ClimateChangeFork

Addressing a Global Issue –Fall 2015: What Have I Seen, What Have I Done to Take Part?

Posted on February 10, 2015 by climatechangefork

This will be a short blog. Any collective efforts to make the world a better place for all of us and for future generations have to start with individuals. The purpose here is to attract contributions about some of these individual efforts. I am inviting comments about your experiences and thoughts. The comment can take the approach of trying to convince somebody to join in a certain collective effort, or can speak to your own actions – reporting which strategies worked and which didn’t. It can address an article or book you’ve read, or a movie, play or TV program you’ve watched that you think should be shared with others. Tell us why you are interested in a specific topic, why you want to spread the word about it, how you plan to act on it or share it, and the results that you expect.

Much of what I focus on in this blog revolves around the interactions between humans and our environment, as well as their ramifications. As I continue to stress, many of the challenges that we face today can be framed in these terms. I will ask my students to participate and I am asking all of you to do so too. I will send individual email requests to authors who post comments that I find especially interesting, asking them to expand upon their thoughts in the form of guest blogs. I want this to be a lively and engaging discussion!

Please make sure that your comments are labelled with your real name and email and a short description of your background as it relates to your comment. The objective here is to relate the global issue that you want to address with your personal activity and interests.

Posted in Climate Change, Education | Tagged Adaptation, Climate Change, Comments, Democratization, Education, Environment, Media, Mitigation, Social Media, Sustainability | 49 Comments

Extinctions in the Anthropocene

Posted on February 3, 2015 by climatechangefork

Yesterday (Wednesday) was the first day of classes in my school. I am scheduled to teach two related courses this semester: Energy Use and Climate Change for advanced undergraduates, and Physics & Society for physics seniors and graduate students. I am going to start both courses with the picture shown in Figure 1. At first glance, one might confuse the picture either with mediocre art or maybe more generously with science fiction. Yet the picture comes from an article that was just published in Science magazine, one of the most prestigious publications in science (I subscribe to it, but anybody can download this picture through Google images). I mentioned that article, “Marine Defaunation: Animal Loss in the Global Ocean,” (Science, 347, 247 (2015)) last week, together with the book The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. Both publications deal with species extinctions of the past, present and future. The picture shows an artist’s representation of how the world once looked and how it might look in the future, both on land and in the ocean. As always, there is no way of knowing what the future will actually bring; the best we can do is to base our suppositions on models that we hope can inform us about what the future will entail. In this case, the picture’s scope extends from 50,000 years ago – the approximate time that early modern humans started to spread from Africa to Asia and Europe – to toward the end of this century (what I call the “End of Now” in my book).

Defaunation Over Time Figure 1
Timeline of marine and terrestrial defauntation

To fit the provided space, the horizontal baseline was presented on a logarithmic scale (August 6, 2012 blog). Additionally, to give us an idea of the environment, not only do the climates of the past and present show up on the middle of the diagram, but the projected IPCC temperature rise (October 14, 2014) is superimposed on the area that represents the future.

The starting supposition in both publications is that we are now living in the Anthropocene (May 14, 2013 blog) period. “Officially” we are not there yet, but with 7 billion people (as of October 2012) and growing, the change in designation becomes inevitable and humans will soon officially become the dominant part of the “natural environment.” A fully qualified group is now discussing the issue, Here is their charge:

The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) is an interdisciplinary body of scientists and humanists working under the umbrella of the International Commission on Stratigraphy and tasked with developing a proposal for the formal ratification of the Anthropocene as an official unit amending the Geological Time Scale. On occasion of its very first meeting, the AWG together with HKW convene a socio- and science-political forum, bringing together scientific experts, political stakeholders, media outlets, and an interested public. The forum presents insights into current scientific findings in defining a global impact of human activities and debates the far-reaching implications of the Anthropocene hypothesis for science and society alike.

Extinction Chronology Figure 2
Comparative chronology of human-associated terrestrial and marine animal extinctions.

Kolbert’s book takes the position that we were basically dominant as soon as humans started to move around about 50,000 years ago. Her reasoning is that we almost immediately started to use killing tools whose effectiveness were independent from our body size and our physical strength. The book focuses on the role that humans play throughout the entire period depicted by the picture. There is no question in my mind that the official designation of the time period will not be quite so broad.

The Science paper emphasizes defaunation in the oceans; its main argument is that in comparison with that on land, the process started much more recently in marine environments, and thus, in principle, is still reversible. Figure 2 illustrates the timeline for land defaunation (again, the image was posted through Google Images, not directly taken from the Science paper). The loss of species shown is confined mostly to megafauna – a class of animals often defined as having body mass that exceeds 45 kg. Many of these species became extinct in Australia between 16,000 – 50,000 BCE. These include monotremes, various marsupials (the largest one exceeding 2 tons), big birds, and large reptiles. There has long been a dispute over who is to blame for these extinctions, but recent studies show a clear “preference” for humans as a cause.

Here is a short (non-exhaustive) list of what is included among the North American megafauna:

Pleistocene fauna in North America included giant sloths; short-faced bears; several species of tapirs; peccaries (Including the long nosed and flat-headed peccaries); the American lion; giant tortoises; Miracinonyx (“American cheetahs”, not true cheetahs); saber-toothed cats like Smilodon and the scimitar cat, Homotherium; dire wolves; saiga; camelids such as two species of now extinct llamas and Camelops; at least two species of bison; stag-moose; the shrub-ox and Harlan’s muskox; 14 species of pronghorn (of which 13 are now extinct); horses; mammoths and mastodons; the beautiful armadillo and the giant armadillo-like Glyptotherium and giant beavers as well as birds like giant condors and other teratorns. The nine-foot sabertooth salmon lived at the time as well. In contrast, today the largest North American land animal is the American bison.

The global extinction phase in the figure is represented by the dodo, an animal that became extinct once the island of Mauritius was settled by humans (July 30, 2013 blog). Mass marine extinction, which is shown as a small vertical blue line that hugs the origin of the figure, only started in the 20^th Century, with the advent of industrialized fishing.

The Science paper differentiates between these different kinds of extinctions:

Local extinction

Defaunation has caused numerous geographic range constrictions in marine animal species, driving them locally extinct in many habitats. These effects have been particularly severe among large pelagic fishes, where ~90% of studied species have exhibited range contractions (8, 14) (Fig. 3). Local extinctions, however, are not unique to large pelagic predators. Close to a third of the marine fishes and invertebrates off the North American coasts that can be reliably sampled in scientific trawl surveys (often small to medium bodied species) have also exhibited range contractions (Fig. 3). Such contractions can result from the direct elimination of vulnerable subpopulations or from region-wide declines in abundance (14). Available data suggest that the magnitude of the range on tractions for this diverse set of trawl-surveyed marine species is, on average, less than the contractions observed for terrestrial animals such as mammals, birds, and butterflies. Though data deficiencies are abundant, most marine animal species also do not yet seem to exhibit some of the most extreme range contractions recorded for terrestrial animals. Asian tigers, for example, have lost ~93% of their historical range (15), whereas tiger sharks still range across the world’s oceans (16).

Ecological extinction

Reductions in the abundance of marine animals have been well documented in the oceans (17). Aggregated population trend data suggest that in the last four decades, marine vertebrates (fish, seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals) have declined in abundance by on average 22% (18). Marine fishes have declined in aggregate by 38% (17), and certain baleen whales by 80 to 90% (19). Many of these declines have been termed ecological extinctions—although the species in question are still extant, they are no longer sufficiently abundant to perform their functional roles. Ecological extinctions are well known in terrestrial environments and have been demonstrated to be just as disruptive as species extinctions (20). On land, we know of the phenomenon of “empty forests” where ecological extinctions of forest fauna alter tree recruitment, reshape plant dispersal, and cause population explosions of small mammals (1, 20, 21). We are now observing the proliferation of “empty reefs,” “empty estuaries,” and “empty bays” (7, 14, 22).

Commercial extinction

Species that drop below an abundance level at which they can be economically harvested are extinct from a commercial standpoint. On land, commercial extinctions affected species ranging from chinchilla to bison (23). Cases of commercial extinction are also common in the oceans. Gray whales were commercially hunted starting in the 1840s.

