LONDON--The head of the U.N.'s panel of climate experts rejected accusations of bias on Thursday, saying a "Climategate" row in no way undermined evidence that humans are to blame for global warming.
Climate change skeptics have seized on a series of e-mails written by specialists in the field, accusing them of colluding to suppress data which might have undermined their arguments.
The e-mails, some written as long as 13 years ago, were stolen from a British university by unknown hackers and spread rapidly across the Internet.
But Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), stood by his panel's 2007 findings, called the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). "This private communication in no way damages the credibility of the AR4 findings," he told Reuters in an e-mail exchange.
This report helped to underpin a global climate response which included this week carbon emissions targets proposed by the United States and China, and won the IPCC a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
The e-mails hacked from Britain's University of East Anglia last week showed scientists made snide comments about climate skeptics, and revealed exchanges about how to present the data to make the global warming argument look convincing.
In one e-mail, confirmed by the university as genuine, a scientist jokingly referred to ways of ensuring papers which doubted established climate science did not appear in the AR4.
Pachauri said a laborious selection process, using only articles approved by other scientists, called peer review, and then subsequently approving these by committee had prevented distortion.
"The entire report writing process of the IPCC is subjected to extensive and repeated review by experts as well as governments," he added in a written statement to Reuters.
"There is, therefore, no possibility of exclusion of any contrarian views, if they have been published in established journals or other publications which are peer reviewed."
"This thoroughness and the duration of the process followed in every assessment ensure the elimination of any possibility of omissions or distortions, intentional or accidental."
In another e-mail, according to news accounts, Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, wrote: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." The revelation of the e-mails was more embarrassing than serious fodder for doubts about the causes of, or basis for climate change, scientists responded this week.
"It is unfortunate that an illegal act of accessing private e-mail communications between scientists who have been involved as authors in IPCC assessments in the past has led to several questions and concerns," said Pachauri.
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OSLO--Promises of greenhouse gas curbs by China and the United States brighten prospects for next month's U.N. climate summit but leave big tangles over cash, rich nations' emissions cuts, and how to tie down a legal treaty.
"This is clearly some progress on the Copenhagen road," Frank Jotzo, deputy director of the Australian National University's Climate Change Institute, said of pledges by the world's top two emitters to tackle global warming.
But he noted China's goal of slowing its rising emissions by 2020 was voluntary and President Barack Obama's plan to cut U.S. emissions by 3 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 faced obstacles in the Senate.
Indeed, China's goal of reducing carbon intensity--the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per yuan of economic activity--by 40 percent to 45 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels still means its emissions will rise, but less than economic growth.
However, analysts welcomed Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Obama's decisions to go to the December 7-18 talks in Copenhagen as a sign of personal commitment to a deal. Obama will visit on December 9, before the main U.N. summit on the last two days.
But Obama's proposed emissions cuts are probably too small to encourage other rich nations to make deeper offers in Denmark. Industrialized nations as a group are offering cuts in emissions averaging between 14 percent and 18 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
"It's not enough in itself to unlock new offers," said Knut Alfsen, research director of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo.
But he said that Washington could sweeten its offer, perhaps with money for research and development or aid to help poor countries adapt to the impacts of climate change such as droughts, more powerful cyclones, or rising sea levels.
Silent on funds
"The White House...was noticeably silent about finance" in announcing Obama's plans for Copenhagen, said Kim Carstensen, head of the WWF environmental group's global climate initiative.
The United Nations wants at least $10 billion a year to help developing nations cope with climate change and convince them that the rich are committed to fighting global warming. And it wants mechanisms to raise far more in the long term.
Carstensen said Obama was likely to argue that his greenhouse goal is a 17 percent cut from 2005 levels after sharp rises since 1990 and sets the United States on a path for deeper cuts than many of its industrial allies by 2030.
Cuts by rich nations are far below demands by developing nations such as China and India that they need to cut by between 25 percent and 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to avert the worst of global warming.
