But among energy experts, there was considerable skepticism over PG&E officials’ assertion that the utility could sharply expand its renewable energy portfolio without higher costs to customers and without hurting supply reliability. The most striking criticism of PG&E’s plan came from those who said the utility would probably have to increase — not reduce — its use of fossil fuels in coming decades after Diablo Canyon’s two nuclear reactors close in 2024 and 2025.

Writing in Forbes magazine, geochemist James Conca was deeply skeptical of the claim the shuttering of Diablo Canyon wouldn’t cost PG&E customers. He also made the point that given the unreliability and cost of solar and wind power, PG&E would have little choice but to build plants producing natural gas, a fossil fuel, to replace the 11 percent of state electricity now provided by Diablo Canyon.

PG&E’s promise of no cost increase is dropped

Last week, the skeptics were proven right on the cost front. PG&E announced it was seeking a 1.6 percent increase in the average bill of residential customers to generate $1.77 billion over eight years to pay for the cost of closing Diablo Canyon.

This triggered fury among environmental groups. “It’s outrageous and it is totally deceptive what PG&E said before compared with what is actually going to happen,” Michael Shellenberger, the leader of Environmental Progress, a green advocacy group based in Berkeley, told the San Jose Mercury News.

But based on what’s happened after the closing of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant in New England at the end of 2014, California environmentalists may have plenty more to be upset about in coming years.

Northeast utilities had years to prepare for the shuttering of Vermont Yankee on the Connecticut River in the town of Vernon, Vermont. Though legal fights continued in federal court, the nuclear plant’s closure appeared inevitable after the Vermont Legislature voted in 2010 against allowing it to continue providing one-third of the state’s power and to contribute to the region’s grid. Green groups expressed confidence that renewable energy would come to the fore.

Closing of Vermont nuclear plant leads to natural gas surge

That hasn’t happened. In January, the Independent System Operator for New England issued a report on energy supplies. In 2014, natural gas supplied 43.1 percent of electricity and oil supplied 1.7 percent. In 2015, natural gas supplied 48.5 percent and oil supplied 1.9 percent.

That’s a more than 5 percent jump in natural gas and oil electricity supply, from 44.8 percent to 50.4 percent.

In a March report, ISO New England implied that this was good thing: “Natural gas resources and renewables are displacing less economic and higher-emitting resources in New England. The ability of many natural-gas-fired plants to change output quickly helps to balance an increasing amount of generation from intermittent power resources that rely on the wind and sun.”

Unless wind and solar power technologies become much more efficient and reliable by 2024, the tough choices now facing New England are likely in California as well.

Roughly 1,000 miles away in Wyoming, the developers of what would be the nation’s largest on-shore wind farm quickly caught word of the proposal.

 

California has long represented the holy grail for the Power Company of Wyoming, the Anschutz Corp. subsidiary that has proposed building the 3,000 megawatt Chokecherry Sierra Madre wind farm in Carbon County.

 

California [already had] a mandate that requires 33 percent of its power come from renewable sources by 2020. And with almost 39 million residents in need of electricity, that represents a potentially hefty sum of green electrons.

 

The problem for wind developers in Wyoming, is Brown and other California policymakers have insisted the Golden State meet its 33 percent mark with power generated from inside the state. California is projected to reach its 2020 benchmark on time.

 

But Brown’s inaugural address left many wondering if the four-term governor was coming around to the idea of out-of-state renewables.

 

“They’ve always said if they raised their renewable portfolio, Wyoming would have a place in that new demand,” said Loyd Drain, the executive director of the Wyoming Infrastructure Authority.

 

Drain has spent the last five years lobbying California policymakers on the virtues of Wyoming wind.

 

“They’re going to look to us, I do believe,” he said.

Wind patterns in two states are opposite

Wyoming’s interest in supplying California is backed up by a pioneering study that looks at wind patterns, an important factor, given the great concern about renewable energy being erratic and unreliable as a 24/7/365 source of power.

A new University of Wyoming study further demonstrates that combining the strengths of Wyoming wind with California wind and solar will reduce the intermittency of renewable energy and smooth the power supply — leading to benefits for utilities and energy consumers alike.

 

It turns out that Wyoming’s and California’s wind patterns are rather opposite, and that means that they’re complimentary. When one is active, the other isn’t. Based on a yearly average, California wind is strongest at night, while Wyoming wind is strongest during the day and peaks in the afternoon — coincident with the time when the sun is beginning to set while the electric load is still increasing into the evening hours.

