seek to train local workers “with crosscutting skills to enable and support a clean energy economy.”

The frightening thing about the memo is that it makes a lot of sensible statements, but commits no one to anything, including the funding to make it work.

Some of the caveat language:

“It is not legally enforceable and shall not be construed to create any legal obligation on the part of either party.”

“This MOU and the attached Appendix can be terminated by either party at any time...”

“Nothing in this MOU authorizes or is intended to obligate the parties to expend, exchange, or reimburse funds, services, or supplies, or transfer or receive anything of value.”

After all, it's just an MOU, not a contract, not a funding document. It's kind of like a blind date: I'll go out with you, but I won't commit to paying the dinner tab, I won't commit to whether there'll be a second date, and not even whether I might dump you midway and go home with someone else.

The state says it will be seeking some federal money, and Karsner said that he anticipates there will be some federal funding for Hawai'i coming up. No promises, no amounts discussed.

That said, there does appear to be a general commitment to move forward.

Among the first steps will be the formation of “working groups” to study key areas, and these groups have amazing deadlines. They are to be established by the end of January, to have draft plans in place by the end of March and by the end of June 2008, they are to “issue final strategic implementation plans that include a set of initial actions needed to jump start activity in each of the energy performance areas, two-, five- and ten-year goals, and specific actions that will be taken to meet the transformational goals required in each of the major areas.”

The groups are to review:

End-use efficiency, electrical generation, energy delivery, transportation, technology integration, sustained financing sources, and policy and regulatory mechanisms.

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate

Huge blooms of life in the "dead" ocean north of Hawai'i

Everybody knows that inside the great oceanic gyre in the North Pacific, nutrient levels are so low it's effectively a lifeless desert.

(Photo: NASA image of a plankton bloom off Australia.)

And as commonly happens, what everybody knows may be based on a kernel of fact but is in other ways wrong.

It turns out certain forms of life are not only capable of surviving there, but they they regularly thrive.

A group of University of Hawai'i and Oregon State researchers recently published “Summer phytoplankton blooms in the oligotrophic North Pacific Subtropical Gyre: Historical perspective and recent observations. The authors include John Dore, Matthew Church, Roger Lukas and Dave Karl, all of the Department of Oceanography in the University of Hawai'i's School of Earth Science and Technology, and Ricardo Letelier of Oregon State's College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences.

Their paper was published in January 2008 in the Elsevier journal “Progress in Oceanography.”

Phytoplankton is tiny drifting plant matter. Oligotrophic refers to areas that don't seem to have much nutrient material to sustain life. Many of the world's oceans have great gyres, which are deep regions around which the currents and winds flow, and which are often extremely low in nutrients.

The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre dominates the middle of the north Pacific, and is surrounded by the great clockwise current that runs north along Japan, east along Alaska, south along California and then west above the equator. It extends well to the east and west of the Hawaiian Archipelago.

The waters within the gyre tend to be very clear because there is so little stuff living in it. But a few years ago, scientists began noticing that occasionally, and generally in summer, they'd see evidence of a spike in life—plankton blooms.

Eventually, they were even able to get images of these blooms from satellites. They showed up as great drifting clouds in the ocean.

That's a huge burst of life. But how were these plants getting fed?

Dore and his colleagues, after sampling the ocean within such blooms, found that the forms of plankton that dominated were ones that could “fix nitrogen,” meaning they didn't need nitrogen in the water for fertilizer. They could convert nitrogen from forms plants can't use into forms they can.

Most appeared to be a blue-green algae called Trichodesmium and diatoms that contain nitrogen-fixing blue-green algae, which are also called cyanobacteria.

While early indications were that these phytoplankton blooms might be rare, Dore said researchers now believe they might be every-summer events.

“I believe that the bloom is an annual phenomenon, but its coverage and exact timing are variable. Its surface expression, which can be viewed from satellite ocean color sensors, can appear in one area, then diminish, only to intensify later in the summer/fall season in another area,” Dore said in an email.

At some point, the plants in these blooms die off, and much of their material probably drifts down into the deep ocean. There, it may form a sudden burst in food resources for the creatures of the dark depths.

“The seafloor biota tend to lead a feast-or-famine existence and the demise of this bloom often results in a big feast for them. Their life strategies may well be 'tuned' to this seasonal pulse of fresh organic matter,” Dore said.

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate

Polynesian "express train" backed by genetics

A new study of the history of Polynesians and their ancestors suggest the predecessors to modern Polynesians were perhaps better at leaving their culture than their genes in places they stopped.

(Photo: A wet sail aboard Hawaiian voyaging canoe Hōkūle'a.)

The new work also appears to back up the thought that Polynesians tended to move on when they came across other cultures, and stay when they were the first inhabitants of a new land.

The new genetic study was done on DNA samples from nearly 1,000 Pacific Islanders from 41 Pacific populations. It indicates that the voyaging ancestors of today's Polynesians left Taiwan or an island nearby, passed fairly quickly through Melanesia, and then swept into the vast unpopulated central and eastern Pacific.