Analysts also say there are uncertainties about the final form of a Copenhagen deal since most nations say time is too short for Copenhagen to agree to a full legal treaty. Denmark wants a "politically binding" pact and a legally binding text in 2010.
"A politically binding promise by a politician...is a meaningless term," said Tom Burke, of the E3G think-tank in London. "There is a serious intent but what it means is fuzzy."
Group of Eight nations, for instance, often make political promises without following up.
"At the end of the day, the atmosphere doesn't care if it's a binding agreement or not, it cares about whether countries are doing action," said Jake Schmidt, of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington.
Additional reporting by David Fogarty in Singapore, Jeff Mason in Washington, and Emma Graham-Harrison in Beijing.
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Nissan's all electric Leaf goes into mass production next year.
(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)Automakers tend to agree that the electrification of the car is inevitable, but Nissan is leading the way by readying a mass-market, affordable electric car for production. The Leaf is a midsize hatchback with a range of a little more than 100 miles, according to Nissan. Although Nissan didn't let us drive it, the company brought the Leaf to CNET's headquarters so we could get a close look at what might be the future of driving.
When Nissan first released pictures of the car, commenters found it ugly, with its bulbous headlights giving it a frog-like appearance. But in person, the length of the car mitigates that criticism. And looking over those headlights, we could see that they are longer, and more fin-shape than bulbous. The lights are LEDs, used because of their low power draw. The shape of the headlight casings has an aerodynamic purpose, splitting airflow around the side mirrors.
A hatch in front of the car conceals two plug-in points, one a standardized socket for electric vehicles and the other a proprietary Nissan design that can charge the batteries to 80 percent in 30 minutes. The Nissan plug, which would only work with very specific charging stations, uses DC power so that the onboard inverter doesn't have to convert external AC power for the DC batteries. The standardized plug will work with more sources, taking AC power from the grid and running it through the inverter, lengthening the time it takes to charge the batteries.
Nissan developed the lithium ion batteries for the Leaf in conjunction with NEC. The batteries are flat slabs that fit in the chassis of the car. Weighing about 500 pounds, the battery placement and distribution helps to lower the Leaf's center of gravity. Beyond charging from a plug, the Leaf also incorporates regenerative braking. Similar to the Tesla, as soon as you lift off the accelerator, regenerative braking kicks in, sending juice to the batteries and slowing the car.
The Nissan Leaf goes on sale in December of 2010 as a 2011 model. Nissan is counting on 20,000 preorders for the car, and will initially build them in Japan. By the third model year, the company expects to start producing them from its plant in Smyrna, Tennessee.
If you need more evidence that energy storage is much more than lithium ion batteries, take a look at the latest smart-grid utility storage projects.
The Department of Energy on Tuesday announced that $620 million in stimulus funding is going to 32 smart-grid programs, which will be coupled with another $1 billion in private money. A total of $770 million from government and industry sources in the next few years will go to energy storage, giving a number of storage technologies a dose of real-world experience. (See this PDF for details.)
(Credit:
PG&E)
Notable in the list is the prominence of compressed-air energy storage and flow batteries, two technologies rarely discussed just a few years ago. Also in the mix are flywheels and using batteries for distributed energy storage in communities.
It's unlikely that all the DOE-aided projects will immediately prove to be commercially viable. But storage has clearly emerged as a key component in the vision of the smart grid. A number of start-ups are developing technologies they hope can address a specific storage application or undercut pumped hydro, considered the cheapest form of utility storage, on price. With pumped hydro, water is pumped uphill and released at peak times to run a generator. But its use is limited by geography.
Many of the 16 Energy Department power storage grants were focused on storing wind power, which is a variable source of energy. In California, for example, utility Pacific Gas & Electric plans to store the power generated by wind turbines at night, when turbines are most productive in underground caverns. During the day, when grid demand is higher, the air is released and passed through a turbine to make electricity.
