In the interest of promoting US economic health and finding someone a decent job in the energy industry, I'm passing along a job posting that I think might be of interest to some of my readers. If you're not interested in smart grid applied research positions in Portland, Oregon, you can stop reading now.

If you're a researcher and expert in demand response and have been looking for a full-time position (I'm not), this might be right up your alley. Check out the job description below. By letting me know you are interested, you gain the advantage that I can personally deliver your resume and cover letter to the person responsible for hiring. If you get hired, I make a little cash in the form of a referral bonus. Have I mentioned recently that Portland is perhaps the United States' premier alt.energy commerce hub? Geez, apply for this job already and get moved to Portland!

Indirectly, this job represents federal ARRA money hitting the street. And for a white collar job, no less. Guess the whole economic stimulus thing is working.

Full disclosure: my wife works at Portland Energy Conservation Inc. (PECI), but has nothing to do with hiring for the position listed below.

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Engineer Lead - Demand Response and Performance Monitoring
Location:	Oregon - Portland Office
Position Code:	12414
# of openings:	1
Description
PECI seeks a Lead Engineer with deep experience in implementing demand response and performance monitoring strategies for commercial and/or residential buildings to join our Technical Research Group. This group serves PECI's cross-cutting technical needs, focusing on the following key areas: technical training for all PECI staff, directing and advising research projects, developing and communicating PECI's point of view on key technical issues in industry venues, guiding technical consistency within PECI's projects and programs, evaluating industry strategies and emerging technologies, and developing a technical knowledge management system.  Technical Research Group engineers will work with PECI's technical leadership to promote forward-looking applied research and provide technical support across the company.    Key Competencies: Identification and analysis of demand reduction measures in buildings, including scoping studies/audits, diagnostic techniques, in-depth systems analysis, statistics and demand reduction calculationsProficiency with spreadsheets is required Understanding of utility priorities and programs around system impacts related to peak and critical events, demand response, time of day pricing, and critical event pricing. Creative development of new or improved approaches to demand response and integration with energy efficiency programs Strong technical writing and presentation skills including reports, supporting documentation to calculations, conference papers, and guides Effective management of project objectives, scope, budget and schedule. Works productively in a consulting environment, communicates proactively, and mentors technical and non-technical staff Existing history of industry leadership in area of expertise, with a strong understanding of underlying market influences on technical issues  Key Responsibilities: Develop strategy and assist teams in incorporating demand response/demand reduction and performance monitoring approaches into utility program designs Lead and perform technical research to support advancement of demand management and performance monitoring system applications Support the development of tools to improve and streamline demand reduction estimates Train staff and disseminate technical knowledge through PECI's internal training program  Requirements: Manual or automated demand response/demand reduction program research or implementation, including understanding of building control system techniques for demand response Development of demand reduction calculation methodologies, cost effectiveness, and supporting documentation Building performance monitoring system hardware, software, and analysis techniques B.S. in Engineering preferred; individuals with a related technical degree coupled with directly relevant professional experience will be considered Minimum 7 years experience in the areas above

My last post ("Collapse researcher calls for new energy sources") probably left you feeling a little defeated. I know writing it certainly made me feel a lot defeated. In it, I quoted Joseph Tainter, a well-known collapse researcher, as he explained how we are all doomed unless we make a major breakthrough in energy supply. And he didn't mean something small like cheaper photovoltaic panels. Tainter was talking about a huge breakthrough, something that turns traditional energy thinking on its head. Not seeing anything like that on the horizon, one can understandably begin feeling a little... well... let's say not so optimistic.

I am now coming out of the funk. But first, a little backstory.

Over the winter of 1998-1999, I worked for six months as a technology consultant for Celera Genomics in Rockville, Maryland. Celera was in full throttle start-up mode preparing to sequence the human genome.* My involvement ranged from configuring the gene-sequencing servers to collaborating with president and chief scientific officer J. Craig Venter and science journalist Barbara Culliton as they hashed out how to share information about the human genome with the world.

During my time at Celera, I developed tremendous respect for Craig Venter and his ability to execute within the context of a seemingly impossible large-scale scientific project. What's more, I saw first-hand the quality of the people, the best in the world in their respective fields, who are willing to give up whatever else is going on in their lives to join Venter's ambitious projects. Those people make the impossible happen.

