Ocean Thermal Energy: New Green Energy

Sky-High California Gas Prices Have a Green Additive

Sky-High California Gas Prices Have a Green Additive
The national average is $2.76 a gallon, while Golden State drivers pay $3.88. Eco-virtue is expensive.

By
ALLYSIA FINLEYJuly 17, 2015 7:08 p.m. ET
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PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

For most American families, the ritual summertime road trip is a lot cheaper this year thanks to plunging gas prices, propelled in part by the U.S. shale-oil boom. The average gas price nationally has dropped by nearly 25% to $2.76 a gallon over the past 12 months.

California is another story. While gasoline in the Golden State is averaging $3.88 a gallon, the average price in the Los Angeles market shot up 65 cents this week to $4.30 a gallon, about 20 cents higher than a year ago. Gas prices surpassed $5 per gallon at some stations, hitting $5.49 in downtown L.A., according to GasBuddy.com.

As usual, purported consumer activists are blaming collusion among putatively monopolistic oil companies. The real culprit is anti-carbon regulation promoted by a cartel of green activists and liberal politicians that is aimed at raising energy costs to discourage consumption. Sticker shock at the pump, like water rationing and high electric rates, is the price Californians must pay for their environmental virtue.

For most of the 1980s and ’90s, Californians paid roughly the national average, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data. Since 1999—the year Democrat Gray Davis assumed the governorship following 16 years of Republican leadership—California gas prices have sizably surpassed the national average and most of the lower 48 states, principally due to more stringent fuel regulations. California gas taxes are also about 12 cents higher than the national average.

In 1999, Mr. Davis’s Air Resources Board banned the fuel additive MTBE—a smog-reducing oxygenate that in low quantities has been detected in groundwater. It also adopted cleaner “reformulated” fuel standards that raised production costs. A tiramisu of other environmental mandates have been layered into the state’s fuel standards.

The results? By 2006 Californians were paying 23 cents more than the national average for regular gas. The disparity increased to 40 cents in 2014 and now sits at $1.11.

Next to crude, electricity ranks as refiners’ largest production cost. Electric rates like gas prices have soared in California thanks to the state’s mandate that requires that renewables make up 33% of the state’s electricity by 2020. Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic legislators have proposed raising the mandate to 50% by 2030.

Over the past three years, electric rates in California rose by 2.18 cents per kilowatt-hour—about four times the rate nationally—as more solar and wind power has come online. Meanwhile, nuclear plants, which generate cheaper electricity, have been decommissioned, and hydropower has flagged because of the drought.

The state’s 2006 global-warming law, AB32, also established a cap-and-trade program that requires large industrial companies operating in the state to cut their carbon emissions or buy permits. Cap-and-trade auctions commenced in 2012, but this year refiners have to buy permits.

Based on an Air Resources Board analysis, the Western States Petroleum Association last year extrapolated that cap and trade would add 16 cents to 76 cents a gallon to the retail price of gas. Other economists projected a 10-cent bump. Sure enough, gas prices skyrocketed this year, though it’s tough to disentangle the impact of cap and trade from other ill-conceived environmental policies.

State and federal environmental mandates have forced several smaller, inefficient refineries in California to shut down over the past two decades. Only 14 refineries in California produce the state’s pristine-burning fuel, and most operate at nearly full capacity to stay cost-effective. Few refiners outside the state blend California’s reformulated fuel.

In most of the country, a problem at one refinery won’t significantly affect retail gas prices. But in California, when one refinery shuts down, others can’t pick up the slack. And it can take weeks to import refined fuel by tanker. In the meantime, customers are stuck paying higher prices.

Hence this year’s price swoon. Following an explosion at an Exxon Mobil refinery in Torrance, and a labor stoppage at a Tesoro plant in Martinez this winter, gasoline prices rose nearly a dollar. Eventually, imported oil helped cover the supply-demand gap. But recently a Tesoro refinery in Carson reduced its output to perform annual maintenance, which has again stretched supply in the Southern California market.

In May Democratic state legislators held hearings to “investigate” the gas price spike. San Francisco hedge-fund grandee Tom Steyer has demanded subpoenas of oil-industry executives.