The advantage of underground compressed air storage is that it can be cheaper than batteries and can store many hours worth of energy. PG&E forecasts that its Kern County, Calif., project can deliver 300 megawatts of power for 10 hours, enough to supply tens of thousands of homes.
Another novel technique is using metal tanks to store compressed air, a technology being developed by a Dartmouth College spin-off SustainX. The compressed air is released to run a hydraulic motor that drives a generator to make electricity.
Flow batteries, meanwhile, use tanks of liquid electrolyte solutions. When the two liquids interact, there is a chemical reaction that creates a flow of electricity.
An advantage of this approach is that store large amounts of energy and discharge relatively quickly, according to the Electricity Storage Association. One project will use technology from Premium Power, which makes tractor trailer-size zinc flow batteries to maintain a steady frequency on the grid and supply power during times of peak demand.
Different strokes
The variety of technologies points to the range of energy storage applications. Flywheels from award winner Beacon Power, for example, can absorb and discharge megawatts' worth of power to the grid but only in 15-minute bursts. Still, flywheels are getting more attention because they are a nonpolluting replacement to the natural-gas plants now used to smooth out short-term fluctuations in grid frequency, according to the company.
Click on the image for a slide show of different energy storage technologies.
(Credit: AEP)Large batteries, too, will be further tested for grid storage. Duke Energy plans to use multiple battery types for 20 megawatts' worth of power delivery at the Notrees Windpower project in Texas. The "hybrid" battery system is being designed for two tasks: to smooth out short-term grid fluctuations and to supply hours' worth of power during the day, according to a Duke Energy representative.
Utility Portland General Electric in the next two years plans to install five batteries from auto battery supplier Ener1 to supply enough juice to power 400 homes for about an hour. Alternative chemistries, including lead carbon batteries from East Penn Manufacturing, will also be used.
One project will test the viability of used car batteries for grid storage. Lithium ion plug-in car batteries from A123 Systems will be used to supply 25 kilowatts for two hours in 20 community energy storage projects. The performance of lithium ion batteries degrades after many years in a car, but there is still sufficient storage and power for grid applications, utility executives say.
California on Tuesday released draft rules for its landmark greenhouse gas cap-and-trade plan that will be the most ambitious U.S. effort to use the market to address global warming.
State law requires California to cut its carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Measures will range from clean vehicle and building rules to the cap-and-trade system that lets factories and power companies trade credits to emit gases that heat up the earth.
Federal rules under debate by Congress could eclipse and preempt regional plans, but California and other local governments see themselves as the vanguard of addressing climate change, especially in light of slow national action and setbacks for international talks scheduled in Copenhagen next month.
The draft released on Tuesday shows California, seen as an environmental trend-setter, may take on even more than expected in its first round of cap-and-trade, which will start in 2012.
Gasoline and residential heating fuel suppliers could be included in the first cap-and-trade phase, which had been expected to focus on big pollution sources like power plants and refineries.
"California is the first out of the box," state Air Resources Board Chair Mary Nichols told reporters on a conference call. The draft rules kick off a comment period that will lead to final regulation next fall.
A less comprehensive northeastern U.S. regional trading system is already under way, focusing on carbon dioxide emissions by big emitters. California by contrast plans to include nearly every source of emissions to reach its goal.
California businesses regularly criticize the plan as going too far too fast--and costing too much. Whether the net effect of the plan will be a new green economy or disaster for overburdened businesses is still hotly debated.
New estimates of plan costs, including suggestions on how much support to give industry, won't be available until an independent advisory group issues a report next year.
The draft avoids what may be the toughest issue--how much to rely on auctions of credits, which would require power companies and the like to buy permission to pollute. The emitters want allowances given to them, especially early on.
But Nichols said California had shown a strong preference for moving to auction as quickly as possible and that its 2006 global warming law provided clear guidance while politicians in the U.S. Congress were still raising support for a bill.