By 1900, their numbers were so depleted that targeted harvest of this species was no longer regionally tenable (24). Likewise, the great whales in Antarctica were serially hunted to commercial extinction (25). Not all species, however, are so “lucky” as to have human harvesters desist when they become extremely rare. Demand and prices for certain highly prized marine wildlife can continue to increase as these animals become less abundant—a phenomenon termed the anthropogenic Allee effect (26). Individual bluefin tuna can sell for >US$100,000, rare sea cucumbers >US$400/kg, and high-quality shark fins for >US$100/kg. Such species are the rhinos of the ocean—they may never be too rare to be hunted.

How could man – a comparatively small animal with (at best) a bow and arrow, be responsible for the extinction of beasts such as the wooly mammoth? Kolbert’s book presents an interesting theory: big animals like the mammoth or today’s African elephants and rhinos are big for a reason. They didn’t use to have any natural enemies.

A very large animal is living on the edge with respect to its reproductive rate. The gestation period of an elephant, for example, is twenty two months. Elephants don’t have twins, and they don’t start to reproduce until they are in their teens.

With such restrictions, they can survive only because they didn’t have predators that could take them on. Once man was able to develop the tools and the social skills to take them on, they didn’t stand a chance. It’s true that the human population was still small and the people killed only the animals that they needed for survival. With the help of computer modeling, however, researchers have found that such a dynamic was more than enough to cause mass extinction within a few hundred years – in geological time, that is an instant.

In the oceans, the process is just starting. 70% of the Earth is covered by oceans, which have an average depth that exceeds 2.2 miles. Marine animal ranges are naturally much larger than those of terrestrial animals with similar body weight. Man’s access is much more limited, or has been up to now. The balance has yet to be completely monopolized by humans. To some extent, fish can still flee from human predators as well as from the changing environment caused by anthropogenic climate change. However, our ever increasing population and technological developments are starting to close that gap. Hopefully, going on the business as usual warming scenario shown in Figure 1, we still have some time to restore the balance.

Posted in Climate Change | 6 Comments

Maine: Codfish Adaptation – Fishermen’s Distress and What the Rest of the World Can Do About It.

Posted on January 27, 2015 by climatechangefork

With a few small changes, the title of this blog could represent (and ring true for) almost anywhere on Earth. I am focused on Maine right now because I think that something can be done about its situation that could be successfully adopted in other locations.

Last week’s blog centered on two articles in the New York Times that addressed the recent migration of codfish away from Maine’s coast and the regulatory agencies’ reaction of limiting fishing in an attempt to minimize the stress on the fish. The imposed limits had a major impact on the ability of the fishermen to make a living. The three key paragraphs in the Wines & Bidgood article read as follows:

In decades past, the gulf had warmed on average by about one degree every 21 years. In the last decade, the average has been one degree every two years. “What we’re experiencing is a warming that very few ocean ecosystems have ever experienced,” said Andrew J. Pershing, the chief scientific officer for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute here.

Joe Orlando, 60, who fishes from a Gloucester, Mass., base, said the effect of the ban was terrifying. “It’s completely, completely over,” he said. “I got a house, kids, payments.”

But many other fishermen do not blame climate change. They blame the regulators, calling the moratorium cruel and needless, because they say their latest cod catches are actually better than in recent years. More than a few talk of a conspiracy between scientists and environmentalists to manufacture a fishing crisis that will justify their jobs.

The second article considerably expanded upon the history of the problem, all the way back to the end of the 19^th century when climate change was not yet a real issue:

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — IN November, regulators from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shut down recreational and commercial cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine, that enchanting arm of the coastal sea stretching east-northeast from Cape Cod. They did not have much choice: Federal law requires action to rebuild fish stocks when they are depleted, and recent surveys revealed cod populations to be at record lows, despite decades of regulations intended to restore them.

Yet annual cod landings in the Gulf of Maine continued to slide, from about 70,000 metric tons in 1861 to about 54,000 metric tons in 1880, to about 20,000 tons in the 1920s, to just a few thousand metric tons in recent years. There have been a few upticks along the way, such as one bumper year in the mid-1980s when the cod catch reached 25,000 tons (due, in part, to an unnecessarily large expansion of the fishing fleet), but for the most part the trend has been noticeably downward since the era of the Civil War.

Again, the difference between the two perspectives is hidden in the numbers and the first paper provides some of those. Major changes in any species’ abundance can result from large modulations in reproduction rates, mortality and/or migrations. Within these parameters, the shift can often be traced back to changes in either the habitat or the species’ vulnerability to predation. For the fish in Maine the changes in predation are coming from overfishing and now the changes in the habitat are dominated by climate change. The main effect of climate change that impacts the fish is the temperature rise. In decades past, the water was warming by an average of one degree every 21 years; in contrast, over the last decade, the water was warming at a rate of one degree every two years! This is not surprising because over the last decade almost every year was the hottest in history – this is climate change and the cod is trying desperately to adapt, but the fishermen don’t want to hear about it.

Figure 1 shows the global situation as recorded in the IPCC’s latest report about other species that are trying to adapt by moving:

Figure 1

Most of the species mentioned in the graph can move. Trees and other plants cannot. They move through selective pollination and through changes in predator distribution. It is estimated that the massive Boreal Forest that covers most of inland Canada and Alaska, most of Sweden, Finland and inland Norway, much of Russia, and the northern parts of Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Japan – and represents 29% of the world’s forest cover – will be unrecognizable in terms of species distribution toward the end of the century.

The potential speed of movement is given for various species (not fish – sorry – we will get back to them shortly) in different scenarios. In the past, I’ve discussed various RCP scenarios (October 14 – 28, 2014). The RCP2.6 scenario is the “environmentally friendly” one, in which the increase in temperature at the end of the century stays below 2^oC; the RCP8.5 scenario, meanwhile, is the “business as usual” scenario where the global average temperature is projected to increase by close to 5^oC. In an environmentally friendly scenario nobody moves; in the “business as usual” scenario, everybody must move to follow preferred environments. The uncertainties here are very large, though, and we still have a lot of work to do.

Fish are important and relatively easy to follow. Figures 2 and 3 show historical fish migrations based on NOAA data.

The distance that corresponds to a change of latitude by 1 degree is about 69 miles.

Graph of Change in Latitude for Marine Life in US Figures 2 & 3

There is no question that cod are trying to adapt to the climate by migrating north and going deep. If we are making a living out of catching the fish we ought to adapt to the fish’s adaptation. The only way that I know that this can be done is through education (of people, not fish) but how? Maine, like any other place in the US and the rest of the world has plenty of opportunities for adult education. Searching for adult education in Maine gets me to a site that tells me that I have 4,953 courses to choose from and directs me to find a local program. I went to Maine’s largest city, Portland, which is located on the coastline, and clicked climate change. I found three relevant courses: one about composting, one about Transition towns or how shifting energy practices are changing our lives, and one on “The Wisdom to Survive” – testimonies by scientists about climate change. But how likely is it that the fishermen who already have a house, kids and payments will register? What’s the reality of educating this demographic? Alternatively, can we find a Katherine Hayhoe (see last week’s blog) in the form of a scientist/fisherman that can chat with the fishermen like Katherine was doing with the evangelists in Texas? I am sure that we will find many. It is likely that all of them go fishing as a recreational activity, though, earning their livelihood in science (like Katherine Hayhoe does). Unlike the fishermen of Maine, most of the evangelists in Texas that Prof. Hayhoe was interacting with do not make their livelihood in religion.

It seems to me that a much better alternative is for the government to create a small paid internship program where willing fishermen could take some of their vacation time to join the scientists in trying to map where the fish are going, then hopefully discuss the broad results with their friends and fellow fishermen. The focus would be on data collection rather than opinion or advice. A good host for such a program would be the Island Institute:

The Island Institute works to sustain Maine’s island and remote coastal communities. Our core program areas—including economic development, education, community energy, marine resources, and media—are driven by the requests of community members themselves. Our core commitment to the islands of Maine includes sharing what works among these diverse communities and beyond.