In the context of that backstory, I am pleased to see that Craig Venter's latest project is aimed at answering Tainter's call, at creating a new breakthrough-level energy source. You can see from the last five minutes of Venter's 2008 TED talk ("Craig Venter is on the verge of creating synthetic life") that he gets the severity and urgency of our food, fuel, and pollution problems. Though not a philosopher, Venter is also not a mad scientist bent on taking over the world (as some portray him). He may be ambitious, but he understands the world and the constraints within which personal ambition must operate. In his TED talk, he concluded by saying, "We're a ways away from improving people. Our goal is just to make sure that we have a chance to survive long enough to maybe do that."

Several signs indicate that a breakthrough is not far away.

In February 2008, Venter said his organization was only eighteen months away from creating "4th generation fuel" from lab-designed algae. I suspect these algae and the associated production process would be designed from the ground up with large-scale, efficient production in mind--the kind of efficient production that may actually have a chance of competing on a cost basis with traditional energy sources... and be quickly commercialized by the energy industry.

Just a week ago, Venter's company, Synthetic Genomics, announced a major partnership worth $600 million with Exxon Mobil. This is Exxon Mobil's first entry into biofuels and demonstrates some impressive salesmanship (likely backed by some equally impressive R&D) on Venter's part. This follows an existing (but unrelated) agreement with BP.

So when Craig Venter says he is only months away from creating biofuel from genetically engineered algae, I believe him. Not that he necessarily has all the details worked out, mind you, but that he has the best minds in the world working diligently on the problem like there is nothing more important. And perhaps there isn't.

* For an interesting narrative on Celera Genomics and J. Craig Venter's race to map the human genome, see The Genome War by James Schreeve.

Having finished reading Joseph Tainter's "classic" The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge 1988), I feel compelled to share his advice for contemporary civilization: invest heavily in energy research and development immediately, regardless of the perceived cost of doing so. The cost of failing to invest will be global economic and social collapse.

According to Tainter, social collapse, the reversion of a society to significantly less complex ways of living, occurs naturally when the marginal economic value of increased complexity fails to exceed the cost of that increase. In other words, people willingly give up participation in complex society in favor of smaller-scale, simpler options when the more complex society takes more from the individual than it gives back. Following this theory, Tainter provides in his book a convincing academic explanation of the collapse of three quite different societies: the Roman Empire, the Maya Civilization, and the Chacoan (Pueblo) society.

I recommend this book in general. Despite Tainter's sometimes dry academic style and excessive use of the passive voice, its 200+ pages of timely insight are worth reading first hand.

For those not immediately rushing out to buy a copy, I offer a passage from the second-to-last page (215):

It is difficult to know whether world industrial society has yet reached the point where the marginal return for its overall pattern of investment has begun to decline. The great sociologist Pitirim Sorokin believed that Western economies had entered such a phase in the early twentieth century (1957: 530). Xenophon Zolotas, in contrast, predicts that this point will be reached soon after the year 2000 (1981: 102-3). Even if the point of diminishing returns to our present form of industrialism has not yet been reached, that point will inevitably arrive. Recent history seems to indicate that we have at least reached declining returns for our reliance on fossil fuels, and possibly for some raw materials. A new energy subsidy [i.e. new energy source] is necessary if a declining standard of living and a future global collapse are to be averted. A more abundant form of energy might not reverse the declining marginal return on investment in complexity, but it would make it more possible to finance that investment.

In a sense the lack of a power vacuum, and the resulting competitive spiral, have given the world a respite from what otherwise might have been an earlier confrontation with collapse. Here indeed is a paradox: a disastrous condition that all decry may force us to tolerate a situation of declining marginal returns long enough to achieve a temporary solution to it. This reprieve must be used rationally to seek for and develop the new energy source(s) that will be necessary to maintain economic well-being. This research and development must be an item of the highest priority, even if, as predicted, this requires reallocation of resources from other economic sectors. Adequate funding of this effort should be included in the budget of every industrialized nation (and the results shared by all). I will not enter the political foray by suggesting whether this be funded privately or publicly, only that funded it must be.

There are then notes of optimism and pessimism in the current situation. We are in a curious position where competitive interactions force a level of investment, and a declining marginal return, that might ultimately lead to collapse except that the competitor who collapses first will simply be dominated or absrobed by the survivor. A respite from the threat of collapse might be granted thereby, although we may find that we will not like to bear its costs. If collapse is not in the immediate future, that is not to say that the industrial standard of living is also reprieved. As marginal returns decline (a process ongoing even now), up to the point where a new energy subsidy is in place, the standard of living that industrial societies have enjoyed will not grow so rapidly, and for some groups and nations may remain static or decline. The political conflicts that this will cause, coupled with the increasingly easy availability of nuclear weapons, will create a dangerous world situation in the foreseeable future.

References
Sorokin, Pitirim A. (1957). Social and Cultural Dynamics. Porter Sargent, Boston.
Zolotas, Xenophon (1981). Economic Growth and Declining Social Welfare. New York University Press, New York and London.

Having found this passage at the conclusion of a well-researched and thoroughly fascinating anthropological analysis of social collapse, I thought it was worth sharing. I'd love to hear your thoughts on social collapse as it relates to present governmental policy.

Given what Tainter says about the role of energy in subsidizing the returns of an increasingly complex society, how do we avoid bringing about inadvertant collapse when we attempt to limit energy consumption in an attempt to deal with the climate change crisis? Is there a correct policy path to steer? If so, what is it?

Utility companies and regulators should insist that new smart meters be able to monitor voltage and current with at least 60 samples per second frequency and (ideally) 12 bit precision; any less, and valuable energy management features could be crippled. Similarly, direct consumer access to the meter output is an absolute necessity. I know of no smart meters on the market today with this level of monitoring precision; if you do, please leave a comment telling us about it.

High-precision electricity load data can be analyzed using a technique known as non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM). By comparing patterns in aggregate (whole-house or whole-office) load to known appliance profiles, energy analysis software can provide detailed appliance-level energy consumption data without requiring appliance-level electronics. This approach is far more affordable than instrumenting each appliance and could provide an economical way to track consumer responses to price signals, allowing advanced energy management solutions to be rolled out to consumers who aren't willing to pay for more expensive home automation. At the very least, NILM can give a power consumer an extremely detailed real-time view of his electrical loads, allowing him to intelligently target efficiency improvements and behavioral changes (possibly driven by dynamic or TOU pricing).

This is from a recent paper by Carnegie Mellon researchers*:

While NILM applications require minimal hardware and some instances claim over 90% recognition of some loads, this approach is not without challenges. The requisite hardware must be able to report power readings with at least 1.0 Hz of frequency[13] and ideally calculates at least true power, reactive power, and harmonics. Associating a particular electrical signature with the originating appliance either involves a training period or a large database of known loads. Still, given the continuing decreases in hardware costs and the possibility of distributing software costs and signature categorization, the high quality of data and low labor costs for installation make NILM the most promising technology for detailed end-use electricity consumption data.
...
[13] Cole A, Albicki A. Algorithm for non-intrusive identification of residential appliances. In: Proceedings of the 1998 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems. Monterey, CA, USA, 1998, 3: 338-341.

I'd like to see NIST and EPRI get in touch with these NILM researchers as part of the smart grid standards process. If we don't get high-precision capabilities baked into new meters while it can be done with little, if any, incremental cost, we will be tearing the meters out again in a few years to replace them with ones capable of high-precision NILM. While meter manufacturers may like the idea of built-in obsolescence and rapid product turnover of $300-500 smart meters, rate payers may criticize this waste of their dollars. And from an environmental perspective, we may find that the carbon footprint of the rapidly obsolescent metering and home automation hardware overshadows any energy savings it manages to facilitate. That would be an ironic tragedy, one that ratepayers will not easily stomach.

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* "Training Load Monitoring Algorithms on Highly Sub-Metered Home Electricity Consumption Data" by Mario Berges, Ethan Goldman, H. Scott Matthews, and Lucio Soibelman published in TSINGHUA SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (ISSN 1007-0214 65/67 pp. 406-411, Volume 13, Number S1, October 2008)

I'm realizing more with each day that the Portland/Vancouver metro area has the potential to emerge as a regional, if not national, alternative energy hub. All the key ingredients are here; from an energy economy standpoint, Portland and Vancouver complement each other nicely.

I'm not a member of the Portland/Vancouver Booster Club, nor do I have anything directly to gain by talking up my city. I've just been piecing some things together that I want to share.

I recently moved back to Vancouver, a bedroom community just north of Portland, after living fifteen years elsewhere (Seattle and Minneapolis, mostly). Vancouver makes its money as a port city, high-tech center, and labor/housing provider for area businesses. What drew me back (in addition to my extended family) was the absence of state income tax, presence of affordable (for the region) housing, on-the-cusp urban renewal, abundant outdoor recreation, and proximity to Powell's Books in Portland... or, more accurately, to all that Powell's Books represents about Portland.

Portland is a progressive city of readers, bicyclists, roller derby fans, skeptics, car-haters, weirdos, hipster alt-conformists, ex-loggers, beer snobs, extreme endurance athletes, econuts, and, perhaps most importantly, a lot of extremely talented engineers. I know because I am friends with some of them.

I know people locally at Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Tektronix, just three major names with long engineering and fabrication histories in the Portland/Vancouver area. Many newer arrivals fill out the ranks: TriQuint in Hillsboro with its broad RF offerings, Microchip in Gresham with its industry-leading embedded microcontrollers, Sharp America in Camas with its innovative LED technologies. The list goes on.

The products of these companies are the raw building blocks out of which the new smart grid will be built. The people who understand them, both from technical and cultural perspectives, live here.

Portland has a unique culture of eco-awareness and liberal generosity. For many Portlanders, the Big Dream is not to make a billion dollars--it's to "make a difference" while maintaining a healthy work-life balance and a modest income. And perhaps more than anywhere else I have lived, the entrepreneurial culture in Portland is very much in touch with its "garage startup" roots. Take Nike for example, started by Willamette Valley local Phil Knight. According to the Seattle Times, "Knight's first shoes, sold out of the trunk of his car, had soles made on [Coach Bill] Bowerman's waffle iron."

Portland's NedSpace is feeding Portland's change-the-world-on-a-shoestring culture by providing inexpensive workspace and VC networking opportunities to early-stage innovators. NedSpace's focus on international social entrepreneurship and giving back to the community resonates deeply with the Portland ethos.

Because of its larger size (2,159,720 people), the Portland metro area provides a more diverse and flexible work force than smaller metro areas emerging as cleantech innovation centers like, say, Austin (1,652,602 people), Boulder (280,440 people), or Spokane (456,175 people). (Population data from Wikipedia). It also boasts better air, ground, river, and ocean transport connectivity.

Many cleantech companies have begun to take advantage of all this. Some examples:

• "The largest solar fab in the Americas" is being developed in the Portland suburb of Hillsboro, Oregon by SolarWorld. Administrative headquarters is in Vancouver, Washington.
• Iberdrola Renewables, based in Portland, is the the north american arm of Spain's Iberdrola S.A., "the largest renewable energy operator in the world." (quoted from Wikipedia)
• Bonneville Power Administration, the largest producer and distributor of electric power in the Pacific Northwest, is based in Portland. Its transmission business and major switching/intertie station is in Vancouver, Washington. BPA distributes power from 31 hydroelectric dams, numerous wind farms, and forecasts the highest rate of interconnected wind generation capacity (30%) of any US balancing authority. BPA will be forced to pioneer leading-edge techniques in grid stabilization and intermittent renewable power integration. In addition, BPA power keeps Southern California from blacking out in the summer by sending power south over one of the nation's few high-voltage DC transmission lines, the Pacific DC Intertie.
  
• With large contracts from both Siemens and Vestas, the Port of Vancouver is one of the leading importation ports for the massive wind turbines being deployed across the Western US. The Port boasts the two largest heavy-lift mobile harbor cranes in North America, the perfect tools for efficiently transloading turbine cargo from ocean-going vessels to trucks and train cars for distribution to wind farms, many of which are being built in eastern Washington and Oregon. Vancouver is the junction of major Pacific shipping routes, major rail lines, and major trucking routes, giving it a distinct geographic advantage in serving as a deployment hub for wind energy infrastructure.
• Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski has managed to establish Portland as the first city to receive electric cars from Nissan, and is working with utility PGE to build a network of charging stations throughout the region. Portland has the highest per-capita rate of hybrid car ownership in the United States.

With so much going on under our noses (but mostly off our daily radar), it's easy to see how Portland/Vancouver could stealthily emerge as the nation's leading R&D hub for smart grid building blocks, affordable wind power, advanced power transmission, electric vehicle deployment, and solar panel manufacturing.

