It looks like Tom Gardiner at Motley Fool is pushing one of my current favorite stocks, Ameresco (AMRC). The Stock Gumshoe deciphered the clues here, giving my Forbes blog about Ameresco a link.
A appreciate the Gumshoe for his dry sense of humor and ability to deflate the hype newsletter promoters are always trying to drum up. Not that I mind when those propmoters are pushing a stock I already own a substantial chunk of!
I’ve blogged before about when Jevons’ Paradox applies, and when it does not. When energy consumers are price sensitive, they may respond to increasing efficiency by using more energy services. When they are not price-sensitive, they don’t.
But here is a new twist: increasing efficiency may come bundled with additional features. Those features may lead consumers to use more energy, even if the increasing efficiency alone would not.
In the case of outdoor billboards, the advent of inexpensive LED lighting may not be so much due to increased efficiency over traditional lighting technology, but the result of additional utility. LED bilboards can show animation, and also can show time-sensitive advertisements. These extra features are leading to an increased use of electricity in billboards, even as the technology is becoming more energy efficient… at least in terms of lumens per watt?
Perhaps I’m splitting hairs here, but I think the increased use of energy in outdoor signage using LEDs is due more to the additional services and interactivity that LEDs provide compared to traditional halide lighting (see this article in the Economist). Put simply, when something becomes more useful, people use more of it, not, as Jevon’s paradox would imply, that people use more outdoor signage lighting as it becomes cheaper.
Competition may just be the key to getting normal people to adopt energy efficiency. Keeping up with the Joneses is a lot more important to most people than saving money (otherwise, we’d never buy an expensive car to impress the neighbors.)
That’s why I’m excited to hear about JouleBug, a social App/game for the iPhone (and soon Android) that turns saving energy into a reality-based friendly competition.
Players compete to earn badges from various energy-saving activities
JouleBug launched today at the South by Southwest Trade show. Press release follows. Read the rest of this entry »
I just frittered away an hour poking holes in a 2002 paper from the American Enterprise Institute and the Brooking Institution that purports to show a net cost to society from higher CAFE standards. Even using the paper’s questionable results, my calculation show an a posteriori net benefit had CAFE standards been raised at the time the paper was written.
Here are links to the original article on Knowledge Problem that spurred me to defend CAFE standards, a link to the AEI/Brookings paper, and my comments on the weaknesses in the paper’s analysis.
Why High MPG Cars May be a Problem, But Efficient Lighting Isn’t
Tom Konrad, Ph.D.
Jevons Paradox: is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.
Recently The Economist reported on research that concluded “making lighting more efficient could increase energy use, not decrease it.” Micheal Giberson at Knowledge Problem thought this was worth commenting on as an example of Jevons Paradox. I’m here to tell you that before we get worried about more efficient lighting, we should keep in mind when Jevons Paradox applies and when it does not.
Jevons’ Paradox is a consequence of the downward slope of the demand curve: when the price of something falls, we tend to demand more of it. The slope of the demand curve is also known as the elasticity of demand. A gently sloped demand curve (where consumption increases rapidly with decreasing price) is said to be "elastic," while a steeply sloping demand curve (where consumption increases only slowly with decreasing price) is said to be inelastic.
I recently wrote about some research showing that the elasticity of the demand for driving has increased in recent years. That means that the effect of Jevons Paradox is becoming more significant when it comes to driving: increases in automobile efficiency that decrease the cost of driving will have the effect of increasing driving more than they would have in the past, meaning that we should not count on increases in CAFE standards (which increase the efficiency of automobiles) to do much to reduce gasoline usage. Instead, we should focus on structural changes that reduce driving by increasing its marginal cost or decrease the marginal cost of alternative modes, such as mass transit.
Micheal Giberson’s note prompted me to look at the paper on which the Economist article was based. I found that the researchers assumed that the demand elasticity for light had not changed over the last 160 years, and would not change in the future. I find this assumption highly questionable, given that the structure of the lighting market has changed greatly as technology changed from candlelight to gas light to electric light.
When candles were the primary light source, acquiring light required a lot more effort than just flipping on a light switch, and it was possible to see the light you purchased being used up as a candle burned down. Today, we would have to go outside our house (at night) and watch the meter spin to see visual evidence of the cost of light, and even then it would be difficult if not impossible to isolate the effect of the cost of light from the cost of watching TV or running our refrigerator.
Because it’s much harder today for a consumer to determine the true cost of the light he is using, I expect that consumers will be much less sensitive to changes in the price of light than they were in the past. In other words, contrary to the assumptions in the paper, demand for light has most likely become much more inelastic in recent years, and so we should not expect that increases in lighting efficiency (and the associated decreases in lighting cost) will have much effect on total light consumption.
