380 parts per million

A driver's perspective on electric cars

2011-06-28T08:28:00.000-07:00

New York Times brought out this article on Sunday narrating the experience of an electric car from behind the wheels. A good read!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/opinion/sunday/26car.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=is%20this%20our%20future&st=cse

The Wonder Car

2011-06-27T15:57:00.000-07:00

Probably the two biggest topics in the news these days are technology companies’ IPOs and electric vehicles. While the former is out of the scope of this blog, despite their fantastic performance, I deem this a good time to write about electric cars in my post this week. The question that comes first to my mind is, where do I begin?:)

An electric car, per Wikipedia, is an automobile propelled by electric motors, using electrical energy stored in batteries or another energy storage device. Electric cars are not something new and they have been around for more than a century now. In fact, as Wikipedia has it, electric cars were preferred to gasoline cars at the dawn of the 20th century and only the rapid advancement in internal combustion engines coupled with the significant reduction in oil prices drove them out of the market. The vigor with which new models of electric vehicles are being rolled out, it seems that the time has come to right that wrong!

The most memorable push for electric vehicles in living history was during the 90s and mostly centered on California. California Air Resources Board (CARB), their emission control agency, mandated the development of zero emission vehicles which led to the development of EV1 by GM and RAV4 by Toyota. (Side note: GM swiftly, and almost shockingly, canceled their EV1 program, something that has been beautifully documented in the must-watch documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car”.) Toyota sold just about 1500 of RAV4s and cost and range limitation were cited as issues with the car.

Around the same time as RAV4, Toyota also started selling its hybrid car, the Prius. A hybrid car is one which can be powered by both gasoline and electricity. Typically, the distance such a car can be propelled by electricity is much smaller and the gas power takes over when this car is driven longer distances. The Toyota Prius uses a small, regenerative battery having a driving range of no more than a few miles. Charging of the battery is done internally by the gasoline engine and the energy generated in the car by the braking process. This car was hailed as an engineering breakthrough as it seamlessly combined the electric and gasoline fuel to propel a car. The smaller electric range in the car was just enough for the needs of the urban dweller, with enough miles to cover his/her trips to the grocery store. This is the reason why more than 2 million Priuses have been sold globally, so far.

It could be argued that the Prius used its battery power to supplement its gasoline engine. Lately, the major car companies have come up with models which have a markedly higher battery power, most prominent among them being Tesla Roadsters, GM’s Volt, Nissan’s Leaf and Toyota’s re-designed Prius. These cars have either significantly increased their mileage from electric power, like Volt and the reformed Prius, or have gone completely electric, like Leaf. The electric range of Volt is about 35 miles while the new Prius can take you upto 13-14 miles on its batteries. The all electric Leaf, on the other hand, can go about 73 miles with a single charge. The amount of power provided by a battery varies a lot with weather and driving conditions. So this number will go down if you are driving on a hot, humid day in dense traffic.

The most critical design element in these cars is the size of the battery, something whose impact cannot be undermined. Battery technology available today is really not capable of meeting the intense demands of electric transportation. The low energy density of batteries necessitates packing more volume of them to get a higher output. This greatly increased both the cost of a car, the cost of battery alone for Leaf is about $18,000 and the volume to fit the larger battery.

There has been a global push in research to drive down the cost of these batteries while also increasing their energy density. So, if you have an idea for a battery that is cheap and packs in a great energy, run straight to one of the car manufacturers! You could choose not to work for the rest of your life:)

Despite all the constraints, there is a definite tailwind behind electric cars, not only because of the generous subsidies provided by governments around the world but also because the common public is getting increasingly intrigued by the concept of charging a car like they charge their laptops or mobile phones. I knew that this topic will take up more than one blog post and I look to follow this up with more on battery technologies. I look forward to making one of you filthy rich!

Let there be light!

2011-06-13T14:24:00.000-07:00

If a survey was carried out for the most innocuous, under-rated, unassuming piece of equipment in anybody’s home, the incandescent light bulb would probably be top the list. After all, how many of us even register the presence of this ubiquitous bulb in our homes, until we get rid of it for the “cooler” and energy efficient CFL. Well, it might come as a surprise to all of you that this same old bulb is lining up to be at the center of a great battle in the near future. Find out below why exactly it should be so.

Light was not always meant to be this abundant and easy as it is today until electricity came along. Prior to electricity, light was expensive, a product of exhaustible, and expensive, resources like whale oil. Edison’s invention really made light a commodity and took it to the masses in limitless quantities. On Dec 31, 1879 he unveiled his incandescent device, which provided illumination by running a current through a filament encased in a vacuum-sealed glass bulb. The newspapers compared the orange glow of the bulb to the “mellow sunset of an Italian autumn”. Obviously, not everyone agreed. Remember that this bulb was competing against the gas flame and some found the light to be unnatural and lacking the comforting attributes of the latter.

The initial bulbs were fairly expensive as well, going for 44 cents apiece in 1891, which when adjusted for inflation becomes $10 in today’s world. However, as electricity became the backbone of lighting in the world, the price of bulbs keeps plummeting. Falling prices and the rapidly growing demand for the existing product stalled advancements in home lighting for more than a century. That the bulb was highly inefficient, giving off 90% of its energy as heat and not light, was largely ignored in the hundred years that ensued. It was not until the energy crises of 1970s that these shortcomings of the bulb came to light, pun intended, and compact fluorescents were invented.

This sets up a nice background about the current war being waged in the realm of lighting products in the US. The US Congress approved a bill in 2007, which mandated a 25-30% increase in lighting efficiency starting January of 2012. The incandescent bulb, as we know it, is not capable of being that efficient; this could very well be the end of the 150 year old invention. As the deadline for this law draws closer, the arguments get more polarized and one could see a badly waged battle on this front.

There are two issues at stake in this debate, price and quality of light. That the Edison’s bulb is dirt cheap is already acknowledged. What is often missed is the quality of light this bulb produces. Research says that the light from an incandescent bulb mimics the natural spectrum and produces light that is in best agreement with the human physiology. CFLs and other forms of lighting products are believed to produce light that is “unnatural”, to say the least and could potentially be harmful to our physiology. This is one argument that would be played several times in this debate.

The ride has not been smooth for these CFLs since their inception and any amount of subsidies or “green branding” has not made the light bulb obsolete. The price of a CFL could be the primary reason for its mild acceptance; the first CFLs sold for $25-$35 a bulb in the 1970s.

There is also active interest in using LEDs(Light Emitting Diodes) for lighting. Scientists at Phillips have put together a LED bulb that also produces light that nicely agrees with the natural spectrum. One such bulb is supposed to last anywhere between 17 and 22 years but the cost of one is an exorbitant $40. Getting this number to a price less than $10 apiece, the magic number reported for consumer acceptance, is only part of the problem. This product would also require intelligent marketing to sell a product that is supposed to last for a generation. Proponents of this technology claim that switching to LED bulbs from the traditional ones would eliminate carbon emissions by 200 million tons, about 3% of the total US carbon emissions.

The next time when you look at your bulb, if you still own one, make sure you remember the 150 year history it carries:)

Musings of an energy wonk II

2011-05-30T20:02:00.000-07:00

Okay, as promised....time to look at the external challenges that utilities will face in the coming years. These are the challenges which, as described earlier, are extraneous to the industry and the industry will have to live with it.

Fuel Price Volatility: Fuel prices, especially gas and oil, have been highly volatile since 2007 and predicting fuel prices has been a minefield. 2007 is also the year since when oil and gas prices have ceased to show any correlation between them, thus further complicating any fuel price prediction methodologies. A major reason for this change has been the exponentially rising production of shale gas.
Fuel prices affect the electric power industry in various ways. When gas was going at its peak price in 2007, there was a lot of activity in securing long term contracts with foreign natural gas producers and constructing LNG terminals in the US to import gas in order to keep domestic natural gas price in check. Since then, the realization of large resources of shale gas has pushed down gas price and rendered the LNG plans ineffective. The unrest in the Middle East and the Japanese catastrophe has again caused gas and oil prices to spike. As the global economy gets more intertwined, a small change in one place can affect fuel prices globally, making life difficult for this industry.

Access to capital: To tackle the internal challenges discussed above, the power industry would require a lot of capital investments, be it sourcing capital to set up a wind farm or getting a demand side management program going. Getting access to capital in this economic climate is not terribly easy and money is not flowing as easily as it was about 4 years ago. To add to the problem, credit ratings of utilities and independent power producers have taken a beating lately, making it even harder to source funds. The economic recovery, and the pace of it, should be keenly observed by this industry.

Carbon/Climate Change Policy: Politically, climate change seems to be a non-starter in the current Congress. However, regulations limiting emissions for both carbon and otherwise, cannot be ruled out completely. The Environment Protection Agency (EPA) has been very active in setting forth a set of regulations that would restrict emissions from the electric power industry.

These regulations, if implemented in their entirety, would necessitate installation of emission control equipment and significantly increase the cost of producing power. Or, these regulations would force several older plants into retirement because retrofitting them with emission control equipment would be uneconomic. This will bring forth reliability challenges for some areas in the country and would require further capital infusion to build new plants to cover for the shortfall. All in all, the policy space can be expected to be abuzz with activity in the near future, either through the Congress or through one of the agencies.
Emission control technology providers stand to gain if stiff regulations are enacted by the regulatory agencies. There could, potentially, be a big market for these technologies.

The electric power industry has come a long way from the days when its sole purpose used to be providing customers with affordable and reliable power. In those days, all these companies had to do was to maintain the status quo. This last decade has really added more dimensions to their mandate, in the form of providing cleaner electricity and information to the customers to better use this vital resource. Maintaining the status quo is not enough in this changed environment.

Musings of an energy wonk

2011-05-17T09:48:00.000-07:00

A long hiatus calls for a long blog. I thought long and hard, wrote long and hard and here it is: the result of all that time spent thinking:)

The American electric power industry has been in a state of flux in the last decade, ever since the sector has been opened to competition. This constantly evolving industry has interesting challenges ahead, which, broadly speaking, can be broken down into two categories: external and internal. External challenges are those that are not under the control of the industry itself. These can be further broken down into sub-categories of fuel price volatility, access to capital and climate change regulation. Internal challenges are those that are integral to the way in which this industry will evolve, both in the near and long term. These can be sub-classified into areas such as Demand Side Management and distributed generation, including incorporation of electric vehicles, and Low Carbon Technology Integration.

Let’s take a few minutes to look at each challenge in greater detail, starting with the internal challenges in the first section.

1.1 Carbon Footprint Reduction: There has been a general trend towards decarbonizing the electric grid, which has been independent of the political opinion on Climate Change. The sector has been reducing its carbon footprint primarily through standards and subsidies for renewable power. The energy sources mainly benefiting from this movement include solar, wind, biomass/biofuel and potentially carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), each having its own unique selling point.
Solar and wind are front runners in this race owing to their practically zero fuel cost, both abundantly supplied by nature. The importance of this largesse cannot be overemphasized when we look at the trajectory of fossil fuel prices in the last few years. However, the unpredictability of these technologies poses planning issues for system operators, an issue most pronounced with wind power. Although leading the pack of low-carbon technology by the way of total installed capacity, equaling 40 GW and growing rapidly, wind cannot be counted upon when you might need it the most. Wind does not blow during the peak hours on hot summer days. Even on normal days, predicting wind patterns could be more complicated than rocket science, making resource planning for system operators a major headache. These technologies are also hobbled by their extremely low efficiency of electricity production.
Biomass makes for an interesting resource for the electricity sector due to the fact that it consumes carbon dioxide to grow. Thus any process of electricity generation through biomass can be designed to be carbon negative, taking in more carbon than it emits, or carbon neutral, taking in as much carbon as it emits. Despite the initial hiccups with integrating biomass energy into the system, there are all the indications that this resource could play a bigger role in the future.
The fate of CCS hangs in the balance. While there is a general consensus that the power sector would need some form of a technology that can capture carbon emissions from coal plants, the prohibitively high cost of CCS has made utilities dither until now. While reducing this cost would definitely help, having a carbon price through a tax or cap and trade would give a massive boost to the feasibility of CCS. Utilities and other players in the power industry would want to be informed of developments in this space.
This area is a hotbed for technology providers, in every shape and form. The push for more renewables through the renewable energy standards will keep demand for wind turbines and solar generation technologies high, in the foreseeable future. There would also be demand for niche solvent manufacturers who can provide chemicals that not only capture a higher percentage of carbon dioxide emissions from coal power plants but also get easily separated from that captured carbon dioxide.
1.2 Demand Side Management: The running joke in the power sector is that if Thomas Edison came back to life today, he would instantly recognize the current electric grid for it’s too similar to the one he had envisioned. There has been a steady movement for the past few years to modernize the grid and make it “smarter”. The obvious place to start is to make the grid a two-way street for information, which would not only keep consumers better informed about their usage and electricity price at different times but also help utilities track and correct faults in the system in a very timely fashion.
A “smart” grid would give better price signals to consumers, having peak hour prices rising steeply compared to the off-peak hours. The hope with all this is that consumers can shift their activities around to shave off the peak demand. A significant reduction in peak demand can obviate the need to build new power plants for reliability purposes, an activity which is not favored in this tight economic climate. We could end up seeing a new business model for utilities and power producers, one in which these companies encourage their consumers to use less of their product but make up the loss by charging higher for the electricity they provide.
The final aim of any smart grid, or the proverbial “smartest” grid, would not only be a two-way street for information but also for electricity. It would enable customers to generate power of their own, through rooftop solar PV or any other distributed generation technology, and allow the grid to feed in power from the other end. Another important technology in the distributed generation space is energy storage, and the role of batteries in storage. This would, however, be a long term vision for the grid, one that would entail that all preceding pieces fall into place.
Somewhere in this spectrum ranging from a smart grid to the smartest grid lays a grid that can enable electrification of the transportation sector. With the advent of electric cars, load on the power sector is bound to rise steeply. This industry would be ill-advised to allow electric car owners to charge their cars at the same flat rate that they charge the households, calling for a differential pricing mechanism. Still, electrification of this sector is a massive opportunity for the power industry. The advent of air conditioning was hailed as the transformational event for the electric power sector in the 20th century. There are enough signs to show that electric cars could very well have the same impact for the power industry in the 21st century.
While the current grid would need to be improved to make it smarter, it would also need to be expanded. There is a lot of activity underway in building transmission lines not only to bring electricity to more places but also to relieve congestion in places with high power prices.
This is another area of extreme importance for technology providers. The enhancements needed for the current grid to become a smart one necessitate installation of a lot of communication and monitoring equipment. This partly explains why all the major high-tech companies like IBM, Siemens and Cisco are so bullish about the smart grid. These companies have got the experience in the telecommunication business and can leverage this expertise to make the electric grid “talk”.