 

“Although the benefits of geographic diversity to renewable energy have been suggested for some time, only recently have there been attempts to quantify these benefits,” says the study’s author, Jonathan Naughton, a UW professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Wind Energy Research Center. “The renewable energy quality metrics proposed in this study are a start at being able to characterize different combinations of renewable energy sources. The result of applying these metrics to energy produced from Wyoming wind and California renewables provides a quite compelling case for geographic diversity.”

But whether this intriguing study and Wyoming’s strong interest will translate into the state becoming a California energy supplier is very much up in the air. Solar power is expanding so quickly in California that utilities are making what appear to be barely disguised attempts to make it a less attractive option for homeowners and businesses considering installing solar panels, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported Thursday. If solar panels keep coming down in price, Wyoming officials’ assumption that their wind power supplies would be attractive to California on cost grounds appears shaky.

However, California’s emphasis on switching to renewable power — and the little-known fact that it is home to The Geysers, the world’s largest geothermal power complex, 70 miles north of San Francisco — has officials in Imperial County hopeful that developing their region’s vast geothermal resource can be part of a larger overall plan to rescue the dying Salton Sea and improve the impoverished local economy.

Last year, working with the Imperial Irrigation District, state Sen. Ben Hueso, a Democrat from San Diego whose district includes all of Imperial County, and Assemblyman V. Manuel Pérez, D-Coachella, won Senate passage of SB 1139 before pulling the bill from Assembly consideration in September. This is from the Desert Sun’s account:

SB 1139 … would require utilities to buy 500 megawatts of electricity from new geothermal plants by 2024 … . While the bill wouldn’t have required that any geothermal power come from the Salton Sea specifically, it’s likely that developers would have jumped to take advantage of the sea’s huge untapped energy potential.

 

IID has estimated that geothermal and other green technology development at the Salton Sea could generate more than $4 billion over 30 years, with much of that money going toward restoring the receding body of water. Ramping up geothermal development would also create thousands of jobs in Imperial County, which has a 22 percent unemployment rate — the highest in the state.

 

It’s unclear why [Hueso and Pérez] decided not to bring the bill to a vote in the Assembly, following its 21-11 passage in the Senate earlier this year. Hueso’s office had indicated last month it was only a matter of time before the bill came up for a vote in the Assembly, but it’s possible he simply didn’t have enough votes to secure its passage.

Imperial still committed to grand plans

As saltonseasense.com noted in June, quoting official reports, the Imperial Irrigation District remains committed “to build up to 1,700 MW of geothermal power by the early 2030s at the Salton Sea.”

But it’s no longer clear if there is much legislative support for an SB 1139-type approach mandating geothermal development. Officials with the state’s three giant investor-owned utilities have never been big fans of geothermal as a major source of state power. Energy experts say there’s a reason that there’s no billionaire enthusiast pushing geothermal, as T. Boone Pickens has done with wind power and several tycoons have done with solar power. It’s because a deep dig into the facts — by scientists as well as potential investors — shows it’s not an attractive option.

Tom Murphy, an associate professor of physics at the University of California-San Diego, explains why on his “Do the Math” blog:

The energy derived is mostly useful for heat, being inefficient at producing electricity. It won’t fly our planes or drive our cars. And it’s buried under kilometers of solid rock, making it very difficult to access. Each borehole only makes available the heat in its immediate surroundings — unlike drilling for oil or natural gas, where a single hole may access a large underground deposit.

 

So my guess is that we’ll burn every tree and fossil fuel on the planet before we start drilling through ordinary rock to stay warm. In other words, there is little incentive to dig deep for heat. By the time we run out of the easier resources —having burned every scrap of wood not bolted down — are we going to be left in a state to drill through rock at a massive scale?  ….

 

In short, even though the thermal energy sitting under our feet is enormous in magnitude, it does not strike me as a lucky find. No one is racing to dig in.  Perhaps it is simpler to say that it’s economically excluded, at present.

The 10 small geothermal plants now operating in Imperial County are seen as a promising symbol of what the poor farming region might become. But the reality seems much more likely to be that geothermal energy — on a large scale, at least — never amounts to much in a California that’s now rushing to invent its alternative-energy future.