As a long-time listener to the Stephen Lacey’s weekly podcast, I was happy to join in as he takes an in-depth look at the Renewables Gap: the question of where the energy is going to come from to power the necessary transition to a clean energy economy, an issue I looked at in Managing the Peak Fossil Fuel Transition.
I’m in great company on this podcast, so if you don’t tune in for me, you might want to know what Bill McKibben has to say about it.
In previous articles, I’ve often claimed that the Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) for energy efficiency measures is much higher than the ERoEI for Renewable or fossil energy generation. This was based on the logic that a high ERoEI is needed to sustain the high financial returns from energy efficiency. Unfortunately, there are few studies of the energy return on energy efficiency, so most of my evidence was anecdotal.
No longer. I was just reading the 2009 Annual report for Green Building company PFB Corporation (PFBOF.PK.) PFB manufactures SIPS (Structural Insulated Panels) and ICFs (Insulated Concrete Forms) and in their sustainability report, they found that the energy saved by their insulation over 50 years would be approximately 130 times the energy used in its manufacture (see chart.)
Since ERoEI is a flawed measure, I also calculated the Energy Internal Rate of Return (EIRR), using both 25 year and 50 year lifespans… they worked out to be 262% and 264%, respectively. For comparison, the highest EIRR I’ve found for a energy generation technology is 205% for wood cofiring. The EIRR for a wind turbine is around 84%, and a combined cycle natural gas plant has an EIRR about 164%.
In otherwords, insulation is a slam-dunk when it comes to energy economics. That’s no surprise, but it’s nice to have some numbers, so we have a better idea of just how good a slam dunk it is.
Micheal Giberson over at Knowledge Problem bounced off my article on why PACE financing would be unlikely to damage the mortgage market to mention several of his own worries about how such programs are implemented.
He and I are in agreement that there’s little wrong with PACE programs in principle, but they raise some thorny issues in practice. Here are a few of his worries. Micheal says:
If PACE is just a way for homeowners to scrape up subsidies – i.e. to improve their properties and make their neighbors’ pay for it – then I’m against it.
I agree, but with a caveat: one justification for subsidies for energy efficiency is that energy efficiency has positive externalities, and creates societal benefits. To the extent that energy efficiency subsidies are societal payments for societal benefits, there is no problem with using PACE to scoop up as many as possible. In fact, it should be encouraged.
Here are some of the societal benefits of energy efficiency:
1. Lower energy consumption reduced the need to build and upgrade energy infrastructure, a cost which is borne by all.
2. Lower greenhouse gas emissions.
3. Predictable energy bills reduce bankruptcies and foreclosures, lessening the need for social services and raising property prices.
4. Less money spent on energy assistance programs.
5. Local jobs from the economic multiplier when money is not spent on fossil fuels imported from outside the region.
6. Reduction in local air pollution from local power plants.
7. Lower water use in electricity generation.
8. Lower energy prices because of reduced energy demand.
9. More total jobs because energy efficiency improvements tend to be more labor-intensive than capital-intensive energy production.
Micheal goes on to say:
If my local government was proposing such a program, I’d worry that mismanagement would lead to future obligations for non-participating taxpayers. What is the mechanism that ensures civil servants will be effective loan officers? Will they get bonuses for doing good work or just be paid the same salary and promoted on schedule whether or not the loans they approved achieve intended results?
I agree with Micheal on this one, but this all depends on the particular implementation, although I just finished reading Micheal Lewis’s excellent book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
on the Wall Street’s role in the subprime mortgage meltdown, and so I’m compelled to point out that civil servants would be hard pressed to do a worse job extending loans to unqualified buyers than any of dozens of mortgage lenders from 2005 to 2008.
And finally:
Maybe the more interesting question is how and why the retail energy and home mortgage marketplaces became so bollixed up that a municipal-government-sponsored home-improvement-lending tax authority work-around is seen as a promising way to help consumers make sensible energy-related improvements to their homes.
Now that’s a great question. If you want to know why the mortgage market is so messed up, I highly recommend The Big Short
As for why the energy market is bollixed up, I think it has to do with lack of just about everything that improves market efficiency. The consumer energy market has limited price transparency, a lack of price information and real-time pricing, a single monopoly supplier, a lack of knowledge on the part of the consumer, regulated prices, a cost-plus pricing model for most suppliers, and subsidies for the purchase of energy for many classes of customers. With all this going against it, it’s no surprise at all that the market is so dysfunctional that civil servants as loan officers starts to sound like a good idea.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which oversees the government agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is now joining them in saying that Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing “could damage the mortgage market.”