Actually, I had a lot of time to write and write and write. You may not have the time to read all of that in one go. So, lets look at the external issues with this industry next week. Stay tuned:)

Endorsement from President Obama!

2011-02-24T09:59:00.000-08:00

What better endorsement on one’s thoughts than that from the President of United States of America! Obama announced his 2012 budget last week, close on the heels of my post on Small Modular Reactors (SMR) and he allocated $853 million dollars for research on SMR in 2012. I always knew Obama is smart enough to know where to get his energy information from:)

More on his budget today, for this is not your average-Joe government budgets but one that signals a clear move towards a clean energy revolution in the United States. The administration has sanctioned about $29.5 billion for 2012 for the Department of Energy, an increase in spending of about 4.2% in a climate where spending on defense has been slashed! About $8 billion of it has been siphoned to clean energy research, specifically wind, solar and advanced batteries. This is in addition to the $36 billion that the White House has asked in loan guarantees for the construction of new Nuclear plants in the US. Nuclear seems to be surely ensconced in this administration’s energy plans much as hydrogen energy was President Bush’s blue eyed boy! Now some people might give me credit for that, for I firmly endorsed Nuclear in all my posts. You know I am not one for taking credits:)

Oh, hydrogen energy! How often do you see a technology go through the cycle of boom and bust in terms of government support, within a decade! From being touted as the next big thing in energy under Bush to being completely stripped of all federal funding under Obama, this technology has seen a lot. I still feel eliminating all funding for hydrogen is a bit harsh. The viability of our fuel cell technologies depend to some extent on such government research funding for hydrogen. That is a topic for another day!

There are other positive tidbits from the budget, like increasing the budget of the government’s venture arm, Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA_E) to $550 million after the excellent work it has done to promote energy entrepreneurship last year. The budget also proposed 3 more Energy Innovation Hubs to solve challenging problems in this area. There is also a proposal to spend $588 million on vehicle technology and a $453 million budget for Carbon Capture and Sequestration projects. The latter proposal has brought a cheer to yours truly, an erstwhile researcher in the field of CCS:)

Finally, let’s discuss the most interesting point of the budget. Obama’s budget seeks to eliminate $3.6 billion in annual subsidies to the oil, gas and coal sectors, totaling to about $46.2 billion in a decade. This is a VERY interesting decision! For long, and especially for people in the renewable energy space, we have heard arguments from the oil, gas and coal lobbies, let’s collectively call them black energy, that renewables are not affordable and the price parity with of green energy and black energy shall never be reached. These aficionados of black energy would conveniently keep mum about the invisible subsidies provided to them by all governments around the world and cry foul whenever a subsidy is announced for green energy. We will be close to talking on a level-playing field with this proposal, by every sense of the word.

The reality is that this budget is too polarized and looks to break too many bastions to even pass the legislative process in the US. The firmly entrenched black energy lobby groups are already out to nip these budget proposals in the bud. Still, the “green” among us can bask in the realization that the most powerful man on earth, as of now, has his priorities right. However fleeting this realization will end up being, it is comforting to see that Obama has followed his talk, of producing 80% electricity here from renewable sources, with matching proposals. Only if Washington, DC could agree!

On a separate note, there is a personal goal for me here. Now that I have Obama in my list of blog followers, I will look to proselytize more world leaders, one at a time. That’s one goal worth striving for and all of you will make this happen:)

Good things come in small packets

2011-02-13T14:49:00.000-08:00

Economy of scale. I love this phrase, bandied about by my economist friends as if there is no tomorrow. And the industrial age, the 19th and 20th century, has been a testament to the beauty of this phrase. Mankind figured that the bigger systems we build, the more efficient they are and the more we can harvest them. Eureka!

Nuclear power must have been one of the darlings of our economist friends, for no other system epitomizes enhanced efficiencies, from enhanced size, than nuclear. Thus, we ended up with behemoths, 1000 MW capacity units, and clubbed 2-4 of such units at one location. All of a sudden we had about 4000 MW of generation capacity to hook up with demand.

As with many 20th century legacies in the 21st century, the concept of economy of scale has also taken a beating. We have realized a whole new love for smaller, manageable things. Remember, too big to fail:) This exciting new paradigm has affected the thought around Nuclear power too and there is a movement towards making smaller, modular nuclear reactors. Reactors which can be placed in each township and managed directly by the people it serves. This not only obviates the need for intricate transmission networks to get this large amount power from God-forsaken places to civilization but also creates something that has never been thought before.

You might be amazed at the concept of a small, modular nuclear reactor in your township. And rightly so. Some of my readers would question, didn’t the Three Mile and Chernobyl nuclear disasters push these dangerous systems away from humanity’s faintest reach, for good? How on earth can we talk of getting them in the midst of townships this time? Fair questions and bear with me for a few more paragraphs for their answers.

One of the major impediments of large-scale installation of nuclear energy has been the enormous cost of financing such a plant. The total cost of starting a conventional nuclear plant is about $10 billion these days, an amount which is not easy to finance without huge government subsidies and other incentives. Small Modular Reactors(SMR), in the works, have capacities in the range of 25-125 MW, a fraction of the conventional designs. This also brings down the installation cost to a few hundred million dollars, which tremendously increases the affordability of such a reactor. The smaller size also reduces the amount of construction material that goes into a safe design, for the risks are much lower with a much smaller quantity of nuclear fuel being used. So much so that initial reports say that the amount of fuel in such a reactor is of no use for weapon grade application. SAFE!

Refueling of nuclear reactors is a process that takes up months and is not a plant operator’s delight. The technology of SMR can make such a reactor go for as much as 30-60 years without refueling. The operators will love this idea, no doubt about it!

All things said and done, it is not that easy to go about planting these reactos. As with every human being, technologies have a cycle of Karma too, and nuclear has not served its Karma well by those famous accidents mentioned in the beginning of this post. A proliferation of such reactors will cause many people to balk at the idea. There will be major delays in their sanctioning by regulatory commissions, which are not adept at handling such a technological shift. Nuclear waste is always a sensitive issue and this concept is not untouched by it. In fact, a number of smaller nuclear reactors will only compound the problem of distributed nuclear waste and ways of disposing it.

However, there are many examples currently to suggest that there is movement in a favorable direction. Several cities, for example the towns of Galena and Fairbanks in Alaska and many island cities, are going ahead with the installation of SMRs. Just keep an eye on this exciting technology in the distributed generation space.

It is exciting to watch how the concept of economies of scale has been turned on its head lately. We have figured that it’s better to work with smaller systems. In fact, this calls for a new phrase, which could be of the order of “Economies of De-Scale!”

Remember, you heard it here first:) 21st century will show us numerous situations where Economies of De-Scale will trump economies of scale.

Let’s not jettison the concept totally. There will always be instances where we cannot do away with scale. And one such instance is the number of followers I have on my blog:) The more followers I have, the more motivation I shall have to write and greater the efficiency of my blog. This economy of scale will always hold true:)

Husk Power Systems: Innovation for the poor

2011-02-06T14:46:00.000-08:00

If the last week’s post was bordering on science fiction type of innovation, with the NASA ring to it, this week we shall look at one which leverages existing technologies to affect the lives of millions. That would lie at the other end of the innovation-impact spectrum. We shall look at a small, but vigorously growing and infinitely exciting, company called Husk Power Systems (HPS).

Social enterprise and social responsibility initiatives have a vey noble picture attached to them. However, where most of these initiatives fail is that the blueprints are designed in air-conditioned halls and well equipped research labs, which cannot hope to mimic the actual conditions. Hence, such initiatives fail to take flight, having lost the battle in the initial designs conditions itself. One of the biggest, and most prolific, disasters is the path-breaking village stove, or ‘chulha’, made by the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) of a major oil giant, whom I shall not aim here The “stove” was supposed to ease the lives of village folks by ridding them from the wood burning stoves, which were a major cause of environmental pollution and health hazards. However, the essential working of the “stove” consisted of a fan which required electric power to operate! In villages!! While most of the distinguished people in the team that designed the “stove” were fixated on the efficiency of it, they missed the most basic design flaw. That villages don’t have power! Thus, this product of a major social initiative ended up being a space-guzzling furniture in an already space-crunched village household.

Husk Power Systems treaded this path rather dexterously, by designing a product in a local setting, for the local people. And the region we are looking at is the state of Bihar, the state that sports the dichotomy of being the second fastest growing state in India, while being the poorest at the same time. Power in Bihar is much more than a luxury, it still has the science-fiction feel in most parts of the state. 85% of people in Bihar have no grid-connected electricity, a shocking statistic that takes time to settle on you. This is one more reason why we need to move beyond the grid, depending on the situation. This supply-demand chasm cannot be hoped to be covered by the conventional electric grid. The astute founders of this company saw that there are two running motifs in Bihar, lack of electricity and abundance of agricultural waste. It did not take long for their sharp minds to conjure a plan to connect the two, and come up with a biomass-driven electric plant. Their technology generates electricity from rise husk and the cost of the power is cheaper than the cheapest form of electricity available, as claimed by their website. And you can start to see an angelic halo around this initiative when I tell you that HPS has managed to replace 42,000 liters of kerosene and 18,000 liters of diesel per year in regions which depended on their diesel gen-sets for basic functions. And hold your breath, biomass electricity is carbon neutral too. So they are not adding to the carbon in the atmosphere, ideally speaking!

That they have gone from their first installation in 2007 to 60 such small-scale plants in 250 villages, serving 25,000 households, in 2010 is a testament to the solidity of their local engineering method. They saw that farmers in the area already used a dual-fuel system that could handle a fuel mix of biomass and diesel. The real challenge was replacing a dual fuel mix with just the biomass fuel because the amount of dirt in biomass clogged the engines producing electricity. HPS has made a fix that makes such an operation possible and is leading to a heady phase of growth. A business plan on this idea won almost all the business plan competition at the US B-schools and brought in more than the required funding for the scale-up. And now for the killer punch, the company also runs schools that train local people to run these systems, install them, own them and make a healthy sum out of them. They plan to create over 7,000 local jobs in the community by 2014. I am running out of adjectives to describe this initiative, and I hope this company achieves what they set out to achieve. Anything less than that will be a letdown for this story almost seems like a fairytale.

Oh, did I tell you that one of the founders of this company left a successful life in the US to start HPS. I think I should stop here lest you start thinking of this as a Bollywood movie script:) At the end of it all, I will indulge myself a little by saying:

Jai Bihar:)

Please check out the company’s website at http://huskpowersystems.com/index.php

Bloom Energy

2011-01-29T11:45:00.000-08:00

Last week we broached the topic of distributed generation, of unleashing an energy democracy of unimagined proportions. Let take the next step in this dream, of looking at a few players in this space. The company we shall be discussing today is Bloom Energy.

Bloom Energy is one of the hottest cleantech startup currently, having been valued at over a billion dollars and having backers as powerful as Kleiner Perkins, Google and Amazon, to name a few. More than the strong credentials of the backers and the Solid Oxide fuel cell technology, the most exciting aspect of Bloom Energy is the concept it envisages. That concept draws me to the firm.

Bloom Energy manufactures Bloom Boxes, which are containers the size of a single car’s parking space and provide a power of 100kW. This power is sufficient to light up 100 average homes, or a small office building. The technology driving this power generation is a solid oxide fuel cell, which is a stack of ceramic plates coated with zirconium oxide, found in beach sand. The fuel cell converts natural gas to electricity and is a very clean source of electricity. The reaction is carried out at 800 degree Celcius, which means very high efficiencies but also increased engineering challenges. The bloom boxes can be stored in your basement and can provide clean, reliable power which is right in your backyard and not exposed to the transmission and distribution red tape.

This is why a lot of business are “blooming” with the possibilities of bloom boxes, most notable being Google, ebay and Adobe, which are all looking to use bloom energy for their data centers. The cost of a bloom box is in the vicinity of $750,000 and the cost of electricity that one gets from this box, including its capital cost is 14 cents/kWh. The average cost of commercial electricity from conventional sources is 10 cents/kWh in some regions in the US. California, where the company is headquartered, is a big blooming ground for this company, pun intended, purely because the power prices in California are one of the highest in the world. The bloom boxes are liberating these electricity guzzling data centers from the shackles of grid electricity and at a reasonable cost.

As with everything in life, there are two sides to the Bloom story as well. Bloom boxes are heavily subsidized at the moment, with about 20% subsidy provided by the state of California and another good chunk coming from Federal subsidies. Hence, the proliferation is California and absolutely no growth outside. The boxes are also deemed too costly, which increases the cost of electricity. To tackle this issue, Bloom Energy has started offering just the electricity as a service, cutely labeled as Bloom Electrons. So you just sign a contract with them for electricity and you don’t need to buy the box anymore. This should ease the price significantly. Also, the low cost of natural gas should reduce the price even further.

In a nutshell, this company is doing something that is very radical with a technology that was considered very radical. The distribution generation aspect of this company is riveting and merits a serious look.

