Researchers at George Mason University and Yale broke down U.S. public opinion into six different categories [pdf], based on people’s belief in, and concern about, global warming.  For the nickel version, see the graphic below:

Of course, I’m sure there are more than six ways of slicing this pie. It seems likely to me that public opinion lies in a continuum, rather than in six discrete groups.

Still, the authors’ analysis yields some interesting findings. My favorite is this: folks who are convinced that global warming is a hoax—the “Dismissives”—admit they haven’t thought all that much about the issue (see Figure 6 on page 14 of the pdf) yet rank themselves as extremely knowledgeable and well informed (see Figure 7).

That should tell us something: for many climate skeptics, facts don’t matter much. They’ve only given the subject a bit of thought, but are still convinced that they know the answers. I don’t mean to be snarky, but to me this suggests that some “Dismissives” may suffer from some version of the Dunning-Kruger effect—the idea that people are very poor judges of their own incompetence. That probably makes many “Dismissives” unreachable: when facts confront their biases, the facts bounce off and the biases stand firm. (I’m sure that’s true of us all, to some degree or another.)

And here’s another point: press accounts of climate issues often include spokespeople at the poles; reporters balance quotes from the “Alarmed” with quotes from the “Dismissive.”  Yet the “Six Americas” report suggests that the process of “balancing” reporting by providing quotes and perspectives from both sides of the debate gives a skewed representation of public opinion.  The “alarmed” and “concerned” make up about 51 percent of the population, while the “doubtful” and “dismissive” represent 18 percent.  Yet if you look at standard he-said-she-said reporting, you might think that opinion is roughly split down the middle.

I’d be very interested in seeing this analysis applied to actual climate scientists. After all, the question of whether climate change is a real threat can’t be decided by a popularity contest or a public opinion poll; the debate is over facts, not opinions.  Many of the climate scientists I’ve met fall into some sort of category far beyond Alarmed—like “Super-Duper-Mega-Alarmed”—and one has fallen somewhere between Cautious and Doubtful (though certainly not Disengaged).  The closest thing we have to this kind of weighing of the collective opinions of professional climate scientists is the IPCC report—essentially, a survey of the opinions of the super-informed.  And contrary to the scorn of the Dismissives, that report leaves little doubt about where the scientific consensus falls.  From the that report:

Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations.

I’d think that sort of statement would be hard to dismiss; but apparently, that’s just my opinion.

This post originally appeared at Sightline’s Daily Score blog.

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Grist recently discussed the new National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) large wind study [pdf]. This study explores scenarios for supplying 20 percent to 30 percent of total electric energy consumption used by the eastern grid through wind power. (The eastern grid serves about 70 percent of the U.S. population.) Although it was not the main focus of the study, the NREL showed that in large-scale renewable scenarios the cost of transmission is much less than when only a small amount of renewable energy is used. For example, one often sees figure of $1,200 per KW for transmission costs for new wind. But if we look at transmission costs on page 39 of the NREL report, and MW generation cost on page 26 of the study, the results pencil out to around $160 to $200 in transmission and distribution costs per KW of capacity.

Although this is supported by really rigorous technical analysis in the study, some simple common sense combined with some knowledge of how the renewable industry works may help explain this.

Quite often short AC transmission lines are proposed to rescue stranded wind, essentially to bring power from a single wind farm to the grid. In many other cases transmission is suggested to support a handful of renewable generation facilities. In those circumstances, that line will be used at an extremely small percentage of capacity, even compared to normal transmission capacity use. (For very good reasons transmission lines are almost never used at anything close to capacity. Peak transmission is supposed to be for rare peak cases. I think something like 30 percent average capacity usage is not uncommon in long distance transmission.)  Now a transmission system connected to a lot of renewabled in many different places will end up with a somewhat lower capacity utilization than one that is used for fossil fuel, hydro, and nuclear energy. But given diverse renewable sources the difference will not be nearly as great as with a renewable monoculture, or even a renewable scenario with limited diversity.