PACE financing is an important program that addresses multiple barriers to energy efficiency. First, it addresses upfront cost: although energy efficiency measures usually pay for themselves, most require an up-front investment which many people have trouble making. PACE financing also helps address split incentives. Because efficiency improvements can take several years to pay back, and most Americans move every few years, the benefits of efficiency don’t always accrue to the people who invest in them. With PACE, the loan used to make the improvement is assessed on the property, so the person who is saving money in energy costs is always the same person who is paying for the energy improvements.
Jonathan Hiskes at Grist makes the counter-argument that PACE financing is not really something new, as the FHFA and the mortgage giants claim, and I agree with him, but there are several stronger arguments against the mortgage regulator’s position that I have not yet seen made.
The FHFA is worried that the “lending is not based on the homeowner’s ability to pay, it bypasses consumer protections such as the Truth-in-Lending Act, and it may not lead to meaningful reductions in energy consumption.” I’ll address each of these points in turn:
Ability to pay. The lending does not need to be based on the borrower’s ability to pay, because the energy improvements improve that ability to pay. For example, Boulder Colorado’s now canceled PACE program required that the homeowner first get an energy audit, which is then used to estimate the cost savings of possible energy improvements. If the homeowner is able to pay for his or her current mortgage (which, supposedly, is based on his ability to pay), then after the energy improvements and the PACE loan, he or she should have better cash flow, and be better able to pay. In other words, PACE should improve the owner’s ability to pay, and actually strengthen the mortgage market.
Consumer protections Unlike complex mortgages, the most important thing about a PACE loan is that the monthly payment be less than the monthly savings, so they are inherently easier for consumers to understand. But if consumer protections are necessary, there’s no reason they could not be added to PACE lending programs without canceling the whole program, as the FHFA seems to want.
May not lead to meaningful reductions in energy consumption. Quite simply put, this is an attempt to throw the baby out with the bathwater. A good PACE program requires an energy audit and professional installation in order to ensure energy savings. It’s important to design PACE programs carefully, but that’s true for any lending program, or any program whatsoever.
Rather than putting a stop to all PACE lending, as has happened, good programs (such as Boulder’s) that do provide some assurance that energy savings will be achieved should continue, since they strengthen borrower’s ability to pay rather than weakening it.
Bad news for both her economic stimulus and energy efficiency. The New York Times reports that PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy) financing for energy efficiency improvements, for which $150M in stimulus money was set aside is running into a roadblock from another arm of the government: the mortgage agencies Fannie and Freddie.
See the full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/business/energy-environment/01solar.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&hp
I took this picture on February 7, 2010, in Denver’s Stapleton New Urbanist development in Denver. Most of the houses in Stapleton are EnergyStar qualified, but this picture tells a story about some that aren’t. The blue house in the background was built in 2009 by Wonderland Homes. The tan house in the foreground is a KB Home built in 2008.
Note how the still-falling snow is melting on the north-facing roof of the tan KB Home, but not on the similarly oriented roof of the blue Wonderland home. Also note that clear lines of unmelted snow where the roof trusses add an extra layer of insulation between the attic and the roof. This is a clear sign that the KB Home (NYSE:KBH) lacks sufficient attic insulation, and enough heat is escaping from inside the house to the attic to melt the snow on the roof as quickly as it is falling. Nor was it just this one house… all the houses I saw that were built by KB showed signs of snow melting on the roof, while all the houses I saw built by other builders (New Town Builders, Wonderland, and McStain) showed no signs of melting. Many were built in 2007, before either of the homes in the photo.
I was shocked. The Stapleton website proudly proclaims “Since 2006, every Stapleton builder had been an EnergyStar partner.“ I’d taken this to mean that every home built in Stapleton since 2006 was an EnergyStar home… an assumption I’m sure Forest City (NYSE:FCE-A) and KB Home would love us to assume. Instead, I have to assume it means that KB builds some EnergyStar homes, somewhere.
KB’s web page for their Coach Series homes in Stapleton displays the EnergyStar logo in two locations. One logo appears with the text “An EnergyStar qualified neighborhood” (emphasis mine) and the other is in a box that says “Save 30-45% on your utility bills with a new KB home compared to a home built as recently as the 1990s.” The implication is clearly that the Coach series homes are EnergyStar homes, but my photo shows clear evidence that they are not. (Ironically, the New Town and Wonderland websites display the EnergyStar logo much less prominently.)
From page 19 of KB Home’s2009 Sustainability Report [pdf]: We have a long history of building ENERGY STAR qualified homes. The percentage of our homes that are built to this exacting standard has grown from 1% of our home deliveries in 2001, the year we began working with ENERGY STAR for Homes, to 37% in 2008. One-third of our divisions built every one of their new homes to this standard in 2008, and only one of our divisions did not build at least some ENERGY STAR qualified homes.
