Bush Cronies Tried To Redefine ‘Carbon Dioxide’ To Save Power Plants From Emissions Regulations»

Earlier this month, former EPA official Jason Burnett wrote to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) with explosive revelations on how the White House has neutered climate change science to protect corporate interests. For example, OMB general counsel Jeffrey Rosen asked for multiple memos on whether carbon dioxide (CO2) from cars and plants could be regulated differently.

In a Senate hearing today, Burnett further explained that under the Clear Air Act, “after a pollutant is a regulated pollutant, controls are required on a variety of sources.” During the “inter-agency process,” Burnett said, OMB officials looked for ways to define CO2 from power plants as different from CO2 from automobiles, in order to shield industrial power plants from regulation under the landmark Supreme Court decision Massachusetts v. EPA:

BURNETT: There was quite a bit of effort and interest to see whether the Supreme Court case itself and regulation of CO2 and other greenhouse gases from automobiles be restricted to just automobiles. … So there’s an interest to determine whether we could define CO2 from automobiles as somehow different than CO2 from power plants, for example –

SEN. KLOBUCHAR: Do you think that’s possible?

BURNETT: Clearly it wasn’t supportable.

Watch it:

It is common knowledge that carbon dioxide is the same chemical regardless of what source emits it. But for the White House, which unabashedly asserts its anti-environment agenda, the definition of CO2 can change to help big polluters.

“I must say that it was sometimes somewhat embarrassing,” Burnett admitted, “for me to return to EPA and ask for my colleagues to explain yet again that CO2 is a molecule and there is no scientific way of differentiating between CO2 from car and a power plant.”

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Saharan sun to power European supergrid

Alok Jha, science correspondent

A worker tends to the world's largest solar plant in Germany. Photo: Waltraud Grubitzsch/EPA/Corbis

Vast farms of solar panels in the Sahara desert could provide clean electricity for the whole of Europe, according to EU scientists working on a plan to pool the region's renewable energy.

Harnessing the power of the desert sun is at the centre of ambitious scheme to build a €45bn (£35.7bn) European supergrid that would allow countries across the continent to share electricity from abundant green sources such as wind energy in the UK and Denmark and geothermal energy from Iceland and Italy.

The idea is gaining growing political support in Europe with both Gordon Brown and Nicholas Sarkozy recently giving backing to the north African solar plan.

Speaking today at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona, Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European commission's Institute for Energy, said it would require the capture of just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle Eastern deserts to provide all of Europe's energy needs.

In addition, because the sunlight in this area is more intense, solar photovoltaic (PV) panels in northern Africa could generate up to three times the electricity compared with similar panels in northern Europe.

Jaeger-Walden explained how electricity produced in solar farms in Africa, each containing power plants generating around 50-200MW of power, could be fed thousands of miles across European countries by using high-voltage direct current transmission lines instead of the traditional alternating current lines. Energy losses on DC lines are far lower than AC ones where transmission of energy over long distances is uneconomic.

"If you look at solar radiation, then the Mediterranean region is a very favourable one," said Jaeger-Walden.

He said that the proposed grid was a way to balance out the intermittencies of renewable energy: "If you can connect the grid to hydro power, you've got that as a backup battery, and in addition there's wind. It's not a single source that's providing the energy but a combination of the different renewable energies."

Conveniently the potential to generate solar energy, either from photovoltaic cells, or by using it to heat water, is at its highest exactly when there is peak demand. "Between 11am and 1pm – there are a lot of cooking activities going on, people are going home, air conditioners are used," he said.

The idea of developing solar farms in the Mediterranean region and north Africa was given a boost recently by French president Nicholas Sarkozy earlier this month when he highlighted solar farms in north Africa as a key part of the work of his newly-formed Mediterranean Union.

Depending on the size of the grid, building the necessary high voltage lines across Europe could cost up to €1bn a year every year till 2050 but Jaeger-Walden pointed out that the figure was small when compared to a recent prediction by the International Energy Agency that the world needs to invest more than $45tr (£22.5tr) in energy systems over the next 30 years.

Much of the cost would come in developing the public grid networks of connecting countries in the southern Mediterranean, which do not currently have the spare capacity to carry the electricity that the north African solar farms could generate.

