$ubsidies for (cough) ethanol?

If the announcement of a new government study doesn’t send your heart racing, Grist staff-writer Tom Philpott has an excellent overview of the ethanol energy analysis in today’s edition.

For my fellow ADHDers, here’s the take home message from a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study: Government funding of corn-based ethanol, bad.

Philpott translates the CBO’s data into simple English: “Subsidizing corn-based ethanol is a mind-numbingly expensive way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Another of Philpott’s bullet points: The modern agribusiness model for growing corn is so energy intensive that corn-based ethanol “is really just a clever way to convert natural gas and coal into car fuel.”

There’s another good reason for steering clear of ethanol, one not mentioned in the CBO study or in Philpott’s summary.

Ethanol kills.

In a 2009 study, Professor Mark Z. Jacobson, director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford University, ranked alternative fuel sources for powering cars, based on environmental effects. Ethanol ranked at the bottom of the list, in part because the tailpipe emissions from burning bio-fuel cause as many premature deaths as gasoline — somewhere around 10,000 each year.

So let’s see: Crazy-expensive, causes deaths from air pollution. But, heh, ethanol is “Alternative Energy.” So, it’s all good, right? Sure, and because smokers sometimes switch to chewing tobacco as an alternative to cigarettes, a wad of Skoal could be considered health-food.

Mark Jacobson's all-electric Tesla roadster

If you’re Mark Jacobson, director of Stanford University’s Atmosphere/Energy Program, you drive an all-electric, cherry-red Tesla roadster, with a license plate proclaiming “GHG FREE.” (GHG = Green House Gases)

Solar power, Charge!

“Note that the license plate is a little exaggerated,” Jacobson wrote The Phoenix Sun via email, “but the power does come from rooftop solar.”

If you’re a regular Sun reader, you know we’ve covered Jacobson’s work in the past. But after he co-authored a cover story for Scientific American on how to create a 100% renewable energy society, the editors at Grist felt Jacobson’s “big picture” thinking merited a full interview.

You can read that Q&A with Jacobson, here, on Grist.

Speaking earlier today at a press conference in Copenhagen, the head of the main European photovoltaic (PV) industry organization made the case for PV as a fundamental solution to climate change.

“The problem is global,” said Adel El Gammal, “and PV can bring a global solution.”

El Gammal, secretary general of the European Photovoltaic Industry Association (EPIA) since 2008, pointed to PV’s major pluses.  His key points included:

• Solar energy is massively available.
• PV can provide distributed electrical generation (as well as centralized).
• It’s a scalable technology, from a few watts to MWs.
• PV can ramp up production very quickly
• It is one of the only technologies that be easily integrated into a dense urban setting.

The potential for solar energy is not just theoretical, he added. In the last year alone, El Gammal said, PV accounted for nearly 20% of all new electrical generation in Europe — some 4.7 GW.

Solar in the “Sunbelt Countries”

In the developing world, El Gammal sees an even larger role for solar PV.

The land between 35°N latitude and 35°S is sometimes referred to as the Sunbelt Countries, for reasons that are obvious after glancing at the map to the right, showing the amount of solar energy falling on the planet.

“Sunbelt countries contain 75% of the world’s population,” said El Gammal, “and are also the fastest growing populations.”

Many of the sunbelt countries have a poor electrical infrastructure — with many as 1.6 billion people living with access to electricity. And where electricity is available it is generated primarily by fossil fuels and at a higher cost than elsewhere.

“PV is a perfect solution to match increasing electrical demand” in sunbelt countries, said El Gammal. It is already competitive with peak load generation and, he added, in two to three years, PV will be competitive with medium load generation.

These projections come from several studies commissioned by the EPIA, primarily the report SET for 2020, published in June of this year. That study takes its name, and its mission from the European Union’s climate and energy policies goals adopted in 2007. These include the so-called 20/20/20 goals:

• Reduce greenhouse-gas emissions unilaterally by 20% from 1990 levels;
• Ensure that renewable energy represents a 20% share of total energy use;
• Reduce overall energy consumption by 20%.

By combining a number of best-case scenarios, the EPIA claims that PV can provide more than half of the EU target for renewable energy, moving from 1% of all electrical generation today to up to 12% by 2020.