Instead, those plants could someday be seen as a symbol of the folly of local politicians and bureaucrats talking themselves into believing that they could treat geothermal energy production as if it were a type of pork that could be legislated into existence.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory goes even further. As Vox reported last month, it no longer believes there is any technical barrier to “a grid running on 100 percent wind and solar.”

This view counters the conventional wisdom. A comprehensive study by Cornell electrical engineer Eilyan Bitar released earlier this year is highly skeptical that a grid system could be reliable without traditional “bulk power generation.”

All of which makes recent developments with California’s wind- and solar-power industries of acute interest. According to a global-energy blog run by McGraw-Hill’s financial information branch …

In the first quarter of this year, with unseasonably warm dry weather tamping down wind flows in California, the amount of power generated by the state’s 44 wind farms fell off by around 35% compared to the first quarter of 2014, according to data filed with the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Energy Information Administration … .

 

While that was a first, clear signal that wind power had its distinct draw-backs, but two more recent dates — June 8 and 9 — seemed something like days of reckoning for renewables in California.

 

As demand for power rose and generation surged to meet it, rain, widespread cloud cover and poor wind pushed down the amount of wind and solar generation available to help meet the demand. Because of the shortage of renewables, prices surged.

‘Microgrids’ meshing with the ‘Internet of things’

This relative unreliability is why Bitar thinks the answer going forward is “microgrids.” This is from a physics blog run by Cornell:

In an intelligent grid, this variability in supply would be balanced through the coordination of flexible distributed energy resources at the periphery of the system. Power would be produced locally and consumed locally, giving rise to self-sufficient communities or cities, called microgrids. Such an approach would decrease the need to transmit bulk power hundreds of miles to counterbalance fluctuations in renewable sources.

 

The architecture of such a system, which requires sensors and actuators in appliances, electric vehicles and the like, isn’t the hard part, Bitar said. The hard part is the design of algorithms to efficiently manage the deluge of information produced by those sensors in order to coordinate the simultaneous control of millions of distributed energy resources on fast time scales.

This in turn suggests the “Internet of things” that Americans have been told is just around the corner — in which an online network constantly monitors and links humans, appliances and machines — would also be an extension of the electricity grid.

Privacy advocates would then have a new area to worry about — individual energy use being subject to 24-7-365 monitoring.

An essay in the Guardian earlier this year raised such concerns.

That’s the conclusion of an article in the March-April issue of Eureka, a new periodical by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The word Eureka, of course, is the state motto of California.

The article is titled “The Politics of Governor Brown’s Climate Change Proposals,” by Carson Bruno, a research fellow on California at Hoover. “In fact, in 2011, allowed renewables plus nuclear and large hydro-electric accounted for 53.1 percent of California’s in-state electricity generation, easily surpassing Brown’s new target,” he wrote.

Bruno clarified in an email to CalWatchdog.com that he only looked at in-state power generation, which included allowed renewables, nuclear and large hydro generation.

And the discrepancy with the official state tally of renewables as not even 33 percent so far is because of the state’s official definition of “allowed renewables.” According to Bruno, California does not include hydro and nuclear power as “allowed renewables” even though they are non-polluting. It also hides its reliance on “dirty” imported power from other states by categorizing it as “unspecified power.”

Bruno said that, if nuclear and hydro power are included, California exceeded the 50 percent green-power threshold in 2011 when the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant was decommissioned and a substantial amount of green solar power mainly took its place.

Moreover, adding new hydro and nuclear power would be just as clean an alternative as less steady and more expensive solar, wind or geothermal power, according to Bruno. Wind power stops on calm days; and solar power stops at dusk.

Of course, building more hydro means more dams, which is opposed by environmentalists; and more nuclear power is close to impossible after the Fukushima accident in Japan four years ago.

Electricity mix

To fact check Bruno’s numbers, CalWatchdog.com conducted its own investigation into California’s mix of electricity sources since the enactment of AB32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. Using its authority under AB32, in 2010 the California Air Resources Board mandated 33 percent renewables by 2020.

California not only does not consider hydroelectric and nuclear power as renewable but hides that the state still partly depends on imported coal power from other states that it has re-categorized as “unspecified power.” In 2013, California got 7.82 percent of its power from coal-fired power plants and 12.49 percent from murky “unspecified power,” totaling 20.31 percent.

The California Energy Commission uses this definition: “Unspecified Sources of Power generally include spot market purchases, wholesale power marketing, purchases from pools of electricity where the original source of fuel is undetermined, and null power.”

