Tag Archives: Department of Energy

The Moniz confirmation hearing — what he said

Posted: April 9th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Early online reports on Tuesday’s confirmation hearings on Secretary of Energy nominee Ernest Moniz focused on his well-known and long-stated support for natural gas development.

But from where I was sitting, the most important moment in the MIT professor’s relatively low-key questioning by members of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee came when Democratic Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado spoke about the impacts of climate change in his state and asked how a balanced energy portfolio could reduce carbon emissions.

As to climate change in general, Moniz said, “I certainly agree the scientific basis for warranting action is completely clear,” and the statement passed with no further comment by anyone on the committee, at least while I was listening to the hearing.

Does the lack of controversy raised by the remark signal that Republicans, at least on this committee, are not disputing the science of climate change and are open to discussing options for U.S. action on the issue?

Moniz then went on to talk about going to a low-carbon economy “that will include natural gas among traditional sources in this country being a bridge. But assuming we do go to a very low-carbon economy, even natural gas will require capping while we deploy renewable energy, nuclear and efficiency, plus hydro.”

I managed to listen in on the live stream for about an hour during which I focused mostly on what Moniz said on issues relevant to the Coachella Valley — renewable energy development, energy efficiency and innovation.

Overall, I’d say Moniz pretty much aced the hearing. It is clear President Obama nominated him because he does embody an all-of-the-above approach to energy and is equally comfortable talking about fossil fuels or renewables. When individual senators tried to push him on specific local or partisan issues, Moniz was not afraid to say he was not up on a specific issue, but would do his research and work with lawmakers on solutions. At the same time, he never backed down on his basic support for a strong role for renewables in the nation’s energy future and support for research and innovation.

One example – at one point, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah referred to a Government Accountability Office report finding significant overlap in wind energy incentive programs across different federal agencies — the Department of the Interior, Agriculture and Energy — and pointedly asked about whether it made sense to have multiple programs.

Moniz answered he was not aware of the report, but added, “I’m very supportive of providing the marketplace with low-carbon options.”

Several questions were asked about the DOE’s national research laboratories and their role in supporting innovation and technology transfer to the private sector — that is, getting federally developed technologies out to start-ups that work with green or tech incubators such as the Coachella Valley iHub.

Moniz said he wanted to involve lab directors in setting research priorities for the departments and also possibly develop regional or state-level initiatives to create a “better innovation eco-system.”

Democratic Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota asked about the low funding levels for clean energy research, about $5 billion, compared to other government funding, tens of billions, for defense and medical research and potential budget cuts in this area due to sequestration.

“This is a very serious issue,” Moniz said. “I would note if one does simple arithmetic as a guide . . . we are under investing by a factor of three.”

With sequestration, leveraging available funds will be needed, he said.

Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii asked for Moniz’s views on the role of energy efficiency in U.S. energy policy.

“Energy efficiency demand side is enormously important if you look at a low-carbon future. It’s hard to see how that can happen withour efficiency gains,” he said. “This low-hanging fruit is quite ripe.”

Moniz called for additional research and more federal-state cooperation, possibly drawing on the Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” model — states being eligible for federal grants for some level of achievement in energy efficiency.

Udall also asked for Moniz’s views on public-private partnerships in developing new technologies in the energy sector.

“I’m an enormous fan of public-private partnerships,” he said (obviously, “enormous” is a frequently used adjective in the Moniz vocabulary). “I would be seeking all kinds of new ideas of moving that forward. We should think about regionally focused industry. The regional issues for solving energy problems are quite big.”

Barring some political bomb shell, Moniz’s confirmation by the full Senate seems likely.  Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has already announced his support.

More controversy can be expected on Thursday, when the Senate Committee on the Enviroment and Public Works takes up Obama’s nomination for the Environmental Protection Agency, Gina McCarthy.

The hearing begins at 10:30 a.m. Eastern time, which means another early morning, 7:30 a.m. out here and will also be live-streamed from the committee’s website.

The archived stream of Moniz’s hearing is available on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee website.

Get your alt fuels here!

Posted: August 23rd, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Want to find out where to charge your electric hybrid or fill up on hydrogen or compressed natural gas in the Coachella Valley?

The Department of Energy has a map for you at its Alternative Fuels Data Center.

Looking at the Coachella Valley, you can quickly find out that there are electric vehicle charging stations at the Hilton Palm Springs, Palm Springs Nissan, J.W. Marriott Desert Springs, Renaissance Esmeralda and Torre Nissan.

If  CNG — compressed natural gas — is your fuel of choice, the ARCO on Date Palm in Cathedral City can fill your tank, along with Sunline Transit and the Mission Springs Water District.

The site also has a pile of interesting charts, so you can look at how prices for alt fuels are measuring up against traditional gasoline and diesel — not bad from the looks of it — or find out how hybrid vehicle sales are doing — down from a peak in 2007.