“As everyone knows, the oil companies have been charging Californians up to $1 billion per month more for gasoline than if we paid the national average,” the billionaire environmentalist asserted. “It’s time to put an end to the Big Oil giveaway.” His remedy? An oil-extraction tax.

Here’s a better idea: Mr. Steyer and his liberal friends in Sacramento should take the stand to explain why they’re gouging consumers to indulge their rich green appetites.

Ms. Finley is an editorial writer at the Journal.

Governor Brown wants to Reduce Gas consumption by 50%

Gov. Brown Talks To KCAL9 About Bill That Would Mandate Reduction In Gas Usage

July 16, 2015 10:26 PM

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 Fuel Prices, Gasoline, Jerry Brown

Dave Bryan

Dave Bryan joined the KCAL9 news team in March, 1994, after ha...

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Election Returns

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — As Gov. Jerry Brown prepares to travel to Rome next week for an international climate conference, the debate over a bill aimed at reducing gas usage in California is heating up.

Brown fully supports SB-350, which would mandate a 50-percent cutback in California’s gas usage in the next 15 years, arguing that it’s a prime factor in global warming.

“We’ve got a serious problem here,” he told KCAL9 Political Reporter Dave Bryan via satellite. “Burning oil and gas and coal and diesel is a big part of the problem. We’ve got to find new bio-fuels. We have to be more efficient. We’ve got a lot to do. And by the way, if we do nothing, the cost is unimaginable.”

“We think this is reckless legislation and one that people certainly need to be aware of because it’ll impact every single motorist in the state of California,” Tupper Hull of the Western States Petroleum Association said via Skype.

Critics charge the bill provides no specific plan to achieve the massive cutback in gas usage. That would be left up to the California Air Resources Board, which those critics, like the oil industry say, would have no limits on what it could mandate.

The impact on Californians, they argue, could be devastating.

“What are they supposed to do to get to work? To get their kids to school?” asked Hull. “What is supposed to replace all of this gasoline and diesel that’s gonna be taken out of the system?”

“Well, of course, the people who are gonna sell 50 percent less petroleum are not only gonna have questions, they’re gonna have a fierce, unrelenting opposition. So, let’s be clear about that,” said Brown.

Cutting gas consumption in half, though, may be especially difficult in the Los Angeles area, where sitting in traffic jams is a long hated ritual and the rapid transit system is still decades away from being a truly comprehensive regional people mover, like New York or Chicago have.

While the oil industry have been leading the charge and criticizing the bill, Assemblyman Roger Hernandez, a Democrat from West Covina, was quoted in The Los Angeles Times as questioning whether an appointed board should be making the rules for cutting gas consumption, charging the bill would give them a blank check of unregulated and unlimited power over the lives of Californians.

In an interview, Brown asked in response: who do you want regulating the consumption? The oil companies?

“You saw what they did and what? Did gasoline go up 80 cents in the last week? Who’s regulating that? Well, the companies were. So, you can have a company regulate or you can have an agency of government,” Brown said, adding: “You need an authority within government to set the conditions of survivability.”

The bill appears to be well on its way to passage having already cleared the state Senate and some Assembly committees, but the debate over how to cut in half California’s dependency on gas by 2030 is possib

New Discovery cuts Air Conditioning Energy Use

Cool Discovery Blasts Summer Heat Into 'the Cold Darkness of the Universe'

By Eric Roston  Nov 26, 2014 10:01 AM PT  

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In this illustration, the reflective panel is coated with a material invented by Stanford engineers. They designed it to help cool buildings without air conditioning. The material works in two ways--It reflects incoming sunlight (yellow splotch) that would otherwise heat the building. And it sends heat from inside the structure directly into space as infrared radiation (reddish rays). The blue areas on an otherwise warm roof show the cooling effect.

The way we cool buildings in the summer has a lot of middlemen. What if we could cut out the middlemen and just eject the heat out to space?

Technology being developed at Stanford University could slash the need for summertime air conditioning, which currently uses up about 15 percent of the $180 billion spent on energy for commercial buildings in the U.S.

Lowering a building's temperature typically requires burning coal or gas to generate electricity, which runs the AC, which lowers the mercury. Far easier and cheaper than burning fuel to cool hot places would be to both stop the heat before it comes in and suck it out when it's too hot.