Look at it this way. A new current generation single large wind generator will operate at about 35 percent on average of nameplate capacity. But, that single generator will occasionally reach full nameplate capacity, or at least come very close. In a wind farm with hundreds of turbines this may never happen. When diverse wind farms in different wind areas are connected together, total generation will never come close to matching combined nameplate capacity. Generation will peak at between 60 percent and 75 percent of nameplate capacity. At this point the real cost per peak MW is higher than the nominal cost per MW. But since kWh generated is the same, real capacity utilization is also higher than nominal capacity utilization. So the cost per kWh does not change, but the quality of the power produced is higher. Higher quality power can make better use of transmission capacity.

Power quality improves even more when solar is placed into the mix.

This has implications for high renewable scenarios, 80 percent to 99 percent renewable. Scaling up transmission for such scenarios won’t increase transmission costs per peak MW, and might reduce them. Even if multiplying renewable generation by 3.3X  increases additional transmission by that amount compared to a 30 percent scenario, it won’t increase line miles by 3.3X. Much of whatever additional capacity is needed will be provided by shipping more power along the same route required in the 30 percent scenario. And increasing the capacity of a line is a lot less expensive than increasing the mileage. For one thing there is no additional land required, and even the line itself does not triple in cost when it triples in capacity.

Additionally, tripling generation won’t quite triple transmission requirements. Much additional generation is a substitute for more expensive storage. But if we ever make really massive use of renewables we will need significant storage. Storage will increase energy quality, and thus reduce at least slightly the need for additional transmission.

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If any progress is to be made in the global fight againstclimate change—whether via diplomatic negotiations or cleantechpartnerships—it will only happen through cooperation between the U.S.and China.  But the potential forcollaboration of any kind took a big blow this past week thanks to the Googlefracas.  Reports TheNew York Times:

Beijing and Washington both initially tried to treat the Google case as mainly a commercial dispute. But Mrs. Clinton’s speech on Internet freedom on Thursday, with its cold war undertones, has catapulted the dispute from the realm of technology and cybersecurity to one of fundamental freedoms. China’s strongly worded response suggests that the tensions could spill over into other areas where the administration is eager for Chinese cooperation, including climate change and curtailing Iran’s nuclear program.

The Obama team is trying to tamp down the gloomy analysis, reportsThe Wall Street Journal:

On Friday, the Obama administration reacted to China’s accusation the U.S. was endangering bilateral relations with restraint. Michael Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said he believed the countries’ ties would “continue to grow and strengthen” despite differences on several fronts.

But that’s transparently wishful thinking. 

Add the Google mess to the list of other barriers to climateprogress that emerged this past week, from ScottBrown’s election to LisaMurkowski’s resolution to the IPCC’sadmission that it screwed up climate data to the SupremeCourt’s evisceration of campaign finance limits.