Back in 2005, I had decided that my final year thesis at IIT would be on Solid Oxide fuel cells. It didn’t take me long, with my brilliant reasoning, to figure out that the problems associated with this technology would not carry it beyond the confines of a lab. Swiftly, I changed my topic to studying catalysis instead. One BIG missed opportunity, some would say. To which I say, I have stopped counting missed opportunities:)

Energy Democracy

2011-01-23T19:17:00.000-08:00

Long weekends spent indoors get you thinking about stuff. Especially when it is -30 degree Celsius outside; all you can do is drink a cup of tea and think.

So I thought. And what better topic to mull over than the electricity grid system! It has been well documented that in many ways the current electric grid resembles the rigidity of landline telephones. The advent of cell phones has revolutionized the telecom sector in more ways than can be described here. This impact has been even more dramatic when you look at the revolution, mildly put, in the developing world. Individual people have been empowered to customize the cell phone to suit their needs and there ARE more than 6 billion needs in the world. What a distance we have come from those days of privileged landline connections to now when having a cell phone comes along with having a name!

The similarities between this and our wonderful grid are striking. Power is produced at a remote location, wires transfer electricity over long distances and bring it to our homes. More than anything else, the most disturbing fact is that electric cables still divide the world into haves and have-nots the same way telephone wires did about 2 decades ago. Electricity is still considered a luxury in most parts of the world, the enviable status telephones had back then. This is not just morally wrong, in a world which has more than 500 million facebook users, but technically inefficient as well!

Electricity generation, at a conventional power plant, is a very inefficient process. For every 100 units of energy that is fed into a plant, 62 units are lost in plant inefficiencies. The remaining 38 units are then sent across the transmission lines which ensure a loss of another 2 units. Of the 36 units entering our homes, 2 units are used to light a typical incandescent bulb and 34 units are lost in heating of the filament used in the bulb. Overall, the efficiency of this process is 2%. This efficiency is criminal in a world, again, inhabited by 500 million facebook users. Facebook has really provided us with a nice sense of perspective to drive any point home:)

It’s about time a cellular phone should appear and break this ossified system of generation and transmission. And I’ve got two words for you: distributed and generation! Distributed generation breaks the monopoly of the big power companies and utilities by placing many different sources of power. Think solar power, the solar panel on your roof could make you self sufficient in electricity and you can break the shackles of the power plants, electric suppliers and electric wires. Obviously, this does not mean putting a tiny coal fired plant in your house; there are some fuels for which economies of scale still make sense. My contention is that we need a mixed approach of power generation from now on: distributed generation for some fuels and centralized ones for other. Solar power is a classic case of the former, and a few more notable examples come to my mind:

-Generating localized power from biomass
-Bloom energy, one of the hottest energy start ups selling fuel cell boxes
-Small Nuclear, a miniscule reactor for a locality(surprise, surprise!!)

I intend to cover each one of them in m y subsequent posts and, hopefully, engage you in a dialogue that can shape the way we view electricity. As solar is already extensively covered I will start with the remaining items in the list above.

History has it that electricity was not always meant to be produced in this centralized fashion. Thomas Edison, arguably the father of electricity, started with DC generation, in which the power sources were placed in vicinity of the people consuming them. It was later that his protégé, Nikola Tesla, developed AC generation. Economies of scale of large, centralized generation and a desire to move these ogreish, polluting sources away from mankind made AC the technology of choice. It’s time to take a cue from the father of electricity!

Let a billion reactors bloom!

India's National Solar Mission

2011-01-21T20:45:00.000-08:00

They say new year resolutions are meant to be broken. I say, who are 'they'?:)

Before moving ahead, let's recap what was discussed in the previous post for these are connected. The last post broached the role of government policies in encouraging a new technology, with particular focus on the Indian Government's massive solar ambition, a plan they are investing close to 20 billion dollars in. The target is for India to have a total installed capacity of 20 GW (GigaWatt, equal to a billion watts) by 2020, a 100 fold increase in solar capacity in a decade. To put this number in perspective, this is equal to the power requirement of 200 million 100 watt electric bulb, the omnipresent unit of everyday home. If we replace the incandescent bulb with the new compact fluorescent lamp (CFL), which uses about 20 watts of average, you can do the math to figure out that this installed solar capacity can light up 1 billion CFLs. That amounts to almost 1 lit CFL per Indian, or about 4 lit CFLs per household, if I assume that the number of people per household is 4 in India. It would be kosher to add a caveat that all these calculations are theoretical in nature for the installed capacity of 20 GW does not translate to a total power production of the same amount. That discussion is beyond the scope of this post.

The plan target also includes setting up a solar manufacturing capability of 4-5 GW by 2017. Of the 20 GW of installed solar power, off-grid applications shall amount to the tune of 2 GW by 2020, and roof-top solar capacity shall sum up to 3 GW by the same yar. Off-grid applications denote the applications for which we need not draw power from the electric grid, say for example if you are not charging your cell phones, batteries, laptops, etc. by plugging the plug in your home's socket you are using off-grid power. If the charging is being done with the energy generated form solar panels installed on your roof, that comes under the purview of rooftop solar and will be encouraged by the government.

If we look at the historical development of solar power in India, we will find the main driver has been the highly unreliable, at best, and completely absent, at worst, nature of electric power in India. 40% of India lives without access to grid electricity. Over 15% of the villages in India are still not electrified, which is the first step. How many electrified villages receive power is a topic for another day:)

In the absence of reliable, or any, power, people had taken to diesel generators, which are about 7 times the cost of power provided by the grid. Solar energy fit the bill for those bravehearts who wanted a cheap and reliable source. The total installed capacity of solar energy in India is around 200 MW currently.

Solar projects will be doles out in auctions phased over the next 10 years and the first such auction was held only last month. This was a much awaited event in the global renewable industry, as is expected by the sheer size of the plan. A total of 620 MW of solar capacity has been sanctioned by the government, which is about 3% of the total target. The auction was a major success, purely by the number of companies bidding in it. However, the prices at which companies won projects were too low, which might affect the sustainability of these projects. One general theme among the winners was the obvious lack of experience of more than a few of them in the energy industry, the list includes a woolen yarn maker and an industrial pipe supplier. We will have to wait and see their capacility in uncharted waters.

One major outcome of this auction was the obvious concentration of projects in the Indian state of Rajasthan. While it could be expected, given the solar irradiance of that state, other state governments might feel left out of this massive subsidy. One such state, none other than Gujarat, has already acted in this regard by having their own state's solar plan. If the national plan has auctioned off 620 MW of solar capacity, Gujarat alone has sanctioned about 1300 MW of solar plants and plans to have another 1700 MW in the next 4 years.

Well, if there is one key takeaway amidst all the numbers thrown in this post, it is that you will see a lot of excitement and activity around solar power in India. I am feverishly excited about the rollout of this plan. Given a choice, I would fast forward 10 years of my life and see where it stands in 2021.

On second thoughts, maybe not:) Oh, and the other key takeaway, the next time you crib about excessive heat in Delhi, you might want to turn around and install solar panels on your roof. Look at the glass half full! Now, who can argue against that:)

A sunny start!

2011-01-08T20:14:00.000-08:00

Any new year starts with a host of resolutions and 2011 has been no different for me. Foremost among them is my resolution to be more active with my blogging this year. When the energy world is agog with such frenetic activity, it's almost criminal for an enthusiastic reporter like me to shut the shop as frequently as I do. Clarion call: time for action!

There can be no topic more fitting for a blog in this biting cold, snowy night than the topic of the sun. Oh, just the thought of the sun brings a smile:) The area of solar energy has been hogging the limelight a lot lately and deserves a discussion.

Solar energy has for long been the holy grail of scientists and researchers around the globe. Historically, solar energy has been harnessed by mankind in a range of ways, from orienting architectural designs to the position of the sun to installing solar panels on NASA space missions. Active use of solar power in our day to day life is a very recent phenomenon, and an area of avid interest. The biggest challenge in the mass deployment of solar energy for electricity production is its massive cost of generation. The cost of producing electricity from solar is about one order of magnitude higher than from conventional sources.

Deployment of solar power is mostly a byproduct of goverment policies around the world. Many countries have taken the leap of faith on solar; Germany, Spain, US being the forerunners, but the two most exciting solar deployment plans come from the two most exciting developing countries: India and China. India, in 2009, announced an audacious plan to aim for a solar installed capacity of 20 GW in a decade, from about 200 MW right now. That's a 100 fold jump in the installed capacity in a decade. Off-grid applications have a target of 2 GW by 2020 and rooftop solar will have to meet a stiff target of 3 GW in the same time frame. Not just this, solar manufacturing is one area of prime importance in this plan: it is aimed to jump from a meagre 700 MW capapcity currently to about 4-5 GW in a decade. Using a slew of incentives, including tax breaks, no import duties etc, the government plans to increase the manufacturing base by 2 orders of magnitude in a decade! I don't remember the last time India was so bullish on manufacturing something!

Now, before the familiar high sounding talk by the Indian government forces you to have a hearty laugh at its audacity and switch off, consider this: according to estimates, 19-20 billion USD has been committed in government subsidies to make this plan a success. That is something! The first set of auctions were held 3 weeks ago and about 620 MW of solar plants have been sanctioned, 150 MW of solar PV and 470 MW of solar thermal. Looking good so far, right!

That India should be a prime location for harnessing solar power should be rather commonsense, given that about 5000 trillion kWh of solar energy is incident on India per year, these targets are taking this commonsense to a whole new level.

I could ramble on about the merits and demerits of India's plan and the way the first auction panned out but I will save all that for subsequent posts. Afterall, who doesn't like to keep talking about warm, benevolent things:)

Hope to see you more often in 2011!:)

Time to get FIT?

2010-08-29T13:51:00.000-07:00

This is indeed a time to get fitter for me, but since when did I start talking about my personal stuff in this space.

So, here it is. FIT, Feed-In Tariffs, are the darling of European clean energy strategy. While the US has been gung-ho about the Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) and Cap and Trade, primarily because of their success with their Acid Rain program, EU has scored tremendous success with FIT. So what is FIT and what makes it tick when Cap and Trade and RPS seem to losing out so far.

A well designed FIT program includes some of the following attributes:
- Guaranteed grid access to renewable energy producers of all size
- Long term contracts for purchases of energy produced;typical contract may be of 15-20 years
- Renewable energy priced at a set premium to encourage initial investment, based on cost generation plus a reasonable profit. The tariff usually declines periodically at a set rate
- Feed in cost is distributed through electricity pricing
- There is no cap on the amount of power generated through different renewable sources
- The tariffs are technology dependent. So they vary for solar, wind, biomass etc.

A cursory reading of the provisions above brings out a set of positives for this policy tool. First that it is independent of the size of the power generator. Usually RPS hinders the participation of small players as only the large players can have the deep pockets to take the risks associated and still make a profit. This FIT will pay at a fixed price, no matter what the size of generation. Also, each generator is assured of access to the grid. A major plus, I would say.

The second factor in favor of FIT is that it fixes a price for the technology and does that long term. Hence, the project developers can plan their assignments and be assured of a fixed stream of revenue. This, I believe, is a major plus for FIT for we have seen numerous cases where the prices governed by Cap and Trade or RPS are not sufficient to promote project development.

I am not trying to promote FIT here. Obviously, it has its own shortcomings. Who fixes the price for different technology could be a major bone of contention. How is the decline rate for prices set? What will the time period of decline be? These are all some issues about FIT. However, one on one this scheme has been more successful than Cap and Trade, as shown by a few countries in Europe, viz. Germany. The growth of renewable capacity in those countries have been tempered lately by the financial bungling seen in Germany and Spain. The power prices set by the government were so lucrative that all solar development happened in these countries and also played its role in bringing about the financial crisis.

So, the ball is in your court. FIT or RPS or Cap and Trade or Command and Control. To be or not to be....:)

Update on the smart grid post

2010-08-29T11:46:00.000-07:00

There is a study done on Smart Grids by US Association of Energy Economics, which gave some interesting insights about the Smart Grid deployment. The report claimed huge benefits of implementing the smart grid infrastructure, something to the order of $20-$30 billions in the next 2 decades, if my memory serves me right. Its one humongous number, anyway. The major point of the report was that just implementing the smart meter will serve us no good. That the smart meters, by themselves, are really dumb meters. Touche!

But its an interesting point! The whole idea of the smart grid, or the smart part of it anyway, is the two way street of communication. Of enabling the user to decipher his/her electric bill and make those changes to reduce consumption. A smart meter that just stands at a home and spits out a electric consumption number periodically does no good. The consumers have to be educated on their consumption patters, on the best way of reducing that. Some IT companies, guess what Google and Microsoft, have the relevant power meter softwares that helps you decipher the maze for you. It will be interesting to watch this space.

Food for thought!

2010-08-15T07:44:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/science/earth/15climate.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=in%20weather%20chaos&st=cse

Something to think about, this Independence Day!

Ask not what the grid can do for you...

2010-06-15T13:58:00.000-07:00

...ask what you can do for the grid! I wish Kennedy is not turning in his grave at the liberty I took with his famous remark. Nothing encompasses the feeling about smart grids better than this statement though. Now, discussing smart grids is like talking about climate change itself, there are ten thousand different facets of it. I may just skim the surface of this topic here.

The grid is the complex network of power generation, transmission and distribution units that deliver reliable, affordable and efficient power to your homes. When you flip the switch at your homes and the electric appliance goes on, you have no clue as to the complexity that has gone into the working of the appliance! The National Academy of Engineering was entrusted with the task of finding out the single most important engineering innovation of the 20th century and electrification, enabled by the electricity grid, came out on top. To give you a flavor of what this means, internet was ranked 13th. And you thought that your iPhone was the best thing to have happened to you since sliced bread:)

However, the grid has remained a 20th century marvel. It is so the last generation, a dumb system that transports power from point A to B, in the same way, every second of its existence! Life has evolved so much that even machines are supposed to get bored performing the same task day in and day out! They also have a life!