According to the CEC, “Null power refers to power that was originally renewable power but from which the renewable energy credits have been unbundled and sold separately. Null power is not attributable to any technology or fuel type.”

Renewable Energy Credits

Renewable Energy Credits are also known as Green Tags.  Instead of trading tons of carbon, REC’s trade kilowatt-hours of wholesale electricity from untrackable sources because electrons from coal and green power are all the same.

RECs are a way for municipal power departments and new municipal Community Choice power buying cooperatives to “green wash” their purchases of imported power from outside California. It is a way of allowing imported coal power, that technically doesn’t add to California’s air pollution, to count as “green” and “clean.”

Yet entirely clean nuclear and hydropower are not considered clean.

When RECs are considered in the state green power mix for both in-state and imported power, California already nearly met or exceeded its 50 percent green power goal in 2009 (49.89 percent), 2010 (50.37 percent) and in 2011 (56.55 percent).

Conversely, when RECs are considered as fossil-fueled power instead of “greenwashed,” the proportion of California’s power from fossil fuel sources has shown no substantial reduction.

Percentage of California Power from Fossil Fuels — 2007 to 2013

In-State and Imported Power

California is meeting its current 33 percent green power goal by including solar, wind and geothermal power as green, excluding hydro and nuclear power as green, reducing nuclear power output and “greenwashing” imported coal power from other states.

Finding the above numbers buried in the CEC’s database may be a Eureka moment. But learning that California hasn’t much reduced its proportion of fossil-fueled power after spending billions of dollars on green energy validates Bruno’s conclusion that California’s green energy policy is “not about climate change, it’s about politics.”

In his Jan. 5 inaugural address for his historic fourth term as California’s governor, Jerry Brown proposed an ambitious expansion of California’s renewable energy goals from 33 to 50 percent by 2030. The current level in 2015 is 20 percent renewables.

However, the 50 percent renewable energy portfolio standard had to be dropped from Assembly Bill 327, passed on Oct. 7, 2013, due to opposition by large utility companies and energy consumer advocates. Nonetheless, Brown wants to revive it, as well as cutting the use of gasoline by half in California in just 15 years.

The devil is always in the details of such ambitious plans. So we’ll have to wait to see the numbers for the costs or impacts on the environment such a massive and sudden expansion of green power would have on California.

As CalWatchdog.com reported, Brown recently was rebuked by the Little Hoover Commission for failing to disclose to Californians how much the price tag will be for renewable power in California.

The closest Californians can come to understanding the impacts such a huge expansion of green power would have on the environment is Stanford University Prof. Mark Jacobson’s similar plan to expand California’s green power to 100 percent by 2030.  Jacobson’s Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford is funded by billionaire California investor and green-energy proponent Tom Steyer.

New Transmission Lines

Here’s how to figure the amount of needed new transmission lines:

1. Eugene G. Preston, Ph.D., P.E., a consulting electric transmission line engineer, has estimated Jacobson’s 100 percent renewable energy plan for California would require 75,000 miles of new transmission lines across the Western United States.

2. Today green power already has reached 20 percent in California, according to the Renewables Portfolio Standard Quarterly Report for the 2nd Quarter of 2014 by the California Public Utilities Commission. So it would have to increase another 80 percentage points to reach Jacobson’s 100 percent level.

And it would need to increase that another 30 percentage points to reach Brown’s 50 percent level. That also means Brown’s level is 3/8ths of Jacobsen’s level, a useful ratio for us to use. (30 percent more renewables for Brown’s proposal; 80 percent more for Jacobson’s = 3/8.)

3. Let’s use the 3/8 ratio. Jacobson’s 100 percent renewables proposal would require 75,000 miles of new transmission lines. So Brown’s proposal would require 3/8 of that, or 28,125 more miles of transmission lines.

Using standard measurements for the land needed for transmission lines, that 28,125 miles of new lines would amount to 852,272 acres, or 1,332 square miles of land acquired for use by the lines.  That would be about the size of the state of Rhode Island at 1,213 square miles.

Preston added:

“Therefore the concept envisioned in the SA [Jacobson’s Scientific American] article is not a workable plan because the transmission problems have not been addressed. The lines aren’t going to get built. The wind is not going to interconnect. The SA article plan is not even a desirable plan. The environmental impact and cost would be horrendous. Lets get realistic.” 

The same problems exist for Brown’s smaller, but still substantial, proposal for 50 percent renewables.