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You hear it all the time, one of the most frequently voiced excuses for Western countries failing to radically cut carbon dioxide emissions: Taking any such action would hand a massive competitive advantage to fast-industrializing China. Yet evidence is piling up that the very opposite is the case. The main challenge from the world’s new industrial superpower is not that it will continue to use the dirty, old technologies of the past, but that it will come to dominate the new, clean, green ones of the future. As developed nations fail to put an adequate price on carbon, and thus to stimulate clean-technology development themselves, they risk handing market supremacy to the rival they most fear. Indeed, it could even be hypothesized that China’s blocking of agreement on rich-country emission targets in Copenhagen was intended to hold back the development of cleantech by its Western rivals.Visitor after distinguished visitor to the world’s most populous country returns home shaken, if not stirred, by the speed and determination with which it is adopting these technologies, especially in renewable energy. David Sandalow, the U.S. assistant secretary of energy for policy and international affairs—a longtime expert in the field, both in and out of government, who has trekked across the Pacific five times since last summer—says, “China’s investment in clean energy is extraordinary. Unless the U.S. makes investments, we are not competitive in the cleantech sector in the years and decades to come.” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote from China earlier this month that he was increasingly convinced that the most important development of recent years would prove to be “not the Great Recession, but China’s Green Leap Forward.” He, too, warned that unless the United States rapidly caught up, “we are going to gradually cede this industry to Beijing and the good jobs and energy security that would go with it.” Certainly China’s commitment and growth in this area are breathtaking. It already boasts a thousand solar water heater manufacturers providing some 600,000 jobs. One in every 10 homes in the giant country has them installed, making up two-thirds of the entire world’s solar hot water capacity; by 2030, some estimates suggest, half of all the country’s households could have them. Solar electricity is not far behind. In 2005, China produced a relatively tiny 100 megawatts of solar cells. Two years later, it was leading the world with 1,088 MW. This year, it is predicted to exceed 5,000 MW, a third of the world’s total—and it’s expected to go on expanding to reach 10,000 MW in just five years time. Solar thermal power is also on the rise: 2,000 MW of solar thermal power stations are expected to come online over the next decade, with a dramatic increase in the years after that. At the same time, installed wind-power capacity has been doubling annually: China is expected to meet its original 30,000 MW target for 2020 in two years time, and last year it vastly increased the target to an ambitious 100,000 MW. Indeed, the wind-power expansion reveals something of China’s ruthless determination to lead the world in these new low-carbon industries.  In 2003, just before the headlong growth of the industry began, the country heavily restricted imports, requiring its wind farms to source 70 percent of its parts from the domestic market. The restriction was only lifted last year, by which time home production dominated the business. And an even more ominous development seems to be gathering pace. China is responsible for 97 percent of the world’s production of rare earth elements or metals, vital for many cleantech products from wind turbines to hybrid-car batteries, fiber optics to low-energy light bulbs. But over the last seven years, it has reduced the quantity of them available for export by 40 percent, and before long may be using all of its production to feed domestic demand. Other countries—including the United States, South Africa, and Greenland—have significant deposits of rare earth metals, but are years away from properly exploiting them. By increasingly restricting supplies, China could strangle overseas clean industries while boosting its own. The U.S. administration, at least, is alive to the danger of China dominating the cleantech market. Last April, President Obama warned, “The nation that leads the world in 21st-century clean energy will be the nation that leads in the 21st-century global economy.” The tens of billions of dollars in his stimulus package devoted to renewables is an attempt to gain that lead for the United States. In fact, there may be an even more productive course: partnership with China. Whereas China can make things much more cheaply than the United States—and open factories much faster—it is, as yet, still far behind the U.S. in innovation and venture capital. There is an opportunity to come together to benefit both countries—and the world. But seizing that opportunity would require the U.S., as well as other Western countries, to take serious action to raise the price of carbon and spark a wave of new technological innovation, rather than ceding the field to China while falsely professing to be protecting their economies from it.

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Photo courtesy obrien26382 via Flickr The great hope for powering a sustainable world is renewable energy. The great barrier to powering a sustainable world is the cost and complexity of building a new national transmission grid that will transmit the carbon-free electricity generated by remote wind farms and solar power plants to population centers.

In 2008, the U.S. Department of Energy released a report that concluded the United States could obtain 20 percent of its electricity from wind power by 2030. This week the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory issued a study that shows how the eastern half of the U.S. could obtain as much as 30 percent of its electricity from wind by 2024. The study focused on what transmission geeks call the Eastern Interconnection, six linked regional power grids that run from the Great Plains to the Eastern Seaboard and from the Canadian border to the tip of Florida.

“Although significant costs, challenges, and impacts are associated with a 20 percent wind scenario, substantial benefits can be shown to overcome the costs,” the report’s authors wrote. “Such a scenario is unlikely to be realized with a business-as-usual approach, and that a major national commitment to clean, domestic energy sources with desirable environmental attributes would be required.”