I’m underwhelmed. First, EnergyStar is not an “exacting standard.” An EnergyStar home must save at least 15% of the energy used by a standard code-built home. According to a 2008 National Renewable Energy Laboratory study [pdf p.14], “for a 2,000-gsf house built to achieve 30% energy savings relative to standard practice, a homeowner can save $512 a year more on his or her energy bills than the extra cost of the slightly larger mortgage.” In other words, this “exacting standard” leaves a lot of money on the table, even when the additional cost (and mortgage) is accounted for.
Further, 37% EnergyStar qualified is better than your average homebuilder… but your average homebuilder does not plaster their website with the EnergyStar logo.
I wonder if the owner of the tan house (or any of the many other KB Homes I saw with melting snow on the roofs) think they are living in EnergyStar homes?
Tom Konrad Ph.D.
California’s RETI process lends insight into the near-term prospects of Solar, Wind, Geothermal, and Biomass.
In September, California’s Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative (RETI) released their Phase 2A report, which outlined potential transmission corridors to collect renewable energy from Competitive Renewable Energy Zones (CREZ) that had been identified in previous phases. As part of Phase 2A, they also screened each CREZ for environmental impact, and the potential difficulty of obtaining land for renewable energy development.
I previously looked at the results from Phase 1A and gained some insight into the cost of renewable energy technologies. However, what renewable energy projects actually get built has to do with a lot more than just economics. If it raises too many environmental concerns, such as infringing on endangered Mojave Ground Squirrel habitat, it isn’t going to get built.
Drawing on the spreadsheet "Supplemental Materials, CREZ Data" I put together the following charts, graphing the economics of each type of renewable energy in each CREZ against the expected environmental impact of that CREZ.
Each circle represents one type of renewable energy at one of 35 CREZs. Concentric circles in different colors appear where a single CREZ offers multiple types of renewable energy development. The only difference between the two graphs is the size of the circles. In the first graph, circle sizes represent the potential annual energy production (GWh/yr) of a CREZ, while circle sizes in the second shows power rating (MW.) Geothermal and Biomass resources are relatively larger in the first graph because these are typically baseload technologies generating electricity near peak capacity all the time, while solar and wind are variable.
The cluster of circles in the middle right represent resources outside California: they were not rated for environmental concerns, so I assigned them an arbitrary value in the middle of the range in order to display them on the charts.
Economic/Environmental Tradeoff?
I found it surprising that there is little evidence of a tradeoff between economic viability of CREZ’s and environmental impact. In fact, the circles in the graphs above are generally clustered along a line from the lower left (high environmental impact, bad economics) to the upper right (little environmental impact, good economics). A tradeoff between economic viability and environmental concerns would manifest itself in a clustering along a line from the upper left (bad economics, little environmental impact) to the lower right (good economics, large environmental impact.)
Considering these four major renewable energy technologies, as they might be deployed in California, there is no real tradeoff between economics and the environment. The best economics coincide with the least environmental impact. If we were to include energy efficiency in the analysis, the trend would be even more pronounced: energy efficiency has the best economic profile of all, yet avoids the use of energy and hence does less harm to the environment.
The exception here is biomass. The small green dots don’t show a pronounced trend in any direction, meaning that there may be some tradeoff for biomass. Such a tradeoff would not be surprising, because harvesting plant matter on a large scale is bound to have significant ecosystem impacts. Note that Biomass here does not include such technologies as waste to energy, which can be environmentally benign, or even an improvement compared to land filling. In this study, the biomass in remote regions that do not yet have transmission, since lack of sufficient transmission was one of the requirements to be a CREZ.
With clean energy, it may actually be possible to do well while doing good.
by Tom Konrad, Ph.D.
Big spending Demand-Side Management programs are not the only way to promote Energy Efficiency.
The Sierra Club’s Rocky Mountain chapter has decided that one of their priorities for 2010 is promoting Energy Efficiency. Since that decision was, at least in part, due to my suggestions as part of their Energy Committee, I volunteered to chair the effort for at least as long as I’m still in Colorado. (I’m planning a move to Connecticut with my wife, but we are waiting for our house to sell first.)
In normal times, we might consider lobbying the state government for incentives to promote energy efficiency, such as those offered as part of the stimulus package. However, a state legislator who came to our last Energy Committee meeting was quite clear: Colorado will be eliminating all (or nearly all) tax incentives next year, so Energy Efficiency programs that rely on state funds are not going to be an effective way forward. For people who, like me had hoped to use Colorado’s recently passed 85% tax credit for PHEV conversions next year, that means we’re probably out of luck. You heard it here first.