"Even if high voltage cables between North Africa and Italy would be built or the existing cable between Morocco and Spain would be used, the infrastructure of the transfer countries such as Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey also needs a major restructuring," said Jaeger-Walden.

Scientists working on the project admit that it would take many years and huge investment to generate enough solar energy from north Africa to power Europe but envisage that by 2050 it could produce 100 GW, more than the the combined electricity output from all sources in the UK, with an investment of around €450bn.

Doug Parr, Greenpeace UK's chief scientist, welcomed the proposals. "Assuming it's cost-effective, a large scale renewable energy grid is just the kind of innovation we need if we're going to beat climate change. Europe needs to become a zero-carbon society as soon as possible, and that will only happen with bold new ideas like this one. Tinkering with 20th-century technologies like coal and nuclear simply isn't going to get us there."

Jaeger-Walden also believes that scaling up solar PV by having large solar farms could help bring its cost down for consumers. "The biggest PV system at the moment is installed in Leipzig and the price of the installation is €3.25 per watt. If we could realise that in the Mediterranean, for example in southern Italy, this would correspond to electricity prices in the range of 15 cents per KWh, something below what the average consumer is paying."

The vision for the renewable energy grid comes as the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) published its strategic energy technology plan, highlighting solar PV as one of eight technologies that need to be championed for the short to medium term future.

"It recognises something extraordinary – if we don't put together resources and findings across Europe and we let go the several sectors of energy, we will never reach these targets. We need a coordination of research applied to different fields," said Giovanni de Santi, director of the JRC, also speaking in Barcelona.

The JRC plan includes fuel cells and hydrogen, clean coal, second-generation biofuels, nuclear fusion, wind, nuclear fission and smart grids. De Santi said it was designed to help Europe to meet its commitments to reduce overall energy consumption by 20% by 2020 while reducing CO2 emissions by 20% in the same time and increasing to 20% the proportion of energy generated from renewable sources.

High-voltage transmission lines

First developed in the 1930s, High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) transmission lines are seen as the most efficient way to move electricity over long without incurring the losses experienced in normal AC power lines. HVDC cables can carry more power for the same thickness of cable compared with AC lines but are only suited to long-distance transmission because they require expensive devices called static inverters to convert the electricity, usually generated as AC, into DC. Modern HVDC cables can keep energy losses down to around 3% per 1,000km.

Another advantage of HVDC is that it can be used as a link to transfer electricity between different countries that might use AC systems at differing frequencies. Alternatively, the HVDC cables could be used to synchronise the AC currents produced by renewable energy sources such as wind turbine farms.

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Wind power: A reality check

Plans are afoot to prod the nation into using much more renewable energy. Can it be done, and what's the cost?

By Steve Hargreaves, CNNMoney.com staff writer

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- High-profile personalities have been telling the nation to ditch that dirty fossil fuel and turn to renewable energy.

T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire oilman, has been hitting the airwaves, pitching a plan to use wind to replace all the natural gas that's used to produce electricity, then using that saved natural gas to fuel cars.

In addition to weaning the nation from foreign oil, Pickens' plan is not entirely altruistic. He's investing hundreds of millions of dollars on a giant wind farm in the Texas panhandle, and his hedge fund, BP Capital, is said to own stakes in several companies that equip cars to run on natural gas. If his energy efforts pan out, he could get even richer in the process.

Then there's Al Gore. The former U.S. vice president and Nobel Prize winner said last week that electricity generation should be completely fossil-fuel free in 10 years.

The question is, are these plans realistic or just dreams?

"It's not out of the realm of technical feasibility," said Chris Namovicz, a renewable energy analyst at the government's Energy Information Agency. "But they come with pretty significant price tags."

The order is indeed tall.

The nation currently relies on coal - the dirtiest of all fossil fuels - for 50% of its electricity production. Natural gas makes up about 21%, and nuclear power comprises about 20%. Hydro and oil each contribute a bit as well, while traditional renewables - wind, solar, biomass and geothermal - ring in at only 3% combined, according to the EIA.

Pickens has a loosely detailed plan to replace the natural-gas-produced electricity with wind energy. He says it could be done in 10 years.