The Island Institute is already partnering with Maine’s Fishermen’s Association, which has experience in raising funds and being involved in community education. The internship program to connect professional fishermen with scientists would require the Institute to expand its activities beyond its current geographic foci, to target vulnerable populations in need of help. My first exposure to their activities came at a 2013 AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) meeting in Boston where they reported about their NSF (National Science Foundation) funded research effort in community education. NSF is insistent that its funded efforts will have a comprehensive assessment component that specifies goals and progress in achieving the goals. If the Island Institute is able to secure NSF funding for the internship program, it will be money well spent.

I am now at the tail end of a semester break. Among other things, I am filling my spare time reading The Sixth Extinction, a new book by Elizabeth Kolbert, which focuses on man’s role in major species extinction. I’ve also been reading, “Marine Defaunation: Animal Loss in the Global Ocean,” an important paper that came out in Science Magazine (Science, 347, 247 (2015)). Many of us probably need to look up what that means, so to save you the trouble, defaunation (according to Wikipedia) is: the “loss of animals from ecological communities.” A recent New York Times article highlights that study. Next week I will try to expand from the situation in Maine to the oceans at large.

Posted in Climate Change, Education | 3 Comments

The Stuttering Energy Transition: Fishing in Maine

Posted on January 20, 2015 by climatechangefork

As we approached the new year, I started to describe the global energy transition that’s been taking place, which we hope will take us away from fossil fuels and closer to non-carbon-based energy sources. My plan was to study the efforts of a few key countries, each of which serves as a potential example from which the rest of us can learn; I started that series of blogs with a look at Germany’s main steps (December 9 – 30, 2014). All of these efforts are largely targeted toward the meeting that will take place in Paris, in December of 2015, where a global agreement regarding such approaches will be discussed. As often happens with any plan, however, reality interfered, so I am pausing from that train of thought – in this case the distraction came, in the form of a short New York Times article about a conflict between two groups of people in the state of Maine.

PORTLAND, Me. — In the vast gulf that arcs from Massachusetts’s shores to Canada’s Bay of Fundy, cod was once king. It paid for fishermen’s boats, fed their families and put their children through college. In one halcyon year in the mid-1980s, the codfish catch reached 25,000 tons.

Today, the cod population has collapsed. Last month, regulators effectively banned fishing for six months while they pondered what to do, and next year, fishermen will be allowed to catch just a quarter of what they could before the ban.

But a fix may not be easy. The Gulf of Maine’s waters are warming — faster than almost any ocean waters on earth, scientists say — and fish are voting with their fins for cooler places to live. That is upending an ecosystem and the fishing industry that depends on it.

Regulators this month canceled the Maine shrimp catch for the second straight year, in no small part because shrimp are fleeing for colder climes. Maine lobsters are booming, but even so, the most productive lobster fishery has shifted as much as 50 miles up the coast in the last 40 years. Black sea bass, southerly fish seldom seen here before, have become so common that this year, Maine officials moved to regulate their catch. Blue crab, a signature species in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, are turning up off Portland.

In decades past, the gulf had warmed on average by about one degree every 21 years. In the last decade, the average has been one degree every two years. “What we’re experiencing is a warming that very few ocean ecosystems have ever experienced,” said Andrew J. Pershing, the chief scientific officer for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute here.

Joe Orlando, 60, who fishes from a Gloucester, Mass., base, said the effect of the ban was terrifying. “It’s completely, completely over,” he said. “I got a house, kids, payments.”

But many other fishermen do not blame climate change. They blame the regulators, calling the moratorium cruel and needless, because they say their latest cod catches are actually better than in recent years. More than a few talk of a conspiracy between scientists and environmentalists to manufacture a fishing crisis that will justify their jobs.

Scientists say the truth is more prosaic: Although the gulf is generally warming — 2012 was the hottest year on record — the last year was cooler, and kinder to cod. Moreover, the gulf’s remaining cod have congregated in deeper, colder waters in southern Maine and Massachusetts, where their abundance masks their scarcity elsewhere.

“A fisherman’s job isn’t to get an unbiased estimate of abundance. It’s to catch fish,” said Michael Fogarty, the chief of the ecosystem assessment program at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors sea life. “The world they see is a different world than we see in the surveys.”

Two weeks later, another article appeared in the New York Times in the form of an Op-Ed that expanded the issue:

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — IN November, regulators from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shut down recreational and commercial cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine, that enchanting arm of the coastal sea stretching east-northeast from Cape Cod. They did not have much choice: Federal law requires action to rebuild fish stocks when they are depleted, and recent surveys revealed cod populations to be at record lows, despite decades of regulations intended to restore them.

The fishery resources of the western Atlantic once seemed virtually limitless, with fish supposedly as numerous as grains of sand in the Sahara. And yet the current emergency effort to restore cod populations is simply the latest chapter in a 150-year saga in which fishermen, scientists, industrialists and politicians have consistently confronted emptier nets and fewer fish.

As early as the 1850s, fishermen from Maine and Massachusetts began to pester their governments to do something about declining cod catches. Those men fished with hooks and lines from small wooden sailboats and rowboats. Fearing “the material injury of the codfishing interests of this state” by increased fishing for menhaden, a critical forage fish for cod, fishermen from Gouldsboro, Me., implored the Legislature in 1857 to limit menhaden hauls.

Yet annual cod landings in the Gulf of Maine continued to slide, from about 70,000 metric tons in 1861 to about 54,000 metric tons in 1880, to about 20,000 tons in the 1920s, to just a few thousand metric tons in recent years. There have been a few upticks along the way, such as one bumper year in the mid-1980s when the cod catch reached 25,000 tons (due, in part, to an unnecessarily large expansion of the fishing fleet), but for the most part the trend has been noticeably downward since the era of the Civil War. There have been plenty of warnings along the way. Maine’s fishery commissioner, Edwin W. Gould, spoke out plainly in 1892. “It is the same old story,” he said. “The buffalo is gone; the whale is disappearing; the seal fishery is threatened with destruction.” For Mr. Gould, the path forward was clear: “Fish need protection.”

Maine is a small state (in terms of population and economic activity) with about 0.4% of the US population and 0.3% of its GDP. A reported clash between fishermen and regulators should not be big news. It might be big news if served as a laboratory for resolution of similar clashes in much larger setting.

I have two academic friends, both of whom are retired professors of history; they now split their lives between teaching in New York and vacationing in a cabin situated on the shores of a beautiful lake in Maine. The cabin is not connected to the electrical grid, but gets its electrical power from a small generator supplemented by a solar panel. When I was making a the movie, “Quest for Energy,” about a community of people living in the Sundarbans in India and their quest to transition their access to electrical power, I invited myself over to my friends’ cabin for a few days so I could learn the intricacies of living off the grid. Since then I have tried to visit for fun – instead of just for reasons relating to my work. My wife and I simply love their place (and their company) and we have great time there. Recently, I met up with them and showed them the article. I asked them what they think can be done to bridge the gap between the fishermen and the scientists (regulators); they told me to forget about it – such a thing will never happen. According to them, the fishermen want to keep guys like me (an academic from NY) as far away as possible from Maine and more specifically from Maine’s precious shoreline.

Maine is not indifferent to climate change. Here is what the Energy Information Administration (EIA) writes about environmental activities in Maine:

Quick Facts

The Port of Portland receives crude oil shipments that are transported by pipeline to refineries in Quebec and Ontario.

Maine is the only New England state in which industry is the largest energy consuming sector; the industrial sector accounted for 34% of energy consumed in 2011.

Maine had the lowest average electricity retail prices in New England at the end of 2013.

Virtually all of Maine’s net electricity generation comes from nonutility power producers.

In 2013, over half of Maine’s net electricity generation came from renewable energy resources, with about 29% from hydroelectricity, 25% from wood, and 7% from wind.