Not All Bad News
As I wrote at the start of the financial crisis, even though there may be less subsidies for energy efficiency, leaner budgets make people more open to the idea of cost saving from energy efficiency. Since subsidies are less likely to be available to break down some of the cost barriers against energy efficiency, it makes sense to use our efforts to break down some of the non-cost barriers.
Eric Hirst of Oak Ridge National Laboratory identifies these barriers to energy efficiency improvements:
Barriers to improving U.S. energy efficiency:
Structural barriersconditions beyond the control of the end user
Behavioral barriersconditions that characterize end users
The ones that might be addressed without much money are:
Attitudes and Awareness
This barrier has to do with people’s mistaken beliefs: For instance, the belief energy efficiency always requires giving something up (not true: a better sealed and insulated home is less drafty and more comfortable as well as being more energy efficient.) Similarly, some people like to waste energy because conserving is un-macho.
Public relations efforts to make people feel better about efficiency can be very inexpensive. For instance, SMUD’s monthly reports to its customers as to how their consumption compares to their neighbors is something that could be emulated by other utilities.
Another method that might also help to make energy efficiency a social norm also involves competition with neighbors: households with low energy use might also be given inexpensive yard signs, allowing them to brag about their energy sipping lifestyle. This might also address some of the perceived riskiness barrier, because when people see others doing something, they are much more inclined to feel that it is both acceptable and safe.
Misplaced Incentives
Misplaced incentives occur when the person who would pay for efficiency improvements is different from the person who pays the energy bill (and would receive the benefits.) Two examples are landlords and tenants, and homebuilders and home buyers.
Builders have been making strides communicating the energy efficiency of their homes through various certification schemes, such as LEED, Built Green, and Energy Star. When the building buyer can assess the efficiency of a building because it carries a widely recognized green certification, he is likely to be willing to pay more for that building. The same is true for renters.
These voluntary moves are a start, but making energy use disclosure mandatory, as opposed to voluntary, should help bring along the reluctant majority who are not already following these practices. If an energy audit or past energy bills were required to be provided by the seller or landlord whenever a building is sold or leased, buyers and renters could decide for themselves how much more they would be willing to pay for an efficient building, and the current owner would have an incentive to make cost-effective improvements beforehand.
Markets and Information
Efficient markets require good information. A large part of the reason that so many opportunities for energy efficiency exist is that information about energy use is not widely available and often difficult to come by. Measures such as those I suggest above all improve information about energy use, and hence should promote the more efficient use of energy at very little cost.
by Tom Konrad, Ph.D.
Current renewable energy technologies must be adopted in conjunction with aggressive Smart Growth and Efficiency if we hope to continue our current standard of living and complex society with diminished reliance on fossil fuels. These strategies have the additional advantage that they can work without large technological breakthroughs.
Energy Return on Investment
Energy keeps our economy running. Energy is also what we use to obtain more energy. The more energy we use to obtain more energy, the less we have for the rest of the economy.
The concept of Energy Return on Investment (EROI), alternatively called Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) has been widely used to quantify this concept. The following chart, from a SciAm paper, shows the EROI of various sources of energy, with the tan section of the bar representing the range of EROIs depending on the source and the technology used. I’ve seen many other estimates of EROI, and this one seems to be on the optimistic (high EROI) end for most renewable energy sources.
The general trend is clear: the energy of the future will have lower EROI than the energy of the past. Low carbon fuels such as natural gas, nuclear, photovoltaics, wind, and biofuels have low EROI compared to high-carbon fuels such as coal and (formerly) oil.
The graph also clearly shows the decline in the EROI over time for oil. Other fossil fuels, such as coal and natural gas, also will have declining EROI over time. This happens because we always exploit the easiest resources first. The biggest coal deposits that are nearest to the surface and nearest to customers will be the first ones we mine. When those are depleted, we move on to the less easy to exploit deposits. The decline will not be linear, and new technology can also bring temporary improvements in EROI, but new technology cannot change the fact that we’ve already exploited all the easiest to get deposits, and new sources and technologies for extracting fossil fuels often fail to live up to the hype.
While there is room for improvement in renewable energy technologies, the fact remains that fossil fuels allow us to exploit the energy of millions of years of stored sunlight at once. All renewable energy (solar, wind, biomass, geothermal) involves extracting a current energy flux (sunlight, wind, plant growth, or heat from the earth) as it arrives. In essence, fossil fuels are all biofuels, but biofuels from plants that grew and harvested sunlight over millions of years. I don’t think that technological improvements can make up for the inherent EROI advantage of the many-millions-to-one time compression conveys to fossil fuels.
