A passive "house is so energy-efficient that it will run on the same amount of power it takes to operate a hand-held hair dryer”.  Isn’t that great? Simply add solar panels to recharge your electric car at home and you can disconnect yourself from the grid! No storm will shut your power off! No need of expensive, inefficient and polluting back up generators to make up for the average 3 days it takes a utility crew to reach your home and restore power after a storm. If everyone were to live in a passive home it would save the government and states billions of dollars of upgrade, maintainance, vegetation management, emergency repair of a costly antiquated electrical grid and wiring system.

But with low natural gas prices and no carbon tax, it might be difficult to find a good business model that would attract venture capital invesment in passive houses.  Elon Musk made it, against all odds, with electric cars (Tesla), and solar panels (SolarCity), success in passive homes should be within easier reach than space exploration (SpaceX)?

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The Passive House: Sealed for Freshness

By Sandy Keenan
The New York Times
08/14/2013

SEATTLE — When you visit Sloan and Jennifer Ritchie’s new passive house in the Madison Park neighborhood here, it takes a while to notice all the things you’re not hearing.

Look out the living room windows and you can see a gardener wielding one of those ear-piercing leaf blowers in the yard, but you would never know it inside.

There is no furnace or air-conditioner clicking on or off, no whir of forced air, and yet the climate is a perfect 72 degrees, despite the chilly air outside.

Then there are the things you’re not feeling. In one of the most humid cities in the country, you aren’t sticky or irritable, and the joints that sometimes bother you are mysteriously pain-free.

The air inside the house feels so fresh, you can almost taste its sweetness.

On paper, at least, the Ritchies’ home sounds too good to be true: an environmentally responsible house without traditional heating and air-conditioning systems that will be an airy 70 to 74 degrees on the coldest day of winter and the hottest day of summer, but use only a fraction of the energy consumed by a typical house.

And yet it’s not some experiment or futuristic dream. Nearly 30,000 of these houses have already been built in Europe. In Germany, an entire neighborhood with 5,000 of these super-insulated, low-energy homes is under construction, and the City of Brussels is rewriting its building code to reflect passive standards.

But in the United States, since the first passive house went up 10 years ago, in Urbana, Ill., only about 90 have been certified. Why aren’t they catching on here?

Part of the problem is the cost. Higher fuel prices and energy taxes in Europe provide a major incentive to embrace passive standards, which are complicated and make construction more expensive. In this country, it could be a decade or more before the energy savings someone like Don Freas enjoys in his 1,150-square-foot passive house in Olympia, Wash., offsets the extra $30,000 or so it cost to build.

“But those are such non-sexy ideas,” said Mr. Freas, 61, who is a sculptor and poet. “What matters is that I have never lived in such a comfortable house.”

Proponents of passive building argue that the additional cost (which is estimated at 5 to 20 percent) will come down once construction reaches critical mass and more American manufacturers are on board. And there are a few signs that day may be coming. More than 1,000 architects, builders and consultants have received passive-house training in this country; at least 60 houses or multifamily projects are in the works; and Marvin Windows, a mainstream manufacturer based in Minnesota, recently began making windows that meet passive certification standards.

Read full article here

Better than wave power, which requires buoy farms floating in the middle of the ocean and can be problematic for ships passing by, tidal power has turbines sitting on the sea floor. A great benefit of tidal power plants is their very high capacity factor hovering around 98%, i.e. better than a nuclear or coal plant. Tidal and hydro power are the only renewable sources that can provide base load power to the grid and therefore hold the most promise – wind and solar require some type of energy storage.

South Korea, the UK and France all have tidal projects in progress, or completed. So contrary to what the article below says the technology is there! Capital costs are probably high, because these projects haven’t been done quite enough yet, to bring the cost down, but once built, energy is essentially free, just some operational and maintenance costs which are probably equivalent or lower than other power plant types.

Tidal projects also come with decent capacity. The South Korean Sihwa Lake Tidal Power Station, which opened last April, is 254MW. So yes it can be done. The US is simply behind, or has a different agenda.  
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Ocean wave power projects seek solid footing on West Coast

By Mike Lee
San Diego Union Tribune
08/15/2011  

Harnessing power from ocean waves or currents has a big upside but it also has could have negative impacts on the ocean environment, according to a 2008 report by Oregon State University and others. Posisble problems include:

• Pelagic habitat: Minimizing entanglement of sea turtles in loose lines is crucial and some scientists are concerned about potential effects of electromagnetic fields created by the operations.

• Benthic habitat: Wave-energy facilities likely will affect local currents and that may change the movement of sediment and larvae. Organisms growing on buoys, cables and anchors may alter sandy seafloor environments where they will be placed.

• Fish: Large facilities could affect migration of salmon, crabs, sturgeon, whales and other creatures.

• Seabirds: Above-water structures may attract birds and alter food webs.

• Marine mammals: Mooring cables may lead to animals getting unintentionally snared.

The cancellation of three ocean wave-energy projects in Sonoma County leaves a proposal north of Oceanside as the only one of its kind off California’s coast.