In fact, there is a running joke in the power generation sector, which goes like this. If Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were to come back to life today, they would have very different reactions. Bell would be at a loss to understand the iPhones and the BlackBerrys while Edison would instantly understand the entire electric systems! For it has hardly changed in design, only gotten bigger! The R&D in this sector is less than 2% of the revenue, a figure lower than the stone, clay and glass industries. There is an urgent need to take this white elephant into the 21st century. We owe this to Edison, if nothing else!

Smart grids are the answer to this conundrum. Move over, the boring behemoths and make way for the lean, mean, efficient machine! The power of smart grids is the flexibility that they provide. It provides consumers to consume electricity more efficiently and provides utilities with the ability to detect problems on their systems and solve them more efficiently. Smart Grids are the democracy agents in power generation systems, they provide the consumer with the power to decide their consumption pattern. Smart grid systems would give real time information to the users about the cost of electricity, their consumption behavior and how much they would be paying for electricity in that unit of time. This would also help people plan their daily tasks better, so that you can make your heavy electric usage sync with the lowest cost. The utility companies will not have to depend on some distressed user to detect a problem on the system, the smartness of the grid will come to the rescue.

As there are positives and negatives to every idea, so it is with smart grids too. Firstly, they are designed for those places where electricity prices are market driven. When you have a flat price profile, the information provided by the grid would not help much. Then, there is the problem of privacy intertwined with smart grids, bringing back memories of the Orwellian "Big Brother". The smart grids provide utility companies with the power to detect which households are running unnecessary devices when the electric load is at its peak and shut it off at their discretion. So, the 'invisible hand' can turn off your AC during the peak summer days. Most people are not comfortable with outsourcing some of these decisions to some outside authority. There have been some studies which show that people, in anticipation of such an extreme step, would keep their air conditioning on forever, lest they might be shut off at any point of time. This would be severely counterproductive to the basic idea.

There are some unresolved issues with smart grids and some of the best minds are working on it. As the most comprehensive picture of these systems gives us a pause, one implementation strategy would be to start off with smart meters. These meters give us a dynamic profile of our electric usage and could be urgently required. Some parts of the world, like west coast in the US and Europe, have gone ahead with its implementation and are seeing the benefits of it. They seem to be 'smart', so far:)

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly!

2010-05-31T14:33:00.000-07:00

Hello, again, to my favorite people! Your most trusted source of energy information is back, after a hiatus:) Any further discussion on anything remotely connected to energy has to talk about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. What a month this last one has been!

The Good: Fossil fuels are the best source of energy known to mankind. The energy density of these fuels per unit of price is unparalleled; the power delivered to your gas tank at a gas station is around 10 MW, a hopelessly high number. We have become irreparably dependent on oil, gas and coal over the last century. Most of these natural resources are dispersed in the natural systems and need to be taken out.

The Bad: Finding and extracting these natural resources is a process fraught with danger, as we have increasingly found out in the recent times. These operations are very resource intensive as well and take a heavy toll on the ecosystems of the region. Despite this, 87% of our energy needs are being met by these fossil fuels.

The Ugly: The recent memory serves me two painful accidents. Coal mine disasters are as commonplace as peanut butter and the recent US accident was another scary reminder of what could be the downside of plundering with disdain. The event that takes spotlight has to be the BP Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico. It has been a grand spectacle of insatiable greed for such resources, unbelievable regulatory and operational negligence, technical impotence despite the best resources and an ecological heartache.

Now for some background of this case, which most of you would be sick of by now. I will repeat the obvious anyway, so please bear with me. Deepwater Horizon, the flagship Transocean oil exploration rig exploded in an accident off the Gulf Coast in the US on the 20th of April. The blast was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that escaped from the oil well and shot up the drill column. The gas expanded quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding. The explosion was so powerful as to take down one of the largest oil rigs in the world in a day. Deepwater Horizon has been credited with drilling the deepest oil well in the world. The excellent testimonies that I had heard from the BP executives who visited MIT campus is still fresh in my mind. In short, the rig was supposed to be a technical marvel in the oil industry. This was a BIG incident.

The oil well has been spewing about 12,000 to 19,000 barrels per day of oil into the ocean by the most recent estimate, totaling to anywhere between 18 to 28 million gallons in the last 5 weeks. This is by far the biggest oil spill in the history of United States. So much so that Exxon, the villain in the Valdez spill 21 years ago, seems like an angel these days. Oh, BP!

What has followed is heart rendering! The best technical experts in this land have been trying to stem the flow of oil gushing through the God-forsaken well. The techniques have exotic names but have done absolutely nothing to improve the situation. It goes a long way to show how much we really know about deep sea drilling and related safety measures. Its really scary given the size of our oil companies, such behemoths!

Its a sordid tail and one can keep writing tomes on this topic about what should have been done and what should be done. One just wishes that the flow could come to a halt and the damages done to the local people and their livelihood could be limited in any possible way! So much for Drill, Baby, Drill!

I have always strived to be an objective reporter of the developments in the energy space in this blog, trying my level best to avoid any personal predilections. However, there are certain special situations under which one is forced to vent it out, and this is one such rare moment for me. According to me, this oil spill points us to two major takeaways. First, we cannot afford to have smaller governments and less regulations. The financial crises, both in the US and EU, and the coal and oil disasters have brought home the point that we NEED a STRONG government and stronger regulations. End of discussion! What is ironic is the rant of conservatives about the inadequacies of the Obama administration in grappling with the problem.

The second, and a big personal, comment is on the urgency of a shift towards renewable resources. As we move into ever more difficult terrains, looking for that last ton of coal, that last liter of oil or that last cubic feet of gas, we expose ourselves to greater dangers. The shift towards low carbon energy alternatives is not only a demand of the climate change supporters but also a need for safer ecology. I am reminded of a oft-repeated statement here which says that the oil age will not end because of lack of oil as the stone age had not ended due to the lack of stone.

Its time to move on!

B(u)y Nuke!

2010-04-03T17:11:00.000-07:00

If there was ever a clear winner from this Climate Change debate, it has to be Nuclear Power. What a volte face for Nuclear energy in this world! A technology that was lying in the dumps, long forgotten about, mired in the security/weapons debate and any exciting news about Nuclear technologies only came from the rogue states like Iran and North Korea and the not-so-rogue, our lovely neighbor, Pakistan!

The whole debate has been turned on its head in the last year or so. It all began with the India getting the NSG clearance for building Nuclear plants using foreign technology and foreign fuel. The huge market potential in India sent foreign companies scurrying with lucrative deals. China has also stepped up the gas on Nuclear in recent years. And suddenly you see a frenzy around this much-maligned technology. President Obama never shies of talking about Nuclear in all his Climate Change speeches, Dept of Energy is undertaking a major financing freebie for Nuclear energy and the developed world also seems to be very excited again. So much so, that we have started to hear the long forgotten epithet "Nuclear Power-It will make power so cheap that it will be costly to meter!"

At this point, it would be suitable to look at the emergence on this technology in the power sector. Since the World War II and the nuclear bombing of Japan, using the N-word was a taboo! However, basic research was still on in different countries on this technology. The Oil Embargo in 1973 was the point in time when this technology came into prominence. Fearing a major challenge to their energy security, the major industrial nations in the world went about deploying Nuclear Energy for power generation with a purpose. US and France, the leaders in this area, were especially concerned about their source of energy. US was growing at a frenetic rate then, and was increasingly becoming a energy guzzler economy. The oil shock shook them out of their dependence on arguably the most volatile region in the world for their energy needs. France, on the other hand, has an interest in diversifying into an energy source for which they had the raw materials. There are no natural resources in France, when it comes to oil, coal or gas. They had uranium mines and all that pointed only in one direction: Go Nuclear! US built so much nuclear power so that 20% of their entire electricity needs came from Nuclear and France built about 55 reactors in a relatively short span of 15 years. The honeymoon period for nuclear ended with the horrifying accidents at the Three Mile Island (TMI) plant in the US and Chernobyl in Russia, then USSR. All the major countries balked at building more nuclear plants and public perception was at its lowest ebb. France, however, in a momentum that is difficult to fathom, kept at its plan unabated! I cannot still reason how were they able to do so at a time when all newly proposed plants around the world were canceled.

The things going in favor of Nuclear were its very low cost of operation and near zero emissions. The very very high cost of building the plant has always been a spoilsport, and continues to be so! However, with the climate change debate taking center stage and emission reduction being the staple diet of global negotiations, Nuclear energy has risen from the ashes like a Phoenix.

However, all is not rosy with nuclear energy. The MIT report on Future of Nuclear Power raises the issues of cost, safety, waste and proliferation as the major impediments in large scale deployment of Nuclear. I would add the issue of public perception to this list. Governments around the world will have to play this space really carefully for the images of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl and TMI never seem to fade in public memory. For Nuclear power to be back in center stage, public's fears will need be allayed.

As far as I am concerned, I am really excited about what Bill Gates talked in a TED lecture, TerraPower, which promises to use what is today's nuclear waste to produce power. That could be a game changer in this space, for it takes care of a few important hurdles for nuclear. Whatever be the case, I would urge you to read up a few keywords on nuclear power for it does feel cool to drop in a discussion on them at a networking table these days! I can guarantee you a few minutes of undivided attention of your audience:)

Climate Sensitivity and Radiative Forcing

2010-03-22T20:27:00.000-07:00

I came across these write ups on the MIT News page and thought of sharing it with the audience here. These are two simple yet effective write ups on the most convoluted concepts in Climate Change. The first one is on Climate Sensitivity:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/explained-climate-sensitivity.html

The second on Radiative Forcing. I was about to write a post on it myself, this makes my task easier:P

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/explained-radforce-0309.html

Unconventionally Optimistic!

2010-03-22T13:20:00.000-07:00

Unconventional was never more conventional! As most of you would have known by now, for hardly a day passes by without reading about 'it' in the news media, we have discovered a huge resource of gas! This gas, labeled as Unconventional Natural Gas, is basically the gas that was initially overlooked as either it was too expensive to 'collect' or the technology was not evolved enough to 'collect' it. We are referring to the three kinds of gas as ‘unconventional’, shale gas, tight gas and coal-bed methane.

Let's look at the evolution of this gas, along with what it means for geo-politics, economics and the debate on climate change. Contrary to the common perception, shale gas, as it is often referred as, is not a ‘discovery’ rather a success story of progressive technological capabilities. This gas was hitherto considered unusable as it occurred in places which could not be mined. The high prices of gas in recent years ensured that large sums of money went into finding out ways of getting this gas out in ways in which it could be used. The development of two technologies, hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling unlocked the huge potential in unconventional gas. Fracing, pronounced ‘fracking’, allows gas trapped in shale rock formations to be released by blasting with appropriate chemicals. Horizontal drilling allows the drills to penetrate the earth horizontally for hundreds or thousands of metres, where the gas is trapped.

This is a huge find and there are mind boggling predictions of the scale of this find, which some say are still conservative estimates. International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates the global find to be 921 trillion cubic metres, more than 5 times the provable conventional reserves! Unconventional becomes the new conventional.

This has led to a frenetic pace of deployment of the technology to produce more gas for the energy hungry countries. The two major shale reserves in the US, Barnett Shale in Texas and Marcellus Shale in the North Eastern US, are finds that have sent the oil and gas industry into a spin! The Barnett Shale alone accounted for 7% of the total gas production in US last year. So much so, that the US is predicted to leapfrog Russia as the largest producer of gas in the world, this year. There have also been major acquisitions and deal signing in this area; the big oil and gas firms are falling over each other to cash in the gold rush. These are the firms that were looking away as the smaller gas players invested in developing the technology!

This is a major development for the geopolitics and economics as well. Shale gas is ubiquitous, as opposed to the concentrated find of oil in the world. This means that the world need not bend over backwards to please the oil producing countries in the Middle East, arguably the most destabilized region of the world, in order to satiate their ever increasing energy needs. The IEA predicts huge finds of such gas in China and India, which will ease the pressure on these fast growing economies to secure their energy sources to fuel their growth ambitions. It also means that America might start investing their money into finding these reserves in their own land, rather than implanting democracies in far off places! The large finds will reduce the mammoth energy bill that some of these countries have to pay, compromising on some of the more important issues at home.

This is also good news on the climate change front. Gas has 50% to 70% lesser emissions than coal and any shift to using more gas in the electricity sector, owing to the glut of it, will only help the cause of reducing emissions.

However, all is not well with this gas. There are huge question marks on the environmental depredation that is caused by mining for the unconventional gas. Mining in the state of Pennsylvania has exposed some problems with water requirements of the process and any tampering with water reserves is going to cause further strain in this brewing global problem. There are also question marks placed on the prediction of this reserve, which may roil the party atmosphere. UK, under Thatcher in the 1980s, made a tactical mistake by switching their electricity generation to gas from coal, based on optimistic predictions of a find in the North Sea. The gas field soon ran out and UK was left dependent on others for more gas! So, the predictions will need to be validated time ad again!

As for common people of the world, like me, it is the perfect time grab a cup of coffee, put your feet up on the table and watch the game evolve:) It’s going to be a gripping story!

Science of Climate Change

2010-03-22T12:19:00.000-07:00

The Economist published a neat article on the science of climate change, which should be a good read for audience here. Reactions anyone?

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15719298

Quite a Study!

2010-03-13T10:10:00.000-08:00

This study has been recently published by researchers at MIT. This is quite a handful so I wanted to throw it out in the open. DOn't know what you think of studies like these:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/climate-wind-0312.html

Fueling the world, the biological way!

2010-03-12T12:25:00.000-08:00

The audience here may be aware of the whole debate on Biofuels but I would love to revisit some of the arguments here. With biofuels, you always run into the trilemma of issues regarding (1) Energy Security, (2) Environment and Biodiversity and (3) Food Security.