Maine: Profile Analysis

Hydroelectric dams and biomass from wood products provide almost half of Maine’s net electricity generation, the largest share from renewable sources in the eastern United States. Biomass alone accounts for more than one-fifth of generation, the largest share by far of any state, placing Maine among the top U.S. producers of electricity from wood and wood waste-derived fuels, such as wood pellets. The state has the highest generation per capita in the nation of electricity from biomass. Use of wood for home heating has grown in rural Maine as the price of home heating oil has risen.

Hydroelectric turbines produce nearly one-fourth of Maine’s net electricity generation, the largest share of any state east of the Mississippi. Water-powered mills were built on Maine’s numerous rivers to run its earliest industries, and when electricity became available in the late 1800s, small hydroelectric dams were built all over the state. By the mid-1980s, the state was home to 782 dams. A few have since been removed to restore natural river flows and fish migrations. Recently, Maine hydroelectric dam owners and conservationists have reached agreements to increase turbine generating capacity at some dams while tearing down others.

In 1999, as part of electricity market restructuring, Maine regulators set a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) requiring that at least 30% of retail electricity sales come from renewable sources, although state electricity distributors had already surpassed that goal. Since then, the legislature has added a second, separate RPS that requires new renewable resources to supply increasing shares of electricity sales, topping out at 10% in 2017. New hydroelectric generators must be smaller than 100 megawatts to qualify under the second RPS. The state legislature has debated lifting that limit to allow more hydroelectricity imports from Canada.

Most new renewable generating facilities planned in New England are wind-powered. Maine has significant wind resources along crests of Appalachian ranges in the state’s northwest and along its Atlantic coastline. The Maine legislature has set goals of installing 2,000 megawatts of wind capacity in the state by 2015; 3,000 megawatts by 2020, with at least 300 megawatts offshore; and 8,000 megawatts by 2030, with at least 5,000 megawatts offshore. Wind energy has been gaining net electricity generating share in Maine rapidly in recent years, with more than a dozen projects coming on line. The state leads New England in wind generation. The first application for wind turbines in federal waters off Maine was filed in 2011. Also on the Maine coast is the first U.S. tidal power generating facility to produce electricity, a pilot project in Cobscook Bay. Because of concerns about the cost of new technologies, New England governors are exploring regional procurement of renewable resources, primarily wind, to meet state RPS goals more economically.

So what can be done to make the fishermen and scientists talk with each other? My first thought was of Katherine Hayhoe. I wrote about her efforts in my April 22, 2014 blog when I described the TV program “Years of Living Dangerously.” Don Cheadle, who narrated the first episode of the program, showed the difference in response to the droughts in both Texas and California. In California, common belief seems to be that climate change is an important contributor to the cause, while in Texas they believe that the droughts are an act of God. Cheadle went to Texas to interview Katherine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and devout evangelist, who joins the evangelists in their prayers but explains that there is no contradiction between believing in both God and science (The Pope is now strongly presenting the same view). Through her efforts, much of the audience was listening and starting to believe that anthropogenic climate change has something to do with the drought and that we can do something to mitigate it.

How could a similar experience help in Maine? Any ideas? Stay tuned!

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The Stuttering Energy Transition and the Sharp Drop in Oil Price

Posted on January 13, 2015 by climatechangefork

Economically, the recent global event that has attracted everybody’s attention is the sharp and major decline in oil prices. Figure 1 shows the decline. I am writing this blog on Friday, January 9^th, and the price of Brent Crude is $47/barrel – a drop of almost 60% in only six months! Consumers in many parts of the world are happy to pay much less for gasoline and heating oil; meanwhile, producers in countries such as Russia, Venezuela and Iran, which are heavily dependent on oil exports for balancing their budgets, are in bad shape.

Figure 1 – The recent sharp drop in oil prices

Figure 2 shows the break-even prices for producing oil in various countries and regions. Countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait are still making money, while shale producers in the US are losing money.

Figure 2

Figure 3 shows the recent decline within the framework of oil price changes from 1947. However, almost all the arrows point to triggers for price increases, not decreases. Among such rapid price increases are those in the 1970s and ‘80s, which were triggered by major political changes such as the Yom Kippur War oil embargo, the Iranian Revolution and the Iran/Iraq War. The most recent increase, which started around the beginning of this century, was triggered mostly by economic forces; China’s increase in demand played a major role.

Figure 3

My main interest is on the effects the sharp decline in price has on the ongoing energy transition from fossil fuels to more sustainable energy resources. To evaluate the possible impact on the transition I have to introduce a new concept that I haven’t mentioned before: price elasticity of demand. Here is what I wrote about it in my book (Climate Change: The Fork at the End of Now; Momentum Press (2011)):

Price Elasticity:

Raising prices does not guarantee decreased use. The concept of price elasticity deals with the correlations between prices of products and services and the corresponding demand. Numerically it indicates the extent to which a 1% increase in price would affect the demand for a good or a service (measured in % compared with the base level). Estimates for gasoline price elasticity are widely, but in the United States they converge to a short- term elasticity at – 0.26 and a long- term elasticity at – 0.86. Based on these numbers, a 10% increase in price results in a 2.6% short- term decrease in the use of gasoline and an 8.6% decrease in long- term use. There are also indications that the elasticity varies between periods of rising and declining prices. Customers adapt faster in times of increasing prices as compared to periods of falling prices. The adjustment of consumers and industry to rising energy prices is one of the main driving forces to an increase in energy efficiency and a decrease in energy intensity, which plays such an important role in our attempt to maintain and increase our collective well- being during the transition period. Most differences in the short- term and long- term price elasticity result from the capital expenditures needed to adapt. As a business we will not invest heavily in research, development, or implementation of energy- saving policies if we believe the high prices are not here to stay, and as consumers we will not try to change our lifestyle through relocation to places with shorter commuting time and greater availability of public transport unless we assume the high prices are here to stay.

Most alternative energy power industries are targeting manufacturing to an expected oil price range that is in the $80 – $100/barrel bracket. In the case of major price changes, inertia plays an important role that reflects itself in price elasticity – in other words, before they are willing to change their business models to adapt, buyers have to be convinced that the price change will last a long time.

There are some economic forces that help prolong the price reduction. As Figure 3 shows, the most recent major rise in price was triggered by a series of OPEC cuts in supply. Presently, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries refuse to repeat the exercise, hoping that the low price will force American producers to cut production and thus alleviate the glut. However, since countries such as Venezuela, Russia and Iran badly need the money to balance their budget, they increase production to generate more revenue, and thus exacerbate the oversupply.

Beliefs in future trends will largely determine the impact on the energy transition. If we strictly follow market forces, the market for the future oil prices should be a good indicator: the price of Brent Crude Oil will return to around $80/barrel toward the end of 2021. This is a rise of about 7% per year – a long-term rate that is far slower than the decline of 60% in half a year (Source – Thomson Reuters; CME Group; Nymex through The Economist Espresso 1/8/2015).

One anecdotal example of the market’s estimate that the decline might be short-term is that oil traders are renting supertankers in which to store surplus oil for later sale at a higher price. Right now, said rental period is only for one year. On the other hand, those banking on a longer term decline include American companies that have started idling oil rigs, and two utilities’ cancellation of a power purchase agreement with Cape-Wind, a $2.6 billion wind power project off the coast of Massachusetts.

We will be closely following these developments.

Posted in Climate Change | Tagged Adaptation, budget, Cape-Wind, China, Clean Energy, crude oil, Demand, Economics, Energy, energy transition, Environment, Fossil Fuels, Future, Gasoline, Iran, Iran-Iraq War, Iranian Revolution, Iraq, Kuwait, Oil, Oil Companies, oil embargo, oil price, Price, price elasticity, production, Russia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Yom Kippur War | 1 Comment

Assessment: Winter 2015

Posted on January 6, 2015 by climatechangefork

In my July 8, 2014 blog, I promised to check in with four self-assessment reports throughout the year, at the following times:

The commemorations of the American and French Revolutions (first two weeks of July)
The Jewish religion’s holy day, Yom Kippur – a day in which Jews are advised to take accounts of their deeds and misdeeds (beginning of October)
New Year’s Day (January 1^st)
Earth Day (April 22^nd)

Well – it’s time for that New Year’s report.