The work shows pre-Polynesian genetic links to the present-day inhabitants of the Melanesian islands—which include the Solomons, New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago—are comparatively weak.

“The Genetic Structure of Pacific Islanders,” was published in the Public Library of Science's journal, PloS Genetics. The authors are biological anthropologist Jonathan S. Friedlaender of Temple University and an international team of collaborators, including, Françoise R. Friedlaender, Floyd A. Reed, Kenneth K. Kidd, Judith R. Kidd, Geoffrey K. Chambers, Rodney A. Lea, Jun-Hun Loo, George Koki, Jason A. Hodgson, D. Andrew Merriwether, and James L. Weber.

The Polynesian languages, like Samoan, Hawaiian, Tahitian and New Zealand Maori, are part of a larger group of related tongues called Austronesian, which may have their roots among the aboriginal people of Taiwan thousands of years ago.

“The distribution and relations of Pacific language families reflect ancient settlement. Austronesian is a widespread and clearly defined linguistic family with more than 1,000 member languages, which has its greatest diversity, and likely origin, in Taiwan (about) 4,000–5,000 years ago,” the authors write.

About 3,300 years ago, once open-ocean sailing had been developed, these folks moved out from Taiwan, and during a stay in the Bismarck Archipelago, they developed into what became known as the Lapita People, whose best-known artifact is carefully decorated pottery.

But these were a voyaging people, and they soon voyaged again.

“After only a few hundred years, 'Lapita People' from this area had colonized the islands in Remote Oceania as far east as Tonga and Samoa, where Polynesian culture then developed,” the authors wrote.

The Friedlaender paper says that while these voyagers left significant parts of their language and culture in the Melanesian islands at which they stopped, that culture was “grafted” onto existing genetic populations and wasn't associated with wholesale genetic mixing.

“Our study suggests that in the Pacific, and specifically in Near Oceania, there is only a modest association between language and genetic affiliation. Oceanic languages were introduced and dispersed around the islands within the last 3,300 years, but there was apparently only a small infusion of accompanying 'Austronesian' ancestry that has survived,” the paper says.

The Friedlaender work argues strongly for the Express Train theory of the population of the Pacific. A rival theory, the Entangled Bank, suggests that there was so much movement and interaction that it would be impossible to clearly identify the ancestors to Polynesians. Another rival theory, the “Slow Boat to Polynesia,” says the Polynesian people sprang out of long-existing Melanesian populations.

The Express Train, by contrast, argues that the early voyagers moved fairly quickly from what is now Taiwan, through Melanesia and then onward into the rest of the Pacific.

The Friedlaender paper says its genetic results pretty much resolve the issue in favor of the Express Train, although it concedes that more research could more closely link the ancestral home to other islands of Southeast Asia than just Taiwan.

“Polynesians are closely related to Asian/Taiwanese Aboriginal populations, while they are very weakly associated with any Melanesian groups (the closest association there appears to be with New Ireland populations),” the paper says.

See a copy of the paper at genetics.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pgen.0040019

For students of Polynesia, there are intriguing links between these studies at the western end of Polynesia and recent studies at the eastern end. There, DNA work on chicken bones found in Chile showed that these South American chickens had came across the Pacific, and were closely related to the chickens of the Polynesians.

Previously, researchers had noted that sweet potatoes, an American crop, had somehow become established throughout Polynesia.

It's indirect evidence that the famed Pacific navigators visited the Americas and perhaps conducted trade. But to date, there's no evidence they stayed. Genetic studies have not to date shown any evidence of Polynesian DNA in the inhabitants of South America.

Polynesians of the voyaging millenia, one might say, were guests who were careful not to wear out their welcome.

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate

Ocean acidification, carbon dioxide damage Hawaiian reefs

Climate change is happening in the air, but big changes associated with greenhouse gases are also taking place in the ocean.

One of them is acidification. New research shows that increased acidity in the oceans, associated with more carbon dioxide in the air, will have dramatic impacts. Lots of forms of life that depend on a slightly alkaline and stable ocean chemistry will suffer.

In a recent report on the subject, a group of Hawai'i, Florida and Bermuda scientists conducted studies that show that coralline algae will have difficulty in a more acid ocean.

Why is that important? Because in many places it is coralline algae, more than actual coral, that binds our Hawaiian reefs together.

This is the form of life—a crusty, often pink-colored kind of algae—that acts like the resin binding fibers together in a surfboard skin. It grows up and over chunks of rock, broken coral, and other materials, solidifying them and creating a sturdy barrier, protecting the Islands from the rough seas.

The new research was reported in a December issue of Nature Geoscience, in an article entitled, “Decreased abundance of crustose coralline algae due to ocean acidification.” The authors are Ilsa Kuffner, of the U.S. Geological Survey's Florida Integrated Science Center, Paul Jokiel and Ku'ulei Rodgers of the Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology, Fred Mackenzie of the University of Hawai'i Oceanography Department, and Andreas Andersson of UH Oceanography and the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences.