On Friday, Brown is releasing his budget proposal for fiscal year 2015-16, which begins on July 1. Something to look for is if he accounts for this added cost to California’s infrastructure.

“[Germany moved] to boost renewable energy sources, almost 15 years ago and concedes now that it made a serious mistake. At the turn of the millennium, the German government pointed with pride as it implemented an ‘energy transformation’ plan that would speed the nation’s conversion to politically correct energy sources. The costs of wind and solar were astronomical, since the sun sets in the evening and the wind, unlike a politician, doesn’t always blow. Nevertheless, the government deemed the cause worthy of great subsidy.

“Conventional energy sources were heavily taxed, and $33 billion in wealth was transferred from the consumers of affordable energy sources to the owners of wind and solar projects in the past year.

“Private residencies last year paid $9.6 billion in additional fees to subsidize renewables. Electricity prices are three times higher in Germany than in the United States. More than 800,000 Germans have had their electricity cut off because they couldn’t pay the light bill.

“Germany’s industrial sector, a quarter of the economy, paid $10 billion in taxes last year to finance green energy. The Federation of German Industries is worried that manufacturers will lose a competitive edge internationally as a result.”

Fracking has hidden impact of costly green policies

As Cal Watchdog’s Wayne Lusvardi has pointed out in dozens of articles in recent years, something similar is unfolding in California. Government edicts are forcing a shift to much costlier sources of power, some of which aren’t even particularly clean. But these edicts are not being accompanied by honesty about the long-term impacts on consumers.

What’s the main reason California consumers haven’t been squawking over a forced shift to costlier power in recent years? A utility executive told me last year that a key factor was cheap and plentiful natural gas — because of fracking — keeping overall energy costs in check.

How perverse is that? The green devil of fracking is making the green mania less painful in California.

But eventually, we’ll have a German-style epiphany and realize that alternative energy simply costs way more than the sort we’re used to using. Eventually as in 2020. More from the Washington Times:

“California has implemented a state cap-and-trade scheme to cool the planet, and drivers are feeling the result at the pump. Californians pay the nation’s highest gasoline prices, an average of 55 cents more for every gallon … .

“The Boston Consulting Group found that after factoring in the state’s low carbon-dioxide fuel standard, gasoline prices could jump an additional $1.83 per gallon by 2020.”

$6-a-gallon gas? We’ll be in full German regret mode then.

This is a harbinger of trouble for California’s ambitious plan to broadly limit its reliance on fossil fuels. In two years, the state will initiate an “Energy Imbalance Market,” which entails buying cheap hydropower during the sunset hours of each day from the Columbia and Colorado River hydropower systems. This will be necessary because of the conversion of much California’s power grid from reliable conventional power to solar power that only generates electricity during daylight hours.

CA will depend on reliable supply of hydropower

If this same dam failure event occurs in the future, it could result in an energy-pricing crisis in California. Bonneville Power Administration officials withheld any comment as to the effect the emerging Wanapum Dam situation has on current power generation so as not to cause any panic in energy markets. However, the dam is continuing to generate power.

The Wanapum Dam is located in central Washington along the north branch of the Columbia River, about 100 miles east of Seattle. It is owned and operated by the Grant County Public Utility District. The dam’s hydroelectric turbines produce 1,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 350,000 homes.

The mile-long Wanapum Dam, built in 1959, has 10 reinforced concrete spillway gates each of which are 65-feet wide, 126-feet tall and 92-feet deep. If the dam ends up breached by failure of the cracked base of the spillway gate, flooding would mainly affect rural areas and would also interrupt power generation.

Grant County utility officials thus far have dumped water to lower the level by 20 feet in the reservoir behind the dam to assure that inspectors were safe when inspecting the dam. The water level is planned to be lowered an additional 14 feet on Monday, March 3.

PG&E relies on power from damaged dam

If the spillway failure results in a breach of the dam, the downstream flooding would damage farms, orchards, boat marinas and recreational fishing. The Washington State Department of Ecology shows that Wanapum Dam also supplies water for municipal and industrial uses, for agricultural irrigation and instream uses.

The major regional risk is that Wanapum Dam’s hydropower facilities are so large that the Grant County utility would have to start buying power to meet any contractual obligations.  Pacific Gas and Electric buys power from the Grant Count utility’s Wanapum Dam.

After 10 years of contentious biological opinions in federal courts, in 2008 a prominent fish spillway was added to the dam. The increased spillages resulted in less power generation and running the dam for fish flows instead of power flows, flood flows or growing crops.