Research published today in the journal Nature describes a new, experimental material that can do those two things. Thin, silicon-based wafers act as both a rooftop mirror, reflecting sunlight and heat skyward, and as a kind of thermal funnel, drawing a building's internal heat up through the roof. Neither requires a volt of electricity.

The Stanford material can reduce the temperature by up to 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit), below the outside air temperature, according to the study. Experiments have proven successful on an eight-inch-diameter wafer. The researchers' next job is to scale up the effort. "We need to get to a point where I can cover part of your roof," said Shanhui Fan, a co-author and professor of electrical engineering. "So there's still a way to go."

Source: Norbert von der Groeben, Stanford Engineering

Stanford electrical engineering professor Shanhui Fan (center) gazes into the... Read More

The reflective panel and coating can probably be manufactured using existing fabrication techniques, Fan said. Scaling-up will require more time, testing and money. The work so far has been supported by the U.S. Energy Department's high-end research agency, ARPA-E. The scientists haven't yet formed a company to commercialize their research.

Reflecting heat and light is easy enough to imagine for anyone familiar with mirrors, or with efforts, like New York City's, to paint roofs white so they heat up less. The real trick is "venting" a building's heat out to space, which has to do with a peculiar feature of the Earth's atmosphere.

Trace gases, such as carbon dioxide and water vapor, have an outsize influence on the Earth's climate, because they prevent heat from re-radiating back out to space. The research takes advantage of the fact that there are wavelengths of heat, or infrared energy, that are not blocked by the atmosphere.

There's a kind of heat window in the atmosphere that no naturally occurring substance, trace gas or otherwise, can block. Set atop a roof, the new material teases this heat out of the building. It could be applied to cars, too. The silicon and hafnium oxides in the wafer absorb and emit heat at the same wavelength that the atmosphere can't block. So it just harnesses energy coming up out of the building and shoots it out of the atmosphere, into the great beyond.

The great beyond is where it gets fun.

For decades, environmental futurists have pointed up at the Sun as the obvious answer to all of our needs. It provides the energy living things need to live and grow. And ever-improving technologies can harness it for residential and commercial power.

The Stanford researchers suggest that what's really interesting isn't the Sun -- but everything else in the universe: the emptiness. The universe is absolutely freezing. Really: It's a few notches above absolute zero. The new Nature paper suggests that humanity should harness what it calls "the cold darkness of the Universe" as a renewable resource. Heat seeks out cold. And there is just no limit to the amount of heat that space would take off our hands.

The technology belongs to a field called nanophotonics -- a wing of nanotechnology that concerns structures tiny enough to interact with light. The Stanford invention appears to successfully reflect solar energy and shuttle the building's heat up, up and away during the hottest daylight hours, when it's needed most.

"I was surprised that you could actually accomplish that, because it's very challenging," said Marin Soljacic, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is familiar with the Stanford research but did not participate in it. "It has all the right ingredients that make it exciting."

A journal research article does not an energy revolution make. It is however, an intriguing technology with backing from a high-profile U.S. agency. It exposes how backwards our current system is of burning carbon minerals to make power to cool buildings. And, to hit the trifecta, it performs the rarest of all feats: it introduces into energy debates a new, renewable resource and a new way of thinking about, literally, the universe: It's the heat equivalent of an infinite garbage dump.

New Breakthrough in Fusion promises a new era of cheap, green energy.

Lockheed Martin Promises to Deliver Fusion Reactor in Just a Decade

Editor's Note: It looks like we won't be needing that high density housing after all.

 

The company believes nuclear fusion is the future of energy, expects its compact reactor will forever change the world

By Laura Sinpetru on October 18th, 2014 03:45 GMT

There's a lot of talk about going green energy-wise these days, chiefly because piles and piles of scientific papers are constantly reminding us that climate change and global warming are having their way with our planet.

The thing is that, of the folks who like to refer to themselves as supporters of clean energy, some are in favor of mainstream green power sources such as wind, wave and sun.

Others, like the folks behind technology company Lockheed Martin, have something entirely different on their mind. In a nutshell, these people strongly believe nuclear fusion is the future of energy.