Essentially, all we need to do is come up with at least $93 billion for new power lines and infrastructure and get myriad transmission operators and local agencies to cooperate on the design of a new high-voltage grid.

Sounds daunting. But let’s put the numbers in context. The $93 billion is roughly what the U.S. spends in eight months on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Or to use another metric, a little more than what Joe Taxpayer forked over to bail out AIG.

The payback to build a transmission grid, however, is likely to be far more productive.  Such an expansion of transmission capacity (and the resulting increase ) in wind power—and one assumes, other renewable energy—would displace coal-fired power plants, according to the NREL.

It would also solve one of the biggest problems with wind—its intermittency, which plays havoc with keeping electricity flowing smoothly. To greatly simplify, the wind is usually blowing somewhere. By multiplying the number of wind farms that feed into a single transmission grid from a broad swath of the country, transmission operators can rely less on fossil fuel power plants—read coal—as a backup when the wind dies, say, in South Dakota.

That will lower not only the price of renewable energy but utilities’ capital costs, which are, of course, passed on to their customers.

In California, for instance, utilities like PG&E spend billions on natural gas-fired power plants in order to provide emergency power for those few days each year when the grid is overloaded—hot summer afternoons when everyone cranks up their air conditioners at the same time.

“About 10 percent of our generation capacity sits idle for all but 50 hours a year,” Andrew Tang, a senior director at PG&E, tells me. “This industry is predicated on the premise that you always prepare for the worst day. It’s hugely expensive.”

Left unsaid in the NREL report is that the massive expansion of wind power needed to supply 20 to 30 percent of the nation’s electricity would be a green jobs machine.

At the beginning of 2009, according to the report, the U.S. had 25,000 megawatts of wind capacity installed and added another 4,500 megawatts during the first half of that year, despite the recession. To reach the 20 percent target, NREL estimates that 225,000 megawatts of new wind capacity must come online. Add another 105,000 megawatts to hit 30 percent.

The researchers offered different scenarios on how to achieve those goals, relying on varying mixes of wind from the Great Plains, the East and offshore. The 30 percent target relies heavily on developing wind farms off the East Coast, a capital-intensive undertaking that so far has run into huge political problems.

The NREL report, which was prepared by the consulting firm EnerNex, offers a highly technical discussion on how to reconfigure the grid to accommodate all that wind. But the bottom line is that between 8,352 and 11,102 miles of 800-volt direct current transmission lines, as well as thousands of miles of lower-voltage power lines, must be built. All in all, as many as 22,697 miles of new transmission lines would need to be installed, along with all the supporting infrastructure.

But the key takeaway is that NREL has concluded that there are no overriding technological hurdles or insurmountable financial obstacles to be overcome on the way to achieving the 20 percent target. It is basically a political problem—just imagine the NIMBY nightmare all those power lines would create.

Well, a political solution has been offered up by, of all people, Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who previously advised President George W. Bush on how to neutralize demands that the government take action on global warming.

Luntz has apparently undergone a climate change conversion. In a poll he released on Thursday, Luntz found that there is broad support among both Republicans and Democrats for climate change legislation when the issue is couched in terms of national security and energy independence.

“National security tops every other reason to support cap-and-trade,” Luntz concluded. “It’s about freeing the U.S. from foreign oil—and opening the door to greater security and prosperity.”

And as green energy advocates press to translate the NREL report into action, it’s worth remembering how a 20th century president managed to persuade Congress to fund a similarly ambitious infrastructure project, the interstate highway system.

Eisenhower did not argue that we needed to spend billions of dollars on a vast road system so we could develop the suburbs or drive coast-to-coast with ease. In the fearful fifties, he said building such a transportation network was all about creating the ability to move troops around the country in a national emergency. In other words, a national security argument secured what would become the driver of American prosperity in the coming decades.