The world has seen many back and forth in this area ever since Brazil demonstrated its prowess with sugarcane based ethanol. US also jumped in the fray by mandating the production of corn based ethanol, on a steep production trajectory, in 2005. Very soon people realized that the policy was causing more harm than good by raising the food prices and shifting the land use patterns. So, President Bush, it was not exactly the Indian middle class which was driving up the cost of food:)

The US policy on corn based ethanol has been much maligned and looks set to be missed. However, that has not dampened the enthusiasm of the industry around this different liquid fuel. The one important thing to bear in mind is that not all fuels that are produced from biological sources are necessarily good. The handling and processing require energy and if the energy is coming from conventional sources viz. coal, oil and gas, we will very well end up with an overall energy penalty in excess of 100%. In short, we might be putting out more carbon than we would have in the business as usual case.

This life cycle analysis, also known as the well to wheel analysis is extremely important in the case where the biofuels are imported into US from developing nations. Currently, US has a tax on imported biofuels that make them uncompetitive in terms of price. So Brazil, the current darling of the world when it comes to bioethanol, is not able to openly operate in US. Say, the US was to do away with the import duty and some such developing nation is able to export here. In that case, the benefit of the emissions reduction will accrue to US while the developing nation will be slapped by excess emissions that went in producing the fuel in the first place. Hence, emission accounting will prove to be a major heartburn in the future!

The ideal path would be a mix of (a) Use the land that is abandoned from agricultural use to grow biomass (b) Use agricultural residues to produce biofuels and (c) Use innovative agricultural methods like mixed cropping, double crops and squeeze in something from Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) too!

The problem with alternative, or low-carbon, fuels are that there is no single right answer with them. No single source of energy, be it wind, solar, geothermal or even biofuels, can provide the same luxuries that the conventional fuel provided us. (On a different note, the flow of energy in a gas tank, when we fill at a gas station, is 10 MW!! Such energy flows can never be matched by any renewable fuel) Hence, the world will have to stop looking for a silver bullet but start looking for that magical mix of fuels that will optimize the energy output and reduce carbon emissions by the required amount.

Until then,be prepared for a bumpy ride! And don't forget to fasten your seat belts:P

Support for IPCC!

2010-02-28T13:24:00.000-08:00

Go IPCC!!

Yes, I am back from a hiatus. Only if I were a bit more regular with my routine!:)

Anyway, I am quite piqued with the way the IPCC has been recently mocked by people from all across the climate change divide. These have surely been unfortunate times for the scientific body. From being held as the apostle of climate science, or any science for that matter, to being the whipping boy of all, the IPCC has come a long way! To provide a bit of perspective for my beloved readers, it all started with email hacking incident where researchers at the University of East Anglia were found to be using a "trick" in the famous "hockey-stick" graph of the global surface temperatures. That was pure bad timing, for it came right before the Copenhagen summit.

Then came the disturbing revelation that the prediction of Himalayan Glaciers completely melting by 2035 was not "pure science" but "gray science"; science that was not peer reviewed. The final "news" to come from the IPCC camp is that it published some reports on Netherlands that were by the national government of that country and not scientifically ascertained.

This has caused some interesting reactions to surface. Few of the climate change enthusiasts have been very quick to distance themselves from the body and the naysayers have got another chance to drive another stake in the concept of Global Climate Change. And mind you, this is a serious one for it exposes the very source of the issue. The reaction of the news media has especially been a treat to watch! Even more when the Northeastern United States was drowned in snow a few weeks ago.

My reaction to this would be three-fold. First, IPCC. There is no denying the mammoth efforts of this committee. No one incident or "gray" science can tarnish the broad message of this committee. The committee cited more than 10,000 peer reviewed literature to come up with its 3000 pages long report. Now, the sheer volume of this effort does not deem the work to be beyond question. The fact that non-peer reviewed work was allowed to be included in this body of work confuses me, but it should not take anything away from the sheer dedication of researchers working on it. And this is not even based on the perspective I have gained by working closely with one of the lead authors of the report for close to 18 months now. I cannot even begin to question his academic integrity just because a prediction made about Himalayan Glaciers was over-ambitious.

This brings us to the bigger question: What is Science? Is anything conclusively proven by science or is it as equivocal as religion or as subjective as philosophy. After all these years, have we even got a conclusive link between smoking and lung cancer? Have we found out the right dosage for any carcinogen for it to be lethal? Science is always uncertain and has probabilities attached to it, which makes it a very poor participant in the adversarial approach in policy making followed by governments globally. It can, in certain situations, provide only the right path to move on. In this way, the IPCC can be counted as a commendable path forward. Shaky at times, but commendable nonetheless.

Second, Climate Change. Nothing we might say against IPCC or nothing that we do to mock the concept of climate change will let us wish away the problem. The earth is warming, the climate is changing and closing our eyes to it will only hasten the inevitable, not get rid of the problem. Here, I would emphasize on the difference between weather and climate again. A lot of the news presenters gushingly proclaimed the demise of climate change as a result of the severe snowstorms in this part of the world lately. That, my dear friends, is the weather part of it. The daily, seasonal or annual variation is weather. Climate is something that cannot be seen by the naked eye and can be measured only over longer time horizons. And the news here is grim! Arctic ice caps are shrinking rapidly, in 2007 they were 50% of their strength in 1979, globally, this January was the second hottest January in the history of the 130 years of surface temperature measurement and the last 10 years have made up the hottest decade ever! I so wish we were talking about the population of the fairer sex here! Sadly, we are not:)

Finally, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri! Oh, how I wish some things about IPCC were different:) I have had the (dis)pleasure of engaging him in a conversation when he came for lecture at my undergrad institution, IIT Delhi, in a different capacity. Back then, I did not find him too happy with people having points of view which did not agree with his. He came across as a rash diplomat! How I wish I had given him the feedback back then!:P After all the diplomatic bungling, the Armani clad bugger goes out and writes a sleazy novel on a climate researcher, modeled on him, who goes around the world in search of hot bodies, not hot temperatures! And to top it all, he releases the book with the fanfare typically associated with a big Bollywood release in India, bang in the middle of all this controversy! WTF!!

In a nutshell, the Armani suits aside, we still trust the IPCC broadly, don't we?:)

Prelude to Copenhagen

2009-12-05T13:14:00.000-08:00

It's only fitting that there is a post on the weekend that gives way to the Copenhagen summit! And hold your breath, for this is the moment you were waiting for your whole life! You shall be left mesmerized by the coordinated global action on this overarching global problem!

Well, who are we kidding here! You can use your breath for other things currently for nothing spectacular is expected out of this political jamboree. And I always counted myself amongst the die-hard optimists!

Keeping with the expected tone of heated discussions at Copenhagen, some of which might question the legitimacy of the climate science, I shall talk today about something that might keep the climate skeptics awake at night:) Oh, I can see them getting all red with the anticipation of going for the kill this year! This one's for you, you Doubting Thomases!

The latest salvo against climate change comes from the most unexpected quarters, the Sun! Never knew that even the celestial powers were scheming against any consensus on climate science:) The phenomenon in question here is Sunspots. I will add a caveat here that people have spent their lives researching on this topic and I am nowhere close to being even a passive observer. So please take my post with a grain of salt, but I would be thrilled if somebody could improve my perspective on this issue.

Sunspots are complex magnetic activities on the surface of the sun, the photosphere, that creates temporary dark spots on it. These spots are cooler than the rest of the surface, they tend to appear in pairs on either side of the sun and are expected to last for about 2 weeks before disappearing. The sunspot cycle is reported to be 11 years in length, coinciding with the magnetic field cycle of the sun. So, as the magnetic field goes stronger, we observe a higher number of sunspots, which then go through a minimum until the magnetic field reverses direction bringing the number of spots back up.

Anyway, beyond the physics of it, we just need to keep note of one simple fact. It may seem that as the sunspots are colder than the rest of the photosphere, the intensity of the solar radiation would be lower than normal, 1366W/m2. This is NOT true, as the surrounding region of the spots are hotter than normal and make the incidence go higher than normal. Put simply, occurrence of sunspots makes the sun send MORE heat to earth.

A new solar cycle was expected to start in 2008, which should have led to the formation of sunspots by now. These spots are still elusive, prompting scientists to say that 2010 will mark a comeback for them, and NASA expects them to peak in 2013. However, the National Solar Observatory in Arizona, US has found that the sun's magnetism has been decreasing in strength for some time now and we may have seen the last of them, as the field would be too weak for them to form! This would mean that we might see less heat from the sun reaching earth, cooling the earth. This is not the first time we shall see such a phenomenon; the period from 1645-1715 was marked by no sunspot occurrence leading to extremely cold winters across the world and goes by the name Maunder Minimum.

You would have guessed my drift by now!:) 2010 will be an interesting year for arguments between climate wonks and climate skeptics. The global warming meets the solar cooling! Let the arguments begin:)

Surf Excel used to run an ad campaign in India, with the punch line:

"Daag ache hai na!"(Stains are good na, desi style:))

I could not agree more with them:)

Here's to Copenhagen!

The CCS conundrum

2009-11-29T09:04:00.000-08:00

Retching jargons comes naturally in the realm of climate change. You have not arrived until you know what the pet acronyms mean and a recent instance made me realize that even CCS, as omnipresent as it may be, is not an obvious one to many. So today my post is dedicated to my pet concept, Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS)! And I am tempted to add, dobara mat poochna:P

CCS is the concept by which you capture CO2 emissions from point sources, viz. power plants, where the concentration of the gas is maximum. The effluent stream of a power plant contains about 12% CO2 by volume. Its easiest, technologically speaking, to capture this at the source than at any other place downstream. The captured CO2 is then compressed and stored. This method is akin to treating a problem at the source itself! Or as the slang goes, catch 'em young!:)

CCS is, in a way, like the ersatz school teacher who used to watch over your bad habits until you became mature enough to understand them! It allows you to consume the BAD energy sources, coal, oil and natural gas, while reducing their carbon impact until the world evolves to a more renewable energy based economy. It allows us the crucial time in which we can mend our ways and evolve our technologies incrementally, for a seamless transition to the 'green' future. And given that renewables constitute about 3% of our global energy consumption, we do need as much time as we can get!

Despite the crucial role for this technology, its deployment is not as simple as it sounds. The energy and cost requirements of capture are huge but the biggest problem comes on the storage side. The compressed and liquefied CO2 has to be stored somewhere. The quantity of captured CO2 is such that it cannot be used industrially, viz. in fizzy drinks or the manufacture of dry ice. Unless of course, if each person starts drinking 30 liters of carbonated drinks every day. That would not be the solution we are looking for:)

So the storage will be done mostly in underground aquifers or under the ocean. This runs into the problem of NIMBY and NIMO, something I have discussed in an earlier post. The public perception of CO2 leaking from the underground aquifers is also an issue. People are scared to death at the mere thought of this evil gas coming out of the ground and annihilating the planet earth. But most importantly, CCS is mired in the incentives problem. The costs of implementing this are such that the power producing companies have no incentives in doing this, until there is a evolved cap and trade program where they can claim credits for the tons of CO2 captured. The Government should be the ideal player to pick the tab for implementing this. We know what the Governments around the world are going through at the moment to criticize them for not sponsoring CCS.

So, there is a certain pessimism about this technology currently. A concept that should be so central to our existence, technically speaking, is languishing at the sidelines. Dr. Steve Chu, US Secretary of Energy is still very optimistic about this, professing the development of 20 demonstration plants, that capture more than a million tons of CO2 each year, by 2020. The reality is that its almost 2010 and we do not have even a single one so far. And we are talking about building 20 such plants in the next 10 years!!!

Where did I leave my magic wand? I have been trying to look for it for quite some time now. Can any of you find that for me please?:)

Blogging v_2.0

2009-11-22T14:44:00.000-08:00

Hello to my favorite people! Its great to be writing here and to have our discussion going! I apologize for my absence, graduate student life hits you in more ways than you can imagine:) But, with the Copenhagen summit only days away, its only logical to renew our vows to energy and to saving the world:)

So where do I start? Lets finish off the 101 that we were having and that shall be a good segue to a greater discussion on Copenhagen. I had finished elucidating Cap and Trade and its only fitting to have some words on Carbon Tax today. A carbon tax works as any other tax, a levy on your consumption of certain things. In this case, it will keep account of your carbon consumption.

So, in the printout analogy, you can imagine being charged an extra amount for each page. This extra amount is supposed to induce people to print less, and use the electronic means more often. Now, this amount is difficult to determine. The extra money that will force me to print less is entirely different from the amount required for Bill Gates! The problem with carbon tax arises from this basic ideology. Who determines the amount? The Government? The same government that bails out people who cause a financial mess and regretfully apologizes for not creating enough jobs? Naah....I would have my reservations against that!

There are certain good things about the tax, when compared to the Cap and Trade system:
- The tax amount is fixed and helps people and companies plan well for the future for they can be assured of the financial impacts of their carbon emissions. In the cap and trade system, the allowance price can go as high as the markets can make them go. And we all are well aware of the consequences when speculations are allowed to run amok.
- The Government gets a steady stream of revenue from it. In the cap and trade system, the government had the revenue only at the point of selling the first set of credits. Once the credits are out there, its the market that makes money and not the government. Hence, this money can be used for further R&D and deployment of the low carbon energy sources, a much needed push! Although, if more money means that the government can bailout more banks and too-big-to-fail institutions, I am certainly moving this argument to the cons side!
- No more MARKETS!:) In the spirit of taking a dig at financial markets, a carbon tax will not form an additional market, that of carbon credits! It will be a simple, regular tax that people will get used to.