"Congress started this, you know, as a political exercise to see how many allowances you had to give out to which groups to get them to buy into the program. They didn't have a climate bill," she said.
"We know how many emissions we have to reduce. The question is how do we do it in a way that costs less," added Nichols, whose Air Resources Board was appointed by state law as the main regulator deciding on how to cut greenhouse gases.
The cost of a ton of carbon dioxide initially could be around $10, based on how other programs operated, she said. That is about half the current European price. The average American has carbon production of about 20 tons per year, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The cap-and-trade system will account for only about a fifth of California reductions but it draws outsize attention, in part because the state, with the largest U.S. economy and population, is part of the 11 member Western Climate Initiative, which includes U.S. states and Canadian provinces.
China, too, will watch California's action, partly by virtue of the state's partnerships with Chinese provinces, said Environmental Defense Fund California Climate Change Director Derek Walker.
"In many ways this is similar to what you are hearing from international circles now. Everybody is coming to the table with their opening bets," he said. But unlike most, California has committed to cuts and now is working out the details.
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The Department of Energy on Tuesday awarded $620 million in smart grid projects, the second major wave of government-led funding to modernize the electricity grid.
The money will come from the stimulus package and be matched by commercial companies, making the total spending $1.6 billion spread across 32 demonstration projects in 21 states. A total of $8.1 billion in smart-grid spending from public and private sources was announced late last month.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the awards at Ohio-based utility AEP, whose GridSmart program is considered one of the more technically advanced.
The bulk of the DOE awards--$435 million--will be aimed at adding communications to the transmission and distribution grid through the installation of two-way meters, sensors on the transmission lines, and in-home energy displays.
This is a large megawatt storage device already on AEP's grid. Click on the image to see a photo gallery of power grid storage technologies.
(Credit: AEP)By networking devices along the grid and adding digital controls, utilities can more easily locate and fix outages and use their energy supply more efficiently. For consumers, in-home displays will allow them to get a real-time readout of their electricity usage to help ways to cut down consumption. Some utilities also offer programs where consumers can get cheaper rates to shave power use during peak times.
The rest of the DOE funding will go toward testing a range of energy storage technologies, including flow batteries, flywheels, and compressed air storage. With storage, utilities can more easily use solar and wind power by better managing the flow of energy on the grid.
The Oyster in the waters off Scotland is the only hydro-electric device producing power, according to its maker.
(Credit: Aquamarine Power)Wave energy got a boost with the connection of the Oyster hydro-electric device to the electricity grid in Scotland last Friday.
Aquamarine Power activated the connection of the Oyster in the waters off Orkney, marking one of the few ocean power devices to be producing electricity.
The device is a hydraulic pump operated by a "hinged flap," where a large metal piece moves back and forth from the motion of the waves. The movement moves a hydraulic piston that pumps water underground to a hydro-electric turbine that drives a generator to make electricity.
The peak power output of the Oyster 1 is about two megawatts, depending on the location. The company, which received research funding from the U.K. government, is now working on a second-generation device.
There are a number of technologies being pursued to convert wave or tidal energy into electrical energy, including underwater generators. The advantage of the pump design is that it's relatively simple and many components, such as gear boxes and generators, are not exposed to the water.
Twenty Oysters, which are attached to the seabed at about 10 meters of water, could produce enough electricity to power 9,000 homes in the U.K., according to Aquamarine Power.
In the U.S., the Seadog Pump uses a similar approach of pumping water offshore to a hydro-electric turbine to make electricity.
The Oyster was tested at the European Marine Energy Centre. In the U.S., there is an effort to establish an ocean power research center in southern Massachusetts.
Norway opened on Tuesday the world's first osmotic power plant, which produces emissions-free electricity by mixing fresh water and sea water through a special membrane.
State-owned utility Statkraft's prototype plant, which for now will produce a tiny 2 kilowatts to 4 kilowatts of power or enough to run a coffee machine, will enable Statkraft to test and develop the technology needed to drive down production costs.