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Last Friday I had the pleasure of visiting Cornell University for the announcement of the school’s new combined heat/power gas plant. The school built the plant as the beginning of its mission to move away from coal - university officials estimate the campus will be entirely off coal in 18 months.This is the latest step Cornell officials have taken in the effort to make the university carbon neutral. Four years ago they built a lake water cooling system that uses cold lake water to cool all of their buildings, a step that dropped the electricity needed for their cooling by 90 percent.  This is on top of aggressive energy efficiency efforts ongoing campus wide. I had the chance to sit down with Cornell officials and chat about their changes, check out the audio here on Cornell’s website.It’s very impressive - Cornell is showing that we can do it (video!), and we can slash our global warming pollution and we can do it quickly.I had two favorite moments at last Friday’s event. First - when Cornell President David Skorton said he looks forward to Cornell’s coal stockpile becoming a symbol of a time gone by; secondly, that the entire event was framed as “Moving Cornell Beyond Coal” on all the placards around the room.On the tour of both the school’s old coal-fired power plant and the new combined heat/power gas plant - it was as if I’d time-traveled. The coal facility was filthy with coal dust and clearly outdated. But the new facility was clean, sparkling and pristine – a sign of the switch to cleaner sources of energy.Cornell University is just another great example of our institutions of higher learning moving beyond coal. Last year we launched our Campuses Beyond Coal Campaign and saw it achieve great success.The campaign’s accomplishments will continue this year, according to Kim Teplitzky, our coal campaign coordinator for the Sierra Student Coalition.“Already we’ve launched efforts at five new schools, including Clemson, the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and Michigan State University, and are gearing up to expand the campaign the even further into Iowa, Tennessee, Colorado and several other states,” said Teplitzky.Teplitzky has seen the campaign’s great work first-hand, noting that college students are clamoring for immediate solutions, asking their universities to stop burning coal on campus in the next three years, and becoming leaders in implementing innovative, creative and forward thinking solutions such as using geothermal, designing better buildings and growing local economies with integrated biomass solutions.  University administrators are seeing that they cannot meet their climate goals without getting rid of coal on their campus.“And students aren’t just focused on their own schools,” added Teplitzky. “The campaign is engaging thousands of youth to demand the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and President Obama take action to ensure that coal ash is classified as hazardous waste and that EPA be allowed to do its job protecting the health and safety of communities affected by the dangers of coal nation-wide.”We have the momentum and are looking forward to another year of great successes.

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When I hear folks like Alex Steffen talk about “remaking cities,” my gut reaction is that U.S. cities seem mostly permanent, like they’re already built and we’re stuck with them. (Quick reminder: The world’s cities cause 75 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions, according to several measures.) But then there’s this new slideshow at Slate, in which Camilo Jose Vergara photographs the ruins of urban America. Some of the photos portray the same abandoned landscapes just a few years apart. It’s amazing how quickly built structures decay, and how quickly weeds and rot take root. It’s a reminder that cities—especially the struggling ones—offer constant opportunities for smarter rebuilding and redesigning.

For a more empirical perspective, Architecture 2030 offers a useful rundown:

Courtesy Architecture 2030

Herein lies the hope. By the year 2035, approximately three-quarters (75%) of the built environment will be either new or renovated.

Architecture 2030 founder Ed Mazria notes that these are pre-recession figures. Construction rates are significantly lower at the moment, though renovation rates are probably up. Even with that caveat, our built environments are less permanent than you might assume.

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DOE and EPA Agree to Make a Brighter Energy Star

WASHINGTON—The past decade was the warmest ever, according to a new analysis of global surface temperatures released by NASA.

The U.S. space agency also found that 2009 was the second-warmest year on record since modern temperature measurements began in 1880. Last year was only a small fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest yet, putting 2009 in a virtual tie with the other hottest years, which have all occurred since 1998.