In the same breath, lets look at the cons side.
- As broached above, the tax amount is completely out there! Nobody knows the exact way to fix it.
- Fears of overshooting climate goals! The reduction of consumption due to the tax should take us to the goal of restricting atmospheric carbon concentration to below a pre-fixed number. However, the odds of that happening are lower than me dating Priyanka Chopra. I wish the odds of the latter event were higher, only so that the odds of saving the world were better:)
- The Big Brother! Denizens of the world are already fed up with large governments and what they bring along. There is a push towards more decentralization of power in all parts of the world and this tax would only entail more government presence in our lives. Where you vote on this depends on where you sit, to quote a favorite expression:)

All in all, carbon tax is not a favorite tool in the discussions currently. Cap and Trade is the way the world seems to go at the moment. However, its always good to know that one has options:)

And that goads me to quote another favorite line from the movie Matrix:

"You have already made the choice Neo, now its time to understand why you did so!"

See you next week!

UNESCO Article

2009-07-28T12:38:00.000-07:00

I recently submitted an entry for an essay writing competition organized by UNESCO. Here is that entry, would love to have feedback from you people. The topic of the essay was

"The Role of Science in Building a Better World"

I will come back shortly to wrap up the cap and trade topic and introduce further climate change topics here.
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"Towards an Energy Revolution"
Science has catalyzed humanity’s quest to unleash its full potential. From being nomadic tribes, making a living out of hunting and gathering, science made man use his brainpower to complex challenges in life, making the impossible possible. It heralded an explosive land productivity to feed the teeming population, the green revolution, through the synthetic manufacture of ammonia and fertilizers to the tenfold increase in labor productivity in the industrial revolution. The abundance of time that science brought forth fueled hegemonic aspirations in man, resulting in historic wars, which brought about a military revolution and pushed the frontiers of science to newer areas, from nuclear power to an aviation revolution. The revolution in computing speed hit us next that is still unfolding. A year has become a long time in the cycle of science and its pursuit has brought man a long way from the early days.

The fixation of bigger, faster and better systems led to a consumption centric approach in man. The more one consumed, the more one wanted to consume. Corporations thrived on this spirit of wanton consumerism and grew at an astronomical pace by goading such behaviour in people. Intricate models were developed to assess economic profitability using the quintessential cost benefit framework but environmental protection was hardly considered as a variable in these models. Environment was conveniently assumed to be a perpetual waste bin, where all waste from our profligate consumption could recklessly be dumped. This issue is the concept of externality, where we price a good without taking into account its entire manufacturing cost.

This makes the global price structures extremely skewed. Coal and oil are dirt cheap as we do not include the cost of their emissions into their market price, inducing us to depend on these carbonaceous fuels for 81% of our energy needs. The world has taken note of this lately and is rallying together to correct the anomaly. However, it is not easy to overhaul the existing global energy infrastructure radically; it has to be done in small, seamless steps. There has to be a two-pronged approach here, first to reduce the environmental impact of these fuels either through improving the process efficiencies or by sucking up the carbon emitted, naturally or industrially. The second deals with the development of technologies and policies related to renewable fuels. My research is focused on the former, of reducing the carbon impact of the non-renewable resources and mobilizing the people towards a low carbon future. It is estimated that the carbon productivity will have to increase tenfold in the next 40 years to achieve this, something we managed in labor productivity during the industrial revolution, but the time horizon allowed is 1/3rd of that available earlier.

I am pursuing a Masters program in Energy at MIT and my research with the MIT Energy Initiative deals with a concept called Air Capture, which stands for sucking CO2 directly out of the air and storing it underground. This technology has recently gained publicity owing to the ease of mitigation of emission from the distributed sources, viz. automobiles, home heating, air transportation etc, which are responsible for more than 55% of the total emissions, and growing. The best part about these systems is their location flexibility, as they can be set up at the sequestration sites and allows skipping building the intricate piping infrastructure to transport the captured liquid CO2, otherwise required. The cost of this process is prohibitive at the moment, in the range of $500-$1500 per ton of CO2, because of the huge energy requirement of the solvent regeneration step, but a global research effort is underway to achieve a technical breakthrough in solvent characteristics. This technology is also ideal from the perspective of technology diffusion to developing nations, where the next wave of emissions will happen.

The other part of my work deals with spreading awareness among common people. I believe, unlike the Manhattan project, this transition to a low, clean energy economy is a complex social problem, which cannot be achieved by the scientific community alone. It will require the help of common people as well. I maintain a blog to share insights and also make it a point to talk to as many people as I can. In my next home visit to India, I have scheduled a series of such talks at all the major Indian universities, for the power of youth can overcome this enormous challenge, even at one of the important countries in this fight against climate change.

Science is about to undergo a metamorphosis; the flaw in our models will spur the next revolution, the Energy Revolution! The hitherto ignored parameter of environmental protection is about to trigger the next level of scientific evolution and the world is quickly getting ready for the challenge.

Article about India in the New York Times

2009-07-05T21:05:00.001-07:00

Here's something I found quite interesting in the New York Times today. Would like you to read this and think it over.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/weekinreview/05giridharadas.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=farewell%20to%20an%20india%20i%20hardly%20knew&st=cse

More on global climate change coming up soon!

Summer of '09

2009-06-18T11:41:00.000-07:00

I think I have been able to convey the nuances of the Cap and Trade system through the printout analogy. We will be using that a lot in the coming weeks to further strengthen the concepts and cap the whole topic off.

In this post, I will be meandering off a little from the energy focus here and talk a bit about my summer time here:) No no, I am not reneging on the basic principle of this post of not putting any personal stuff here. So I will not be telling you how I am having a great time in Boston this summer, how it has been fantastic weather for the most part, how I have been enjoying the morning runs, weekend beaches and the generally lively atmosphere, minus the nagging workload of courses and going through the easy-paced research life:P Nothing of this sort here...don't worry!

I wanted to write something about the extremely enriching conferences that I have attended over the past 2 weeks. Just to back it up a bit, I had got an internship at The World Bank for the summer in their Carbon Finance Unit. It was the kind of place I wanted to work at, the kind of place for which I had come to this program in the first place. But then, as is with life, I had to give that up and work on my research to get a paper by the end of the summer. I was so angry at this turn of events....so ANGRY!! However, it has turn out to be a great experience so far, mainly because of the conferences I have been to in a span of a few weeks and the amount I have learned from them!

So last week there was this 40 year celebration of the Apollo landing on the moon. Technically, a month earlier as 20th July, 1969 was when that happened. I have always been a little critical of the Space programs, mainly from the developing country perspective. When we don't have money to feed our people, I thought it preposterous for civilization to engage in a space war to land on the moon and then come back with tonnes of moon rocks! As if, we didn't have enough rocks on earth. I have been pretty opinionated on this regard and got into lengthy conversations with my peers in the Aero/Astro department here. So, this celebration were a chance for me to see what did we learn from all the trillions of dollars spent on space missions!

Was I swept over! The man's inquest of space has shaped the way we do things in a phenomenal way! From the area of telecommunications, to education to life sciences, to the food industry! You look at something and you find it linked to the space related research efforts. I must say, this was a big eye-opener for me and I accept my rather naive opinion of this whole area.

And now for the biggest part: I met Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin at the conference! Yes, the first 2 people on the surface of the moon! Yes, the men about whom I used to read in the books in my school! Yes, the same voice which said something to the effect of "A small step for man, a giant leap for mankind":) I fall short of words to describe how I felt when I met them...goosebumps would be a euphemism!:P In one of the sessions, we were asked to clap for the people involved with the Apollo missions and I must say I would be right up there in terms of the decibel level of my clapping:)

The contribution of the space program in the realm of climate science is also crucial. The ozone layer problem was first spotted through a satellite image over Antartica that led to the Montreal Protocol. These space borne cameras have been very vital in the fight against carbon dioxide accumulation and we will have to increasingly depend on them in the future in the face of a climate treaty post Kyoto. Any global effort in this area will hinge on the confirmation that every country is following suit, primarily due to the global nature of the problem. So, if any country/region is not adhering to the assigned emission target, the problem is not getting solved and even those places that are managing their emissions well are getting hurt. These space systems will keep everyone in check and make sure that the offenders are punished/reprimanded. They have been doing a great job in the ozone layer maintenance by providing a region wise data on the emission levels globally.

So this proselytistic self is all about space program now! Go ISRO! Go NASA!

The other conference I was talking about was on Engineering Systems, the most recent discipline of Engineering that brings together an integrated approach on problems. It is the new belief of the complex nature of the problems in the 21st century and how only one discipline of engineering, or even social sciences, is not enough to solve them. It was an enriching experience, in its own way, looking at the evolution of a whole new field that could be taking up all the space in the future.

I would finish with a quote from the movie Apollo 13, motivated from my new found love for space! Tom Hanks was asked by a Senator in the movie the relevance of going ahead with space programs once they had already landed on the moon and led in the space race against the USSR. What more benefit can they derive from going to a place they have already explored a couple of times. The actor, very prophetically retorts that wonder what had happened if people after Christopher Columbus had the same logic!

Back to climate change in the next post!:)

Cap and Trade system: The Panacea!

2009-06-07T16:18:00.000-07:00

Cap and Trade (CAT) has been in the news for quite a long time now, and is big in the Climate Change domain. People have been citing this system as a solution to the externality problem of Climate Change, something I talked about in a previous post. It is also a market based solution and is lapped up by the developed world. I had alluded to it, briefly, in the last post on the Waxman Markey bill. Today, I wish to provide a primer to this concept.

I was looking for an apt analogy to present this concept for this past week until today morning! We had an Officer's Retreat of my dorm at MIT today, where all the elected/selected officials were huddled in a room trying to brainstorm about major problems for the coming year. A major concern has been the amount of paper wasted for trivial printouts,a s they are subsidized here, at the dorm's computer center and somebody proposed a cap and trade set up to reduce the number of printouts . Lo and behold, there was my analogy!:) And the sign to write my blog today! I must say, sometimes I have to believe in the concept of 'signs', the much hyped about concept in Hollywood/Bollywood but much maligned in the real world. What, aren't you convinced that this is a good enough sign!?!:P

Anyway, so back to the issue at hand. Let's take the case of papers we use for printouts. Say, and this is not that chimeric either, the incessant use of paper is causing a huge drain on the number of trees left. Things come to a point that we need to overtly preserve the trees and at the same time have enough papers for printing out the essential items. This can be done by calculating a sustainable yield of papers that we can use, without consuming too many trees that it threatens their existence. Lets say this number is 1000 pages. So, we have got to limit the number of printouts to less than or equal to 1000 pages.

Now that we know the number of pages we can possibly use, we need to find a way to distribute them among the people that need it. The market based solution, that is the Cap and Trade system, would go for an auction on the pages. So, people will bid a price and a certain number of quantity they want and the highest bidder will get his bid amount, say 100 pages, and then it will trickle down till all the allowance, i.e. pages, are sold off. There is a huge debate over the exact process of giving away the pages right now, for this will hurt a lot of people. The cost of printout, which so far used to be only the cost of the cartridge and the cost of paper, assuming an infinite flow of paper, will go up when the cost of paper goes up as a result of this auction. Not only is the cost of paper the cost of making it, but is also includes the externality of cutting down a tree, a valued resource and what monetary impact it might have on our future.

We will add a level of complexity here. If you assume that it was not an MIT dorm where only students, having similar economic statuses, live but a residential place where students and working professionals live together, you will have to agree that the cost would break the back of the students, who will not be able to afford such a high price and most necessarily need a lot of print outs. The professionals will most essentially be printing their movie schedules and their restaurants directions from google maps when the students have to solve their problem sets off the internet. A more telling situation would be if there were some students in the dorm who were sons and daughters of big oil barons in the Middle East, or their parents had deep pockets:) Wonder what that would do to the printout disparity!

Hence, the housing officials can decide to relax the rules a bit and give out free allocations to the students a minimum number of pages. This allocation would then reduce the pool of papers left to be auctioned and would raise the price for the professionals, the affluent sections, forcing them to use paper judiciously. We will play around with this analogy further to introduce all the concepts. But first, let us look at the real system to make the connection clear.

In the cap and trade system for the carbon dioxide emissions for climate change will need to start by, again, deciding the amount of CO2 we can emit that does not harm the environment beyond repair. Hence, we will need to define a sustainable rate of emissions, keeping in mind the different climate dynamics. The starting point will be deciding the atmospheric CO2 concentration at which we are comfortable. Lets say that is 450 ppm in 2100, refer to my first post for details here. From that concentration, we will have to figure out the amount of sustainable emissions each year that will keep the atmospheric concentration below 450 ppm by 2100. This is the most tricky part as a lot of climate science comes into play in this calculation between the atmospheric concentration and the amount of emissions. We shall look at some of the science later, once we are through with the economics! Afterall, economics is the more interesting part, right?:P

Once we have figured out the quantity of emissions, we could go on to auction all of them. This will raise the price of almost all commodities available, the price of your food, clothes, water, oil, housing repair etc. everything will go up since prices now includes the cost of externality of environmental damages! This will almost kill the underprivileged section of the society, who will not be able to bear the additional cost on essential items. Hence, to insulate them from this, the government can decide to give away the allocations free, something that the dorm officials did in the case of handing out papers free to the students. This is called the system of phased auction, which leads to a lot of interesting scenarios we will see in later posts!Just to point out here that EU has a Cap and Trade system in place for CO2 and they have been 'freely' allocating a major part of their allowance so far. Full auction will kick in at a later date.

We have seen the cap part of it so far, the part where the number of allocations are decided and then allocated through auctions or similar mechanisms. The second, and by far the more exciting part, is the trade part! Here, this system allows the entity to trade the allocations. So, if in the paper case, I had bought extra papers that I cannot use and somebody else is in a dire need of papers, I can trade my extra papers with him that it gives me a profit on my investment and is lower than the market price of the paper for the latter student. In the climate side, if an industry has allowances that it cannot use, it can trade them with one that needs them at a cost that is mutually beneficial.