Hence, going forward, we are going to have to power our society with a combination of renewable energy and fossil fuels that have EROI no better than the approximately 30:1 potentially available from firewood and wind. Since neither of these two fuels can come close to powering our entire society (firewood because of limited supply, and wind because of its inherent variability.) Also, storable fuels such as natural gas, oil, and biofuels all have either declining EROI below 20 or extremely low EROI to begin with (biofuels). Energy storage is needed to match electricity supply with variable demand, and to power transportation.
Neither hydrogen nor batteries will replace the current storable fuels without a further penalty to EROI. Whenever you store electricity, a certain percentage of the energy will be lost. The percent that remains is called the round-trip efficiency of the technology, shown on the vertical axis of the graph below, taken from my earlier comparison of electricity storage technologies. (Click to enlarge.)
Round trip efficiency (RTE) for energy storage technologies is equivalent to EROI for fuels: it is the ratio of the energy you put in to the energy you get out. You can see from the chart, most battery technologies cluster around a 75% RTE. Hence, if you store electricity from an EROI 20 source in a battery to drive your electric vehicle, the electricity that actually comes out of the battery will only have an EROI of 20 times the RTE of the battery, or 15. Furthermore, since batteries decay over time, some of the energy used
to create the battery should also be included in the EROI calculation, leading to an overall EROI lower than 15.
The round trip efficiency of hydrogen, when made with electrolyzers and used in a fuel cell, is below 50%, meaning that, barring huge technological breakthroughs, any hoped-for hydrogen economy would have to run with an EROI from energy sources less than half of those shown.
Taking all of this together, I think it’s reasonable to assume that any future sustainable economy will run on energy sources with a combined EROI of less than 15, quite possibly much less.
It’s Worse than That: The Renewables Hump
All investors know that it matters not just how much money you get back for your investment, but how soon. A 2x return in a couple of months is something to brag about, a 2x return over 30 years is a low-yield bond investment, and probably hasn’t even kept up with inflation.
The same is true for EROI, and means that users of EROI who are trying to compare future sources of energy with historic ones are probably taking an overly-optimistic view. For fossil fuels, the time we have to wait between when we invest the energy and when we get the energy back in a form useful to society is fairly short. For instance, most of the energy that goes into mining coal comes in the digging process, perhaps removing
a mountaintop and dumping the fill, followed by the actual digging of the coal and shipping it to a coal plant. Massey Energy’s 2008 Annual Report [pdf] states that "In 2008… we were able to open 19 new mines, and ten new sections at existing underground mines." This hectic rate of expansion leads me to believe that the time to open a new mine or mine section is at most 2 years, and the energy cycle will be even quicker at existing mines, when the full cycle between when the coal is mined and when it is burnt to produce electricity requires only the mining itself, transport to a coal plant, and perhaps a short period of storage
at the plant. Most coal plants only keep a week or two supply of coal on hand.
In contrast, Nuclear and Renewable energy (with the exception of biofuels and biomass) present an entirely different picture. A wind farm can take less than a year to construct, it will take the full farm life of 20 years to produce the 10 to 30 EROI shown in the graph. Solar Photovoltaic’s apparent EROI of around 9 looks worse when you consider that a solar panel has a 30 year lifetime. Only a little of the energy in for Nuclear power comes in the form of Nuclear fuel over the life of the plant: most is embodied in the plant itself.
Jeff Vail has been exploring this concept on his blog and the Oil Drum. He refers to the problem of the front-loading of energy investment for renewable energy as the Renewables Hump. He’s also much more pessimistic than the above chart about the actual EROI of most renewables, and found this chart from The Economist which illustrates the up-front nature of the investment in Nuclear and Wind:
In terms of EROI timing, those technologies for which the cost of generation includes more fuel have an advantage, because the energy used to produce the fuel does not have to be expended when the plant is built.
In a steady state of technological mix, EROI is the most important number, because you will always be making new investments in energy as old investments outlive their useful lives and are decommissioned. However, in a period of transition, such as the one we are entering, we need a quick return on our energy investments in order to maintain our society. Put another way, Jeff Vail’s "Renewables Hump" is analogous to a cash-flow problem. We have to have energy to invest it; we can’t simply charge it to our energy credit
card and repay it later. That means, if we’re going to keep the non-energy economy going while we make the transition, we can’t put too much energy today into the long-lived energy investments we’ll use tomorrow.
To give a clearer picture of how timing of energy flows interacts with EROI, I will borrow the concept of Internal
Rate of Return (IRR) from finance. This concept is covered in any introductory finance course, and is specifically designed to be used to provide a single value which can be used to compare two different investments with radically different cash flow timing by assigning each a rate of return which could produce those cash flows if the money invested were compounded continuously.
Except in special circumstances involving complex or radically different size cash flows, an investor will prefer an investment with a higher IRR.