A Needed Vision

But is such a rapid shift really possible, or is this just a case of industrial wishful thinking? I put that question to Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, and director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at the school.

Although Jacobson couldn’t speak to the details of SET for 2020 plan, he told The Phoenix Sun that the report is “the kind of vision needed to solve serious problems we are all facing with respect to climate, air pollution health, and energy security.”

Like El Gammal (who told a reporter today that “We have to change our relationship with energy”), Jacobson does not think half-measures are adequate. “I think we need to transform our energy infrastructure entirely,” he said, “to a combination of large scale renewables, including PV, and this needs to occur over the period of 20-40 years (2030-2050)….PV will play a pivotal role in this transition, so large-scale plans such as this are welcome.”

(Jacobson is no stranger to large-scale plans. He is co-author, with Mark Delucchi, of the recent Scientific American cover story, A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables).

Which Energy Future?

El Gammal ended by pointing out what so many seem to miss: that our energy choice has very little to do with technology per se. It’s a question of policy.

“There is no technological issue with PV,” he said. “It is just a matter of political will.”

Which is both bad news and good

Bad, because politics are far more complicated than any technology. Good, because politicians are the servants of public will. That means the choice is ours, as is the responsibility for conveying our determined wishes to our leaders.

Resources

To download the executive summary of the SET FOR 2020 report, click on the report image. (PDF file.)

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Stanford Professor Mark Jacobson

I was disappointed when I discovered that the list of experts at last week’s Clean Energy Summit would not include Stanford University’s Mark Jacobson. Of course, no individual is indispensable at such a summit. But as the day went by I felt his absence more and more keenly.

That’s because Jacobson is one of the few scientists looking at energy’s Big Picture. How big?

In an article published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science earlier this year, Jacobson reported the first quantitative, scientific study evaluating the top energy sources based on:

1. Potential for delivering adequate power for electricity and vehicles
2. Impacts on global warming
3. Air pollution mortality
4. Energy security
5. Water supply
6. Land use
7. Wildlife
8. Water chemical pollution
9. Thermal pollution
10. Nuclear proliferation
11. Undernutrition

By using each of these factors to assess ten major energy sources, Jacobson produced a list that should be the starting point in any discussion about our energy future. Here’s what he found:

The top electrical generating energy sources are (from best to worst):

1. Wind
2. Concentrated Solar Power (CSP)
3. Geothermal power
4. Tidal power
5. Solar photovoltaics (PV)
6. Wave power
7. Hydroelectric power
8. Nuclear power
9. Coal (even with Carbon Capture and Sequestration, CCS)

Nuclear and coal actually tied for last place.

For powering vehicles, Jacobson produced a second list. Again going from best to worst:

1. Wind BEV (Battery Electric Vehicles)
2. Wind HFCV (Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles)
3. Solar CSP-BEV
4. Geothermal BEV
5. Tidal BEV
6. Solar PV-BEV
7. Wave BEV
8. Hydroelectric BEV
9. Nuclear BEV
10. Coal CCS-BEV (tied with #9)
11. Corn ethanol
12. Cellulosic ethanol

Jacobson’s findings are a surprising blow to backers of ethanol-based bio-fuels. He also had harsh words for politicians who are pouring money into this area. “Biofuels are the most damaging choice we could make in our efforts to move away from using fossil fuels,” Jacobson told a reporter. “We should be spending to promote energy technologies that cause significant reductions in carbon emissions and air-pollution mortality, not technologies that have either marginal benefits or no benefits at all.”

Jacobson highlights the need to fund wind energy in particular. He says that the entire US fleet of vehicles could be powered by as many as 144,000 5 MW wind turbines. That’s a large number. But the country has met higher production goals in the past. In WWII, Jacobson says, America built 300,000 airplanes — a far larger and more difficult job than building wind turbines.

Such a program would be positive way to stimulate and grow our economy as well, he adds.

Click me

“There is a lot of talk among politicians that we need a massive jobs program to pull the economy out of the current recession,” Jacobson says. “Well, putting people to work building wind turbines, solar plants, geothermal plants, electric vehicles and transmission lines would not only create jobs but would also reduce costs due to health care, crop damage and climate damage from current vehicle and electric power pollution, as well as provide the world with a truly unlimited supply of clean power.”

The paper is available by clicking on the journal cover.