Over the course of the last three months, a slew of important global developments in energy transition took place, leading many of us to think that 2014 was the start of a breakthrough in the worldwide attempts to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. That doesn’t necessarily mean that such a breakthrough is imminent, but efforts are underway, and the “skeptics” subset of deniers (September 3, 2012) have increasingly fewer branches to hang their arguments on.

These developments include the recent US-China agreement (signed November 12, 2014) regarding the two countries’ specific targets and tactics to mitigate climate change, and the call Pope Francis issued to the 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide to tackle the issue. Though many will consider this out of place in this list, I am also including the recent sharp drop in global energy prices, which was spearheaded by the more than 50% drop in oil and gas prices over the last six months. The common opinion right now is that the drop is good for consumers but bad for most producers and countries that heavily rely on oil to balance their budgets. Many also consider the abrupt change to be an obstacle to efforts to mitigate climate change through a global energy transition to more sustainable sources. I believe that’s an over-simplification. Next week I will discuss the matter, and will examine some of the aspects of the price drop that may be friendlier to the energy transition.

No one has specifically raised this as a concern, but since this post is part of my periodic assessment reports, I would like to use it as a self-assessment of the ethics of my style of writing.

In other words, could my style of writing for this blog be labeled as plagiarism or worse – intellectual theft?

Let’s start with a definition of plagiarism: Meriam Webster Dictionary defines plagiarism as:

The act of using another person’s words or ideas without giving credit to that person : the act of plagiarizing something

Plagiarism is a big issue in academia. Everybody is vigilant against it, trying to make sure not only that our students aren’t trying to present the work of others as their own, but also that faculty cannot enhance their accomplishment portfolios by borrowing other people’s work and hoping that no one notices. Among the measures against such practices are the very sophisticated anti-plagiarism programs that can now scan literature for unaccredited pieces of work. The other side of this culture is that most of our intellectual work is constructed on the broad shoulders of our predecessors.

I myself am hyper-aware of the issue, as it pertains to my own writing and that of others. In fact, the issue was broad enough that I found myself collaborating with an English professor at my institution to write an article for a professional journal summarizing our collective experiences on the issue. I am citing here the introductory paragraph to this article, which was mostly written by the editors of the journal:

In response to a pamphlet on ways to avoid plagiarism published by their university, a science professor and an English professor reflect on their own writing practices. They also explore such topics as electronic plagiarism detectors, the history of “imitation” in literature, the Popperian formulation of the scientific method, the postmodern notion that “everything is already written,” the problem of “unconscious plagiarism,” Foucault’s “author function,” and the different assumptions about truth made in the “objective” work of science and the “subjective” work of the humanities. They reflect on some reasons why teachers’ guidelines may foster plagiarism among students, and they suggest ways to frame assignments that help students to do their own work.

I am a scientist that was trained to do scientific research. I am an old guy with a tenured university position and a Wikipedia profile (see the right column of this blog). I am also an experimentalist, so most of my work is based on experimental findings – whether they are mine, my students’ or collaborators’. No plagiarism there. However, in my long time of doing so, I have acquired enough experience and enough of a reputation to be asked to write review articles and books that are based on other people’s work. Every finding that I present is properly attributed and, when necessary, permission has been granted from the authors and/or publishers. No plagiarism there either.

I was recently invited to write a review article for a professional journal on the topic of climate change. My practice in writing any scientific paper or presenting a talk on any scientific topic is to start with the data, describe it in detail, and then discuss the ramifications.

When writing the blogs, I follow a similar routine. I focus on climate change and my objective is to try to establish a connecting line between the relevant science, my students, and members of the general public that don’t have a science background. I am using the blog in a few of my courses, and routinely welcome comments from my students. Another important objective for me is to frame my own thoughts on a range of diverse, yet interconnected issues that – without the blog – would likely stay separate in everyone else’s minds. I put my thought process in writing in part so that I can spur my readers to think and (hopefully) react/provide feedback.

As I often mention here, with more than 7 billion people in the world and growing, humans are an increasingly important part of the physical environment; discussions are under way to label the present era as Anthropocene. Climate change deals with the past, present, and an extrapolated near future. Mitigation and adaptation on scales that vary from local to global are ongoing, as are the fluctuations in politics and money flow aimed at influencing discussions on these topics.

The dispensation of information is now changing as well. Some of the information comes the old-fashioned way, through reporters who are paid by news organizations to probe, investigate and document. The role of aggregators that collect various news reports on select topics is also growing.

As a “lone wolf” with no organization and no budget, I am relying on the news infrastructure.

I have a combination of paid and free subscriptions that I follow on a daily basis. These include: the New York Times, The Economist, National Geographic, Scientific American, Science Daily, and Renewable Energy World. In addition, my computer facilities come with their own aggregators that I follow regularly. If I find something relevant that I want to use, my subscription through my college library usually allows me to download the original publication.

Following the same practice I use for my scientific papers, I don’t ask readers to agree with me blindly; I make sure to cite and wherever possible link to any reference that I use, in addition to including the relevant paragraph(s) that clarifies the story that I am trying to tell. If I need picture or graph that I regard as pertinent to the story, I often go to Google Images and use the available links. I do not ask permission to do that because my timing does not allow for the usual lag that such requests often entail.

My basic assumption is that if information is posted sans a warning against its use without permission, it’s fair game. I don’t pay anybody for the information that I post; I don’t have the resources for that and again, the time element in such transactions is prohibitive. In a sense, I am acting here as an aggregator on the particular topics that I wish to write about. I have no idea how commercial aggregators work, especially in this age of the internet, but so far I have not been warned by anybody to cease and desist.

So – following the original dictionary definition, I do not plagiarize, but my practice of direct use of data and paragraphs from original publications without permission for doing so may be questionable. I have justified these practices to myself in various ways – none of them to my complete satisfaction. It would be nice to have some feedback. Please let me know what you think!

In my last assessment, I included an update on my readership/ social media progress, so I will do so again here. Again, most of my efforts have focused on Twitter. In the last 60 days, I have gained 91 followers (bringing my total to 300). I also had 961 link clicks, 93 mentions and 78 retweets. This is all readily accessible information. On Facebook, in the same time period, my page got an additional 6,075 impressions from 1,769 users.

On my blog itself I’m happy to report that I’ve had had 1,655 visits from 902 unique computers, 700 of them new visitors. To those of you reading, I thank you and (as always) welcome your comments.

Posted in Climate Change, Education | Tagged academia, Adaptation, assessment, Breakthrough, citation, Clean Energy, Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Climate Change Deniers, Climate Skeptics, Democratization, Facebook, New Year, plagiarism, quarterly report, Quarterly Reports, references, Report, Social Media, Twitter | 1 Comment

Stuttering Energy Transitions: Germany – Storage

Posted on December 30, 2014 by climatechangefork

As I have mentioned before, electric utilities must necessarily store electricity in order to keep up with the fluctuations in consumer demands (July 29 – August 12 blogs). For example, all around the world (where people are connected to electrical grids) people use considerably less electricity in the middle of the night compared with that used at dinner time. The process is known as load leveling; it is essential when the generation of electricity is steady but consumption is not. There is an increasing need for such a process when the generation of electricity is intermittent – as is the case with solar energy use in forms such as photovoltaics (solar cells) and wind. The enhanced need for storage in the use of such intermittent sources was the trigger for the contentious series of blogs in November that followed John Morgan’s guest blog on EROI. I came to know John Morgan through an exchanged series of tweets (August 8, 2014 blog) about David MacKay’s article on the “ultimate” need for storage in a virtual, fully sustainable, England. Here is what I wrote in that short blog:

Thank you Dadiva for directing my attention to this important article. It is a significant quantitative contribution to the requirements necessary for a global energy transition to decarbonized energy sources based on solar energy conversion in all its forms. It makes the key point that although globally there is plenty of energy coming in, locally there are imbalances that require separating energy production from consumption. The emphasis in the paper is on sovereign states (with Britain as a focal point), but in-state disparities – especially between dense populations of urban consumers and equally dense rural production areas – require extensive investments in storage and smart grids capable of covering a large area.