Energy Internal Rate of Return (EIRR)
I first suggested that IRR be adapted to EROI analysis by substituting energy flows for investment flows in early 2007. I called the concept Energy
Internal Rate of Return, or EIRR. Since no one else has picked up the concept in the meantime, I’ve decided to do some of the basic analysis myself.
To convert an EROI into an EIRR, we need to
know the lifetime of the installation, and what percentage of the energy cost is fuel compared to the percentage of the energy embodied in the plant. The following chart shows my preliminary calculations for EIRR, along with the plant lifetimes I used, and the EROI shows as the size of each bubble.
The most valuable energy resources are those with large bubbles (High EROI) at the top of the chart (High EIRR.) Because of the low EIRR of Photovoltaic, Nuclear, and Hydropower, emphasizing these technologies in the early stage of the transition away from fossil fuels is much more likely to lead to a Renewables Hump scenario in which we don’t have enough surplus energy to both make the transition without massive disruption to the rest of the economy.
How to Avoid a "Renewables Hump"
Note that the three fossil fuels (oil, gas, and coal) all have high EIRRs. As we transition to lower carbon fuels, we will want to keep as many high EIRR fuels in our portfolio as possible.
The chart shows two renewables with EIRRs comparable to those of fossil fuels: Wood cofiring, and Wind. Wood cofiring, or modifying existing coal plants to burn up to 10% wood chips instead of coal was found to be one of the most economic ways of producing clean energy in the California RETI study. The scope for incorporating biomass cofiring is fairly limited, however, since it requires an existing coal plant (not all of which are suitable) as well as a local supply of wood chips. Some coal plants may also be converted entirely to wood, but only in regions with plentiful supplies of wood and for relatively small plants. The EIRR for this should fall somewhere between Wood cofiring and Wood Biomass, which is intended to represent the cost of new wood to electricity plants.
Natural Gas
To avoid a Renewables Hump, we will need to emphasize high-EIRR technologies during the transition period. If domestic natural gas turns out to be as abundant as the industry claims (there are serious doubts about shale gas abundance,) then natural gas is an ideal transition fuel. The high EIRR of natural gas fired generation arises mostly because,
as shown in the chart "it’s a gas" most of the cost (and, I assume energy investment) in natural gas generation is in the form of fuel. Natural gas generation also has the advantage of being dispatchable with generally quick ramp-up times. This makes it a natural complement to the variability of solar and wind.
However, I think it is unlikely that we’ll have enough domestic natural gas to both (1) rely much more heavily on it in electricity generation and (2) convert much of our transportation fleet to natural gas, as suggested by T Boone Pickens. We’re going to need more high-EIRR technologies to manage the transition. Fortunately, such technologies exist: the more
efficient use of energy.
Energy Efficiency and Smart Growth
I have been unable to find studies of the EROI of various efficiency
technologies. For instance, how much energy is embodied in insulation, and how does that compare to the energy saved? We can save transportation fuel with Smart Growth strategies such as living in more densely populated areas that are closer to where we work, and investing in mass transit infrastructure.
The embodied energy of mass transit can be quite high in the case of light rail, or it can be very low in the case of better scheduling and incentives for ride sharing.
Many efficiency and smart growth technologies and methods are likely to have much
higher EIRRs than fossil fuels. We can see this because, while the
embodied energy has not been well studied, the financial returns have.
Typical investments in energy efficiency in utility run DSM programs cost
between $0.01 and $0.03 cents per kWh saved, much less than the cost of new fossil-fired generation. This implies a higher EIRR for energy efficiency, because part of the cost of any energy efficiency measure will be the cost of the embodied energy, while all of the savings are in the form or energy. This relationship implies that higher IRR technologies will generally have higher EIRRs as well.
Smart growth strategies also often show extremely high financial returns, because they reduce the need for expensive cars, roads, parking, and even accidents [pdf.]
Conclusion: Brian or Brawn
The Renewables Hump des not have to be the massive problem it seems when we only look at supply-side energy technologies. By looking at demand side solutions, such as energy efficiency, conservation, smart growth, and transit solutions, we need not run into a situation where the energy we have to invest in transitioning from finite and dirty fossil fuels to limitless and clean renewable energy overwhelms our current supplies.
Efficiency and Smart Growth are "Brain" technologies, as opposed to the "Brawn" of traditional and new energy sources. As such, their application requires long-term planning and thought. Cheap energy has led to a culture where we prefer to solve problems by simply applying more brawn. As our fossil fuel brawn fades away, we will have to rely on our brains once again if we hope to maintain anything like our current level of economic activity.
Predicting market moves is notoriouslly difficult, but I’m feeling pretty good about my recent efforts.
On October 11, 2008, I stoped being a permabear and said, “the market as a whole now seems to me to be fairly valued.” The S&P 500 closed the previous Friday just below 900; today it closed at 919.32. In the fear that abounded last October, it was a hard call to be even that bullish, bit it seems to have worked out.