What the heck is nuclear fusion?

For those unaware, nuclear fusion is all about getting atoms to come together, cuddle up to each other and fuse. More precisely, it's about figuring out a way to compel two light atomic nuclei to get together and birth a heavier one.

As explained by scientists, such a reaction – which, by the way, is the same one that fuels our Sun – releases massive amounts of energy. It doesn't, however, produce any radioactive waste or greenhouse gases.

Because of this, there are some people who very much like talking about nuclear fusion as if it were no more and no less than the holy grail of energy production.

What does Lockheed Martin have to do with it?

As it turns out, quite a lot. Thus, it was earlier this week when the company issued a statement saying that, having taken its time to research the ins and outs of nuclear fusion, it was confident that it would deliver a compact fusion reactor in about a decade.

What's more, the technology company maintains that the compact fusion reactor it has in the works will be comparable to a Class 8 trailer tractor. Simply put, it will be way smaller than most people would expect it to be.

“Skunk Works team is working on a new compact fusion reactor (CFR) that can be developed and deployed in as little as ten years. Currently, there are several patents pending that cover their approach,” Lockheed Martin says.

“While fusion itself is not new, the Skunk Works has built on more than 60 years of fusion research and investment to develop an approach that offers a significant reduction in size compared to mainstream efforts,” it adds.

Interestingly enough, the company swears to it that it will be done building a prototype of this compact nuclear fusion reactor in about 5 years. Besides, it argues that, once all the details get sorted out, it will only take it a year to build the actual reactor.

The thing is that, up until now, the company has failed to publish any scientific papers detailing its approach when it comes to using nuclear fusion as an energy source. Hence, it might be wise to take its announcement with a grain of salt.

To learn more about what nuclear fusion is about and how Lockheed Martin believes it can forever transform the world we live in, check out the video below.

EDITOR's NOTE TO THE CITIZENS OF MARINWOOD CSD : The twenty year "lease to own" contracts on first generation solar from prominent members of the Marin "Green Mafia" should be put under the microscope. Huge rebates are paid directly to the vendors but the full price retail price is charged to the city. In addition  the price of the solar arrays are dropping like a rock.   We will be stuck with OLD technology at inflated prices for twenty years.

Imagine if you went into a car dealership and you were offered a car for "no money down".  The car dealer offered you a twenty year lease on the full sticker price of the car.  Meanwhile, the dealer pockets a huge rebate from the manufacturer that nearly pays for the price of the car.  He gives you very "affordable" terms, telling you how much you will "save".  Next year, the price of your car drops.  In five years, new technology renders your car too expensive to drive and maintain yet you are "on the hook" for fifteen more years. Does this sound like a good deal to you?

Marinwood CSD voted down the SEI/Optony/Sol Ed contract in September 2014 for solid reasons  including the enormous cost,  the poor condition of our roofs housing the solar arrays, the questionable financing,  and technological obsolescence.  Bill Shea, Justin Kai and Deana Dearborn voted against the contract.  Bill Hansel and Tarey Read voted to approve the 70 page contract (DESPITE the lack of legal and financial analysis by competent professionals!) for a twenty year term.


Despite the clear will of the majority Hansel and Read, along with a few community members are insisting on bringing back the contract for a SECOND time to vote.  
 



If this was not bad enough,  the contract faces possible legal challenges due to the fact that a former CSD director was awarded the "no bid" solar consulting contract.  It was modified and signed outside of a public meeting review in violation of state laws.   Legal, financial and technical difficulties will be ahead if CSD directors Bill Hansel, Tarey Read approve the solar contract.



The prudent course of action for the Marinwood CSD, is to fix our roofs and other essential maintenance and revisit solar energy in the near future when solar array prices drop further. 


