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One of the least publicized but nevertheless significant obstacles to the new infrastructure required to support development of new energy resources is that this infrastructure can be unsightly. A few years ago, I was working on a consulting assignment at a well-known university. Management had a strong interest in developing on-campus renewable resources. Funding was easy to acquire. The biggest obstacle to progress was that a politically powerful, well-funded neighborhood association nearby...
The La Conner School District is among hundreds of districts nationwide examining the feasibility and long-term cost advantages of switching from diesel to electric school buses. Key advantages include: reduced use of energy for bus power, accompanied by lower net emissions; stable and predictable energy prices; reduced maintenance costs; and greater student and driver comfort with the elimination of on-board emissions and nearly silent operation. Electric vehicles have far fewer moving parts...
In 1992, two colleagues and I visited Ukraine and Russia to tour ex-Soviet research laboratories in search of interesting technologies that had been developed by their scientists and engineers. The company I worked for hoped that we’d be able to bring something valuable back to Canada, and also hoped that we could justify enough in the way of licensing fees and direct investment to help keep the scientific and engineering expertise of at least one Ukrainian or Russian lab together. Neither Ukrai...
I wrote earlier that existing technologies aren’t that far from allowing us to produce sustainable energy for as little as a tenth of the cost of conventional electric generation. Solar photovoltaic costs, in particular, are still falling fast. Solar resources cannot produce energy at their lowest possible cost everywhere, but there are other low-cost renewable energy sources. Wind, hydroelectric power, advanced waste-to-energy technologies and several devices that can convert energy into u... Full story
Holiday lights abound. As Ray Stevens said about Santa Claus, they’re everywhere! They’re everywhere! They’re all over La Conner’s homes, streetlight posts and various public spaces. The big Christmas tree in Gilkey Square dominates the north end of downtown. The tiny tree auction has come and gone at the La Conner Swinomish Library. Thousands of years ago, the tradition of holiday lighting started with simple oil or candle menorahs, which were (and still are) used by Jewish families to mark Hanukkah. In the 18th century, central Europea... Full story
In the 1880s, thousands of businesses in the U.S. depended on horse-drawn transportation. Carriage manufacturers, blacksmiths, horse breeders, stables and related enterprises were major employers. Of hundreds of American carriage manufacturers, only two – Studebaker (now out of business) and Fisher (now a part of General Motors) – made the transition to automobiles and survived past World War II. For decades, the example of the buggy whip manufacturer that failed to develop a new niche when aut... Full story
The ongoing emergence of low-cost energy technologies is leading to the development of a host of interesting systems that aren’t directly related to the large-scale electric grid. Read this asking yourself if and where the Town of La Conner might be able use the following. It’s become possible to use a solar array (or a solar panel mounted on, or even wrapped around, the light pole) to charge batteries mounted in a street or parking lot pole during the day. This can provide enough energy to powe... Full story
The need for electric vehicle charging infrastructure will inevitably increase. People who don’t want EVs now because their initial cost is too high or their range is too low will re-evaluate that decision periodically. Some people will change their minds as EVs improve. We’ve seen this movie before and we know how it ends. When Japanese cars arrived in the U.S., only loony west coast liberals wanted them. Detroit’s Big Three laughed them off. Over the next 20 years, Japanese cars impro... Full story
Last week I talked about electric vehicle chargers in rural British Columbia. Charger availability there is still improving. Flo.com’s map shows that the charger in Woss, BC (population about 200), has been upgraded since Jenelle and I traveled there about a year ago. Woss now has a Level 3 (fast, 50 kilowatt) charger, with two Level 3 plugs. It’s about 40 miles from the nearest larger town, Port McNeill (population about 2,000). Port McNeill also has a public Level 3 charger. For ref... Full story
About a year ago, Jenelle and I drove from Victoria, on the south end of Vancouver Island, to Port Hardy, near the north end. We took a gasoline-powered car. We weren’t sure whether public charging stations would be readily available for her electric vehicle, a Chevy Bolt. We did pay attention to charging station availability. If we took the same trip again, we’d be totally comfortable in the EV. In downtown Port Hardy, there was a 50-kilowatt Level 3 charger. That’s a fairly fast charger that... Full story
Pumpkin spice lattes, football, leaves starting to change color, the approach of Halloween … it’s time to talk about vampires and phantoms. Vampire and phantom electric loads, that is. Many consumer electronics today are on even when they’re off. Clocks seem to be built into just about everything, though not used; they’re often just blinking 00:00. Computers, televisions and gaming consoles have standby modes to allow them to start up quickly, apparently because manufacturers think we’re t... Full story
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the possibility of buying a second electric car. I’m still giving that some consideration. However, before making a final decision, I’m going to wait till the recently-announced process is finalized for the (up to $7,500) federal tax rebate to be directly deducted from the price at the time of purchase is in place. That’s expected by January. While looking at the state of the art of electric cars, I found out that another electric vehicle type has been getti... Full story
The La Conner School District and the La Conner Fire Department have each been awarded a grant from the Washington state Department of Commerce. These grants will fund work required for each to evaluate the feasibility of and complete a preliminary design for installation and use of combined solar generation and energy storage systems. Both grant applications were submitted to DOC with assistance from the Skagit Valley Clean Energy Cooperative. Co-op volunteers Mary Wohleb and Marylee...