On June 2, I said we were near a market peak/ The S&P 500 closed that day at 944.74, and is currently down 3% almost a month later, having only bearly exceeded that number by a fraction of a percent.
Since I’m currently short-term bearish, I’ve started a series of articles not to by now, but to buy when a market decline puts them back on sale. Here are may clean enrgy shopping list articles so far:
Chevron’s willyoujoinus campaign rubs me the wrong way. What is the message here?
To me, this seems to be saying:
These types of messages undermine energy efficiency. There are many ways to save energy which don’t involve inconvenience, and help your bottom line. For instance, you can now buy a power strip for your TV or computer which switches off all the peripherals when the main electronic device is switched off. If you just set it up to turn off your VCR and DVD players when the TV is off, that will probably be a savings of 50 watts. If the TV is off 18 hours a day vor a year, that’s over 330 kW, or a savings of about $60 in the Northeast, $47 in California, or $33 in Colorado… but the powestrips cost only $25-$40, depending on which version you get… more than a 100% return in one year.
Saving energy does not need to be about sacrifice. I ride the bus out of choice… I’m less likely to get in an accident, and I can get work or reading done in the process. One day they were doing maintenance on the standard diesel that serves my route, and instead the bus was one of the newer hybrids. The ride was much smoother… so RTD saving energy by using a hybrid not only saved the transit district money, it made the passengers more comfortable.
Energy Efficiency is a win-win. When Chevron equates it to sacrifice, everyone loses.
I’ll be referencing these notes in an article to be published on AltEnergyStocks.com as What the ARRA Means for Clean Energy: One State’s Example on March 15th.
Since Obama’s election, my partent Charles and I have been looking at what Obama’s refreshing attitude towards Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency, combined with the credit crunch, will do for some of our favorite stocks… here are the highlights:
Companies that may benefit from a solar glut
How Oil prices affect Alternative Energy Stocks
Emissions trading stocks under Obama
What might happen to Solar Photovoltaic companies if consumers pull back
Charles and I expect divened paying companies to come back into vogue. He has a few dividend paying alternative energy companies and I have a couple dividend paying energy efficiency companies to consider.
I also revisited my list of Blue Chip Alternative energy companies to see which ones might benefit from the expected stimulus package, while Charles looked at Smart Grid stocks that might benefit from a stimulus package. One technology I’m betting on is Geothermal heat pumps.
My partners and I received a couple angry emails because of what I consider very well reasoned arguments as to why Barack Obama would be better on Energy and Climate than John McCain. It still shocks me that anyone interested in alternative energy investing would even consider this controversial. If they support McCain, they might not like the fact that their candidate isn’t the best on energy issues, but simply consider other matters more important.
YouTube Removes Clip of McCain mocking tire inflation.
It’s a crazy world we live in. In the first draft, we had found a video where McCain was shown deriding Obama’s advocacy for energy efficiency in the form of well-inflated tires, but it had been taken down by YouTube a day later. We had to settle for a news story talking about the McCain campaign and their tire guages, not McCain himself.
On what grounds was it removed, I have to wonder? It was a public appearance of a public figure, so you would think that it would not have been removed on copyright grounds, but your guess is as good as mine. Does YouTube remove all videos of public figures making fools of themselves?
I vote in Colorado, and we actually have more initiatives on the ballot than in California. Again, from the perspective of a voter primarily concerned about climate change and clean, renewable energy, here are the propositions that are relevant. (I’ll spare you my opinion on if eggs should be people.)
Amendment 52 – Redirect severance tax revenues for road repairs. No.
A quick look at who’s backing this thing is enough to convince me it’s crazy. See my article on Colorado Republicans.
Amendment 58 – Ends a tax subsidy for the oil and gas industry. The saved money would be used to expand college scholarships, preserve wildlife habitat, support clean energy projects and help local communities deal with the impacts of oil and gas drilling. Yes.
I looked into this in detail as Policy Committee Chair for the Colorado Renewable Energy Society (CRES), which endorses the bill. Naturally the oil and gas drillers want to keep thier subsidies, which is why you’ve probably seen more ads against it than for it. See A Smarter Colorado for the other side’s take.
Boulder Initiative 1A. Yes. This would allow Boulder county to issue municipal bonds and use the proceeds for loans to help fund home energy efficiency and renewable energy improvements in residents’ homes. CRES has also endorsed this one, for pretty obvious reasons.
And, of course, if you care about clean energy, you’ll be voting for Mark Udall and Barack Obama. I used to like John McCain, and once even voted for him in a primary… back when he was a maverick. Now he’s just old, and in the pocket of his party.
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