You can also find tips on more fuel-efficient driving.

The big drive, it seems, is to reduce idling by commercial fleets.

A few factoids for thought –

  • Medium-duty trucks use about 2.5 billion gallons of fuel to idle each year, or 6.7% of the total fuel they consume.
  • More than 650,000 long-haul heavy-duty trucks idle overnight for required rest stops at least some fraction of the time, using more than 685 million gallons of fuel per year.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration notes that we emit 19.64 pounds of carbon dioxide for every gallon of gasoline we burn and 22.34 pounds of CO2 for every gallon of diesel.

Gentlemen and ladies — please — turn off your engines.

Another solar manufacturer defaults on DOE loan guarantee

Posted: June 29th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Abound Solar, a Colorado-based solar panel manufacturer,  announced Thursday it is ceasing operations and will be filing for bankruptcy, and yes, it had a loan guarantee from Department of Energy, raising the specter of another Solyndra.

But, as reports across the Internet are being quick to note — the company had only drawn down $70 million of its $400 million loan guarantee, and it had about $300 million in venture capital and private investments.

Concerns about undue influence by high-rolling Democratic party donors  will likely also not be an issue, as the firm drew both red and blue investors.

According to a report on Bloomberg Businessweek website, Abound’s investors included –

– Pat Stryker, the billionaire heiress of a medical devices company, who has been a big fundraiser for President Barack Obama.

– Raymond Debbane, who has donated to Republican candidates including Rep. Darrell Issa, the California Republican who led an investigation of the U.S. Energy Department loan guarantee program.

In addition, Abound’s energy loan application earned a bipartisan letter of support from Indiana lawmakers due to the the company’s plans to build a plant in the state.

Republicans Sen. Richard Lugar and Rep. Dan Burton and then-Sen. Evan Bayh and Rep.  Pete Visclosky, both Democrats, signed an Oct. 30, 2009 letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, voicing “strong support and encouragement” for the company’s loan application.

GreenTech Media has a good behind-the-scenes report on the events and market forces leading to the company’ s decision to close its doors, laying off 125 employees.  While the company cited competition from low-cost Chinese panels as a central cause for its failure, GreenTech reports it hit a cash-flow crunch as it was trying to ramp up a new,  more efficient version of its thin-film panel.

The firm awaited $10 million from the DOE and $10 million from its investors, but had a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. The DOE was waiting for the investors, and the investors were waiting for the DOE. Abound’s venture investors include DCM, Technology Partners, GLG Partners, Bohemian Companies, and Invus. DOE money is milestone-based and comes with very specific spending covenants.

Abound’s management found itself in a very sticky spot, locked in a survival race between burn rate and ramping up the factory to run at high enough utilization to lower costs and generate revenue and eventually profit. Add impatient investors, a flinchy DOE, and a media faction hungry for Obama DOE scandals — and it was a queasy mix, almost from the start.

The Department of Energy, possibly learning from Solyndra, has been trying to stay ahead of the story with a post on its website, putting this latest failure in context.

Damien LaVera, deputy director of the DOE’s Department of Public Affairs, acknowledges that loan guarantees to solar manufacturing firms do carry higher risk, but that they account for only 4 percent of department’s loan guarantee portfolio.

In the case of Abound, he said:

Because of the strong protections we put in place for taxpayers, the Department has already protected more than 80% of the original loan amount. Once the bankruptcy liquidation is complete, the Department expects the total loss to the taxpayer to be between 10 and 15 percent of the original loan amount.

The bigger question, he says, is whether the U.S., which invented solar technology, is going to cede the field in manufacturing to China, which in 2010 alone provided $30 billion in subsidies to its solar manufacturers.

Some in Washington believe that the United States cannot, or should not, compete with China when it comes to solar manufacturing – and aren’t willing to make any investments or take on any risks to win the global clean energy manufacturing race. Meanwhile, China . . . is surging to capture roughly half the market. That’s because China realizes this is a huge global market and a competition worth winning.

We respectfully disagree with those who are willing to cede thousands of high paying jobs and the innovations to come over the next decade and beyond to our competitors in China and around the world. Americans invented solar technology, and with the right support our companies can out-innovate and out-build any competitor, anywhere in the world. 

The recent ruling from the Department of Commerce, slapping high tariffs on Chinese-made solar cells will have little impact on Chinese dominance in the market, most experts agree, because the major Chinese manufacturers are setting up to circumvent the tariff by moving their operations to other countries.

Energy efficiency — DOE has 57 apps for that

Posted: May 29th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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When it comes to energy efficiency, experts will tell you that better, greener technology only gets you so far. You have to get people to change their behavior, that is use less electricity, which is a lot more difficult.