There’s wide interest in harnessing the ceaseless power of the ocean because so-called hydrokinetic energy facilities could provide a steady source of energy without air pollution or toxic waste.

But there are so many barriers that the concept hasn’t generated much momentum in California despite aggressive state mandates to ratchet up renewable power supplies. To reach commercial production, a wave-energy farm proposed near San Onofre would have to minimize interference with ocean ecosystems, the famous surf break at Trestles and Marine training at Camp Pendleton. Besides that, proponents must prove the technology will work in the corrosive waters of the ocean and navigate a grueling approval process.

Read full article here

The article below provides a great opportunity to once again showcase Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen’s marketing framework as described in his book “The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth.” Christensen says essentially customers “hire” a product to do a specific “job” for them. For companies, understanding what “jobs” customers are trying to get done is an essential part of the internal decision-making when it comes to how to design or enhance products, and how to get more customers to buy more of the company’s products. Christensen explains this theory in simple language, using milkshakes as an example, click here

The three home energy management products below just failed Christensen’s “job” test. The way these products were designed assumed that the customers would “hire” these products to do fun science projects! Not surprisingly, only a small proportion of the population was interested in doing fun experiments like reading and trying to interpret or derive any useful information from hourly energy usage.

Intuitively, 1) electricity is pretty cheap, so most people don’t care much, and 2) people with big houses interested in lowering their electrical bills will “hire” a product that can do just that in a very simple way. Once again, user experience is key. Make it simple and easy for the consumer to save electricity and money--no matter how fancy, dashboards are useless if they’re not taking care of the “job” the consumer needs done.
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Why Internet companies are abandoning home energy plans

By Katie Fehrenbacher
Gigaom
08/11/2011

Throughout 2009 and 2010, Internet companies like Microsoft, Google and even router giant Cisco launched experimental software and hardware to help building managers and home owners monitor and control their energy consumption. While Microsoft and Google focused on consumer-facing software, Cisco decided it would build a home-energy dashboard and also sell building-energy-management products.

But now, 12 to 24 months later, all three of these players have ultimately made the decision to abandon those projects. Cisco was the latest one to jump ship, and on Wednesday afternoon it penned a blog post announcing the choice. Cisco plans to move away from both its building-energy tools, which it purchased via Richards-Zeta back in 2009, as well as its Home Energy Controller, an energy dashboard it had developed.

Little effort, little reward

First off, all of these firms were really just dabbling in and experimenting with the energy-management field. Cisco’s energy dashboard was actually a device created by Open Peak and customized by Cisco, and it was meant to be tested out in its smart-grid pilot trials with utilities. In Cisco’s blog post this week, it said after testing out the tools in its pilots that it decided it needed to evolve its strategy.

If you look at Google’s and Microsoft’s entire business lines — and balance sheets — their PowerMeter and Hohm energy web tools were minor projects. Google even launched PowerMeter out of Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm, and actively said it had no business model for the software.

Lack of consumer interest

Ultimately Google and Microsoft shut down PowerMeter and Hohm, partly because not enough consumers signed up to use the service. The tools were free and easily available on their websites, but at this point consumers just lack the fundamental interest in spending time managing their home energy consumption.

Read full article here

Reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel is practiced in the U.K., France, Japan, India, and Russia but was banned in the U.S. back in the mid 70s under both the Ford and Carter administrations.  The fear has been other countries using these same reprocessing techniques to extract plutonium for non-civilian purposes.

And so, as of today, an estimated 64,000 tons of spent fuel has accumulated and sits on the sites of 65 U.S. nuclear generating power stations. These materials will remain radioactive for thousands of years. Reprocessing nuclear fuel --a process by which plutonium is extracted and then converted into MOX nuclear fuel that can be used back in the same traditional nuclear reactors-- would reduce the volume of high-level nuclear waste by about 20 percent, and levels of radioactivity from the waste of reprocessing also decay much faster. But that would still leave 80 percent of high-level waste sitting on the sites of nuclear plants.

TerraPower, backed by Bill Gates, is working on a reactor that would allow the nuclear fuel to remain inside the core, while slowly undergoing fission for 40 years vs. the typical one and a half to two years in currently operating U.S. reactors. In that scenario, one would only need to worry about spent fuel storage every 40 years, at which point the spent fuel rods would have already reached a very low level of radioactivity.

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Futuristic U.S. Power Reactor May Be Developed Overseas

By Peter Behr
The New York Times
06/31/2011

The TerraPower "wave reactor" concept is backed by Microsoft's Bill Gates, is endorsed by Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman Jr. and has gotten a receptive ear from President Obama's Energy Department.

But it's headed overseas for its next crucial step, if ongoing negotiations with a foreign sponsor are successfully completed, says Roger Reynolds, TerraPower's technical adviser.

The Bellevue, Wash., startup says it has verified the theory behind its slow-burning reactor through supercomputer simulations and now needs to build a pilot version of the reactor, to evaluate how the metal fuel casings in the core will withstand decades of radioactive bombardment.

