Offshore Wind and Ports - What’s the big logistical bottleneck that concerns the British as they try to build a formidable offshore wind industry?  Port capacity.  The good news:  The UK’s Crown Estate leased nine sites offshore early this year that, if fully developed, will provide 32 GW of electricity - 25% of the UK’s needs - by 2020!  The bad news:  Ports lack the space and infrastructure to handle a big ramp up for outfitting these big wind farms.  So, the word that money for port upgrades will be included in the new, very tight UK budget is welcome to offshore developers - and folks concerned about climate change.  A big British offshore wind presence is going to help us all advance on the renewable energy front.

Severn Barrage - This ambitious attempt to harness the massive tides in the Severn Estuary has, however, taken a hit from the new budget.  The Guardian reports that because the British taxpayers would bear the brunt of the costs for this project, slated to provide as much as 5% of UK electricity - and cost £30 billion (before overruns) - the government has punted.  It’s a great idea, on paper, and the La Rance facility in Brittany has been cranking out 240 MW of juice at peak since the 1960s.  But the British are hard pressed for cash, and sometimes reality needs to be faced.

(Maybe they’ll deploy a large array of these babies from Atlantis instead.) 

Nuclear Power - Speaking of reality, even in the face of the nearly complete lack of economic reality for new nuclear power, the government is pressing on.  Chris Huhne, the secretary of state for energy and climate change - and a leading member of the Liberal Democrats, a party that adamantly opposes new nuclear - is leading the charge for the coalition government.  I noted here, lauding the German public for its outspoken opposition to nuclear power, that the website of the Liberal Democrats says:  “More nuclear power will soak up subsidy, centralise energy production and hinder development of Britain’s vast renewable resources. Nuclear has a dirty legacy and increases global security risks. We oppose construction of further nuclear power stations.”  Coalition politics really does make very strange bedfellows indeed.

Carbon Capture and Storage - Interestingly, to me anyway, the Lib Dems support CCS, but the Guardian says the government is shelling out £1 billion for its continued R&D.  I think it’s a black hole, and governments are only embracing it in order to placate some powerful mining and utility interests.

(It would be great if the renewables industry had the kind of juice that the fossil fuel folks continue to exploit to their advantage.  At least one solar industry leader sounded the call recently.)

It was shocking and sad to learn that the great Hermann Scheer died last night.  He leaves behind an extraordinary legacy.  That he had such vision, energy and commitment is one of the reasons why renewable energy is taking its rightful place in the world economy.  It will be, before much longer, the dominant form of energy.  I quoted Amory Lovins here:  “The Renewable Revolution has been won.  Sorry, if you missed it.”  Scheer’s contribution to winning the revolution is incalculable.

I wrote about Scheer in this post from last December.  He was a leading Social Democratic member of the German parliament and the principal architect of the German National Renewable Energy Act.  Through a feed-in tariff created by the law, a premium price is paid to providers of renewable energy.  This fostered a quantum leap in renewable activity in Germany.  (For background on this, see Scheer explaining it at this video taken from Nova’s program, “Saved by the Sun.”)

Scheer was the President of EUROSOLAR, the European Association for Renewable Energy, and General Chairman of the World Council for Renewable Energy (WCRE).  He was a tireless advocate for renewable energy - and reason.

If you can, take the time to watch his talk at the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) from a year ago in Washington.  The video segment with Scheer and his introduction by ACORE’s head begins at 43:45.

Following up on my post of the other day, there’s a poll just out from the Financial Times and Harris:  in the US and the five largest EU countries, “Big majorities of the public … favor the building of more wind farms in their countries, varying from 90% in Spain and 87% in the U.S. to 77% in France. And large numbers of them favor it ’strongly.’”  On new nuclear power, “Opinions … are more mixed and vary by country. The public is more or less equally divided in the U.S., Britain and France but clear majorities are opposed in Italy (60%), Spain (63%) and even more strongly in Germany (77%).”  (As I’ve noted, the Germans get it.)

Meanwhile, one of the FT’s energy magi, Ed Crooks, had a story earlier this week echoing the theme that new nuclear is fighting an uphill battle in the US owing to its inability to compete economically.  One reason?  It’s being murdered by natural gas on price.  With the shale gas bonanza coming into full swing, gas is going to be competitive for a long time.  As John Rowe, head of Exelon, the utility with the biggest presence in nuclear power in the US says in the article:  “Gas is queen.”  (Rowe strikes me as a peculiarly level-headed individual.  See Speaking of Nukes … here.)

Arrogant - and wholly boneheaded - quote of the week comes from the FT article.  According to James Connaughton, Constellation Energy Group’s vice-president for corporate affairs and policy:  “There is no reasonable scenario by which we can meet the government’s aims for energy security, air quality and cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, without building in excess of 100 new nuclear plants.”  Indeed?  Read this blog sometime, Jim.  For you, the posts on renewable energy and energy efficiency.  (Connaughton spent eight years in the last President Bush’s White House as the chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality.  Nuff said.)

The good folks at Change.org have organized this year’s Blog Action Day around water.  (Last year was climate change.)

Click here to find out why water matters, and to link up with groups that are very deeply involved.  Then dive in and get involved yourself.

The venerable Matt Wald has been covering nuclear power and renewable energy technology at the NY Times since Hector was a pup.  He has the lead story today:  Offshore Wind Power Line Wins Backing.  A high-voltage cable, costing $5 billion and with a 6 GW capacity, would run offshore connecting wind farms from Virginia to New Jersey.  Google is on board, adding its considerable technical and financial weight to the project.

I remember a study from decades ago saying that New England could run wholly on offshore wind power.  Well, that was just a study, but we’re talking about reality today.  The embarrassingly unprincipled opposition to Cape Wind has failed.  This project, stalled for nine years, is going into the water.  Governors from all up and down the Atlantic seaboard are enthusiastic about offshore.  It’s going to be a long time before we catch up to Europe, but there’s just enormous upside potential.  Plus, for us effete Eastern intellectual snobs, it’s local.  We don’t need to import our wind from the Great Plains.  It’s homegrown.

Wald wrote the other day about nuclear power’s financial woes in the US.  The headline puts it down to a sluggish economy, but the head of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) says, as Wald reports,  “…the nuclear industry will experience no renaissance for the most simple of reasons:  ‘nuclear reactors make no economic sense.’”  This echoes Amory Lovins’s analysis as well as Citigroup’s view on nuclear for the UK.

As Bob Dylan would say, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

We were in Cambridge this past weekend having a fine time, very much including getting out for Honkfest.  The best band we saw was the Seed & Feed Marching Abominable, “Atlanta’s wildest community band,” but they were all pretty anarchically blessed.

Meanwhile, 350.org was staging it’s 10/10/10 Global Work Party.  We saw some evidence of  the good folks taking part in this, but then Cambridge is pretty green all the time, with the City being quite serious about fostering climate protection initiatives, and the Boston metropolitan area being excellent for mass transit and biking and walking.  M.I.T. , Harvard and Tufts are also, not incidentally, very involved in energy, climate policy, and the entire array of sustainable practices that are going to save our sorry butts - if we embrace them.

In my last post below, I once again lauded President Obama and his administration for taking action on clean tech. Hear the message on clean tech jobs and the economy from the President himself.

If we wait for the US Senate to create even adequate, let alone progressive, thoughtful legislation mandating a price on carbon, it will be too late.  I have written about the manifestly undemocratic public policy graveyard that is the US Senate and its denizens a number of times.  If you care about the parlous state of our climate system, The New Yorker had an article this week that was particularly painful to read:  “As the World Burns.”

However, I do think the article has painted the Obama Administration in an unfairly poor light, as has commentary from a number of sources, particularly my brothers and sisters on the Left.  I wrote here, for instance, about Joe Romm’s frankly ludicrous assertion that Obama’s presidency is “failing” because of his inability to pull a legislative climate change rabbit out of the hat of the Senate.  (Is that straining at the metaphor?)

In any event, because of the stark reality of the Senate’s ongoing and seemingly endless mis-, mal- and nonfeasance, as portrayed so vividly in the New Yorker article, the grownups in the Obama Administration have been moving forward with all due speed.  I have celebrated their initiatives here many times and I hope to continue to do so for the next six years.

For instance, as the excellent Elisabeth Rosenthal wrote the other day at the NYT, the Department of Defense is moving vigorously forward in deploying renewable energy at its bases and alternative fuels for its fleets, very much including aircraft, with the Air Force seeking to have its entire complement certified to run on biofuels by next year.  One very senior DOD official is particularly gung ho: “‘There are a lot of profound reasons for doing this, but for us at the core it’s practical,’ said Ray Mabus, the Navy secretary and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who has said he wants 50 percent of the power for the Navy and Marines to come from renewable energy sources by 2020. That figure includes energy for bases as well as fuel for cars and ships.”  50% by 2020!  (And the breathtakingly regressed body that is the US Senate is talking about 15% by 2040.  Child, please!)

For more from Rosenthal, listen in on the podcast interview with her at the article.

Meanwhile, the White House announced that it will install solar panels and a solar hot water heater on the roof.  This is a return to the time when Jimmy Carter had solar on the White House.  Ronald Reagan, you may remember, contemptuously ripped that array down.

Over at the Department of the Interior, Secretary Ken Salazar made several separate big announcements this week granting the use of public land for pathbreaking installations of utility-scale renewables.  The first announcement included two solar projects:  Imperial Valley (709 MW) and Chevron Lucerne Valley (45 MW).  Another project, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, will produce up to 370 MW with a “power tower” from BrightSource Energy.    (I saw another power tower in operation a little over a year ago in Andalusia.  It’s really quite beautiful.)

To cap a very big week for renewable energy in the United States, Secretary Salazar also announced the signing of a 28-year lease for Cape Wind, the first offshore wind power project for our coastal waters.  Cape Wind is particularly gratifying because the project’s developers have battled through nine years of stomach-churning obfuscation, ill will and downright prevarication from its opponents, mostly moneyed folks named Kennedy, Koch and Mellon, among others.  Cape Wind’s story is epic.  Jim Gordon, Cape Wind’s guiding genius, said here:  “We’re ready to roll up our sleeves and get to work building America’s first offshore wind farm that will create hundreds of jobs, increase our energy independence and promote a healthier and more hopeful energy future.”  Good on ‘ya, Jim.

Big party on Sunday!  Check out the action where you are and get your work shoes on.  (They should definitely double as dancing shoes.)  We’ll be at Honkfest in Cambridge, being free, green, laughing, dancing and generally spreading the word.

For last year’s festivities, see this:

I was at this year’s Urban Green Expo in New York and vastly enjoyed William McDonough’s keynote presentation.  He is an architect, designer, sustainability expert (from way back), and co-guru of the visionary Cradle to Cradle framework for building and living.

McDonough’s talk had several key themes:

* there are no wastes, only nutrients;
* we are all indigenous - to the planet;
* we need to accelerate the pace of eco-effective design (because the planet is in crisis);
* and we need to move from a mindset of doing less bad to doing more good.

On this last, he said that environmental regulations were a sign of design failure.  If we are spending time and energy chasing bad actors, then we’re not pursuing the creative.  If we say, for instance, that we need to reduce various criteria air pollutants, like carbon monoxide and ozone, to “acceptable” levels then we are not shooting the moon:  seeking ways to eliminate carbon monoxide and ozone.  Not incidentally, these sorts of goals are entirely within reach.  (Think electrification of transportation for instance.)

I love the idea of wastes as nutrients.  Sewage treatment plants, for instance, can provide a continuous stream of organic fertilizer.  Milwaukee’s been doing it for 85 years.  NYC for 20.  There ought to be a federal law mandating it.  In China, nightsoil use is a pervasive and productive practice.  (McDonough told a story of when he was a child in Japan and the “honey wagons” used to come at night to pick up the human waste to transport it to the local farms for use as manure.)  “Methane to Markets” is an international initiative to recover gas from landfills.  Waste-to-energy plants, with virtually total pollution control in place, are transforming some energy markets.  Biochar can utilize several forms of waste to provide a high-grade soil additive, among its other extraordinary properties, including sequestering potentially massive amounts of carbon.

I took a swing at creating a “waste as nutrient” system for New York City a few years back:  Urban Gold.  This was a whole system for the management of NYC’s modest 25,000 tons per day of municipal solid waste.  Almost everything was a feedstock - recyclables, compostable matter, and material that could be pyrolyzed or gasified to produce biochar and biofuel.  At the time, there were more than a few glimmers of interest:  from some well-placed Sanitation Department officials, some folks at the Economic Development Corporation, from a Congressman very interested in infrastructure and transportation, from some environmentalists and from private-sector folks.  I also designed a similar scheme for Bulgaria - just on paper, alas, but I think this sort of approach to MSW management is wholly viable.  (Feel free to check in with me if you think it’s worth pursuing in your neighborhood.)  See also the excellent work of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR).

I first became aware of McDonough over 25 years ago when he designed the headquarters of the Environmental Defense Fund in NYC.  This was a green building breakthrough.  The Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Audubon Society followed suit with their respective headquarters, also in New York.  McDonough, perhaps not incidentally, exhorted the architects, designers, developers, students and others at Urban Green Expo to, as the conference theme stated, “push the envelope” - and he cited the uniqueness and creative possibilities in New York.  As I noted the other day in my previous post on this event, the organizers, the Urban Green Council, have been working very hard to promote the letter and the spirit of sustainable design, to excellent effect.

He told the story of his first solar house, in Ireland, and that he invited a friend, Seamus Heaney, to write a dedication.  Heaney came and, after some time pondering, pronounced of the house:  “This is a fierce commotion.”  McDonough exhorted us to be fierce in design, in our commitment to sustainability, in our defense of children and their future on the planet.

McDonough has had some truly remarkable projects over many years.  One is the Ford truck factory in Dearborn, built on one of the most polluted sites in the world.  To clean up the 1,100 acre footprint, laden with toxics and heavy metals, McDonough stipulated the use of phytoremediation:  using plants to break down contaminants.  This approach is saving Ford billions of dollars.  The facility also has a 10-acre green roof - the largest in the US.  (See the powerpoint on this extraordinary project.)

He has also recently completed NASA’s “Sustainability Base” at its Ames Research Center in California. It is a model for the Obama administration’s executive order mandating zero-net energy consumption for its buildings.

One of the cooler concepts from McDonough’s shop is the design for a building housing biomedical research labs in Barcelona.  Each floor has its distinctive butterfly colors.  Each Saturday, local school children will be invited to the release of thousands of real butterflies from the atrium.  “How many buildings do you know that hatch butterflies?” McDonough asked.

There is much more in McDonough’s work.  His talk was riveting, like the best Shakespeare I’ve seen with the Royal Shakespeare Company or one of the better Grateful Dead shows from the late ’60s.  (Yeah, I’m old.)  The commitment and the fire of Bill McDonough have been a gift to the architectural and design communities, but also to those of us - you included I trust - who have been working to cool the planet with cool approaches like butterflies in the atrium.  Do more good.