This post can go on for another 15 pages and we will still be short of the exact nuances of a Cap and Trade system:) Hence, in the interest of time and space, I shall put this one to rest here. I hope I have been able to convey the basics of a Cap and Trade system and will pick it up from here for some other details of it.

Until then, take printouts with care. You never know when the externality kicks in:P I must say, my meagre graduate student salary will most essentially go into buying papers, if that happens!

The Waxman Markey Bill

2009-06-01T15:38:00.000-07:00

First of all, I need to acknowledge the two very wonderfully positive feedback about my blog this week which gives me immense pleasure to keep at the task:) Man is a creature of habit, they say. And this habit is greased and facilitated by appreciation, I say:) Heartfelt thanks to the people who appreciated the effort!

So, now to the most written topic of my blog: The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, popularly known as the Waxman-Markey bill. This bill is being reviewed by several committees in the House and one of them,Energy and Commerce Committee, just approved the bill, though in a slightly different version. All these slicing and dicing by the various committees will produce a version of the bill that will be tabled on the floor of the House for voting. There is still a long way to go for this bill, or any of the radical measures included in it, to become a reality. However, it much be acknowledged that this is the first time a serious climate bill has gone this far in the US political arena. Nobody knows what the final version of the bill will end up becoming but anything with such a starting point will not go that awry! Anyway, we shall deal with the changed version passed in the House committee later, first the initial draft of the bill!

The bill has 4 titles in it, which are:
Title I: Clean Energy
Title II: Energy Efficiency
Title III: Reducing Global Warming pollution
Title IV: Transitioning to a clean energy economy

There are such radical thoughts in it that one cannot be left unimpressed by the enormity of the changes it seeks. Some of the salient features of the bill are:

- Renewable portfolio standards of 6% by 2012 and 25% by 2025. This means that 6% of the total energy by 2012 and 25% of the same by 2025 HAS to be produced from renewable sources like wind, solar, biomass etc. Imagine what impact such a policy would have on the renewable sector. This would provide the much needed fillip for this sector in the form of government backing, something that it always yearned!

- My favorite: Money has been allocated for demonstration plants for Carbon Capture and Sequestration(CCS). If this clause passes the muster, well....I must say I am smiling from ear to ear while writing this one:)

- There is some talk on cleaner fuels and vehicles and smart grid. We shall look into what a smart grid is at a later date.

- A major emphasis is on improving the energy efficiency of the economy. Logically, the more efficient you are, the less you need to consume. Simple,right? Well, keep in mind that things are not that logical in politics always:) Refer to my last week's post for more details!

- Cap and Trade system: This is the most radical proposal of the bill. It seeks to reduce the Green House Gas (GHG) emissions by 3%,20%, 42% and 83% below 2005 levels by 2012, 2020, 2030 and 2050 respectively. This is to be effected by putting a cap on the emissions, creating credits for the level of emissions and allowing the different players in the economy to trade these credits among themselves at a market determined price.One more market is being created and this one will be bigger than anyone can imagine. In the interest of time, I shall take this again in a later post. You should not be spending hours on a blog! Reading this post is not your primary job, right?:P

- There are other schemes to make a transition to a cleaner energy economy and some provisions to make this transition seamless.

This is a HUGE HUGE bill in the climate arena! I just hope it passes, in some form. I still remember the day Obama talked about this bill, I decided to go ahead and apply for a PhD after my MS. Stopping after a Masters degree would be a crime in this radical area, right? Any more doctoral candidates in the making?:P

P.S.: I intend to take a lot of the issues I briefly touched in detail in later posts. Let me know if anything is not clear above and I shall make sure to enunciate that point later.

Misdirected policies

2009-05-13T07:44:00.000-07:00

We are about to see a classic case of what misdirected policies can do to a build up of momentum. Just when we were seeing an unprecedented momentum in the area of Climate Change and people had started to entertain thoughts of living in a carbon constrained world, politicians do a volte face. Or maybe this is what they are taught to do.

The US Congress is tending towards passing a Cash for Clunkers program which aims at retiring the current old fleet of cars and increasing the average mileage of the transportation sector. They aim at doing this by providing incentives to people to retire their cars, if they are older than a particular age. This is done by providing them with a tax credit for the new car that they buy. This tax would be premised on the difference of mileage between the retired and the new car.

This is how it will work: A matrix is drawn with the type of car and the difference of mileage between the cars are the axes. Depending on your x and y co-ordinates, you will be entitled to a particular tax credit amount.

This is not a new concept that the US Congress is introducing. Germany was the first one to try this. Lets get this straight, there are some good things about this concept. It will reduce the CO2 emissions from the transportation sector, the most difficult one to control in the fight for climate. This will also be the much needed fillip for the US car manufacturers, for this policy will lay the foundation for increased buying by people. It could also be the vanguard for technological change, for you might be tempted to buy the hybrid cars through a nested policy. That will be more than helpful for the hybrid technology, just waiting on the wings to take off!

There are reportedly 2 issues with this scheme, as the German experience has shown:

- This is the costliest way of reducing carbon, per unit of carbon reduced. So, if you look at the amount of carbon dioxide emission reduced by this scheme, the amount comes out to be exorbitantly higher than the ones being demanded by CCS community! It is so high that the cost of doing Air Capture, capturing CO2 from air, looks reasonable enough! This clearly shows the wrangled calculations of the policy makers!

- It also has a national competitiveness angle to it. It was seen in Germany that most of the cars that were bought new were Japanese cars, as opposed to the German cars. And this policy is aimed at providing the must needed boost to the US automobile manufacturers. I am not sure how much will they like old Fords, GMs and Chryslers being dismantled and paving the way for even more Toyotas! At least, the old Fords and GMs and Chryslers were providing some money in the form of maintainence to them!

All in all, I guess this policy needs a second, closer look at! Somehow, I feel the politicians here have come into the Santa Claus mode, where they are bent upon distributing money in the masses! Why not then give it to the hard working researchers like us who are trying to make CCS a reality than do something like this, I often wonder?:P

Ok...next time the US Climate Bill, for sure:)

NIMBY and NIMO(c)

2009-05-03T10:08:00.000-07:00

No, you are not mistaken! You are on the right blog and to dispel any fears that may have arisen, we are not going to talk about animation movies here:)

NIMBY and NIMO(c) are two of the most common acronyms you would have heard, or are about to hear, as the world shifts towards a cleaner energy portfolio, or tries to pay for their past sins through Carbon Capture and Sequestration(CCS). The terms stand for:

NIMBY: Not In My Back Yard
NIMO(c): Not In My Ocean

You can easily see the connection between the large scale deployment of the renewable sources of energy and the inherent problems due to these concepts. All the major renewable sources, viz. Solar, Wind, Hydro require a distributed foot print. All the solar power, or wind power cannot be harnessed by one behemoth like solar panel, or a wind turbine of the size of the sun, installed in a God-forsaken place and the power be transmitted to your home. They have to be put up in a diffused manner, in your and my backyards. And lets not even start to talk about hydro electricity here. People in the developing world are well versed with the tragedies associated with building a large hydro electric installation.

Add to this the fact that to capture carbon and store it through the process of CCS, you need storage locations and most of these would fall within the boundaries of your home. How comfortable are people with installing a solar panel on their roof is well understood but how comfortable will you be if a wind turbine was put in your backyard or if someday people start putting CO2 in the patch of land in your home will define the pace at which these technolgies develop. The expert opinion is that the government will have to step up and make some regulations here for this is too complex a matter to be left to the public. So much for NIMBY..

There has been talks of doing all these operations off-shore, mostly sequestration of the carbon dioxide captured through CCS. It is reported that the liquid CO2 stays at the botton of the ocean for thousands of years as it is heavier than water. The fear there is that countries might oppose using their maritime boundaries for this purpose. If that is the case, this will again increase the costs of transporting the liquid CO2 over large distances over these boundaries. This is the concept of NIMO and has been promulgated and patented by my research advisor here at MIT:) Just kidding!

While I do believe that government regulations are important to overcome this issue and governments around the world have to rally together to achieve the proliferation of 'green energy', the technology also has to prove its worth to placate the sensitive behavior of people towards them. What do you propose as a plausible solution?

One thing is sure, soon gone will be the days when your energy used to be produced at slimy, dirty, unseen corners of the world and transported to your house at the flick of a switch. In the 'green age' you will have to play a role in its generation and use. How about this level of democratization!:) Thou shalt generate thy energy thyself!:P I hope Shakespeare has not turned in his grave by my misuse of his language here:)

Maybe, when US endeavors to transport the model of democracy in the future, remember Afganistan and Iraq, this concept of energy democracy will play a major role in it:) Maybe, I should start patenting some ideas soon:)

Externalities!

2009-04-24T14:15:00.000-07:00

My apologies for my absence! This post has taken a month and a half in coming and I know you missed me:)...I hope!Life is an interesting phenomena. Someone hit it right on the head when he opined that life is what happens when you are busy planning other things! So true man!! Little had I realized when I started this blog that I will not write a post for 6 weeks!:)

Anyway, life has changed a lot in the interim, Energy wise, politically and otherwise too, and we will take things one by one from here. We shall limit our discussion to the Energy domain, and the related political matters that come along with it! Its interesting to note how much Energy is intertwined with Politics, pretty much like siamese twins! The last technological revolution thing to have been embroiled in the political quagmire would be Biotechnology, or Nanotechnology, possibly!

Anyway, the US Energy Bill was introduced in the House recently. The one that promised to radically alter so many ways in which we do things here,and possibly around the world too! We shall deal with this in greater detail at a later post. Today, I want to talk about a concept in Economics that keeps coming up, time and again! This is called the concept of Externality, and I was completely ignorant of it until recently.

Externality is the concept by which an impact is caused on an entity not party to any economic transaction. So, if you own a power plant and emit gunk into the atmosphere and if there is a laundry next to it, the laundry is facing an externality as the poor quality of air affects its operational efficiency. Externality can be of 2 types, positive and negative. The example I stated above is one of negative externality where the laundry is facing a negative impact of your power producing operation, and it is not a party to it. A positive externality would be one where you fireproof your house and increase the safety of your neighbors as a result of which!

This concept is at the core of free market philosophy, for you are not operating under a free market until you include the cost of any such externality. The interactions are not properly valued if the externalities are not internalized. Hence, the laundry and the power plant will have to sort it out among themselves, either voluntarily or through regulations.

The above concept basically summarizes the entire debate about Climate Change. That we have not priced things right for the last 259 years, since the Industrial Revolution! We never included the cost of harming the environment in the profit calculations! I guess some bright MBA grad might have missed it in his valuations model:) My apologies if I hurt any sentiments out here....It is cool to take a dig at Management grads lately, and who doesn't want to sound cool!:P

Environment was always considered a Public Good and that everyone has a right to it. When we buy petrol or gasoline at a gas station, we pay the cost of a litre of it which takes into account only the manufacturing cost and the profit margin of the fuel. That is, the cost of extraction, refining and delivery and the profit margin. And yes, if the fuel comes from Alaska, an overhead that goes into surveillance of Russia personally ensured by Sarah Palin:) Btw, an inside info you might find useful. It is a must to have a few political jokes in your armor when you are working in the energy field! It makes you sound so possessed:)

Anyway, so the cost of removing the pollutant you put in the environment as a result of the combustion of that fuel is not included here. This concept is ought to change, when you should buy fuel at a gas station, you should be paying not only for the cost of fuel, but also for the cleanup. As one cannot expect the industries to do this voluntarily, we will have to take refuge in regulations to achieve this. This argument lies at the heart of the Climate Change debate.We need to undo the wrong we have unleashed on the environment for the last 259 years! And we must pay a price for not doing it effectively since then.

Undoing a historical wrong is not going to be easy, believe me:) Try not excercising for a long period of time and then try to lose the excess flab in one go! Take it from me, it is one HELL OF A JOB! But then , we are not supposed to talk personal stuff here, right?:) Until the next one....Keep saving the planet!

MIT Energy Conference!

2009-03-05T18:51:00.001-08:00

This is the week of the MIT Energy Conference, the largest student run energy conference in the world! It is scheduled for this Friday and Saturday, the 6th and 7th of March. And what an exciting week this has been! I am so looking forward to the weekend for the guests and panelists present a mouthwatering prospect. For people who want to learn more about this AWESOME conference, here is the link:

http://www.mitenergyconference.com/index.htm

As this is my blog, and I am allowed some shameless publicity here, I put together a completely new idea for the conference, the idea of a workshop. So, the day of Friday is a day of workshops, and my workshop is one of those. Details of the same can be found at:

http://www.mitenergyconference.com/workshop.htm

And if you scroll down to the last on this page, you shall see the workshop that I am organizing tomorrow. So much for my contribution to the MIT Energy Conference.

I shall take this opportunity to describe something about my research area, here at MIT, and the topic of the workshop tomorrow. This area, or technology, is called Air Capture, which quite logically stands for capture of CO2 directly from the air. This is one of the most exciting next generation CCS technologies out there and a topic of intensive research. Its USP lies in the fact that its a cheap way to mitigate the emissions of the distributed sources, like cars, planes and human beings. One can understand point sources, the thermal power plants etc., being tackled by the conventional CCS technology but we cannot install this in all the cars on the road. This is where Air Capture provides a very viable option of mitigation.

There are several drawbacks of this process too, and I shall not go into the specifics of it lest this blog starts resembling the research paper I am writing:) Suffice to say that there are promoters and critics of this technology in equal measure out there.

This is all for today, I am sure I will be posting something shortly after the conference for I will be brimming with knowledge and itching to share them with you. Hence, I shall save you the 'pain and suffering' of reading my blog twice weekly:) Enjoy the weekend!

Plagiarized by The New York Times!