Being one who prefers hard facts over conjecture any day of the week, I decided to check out the impact of yesterday's Earth Hour on actual aggregate electricity demand at the wholesale level. PJM Interconnection, the grid operator for most of the mid-Atlantic U.S., provides guest access to wholesale data for their operating area. This data should be representative of the U.S. as a whole.

I took a screenshot of the PJM load graph, shown below.

My initial reaction is that overall demand during Earth Hour trended just like it would on any other Saturday evening; it dropped off gradually as households wound down and went to sleep. Consumption during Earth Hour actually tracked above PJM's day-ahead and hourly forecasts.

It would be nice to see the data from last Saturday for comparison purposes. I'm still looking for that.

As a publicity and awareness event, Earth Hour was in many ways a success. Props to the organizers for that. But on the question of whether Americans will actually reduce energy demand when asked, Earth Hour demonstrated that it takes more than good intentions to measurably alter our behavior.

The conventional thinking in smart grid and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) circles envisions a two-way communications network between utilities and consumers carrying energy consumption, dynamic pricing, and load shed signals between consumers' smart meters and utilities' central control systems. Unfortunately for rural energy consumers, including many of America's farmers and ranchers, this vision will not become reality for a long, long while. Where neither WiMAX nor traditional cellular data networks provide wireless data coverage, no affordable, technically feasible, real-time, two-way data communication link alternative exists (that is, without commandeering the consumer's phone line). Without a real-time two-way link, smart metering, as currently envisioned, cannot be deployed to rural America.

In Boulder, America's first "smart grid" city, Xcel Energy has made a substantial investment not just in new smart meters, but also in the costly broadband infrastructure necessary to read them:

Minneapolis-based Xcel, Colorado's largest electric utility, has installed about 14,000 "smart" meters that provide information to the utility and to customers. Xcel and its contractors have strung more than 100 miles of [fiber-optic] cable over power lines for broadband transmission and hooked up a handful of homes to program and monitor energy use.

From the Associated Press, via Minneapolis/St.Paul's WCCO.com

You can see a map of Xcel Energy's Boulder urban Smart Grid here.

It may not be obvious, but the only immediate way to economically justify a fiber-optic backbone deployment of the type Xcel is using in Boulder (beyond R&D) is to re-use that same fiber backbone to compete with incumbent DSL and Cable operators (e.g. Qwest and Comcast) in the commodity-grade residential broadband marketplace. That's a messy prospect with all sorts of political favoritism and anti-trust implications, especially with money in the ARRA (a.k.a. the Federal Stimulus Bill) specifically earmarked for broadband deployment. Giving both smart grid and broadband funds, amounting to some billions of dollars (see footnote), directly to utility companies is just too much concentration of monopoly power for most Americans to feel comfortable. As a result, I think it's unlikely that rural utilities will get federal funding for both smart grid trials and broadband programs.

As an alternative to an expensive fiber-optic rural grid overlay, rural utilities could potentially turn to the two-way capabilities of third-party wireless data networks like SMS, GPRS, CDMA, or WiMAX. (Another alternative, broadband-over-powerline (BPL), is too expensive for rural grids.) Smart meters are already being designed to use these technologies, and big names like GE and Intel are backing them. However, each of these technologies faces problems that make them unsuitable for rural deployment. I believe that WiMAX is too expensive for the coverage area required by rural deployments. GSM, GPRS, CDMA Data, or SMS coverage may be available in some rural areas, but a quick glance at the AT&T Wireless and Sprint Nextel coverage maps quickly shows that many rural areas lack basic cellular data services. Filling in these gaps would be both costly and unprofitable; that's why it hasn't been done yet. Consumers in areas without cellular coverage would similarly be without the benefit of smart grid electricity, resulting in less efficient usage of electricity there and higher over-all energy costs.

Smart metering and demand response systems will reduce costs for urban utilities and urban consumers through efficient load management. Using dynamic pricing and demand response capabilities, they will be able to avoid buying excessive amounts of bulk power at high prices during peak demand periods. Meanwhile, rural electric cooperatives will still be forced to buy bulk electricity at market rates, even when critical peak pricing is in effect. Rural power consumers will pay more and will lack the tools to change the situation. Eventually, while urban air conditioners, pool pumps, and car chargers are automatically cycling off during peak pricing periods, rural utilities may be forced to implement rolling blackouts in order to be able to break even on operating costs while maintaining regulated energy pricing structures.