MacKay’s emphasis was on global need, but he used his native England as a virtual case in point. Meanwhile, Germany is probably the best example of what shape such a transition will take: it’s a large (population 80 million), rich, developed country that has taken a top-down approach, and its decision to move the energy transition full speed ahead has met with support from most of the population. The issue of the storage requirements in the transition is under active discussion. The head of Agora Energiewende, a German think tank focusing on the German energy transition gave his position:

‘We don’t really need new storage devices in the next 10 to 20 years’ as cross-border power trade, demand management and intelligent steering of fossil-fired power plants can ensure flexible electricity flows at less money, Patrick Graichen, head of Agora, told reporters today in Berlin

Below are some significant parts of Paul Hockenos’ article in Renewable Energy World that summarizes the debate and Agora’s thoughts on this issue:

… this autumn, one of Germany’s leading energy think tanks, Agora Energiewende (financed by the Stiftung Mercator and the European Climate Foundation), dropped a small bombshell on the Energiewende community. In a study carried out by Agora and other high-profile, independent research institutes, it concluded that significant storage capacity for renewably generated electricity would not be needed for another 20 years — until Germany has at least a 60 percent share of renewables in its power sector. The study is a hot potato that has, so far, incurred considerable critique from peer institutes and lobby groups.

‘The key insight here,’ explains one of the authors, Daniel Fürstenwerth of Agora Energiewende, ‘is that the Energiewende can continue investing massively in renewable power right now. We will need to invest in power-to-power storage capacity in the long term, but not today. We have to keep the Energiewende cost-efficient or the German people, industry, and the political establishment won’t go for it.’

The essence of Agora’s argument is that Germany’s energy system can maintain the flexibility it needs even as renewables expand by other, less costly means than new power-based storage technology. These alternative options include demand-side management, flexible conventional power plants, and grid expansion both in Germany and across its borders.

Demand management is an idea central to the work of Agora Energiewende, a young think tank that burst onto the scene in Germany two years ago. ‘It’s about making the electricity demand flexible so that it meshes better with a fluctuating power supply,’ explains its website, as well as ‘making the power system as a whole more flexible in order to ensure security of supply.’ Agora’s analysts argue that energy demand management can be spurred by market incentives, regulatory guidelines and new technology that will reduce investment costs in the Energiewende and help ensure supply security.

Load control, load shifting, energy efficiency and conservation, for example, are all ways to manage demand. One Agora study shows that Germany’s industrial producers can shift more than a gigawatt of their power demand for short periods, a phenomenon that on a larger scale could go a long way to ensure security of the regional power supply. Pilot projects in Bavaria and Baden Wurttemberg have already brought encouraging results.

Moreover, inflexible conventional power plants like Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plants can be made more flexible by adding hot water towers. In Germany today there are already CHP plants in places like the German cities of Flensburg and Nuremburg that turn surplus power into hot water, opening the way for renewables to provide supply when the weather dictates. ‘It’s a relatively cheap solution,’ says Fürstenwerth.

The other cornerstone of Agora’s argument is that Germany’s current grid and the expansions underway — an additional 2,650 kilometers of new high-voltage grid is currently being laid — will provide the flexibility necessary to accommodate more renewables. Agora assumes that grid construction will proceed as planned — in Germany as well as in neighbor countries — which will better enable grid operators to match supply and demand. And the better Germany is linked to its neighbors, the more it can balance by trading on the European market.

The people at Angora emphasize flexibility – different sustainable sources have corresponding intermittency periods, but if they can match certain ones with peak usage times, they can partially stabilize the energy supply and thus decrease the need for storage.

As the following figure shows, wind power and solar cell power in Germany correlate negatively throughout the year:

As we will discuss when we look at the energy transitions of other countries, such combinations of sustainable sources with different intermittency are now starting to permeate globally, becoming an important element in the global transition.

Posted in Climate Change | Tagged Adaptation, Agora Energiewende, Clean Energy, client, Climate Change, Coal, Cost, David MacKay, Economics, Electricity, Emissions, Energy, Energy Sources, Energy Storage, energy transition, Environment, EROI, feed-in tariff, Fossil Fuels, Gas, Germany, intermittency, Investment, John Morgan, Mitigation, Natural Gas, Nuclear, Nuclear Energy, Photovoltaic, photovoltaics, Pollution, Power, Renewable, Renewable Energy Act, Solar Energy, Supply, tariff degression, Technology, Utility | 1 Comment

Stuttering Energy Transitions: Germany – Producers

Posted on December 23, 2014 by climatechangefork

As I discussed in the in the last blog, the feed-in tariff that was introduced as a key element in the German energy transition has resulted in the Germans paying among the highest electricity rates in the world. It was designed to basically subsidize the producers of the new alternative energy. The graph below shows the results:

Figure 1 – Recent Market Share of Photovoltaic Cells

This shift to total domination of Chinese solar manufacturing over almost everybody else was due to the Chinese ability to drastically reduce their prices of the cells. This is shown in Figure 2:

Figure 2 – Prices of Crystalline Modules of Chinese Made Photovoltaic Systems

With wind, the situation is a bit better:

Figure 3 – Wind Power in Germany 1990-2011: Installed capacity (MW) in red and average power generated (MW) in blue.

Figure 4 – Wind Power Share

Not surprisingly, the emerging dominance of Chinese photovoltaic cells has caused major stress in the manufacturing of solar cells in the rest of the world, including Germany. But is this good, bad or irrelevant for the world as a whole? In terms of global energy transition, it has to be good. The plunge in prices makes the holy grail of bringing down the cost of nonpolluting energy alternatives an ever more reachable reality. The claim that the switch to alternatives generates jobs may be true globally but it becomes questionable on a local scale. As I have written before, the local scale, in the form of sovereign countries, makes the rules. Both the US and the European Union are currently fighting the Chinese dominance claiming that the Chinese government is subsidizing the export of solar panels, an act forbidden by the rules of WTO (World Trade Organization). In addition, there are strong indications that many Chinese manufactures are selling the panels below cost. This is always a controversial issue in trade between developed and developing countries in which the components of the cost structure differ mainly because of differential labor costs. The sharp cost decline was a major factor in the bankruptcy of many American and European manufacturers – perhaps the most famous one (at least on this side of the Atlantic) was the bankruptcy of the American manufacturer Solyndra, which defaulted on a half billion dollar loan secured by the American government. Recently, the plunging prices have started to affect Chinese firms as well, mainly because of rising labor costs in China. This is shifting some of the production to other developing countries such as Malaysia (see Figure 1 for the recent stabilization of market share of China coupled with the rise in the Malaysian share). Individual countries have tools to fight such trends. As of 2012, the US has imposed stiff duties of about 30% on Chinese imports of solar panels, while the European Union imposed a quota for import of the panels. The US is expected to broaden the impact of the duties. These combined actions will most likely result in the stabilization of the prices, possibly even reversing the decline. Even within the European Union there are strong voices that claim that the German policy of high feed-in tariff amounts to an illegal subsidy of German producers. Here is what the Financial Times writes about the issue:

Joaquín Almunia, the EU competition chief, contradicted Mr Gabriel’s claim that one outstanding issue – forcing Germany to treat imported energy on the same terms as domestic producers – was never before raised in six months of talks. In a statement issued on Thursday, Mr Almunia argued the discrimination was potentially illegal, a risk that had been “made clear to the German authorities back in December 2013”. ‘There is nothing new in the need to address possible discrimination of imported electricity by Germany,’ he said. ‘If consumers have to pay a surcharge on their consumption of both domestic and imported electricity but revenue from the surcharge is used to only finance domestic electricity producers, there is a risk that imported electricity is disadvantaged and made comparatively more expensive.’

There is no question in my mind that the rules for international trade in alternative energy sources will, at some point, emerge as an important issue to be discussed as part of the global mitigation policy for climate change. Hopefully, this will lead to establishing more effective rules of trade that can facilitate a global energy transition in a timely way. The next blog will be focused on the necessity for storage infrastructure in Germany and thus will be directly connected to the November discussions about the role of storage in the EROI considerations in the transition.