 




Come to the CSD meeting at 7 pm on Tuesday,  October 7th at the Marinwood Community Center.  We need to stop the back room deals and foolish waste of Marinwood CSD money.
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From the Washington Post:

The coming era of unlimited — and free — clean energy

 

By Vivek Wadhwa September 19

Solar energy is ready for primetime. (Nicky Loh/Bloomberg)

In the 1980s, leading consultants were skeptical about cellular phones.  McKinsey & Company noted that the handsets were heavy, batteries didn’t last long, coverage was patchy, and the cost per minute was exorbitant.  It predicted that in 20 years the total market size would be about 900,000 units, and advised AT&T to pull out.  McKinsey was wrong, of course.  There were more than 100 million cellular phones in use in 2000; there are billions now.  Costs have fallen so far that even the poor — all over world — can afford a cellular phone.

The experts are saying the same about solar energy now.  They note that after decades of development, solar power hardly supplies 1 percent of the world’s energy needs.  They say that solar is inefficient, too expensive to install, and unreliable, and will fail without government subsidies.  They too are wrong.  Solar will be as ubiquitous as cellular phones are.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil notes that solar power has been doubling every two years for the past 30 years — as costs have been dropping. He says solar energy is only six doublings — or less than 14 years — away from meeting 100 percent of today’s energy needs. Energy usage will keep increasing, so this is a moving target.  But, by Kurzweil’s estimates, inexpensive renewable sources will provide more energy than the world needs in less than 20 years.  Even then, we will be using only one part in 10,000 of the sunlight that falls on the Earth.

In places such as Germany, Spain, Portugal, Australia, and the Southwest United States, residential-scale solar production has already reached “grid parity” with average residential electricity prices.  In other words, it costs no more in the long term to install solar panels than to buy electricity from utility companies.  The prices of solar panels have fallen 75 percent in the past five years alone and will fall much further as the technologies to create them improve and scale of production increases.  By 2020, solar energy will be price-competitive with energy generated from fossil fuels on an unsubsidized basis in most parts of the world.  Within the next decade, it will cost a fraction of what fossil-fuel-based alternatives do.

It isn’t just solar production that is advancing at a rapid rate; there are also technologies to harness the power of wind, biomass, thermal, tidal, and waste-breakdown energy, and research projects all over the world are working on improving their efficiency and effectiveness.  Wind power, for example, has also come down sharply in price and is now competitive with the cost of new coal-burning power plants in the United States.  It will, without doubt, give solar energy a run for its money.  There will be breakthroughs in many different technologies, and these will accelerate overall progress.

Despite the skepticism of experts and criticism by naysayers, there is little doubt that we are heading into an era of unlimited and almost free clean energy.  This has profound implications.

First, there will be disruption of the entire fossil-fuel industry, starting with utility companies — which will face declining demand and then bankruptcy.  Several of them see the writing on the wall.  The smart ones are embracing solar and wind power.  Others are lobbying to stop the progress of solar power — at all costs.  Witness how groups in Oklahoma persuaded lawmakers to approve a surcharge on solar installations; the limited victory that groups backed by the Koch brothers won in Arizona to impose a $5 per month surcharge; and the battles being waged in other states.  They are fighting a losing battle, however, because the advances aren’t confined to the United States. Countries such as Germany, China, and Japan are leading the charge in the adoption of clean energies.  Solar installations still depend on other power sources to supply energy when the sun isn’t shining, but battery-storage technologies will improve so much over the next two decades that homes won’t be dependent on the utility companies.  We will go from debating incentives for installing clean energies to debating subsidies for utility companies to keep their operations going.

The environment will surely benefit from the elimination of fossil fuels, which will also boost most sectors of the economy.  Electric cars will become cheaper to operate than fossil-fuel-burning ones, for example.  We will be able to create unlimited clean water — by boiling ocean water and condensing it.  With inexpensive energy, our farmers can also grow hydroponic fruits and vegetables in vertical farms located near consumers.  Imagine skyscrapers located in cities that grow food in glass buildings without the need for pesticides, and that recycle nutrients and materials to ensure there is no ecological impact.  We will have the energy needed to 3D-print our everyday goods and to heat our homes.

We are surely heading into the era of abundance that Peter Diamandis has written about — the era when the basic needs of humanity are met through advancing technologies. The challenge for mankind will be to share this abundance, ensuring that these technologies make the world a better place.

Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, director of research at Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke, and distinguished fellow at Singularity University. His past appointments include Harvard Law School, University of California Berkeley, and Emory University.

Today's average electrical appliance has more computing power than the first generation personal computers.