The reactor is designed to run for 40 years or more without refueling as it steadily consumes most of its original fuel supply. Thus it remains intact, disarming concerns about long-term spent fuel storage or the theft of nuclear material during refueling or fuel reprocessing, the company said.

Reynolds said the plant won't be built in the United States.

"We've had conversations with the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, the French," Reynolds said in an interview. "We have an aggressive schedule where we think it is important to get something built and accumulate data so that we can eventually build them in the U.S. Breaking ground in 2015, with a startup in 2020, is more aggressive than our current [U.S.] regulatory structure can support."


Read full article here

France found its equivalent of a carbon tax! It simply banned fracking shale gas altogether. With 90 percent of its electricity coming from nuclear power, France is protecting its nuclear interests from the potential cheap natural gas alternative.  France’s 58 nuclear reactors are operated by Electricite de France (EDF), approximately 90 percent of which is owned by the French government.

The ban also keeps environmentalists happy. Fracking is bad for the environment – though the fracking industry would argue that there are no studies to substantiate any of these environmental risk claims – and natural gas power plants, while cleaner than coal plants, still emit a lot of CO2.

Though nuclear generation has close to a zero carbon footprint – it does not emit carbon –, French environmentalists would still like to see nuclear power go away. But with no natural gas plants in the country, I don’t see what alternatives there are to replace France’s base load power (some private groups acquired some old coal plants betting that with all this green wave going on, old cold plants might need to come to the rescue). At this time, France is slowly but surely ramping up its renewable capacity, as renewable share will have to reach 23 percent of electricity consumption by 2020 as set by the European Union.
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France Vote Outlaws ‘Fracking’ Shale for Natural Gas, Oil Extraction

By Tara Patel
Bloomberg News
07/01/2011

French senators voted to outlaw hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, making France the first country to pass a law banning the technique for extracting natural gas and oil.

“We are at the end of a legislative marathon that stirred emotion from lawmakers and the public,” French Environment Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet said late yesterday before the vote. Hydraulic fracturing will be illegal and parliament would have to vote for a new law to allow research using the technique, she said.

Energy companies that plan to use fracking to produce oil and gas in France will have their permits revoked and its use could lead to fines and prison, according to the law passed by a vote of 176 in favor, 151 against by the senators in Paris.

Lawmakers of the ruling UMP party voted in favor of the bill while the opposition Socialists rejected the proposal for not going far enough. Before the French vote, the ban had moved between the upper and lower houses of parliament since March.

Fracking, widely used in North America, uses a mixture of water, sand and chemicals injected under high pressure to break dense rock to release trapped oil and gas. Green groups and politicians led protests across France, saying the method could cause environmental damage. Government ministers and industry representatives say it is the only method currently available to extract hydrocarbons from the rock.

Ban ‘Deplored’

Oil companies operating in France “deplore” the French ban, according to the Union Francaise des Industries Petrolieres, or UFIP, which represents Total SA (FP) and other explorers and refiners. UFIP, it said in a statement, “considers that the law will prevent an evaluation of shale hydrocarbon resources and their impact on the French economy.”

Read full article here

Have you heard of passive homes?

They are super ultra energy-efficient homes.

In the clean tech world, there is nothing cleaner than a Kwh, or Btu that is not used. At today’s U.S. electricity consumption, you’d have to cover the equivalent of the entire state of Michigan with solar panels to meet the country current electricity needs, and that would still not cover for the hours where the sun is not shining.

Forty percent of electricity use in the United States comes from residential homes; add to that 35% from commercial buildings, if we were to make all of our residential homes and commercial buildings “passive,” we could cut out 2/3rd of the U.S. electricity consumption! Yes, the claim is that a well-designed passive home can reduce energy consumption by 90%.

The concept of a passive home is not new.  But, earlier passive houses have been known to trap moisture inside, leading to mold and indoor air quality issues. More advanced designs and ventilation systems would eliminate these problems.

The New York Times has a very nice graphic explaining how these homes work: very thick walls, well-oriented windows, and underground heat exchangers.  See below.

Now the question is what would trigger U.S. consumers to retrofit their homes to be ultra energy efficient/passive?  With the vast supply of newly found natural gas in the form of shale gas, the powerful and well-capitalized oil and gas companies are investing to drill any shale gas they can locate, which is bound to keep electricity and natural gas prices at an all time low for the foreseeable future. Thus, paying your monthly electricity and gas bill will be cheaper than the capital expenditure you’d have to make to retrofit your home.

For now, the passive home might only be for the wealthy and environmental friendly consumer.

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The Secrets of a Passive House

The New York Times
09/25/2010

When completed, the Landau residence now under construction in Norwich, Vt., will be one of about a dozen buildings certified as “passive houses” in the United States. Their strict building standard sets limits on total energy consumption and peak heating and cooling demand. A heat exchanger circulates fresh air throughout the house and reuses warmth from the inside air. The result is a house that typically uses 90 percent less energy for heating than a conventional house. 

Read full article here