According to James Hansen, who heads NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, global temperatures change due to variations in ocean heating and cooling. “When we average temperature over five or 10 years to minimize that variability, we find global warming is continuing unabated,” Hansen said in a statement.

A strong La Niña effect that cooled the tropical Pacific Ocean made 2008 the coolest year of the decade, according to the New York-based institute.

In analyzing the data, NASA scientists found a clear warming trend, although a leveling off took place in the 1940s and 1970s. The records showed that temperatures trended upward by about 0.36 degrees F per decade over the past 30 years. Average global temperatures have increased a total of about 1.5 degrees F since 1880.

“That’s the important number to keep in mind,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist with the institute. “The difference between the second and sixth warmest years is trivial because the known uncertainty in the temperature measurement is larger than some of the differences between the warmest years.”

Last year’s near-record temperatures took place despite an unseasonably cool December in much of North America and a warmer-than-normal Arctic, with frigid air from the Arctic rushing into the region while warmer mid-latitude air shifted northward, the institute said.

The analysis was based on weather data from more than a thousand meteorological stations worldwide, satellite observations of sea surface temperatures, and Antarctic research station measurements.

“There’s a contradiction between the results shown here and popular perceptions about climate trends,” Hansen said. “In the last decade, global warming has not stopped.”

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On Thursday the University of Charleston in West Virginia hosted a debate between Don Blankenship, CEO of mountaintop-removal mining firm Massey Energy Co., and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., environmental lawyer and founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance. I kept up a running play-by-play that can be accessed by scrolling back through my Twitter feed, but I didn’t take notes, so this is from memory and I won’t be using direct quotes.

The mystery to me going in was why Blankenship agreed to it. What possible incentive is there for a corporate CEO to put himself in a risky situation, publicly defending a widely reviled product? What’s the upside? Why not just buy some ads or hire more lobbyists?

Having watched the debate, I’m more mystified than ever. If that was supposed to be damage control, I’d hate to see damage. Blankenship had every advantage, with a friendly hometown crowd eager to applaud him and a moderator who helpfully read off pro-coal facts during commercial breaks, but he was painfully and obviously outmatched by Kennedy. I guess it’s easy to get over-confident when you’ve effectively purchased a state government and broken the law with impunity for years.

He didn’t seem even cursorily prepared. Kennedy reeled off fact after fact about declining mining employment in WV, the age of Appalachian ecosystems and the impossibility of recovering them after MTR mining damage, the enormous health and economic impacts of coal on Appalachia, the size of Chinese investments in clean energy, the number of Clean Water Act violations from Massey, and on and on and on. Every fact was geared toward a plea to West Virginians: look, this man is making himself rich by making you poor. He’s sapping your state of jobs, income, health, and a future.

In response Blankenship had nothing but ressentiment and nativism. Over and over he dismissed Kennedy’s facts as “rhetoric” and “just false” claims that “you can find on the internet,” but not once did he refute or even convincingly contest a particular claim. He asked the audience to dismiss them based purely on crude stereotypes about out-of-state environmentalists.

His very first rebuttal drew on a familiar conservative trope: environmentalists are are overly emotional and rely on extremist rhetoric rather than facts and cool reason. But no sooner had the words left his mouth than he was talking about how the coal industry is really “your neighbors” and “Sunday school teachers,” working to create down-home energy so terrorists don’t come over and kill us. He warned that pesky regulatory constraints from do-gooders mean “we all better learn to speak Chinese.” This is what reasoned, non-emotional rhetoric looks like, I guess: if you criticize my company you hate Sunday school teachers, love terrorists, and want to surrender national sovereignty to Red China.

