Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Energy policy: Wind Here's a pitch for wind energy from the GOAT blog. They write: Among the top 20 states for wind energy potential are Montana (ranked number 5 by the American Wind Energy Association), Wyoming (7), Colorado (11), New Mexico (12), Idaho (13) and California (17). The total amount of electricity that could potentially be generated from wind in the United States has been estimated at 10,777 billion kWh annually -- more than twice the electricity generated in the country today... A production tax credit (PTC) -- the only existing federal incentive for wind power -- will lapse at the end of 2008, unless Congress acts to reauthorize it. A vote in the Senate failed in early February (both Sens. Clinton and Obama voted for it; McCain did not vote); a House vote passed a few weeks later. Wind has one of the highest energy payback ratios of any power technology. Energy Payback Ratios (EPR) compare the amount of energy produced by a power plant to the amount of energy it takes to build, run and eventually decommission the plant. The more efficient the technology, the higher the EPR. Wind power has few downsides, with zero emissions, no use of fuel, no use of water for steam or cooling. Wind farms can spread over large areas, but their footprint is light, since farmers or ranchers can continue to work the land up to the foot of the turbines. In terms of bird fatalities, wind causes fewer than 1 per 10,000 deaths. More Coyote Gulch coverage here. "cc" 6:16:17 PM     CU scores $1 million for biomass project From The Denver Post: "A University of Colorado lab was awarded a $1 million federal grant announced Wednesday to create a system for turning vegetation into hydrogen or liquid fuel through concentrated sunlight. A team led by professor Alan Wei mer of the Boulder school's chemical and biological engineering department will heat biomass like grass, cornstalks and leaves, wood waste and algae to more than 2,000 degrees to produce an intermediate "syngas" [~] a mixture of carbon oxides and hydrogen. The grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of Energy was part of an award package of $18.4 million for 21 biomass research and demonstration projects." "cc" 7:32:03 AM     Climate Change: The earth is a beautifully complex system It's urgent that we start acting soon, as a planet, to lower CO2 emissions. Here's Part I of a three part series looking at the effects of climate change on Northern Colorado from The Craig Daily Press. They write: The news of climate change is now frequent. The changes result from pollutant gases that over-concentrate in the earth's atmosphere, remain caught and less dispersible, and capture the sun's heat, interfering with the sun's various ray components and their dispersal. In some surface areas, concentrated sun heat increases water evaporation, dries soil and foliage, and may release the congested evaporation far away from typical rainfall/snowfall areas. The increased evaporation can be pulled by atmospheric stronger, longer winds -- such as those forming and moving the North American Jet Stream -- to different-than-usual global zones, abandoning some to drought and others to over-precipitation. The Pacific Ocean's currents also receive evaporation plus recently melted cold glacier waters that, in colder and greater amounts, sink to ocean bottoms and are carried by current toward the equator where they gradually warm and thus rise toward the surface to become part -- but a cooler part -- of the Gulf Stream that slants northeast from the Gulf across the Atlantic to eastern Canada, Greenland, and Europe, bringing colder winters. Or, as recent studies at Steamboat's Mount Werner Storm Peak Lab show, evaporation from longer heat seasons, where the elevated CO2 levels also carry sulphur and nitrate particles from both coal-burning and natural or stronger forest fires, will decrease annual rain and snow totals. The particles attract and hold cloud moisture and scatter it, rather than allowing large enough moisture drops to attract each other into clouds that, when moisture-filled, release rain or snow to the ground. Polluted clouds are shown to "yield at least 15 percent less precipitation than clouds formed in clean air"... In the midst of such changed temperatures and wet/dry cycles and areas, available forage and growth and even the bird and bee carriers of seeds or pollen may have to relocate for reproductive assurance. Bill Stanley of the Nature Conservancy Global Climate Change Initiative has said we may have to "design new nature reserves to accommodate the movement of whole ecosystems -- fungi, centipedes, anonymous species and known species." Thus, news reports appear of armadillos in northeast Arkansas, 50-million acre fires in Siberia, a hundred gigatons of ice melted from Greenland's glaciers and a manatee seen swimming past Chelsea Pier in New York City. Here's Part II of the series looking at the effects of climate change on Northern Colorado from The Craig Daily Press. From the article: There is no function of nature that will exempt northwest Colorado from climate change. Our winters are either milder or influenced by the relocating jet stream and by the Pacific Ocean's handling of accelerated Arctic ice-cap melt. Our summers are hotter and drier. Ranchers notice even small animal species seeking longer-surviving vegetation on the slightest higher elevations in summer; DOW must decide to monitor big game migration patterns for climate-affected change; the summer tourist and fall hunting seasons may change slowly or unexpectedly; the Yampa/White river basins snowpack in 2007 "peaked on March 13, at a level that was 72 percent of average for that date" (31 days before the April 13 average peak date); agriculture here finds irrigations seasons that are too early and end too soon in summer; fish find streams and rivers too deluged in spring from fast-snowmelt sediment and then overheated in summer, when slower, later snowmelt would normally cool the water. Northwest Colorado is now home to pine-beetle dying forests (the beetle larvae are no longer sufficiently winter-frozen, and winter thaws often produce one extra beetle generation per year). As reported by Gary Severson, executive director of the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments, bark beetles "strangle trees by cutting off nutritional channels" and can kill 90 percent of an area's lodgepole pines. Our infested forests "are largely the headwaters for our rivers and streams." When those dead or drought-dried forests burn, we will see decreases in the services that healthy forests provide for free: CO2 uptake and storage, cleaner sediment-free water and watershed (erosion and species habitat) management. Recent congressional hearings on climate change included University of Montana professor Steven Running reporting that since 1986 the fire season in the West has grown 78 days longer, a 20-30 percent increase. Another such increase is likely during the next decades, and fire sizes more than 100,000 acres are now the norm. "cc" 6:38:24 AM

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