Last time, I suggested buying Energy Star electronics to cut your energy bills. What is Energy Star and why is their work relevant? Energy Star is a voluntary program started by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1992 to promote energy efficiency and sustainability. Energy Star encourages manufacturers and building designers to submit their products for evaluation and (hopefully) certification that they are more energy efficient than competing products. Energy Star thus makes it easier...
A typical home in western Washington uses about 10,800 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per year. If you add in an electric car, that will increase to about 14,400 kWh. Solar panels in western Washington produce about 1,100 kWh per year, per installed kilowatt (kW) of capacity. To fully power a house and a car, you’d need to install about 13 kW of solar generation capacity. Here in Washington, net metering utility rate tariffs allow you to feed excess power to the grid and be paid for it, s...
Electricity and natural gas are very unusual products. The end-use customers, homeowners, use these products without knowing how much they’ve used, or how much the products will cost, till they get the bills. In our state, retail electric and gas prices don’t change quickly when wholesale prices change. Instead, wholesale price changes are absorbed by the retailer (the utility) in the short term. High wholesale costs do eventually get passed on to the customer, in increases that the uti... Full story
Lithium-ion batteries have long been in the news because of their role in electric vehicles, but uses for this technology are expanding to the utility industry. Batteries that can be charged and discharged quickly, and re-used for thousands of cycles, open up options for utility-scale energy storage that haven’t been economic before. Now that utility-scale lithium batteries are available at commercial scales and reasonable prices, they are being adopted by the utility industry itself. As a... Full story
When I started working on lithium-ion batteries, in 1993, Sony and Toshiba had introduced the first such commercially available batteries a couple of years earlier. They were mostly used in “the 4 Cs” of small consumer electronics – cassette players, camcorders, cell phones and computers. If anyone had thought about putting a bunch of lithium-ion batteries together into huge battery packs, for vehicles or utility distribution systems, they would have stopped as soon as they found out the cost:...
New solar and wind electric generators are being installed at increasing rates because their costs are declining and utilities are getting better at integrating intermittent generation into their grids. New renewable generation plants are more economical than new coal or natural gas plants. Renewable generators are, therefore, displacing fossil or nuclear fueled plants when the old plants are retired. However, generation from solar and wind sources doesn’t necessarily happen at the exact same t...
About a month ago, I had to take my gasoline car into the dealer for routine maintenance. That cost about $2,000, and it needs more work. My car has been driven about 100,000 miles. It probably has at least another 100,000 to go before the end of its life. However, maintenance will be increasingly expensive from now on. I think $2,500 a year is a realistic estimate. My car gets about 20 miles per gallon. Even though I have a short commute here in La Conner, Jenelle and I visit family in Seattle... Full story
Given national and international news, you may be thinking that it would be great to build a self-sufficient cabin in remote northeastern Washington. My grandfather did that, about 120 years ago. However, my grandparents’ cabin wasn’t very comfortable by today’s standards. They had to collect firewood to cook. The outhouse was a few hundred feet away from the main house, so grandchildren were warned about bears prior to bedtime. One might think that was just grandparents having fun at their...
Just 20 years ago, a kilowatt of new photovoltaic solar panel electric generation capacity cost more than a hundred times as much as a new kilowatt of natural gas capacity (although the difference was less significant with ongoing fuel costs for the gas plant factored in). General Motors’ EV1 in 1996 completely failed to bring electric cars back. Technology doesn’t stand still. Today, solar and wind energy are usually the least expensive sources of new generation. Electric vehicles are clo...
First, a clarification: Last week’s headline said we can expect 100% solar and wind energy on the grid in the future. Although that’s likely to become feasible within the next 20-30 years, I don’t think it’ll happen in Washington. We are, however, likely to have 100% renewable energy by 2050. Solar and wind will be prominent, but hydroelectric generation will still be used and geothermal energy may even be developed. Iceland and New Zealand have 100% renewable electric systems already because...
When I talk with groups about solar and wind energy, people ask: “The sun isn’t up all the time and the wind doesn’t blow all the time. How can solar and wind energy power a reliable electric grid?” About 25 years ago, senior management at a major utility turned down an experimental 8 kilowatt solar project I had proposed because the transmission systems engineers told the CEO that unpredictable solar energy might destabilize the entire utility’s grid. In other words, serious industry professio...
An earlier column emphasized understanding the numbers on your electric bill. Understanding what the bill means, however, doesn’t help much in understanding why you’ve used that much energy, nor does it help you reduce your energy costs. For that, you need to understand how much each of your electric devices contributes to the meter reading. Electric devices have wattage ratings. Multiply the wattage by the amount of time the device is used to determine how much energy that device is using. For...