One approach that has been embraced by the federal government and utilities runs on the proposition that if you can show people the connection between their energy use and their electric bills, they might be motivated to change. This is the basic principle behind smart meters and the more detailed information they offer on ratepayers’ energy use.

Building on that, earlier this year,  with prodding from the federal government, California’s three main utilities launched an initiative called the Green Button, a literal green button available on their websites. A quick click of the button and ratepayers could download detailed, raw data on their electricity use in a file form that could be easily input and shared with energy efficiency applications.

To kick start the market for Green Button apps, the Department of Energy has held an Apps for Energy competition, challenging developers to come up with mobile and tablet apps that use the downloadable data to engage people and motivate them to cut their energy use. And to make it serious, the DOE offered some sizable cash prizes, from $4,000 to $30,000 for the top overall winner.

The competition has two parts, one where the entries were judged by an expert panel, and another where the public gets to weigh in and vote for their favorites.

The department received 57 apps, and last week announced five top winners in the judged competition, in two categories — overall, which appears to be apps developed by startups or working developers, and students. 

The top winner overall — for the $30,000 prize – is an app called Leafully, which promotes energy efficiency by translating your energy use into the amount of trees that would be needed to offset your energy use. Using the Green Button data, the app allows folks to track their energy use and set goals — for example, cutting your kilowatts enough to save 10 trees.

The top winner in the student category – scoring a $15,000 prize – is called wotz, developed by a team of students at UC Irvine. This one is really fun, encouraging people to play, explore and challenge themselves with different interactive interpretations of their Green Button data.

Voting in the public competition is still open and runs through the end of the day May 31 – this Thursday. The top winner there gets $8,000.

So far, the leader, way ahead with 3,135 votes, is an app called iEnergy, developed by Interlink Network Systems.  It provides information linking energy use and electric bills and allows you to monitor your top kilowatt-guzzling appliances.

One thing that surfaces in many of the apps is that while we usually focus on reducing our peak usage, it is baseline energy use — the underlying power buzz for appliances and electronics that run even when we’re not home — that makes up a significant part of our bills.

Other takeaways from the competition, as pointed out in a column by Phil Carson, editor of the Intelligent Utility website, are –

  • Application developers are motivated by challenges, competition and money
  • If incentives work for app developers, they’ll work for utility customers
  • Utilities should focus on the youngest customers with these apps and value propositions, and make energy management cool; then have happy users spread the word.

 That last point could be critical. As one of the developers in the iEnergy video says, the earlier in life people start changing their energy habits, the more likely those changes are to become engrained, permanent behavior. 

So check out the apps and vote for your favorites.  Which ones do you think would get you to change your energy use?

And as a quick footnote here — I hate to keep harping on Southern California Edison – but while writing this blog post, I went on the Edison website — cause I’m an Edison customer — to look for the Green Button. It’s not easy to find. You have to have an online account and then you have to go to the Usage screen — the last of the three screens available on customers’ individual account pages.

This would not be so bad if Edison had posted some basic information, with a link easily visible on the website’s home page, telling customers how to get to the Green Button for their accounts.  Not there, even if you put “Green Button” into the website’s search engine.

Maybe as part of the national energy efficiency drive, we need utilities, as well as ratepayers, to change their behavior.

 Anybody got an app for that?

First Solar loses loan guarantee on Topaz

Posted: September 23rd, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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In recent days, the Department of Energy has been finalizing a flurry of renewable energy projects ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline for some of its loan guarantees – but one of them won’t be First Solar’s 550-megawatt Topaz project in San Luis Obispo County.

The Arizona company announced Thursday that Topaz would not meet all the requirements for the conditional $1.9 billion loan guarantee the DOE granted it in June. Company officials would not go into details on exactly what requirements were not met, but they stressed this does not mean they are walking away from the project.

“First Solar’s business model is to develop projects and build and operate and maintain them, ” said Alan Bernheimer, a company spokesman. “We’re not in the business of wanting to own them. Typically we bring in equity investors and potentially some debt around the time construction starts.”

The company is in talks with investors and looking at other debt options to move the project forward without the loan guarantee, he said.

Bernheimer also said that First Solar is not expecting similar problems for its 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight project, now just beginning construction near Desert Center. It received a $1.88 billion conditional loan guarantee in June.

The company also has a third project, its 230-megawatt Antelope Valley solar ranch, in the pipeline for a $680 million DOE loan guarantee.

Is the Topaz situation yet another ripple in the ever-widening impact of the Solyndra bankruptcy and congressional investigation?

Bernheimer thinks not.  Utility-scale solar projects, such as Topaz and Desert Sunlight, are a different animal from solar manufacturers and the risks to the government and taxpayers are much less.

“These projects have long-term power purchase agreements with utilities,” he said.  “The fixed payments are going to be a reliable revenue stream.”

Still, the DOE has to finalize the loan guarantees for Desert Sunlight and Antelope Valley next week — and everyone will be watching.