In 2011, the Grant County utility had to repair failed water stops that overwhelmed the power plant’s drainage system, resulting in a near-catastrophic failure of a turbine.

Energy Imbalancing Market addresses limits of solar power 

An emerging problem with California’s new green power grid is the need to ramp up enough conventional power each day because of two events:

1) When solar power is sunsetting (going dark);

2) When the mostly nighttime wind power turbines aren’t spinning enough yet to take over.

This is called the “Duckchart Problem,” as seen in the nearby chart.

The ramping up of conventional gas-fired power during the sunset hours to replace solar power is expected to sharply raise electricity rates.  To lessen this three-hour pricing crisis each day, California is setting up what could be termed an “Energy Imbalance Market” to buy cheap hydropower mainly from federal dams along the Columbia and Colorado Rivers. The Bonneville Power Administration’s electric grid reaches from the Columbia River to the Oregon border and into California.

An evaluation of California’s proposed Energy Imbalance Market by Argonne National Laboratories addressed the risks of relying on federal hydropower due to environmental lawsuits to protect fish.

Another problem is that ramping hydroelectric power turbines up and down to back up stop-and-go wind and solar power puts a strain on the hydropower plants and wears out equipment faster. Hydropower and wind power have ended up to be a “terrible fit.” About half of the wind power generated in the Pacific Northwest is purchased by California.

The Argonne report, however, did not foresee risks of dam failure.

The developing dam failure at Wanapum Dam on the Columbia River not only shows the future vulnerability of California’s green power grid. It may also show that such vulnerability stems from the nature of the green power grid.

By Chriss Street

Al Gore opened his 2006 movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” with an apology for not having already saved the world from global warming: “I have advocated policies to promote renewable energy and accelerate reductions in global warming pollution for decades, including all of the time I was in public service.”

In support of his continuing political agenda, Al Gore joined Van Jones last week to argue for wind power’s “clean energy” as a replacement for fossil fuels’ “dirty energy.”  Inconveniently for Mr. Gore, the truth is that mining and processing key materials to make the magnets in wind power turbines are releasing massive amounts massive amounts of air, water and ground pollution, including enormous quantities of radioactive waste into the global ecosphere.

California’s deserts and mountains are rapidly being blanketed by wind farms with huge turning propellers that spin large magnetic coils to produce electricity.  Rare Earth Elements are an essential ingredient needed to manufacture these magnets.  REEs, such as Neodymium, Samarium, Gadolinium and Dysprosium, are in limited supply. Which brings into question both of Mr. Gore’s “renewability” and “sustainability” marketing claims.

California was the world’s largest producer of REEs until 2002, when the huge Mountain Pass open pit mine was closed after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency determined that 600,000 gallons of highly radioactive mining wastewater had been spilled onto the surrounding desert between 1984 and 1998.  The water contained highly concentrated amounts of radium, which has a half-life of 1600 years, and thorium, which has a half-life of 14 billion years.

Today, 95 percent of all REEs are mined and processed in remote Western China.  Once shrouded in secrecy by China’s autocratic leadership, the environmental dangers of unregulated REE mining have caused so much damage it is now an acknowledged national concern.  According to Wang Caifeng, China’s Deputy director-general of the Materials Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, producing one ton of REEs creates 2,000 tons of mine tailings.  It is also estimated that, within Baotou, where China’s primary rare earth production occurs, REE enterprises produce approximately 2.5 billion gallons of highly polluted wastewater per year and most of that waste water is   “discharged without being effectively treated, which not only contaminates potable water for daily living, but also contaminates the surrounding water environment and irrigated farmlands.”

Rare Earths

According to an article published by the Chinese Society of Rare Earths:

“Every ton [2,000 lbs.] of rare earth produced generates approximately 8.5 kilograms (18.7 lbs.) of fluorine and 13 kilograms (28.7 lbs.) of dust; and using concentrated sulfuric acid high temperature calcination techniques to produce approximately one ton of calcined rare earth ore generates 9,600 to 12,000 cubic meters (339,021 to 423,776 cubic feet) of waste gas containing dust concentrate, hydrofluoric acid, sulfur dioxide, and sulfuric acid, approximately 75 cubic meters (2,649 cubic feet) of acidic wastewater plus about one ton of radioactive waste residue (containing water).”