“These findings suggest that at lower pH, these reef-building algae could be much less competitive on future coral reefs,” Kuffner said.

The chemistry of acidification is pretty simple. If you bubble carbon dioxide through water, it becomes more acidic as carbonic acid is formed. If you increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the oceans soak up some of it and become more acidic.

The increased acidity of the oceans is already being measured. It's not about models of something that might happen. It's already happening.

The researchers, working at Coconut Island in Kāne'ohe Bay, in a nine-month study ran seawater with with different acidities through six jars. They found that coralline algae settle at lower rates and grow more poorly when the acidity is higher. Also, fleshy (which is to say, soft rather than hard) algae grew more readily.

“The results of our study were visibly obvious and may provide a glimpse into the future,” Kuffner said.

“We saw a 92 percent degrease in the area covered by the crustose coralline algae in the tanks with lower pH compared with tanks at today's ocean pH level. Non-calcifying fleshy algae increased by 52 percent.”

One issue for future research is whether the competition from fleshy algae increases the decline in coralline algae, the authors say. Another issue could be how changes in acidity add to detract from the impacts of increased temperature associated with global warming.

“Predicting changes in community structure resulting from ocean acidification and other stressors (for example high-temperature anomalies) will be important in modelling future rates of carbonate production by coral reefs and associated ecosystems,” the scientists say in their conclusion.

The impact for crustoese coralline algae and for our oceans, they say in a press release associated with the scientific article, is potentially severe.

“They carry out key ecological roles that affect the health and sustainability of coral reef ecosystems.

“Not only do they build reef framework, produce sand, and help cement loose coral fragments into massive reef structures, they also attract reef-building coral larvae by providing a place to settle.

“If these ecosystem services are left undone, coral reefs and associated systems and coastlines could be notably altered as the pH of the oceans slowly declines,” they said.

(We've discussed this before in this blog. See: http://raisingislands.blogspot.com/2007/11/mackenzie-climate-perspective-watch-out.html and http://raisingislands.blogspot.com/2007/10/ocean-acidity-rising-faster-than-feared.html and http://raisingislands.blogspot.com/2007/09/ocean-acidity-from-co2-could-violate.html and our initial take on the issue, http://raisingislands.blogspot.com/2007/09/ocean-acidity-next-big-climate-thing_01.html.)

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate

Huge advance in hybrid battery technology--more power, longer life

Among the relatively few complaints about electric and hybrid cars is, what do you do with a pile of toxic batteries when they (too quickly) wear out?

(Photos: Test car in the United Kingdom goes 100,000 on new UltraBattery. Credit Advanced Lead-Acid Battery Consortium. Researcher Rosalie Louey prepares battery components. Credit CSIRO.)

Battery performance and battery life have been a big, muddy anchor preventing faster movement in a number of technologies to reduce fossil fuel use.

A team of researchers has now combined known technologies in a unique way that promises to increase the life of batteries by as much as four times.

Turn that number around, and it means a 75 percent reduction in the amount of battery waste.

It's an indication that electricity storage technology is hardly close to a standstill.

The breakthrough was announced by researchers with the Energy Reformed National Research Flagship of Australia's CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, who developed it. Battery construction was by Japan's Furukawa Battery Company, and testing in the United Kingdom was done through the American Advanced Lead-Acid Battery Consortium.

Their UltraBattery is in actual use. It's loaded on a hybrid car, which has now been driven more than 100,000 miles on a test track in the United Kingdom.

The UltraBattery combines a supercapacitor with a lead acid battery to create a battery that, in the words of CSIRO, “lasts longer, costs less and is more powerful than current technologies used in hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs).”

One of the bonuses of the capacitor is that it takes a charge quickly and delivers a charge quickly. The UltraBattery loads the capacity quickly during braking, and employs the capacitor again during heavy acceleration. A lead-acid battery is the kind that's in your car now. They tend to be great for long, slow charging and long, slow discharging, but their performance can be significantly decreased by the kind of sudden demands that capacitors love.

“Previous tests show the UltraBattery has a life cycle that is at least four times longer and produces 50 percent more power than conventional battery systems, It's also about 70 percent cheaper than the batteries currently used in HEVs,” said David Lamb, who heads low emissions transport research with the program.

The program said it also has UltraBattery applications for renewable energy technologies like solar and wind power.

Some local links:

Cars that inflate:

raisingislands.blogspot.com/2008/01/cheap-nimble-inflatable-car.html

Fuzzy logic and batteries:

raisingislands.blogspot.com/2008/01/using-fuzzy-logic-to-get-miles-out-of.html

Cars that run on air:

raisingislands.blogspot.com/2007/12/air-cars-in-our-future-probably-but-not.html

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate