Update On Blocking ‘Spam’

As some experienced readers of this blog have noticed, there seems to be a lot of ‘spam’ getting through as Comments. I’ve been concerned as well, and after checking with my ‘web site expert’ (my brother-in-law) I am now aware of how so-called ‘spam-bots’ can load up open web sites with short comments that may seem reasonable but are not. His solution was to install ‘Captcha’ which, in principle, will eliminate more than 99% of such spam. An explanation of what Captcha is can be found at the following web site: http://www.google.com/recaptcha/captcha

I am hopeful!

Leaving the World in Younger Hands: It Will Be OK

As a ‘retired’ person who has had a long career, I have often heard concerns expressed by some colleagues about the people who will succeed us. Will they be able to handle all the problems they will face (some of which we created) and is the world heading down a sinkhole in their hands? As best I can tell this is a common refrain among older folks in any activity, and will undoubtedly be true of today’s younger folks when they get to that stage of life. Having worked with many young people and mentored a number over the years, I want to comment on that concern.

As a former Fellow in the Congressional Fellowship Program, I have occasionally been asked to serve as a reviewer of fellowship applications, including face-to-face interviews of finalists. Admittedly, these are somewhat unique and highly screened applicants. They all hold science Ph.D’s and are self-motivated to work in Washington, DC for a year or two on Capitol Hill or in a U.S. Government executive branch department or agency. Nevertheless, I am continually impressed, and even awed, by the quality of most of those I interview, many of whom do not receive fellowships because of the intense competition. I’ve also met and worked with other Fellows who came through other paths and who impress me greatly. In my opinion they are every bit as good as those that were part of my peer group, and perhaps better in terms of training and commitment to public service. I do not lose sleep over those who will succeed us in the years to oome.

I have also worked with many others who did not come to public service via the fellowship route. Some of them were people I worked for and with, and some were people I hired as I advanced through my career. All I can say is that I’m not worried about our future public servants and leaders. In fact I see them as more committed to public service than my post WW II generation that was labeled ‘the apathetic generation’.

What I am concerned about is a lack of mentoring of young people by today’s managers, as mentioned in the opening Page of this blog: ‘About this blog and me’. The importance of mentoring will be discussed more fully in a future blog.

The 1996 Summer Olympics: Setting A New Green Energy Standard

One purpose of this blog is to share history that might otherwise be lost. In that spirit I offer the following piece (‘Green Energy at the Olympics’) that I drafted in 2012 but has not previously been published. It tells the story of the U.S. Department of Energy’s role in the 1996 Summer Olympic Games held in Atlanta, GA, and has been updated slightly for this Post. Atlanta was the site of the first ‘green Olympics’ and set a challenge that has been met in Olympics that followed. Also attached are photos from the Olympics site, showing some of the solar energy projects that were implemented.