This inconvenient environmental holocaust seems to have been exempted from Gore’s evaluation of wind power as source of “clean energy.”  Recently, physicist John Droz Jr. consulted with nuclear experts to compare the radioactive waste generated from a 3 gigawatt (GW) wind farm with that of a nuclear reactor to generate the same amount of electricity.  Their conclusions:

Wind Energy

Fact 1: Wind turbines require about 2000 lbs. of REEs per megawatt of rated capacity;

Fact 2: U.S. Army reports that mining 2000 lbs. of REE creates about 2000 lbs. of radioactive waste;

Assumption 1: The available Capacity Factor of these turbines will be about 33 percent (very optimistic);

Assumption 2: Water is about 50 percent of the weight of the REE mining radioactive waste. 

Therefore, the radioactive waste for a 3 GW wind facility:

—> Twenty year expected usable life of wind turbine (optimistic);

—>  50% of waste is water that will evaporate away; 

Total of wind power radioactive waste (3000 MW x 2000 REE/MW x 1 x .5) = 3,000,000± pounds

Nuclear Power

Fact 1: Nuclear reactor is Pressurized Water Reactor;

Fact 2: Radioactive waste is spent fuel rods that are permanently stored in deep earth repository;

Assumption 1: GW Nuclear facility generates about 60,000 pounds per year of “spent” uranium;

Assumption 2: Twenty years is used as that is the generous expected life of a wind turbine.

Therefore, the radioactive waste for a 1 GW single-pass nuclear power plant:

—> Average 60,000 pounds per year;

—> Twenty years of operations.

Total of nuclear generator radioactive waste (60,000 lbs. x 20 yrs.) = 1,200,000± pounds

So compared to the radioactive waste from wind energy to the radioactive waste in an “equivalent” nuclear power facility to produce the same amount of electricity, wind energy is dirtier — with 250 percent the amount of radioactive waste!  The next time you hear someone promote wind energy as a renewable, sustainable, clean, green source of energy that will give us energy independence, ask if it will also help the earth glow in the dark.

Note: The writer is indebted to John Droz Jr. for the technical research and analysis provided for this report.  Mr. Droz has been a physicist and an environmental activist for over 25 years.  He received undergraduate degrees in physics and math from Boston College and a graduate degree in physics from Syracuse University.  John has been a participating member of the Sierra Club and the Adirondack Council.

Feel free to forward this Op Ed and follow our Blog at www.chrissstreetandcompany.com

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By WAYNE LUSVARDI

With the swagger of a boxer before a match, on July 24 Gov. Jerry Brown said he would “crush” any efforts to block renewable energy projects in California.

Brown apparently was referring to efforts by environmentalists to stop a planned gargantuan 968 Megawatt solar energy project called Solar Millennium to be located in the Mojave Desert.  This is a pet project of President Obama and is backed by a $2.1 billion federal loan guarantee to build the first half of the project.

With Brown’s use of his bully pulpit and the threat of legal action against any opposition to large solar power plants in the Mojave Desert and elsewhere, what are Californians left to conclude  — so much for the natural environment, the rule of law and democracy?

But markets will eventually crush renewable energy if it is ever exposed to an open and competitive energy market instead of the government-protected and heavily subsidized energy “market” in California.

And the bond market may eventually react to Brown’s 2011-12 state budget gimmickry. The bond market could impose a higher interest rate premium for the greater risk of default of state general obligation and revenue bonds. Or the higher cost could come from greater risk of default in providing sufficient funds to meet mandated state services such as Medi-Cal and K-12 public education.

Moreover, the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) has just issued rules that require public pension funds to “mark-to-market” the amount of unfunded pension liabilities of CalPERS, CalSTRS and other public pension funds in California. This rule change will finally reveal that CalPERS is only perhaps 50 percent funded, instead of 70 percent funded as it claims.

Let’s take a quick look at the scorecard of how Jerry Brown has fared with markets in relation to environmental-energy issues in his three terms as governor of California.

Bottle Rock Geothermal Plant Failure

When Brown formerly was governor in the mid-1970s, the state Legislature approved whopping 55 percent tax credit for wind, solar and biomass energy plants. President Jimmy Carter signed a 1978 federal law called the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA). It encouraged states to enact their own green-power tax incentives and helped launch renewable energy. Brown claims he pioneered tax credits for renewable energy in California.