When Kennedy accused him of leaving behind ghost towns across WV, Blankenship responded that he’d bought up all those homes at fair market value (“those people left voluntarily”). In response to Kennedy’s points on water pollution, Blankenship effectively dismissed the threat of mercury as a bunch of hype on the internet. (If mercury is dangerous, he asked, how is it people in India live to be 79? Really, that was his argument. Apparently he’s never heard of Minimata disease.) When Kennedy listed the social and health damages done by coal—“externalities” the industry charges to taxpayers—Blankenship mumbled, “do we have some of those externalities? I don’t know. Maybe.” When Kennedy pointed out that China is dumping trillions into renewable energy, Massey responded that they were only building windmills to appease the UN. When Kennedy pointed out that Massey’s own disclosure revealed some 12,000 violations of the Clean Water Act last year, Blankenship responded that they’re reducing their violations year to year, now that they’ve been reminded by the EPA that it would be a good idea.

In short, Kennedy was the encyclopedic superego of environmentalism and Blankenship was the raw id of crony capitalism.

I’ll admit I’ve always been perversely fascinated by Blankenship. Most big corporate CEOs have mastered the art of calorie-free management speak. They’ve learned how to stay on message and skirt controversy. Not Blankenship. Not only does he openly flout the law and buy political access, he remains defiantly unpleasant in person, speaking in an affectless, heavily accented mumble. Watch toward the end of this video, the archival footage:

He still talks like that. He simply dismissed Kennedy’s facts and stuck to his narrative:  global warming’s a hoax, hippie environmentalists are strangling free enterprise,  out-of-staters have no right to question what happens in WV, and China is going to take over if we don’t mine and burn all the coal we can as fast as we can. We’re crazy to be worried about “parts per million” of pollutants when coal is the only thing keeping our life expectancy above Angola’s. We’re in a ruthless global competition for dominance and the most productive and efficient win, mountains and poor people be damned.

In sharp contrast to, say, Duke Energy’s congenial, folksy CEO Jim Rogers, Blankenship fashions himself a hillbilly John Galt and doesn’t give a f*ck what you think about it.

Why he’d want to take that act to a national audience is a true puzzlement.

—-

Addendum:

By the way, asked what they might agree about, the Blankenship and Kennedy settled on two things: they don’t like “free trade” and they think carbon capture and sequestration is nonsense.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

We are all from Wise County

David Roberts wants to see distributed generation taken seriously. He’s getting his wish.

Let the era of solar wholesale distributed generation begin.

Last Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission approved a resolution to implement the auction portion of Southern California Edison’s Distributed Generation PV program. This is a big deal—the door is now open for a competitive bidding process for 250 MW of solar photovoltaics from independent solar developers (of 1 to 2 MW in size, 90% of which must be rooftop) over the next few years. First auctions should begin in the next month or two.

More importantly, this is the beginning of what will be a wave of wholesale distributed generation in the state.

To recap, almost 2 years ago, SCE applied to regulators for permission to build and own 250 MW of distributed solar. Solar advocates made the argument that this should be conditioned on opening market opportunity for independent solar developers to provide the same value to ratepayers—and in the end, the Commission agreed. The final decision required SCE to buy an equal amount—250 MW—from independent solar developers (for a combined total of 500 MW). Decision here.

(For the curious or masochistic, all docs in proceeding here ).

Importantly, much work on the auction process and standard contract terms and conditions were worked out last fall. This is a key element. Drafts available here but were modified (mostly for the better) by the final decision.

Pacific Gas and Electric has proposed a similar program, which should wrap up by February. With a lot of issues worked out in the SCE process, once (if) approved, PG&E’s program should be able to launch fairly quickly. This is another 500 MW (250 utility owned, 250 from independent power producers, in the 1-20 MW range).

In the same vein, the Administrative Law Judge on the proposed 1 GW market-based feed-in tariff could decide shortly (knock wood), and if there are no bumps from the trajectory that the staff proposal laid out, a functional program for 1 GW of 1-10 MW sized renewables over the next four years could be launched before summer.

Total, that’s at least 2 GW over the next few years. But I expect that more will come in under the state’s regular RPS process, and as (or, if) these programs prove successful, they can be modified and increased.

Success begets success.

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