Green Energy at the Olympics
With the London Summer Olympics of 2012 behind us and the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Summer Olympics coming into view, it is time to bring the record of greening the Olympics up to date.
The host British Government for the 2012 Games accepted the challenge to ‘green’ the Olympics and did an excellent job. BP, an official sponsor, announced that three of the company’s advanced biofuels (cellulosic ethanol, biodiesel, and biobutanol) “….will be demonstrated in approximately 100 fleet vehicles at the 2012 Olympics. …. By incorporating them in the fuels for London 2012 we have taken the next generation of biofuels from the laboratory to the road.” In addition, energy efficient, sustainable and recyclable facilities were designed and constructed, and a portion of the Olympic site’s electrical demand was met by solar panels.
These ‘green energy’ activities continued the theme of greening the Summer Olympics that started with the U.S. Department of Energy and Atlanta in 1996, and continued with Sydney in 2000, Athens in 2004, and Beijing in 2008.
When Atlanta was selected for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games it was understood that this was likely to be the last U.S. city to host the Summer Games until well into the next century. It was also recognized that the Olympics represented a highly visible and unique opportunity to showcase American energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies and ‘speak to the market’ directly. More than two million on-site visitors were expected in Atlanta, as well as a global TV audience of more than three billion. The 2012 TV audience for the London Games was even larger.
Planning for the U.S. Department of Energy’s activities at the 1996 Summer Games began in 1990 at DOE’s Atlanta Support Office, and took formal shape in March 1992. This is when the newly formed National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Atlanta Support Office formed a team to identify and discuss opportunities with the Atlantic Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) and the Metropolitan Atlantic Olympic Games Authority (MAOGA). Technical opportunity teams were formed, and initial discussions with industry and other stakeholders began that fall.
Unfortunately, much of this planning got lost in the aftermath of the 1992 U.S. presidential election, the beginning of a new Administration, and the appointment of a new Secretary of Energy. When this became clear early in 1993 some of us decided to act and revive the effort as an ad hoc activity – no DOE funds had been budgeted for activities in Atlanta. Through a series of internal actions at DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and generous in-kind and cash contributions from private sector partners, a significant demonstration program was planned and implemented, with many ongoing benefits to Atlanta and to Georgia Tech where most of the athletic competitions were located.
What was accomplished?
– 40,000 square feet of the roof area of the newly-built swimming arena (Natatorium) were covered with 2,856 photovoltaic (PV) modules, delivering 340 kilowatts of peak electrical power to the swimming complex. At the time, and for several years afterwards, this was the largest PV building installation in the world.
– A 9 kilowatt peak PV array was mounted over the walkway to the Natatorium, which charged a battery storage unit to offset nighttime lighting electrical needs.
– 274 solar pool heating panels were also mounted on the Natatorium roof, to heat the one-million gallon Olympic pool.
– Several hundred alternative fuel vehicles, both buses and light duty vehicles, were used as part of the Olympic fleet. Fuel sources used included compressed natural gas, liquid natural gas, battery-stored electricity, and hydrogen.
– A stand-alone PV-powered outdoor lighting system (65 double-lamped fixtures) provided the illumination for the visitor parking lot of the newly built Martin Luther King, Jr. Visitor Center.
– A 7 kilowatt peak dish-engine, multi-faceted, concentrating solar power unit was on loan to Georgia Tech for demonstration during the Olympics.
– A local school roof was selected for installation of a highly reflecting ‘cool roof’ to reduce cooling requirements
– A building on the Georgia Tech campus and the newly built Southface Energy and Environmental Resource Center were selected as sites for geothermal heat pump demonstrations. The 6,000 square foot Center, located on land leased from the City of Atlanta and next to the City’s Science Museum, was built with DOE funds as a demonstration site for current or emerging energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies for the building sector.
It is anticipated that the greening of future Olympics, both Summer and Winter, will continue and serve as an expanding showcase to the world of what can be done with green energy. We have come a long way since 1996, with many green energy technologies entering the global energy mainstream and beginning to take their place in our energy future. Demonstration at the Olympic Games and other public events can hasten this inevitable and critical development.

Photos (in order): installing solar panels on Natatorium roof; Natatorium roof (PV + water heating); Olympic pool under solar roof; installing the reflective ‘cool roof’

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A Tribute to two Distinguished Colleagues And Renewable Energy Pioneers

This will be a relatively short Post but an important one – a personal tribute to two long-time colleagues who definitely qualify as renewable energy pioneers – Drs. Jerry Weingart and Sam Baldwin. I know there are many others who have contributed to our march to a renewable energy future, and I have worked with many of them. I pick these two because they are friends, because of an important and visionary paper that Jerry wrote many years ago that warrants renewed attention, and an important report that Sam organized recently that answers an important question about our energy future. They have both done many other important things as well, but I will leave that for others to document.

I first met Jerry in the 1970’s when he was working at a DOE national laboratory and renewables were first receiving serious government attention. I met Sam early in the 1980’s when he came to Washington, DC as a Congressional Fellow of the American Physical Society. We have been colleagues and friends ever since.

The long and detailed paper that Jerry wrote, ‘The Helios Strategy: An Heretical View of the Potential Role of Solar Energy in the Future of a Small Planet’, and for which he received a Mitchell Prize, can be found at TECHNOLOGICAL FORECASTING AND SOCIAL CHANGE 12, 273-315 (1978). The Abstract is reproduced below:

ABSTRACT
Over the next hundred years there must be a worldwide transition from reliance on fossil fuels to the use of
some combination of long-term and abundant primary sources for the production of heat, electricity, and
synthetic fuels. The rate at which such options can be developed and employed, as well as the maximum rate at
which they can provide energy at a sustained rate, will place important constraints on the rate and limits to
growth of other human activities. It is generally argued that only the fission option, in the form of the
fast-breeder and high-temperature reactors, can provide the energy required for a livable world, particularly if
this means a world of 10 billion people living at the present energy level of Western Europe. However, a careful
examination indicates that the use of solar energy, through a menu of technological options, can provide the
needs of a world at this scale of energy use, and that this can be accomplished within the constraints of land
availability and requirements for energy, materials, and labor. No scientific breakthroughs are required, although
a number of these would be helpful, but very substantial engineering advances clre required, and the
transition to such a world-wide system would take no less than a century. However, the feasibility of such
large-scale use of solar energy will substantially alter those aspects of the “limits to growth” discussions in
which future growth strategies are constrained by available and acceptable energy alternatives. This paper
outlines a global solar-energy system considered feasible for more than 10 billion people living at 5 kW per
capita.

The study that Sam organized and led, The Renewable Electricity Futures Study, was published by NREL in June 2012. I consider it a breakthrough achievement. It is discussed in more detail in my previous blog Post entitled ‘The Promise of Renewable Energy’. It will be referred to for many years as a landmark in our progress toward a future based on renewable energy.

The Promise of Renewable Energy: It Can Do The Job

In my previous blog I talked about the broad range of renewable energy technologies and the fact that most of them are direct or indirect forms of solar energy. I also talked as a physicist (please forgive me – congenital weakness) about the origin of solar energy in that fusion reactor 93 million miles away from earth. Now I’d like to talk about what happens to that solar radiation when it reaches the earth’s atmosphere, and what it promises as an energy resource for the earth’s future.

This is not an obvious discussion. A question raised throughout my years involved with renewable energy has been: Can renewable energy meet human needs for energy or is it something less than that as a practical energy resource? These ‘doubts’ began to be raised in a series of studies sponsored by the U.S. coal industry in the mid 1990’s, at a time when the promise of renewables was beginning to be actively explored and, I believe, the coal industry began to feel threatened as a long-term source of electricity. The studies were refuted which required a lot of work, as is currently true of studies questioning the reality and seriousness of global warming and climate change. Both efforts mirror the long-term battle to educate the public about the serious health effects of smoking.

What happens to the more than 6 million quads of solar energy that annually reach the earth’s atmosphere? While the amount of energy radiated by the sun does vary slightly due to sunspot activity, this variation is negligibly small compared o the energy released by the sun’s basic radiative process. As a result the amount of energy received at the outer boundary of the earth’s atmosphere is called the Solar Constant because it varies so little. This number, averaged over the earth’s orbit around the sun, is 1,367 watts per square meter on a surface perpendicular to the sun’s rays. In fact, the earth’s orbit around the sun is not circular but elliptical, and the ‘Solar Constant’ varies by about three percent during the year. In the northern hemisphere the highest value is in the winter and the lowest in the summer.

About a quarter of the radiation incident on the earth is lost by reflection back into space from the top of the atmosphere and tops of clouds. For the radiation penetrating the earth’s atmosphere a not insignificant amount is lost due to scattering and absorption by air molecules, clouds, dust and aerosols. One must also take into account the earth’s rotation and the resultant day-night (diurnal) cycle. To put a number on all this, if one assumes 30% is lost due to the above factors and the sun shines only 12 hours per day on a one square meter surface, that surface receives no more than (1,367W/m2)x(70%)x(12 hours/day)x(365 days/year) = 4,200 kWh of solar energy per year. Since on average the sun actually shines less than 12 hours/day at any location, the maximum solar radiation a site can receive is closer to 2,600 kWh per square meter per year. To put this number into perspective, the average person on earth uses about 20,000 kWh per year (524 quads in 2010 for 7 billion people).

A definitive and transparent answer to the question ‘How real is renewable energy?’ was given recently in the June 2012 NREL report Renewable Electricity Futures Study (Renewable Electricity Futures Study) which concluded that “Renewable electricity generation from technologies that are commercially available today, in combination with a more flexible electric system, is more than adequate to supply 80% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while meeting electricity demand on an hourly basis in every region of the country.”

This is not a prediction but a statement that renewable electricity can meet our needs if we so choose. It will not happen without overcoming many barriers (need for new transmission lines and storage, technology cost, political opposition) but it is possible if we have the political will to make it so. We must also recognize that renewable resources can be used to supply thermal energy as well as electricity, for space heating and cooling and water heating, and transportation fuels via chemical conversion of biomass materials. This is why I get excited about our renewable energy future!