In July of 1979, the state Department of Water Resources filed an application for construction of two geothermal energy plants in Northern California, the Bottle Rock and South Geysers Geothermal Plants, to carry out Brown’s plans for an environmental legacy.  The Bottle Rock Plant was finally built in 1985, after Brown left office in 1983. To make a long story short, by 1990 the Bottle Rock Geothermal Plant was shut down because it couldn’t generate enough electricity to pay off the revenue bonds that financed the construction of the plant.  The South Geysers Plant was never built.  State government should never have built the plant, as it was financially infeasible in the market from the get-go.

In December 1990, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California ended up having to pay off the $283 million in bonded indebtedness on the plants.  The bonds won’t be paid off until 2024.  So Southern California water ratepayers ended up having to pay off the bonds on a Northern California power plant that has since been re-opened and now ironically generates power exclusively for Northern California cities.

Strike one against Brown.

Score: Markets 1. Brown 0.

Abandoned Wind Farms in Town of Mojave

To make another long story short, by 1998 ugly old wind machines in the Tehachapi Gorge near the desert town of Mojave in Kern County were abandoned in place. The reason: dropping natural gas prices made over-market-priced wind energy uncompetitive.   To view the photographs of the visual blight and nuisance of the abandoned wind farms, go to this link.

The tax credits under PURPA ended up a tax scam as wind developers just collected their credits and abandoned the wind turbines without restoring the land to its original condition.

Most counties and cities now require the removal of unsightly wind turbines if wind farm operations are ever shut down. But the sheer size of the proposed solar project near the Blythe would raise questions of who would remove the solar mirrors if the project went bankrupt?  Without a costly demolition bond paid up front, who would pay for such removal of 11 square miles of mirrors?  This has probably crossed the minds of those in Riverside County where the Blythe Solar Project — referred to by Gov. Brown and encompassing some 7,000-acres — is to be developed.

This does not even consider that solar thermal-power technology, as planned at the Solar Millennium Project in Blythe, is typically 4.7 times the price of low-polluting natural gas power, 3.6 times the price of clean hydropower and 2.2 times the average retail price of electricity for residential use in California in 2011 (see table below).

Comparative Price of Energy

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Not only is solar thermal power way over the market price of every other source of power. It doesn’t even reduce pollution because it is located in the remote desert instead of in an urban-air basin that traps smog.

So Brown lost again.

Score: Markets 2. Brown 0.

The Energy Crisis of 2001

PURPA allowed non-public energy producers to sell electricity to utilities for the first time.  PURPA led to the accounting schemes of Enron. Enron did not cause the California Energy Crisis of 2001. But PURPA did lead to the notion that energy deregulation might be able to pay off the bonds on old polluting power plants. The plants had to be mothballed to meet stricter EPA air quality standards in California in 2001, or risk forfeiting federal highway, education, and Medicaid funding.

Energy deregulation failed in California because a heavily Democratic majority ih the state Legislature and Democratic Gov. Gray Davis pulled the plug on it. But electricity deregulation may have failed anyway as long as it was based on PURPA tax credit schemes instead of market price competition.

But the California Democrats’ own plan to contrive a pricing fever — or bubble — to pay off the bonds on the old polluting power plants also failed. The result: rolling blackouts, the 2003 recall of Gov. Gray Davis and the rolling of the bond debt on mothballed dirty power plants into a $42 billion general-obligation bond that will be paid off in 2012.

When the $42 billion in bonds are paid off next year, the long-term energy contracts that paid off those bonds will come under SB 2, which Brown signed on April 12. SB 2 mandates that one-third of California’s electricity must come from renewable sources by 2020.

The Energy Crisis of 2001 morphed into 33 percent permanently over-market-priced Green Power to begin in 2012.

So Brown lost for a third time.

Score: Markets 3. Brown 0. Three strikes and he’s out.

Three Strikes, You’re Out — Except in Politics

In baseball, three strikes and you are out.  In California politics, three policy failures and you are enshrined as the guru of renewable energy.  California Gov. Jerry Brown has repeatedly failed each time an environmental project or policy of his has been exposed to the market.

Brown vows to “crush” any opposition to the gigantic Millennium Solar Project in the remote Mohave Desert.  But NIMBY’s — Not-In-My-Back-Yarders — are not very concerned about huge solar projects that may harm the desert ecology as long as it doesn’t affect their home values or beautiful mountain views.

What Brown likely will end up crushing is the middle class that will eventually be sandwiched between higher energy prices and mass unemployment.