Posted in Climate Change | Tagged Adaptation, China, Clean Energy, client, Climate Change, Coal, Cost, Crystalline Modules, duty, E.ON, Economics, Electricity, Emissions, Energy, Energy Sources, Energy Storage, energy transition, Environment, EROI, EU, feed-in tariff, Fossil Fuels, Gas, Germany, Investment, Malaysia, Mitigation, Natural Gas, Nuclear, Nuclear Energy, Photovoltaic, photovoltaics, Pollution, Power, Price, producers, quota, Renewable, Renewable Energy Act, Solar, Solar Cells, Solar Energy, Solyndra, Supply, Tariff, tariff degression, Technology, US, Utility, Wind, WTO | 1 Comment

Stuttering Energy Transitions: Germany – Consumers

Posted on December 16, 2014 by climatechangefork

The German Renewable Energy Act (German: Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz, EEG) was designed to encourage cost reductions based on improved energy efficiency from economies of scale over time. The Act came into force in the year 2000 and was the initial spark behind a tremendous boost of renewable energies in Germany.

The three main principles of the EEG are:

a) Investment protection through guaranteed feed-in tariffs and connection requirement: Originally, every kilowatt-hour generated from renewable energy facilities received a fixed feed-in tariff. The system has recently been modified to now also include a market premium system. Network operators are required to preferentially feed-in this electricity into the grid over electricity from conventional sources (nuclear power, coal and gas). Renewable energy plant operators in principle receive a 20-year, technology-specific, guaranteed payment for their electricity generation. Small and medium enterprises have been given new access to the electricity market, along with private land owners. The Federal Ministry for Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety argued that anyone producing renewable energy could sell his ‘product’ for a 20-year fixed price.

b) No charge to Germany’s public purse: The promotion of renewable electricity continues to be necessary up until now. The EEG rates of remuneration show what electricity from wind, hydro, solar, bio- and geothermal energy actually cost. Compared to fossil fuels, there are lower or no external costs, such as damage to the environment, the climate or human health. The remuneration rates have until recently been considered not to be subsidies as such, since they are not paid for by taxes and are paid for by every consumer as an EEG surcharge (EEG-Umlage) that is included in the electricity bill. The polluter pays principle a.k.a “whoever consumes more, pays more” is in effect passed on to consumers. In 2013, the total EEG surcharge amounted to EUR 20.4 billion. In 2014, the EEG surcharge was set at 6.24 ct/kWh. Certain reductions of the EEG surcharge apply for energiy intensive industries (so-called special equalisation scheme).

c) Innovation by decreasing feed-in-tariffs: Feed-in tariffs in Germany decrease in regular intervals to exert cost pressure on energy generators and technology manufacturers. The decrease (called “degression”) applies to new plants. Thus, it is hoped, technologies are becoming more efficient and less costly.

The prices of electricity over this time period behaved as the figure below shows:

Figure 1 – electricity prices in Germany since the EEG was introduced. The green line above is the price of electricity on the German electricity exchange. The red line is the average price of electricity for households. The other lines are for commercial clients and special customers (notably, their prices have also risen).

The price of electricity in Germany was high relative to other countries, as can be seen in Figure 3.

Average Price of Electricity Cost by Country

Figure 3 – The relative price of German electricity in 2011

As I mentioned in last week’s blog, more than 60% of the Germans were happy with the new energy policy. This, of course, leaves plenty of unhappy people. Any transition of this magnitude produces many winners and losers. They, in turn, keep the conversation going and serve as an excellent example for other countries, who can take notice, learn and adapt – thus pushing forward the global energy transition that will mitigate destructive changes in the physical environment.

Of the many aspects mentioned above, the feed-in tariff is key. Since its inception, some important changes have taken place, including:

Purchase prices were based on generation cost. This led to different prices for wind power, solar power, biomass/biogas and geothermal and for projects of different sizes.
Purchase guarantees were extended to 20 years.
Utilities were allowed to participate.
Rates were designed to decline annually based on expected cost reductions, known as “tariff degression”.

Since it was the most successful, the German policy (amended in 2004 and 2008) often was the benchmark against which other feed-in tariff policies were considered.

Other countries followed the German approach. Long-term contracts are typically offered in a non-discriminatory manner to all renewable energy producers. Because purchase prices are based on costs, efficiently operated projects yield a reasonable rate of return.

This principle was stated as:

‘The compensation rates…have been determined by means of scientific studies, subject to the proviso that the rates identified should make it possible for an installation – when managed efficiently – to be operated cost-effectively, based on the use of state-of-the-art technology and depending on the renewable energy sources naturally available in a given geographical environment.’

—2000 RES Act

Feed-in tariff policies typically target a 5–10% return.

Feed-in tariffs (REFIT) supported growth in solar power in Spain, Germany and wind power in Denmark.

The success of photovoltaics in Germany resulted in an electricity price drop of up to 40% during peak output times, with savings between €520 million and 840 million for consumers. Savings for consumers have meant conversely reductions in the profit margin of big electric power companies, who reacted by lobbying the German government, which reduced subsidies in 2012. Energy utilities lobbied for the abolition, or against the introduction, of feed-in tariffs in other parts of the world, including Australia and California. Increase in the solar energy share in Germany also had the effect of closing gas- and coal-fired generation plants.

Some of the important losers over the years were the German utilities. An article by Leon Mangasarian and Stefan Nicola from Bloomberg that was published in Renewable Energy World summarized some of the important issues that they were facing. I am including few paragraphs below:

BERLIN — Germany’s biggest utilities face dwindling market shares as the shift to renewable energy spurs regional power generation and storage technology, a senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party said.

Electricity companies are ‘fighting something of their last stand,’ Christine Lieberknecht, the Christian Democratic Union premier of Thuringia state, said in an interview. ‘In a few years, nobody will even talk about it anymore because the technology for decentralization of power production and energy self-determination will make such strides.’

That vista suggests a deepening crisis for EON SE and RWE AG, Germany’s biggest utilities, whose profits are slumping as Merkel pushes plans to close all 17 German nuclear reactors by 2022 in response to the Fukushima meltdown in Japan in 2011. Both companies produce mostly conventional energy.

Germany’s energy landscape is shifting as renewable sources grab revenue while consumers and companies criticize rising power costs that are three times higher than in the U.S., in part due to taxes and subsidies to promote renewable energy. Merkel plans to more than triple Germany’s renewable share to 80 percent by 2050 from about a quarter now.

Essen-based RWE generated 6.4 percent of its power from alternative energy sources last year, compared with almost double that at Dusseldorf-based EON, Germany’s biggest utility by market capitalization.

As mentioned earlier, the feed-in tariff is destroying the business model of the electric utilities and serves also as a vehicle to subsidize the alternative energy producers. This will be further explored in the next blog, where I will shift to the producers.

In my last blog, I ended with a look at one at of the most fascinating recent developments of the German adaptations to these change – the splitting of the largest utility, E.ON into two companies. One of these will continue to be focused on fossil fuels while the other one will completely shift to the new alternative energies and integrating consumer demands with energy supply. This will be fascinating to watch and, if successful, could be a great basis for all of us to learn from.

Posted in Climate Change | Tagged Adaptation, Clean Energy, client, Climate Change, Coal, Cost, E.ON, Economics, Electricity, Emissions, Energy, Energy Sources, Energy Storage, energy transition, Environment, feed-in tariff, Fossil Fuels, Gas, Germany, Investment, Mitigation, Natural Gas, Nuclear, Nuclear Energy, Pollution, Power, Renewable, Renewable Energy Act, Solar Energy, Supply, tariff degression, Technology, Utility | Leave a comment

Stuttering Energy Transitions: Germany

Posted on December 9, 2014 by climatechangefork

2015 is knocking at the door. I just got The Economist’s “The World in 2015” special issue both in print and digital form. It’s full of numbers, predictions and stories. Most of its numbers and predictions are optimistic extrapolations of the present. The majority of the Science and Technology section includes information that is on the brink of public announcement. There also is a section by a science-fiction writer (Alastair Reynolds) that discusses which elements of fiction might soon become fact. The piece includes flying cars, talking to robots, new stuff from the Large Hadron Collider, etc., but it makes no predictions about what will happen to the planet as a whole. After all, there is no profit in trying to upset readers.

