green economy

California's largest electric utility is desperate to slow down a new program that's going to revolutionize the way small businesses pay for their power. The company claims customers need more time to understand 'dynamic' pricing, but higher "time-of-use" rates will mean a new way of doing business for many of California's small business owners.

Consumer advocate groups and The California Small Business Association have come out against the new pricing for electricity, but state regulators have already approved the program. According to the San Francisco Chronicle "PG&E in November will start charging its roughly 500,000 small-business customers different rates for electricity at different times of day. Businesses will also face significantly higher rates on a handful of days each year when power supplies are strained, either by hot weather or problems with the electricity grid."

It should be noted that business owners will be able to "opt out" of the program —for the time being, anyway. According to The Chronicle, "the California Small Business Association has now asked the California Public Utilities Commission, which approved PG&E's program, to slow down the timetable for the changes. And PG&E, to an extent, agrees, arguing that the utility needs more time to educate its customers."

What utilities like PG&E want to "educate" all of us about is the transition to "time-of-use" rates. So what does all of this actually mean? Wikipedia breaks down the different categories of time-based pricing in relation to electricity industry like this:

• time-of-use pricing (TOU pricing)—whereby electricity prices are set for a specific time period on an advance or forward basis, typically not changing more often than twice a year. Prices paid for energy consumed during these periods are pre-established and known to consumers in advance, allowing them to vary their usage in response to such prices and manage their energy costs by shifting usage to a lower cost period or reducing their consumption overall;
• critical peak pricing—whereby time-of-use prices are in effect except for certain peak days, when prices may reflect the costs of generating and/or purchasing electricity at the wholesale level
• real-time pricing (also: dynamic pricing)—whereby electricity prices may change as often as hourly (exceptionally more often). Price signal is provided to the user on an advanced or forward basis, reflecting the utility’s cost of generating and/or purchasing electricity at the wholesale level; and
• peak load reduction credits—for consumers with large loads who enter into pre-established peak load reduction agreements that reduce a utility’s planned capacity obligations.

The Wiki-editors go on to recommend dynamic pricing, saying that "time-based pricing will reflect the price variations on the market. Such variations include both regular oscillations due to the demand pattern of users, supply issues (such as availability of intermittent natural resources: water flow, wind), and occasional exceptional price peaks." The general idea is that dynamic pricing begets consumer response—once people are paying more for electricity depending on when they use it, they tend to pay more attention to their usage. While it may be true that Americans have long enjoyed cheap electric rates in comparison to other countries, but the days of power that's "too cheap to meter" are decidedly coming to an end...

For decades, the advance of distributed solar power in the United States has seen its share of setbacks. Distributed solar, as opposed to centralized (think big desert arrays like these), refers to solar photovoltaic panels—PV panels for short. In fact, just a few short years ago, headlines everywhere were warning investors of the impending burst of a 'solar bubble' caused by too much supply and not enough demand. While it's true that many solar start-ups have since fallen by the wayside, a new industry report by VLSI Research is seeing more than a light at the end of the tunnel—they're seeing the potential for a PV explosion.

According to weSRCH, who published the report, 2011 is slated to be a banner year for PV sales and investment. VLSI's market research states that PV sales are "expected to grow 24%, driving sales to in excess of $12B". Sounds like good news...and boy, did we need some good news. The recent financial crisis caused more than one hiccup for the growth of PV: in 2010, Spain (a global leader in solar installations) was forced to cut back their feed-in tariffs for solar. In the same year, the PACE financing scheme for solar installations in some U.S. states ran into some legal trouble of their own. According the VLSI, however, there’s a silver lining to be found here, too: "Looking back, 2010 was a record year for PV Manufacturing Equipment, beating the previous peak reached in 2008 by around 10%."

The report goes on to name companies like Applied Materials, Amtech, Apollo Solar, Komatsu, Jusung, GS Solar, and Meyer Burger as the big success stories of 2010. It also sites new manufacturing innovations as one reason for PV's surprising growth rate last year. What's interesting to note is that of the companies mentioned above, only Applied Materials and Amtech are based in the U.S. The others are from around the globe: South Korea, Switzerland, Japan, and of course, China. But this doesn't mean the U.S. doesn't stand to benefit greatly from 2011's 'sunny' forecast for solar sales—quite to the contrary...

Three decades after the one-two punch of Three Mile Island (1979) and the Chernobyl disaster (1986) decimated the public image of nuclear power, and the American nuclear industry is still working hard to win back the public's trust. Moreover—and as David Biello points out in Beyond the Light Switch—they’ve actually done pretty well so far. In the American Nuclear Society's own words, "The nuclear industry's commitment to safe packaging and security has produced a safety record that would be difficult to match."

The ANS website goes on to describe their success in further detail, specifically citing their safety record when it comes to the transportation of radioactive materials: "Over the past 40 years, about 3,000 shipments of spent nuclear fuel have navigated more than 1.7 million miles of U.S. roads and railways.  Of all this travel, no radioactive materials have been released resulting from an accident or any other cause.  During this same period, there have been about 98 million kilograms of spent nuclear fuel shipped worldwide, with no record of any release of radioactive material."

And the public has taken notice. Stewart Brand, lifelong environmentalist and creator of the Whole Earth Catalog,  goes on record as a pro-nuclear convert in Beyond the Light Switch. Brand points to the growing threat of climate change as a major factor behind many former nuclear foes' reevaluation of nuclear power’s potential low-carbon benefits. It seems a lot of people are ready to rethink nuclear and—surprise!—the government is on board, too. In this week's State of the Union Address, President Obama singled out the efforts currently being undertaken by Oak Ridge National Laboratory to improve the efficiency of our existing nuclear plants.

Obama's praise of Oak Ridge was followed by the obligatory promise of breaking our nation’s longstanding dependence on foreign oil—check out this clip from The Daily Show for further [read: hilarious] contextualization. But Obama also stressed the importance of redirecting taxpayer dollars toward "tomorrow's" energy resources. This led to the other obligatory energy economy ‘shout-out’: green job creation. In this year's SOTU, President Obama set the new goal of generating 80% of America’s electricity from clean energy sources like wind, solar, and nuclear…by 2035. An ambitious challenge, sure…but building that much nuclear generation isn’t going to be easy. Nuclear may now be considered green, but it’s still expensive to build, and strong federal support is going to be vital.

There's one other big problem standing in the way of a nuclear renaissance; remember how the nuclear industry spent the past 30 years working to try and clean up their tarnished image? 

The story is simple enough: foreign companies (read: countries) are buying up American coalmines and natural gas fields. But what really struck the BTLS braintrust about this story were people’s widely differing reactions to the headline. Some immediately picked up on the sensational energy security angle, while others immediately saw an outrageous hypocrisy in the very notion of "carbon offshoring". Could the United States potentially end up right back where we started in terms of cleaning up the environment? Shouldn’t we be worried about foreign companies taking control of our limited natural resources? Why should we bother with costly carbon capture and sequestration technology if we're just going to end up letting someone else burn our coal somewhere else?

For answers we talked to BTLS host and senior braintrustee-Scientific American's David Biello. David explains that even though we see a lot of stories in the news about countries like China making great strides building clean energy technologies (like solar panels), China’s energy economy is still far from 'green'. Because China’s economy is expanding so rapidly, and because coal is still their primary resource, they need more energy (read: coal) than ever before.

While China may still have a long way to go, keep in mind—so too does the United States. According to David, coal makes up for over 70% of China’s energy mix. In the United States we’re not much better...