This rural-urban disparity can be resolved through better solution architecture of smart grid systems. At the most basic level, demand response and dynamic pricing can be implemented without real-time two-way communication between the utility and the consumer. Consumption data can be stored at the consumer's location, in a smart meter, home automation controller, or personal computer system, and periodically forwarded to the utility using mobile or even handheld automated meter reading (AMR) technologies. More frequent, but less trustworthy, complementary updates can be sent by the consumer's in-home energy monitoring system via dial-up Internet access, satellite broadband, or other available consumer-controlled IP broadband technology. This store-and-forward approach eliminates the need for real-time two-way data communications while still providing the benefits of sophisticated time-of-use (TOU) pricing schedules.

Rural consumers can receive dynamic pricing information a number of ways, whether it be over a one-way paging network or through traditional AM broadcast radio (e.g. a rural radio announcer reads "the price for April pork bellies on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is up five dollars to $80.56 today, meanwhile the Lake Wobegotten Rural Power Co-op will charge 28 cents per kilowatt-hour, triple the normal rate, for residential and farm electricity from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. today due to excessive forecasted demand on the wholesale market." This may seem a rudimentary solution, but this is the kind of no-nonsense, keep-it-short-and-simple (KISS) approach to distribution of real-time market information that consumers take meaningful action on every day. Let's empower rural energy consumers with the information and infrastructure necessary to make smart energy choices, not through uneconomic technology, but through least-cost solutions that implement dynamic energy pricing and charging in ways that will work for everyone.


Footnote:

The ARRA allocates $2.5 billion to rural broadband deployment through the Distance Learning, Telemedicine, and Broadband Program of the Rural Utilities Servoce; $4.7 billion to broadband deployment through the "Broadband Technology Opportunities Program"; and a 50% federal funding match for qualifying smart grid demonstration projects through amendments to the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.

The Economist newspaper, long known for its progressive libertarian stance on everything from stem cell research to executive compensation, this week implicitly admitted that cap-and-trade is the preferable of many difficult-to-swallow options in the arena of potential US climate change legislation. It points to research that shows a cost of $69 to $137 per ton of carbon emissions reduced through the approaches funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), "the stimulus bill". In contrast, it cites PointCarbon research indicating that a cap-and-trade approach will reduce emissions at a much more affordable $13 per ton.

In its briefing "Sins of emission" in the 14 March 2009 US print edition (page 26), the paper lays out both the perils and advantages of cap-and-trade policy as implemented in Europe and presently being discussed in the US Congress.

Among the political challenges to cap-and-trade, the paper highlights, are the strong opposition from highly coal-dependent midwestern states, the economic impacts of higher energy prices to consumers and businesses, and the volatility of carbon markets. (Europe's has seen 300% price swings since 2005).

Despite the criticism of cap-and-trade, and after a passing mention of the newspaper's ideal approach, a carbon tax, the paper focuses its attention on explaining why direct government intervention, highlighted in the stimulus bill in the form of credits and tax breaks for renewable power and smart grid build-out, is redundant with, and damaging to, cap-and-trade policy.

The paper concludes with a warning to those promoting renewable portfolio standards (RPS) and similar governmental micromanagement techniques:

Congress is unlikely to swallow the castor oil of cap-and-trade without such sweeteners, Washingtonians say. But the more lavish the subsidies, the more expensive cutting emissions becomes--and the harder for voters to stomach.

If you're interested in climate change policy, I highly recommend reading what The Economist has to say.

Links to articles at Economist.com:

Briefing: Sins of emission
"Barack Obama is keen to curb greenhouse-gas emissions with a cap-and-trade scheme. Can Congress come round to his way of thinking?"
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13272099

Leader: Cap and binge
"America's politicians are at last getting to grips with global warming, but in a dangerously expensive way"
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13278201

I had an "aha!" moment this morning related to the politics of nuclear power and nuclear waste. I have a new (to me) theory about why nuclear power is so controversial. To get out of the mess, we need to allow the nuclear industry more freedom to bear its own monitoring, safety, liability, and disposal costs. I think the industry's reaction to this cost burden will tell us once-and-for-all whether nuclear power can stand on its own two feet.