I will try to welcome 2015 a bit differently. On November 11th, the US and Chinese presidents came to a landmark agreement: the US will accelerate the speed of its current reduction of greenhouse gas emissions so that its level by 2025 will be close to 30% below its level in 2005 (double the pace of reduction it targeted for the period from 2005 to 2020). Meanwhile, China’s emissions will peak by 2030 – by which time sustainable sources should constitute at least 20% of its energy supply. People around the world saw this agreement by the two worst polluting countries as a good framework upon which to base a global agreement – one which will be discussed at the United Nations Climate Change Conference scheduled be held in Paris, France in December of 2015. Many eyes are now turning to India to see if it will follow. I will try to follow the global preparations for the December 2015 Paris meeting and include updates in this blog.

One of my main recurring themes on Climate Change Fork has been trying to follow the global energy transition from fossil fuels to a more sustainable mix. That mix must necessarily avoid changing the chemistry of the atmosphere, since any modification to the planetary energy balance could drastically affect the global climate. I have just ended a series of blogs (see all four November blogs) trying to make the case that such a transition is indeed possible, despite the many voices that disagree. Up to now I have discussed energy transition as a global phenomenon (see December 24, 2012 blog) with anecdotal references to individual countries. I think that it’s high time to change gear and address a few individual countries’ efforts in some more depth, as well as better defining the stuttering process that attempts at such transition entail. I have chosen six countries to follow, with the hope that their experiences can teach us all. These countries are China, US, India, Australia, France and Denmark. I have rearranged my computer’s filing system that is set to mimic my book’s chapter with updated information, to reflect on what takes place in these countries, in addition to (not instead of) the global picture. I plan to sustain my focus on the energy transitions that take place within these countries – at least until the Paris conference. That said, I fully expect that this focus will be interrupted frequently to reflect on important current events that I will wish to comment on.

I’ll start here with Germany and an article written by Justin Gillis in The New York Times. The article is focused on Germany’s energy transition and some of the important issues that it is raising. Below are some of the key paragraphs:

A reckoning is at hand, and nowhere is that clearer than in Germany. Even as the country sets records nearly every month for renewable power production, the changes have devastated its utility companies, whose profits from power generation have collapsed.

… Taking full advantage of the possibilities may require scrapping the old rules of electricity markets and starting over, industry observers say — perhaps with techniques like paying utilities extra to keep conventional power plants on standby for times when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. The German government has acknowledged the need for new rules, though it has yet to figure out what they should be. A handful of American states are beginning a similar reconsideration of how their electric systems operate.

‘It’s pretty amazing what’s happening, really,’ said Gerard Reid, an Irish financier working in Berlin on German energy projects. ‘The Germans call it a transformation, but to me it’s a revolution.’

… The shifting economics can largely be traced to China, by way of Germany. Over the past decade, the Germans set out to lower the cost of going green by creating rapid growth in the once-tiny market for renewable power.

Germany has spent more than $140 billion on its program, dangling guaranteed returns for farmers, homeowners, businesses and local cooperatives willing to install solar panels, wind turbines, biogas plants and other sources of renewable energy. The plan is paid for through surcharges on electricity bills that cost the typical German family roughly $280 a year, though some of that has been offset as renewables have pushed down wholesale electricity prices.

… In Germany, where solar panels supply 7 percent of power and wind turbines about 10 percent, wholesale power prices have crashed during what were once the most profitable times of day. ‘We were late entering into the renewables market — possibly too late,’ Peter Terium, chief executive of the giant utility RWE, admitted this spring as he announced a $3.8 billion annual loss.

The big German utilities are warning — or pleading, perhaps — that the revolution cannot be allowed to go forward without them. And outside experts say they may have a point.

The Achilles’ heel of renewable power is that it is intermittent, so German utilities have had to dial their conventional power plants up and down rapidly to compensate. The plants are not necessarily profitable when operated this way, and the utilities have been threatening to shut down facilities that some analysts say the country needs as backup.

The situation is further complicated by the government’s determination to get rid of Germany’s nuclear power stations over the next decade, the culmination of a long battle that reached its peak after the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan. As that plan unfolds, shutting down a source of low-emission power, Germany’s notable success in cutting greenhouse gases has stalled.

So, what is happening in Germany? The German program for energy transition is summarized in a document titled “Energy Transition – the German Energiewende.”

The government-approved program objectives were set in 2010 and are summarized in figure 1. As the site mentions, the history of the program didn’t start with the present government or with the realization that an energy transition is needed to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. Instead, it started as an anti-nuclear effort, and has developed and gained public support throughout the years.

Figure 1 – Government Approved Objectives of the German Energy Transition

According to German sources, the program enjoys wide public support (60%) but since there are winners and losers in the program, there is no shortage of public disagreements.

The distribution of primary energy resources, as of shortly after the adoption of the program, is summarized in figure 2.

Figure 2 – Primary Energy Consumption in Germany – 2011

The program is evolving. As Justin Gillis mentioned in his article, the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan has left a serious mark on Germany’s policy makers. Shortly after the disaster, on May 29, 2011, Merkel’s government announced that it would close all of its nuclear power plants by 2022. Eight of the seventeen operating reactors in Germany were permanently shut down following Fukushima. Energy supply had to adjust, and coal and other fossil fuels have filled much of the gap.

On December 4^th, the government announced the following adjustment:

BERLIN — Germany has fallen behind in its ambitious goals for reducing carbon emissions. It is burning more coal than at any point since 1990. And German companies are complaining that the nation’s energy policies are hurting their ability to compete globally.

But on Wednesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government said it was redoubling its efforts, proposing new measures to help it reach the emissions-reduction target for 2020 it set seven years ago when it undertook an aggressive effort to combat climate change.

However, something else happened the same day, as reported in a piece by Paul Hockenos that appeared on “Renewable Energy World”:

BERLIN — Germany’s biggest utility E.ON — long a pillar of the country’s fossil fuel and nuclear industry — dropped a bombshell on Europe’s business world with the announcement that the multinational was exiting the conventional energy market in favor of a new business model based on renewables, intelligent grid systems, energy management and other services. Indeed, the company seems finally to have drawn the logical consequences from the Energiewende, Germany’s renewable energy transition, after years of resisting the ambitious transformation of the nation’s energy supply.

‘This is part of a transformation that almost all of Europe’s major utilities are currently undergoing in response to fundamental changes in their energy markets,’ says Toby Couture, director of the Berlin-based consulting firm E3 Analytics. ‘They’re endorsing different adaption strategies. E.ON’s seems to be the boldest, the most far-reaching so far.’

A few days later, an article in The Economist provided some more details:

FOR many Germans, E.ON, the country’s biggest utility, is a symbol of stability. But on November 30th it surprised by announcing it would split itself up. In 2016 it will float a new company which will include its power generation from nuclear and fossil fuels, as well as fossil-fuel exploration and production. The rump—which will keep the E.ON brand—will make money from renewable energy, distribution and ‘customer solutions’, a grab-bag of offerings such as advice, smart-metering and the like. The firm’s boss, Johannes Teyssen, said that as a sprawling integrated utility E.ON could only be ‘mediocre’. Two focused ones would do a much better job.

As Justin Gillis’ piece made clear, the majority of German utilities fought tooth and nail against the new program. In the next blogs I will try to explore the reasons for their opposition and the role of the intermittent nature of sustainable sources in the energy transition. Meanwhile, it is interesting to see that Germany’s largest utility is sort of switching sides by splitting not only its focus but also its entire organization.

Posted in Climate Change | Tagged Adaptation, Australia, China, Clean Energy, Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Denmark, E.ON, Economics, Education, electrical power, Electricity, Emissions, Energy, energy generation, Energy Storage, energy transition, Environment, Fossil Fuels, France, Fukushima, Germany, Global Warming, India, Mitigation, Nuclear, Nuclear Energy, Pollution, Power, Power Plants, Science, Sustainability, Technology, United Nations, United States, US | 1 Comment

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