"That is extremely aggressive," said Dave Hamilton, director for global warming and energy projects at the Sierra Club. "But it's in the right direction. It's a good thing we have an oilman saying we can't drill our way out of this problem."

Unpredictable wind

One of the big challenges with using wind to replace natural gas is that, unlike the steady flame from natural gas, the wind doesn't blow all the time.

To make sure enough power is available when the wind isn't blowing, backup generators would be needed, said Paul Fremont, an electric-utility analyst at the investment bank Jefferies & Co.

That could mean maintaining those natural gas plants in case of emergency, or implementing even more novel ideas like systems in Europe that use excess wind electricity to pump water uphill when the wind is blowing, then release it through hydro dams when the wind stops.

Either way, any type of backup system comes with a price.

"It's very costly, and very inefficient for society as a whole," said Fremont. "Policy makers will have to decide if the benefits are worth it."

The utility industry also has reservations about using wind on a large scale, again pointing to the fact that it doesn't blow all the time.

The Sierra Club's Becker downplayed the problem. While a challenge now, he said technological advances will allow several wind farms from varying regions of the country to be tied together in the same electricity grid; when some are idle, others could make up the difference.

"The more we focus on how to get this done, the quicker we'll solve our problems," he said.

Government regulations

Another impediment to large-scale wind generation is a lack of turbines and infrastructure, said Hamilton. Companies like General Electric (GE, Fortune 500), India's Suzlon and Spain's Gamesa, which make wind turbines, aren't building enough of those turbines to meet demand because government tax credits offered to energy producers expire every two years. These tax credits are a big incentive for people to invest in wind energy - Pickens would net $60 million a year, according to Jefferies' Fremont, and that is likely why he's currently pitching his plan to lawmakers.

Companies fear that, if the tax credits aren't renewed, they will be stuck with unwanted wind turbines if energy producers scale back their demand for wind power.

Also impeding the development of wind power is the fact that the government is unclear about how or whether it will regulate greenhouse gas emissions. If regulations were enacted, investments in wind energy would likely increase as utilities seek cleaner sources of power.

Wind farms also could benefit when companies or people buy carbon offsets - essentially payments to producers of clean energy and others who take steps in reducing greenhouse gasses.

Despite these challenges, wind power's ability to produce 21% of the nation's electricity needs isn't out of the question. While wind currently only makes up 0.8% of the country's total electricity production, and would need to grow well over 20 times that to replace gas, it's worth noting that wind capacity has increased twelvefold since 1990, according to the EIA.

The second part of Pickens' plan - using natural gas to power vehicles - is perhaps easier.

While automakers are betting on electric cars as the vehicle of the future, those electric cars will still need backup engines to recharge the battery on long trips, at least for the foreseeable future.

Those backup engines could run on natural gas, said Julius Pretterebner, a vehicles and alternative-fuels expert at Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

Pretterebner also pointed to a host of other reasons why natural gas in cars is a good idea: It's about half as expensive as gasoline and 30% cleaner; the infrastructure to get it to service stations already exists; it's relatively cheap to convert existing cars ($500 to $2,000 per car, he said); and natural gas can be carbon neutral, if it's made from plants, a process he said requires no new technology.

"It's maybe the best alternative fuel we have, and the quickest way to get off foreign imports," he said.

As for Gore's call, there aren't any specific measures to analyze. But if Pickens' timetable is aggressive, Gore's is like Pickens' gone wild.

"It's completely impractical to imagine that we could totally wean ourselves off fossil fuels," said Jim Owen, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, the utility industry's trade association.

Impractical, maybe. But using more renewables is certainly worth looking into. The EIA estimates that by 2015, wind energy will cost 7 cents per kilowatt-hour to produce, just a half-cent more than coal or natural gas.

The EIA says if strict greenhouse gas restrictions become law, renewables might go from 3% percent of the nation's electricity mix to around 25%. Coal, meanwhile, would likely go from more than half to less than a quarter. The EIA said that under the worst-case scenario in bringing about this shift, electricity prices may double.

Given the dangers global warming may pose - U.N. scientists predict severe droughts and floods unless greenhouse gasses are drastically reduced - more-expensive electricity may be a cost Americans are willing to bear.

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