The plant is driven by osmosis that naturally draws fresh water across a membrane and toward the seawater side. This creates higher pressure on the sea water side, driving a turbine and producing electricity.
"While salt might not save the world alone, we believe osmotic power will be an interesting part of the renewable energy mix of the future," Statkraft Chief Executive Baard Mikkelsen told reporters.
Statkraft, Europe's largest producer of renewable energy with experience in hydropower that provides nearly all of Norway's electricity, aims to begin building commercial osmotic power plants by 2015.
Here is the company's illustration of how the plant works.
(Credit: Statkraft)The main issue is to improve the efficiency of the membrane from around 1 watt per square meter now to some 5 watts, which Statkraft says would make osmotic power costs comparable to those from other renewable sources.
The prototype, on the Oslo fjord and about 40 miles south of the Norwegian capital, has about 2,000 square meters of membrane.
Future full-scale plants producing 25 megawatts of electricity, enough to provide power for 30,000 European households, would be as large as a football stadium and require some 5 million square meters of membrane, Statkraft said.
Once new membrane "architecture" is solved, Statkraft believes the global production capacity for osmotic energy could amount to 1,600 to 1,700 terawatt hours annually, or about half of the European Union's total electricity demand.
Europe's osmotic power potential is seen at 180 terawatts, or about 5 percent of total consumption, which could help the bloc reach renewable energy goals set to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases and limit global warming.
Osmotic power, which can be located anywhere where clean fresh water runs into the sea, is seen as more reliable than more variable wind or solar energy.
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CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The first crack at vital smart-grid technical standards are due next year and some companies are already gumming up the works by pushing their own networking technology, according to the government official shepherding the process.
The need to hammer out interoperability standards is urgent and the task is extremely complex, said George Arnold, the national coordinator for smart-grid interoperability at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) who gave a presentation at a seminar organized by the IEEE here on Saturday. There will eventually be hundreds of standards covering many areas, from cybersecurity to how meters talk to plug-in cars.
"We've never tried to anything of this magnitude before," Arnold said. "It's more complicated than the Internet and Internet standards have been evolving for over 20 years."
By contrast, smart-grid standards need to be agreed on quickly, with the next phase of a multiyear process due next to begin year. Technical interoperability through standards is supposed to safeguard various players, including consumers and utilities, against technical obsolescence and wasted investment. About $8.1 billion of federal, state, and industry money will be spent on upgrading the electricity grid in the next three years.
The smart grid touches a number of different devices in a home and on the electricity grid. There's a push to establish the technical blueprints and standards certification by late next year.
(Credit: Electric Power Research Institute)In the case of smart appliances, Arnold said he is ruffling feathers by pushing networking companies to sort out a dizzying number of options.
With two-way meters installed in people's homes, a meter can send a message that higher electricity prices have gone into effect. For example, during a hot summer day when the air conditioning load on the grid is high, utilities may look to "shed load" and have some of its customers volunteer to lower their consumption.
An appliance, such as a dishwasher or clothes dryer, equipped with a chip should be able to receive the message from the meter and go into energy-saving mode. A "smart" appliance could receive the message and perhaps do a job in an hour instead of half an hour to use less power. That handshake between the appliance and meter needs to be standardized to make sure that consumers can buy products from different suppliers.
The problem is that there are multiple methods for passing energy-related information around the home and the companies involved are pushing their own technology, creating a "mess," said Arnold. There are wireless protocols Zigbee and Wi-Fi and at least six powerline communication protocols that use a home's wiring to move data.
"We're trying to accelerate the normal process and gravitate to a few market solutions, which normally takes years," he said after his talk. "Proponents of various communications standards all have a role but at the end of the day, there has to be some assurances for consumers."