The US nuclear power industry is based on boiling-water and pressurized-water thermal reactor designs that utilize only about 1% of the available potential nuclear energy in their lightly-enriched uranium fuel. The nuclear waste from these reactors, consisting of a mix of fertile uranium, fissionable uranium, plutonium, and various lighter radioactive byproducts, gets pulled from the plant in such a state that it is both dangerous and seemingly useless. Storage and disposal of these radioactive wastes is fraught with risks of environmental contamination and serious public health impacts.

Nuclear research has developed technical solutions to this problem, but their economic viability remains in question. Several fuel reprocessing techniques have been developed that allow the spent fuel to be converted back into a resource that would be usable as feedstock to the reactors that produced it. Unfortunately, these same reprocessing techniques can be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium and highly-enriched uranium that could, potentially, be diverted into malicious hands. In response to this risk, the US stopped its nuclear fuel reprocessing program during the Carter administration, back in 1977. Other countries continued:

Reprocessing of civilian fuel has long been employed in Europe, at the COGEMA La Hague site in France, the Sellafield site in the United Kingdom, the Mayak Chemical Combine in Russia, the Tokai plant in Japan, the Tarapur plant in India, and briefly at the West Valley Reprocessing Plant in the United States.

from "Nuclear Reprocessing" (Wikipedia)

An alternative class of reactor designs, known as breeder reactors because of their ability to "breed" fissionable fuel from non-fissionable feed stock, can utilize either uranium or more-abundant thorium fuels more completely. In theory, up to 99% of the fuel can be consumed, considerably increasing the running time of the reactor on a single fuel load and similarly reducing the amount of waste produced.

Breeder reactors have been largely ignored in the US nuclear industry due to their increased complexity (and initial cost) over non-breeders. The market for mined uranium (a limited resource) has been soft for some time, largely due to the economy of scale established in the mid-1900s by strong US Government defense demand. With defense needs for uranium down since the end of the Cold War, the combination of established large-scale exploration and mining efforts and resulting supply surplus have kept fuel costs for commercial nuclear reactor operators artificially low. Also, the ultimate cost of both waste disposal and accident liability has been partially borne by tax-payers (see Yucca Mountain and Price-Anderson Act). These policies have amounted to indirect subsidies, providing industry with little economic motivation to invest in breeder reactor technology or other efficiency innovations.

The dangerous, partially-used nuclear fuel assemblies sitting around the US at various reactor sites are prime candidates for reprocessing and reuse. With the development of reprocessing facilities and a movement to breeder reactor designs, this waste could be a resource. Thus, moving this "waste" into long-term deep-geologic containment sites like Yucca Mountain is, in a way, like throwing away energy reserves. Economically, it might make more sense to reprocess this fuel, use it to generate power, then move the resulting fully-expended waste into long-term containment. But that's not happening.

Due to valid nuclear proliferation concerns, lack of a freely-functioning nuclear energy market, and competing political viewpoints, we find ourselves paralyzed. Citizens are paying for this inaction three times over: first, through potential long-term environmental contamination resulting from eventual plant decommissioning and storage of radioactive wastes at reactor sites; second, through partially tax-funded geologic storage efforts (e.g. Yucca Mountain); and third, through the loss of a waste resource that could be effectively converted into electric power through reprocessing and more efficient reactor designs.

I wish I could say that the answer is to renew our fuel reprocessing efforts and to fund research and development of commercial breeder reactors. But I can't, because I don't know if that makes sense from economic, public safety, and international relations perspectives. It seems a little hypocritical to respond to our energy crisis by exploiting the very technologies that we are denying to so-called "rogue states" like Iran and North Korea. (Wouldn't that be provoking them?)

I can say that I'd like to see the nuclear power industry reformed in such a way that a) reactor suppliers (e.g. GE and Westinghouse) and operators can be held fully liable for environmental contamination and potential public health impacts of their products (repeal the Price-Anderson Act), and b) that reactor operators fund 100% of the monitoring, clean-up, and disposal costs of their wastes.

I suspect, should this legal liability and direct financial accountability be put in place, that nuclear power would cease to be economically viable. But I could be wrong.

What do you think?

