Progress and pitfalls in California’s clean energy quest
Due to breaking news events in Sacramento and Los Angeles over the weekend, we had to reschedule the radio rollout of Climate Watch until next week. Please listen to our two-part series on “Solar Realities” (aired on September 15 and 16, 2009 on The California Report). Listen to Part 1 of the series here, and Part 2 here. In the meantime you can explore some of the supersized solar sites already built in the Mojave and see where utilities are planning to add one that would dwarf even these.
Morning presentations covered various public health effects from climate change (mostly from air pollution) and some ideas for carbon sequestration, from the potential for low-tech wetlands storage, to the huge WestCarb pilot project, aimed at injecting surplus carbon dioxide into subterranean rock formations. Just approved by DOE is a plan to inject a million tons of CO2 over a four-year period, at a site near Bakersfield. John Henry Beyer of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab says that oil companies may be able to use the stored CO2 for “enhanced oil & gas recovery.”
Greg Rau of UC Santa Cruz cast the mandatory pall-of-the-day with a blunt assessment of the battle against global warming: “We are failing to mitigate atmospheric CO2.” Too much of growing energy demand is being met with fossil fuels, Rau explained. “We need to urgently think about this.” Most of Rau’s talk was devoted to the problem of ocean acidification, recently profiled by my colleague Lauren Sommer for Quest Radio.
One guy who’s done a lot of thinking about it is Hashem Akbari, who will take the lectern today to call upon cities around the world to move rapidly toward “cool roof” policies. Akbari, who works at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, has been a long-time advocate of using reflective roofing and paving materials to help offset the effect of “urban heat islands.” He says that replacing the roof of one typical suburban home (about 1,000 square feet) can produce a CO2 “offset” of four metric tons. He adds that replacing flat commercial roofing with white “cool” roofing or coatings can increase the solar reflectance of the roof from as low as 10% to as high as 80% (at least until it gets dirty). I interviewed Akbari for a Quest Radio piece on heat islands last year.
About 300 scientists, policymakers and resource managers turned out for the California Energy Commission’s 5th annual conference, with about twice that number watching via video webcast.
The focus for much of day one was marking the progress toward regional modeling, i.e. fine-tuning the well established global climate models to yield specific data and hence, forecasting power for local areas. Interesting findings so far include an apparent decrease in the intensity of SoCal’s Santa Ana winds, notorious for fanning wildfires in southland canyons.
Also, Robert Bornstein of San Jose State University is about to publish his study, showing a persistent cooling trend along the California coast, since the mid 1970s. According to Bornstein’s data, areas influenced by the sea breeze have actually cooled an average of 0.4 degrees C per decade over the period, a rate faster than the rest of the state has been warming. Bornstein was quick to point out that he’s not challenging the premise that California is warming as a whole. In fact, he says the coastal cooling trend is yet another weird artifact of global warming.
Stanford ecologist Terry Root dropped the first bombshell of the conference by uttering a term deplored by her ilk: species “triage.” Root says the climate pressures on California wildlife species are so dire that we will need to pick and choose which ones to save. Asked where to start, she suggested those species that provide “ecosystem services,” such as insects that assist with plant pollination. “In an emergency situation,” she said, “you ask as many questions as you can–but you have to act. We’re plodding along, doing as much as we can. It’s not fun.”
Root’s bird phenology (migration timing) studies were the subject of a story I did for The California Report. The principal interview for that report, Dena Macmynowski, was a graduate student working with Root.