Whirlpool last month announced that it would make 1 million "smart energy" clothes dryers by the end of 2011. That commitment, however, was contingent on standards being cooked by the end of 2010 and changes to regulations to reward consumers, appliances makers, and utilities to shave peak-time electricity use.
General Electric's appliance division, too, is making a complete line of demand response appliances.
But appliance manufacturers will be reluctant to support multiple protocols in their networking chips because that could raise the price of these grid-aware white goods.
Internet as a model
The situation with home-area networking is just one instance playing out among the dozens of technology providers, utilities, regulators, and standards bodies. Conflict over standards is common in the tech industry because betting on a failed standard can be costly. But the situation is more complex in the smart grid given the number of groups with a stake in the process.
NIST was given authority over smart-grid standards in 2007 and in September released a framework and roadmap for interoperability. (Click for PDF.) Arnold said that there has been strong industry support for the effort. But given that a number of smart-grid trials are already under way, NIST is focusing on accelerating the process, which will result in a testing and certification next year.
In some ways, NIST is looking at the Internet standards as a model for how the process should be operated. Last week, there was an event called Grid-Interop where a governing panel was created specifically to focus on interoperability.
"Over time this organization (called the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel) is going to become something like the Internet architecture board," said Arnold. "It's not being set up to develop standards. It's really being set up to develop the overall architecture and select which standards should be used."
Internet pioneer Vint Cerf is on the governing board of the panel, he added.
In its framework document, NIST identified eight priority areas where there is a lack of standards, which includes networking communications, security, and plug-in vehicles. But it is relying heavily on existing standards, including international standards, wherever it can to expedite the process, Arnold said.
That means coordinating among several standards organizations because the smart grid touches so many pieces of hardware and software. For example, to standardize plug-in electric vehicles requires coordination among upwards of 10 different organizations to cover national electric safety codes and standards for car batteries, networking, energy storage, and smart meters.
One of the principles that NIST is pursuing is that standards-based products should be backward-compatible since standards will continue to evolve for many years, Arnold said. He added that communications protocols over time should be based on the Internet Protocol.
Sun Catalytix, a company that's trying to develop a revolutionary clean-energy system, has finished a round of seed funding and secured a technology license from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Cambridge, Mass.-based company was formed about one year ago to commercialize research from MIT professor Daniel Nocera in which he attempts to mimic the process of photosynthesis.
Polaris Ventures finalized a $3 million seed round of funding for Sun Catalytix and expects to raise a series A round next year, said Polaris' Bob Metcalfe, who is also on the board.
Sun Catalytix is pursuing a breakthrough system that would use cheap solar panels to produce hydrogen, which would be stored and then used to produce electricity in a fuel cell.
(Credit: MIT)The core of the company's technology, which Nocera has sought to patent, is a low-cost catalyst for an electrolyzer, a device that splits water to make hydrogen. That hydrogen can be used with a fuel cell to make electricity. Or the hydrogen could be combined with other materials to store energy in a liquid fuel, such as methanol or ammonia, Metcalfe said.
Nocera envisions that homes would be equipped with solar panels to produce hydrogen from water during the day. At night, the stored hydrogen could power a home without releasing carbon emissions.
The key difference with the Sun Catalytix electrolyzer is that it is being designed to be made with cheap materials and work with all sorts of water, said Metcalfe.
"Splitting water to make hydrogen is as old as the hills. The breakthrough here is that it's dirt cheap. They operate in dirty water like water from the Charles River and they've used salt water from the Boston Harbor," he said.
The catalyst that splits the water molecules uses cobalt phosphate, which is cheap and abundant compared to expensive metals such as platinum, Metcalfe added. So far, the five-person company has built a number of prototypes made from PVC plastic.
A fully functioning system would take a number of years to develop and depend on other components being cheaper, including solar panels and hydrogen storage, Nocera has said.
But Metcalfe said that Polaris believes the company can commercialize the technology "in the short attention span of a venture capitalist." Typically, venture capitalists expect to generate a big return in five to seven years.