Resources:

IAEA's United States Country Profile

Wikipedia articles:
Light Water Reactor
Breeder Reactor

Parker, Sybil P. McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Energy. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co, 1981.

I'm making some progress on the dynamic pricing economics front. This issue impacts our entire approach to smart grid, smart metering, and, ultimately, our ability to make use of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs).

It all boils down to demand response (DR), a utility's ability to adjust consumer demand to align with electricity supply. Effective DR is critical to the success of wind and solar deployments. As such, how we choose to implement DR is at the heart of current smart grid discussion. Here's how I'm thinking about it right now.

The question: What is the minimum amount of data and control that a consumer must offer to its electricity provider at the meter interconnection to empower the utility to confidently understand its demand response load shedding ability with respect to that consumer's immediate energy needs?

The answer: Much of the electricity load in a home can be attributed to a handful of services within it. For the sake of discussion, I'll take what I suspect are the top three: comfort heating/cooling, water heating, and clothes drying. I think I can make each of these loads both responsive to price signals and predictable to the utility company without giving the utility direct control over enabling or disabling the load.

Comfort heating/cooling
A consumer should be able to define his heating/cooling needs in the form of a three dimensional demand curve by time period. If I could set my thermostat based on dollars per day (or similar approach) rather than to a fixed temperature, then specify my hours of occupancy, the thermostat would be able to allocate energy to heating and cooling both appropriately and predictably. A mathematical model showing my heating/cooling demand function could be periodically sent by the thermostat, with consumer consent, to the utility to aid in demand response planning. By aggregating these demand functions in a centralized information system, the utility could construct a single demand response function to tie retail real-time electricity price to heating/cooling load.

Water heating
In my house, water heating load is dominated by the bathroom shower. I assume it is the same in most households. The scheduling and duration of showers (and thus hot water usage) would probably show a relatively predictable demand function with respect to price, if only the clear cost of showering at a given moment were readily available. A computer desktop widget or in-home display could easily convert the momentary price of electricity and water into the price per gallon for hot water, and from there to the price per minute for showering. The display might report that, for instance, a seven minute shower would cost $0.24 right at this moment. By implementing such a solution in limited trials before massive roll-out, the utility could develop a reliable mathematical demand model for correlating price with load shedding ability.

Clothes drying
Following on the idea I laid out for water heating, the consumer could be informed of the momentary price for drying a load of laundry. This could be implemented most easily through a numeric display on the console of clothes dryer appliance itself, but it could also be provided through a computer desktop widget or an in-home display.

By making each of these three energy uses responsive to price signals in a predictable way, a utility company could confidently understand its ability to shed load through control of no more than the real-time retail price of electricity. This control empowers grid operators to make confident use of variable resources like wind and solar generation without depending on fossil-fuel powered spinning reserve capacity or draconian in-home appliance cut-off switches. This replacement "spinning reserve" would be based on well-understood, predictable consumer responses to price signals.

Taking this approach helps to mitigate consumer concerns over privacy protection, and it allows the consumer, not the utility or regulatory agency, to make energy resource allocation decisions within the home.

Moreover, without something like what is described above, the plug-in hybrid car concept cannot be accommodated into the electricity grid. This is a huge point, not be be ignored. (See the footnote below.)

To implement this approach, we need some major changes in the operating reserve rules and disturbance control standards set out by NERC and implemented by the regional grid coordinating councils. We also need the concept of the mathematical model of the consumer demand function to be added to the smart grid standards being developed right now by various groups, including NIST, the OpenSG Users Group, the ZigBee Alliance, and the GridWise Alliance.

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Footnote

Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles - Another area of concern are PHEVs. This is one technology which completely shatters the central generation to end-consumer power system model that is in operation today. Most aspects of these load and storage devices (in technical terms) are yet defined. Policies and regulations are also not quite complete and certainly business models for energy accounting are sorely lacking. There are several cross-industry groups assessing these gaps and proposing solutions. Utilities are attempting to prepare by obtaining advanced metering devices which are able to perform bi-directional energy accounting, by developing strategies around home area networks and information models, and investigating financial accounting strategies, but much of this work is incomplete.

(Quoted from Smart Grid Standards Assessment and Recommendations for Adoption and Development, Draft 0.83, February 2009, by Erich W. Gunther, et al, of EnerNex Corporation for the California Energy Commission.)