2009-03-01T07:42:00.000-08:00

This is an untimely post but was necessitated by an untoward incident. The New York Times, in retaliation to me stealing their editorial title few days back, has plain lifted the ideas I presented in my last post in their front page article today!!:) Here's the complete article and you can judge for yourself:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/science/earth/01treaty.html?_r=1&hp

I would also post another green, or yellow, energy article that I read this week. Quite an interesting read it was. A caveat though, its only for the avowed supporters of green:)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/opinion/27george.html?scp=1&sq=yellow%20is%20the%20new%20green&st=cse

Happy Reading!

Climate of Change!

2009-02-26T19:44:00.000-08:00

Hello to my favorite people! The title is not of my creation, as I have already nixed any thoughts about my creativity in an earlier post. It is plagiarized from the editorial by Paul Krugman in the New York Times today. The last few days have been an amazing experience in the Obama land, from the Climate Change and Green Energy perspective, i.e. my perspective:). The State of the Union address, and the ensuing budget brought forth by the government solidly stated that this administration believes in walking the talk. A welcome relief from the past regime, and in general of the class of politicians who mostly subscribe to all talk and no walk.

It feels great to be writing a blog during this historic week in US politics. For the uninitiated, the Obama administration has included setting up a cap and trade system in this year's budget proposal. This is such a HUGE moment in the climate change arena, such an admirable change from the last US regime that didn't even seem to recognize the concept, at the cost of irreparable harm. Anyway, as they say, good riddance!:) Not just that, the resources generated from selling the carbon credits will be channeled to further research and deployment of renewables. Did they say that double whammy was ever as good! I might say this at the cost sounding banal, but I am amazed at the amount of change I am about see in a lifetime:) Anyway, more on this later, time for the topic of today.

Again, I shall start with replying to the comment of my last post and then go onto discussing something new. And believe me, there shall be something new today:)

The one comment I got to my last post was related to ice caps in the Arctic have risen to a 17 year high and that defeats the argument of Climate Change. Its a very potent argument brought forward by a very special person, whom I have always looked upto. And this is another instance why. Thanks Anu for bringing forth this topic, for I somehow forgot to broach it. This is the distinction between the Climate and Weather. Weather is the seasonal variation of temperatures, pressure, wind speed, etc., a very temporal phenomena and I shall not even go in detail for I can hardly be aware of all the forces at work here. What we concerned about is Climate, and Climate Change. Its not the year after year temperature in a part of the world, but the environment's behavior, overall. I still doubt the data that ice levels in the Arctic were at 17 years high, but reports show that they were greater than the levels reported in 2007. However, if you compare the level of ice caps between 1979 and 2007, they have HALVED! I am not saying that the ice caps reduced each year, there could have been fluctuations in the annual level, but they have been monotonically decreasing, as a trend. Hence, the yearly levels of ice caps should be used as a point to negate the concept of climate change. As I said earlier, we have long moved beyond that phase, all its skeptics should be treated as pariahs now:) Like George W. Bush in US:)

Monotonically, aah, I love to use this word! I was introduced to this word in my high school maths, through a chapter on Functions and graphs, and have been hooked onto it ever since:) Whenever I am able to plug this word into any of my writing or conversations, the literary side of me gives a pat on the back to my mathematical side. What were the odds of my exposure to this word had I taken literature as a major:) Thanks Anu for giving me this opportunity, again!!:)

Now for the topic of the day. Since we started the post with with a political overtone, lets stick to it for the day! Consistency should be a hallmark of my blog, something that has never been of my life! So we shall discuss the policy side of Climate Change today. Precisely speaking, the development of the Kyoto Protocol and the post Kyoto scenario. Hopefully, I will be able to justice to this humongous topic.

Just to give you a little background to it, Kyoto Protocol has been modeled on the lines of the Montreal Protocol, which was signed by countries to arrest the depletion of the ozone layer. The Ozone layer protects us from the harmful ultraviolet radiations of the sun and it was getting severely depleted in the 1980s due to the emission of the CFCs into the atmosphere, the primarily refrigerants used at that time. It was a pointed problem and got a pointed policy response. The different countries ratified it without breaking a sweat, as it required a simple technological fix. The technical world had brought out a cheap and easy alternative to the CFCs and compliance was easy. The latest numbers for ozone layer confirms the fact that Montreal Protocol was a great success as countries are still sticking to the targets.

The grave error policy makers did at the very beginning was to build the Kyoto Protocol on the lines of the Montreal Protocols. But we can't blame them for basking in their glory, for seldom does a policy response meet with this level of success. The problem here is far more complex than the ozone layer depletion, and the to think of a solution would be amateurish. The second grave error that they did was to exclude the developing nations, the Non-Annex B countries, from making any commitment to reducing emissions. They were asked to jump onto the bandwagon at their own sweet will while the developed world were told to adhere to time bound targets. This was a failed strategy, right from the very beginning and confirmed only lately, when China trumped US in total Green House Gas(GHG) Emissions in 2008.

And then the poor thing hit the rock called George W. Bush, who just didn't budge an inch. US did not approve the Kyoto Protocol, and the entire treaty has been a cross between a good starting point and a meek response to a grave problem. It is too focused on the short term, with no thought given to the road ahead. In fact, the first phase of compliance started in 2008 and is until 2012 and I will not burn my hands by making any predictions here.

All is not lost yet!The world leaders reconvene in December 2009 in Copenhagen to decide the future of this treaty, post 2012, when its first compliance period ends. That should be an event worth waiting for, and it gives me great pleasure to imagine that US would be on the right side of the arguments, finally!:)

Blogging revisited!

2009-02-19T17:08:00.000-08:00

Yaayyy! Blogging time! Its hard to fathom that a person so averse to blogging just a week ago has been waiting all these days to write another post!:)

I am really amazed and honored by the kind of people who took time out to read my blog and post their comments. There are some very old and special friends, some very special seniors, special family members and some enthusiastic blog readers. I take this opportunity to thank each one of you for your time and effort. I will start this blog by responding to the comments first and then shall delve into a topic for today, if space permits.

The first, rather overarching, feedback I got on the blog is that I am acting as a doomsayer by saying that Climate Change is the biggest threat faced by mankind. This is certainly not a prophecy of doom based on any whim, that a comet will hit the planet earth on this day of that year. Carbon Dioxide accumulation is a hard fact of life, proved by science. And this is bound to happen, if we don't act accordingly. My endeavor here is to make people aware of a threat that is very much there, but is taking shape very very slowly. It is so glacially slow that people might ignore it, at their own peril. Climate Change is no Lehman Brothers, that it is here today and gone tomorrow, it won't be that sudden a process. It is more like a small opening in the embankment of a river. The opening is so small that nobody, in the Business As Usual scenario(BAU), hardly ever notices it in the rigmaroles of their daily life, but the water of the river is slowly eating away the sediments, and the cavity grows ever so slowly! One might say that the cavity is not there, but the process is irreversible and would get noticed at the point of no return.

You might have read this story in school, of a small Dutch boy who prevents his village from drowning by blocking a similar cavity in his village embankment with his finger overnight, until people notice him standing there and repair the damage. He saves the whole village by his prudence, else the river would have destroyed it. Sadly speaking, we are beyond the point in the saga where one heroic effort can do the needful. We need the masses to sit up and take notice of the cavity. Until then, researchers, scientists and other activists of Climate Change will only act as small Dutch boys so that the masses of the world can take notice and remedy the situation.

This blog is just a small effort in the hope of making people inquisitive about Climate Change, so that they start asking those questions that we have hitherto conveniently swept under the carpet. And make no mistake, this is pure science. There is no conjecture, or mysticism involved here. If people are still not convinced about the change, I will urge them to do a small experiment at home. Try sitting in a closed room with an open furnace, with some fresh wood, or coal,better still, in the furnace. Sit in the closed room and try to do your normal activities. See for yourself what changes begin to happen as you spend more time in the closed room. I agree, all this is happening at a very fast pace in the room, but the changes will be there for you to feel. The same is happening with the environment, albeit at a very slow level.

The second point brought about by a dear friend, Mrigank, was related to the developing world and their role in this process, given their usual problems with poverty, literacy, public health etc. While I must give him the credit for an impassionate plea for Climate Change not being as important in the developing world as it should be in the developed world, I have reasons to the contrary. And I hope that I can convince him with my reasons, something that I have not been able to do very many times in the past:) The reason is exactly what Sreekumar mentions,Sustainability, and I hate him for stealing my thunder on this:) Sustainability is the buzzword for the developing world, that can take them beyond the mentality of the third world countries.

Consider this: the total share of global CO2 emissions of India is around 5% and that of US is around 24%. If you take a per capita value of the same entity, the ratio is even more skewed as we know that US has around 300 million people emitting that amount while in India 1.1 billion people cause a smaller dent. Now do an interesting slicing of data, for all the data enthusiasts in you, take the top 5% of Indian population, in terms of personal income, and look at their average CO2 emissions. It comes out to be of the same order as an average person in the US!!! A wealthy Indian is at the same consumption level as an average American! This simply means that rich people in our part, or any poor part, of the world are hiding behind the poor. They will keep enjoying their level of comfort, and keep blaming the developed world for all their emissions, as long as they have a good chunk of poor people in their country to take care of them, in order words average out the emissions for them. Thus, there is vested interests in keeping people poor and ignorant. This may sound ludicrous, but this my friends is close to reality. We need to bring the lot of poor in these countries up in a sustainable manner. Imagine if all the poor people in India start dreaming of a life like the wealthy, at the same level of consumption, the emissions will simply shoot through the roof, literally speaking!

There has to be a 2 pronged approach for this. The rich, in the poor countries, have to cut down on consumption and the poor have to be developed in a sustainable manner, without being forced to give up any of their amenities. As a simple example, the bulk of the emissions in an Indian village is caused by the 'chulha' or the open coal furnace. Once ignited, it keeps burning for the most part of the day as it is very difficult to reignite, once put out. Just imagine, if we could harness some sort a solar powered furnace for these people, how much of a dent in the emissions we can cause at the national level,and at the global level too. We did not ask the village poor to let go of any benefits he/she was entitled to, we just changed the source of it. I am not talking chimerically here, this very much being implemented at the village level. Check out the work one Mr. Harish Hande is doing in this field in the villages of Karnataka and Gujarat and you will be convinced of the scope of possibilities here. I have met him personally, and must say that his work is really commendable. It takes a lot of guts and gumption to go the way he has gone, and endure as much as he has endured!

God! I will have to tame my blogging prolixity or else will end up making a tome of my blog! I will postpone broaching a new issue on Climate Change at a later date, on a different post. Till then, enjoy saving the planet! You are all heroes this world is looking upto:) At least, I tell myself this statement everyday, first thing in the morning. Keeps me going strong through the day!:)

P.S.: It is scientifically reported that if we start living the same lifestyle as we had in 1750, the pre-industrial era, things would come back to normal and we will not have to worry about climate at all. How many of us are willing to do so?:) Some food for thought....:)

A 'blog' next door

2009-02-11T17:02:00.000-08:00

'Why another blog?'

I have debated on this question over and over again, only to end up firm on my convictions of not jumping onto the blogging bandwagon. All this while that I was not writing a blog, or blogging as they say in the blogosphere, I used to pester my friends with random thoughts, to the extent of either driving them crazy with the volume of my thoughts or being completely ignored for the same reason.

Today in a session on 'Challenges in the Global Economy' by the Sloan School of Management here at MIT, Prof. Simon Johnson, a renowned faculty from that very school and the Chief Economist of IMF not so long ago, described himself as blogger first and a Professor second. Whatever may be the reason for him to make that comment, it drove home the point that I am already behind the curve on this phenomena, and its time to catch up.

Now that I have laid down the reason for this new endeavor, another rankling thought is the content of this blog. Should I just add to the mountain loads of personal information on the blogosphere, from detailing my diurnal activities as a lot of people do, to gross levels at times, or write about what my pet has done since morning? I decided to do neither, instead focus on what has become my life's passion of late. Climate Change! Now, before this name puts you off into not reading my blog anymore, and pass a word around to your progeny to follow suit, give me a chance.

I have decided that I will distill all the information that I receive at this amazing place, called MIT, and help spread the severity of the situation. Without doubt, and as more technical research claims it everyday, this is the biggest problem humanity has ever faced,probably, for it strives for its extinction. The current levels of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has reached 380 parts per million(ppm), hence the name of this blog:), and if we continue in this Business as Usual(BAU) scenario, we will end up at a concentration level in the ballpark range of 900 ppm, or in other words, cease to exist for that level of CO2 would be simply catastrophic. Hence, the problem is real, and its getting serious with each passing second. And calls for action, immediately! The size of the problem cannot be tacked by a few scientists and engineers alone, the entire world has to come together to save the situation. Anyway, we will see more on this in every subsequent post!

The motivation of doing something like this also came at a session last week at MIT, on Climate Change. Since when did I become innovative?:) That session was conducted by another renowned professor in this area, Prof. John Sterman. He drew an interesting analogy, combining two famous movements in the US history, which he claimed would be required to salvage the situation for us. And that is the amalgamation of the Manhattan Project, one that developed the atom bomb, for its technical expertise, and the Civil Rights movement, for its mass appeal and mass contribution. While he claimed we are making decent progress in the technical realm, masses are still not involved in ameliorating the situation. And he put the onus on everyone who is conducting any research in this area to help in whatever small way he/she can, to spread the word around. I shall try to come clean here!

Its hideously ironical that while all my undergrad years, I vehemently tried to enter a consulting firm, simply to get away from the academics, it was a stint in a consulting firm that sent me scampering back to academia:) And even more intriguing that I shall devote so much time and energy of my life, along with numerous other razor sharp brilliant minds, on studying a gas that had got a very trivial mention in my middle school biology books, only in the photosynthesis process. This seems to be Carbon Dioxide's attempt at redeeming itself:) And its an ugly way, indeed!

Gosh, I do love writing!:)

P.S.: Hope I am not the only person reading upto this line:)